Long Way Gone (20 page)

T
he sound woke me. An incessant beeping from a machine above my head. I blinked and tried to adjust to the light, but the world was white and bright and fingers-on-chalkboard noisy. Tubes and wires were running into and out of most every part of me. I was draining and dripping everywhere.

A man walked between me and the light overhead. A stethoscope hung around his neck. The beeping stopped. His voice sounded muted. “How you feeling?”

I tried to talk, but my voice was nowhere to be found. I mouthed the word
alive
, but no sound came.

He patted my leg. “When you got here, you were not.”

I tried to say something else, but it never made it out.

He continued, “You want the good news or bad?”

I figured I already knew the bad.
Good.

He smiled. As if that somehow made it better. “You'll live.”

I found little comfort in that. Given that we were talking, I thought we'd covered that. I pushed hard and almost whispered the word. “Bad?”

His face changed. “You'll live”—he paused, choosing his words—“differently.” He eyed the whole of me. Wondering where to start. The way a mechanic does after you've just taken your fifteen-year-old car in for a diagnostic.

“Something pretty big fell on your hand and broke most every bone.”

I tried to move my fingers, but they felt thick and obstructed.

“Whatever was burning in that building was toxic and extremely hot. Fried your throat and voice box. You're going to have to learn to talk again. I highly doubt you'll ever have the same control you once had over your voice.”

That would explain the strange lump in my throat.

“We reconstructed your eardrum, but hearing loss is a certainty. And we stopped the bleeding in your chest and managed to get the bullet out, but it did some considerable damage.” He turned and shined a red laser at an X-ray. I recognized a rib cage and spine, which I assumed were mine. “We'll talk more about that in the days ahead.”

I was pretty groggy. Coming out of a rather deep haze of medication. His words were echoing off the inside of my mind without landing anywhere. I motioned for a pad of paper, which he handed me. The injury to my right hand forced me to scribble with my left, so the words were barely legible.
Where's that leave me?

He sighed, sat on a rolling stainless steel stool, and scooted up next to the bed. “You'll never sing again. Might not even talk. Probably never play an instrument that involves your right hand. You may never hear out of your right ear again. And then there's your liver.” He continued to speak, but my mind was having a tough time making sense of what he said. The words bounced around the inside of my skull like a marble.

I lifted my head and tried to look around, but the room was spinning, so I laid it back down and closed my eyes. “Jimmy?”

He leaned in closer. “Who?”

I mimicked playing a guitar.

He laughed. “The guitar you were latched onto when they brought you in?”

I nodded.

“Never seen that one before. Had to pry the case out of your hands.” He continued, “It probably saved your life. Had it not been there, I doubt we'd be having this conversation. It's right over there, in the corner.” His eyes took on an inquisitive slant. “You know the guy who pulled you out?”

I shook my head.

“Sam something-or-other. He's been in here several times with that girl. The singer. He's her producer. Everybody on the hall wants his autograph. Hers too.”

My whisper was angry. “Never happened.”

He glanced up at the TV. “He saved your life. It's on all the networks.”

I let it go. The truth would take too long.

Whispering so much had dislodged some mucous in my throat, causing a painful, stitch-stretching, spastic cough. He held a plastic bowl beneath my chin, which I half filled with crimson mucous.

I looked around me and patted the bed with my left hand like an old man searching a coat pocket.

“You looking for something?”

I used hand signals to accentuate my broken whisper. “Small black notebook. Rubber band holding it together.”

He shook his head. “Haven't seen it. I'll ask around, but I doubt it survived.” A pause. “That was a hot fire.”

“Heart pine.”

He leaned in closer. “What's that?”

I whispered, “Two-hundred-year-old kerosene.”

He nodded. “That would do it.”

I stared at the ceiling as the tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. Somewhere in these first foggy moments, I realized several things: my songs were gone and my playing days were over, but it was the last revelation that hurt the most.

Daley was better off without me, and I was going to have to leave her without explanation—which would hurt her the most.

T
he story was all over the news. Sam feigned torment and acted deeply distraught. The ten stitches in his forehead added color to the picture.

In the aftermath, two stories emerged. What Sam told the public. And what Sam told Daley.

The truth, however, was in neither.

In the first story, Sam told authorities and pretty much everyone with a camera that he and I had been working on postproduction when we encountered a man robbing his office safe. He confronted the man, and the man shot me, hit Sam in the head with something heavy, and then evidently lit a propane bomb to cover the evidence.

Sam woke to flame and fire, gathered his senses, and carried me to safety. The thief escaped with eighty thousand in cash and his wife's jewelry. Through crocodile tears, which the camera did an excellent job of highlighting, Sam lowered his voice and spoke of how he considered me the son he never had. He spoke of my promise. Of all the lost possibilities.

Authorities were still looking for the unidentified man, whom Sam couldn't see well enough to identify. Just said he was big. Film taken by media crews showed an inconsolable Daley clinging to my smoking clothing as I was being loaded into an ambulance clutching a guitar case.

It made for fantastic news.

They brought me to Vanderbilt Medical. The nurses said Daley had been at my bedside 24/7. She'd helped turn me. Bathe me. Change my wound dressings. The ever-benevolent and affected Sam spearheaded my care. He brought in the best doctors. Burn specialists. Surgeons. A hand specialist. Throat specialist. They stuck me with needles to shoot stuff in and they stuck me with needles to draw stuff out. I began to feel like a raw pincushion.

This care for me did two things: it endeared Sam to Daley and it sold a lot of records.

But as they weaned me from medicine and began slowly waking me from my medically induced coma, Sam suddenly found reasons for Daley to be on every talk show across the country. She became the poster child for how to overcome unspeakable personal tragedy and make it through. Camera angles flashed back and forth between her engagement ring, pictures of us performing onstage, and her present-day watery eyes. Daley was fragile, on the verge of cracking, and Sam took advantage of every tear that fell from her beautiful face.

I sat in bed, watched Daley make the talk show rounds in New York, and caught snippets between naps. The unknowns were many. Interviewers asked her, would I be able to walk her down the aisle? Could I speak? Sing? Play? How much of me had been burned? Would we be able to have children? Had I suffered oxygen deprivation? Did I have all my faculties?

An empathetic Sam even sent her to and fro on his private jet so she could return quickly to my side. In a brilliant coup d'état, he secured a
60 Minutes
exclusive. If he tried over the next million years, he'd never get media exposure this good.

Interestingly, no mention was ever made of my missing notebook.

But if I thought this entire charade showcased his talent, I had another thing coming. The ever-resilient and inventive Sam had two more tricks up his sleeve. The first was to “reluctantly” release the album. Out of respect for me, he stated publicly that he wanted to wait until I could play again so that we could tour, but then a copy was leaked to the
media. He vowed to find who did it. “They'll never work anywhere in this town again.”

It went platinum in two days. And platinum a second time by the weekend.

That didn't surprise me. But the second trick I never saw coming. Sometimes you bump into a better poker player. And Sam was just better.

Pain had become my constant companion. My skin still felt like it was on fire. Much of me was raw, including my vocal cords. Moving cracked open scabs. Lying still caused thicker scabs. Surgery had reconstructed my eardrum, but the only thing I could hear was a constant muted ringing.

My pessimistic and constantly frowning doctor said, “Any ability to hear will take months to return, and only if the grafts hold.” A forced smile. “So don't hit your head on anything.”

“I'll try not to.”

“But even if you wear a helmet for the next year, you can only expect at best about a 10 percent return. For all intents and purposes, you'll be deaf save certain low-end frequencies. There was just too much damage . . .”

I tuned him out.
What kind of a guy goes into medicine who only knows how to give bad news? I mean, there has to be some good news around here somewhere.
I started wondering if he actually enjoyed it.

Given the risk of infection, they kept me in the burn unit, which gave me a good bit of solitary time to think. The truth was painful but clear. I couldn't sing. Couldn't play. Couldn't talk. My throat felt like someone had cut out my vocal cords. And while all this was settling in my foggy brain, my doctor returned with more bad news. He sat on a stool with wheels and scooted over next to the bed. “I have your labs.”

I heard the words he spoke, but they didn't really sink in.

“So when you hear your heart pounding like Niagara in your ears, or cough and find both blood and what looks like coffee grounds . . .”

I whispered, “Until then?”

“Live your life.”

“Like an inmate on death row.”

He tilted his head side to side. “That's one way of looking at it.”

“How would you look at it . . . if you were lying here?”

He didn't answer.

I stared out the window, across a brilliant blue Nashville skyline, and rasped, “How much time do I have?”

He wouldn't commit. “That's anybody's guess.”

I stayed quiet for a moment, lost in the view, until he tapped me on the knee. “You still here, Cooper?”

I turned toward him. My voice had grown hoarser. “You should probably call me Coop.”

He nodded, realizing that he knew more about my physical person than anyone on the planet. He folded his hands. “I keep wishing I could walk in here with good news, but—”

“Me too.” There was little good and we both knew it.

“You've got some visitors waiting to come in, but I wanted a chance to talk with you first.”

My voice had checked out so I reached for the pad by my bed and scribbled, showing how my left hand moved more slowly than my brain.
They know any of this?

“No.”

I'd like to keep it that way.

“Understood.”

He patted me on the foot and walked out, and a few minutes later Daley and Sam walked in. She'd been crying, and when she sat she kept a safe distance—which struck me as odd. Sam stood at the end of my bed, a smug look on his face.

Finally Daley spoke. “Cooper, why?”

She called me Cooper.
Why'd she call me Cooper?

I looked from her to Sam and back to Daley. I didn't like where this was going. I turned the pad to a new piece of paper and scrawled,
Why what?

She blew her nose. A lot was coming at me fast, but it was here I noticed she wasn't wearing the ring I gave her. She said, “Why'd you do it?”

My eyes were still staring at her naked hand. I forced a whisper. “Do what?”

“Sam is willing to brush it under the rug. Keep it between us. But just give it back.”

I tried to shake off the fog. More Sanskrit.
Give what back?

She looked at Sam, pleading,
Let me try and talk some sense into him?

Ever forgiving, he smiled in soft understanding and patted her shoulder.

“All the stuff you and your friend took out of the safe?”

So that was how he was going to play this.

That's what he told you?
I wrote.

“You deny it?”

You believe him?

She pointed to his head. “Explain that.” She pointed to me. “Explain any of this.”

I tried to write faster.
What'd he tell you I took?

She looked to Sam and then back at me. “The eighty thousand cash. And Bernadette's jewelry.”

I'd never been a poker player. Didn't really like cards. But lying in bed with tubes running out of me, I realized I was playing poker with Sam whether I liked it or not, and he was only seconds from running the table. I scribbled angrily in block letters and held up the paper to Sam.
Y
OU TELL HER THIS
?!

He played the empathetic and forgiving uncle. “Coop, we've got a lot of good things on the horizon. In a couple of months you'll be making some healthy royalties.” He acted like he was doing his best to take it easy on me, be understanding, let bygones be bygones. “Some of that jewelry belonged to Bernadette's grandmother. They got it out of Germany before the war.”

If I could have climbed out of bed and ripped his smirking lips off his face, I would have.

The thing that Sam understood, far better than I, was this: all he had to do was appeal to the fragile place in Daley that had been wounded by her dad. If he played the I-am-the-one-person-on-the-planet-you-can-trust card, then she'd turn on me. Her experience with men would convince her that she couldn't trust me when it mattered most. Aside from his strategy being as painful as the physical torment my body had suffered, it was brilliant.

I sat there, letting story number two sink in. Sam had played both hands perfectly. He'd told the media one story, which made him look like the loving Daddy Warbucks and in turn helped sell millions of records. Behind closed doors, he'd told Daley story number two. Both stories endeared her to him and separated her from me.

I stared out the window.
What defense do I have? What can I possibly say?
The pain in my side registered.
And even if I could convince her that Sam is lying, what future does she have with me?
Finally my brain cleared and I asked myself,
What's best for Daley?

I did not like the answer.

Sam helped Daley stand and then tapped me on the foot. “Bernadette would be grateful if you'd return everything. All is forgiven. Water under the bridge.” Then he waved his hand across the hospital room. “All this is on me. We've got the best doctors. No need for you to worry about paying any of it back.” He tugged on Daley's arm and said, “Come on, Dee.”

He'd even started calling her by my nickname for her. She patted his hand, holding his one hand in both of hers and looking up at him. “Can I have a minute with him?”

“Sure, baby. I'll be right outside if you need me.”

I'd known hardship in my life. Nothing like this. I wanted to puke.

He left, and Daley stood at the foot of my bed. Tears falling down. Arms crossed. The same cold wind. A safe distance. Finally she shook her head and palmed her face. Smearing the tears more than wiping them. Her face spoke betrayal and pain. The truth was simple. I'd lost.

She managed, “How—?” Her voice cracked and her throat choked
off the words. “After all he's done . . .” She reached into her pocket, slowly set the engagement ring on the bed, and walked out.

The smell of Coco Chanel was still wafting across me when Sam walked back in.

He stood next to the bed. Towering. Finally he leaned toward me and his mouth took on a smile, but there was no good in it.

“I heard you play when you were seventeen and traveling with your dad's ridiculous tent circus, and I knew I'd never really heard anyone play like you. We courted you, tried to record you, even sent you a Fender with your name on it, but your dad would have none of it. Eighteen months pass, and I walk out of a bar where one of my acts is being upstaged by a punk on the street corner. People were actually leaving the bar to hear the kid on the street. I thought,
Let me take a look.
And there you were. Playing the guitar your father made famous. The one you'd stolen. You looked so happy, so in tune with ‘Jimmy,' that I was all too happy to pay someone to take him from you.” He chuckled and his eyes darted to the corner. “One of my favorite trophies.”

He tapped himself in the chest and I smelled whiskey in his whisper. “I choose who makes it in this business. Not you. Not your talent. Not your dream. Not the gift in your fingers.” He laughed again. “Did you actually think I would let you have Daley?”

I wanted to respond, but the world was coming at me too fast.

“Leave a forwarding address so we'll know where to send the wedding announcement.” He stood and ran his fingers along the inside of his belt. “Oh, and—” He pointed a thumb at Jimmy. “You can keep the souvenir.”

His words shot through me, doing more damage than his bullet. He didn't just want Daley's music. He wanted Daley.

That was the last time I saw Sam Casey.

Six weeks later I walked out of the hospital and limped to the mailbox. I had written the letter left-handed, which took some time and made it difficult to read.

Music washes us from the inside out. It heals what nothing else can. It's the miracle we call song. May the song you sing forever heal the hurt you feel.