Rescue (25 page)

He has little sense of time during the ride. He notes the lights of Burlington and can feel the helicopter descending to the
roof of the hospital. Another team will meet the chopper, and once again Rowan will be transferred.

Webster remembers his mother’s admonition:
You can’t regret anything that leads to your children.
Webster wants to add a corollary:
You will regret something you did that caused your child harm.
If only Webster had forbidden Rowan to go to the dance. If he hadn’t read her diary, she might have lingered at the house,
waited for Tommy to knock on the door, and somehow those few minutes might have altered the universe in such a way as to cause
her not to drink so much, not to be so willing to take a dare. If he’d tried to get in touch with Sheila sooner. If he hadn’t
sent his wife away, depriving Rowan of a normal family life.

Webster feels the jolt as the chopper lands. The ER doc and
nurse have the door open at once and are already wheeling Rowan into the hospital, the chopper medic giving his report as
he jogs. Webster hops out and runs to catch up. He won’t have a problem with the ER personnel. Any parent would be allowed
access to his child.

The ER doctor assesses Rowan. He orders blood tests, an X-ray on the shoulder, a CAT scan of the brain. If that doesn’t show
what he wants, he’ll order up an MRI. Webster hopes that Rowan will wake up on her own before the MRI.

“You the dad?” the ER doctor asks.

“Yes. How is she?”

“Right now, critical. I’ve ordered tests, but we don’t know what we’ll find. As you know, prognosis is guarded with head injuries.
We need to know how much swelling of the brain there’s been. You ought to get yourself a cup of coffee and some food. After
the tests, they’ll wheel her up to the ICU, and you can be with her then.” The doctor wraps a solid hand around Webster’s
upper arm, and the gesture frightens him. Does the doctor know more than he’s telling?

Webster finds his way to the cafeteria and stands in line. All hospital food is the same: fattening and unhealthful. He wonders
how much he actually weighs. He might not get back on the scale until he’s been running for a couple of weeks. He passes through
the entire line and finds nothing he can stomach except a tangerine and the cup of coffee. He searches for an empty table.
He doesn’t want to talk, and the uniform might elicit talk.

He wonders what happened to Rowan’s dress. Where Tommy is and how he’s doing. Maybe later, he’ll call the kid and report
and ask him to drive the cruiser up to Burlington. No, Tommy can’t do that; Webster has the keys in his pocket. It doesn’t
matter. None of it is important.

The only relevant fact is the nature of the swelling inside his daughter’s head.

W
ebster holds Rowan’s hand. The low beeps from the IV, the steady signal from the monitor, and the crackling from the blood
pressure cuff—all of it make a symphony both horrific and comforting. Proof that she’s still alive, waiting, as he is, for
a moment of recognition. He pictures the long fall in the night, the unseen rock protruding, the black water. A boy, standing
in his underwear, calling out and begging. Amid the low laughter, the thunk, the odd trajectory, the shallow splash of feet,
the audible warning to hurry… hurry…

He imagines the glow of the firelight, the dumbstruck faces, some alert at once while others gape. The boy diving into the
inky quarry, calling out again and crying. The resistance as the boy drags the girl to the edge, the weight like heavy cloth
moving through the water.

In the ICU, the lights are harsh and unforgiving. Already the purple-blue below her eyes, the gauze wrapped around her head.
Webster prays as he hasn’t in years. “Please,” he says aloud.

He brings Rowan’s slender hand to his forehead and whispers.

After a while, he stands up and goes outside into a corridor, where he is allowed to make a call. He rummages in his wallet
for a piece of paper Sheila gave him as she left his house. He
waits through the rings and is relieved when the phone is answered.

“You’d better come,” he says.

The longer the patient is in a coma, the less likely that patient is to recover. This is a fact Webster knows, and he wonders,
as he sits in a chair beside the bed, what kind of healing is happening inside her skull, and why it’s taking so long.

When Sheila comes, she has on a pair of black cotton pants and a white dress shirt and looks as helpless as he feels. She
carries a small duffel.

“They said the next forty-eight hours will tell,” Webster reports as they stand in the hallway.

Will tell what? Webster wants to know. He didn’t ask, afraid of the answer. “They said an MRI might be necessary.”

Sheila leans against a wall.

“Today they’re going to attempt surgery on her shoulder. I asked the neurosurgeon whether or not they’d have to drill into
Rowan’s head to relieve the pressure, and he said they didn’t expect to have to do that just yet.”

“Yet.”

“Yet.”

“You look utterly exhausted,” Sheila says.

“I am, but I don’t dare leave her.”

When he sits with his daughter, he talks to her, no longer believing that she can hear him. He does it the way an agnostic
might say a prayer, hedging his bets. He has told her everything he can remember from her childhood, which isn’t much, his
memories limited to the photos he’s taken of her, and most of
them celebrating special occasions. According to the pictures, all of Rowan’s life has been a special occasion. He hasn’t
talked to her about the last photo he took, of Rowan against the wall in her black dress and stilettos, no smile on her face.
He doubts he will ever be able to look at that picture. Should it come to it, he’ll have Koenig print out the pictures on
the disk, give him everything but that one.

But it won’t “come to it.” It simply won’t.

“Let me sit with her,” Sheila suggests.

Webster is surprised by the offer. “It might upset her too much if she wakes up and you’re there.”

“We should be so lucky,” Sheila says.

Webster leads Sheila into the room. He watches as his ex-wife gets her first glimpse of their daughter at age seventeen. A
thin body under the sheet, attached by lines to different monitors, a head bandaged. The color drains from Sheila’s face.

“I know. It’s terrible,” Webster says.

“She’s beautiful,” Sheila says.

“Sometimes I talk to her. I hold her hand.”

Sheila sits. For long time, she is still. Then she makes a tentative gesture toward Rowan’s hand.

“It’s all right,” Webster says. “The injury is on the other side.”

“My hands are cold.”

“She’ll warm you up.”

Sheila reaches for Rowan’s slender hand. It’s a calm moment, though Webster feels electricity in the room. He remembers his
vigil at Rowan’s side fifteen years earlier, the one Sheila couldn’t participate in.

“It’ll be a miracle if I sleep,” Webster says. “I’ll probably be
back in an hour. There’s an inn attached to the hospital they tried to get me to go to after I got here. You have my cell
phone number. Call me if there’s any change at all.”

“Of course,” she says.

“Are you afraid?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

When Webster returns, he tells Sheila that he’s booked her a room at the inn. He gives her the key.

“Did you sleep?” she asks.

“I might have dozed.”

“Well, that’s all right then.”

“Did anything happen here?”

“I held her hand,” Sheila says.

“Oh, God,” Webster says. “This is all wrong.”

“I talked to her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she was fine.”

Webster smiles at the mild joke.

Tommy and Gina come bearing flowers, which they don’t allow in the ICU. The sight of Rowan makes Gina cry and causes Tommy
to look away. Koenig and his wife, Ruth, make the trip, bringing a meal that Webster can’t eat. Even the probie comes straight
off his shift, silently standing near the door, awkward in the situation. Webster thanks him before he leaves.

Webster bends to kiss Rowan on the cheek. He wants to feel her breath.

“Your mother is here,” he tells his sleeping daughter. “She came
all the way from Boston. Actually, Chelsea, where she lives. She came to watch over you. I think you might like her. She’s
an excellent painter. I’ve seen the paintings. You’d like them, too. It seems pretty obvious to me that she’s been thinking
about you all this time. She cried when she saw Puppy. No, forget that.”

Webster thinks.

“I forgot to tell you that she has a sense of humor. I thought she’d lost it, but it’s there. Maybe it will come back full
force, I don’t know. She sat here with you while I dozed in a room at the inn attached to the hospital. She held your hand.
I don’t know if you could feel that or not. She said she talked to you and that you told her you were fine. I hope you were
telling the truth…”

Webster is running out of things to say to Rowan. Is she slipping farther and farther away from him with each passing hour?
This is what he fears the most. That everything is already lost, and he doesn’t know it.

He panics when he wakes and sees the clock. Rowan is now in hour forty-nine. He’s aware of other people in the room.

He stands, alert. “What’s happening?” he asks.

“We’re taking her for another CAT scan,” one of the nurses answers.

“She’s already had the MRI. Why?” Webster asks.

“The doctor will be in shortly to talk to you. This is routine,” the nurse adds. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”

“Routine?” Webster asks, incredulous. “What’s routine about a child being in a coma for forty-nine hours?”

“This shouldn’t take long,” the nurse says.

Webster walks to the window and stares at the lit parking lot. It’s still dark, three thirty in the morning. Two solid days
since
Rowan and the other girl, Kerry, fell into the quarry. He thinks about the other father, living with his own awful news. Webster
should have given the parents a call. He doesn’t even know the girl’s last name. Not a friend of Rowan’s that he knew about.
He could call Tommy, but he doesn’t want to call only to tell the boy that there’s been no change.

Two days is nothing, he tells himself. He knows of cases in which the patient was out for a week or more and then recovered.
Not a hundred percent recovery, but a comeback just the same. No, it’s not the same. Rowan has to come back as herself with
all her faculties. He is still praying for that. Maybe there will come a day when he’ll be able to accept less. He can’t imagine
it.

“Mr. Webster.”

Webster turns to see the neurologist in the doorway, a guy named Lockhart. He has a sport coat on, a tie loosened. A thick
head of dark hair. He looks twenty-two. “We’ve taken your daughter down for a CAT scan,” the doctor says. “It’s been forty-eight
hours, and I think it’s time for another look. I don’t have to tell you that the longer it takes for her to regain consciousness,
the more difficult the outcome may be.”

No, you didn’t need to remind me of that.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to see something that will give us a clue as to how to proceed. If we need to drill into her
skull to relieve the pressure, we will. But it’s not something we want to do.”

Webster is silent. Appalled.

“I’ve personally witnessed a lot of miracles, Mr. Webster. I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I’ve seen patients come
fully alert after a week, two weeks…”

“What’s taking so long?” Webster can’t help but ask.

“The brain remains a mystery. If we had a drug to wake her up without risk, we’d give it to her.”

Webster thanks the man and makes his way down to the cafeteria. The room, without Rowan in it, is a place of horror.

Later that morning, Sheila arrives to spell him. Webster stands and meets her in the doorway. She asks Webster if there has
been any change. He tells her what Lockhart told him. Sheila shuts her eyes and shakes her head.

“Don’t do that to me,” he says.

“Don’t do what?”

“Shut your eyes and shake your head. I can be afraid, but you can’t. I need you to stay strong. Just keep telling me she’s
fine.”

“All right.”

Webster stands outside while Sheila enters the room and takes the chair. This time, she reaches for Rowan’s hand at once.
Webster can see that she is talking to their daughter.

Webster sleeps for five hours and then returns to the room. Sheila says she’ll get something to eat. When he’s alone with
his daughter, he sits and looks at the same impassive face he’s been looking at for more than two days. He tries to remember
what it felt like to be her Little League coach.

“OK, Rowan. You can do it. It’s game time. Nothing to be afraid of out there. You’ve gotta step up to the plate. Get into
your stance. Take your time. Do not swing at the first pitch. But the next fat pitch you see coming your way, you give it
everything you’ve got. I’ve seen you hit it over the fence, so I know that you can do this. The game’s on the line. It’s the
bottom of the ninth,
your team is down a run, one out. You’ve got a runner on first. All you need is a good solid hit. A good hit gets the runner
home. Then you still have two outs to go. I see you winning this game. But it’s up to you. No double plays, right? This game
is not going to end with you barely off the plate. I’m your coach, and you need to listen to me.”

Webster pauses.

“Anything?” he asks Rowan.

He waits.

“You got anything to say to me? Questions you need to ask? ’Cause you’re up at bat right now, and you need to do this.”

Webster waits.

“Honey?” he asks. “Sweetie?”

Nothing.

Webster sits with his face close to hers. He’s used Listerine. Maybe that will snap her out of it.

“OK, listen. I’m going to wait here. The game will wait, too. But whenever you’re ready, you just give the signal, and we’ll
be ready. I’m going to hold your hand. I’m not going to leave you. You give me the high sign.”

The second CAT scan shows no improvement.