Guitar Notes (22 page)

Down a gleaming white corridor through a set of double doors marked
SURGICAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT
, Lyla is lying in a bed, slightly upright, with her arms at her
sides, bound to the metal rails to keep her from moving. Her face is swollen, and her eyelids are purple and puffy. Her head is shaved, and underneath the bandage, a piece of her skull has been removed. A breathing tube is in her mouth, held in place by white tape. A trickle of liquid is snaking out her right ear and down her neck. A thinner tube is taped to her right arm and connected to a bag that is hanging from a silver stand. Through the needle in her arm, cold liquid drips into her veins, medicine to reduce the swelling of her brain and to keep her asleep, and fluids to keep her hydrated. Underneath the blue hospital blanket, her left leg is in a cast. The hiss of the ventilator fills the room.

She is somewhere past a dream, floating in a dark green lake. Hour after hour, the current gently tries to pull her farther away.

 NOVEMBER 24. MONDAY.

Tripp walks into the music room with the guitar and a note of apology. It’s an even day, which means Lyla should be coming to the orchestra room first period, so he is hoping she will walk through the door and smile.

Instead, he overhears Mr. Jacoby talking with Mr. Sanders about the accident. Bit by bit he pieces together what has happened to Lyla, then Mr. Jacoby notices him and stops talking. The teacher takes the guitar and the note and pauses, as if he doesn’t know what to say. Finally, he gives him a nod and tells him to go to class.

Tripp walks out in a daze. Ahead, he sees Annie approaching and he stops her.

She looks sick to her stomach and says, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

The bell rings and she hurries into the music room.

“I’m sure you have somewhere to go, Tripp,” Mr. Handlon says as he walks by.

Tripp walks to class and sits down. He wants to scream, but he is locked in the reality of this classroom, this day.

He gets through his morning classes. At lunch, he calls Lyla even though he knows it’s pointless, and then he writes three notes to Annie, asking her to tell him what she knows, but he throws them all away. By the afternoon, differing rumors about Lyla’s accident are all over school. She has a broken leg. She has a concussion. She is going to be all right. She is dying.

As soon as school is over, his mom calls and reminds him that he has to come to the store. When he gets there, she peppers him with meaningless questions. Did you give the guitar back with an apology? Yes. Do you have your algebra book? Yes. Do you know what you’re supposed to do for science? Yes.

He goes into the back workroom and enters his zip code and the word
hospital
in a search engine on the computer. Fifteen hospitals are listed. He calls each one and asks if there is a patient named Lyla Marks. No each time. A thought occurs to him. He puts in the address for the Pomegranate Playhouse and finds the nearest hospital. He calls it, and the woman on the end of the line tells him that she’s there. Time seems to stop.

“Is she okay?”

“Are you a family member?”

“I’m a friend.”

“Information about this patient is unavailable at this time.”

“Why? Can’t you just tell me if she’s going to be okay?”

“I’m sorry,” the woman says. “It says here that family members only should have access to patient information.”

He doesn’t know what to do. To keep his mom off his back, he does his homework.

As soon as they get home, he disappears into his room. He listens to the recording that they made on the boat, their voices singing
lucky, lucky me
, and then he switches it off. It’s like a horrible taunt.

 NOVEMBER 25. TUESDAY.

A group of girls from Advanced Orchestra put a big white basket and a note about Lyla by the music room. Three stuffed animals are in the basket as well as cards that people are signing. Someone is going to bring it to the hospital tomorrow.

All day he hears more rumors. Lyla is in a coma. Lyla is brain-dead.

Annie is absent, and someone says she’s visiting Lyla. Someone else says Annie’s at home, sick because she’s worried that Lyla is going to die hating her. She and Lyla were in a big fight over him. People are talking. No one talks to him directly, but they know that he and Lyla were
caught in the music room together; they know that they were eating lunch together. People are looking at him strangely. Like maybe he is to blame. Then he hears Marisse say that the reason Annie is sick is because she thinks she caused the accident: that day she had called Marisse and confessed that she was hoping that Lyla wouldn’t make it to the Coles audition. It was like a jinx, Marisse says.

As soon as school is out, Tripp leaves. He calls Lyla’s home phone number and listens to the recorded message. “You’ve reached the Marks residence. Please leave your name and number after the beep.”

Tripp takes a breath. “This is Tripp Broody.… I know I’m not supposed to call. But I just need to know how Lyla is. This is my cell phone number. Please call back.”

 NOVEMBER 26. WEDNESDAY.

Tripp hears from Mr. Sanders that Lyla was transferred to a special hospital nearby. He says that Lyla isn’t snapping out of it; yes—it’s really a coma. Tripp wants to ask what that means, but he is too afraid.

At lunchtime, he sees Annie in the hallway and hears that she and another girl are going to take the basket, overflowing now with stuffed animals, to the hospital after school today. All day he wants to put a note in the basket, but he is worried that Mr. Marks will read it and get even more angry.

Tripp is sitting at his desk, reading articles about comas on the web. People in comas can often hear, but they can’t get a certain part of the brain to wake up, so they can’t respond. He clicks on a story about a woman who was in a car accident at the age of twenty-six and never woke up. The story hits him like a kick to the stomach.

The door to his room opens, and his mom walks in, oblivious to what he’s going through. “I just got an e-mail from Crenshaw about your status.” She holds up a printout. “We have to talk about this sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner.”

He holds his breath and stares at his screen, trying to keep from falling apart.

“So you’re not talking? Is that it, Tripp?”

“Please just leave me alone, Mom.”

“Don’t give me that attitude.”

Her voice shoves against him, and his composure breaks. He gets up, sending his chair to the floor with a crash, and meets his mother’s gaze. “Lyla got in a car accident on the way home from the wedding. Okay, Mom? And I don’t know if she’s going to be all right.”

He pushes past her, walks out the back door and down the steps, and stands in the backyard. The ground under his feet is cold, the air, too—he can see his breath. No moon. No stars. Nothing but black. Why is it that
everything he loves gets taken away from him? It’s like there’s a black hole in the sky with his name on it and its job is to suck everything that he loves out of existence.

Lining either side of the concrete patio are rows of autumn mums in clay flowerpots, and the cheerful symmetry, for some reason, makes him even angrier. He picks up a flowerpot and hurls it at their fence. Even as the satisfying crash hits his ears, he knows that it is pointless. The flowerpots are not to blame. He picks up another and throws it anyway and then another, until all six are broken, and finally he sits on the bottom step.

After a few minutes, he hears the sound of the door opening behind him. His mom walks down the stairs and sits next to him, hugging herself to stay warm. She sees the broken pots and says nothing about them. Finally, she speaks. “I called Tina Chan, a mom I know from last year’s silent auction committee to see if she had any information about Lyla. I remember that she was involved with the music program and thought she might know Lyla’s family.”

Tripp doesn’t move.

“A deer jumped in front of the Markses’ car, Tripp. I don’t want you to blame yourself or Lyla’s dad, for that matter. It’s nobody’s fault. It just happened.”

Tripp takes this in. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Kids are resilient. I bet she’ll get better soon.”

He looks at the broken pots. “That means you don’t know.”

She is silent. “Yeah. I don’t know, Tripp. It’s definitely a serious injury.”

He lets his breath out in a small stream. “I want to go to the hospital.”

She puts an arm around his shoulder. “It’s really nice that you want to visit her, Tripp. Really nice. But … I don’t know … her dad must be so overwhelmed, and it might upset him. I don’t think we should be adding tension to the situation, do you?”

Tripp looks at the black sky.

She pats his leg. “It’s freezing. Come inside.”

He nods, but he doesn’t move.

“You know you can’t go around breaking flowerpots, either.” She attempts a smile. He nods again. “Come inside, honey.”

“In a minute.”

She goes in, and he closes his eyes.

Lyla … just wake up. Please
.

“Sweetie, feel this. Feel how soft it is.” Lyla’s dad picks up her hand and slips a small stuffed teddy bear underneath it. “Feel that? If you can hear my voice, just wiggle your fingers.”