Once More With Feeling (7 page)

She didn't know how long she rocked there,
suspended and content like a nursling snuggled against a mother's
breasts. Her next moment of awareness was triggered by an explosion
of light and demons tearing at her lungs.

Somewhere nearby a male voice shouted. "This
one's back, but we're going to lose her again if we don't get her
there soon!"

She wondered who was back, and where they
had gone in the first place.

"Well, the other one's still breathing, but
that's the most I can say!"

She preferred the darkness and sought it
again. This time it was less comforting and more intriguing. As a
child she had dreamed of flying, wildly colorful dreams where she
had drifted above the earth, weightless and free. She was drifting
now, as if she had misplaced her body, only to find that she had
never needed it in the first place.

She was still surrounded by the abyss, but
there was a subtle air current, as pleasant as the first gentle
breeze of evening after a torrid summer day. The breeze wafted
around her, but it didn't carry her forward. She rode it like a
ship at anchor.

Time did not matter here. The abyss
mattered, and the gentle currents. Her inability to move forward
mattered, but only as an intellectual exercise. She could stay
here, suspended forever, and not feel cheated. Her sense of peace
was complete.

The darkness was split by light again. Her
eyelids flew open involuntarily, and the light doubled in
intensity. It was circular, and so painful to behold that she
wanted to reach out and shut it off. But she was paralyzed. She was
no longer weightless, but heavy and stiff.

There were human shapes above her.

"BP fifty over zero," someone shouted.
"We're going to lose her again."

She wanted to tell them she wasn't lost. She
knew who she was, if not where.

A woman bent over her as other voices
shouted orders in the background. "You're at the emergency room.
Hold on, honey. We've called your family. Now don't you leave us
again."

"I don't know why you bother," a male voice
said. Elisabeth could feel hands moving over her body, and she knew
the voice must belong to the hands. "She can't hear a thing."

"Hold on," the woman said, bending over her
again. "I know you can hear me. Just hold on."

A new voice spoke. "Maybe you should tell
the other one to hold on, Kathy. That's Gypsy Dugan, lying over
there."

"Never heard of her."

"You sure as hell will if they lose her. And
they're about to."

"Damn!"

As suddenly as she had left it, Elisabeth
was back in the abyss. She was no longer tethered, but moving with
the currents. The feeling was delicious, like floating in an ocean
with no fear of sharks or undertow.

The darkness was less than complete now.
There was light in the distance, a light so radiant it defied
comparison to anything she had seen before. And the instant she
experienced it, she realized she was no longer inside her human
form.

Her human form lay on a stretcher where
voices and hands labored to keep her alive as they simultaneously
discussed the vital signs of Gypsy Dugan.

The accident was suddenly clear. She
remembered the impact of the limousine, the shattering of glass,
the screaming of metal. And she had screamed, too. She had realized
she was going to die. She had thought briefly of Owen and their
plans for the evening. Now, that seemed remarkably foolish. Her
life hadn't even flashed in front of her eyes.

Or perhaps it had. She had spent the
greatest portion of her own life living Owen's. If her last thought
was of his schedule, then that was symbolic of the woman she had
been at the moment of her death.

Except that Owen and dinner with the
Caswells hadn't been her final thought. Not quite. Just as her eyes
closed, and just as she'd thought of Owen, she had caught one final
glimpse of the limo. And she had realized that the limo driver was
a woman.

Gypsy Dugan
.

Suddenly Elisabeth understood the discussion
in the emergency room. For some reason, known only to herself,
Gypsy Dugan had been tearing down the road toward the Expressway in
a black limousine. And she hadn't been sitting where celebrities
sit. She had been behind the wheel, aiming straight for Elisabeth's
Mercedes.

But not on purpose. Gypsy hadn't tried to
hit her. Elisabeth remembered an intersection just ahead, and
another car edging out. Gypsy had swerved to avoid the car, and the
limo had spun out of control. The panic in Gypsy's eyes was the
same panic Elisabeth had felt. For that moment they had been
sisters, bonded by the knowledge of what was about to happen.

Perhaps Gypsy was hovering in this twilight
world with her.

The feeling of peace vanished, and she no
longer drifted. She became a swimmer struggling against the
current. Immediately she was back in the emergency room, but she
didn't need her eyes to see. She wasn't even on the stretcher
anymore, where two men and three women worked frantically over her
body. She was floating above it all, like a sentimental
life-after-death reenactment on
The Whole Truth
. She could
see everything without turning or focusing. In less than a moment,
less than the blink of an eye--if she'd had an eye to blink--she
understood everything that had happened.

No one was willing to give up on her. They
were possessed. Her death was an insult and as yet, an
unacknowledged one.

They had lost one patient today. They would
not lose another.

Elisabeth saw the sheet that covered Gypsy.
Someone had just pulled it up to her shoulders, although no one had
yet shown the courage to cover her face. There were two men and a
woman in a circle around her, but although they appeared shaken, no
one was trying to help her. Clearly, Gypsy was beyond help.

This was particularly clear to Elisabeth
because she knew that Gypsy was in another place in the room. There
was just the briefest moment of contact, an impression, a whisper.
Now the essence that was Gypsy had no body, but Elisabeth could
sense her anyway. This was still the Gypsy she had seen so often on
the television screen. Sassy, courageous, and
amazingly--considering everything--seductive.

There were no words, but Elisabeth
understood that Gypsy was moving toward the abyss, and with
characteristic panache, she embraced the experience. Gypsy Dugan
was on her way to the biggest scoop of all.

Then Gypsy was gone and Elisabeth was
acutely aware that the emergency room team just below was still
struggling.

"If you bring her back again, God knows what
we'll have on our hands," one of the men warned another.

"She has a name," one of the women said.
"Her name's Elisabeth Whitfield."

The abyss beckoned, and darkness blotted out
the bright lights, one by one.

It was time.

But it wasn't. The velvet arms of death had
never seemed so comforting or conversely, so terrifying. Elisabeth
wanted to live. Gypsy might be ready to move ahead to whatever
awaited her, but Elisabeth was not. The abyss had taught her that
there was no reason to fear dying, that whatever waited after death
was as pure, as perfect, as indisputably glorious as heaven--and
not one bit like hell. There was no judgment there, but only an
assessment she was to make herself.

Her assessment was that she had not lived
long or well enough. She had not accomplished all that she could
have. Time after time she had taken the easy way out, choosing
comfort and tradition over risk.

She couldn't die. She wouldn't. Gypsy had
lived exactly as she had wanted to. If nothing else could be said
about her, that much could. Elisabeth didn't even have that to show
for her life.

She would not die
.

The lights faded completely, but this time
there were no velvet arms to comfort her. She was suspended in time
and space, and there was no sensation. Then consciousness vanished
completely, and Elisabeth was no more.

A bird trilled relentlessly, so relentlessly
that Elisabeth wished a hawk would emerge from the thick clouds
that surrounded her and carry it away. She thought she was fond of
birds, had even tramped through forests and swamps with a notebook
in one hand and binoculars in the other. Somewhere along the way
she had learned to distinguish a waxwing's chirp from a redstart's
warble. But this bird's song was unfamiliar. Worse than
unfamiliar.

She considered retreating again. She was
exceptionally good at that by now. She could judge the exact moment
when pain would swoop down, like the hawk in her imaginings, and
tear her flesh into ragged strips. Just as the agony became
unbearable, she could burrow inside herself, hide deeper in the
clouds of total oblivion until she forgot the pain that was waiting
for her every time she emerged.

But even as she perched on the edge of
unconsciousness, she realized that something had changed. The pain
was fierce, but it wasn't growing stronger. The thick clouds were
dispersing, along with her possibility of escape. She felt only
gratitude that the sky was turning an unadulterated blue once
more.

The bird wasn't a bird at all.

Elisabeth opened her eyes and peered at
white acoustical tile. For a moment she thought the clouds had
descended, then as her eyes focused, the pattern of tiny holes in
identical squares began to make sense. She was gazing at a ceiling.
And the bird was the tinny sound of a portable radio. A portable
radio blasting hip hop.

She opened her mouth to protest, and fire
streaked across her face. Her lips felt swollen and cracked. She
tried to run her tongue across them, but her brain refused the
command. She tried again, only to realize that something blocked
her progress.

"Not the worst job I've ever had." The voice
of a young woman competed with the aggressively rhythmic patter
from the radio. Elisabeth couldn't place the direction of the
sound.

"She doesn't need a lot of care. Just lies
there. Food goes in, food comes out. I check her vital signs, check
the monitors. Check the action on the daytime dramas when I get too
bored."

The voice that responded was deep and
masculine. "Then there's been no improvement?"

"How'd you get up here, anyway? S'not
supposed to be anybody in this room but hospital personnel."

"I bribed the security guard."

The woman laughed. "With what, sugarplum?
Your autograph?"

"Do you think she's going to wake up?"

"You have to ask the doctors that."

"I've asked."

"And you don't like what they say?"

"They don't say anything worth listening
to."

"There've been times. . ." The woman paused.
"Sometimes I'm encouraged."

"Can I see her?"

"Nah. Something happened and somebody found
you here, I'd be the one in trouble. You'd better get on, now."

"Look, if I give you my card, will you call
me if something changes?"

"I don't know . . ."

"It would mean a lot."

"You're hard to say no to, you know
that?"

"I depend on it."

Elisabeth didn't know where she was or why,
but she knew the man's voice was somehow familiar. The woman's was
not. And the music that was pouring from the radio was something
she'd only heard from the stereo systems of passing cars.
Everything, the room, the woman, the music was alien. Everything
except the man's voice.

Owen. Even as she pulled Owen's name out of
the clouds, she discarded it. Owen's voice was deeper, and there
was a guttural quality to his "r's," just the faintest husky rumble
that betrayed the fact that he had grown up speaking another
language.

The voice wasn't Grant's, either. Grant's
was higher, a resonant tenor, and his enunciation, like hers, was
prep school perfect, as if his thoughts were carefully divided into
syllables and spelled out in phonetics.

She knew other men, although she couldn't
recall their names just now. But the man speaking was not one of
them. Of this she was sure. Still, she knew him somehow. She knew
him.

Something cool ran down her cheek. It took
her a long time to realize that she was crying.

The conversation was over now, and someone
was stomping relentlessly. The stomping grew louder and louder.

"Awake again, huh? I wonder what you're
thinking about when you stare at the ceiling that way. Are you
thinking at all? Or are you still way off in dreamland?"

Elisabeth tried to turn her head toward the
woman's voice, but she found she was immobilized. Frustration
filled her, and the tears fell harder.

"Well, look at that."

A hand brushed the tears away. A soft,
gentle hand. "Honeypot, can you actually hear me this time?"

Elisabeth tried to answer, but the same
impediment that had stopped her from licking her lips kept her from
speaking.

"No, don't try to talk." The same soft hand
linked fingers with Elisabeth's. "Look, if you can hear me, if you
know what I'm saying, squeeze. Just a little will be fine."

Elisabeth tried. The wrong hand clenched
spasmodically.

The woman sighed. "Thought we had something
this time." She started to unweave her fingers, one by one.

Elisabeth squeezed again.

"Whoa . . ." The fingers wove back into
place. "Try that again, sweetcakes."

Elisabeth squeezed.

"Once for yes, two for no."

Elisabeth squeezed once.

"Do you know where you are?"

Elisabeth squeezed twice. She had never done
anything more exhausting.

"You really do understand, don't you?" The
woman laughed. She sounded absolutely delighted. "Look, I'm going
to bend over the bed so you can see just who you're talking to. My
name's Perry, and I'm your day nurse. You're in the hospital, and
you're as safe as a bug in a rug."