Lurlene McDaniel (7 page)

Mark's workshop is in an old barn off a back road in the hills surrounding Asheville. I can hear the whine of the big circular saw ripping wood before I walk in the door. Inside I see Mark feeding boards—poplar is my guess—into the whirling teeth. He's wearing eye protection and a French wool beret. His face and arms are caked with sawdust.

I love the smell of the place, the fresh-cut lumber, the mix of paints and varnishes, the dust itself. The wood was once a living thing and Mark treats it with respect while shaping it, cutting and sanding it, staining or painting it, turning it into cabinets or tables, desks or an occasional chair. “Chairs are hard,” he has told me. “Most people won't pay what they're worth in time to make them.” He wrestles works of art out of raw wood, and he's taught me all I know about his trade.

I feel ashamed that I haven't been to work for more than a month. I left him in the lurch. Not nice. Mark looks up, sees me, turns off the saw and lifts his goggles. He comes over, his face in a grin.

“Well, hey, stranger!” He shakes my hand.

I grin too. He could have been angry and thrown me out. “Sorry I haven't been around to help you.”

“We're making it.” He gestures to the back of the barn, where I see Rudy hand-rubbing cherry stain on a large bookcase. Mark uses Rudy only in an emergency, when he gets so backed up that he and I can't handle the workload. Rudy's a good carpenter, but he drinks and disappears for months on end. Mark needs someone he can depend on. That's supposed to be me.

“How's he doing?”

“So far, so good.” Mark wipes the sawdust off his arms with a rag. “How's your girl doing?”

I tell him about Analise's surgery and how the brain swelling is down, that she's been placed in a room on the neuro floor but she still hasn't woken up. His face is full of sympathy.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?” he asks.

I drop my gaze, scuff the toe of my boot
through a pile of sawdust. “I want to come back to work. School just isn't enough to keep my mind busy. I—I need to be busier because I think about her all the time, and now that the cops think someone hit her and pushed her over the side—”

“What?” Mark exclaims. I fill him in on what I know about the accident—precious little—and he says, “How could somebody do that?”

“Thinking about it is making me crazy because there's nothing I can do. But if I ever get my hands on that driver …” I stop talking, let my anger cool.

Mark squeezes my shoulder. “I've got work for you, Jer. Let me know the hours you're available and I'll work up a schedule between you and Rudy.”

“I don't want to take work from Rudy.”

Mark grins. “He's been working steady for three weeks, so I'm figuring he's about ready to split. If the past is any indicator, that is. Don't worry about Rudy. Just show up. Spence Palmer ordered a custom desk from me. You know his kid at school?”

“I know of him. He's BMOC and doesn't mingle with us commoners. Not a big baseball star like him.”

“Well, Spence wants the desk done by Christmas. It's a push, but with your help we can get it out.”

Anything to help Mark. Anything to get my mind off Analise. “I'll be here tomorrow, soon as school's out.”

“I
think, therefore I am!”

I remember from my philosophy class that a Frenchman, Descartes, wrote these words. I get his meaning now. I can think, but no one knows it. I am trapped inside a body that I can't make obey my instructions.

“Wake up!”
No response.

“Move, hand, leg, eyelid!”
Nothing happens.

I am.
But also, I am not. I wonder what Descartes would say about my situation? Coma. Not dead. Alive in only the strictest sense. Time has become fluid, like a river. I am awake. I am not awake. I have no way of knowing how much time passes between these two states. I simply fade out. Or I rise like a bubble to the surface of a lake. Time melts. Voices whisper, then go away. I can't escape.

They feed me through a tube down my throat.
They bathe me, lifting my arms, my legs, washing away the smell of inertia. I never leave the bed. Mom washes my face, smudges my cheeks with a little blush. My hair's been cut, and she tucks the stubby new growth under a stocking cap to keep my head warm.

Daddy reads to me, like he did when I was little, until I was four and snatched the books away from him, saying, “I can read all by myself, Daddy.” My old books … the ones I loved as a little girl. He reads them over and over and they comfort me.

A physical therapist, June, I think, massages my body, stretches my muscles, working around my casts. I hear her tell Mom, “We want to keep her muscles limber. We don't want her limbs to contract, curl up.”

Mom says, “Show us how, and we'll help too.”

And Jeremy comes and lifts my hand and presses his lips to my open palm, and inside my chest, my heart melts. Not the heart attached to my physical body, but the heart inside my soul. I love him so much. I try to remember the last time I told him that. I can't. What
is
the last thing I remember before I floated in darkness? Before I was pulled through the tunnel toward the shining light?

I struggle to see pictures from my past. If I can
recall something a philosopher said from a class lesson, why can't I see other memories?

“She's restless,” I hear my mother say. “I think she knows you're here, Jeremy.”

His hand caresses my cheek. “Wake up, Analise. Please wake up.”

I want to go to the surface, but something is pulling me down, back into the dark. No matter how hard I fight, I cannot resist the force that draws me. One clear image glows. I am riding my bike and I see ground rushing past me. It's night and I'm cold. The ground glows with light. I turn and glance over my shoulder to see why the ground is so suddenly vividly lit. Blinding white lights rush toward me. Bright lights. So bright, I squint.

Darkness comes and I fall into it, headlong.

I can't eat or sleep. All I do is think about what's been said in the halls, what Judie has told me.
Analise was a victim of a hit-and-run.
The police are sure because of paint scrapings taken from her smashed bike and the broken guardrail. I keep seeing this picture in my head of Quentin framed in the headlights of his SUV. I see him dragging brush toward the guardrail. I see his face, dark with concentration. I ask myself, “Did his car hit her?” It's hard to get my mind around it. If he did, why won't he confess? Why would he drive off and leave her?

“You are like so far into outer space!” Judie says.

We're shopping downtown over the Thanksgiving holiday, chased in and out of stores by a bitter north wind. My hands are freezing, and my heart isn't into it. “Sorry,” I say.

“Are you honked about seeing your dad over Christmas?”

“Of course not. He's getting a hotel room and taking me shopping. I can't wait for him to come.”

“Then what's got you so strung out?”

“I can't stop thinking about Analise.”

Judie gives me a
Huh?
look.

I could bite off my tongue for saying what's been on my mind for weeks. Judie isn't stupid, and once she stares long enough at me, I begin to turn red. Now there's no hiding from her third degree.

“You're not telling me something.”

I get tongue-tied.

“I think we'd better go over to Starbucks, sit down with some coffee and have a little chat.”

I don't want to chat, but I feel confused and helpless. Maybe if I talk to someone—anyone—I can have some peace again. I let her lead me out of the store and down the street to the coffee shop.

She buys us coffee, finds us a small table in the back of the shop, and we sit. I sip my coffee and burn my tongue. Judie sits and stares. Finally she says, “Spill it.”

Now that I'm actually about to reveal what's
on my mind, I get scared. “It's probably nothing. Just my imagination working overtime.”

“You talk. I'll decide.”

I sputter around until I can't dodge the topic any longer; then I tell her the whole story about the night of the party and my date with Quin. She listens while her blue eyes stare holes in me. I end with “I—I was half-asleep, so all I remember is feeling a jolt. He got out of the car. He looked at the fender. He covered the hole in the guardrail with brush. I—I took his word for it. That it was a deer. That he hit.” My words dribble away.

Judie looks out the plate glass window, and I know she's thinking hard about what I've said. I'm feeling better for having gotten the words out, like a weight has been lifted off me. I take a deep breath and find that the constant knot in my chest has loosened.

I say, “I don't know what to do.”

She turns to face me. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? But—but I'm going crazy.”

“Don't do anything
yet,”
she amends. “Let me think about this for a while.”

“M-maybe I should go to the police.” I say the words but don't mean them. I'd faint; I'd throw up if I had to talk to the police. “I'm scared, Judie.”

Judie reaches over, pats my hand. “Give me some time to figure this out.”

Her willingness to help me instills a calm in me. I understand all over again what a good friendship is all about. It's sharing your problems and having a friend help you carry them. I could cry with relief and gratitude.

I
've been moved. I know because the atmosphere surrounding me seems different, and because I hear Mom and Dad talking. They say, “Long-term care center,” and “More intensive therapeutic help.” This means only one thing: I'm not getting better. Oh, my body is healing, because they've removed my casts. But my mind is still trapped, held captive by a demon called
Coma.
It rules me. I can't break free. And I've tried. Yes, I've tried.

Memories haunt me. I see the bright lights over my shoulder. It's like a film loop, going round and round, showing the same pictures every time, until I could scream. But I can't scream. I can't control anything.

Once, as I float to the surface of my reality, I hear Mom and a doctor talking. His deep voice rumbles. “… insert a G-tube. More comfortable for her … a simple surgery.”

“We want what's best for her.”

“… best for long-term care.”

I understand then the doctors are losing hope that I'll wake up. I panic.

“Doctor, look, she's moving. Thrashing!”

“Mrs. Bower, I know it seems that way, but it's reflexive. Try to understand. We test her regularly.”

I want to scream at him.
“I'm here! You ass! I'm right here!”

Mom says, “But her eyes keep opening.”

“And she has higher brain function too,” the doctor says. “Which means she isn't in a persistent vegetative state. We can see brain activity on her MRIs. But so far she is unreachable except through deep pain stimuli.”

Mom begins to cry and I feel pain like no other. It sears through my brain, throws me back to the blinding lights, and all at once I feel the scrape of hard metal on my left side, the crunch of bone against metal as my right leg hits something hard. I see the world spin out of control and I am flying birdlike through dark space, spinning like an out-of-control top, tumbling headlong into total darkness. Above me, I hear tires screech and smell burnt rubber. I flail, spin, topple. And I silently scream.