The Last Hour (11 page)

“I know,” Jessica said, her voice sad.

“No. No, you don’t. I’ve spent my entire life taking care of other people. And for a second there, it was like ... it was like he was right here. Like I could feel him.” Her chin started to tremble, and then her whole body shook. “I finally found someone who took care of
me.
And I’m so afraid I’m going to lose him.” And then she broke down completely, almost wailing, her face buried in her lap.

I gasped, and watched. Helpless.

Hopeless.

Jessica threw her arms around Carrie. And that’s where I needed to be. Protecting her. And I couldn’t.
God damn it!

“Way to go, Einstein,” I heard a mutter behind me.

I spun around, and for the first time I felt a hammer of rage at Sarah. “Sarah, will you just shut up?”

She sighed and gave me a look that would have frozen my balls into icicles if I’d actually physically been here.

I closed my eyes and tried to take a deep breath to calm down. Finally, I said, “Sorry. I just don’t know what to do.”

She nodded. “I know. I tried with Jessica, too.”

I stared off at the wall. “I
hate
being helpless.”

She looked at me and said, “We can affect some things. You saw that. I think I figured it out. It’s ... strong emotions. That’s all that comes through.”

“I don’t know what good that does me. Or her,” I said.

“I don’t either. Let’s go find out what’s happening, then.”

“What?”

“The operating room.”

I felt a shudder. The thought of seeing the surgeons cutting into my body ... operating on my
brain
—I couldn’t get my mind around that. I slowly shook my head.

“Come on, Ray. We’re not doing any good here. If anything, we’re making things worse.”

“I need to stay with Carrie.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a skeptical look. “You may need that, Ray, but does she? Look at her! You keep touching her, and it’s driving her insane. You heard what they said! We’re both as good as dead. How the hell is she supposed to get through this if you keep
touching
her?”

In all my years, I’ve never hit a woman. Never even wanted to. But it took everything I had to not scream at her. My fists were balled at my side, and I shouted back, “She needs me, Sarah!”

“She
needs
to survive this, Ray.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to run out of here and howl at the doctors and the idiot driver who had hit us. I wanted to find all the people in the Army and NIH who had made our brief lives together such a miserable struggle, and
hurt someone.
But I couldn’t do any of that. Even if I’d been here physically, even if I’d had the opportunity ... I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
 

I looked up at the ceiling, struggling to contain my rage. I tried to breathe, and calm myself, and let the emotions just flow out. It was almost palpable, almost real.
 

But not quite.

My shoulders sagged, and I said, “Look, why don’t you just go on without me, all right?”

And then Sarah did something completely unexpected. She looked away from me, and wiped her right arm across her eyes, and said, “Because I’m afraid to go alone.”

I closed my eyes. All right. I could do this.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”

I grabbed her hand, and we walked together out of the waiting room, right through the sliding doors that you needed an electronic pass card to open.

Beyond the doors, it was crisp and brightly lit.
 

“How do we find ... us?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“I feel gypped. Aren’t we supposed to get a spirit guide or something?”

I suppressed a laugh. “They must be all booked up or something. We’ll find it.
 

And we did. We walked down the hall, looking in the small window in the doors. The first door was an office, but the second opened into an anteroom, filled with equipment on tables and sinks that looked suspiciously like something you’d see on television, where surgeons would wash their hands on their way into an operating room.

“In here,” I said. We slipped through the doors. Another set of sliding doors was beyond. We walked toward those and peered through the glass.

Bingo. An operating team stood around a small body draped in sheets. They were doing something to the leg. I looked closer, and in between the surgeons, underneath an air mask, I could see Sarah’s pale face, badly bruised on the left side.

“You sure about this?” I asked. “This is you.”

I looked at her as I asked the question. Her eyes were wide, scared, and she chewed on her lower lip.

“Hey,” I said.

Her eyes darted to me.
 

“It’s going to be okay,” I said.
 

She nodded rapidly and said, “Let’s go.”

So, we stepped through the door. I was immediately assaulted with the sound of quiet music. It wasn’t the volume that struck me, but the music itself.
 

Disbelief spread across Sarah’s face. “Are you serious?
New Kids on the Block?
Do these people have no respect at all?”

“Someone must have lost the coin toss,” I muttered, trying hard not to laugh.
 

“This music is probably destroying my immune system as it plays. Are they trying to kill me?”
 

The music continued, despite her disbelief. At that moment, the boy band on the radio was singing something like “oh ... oh ... oh ... oh…” and she screwed up her mouth into a sneer and quietly sang, “Oh ... oh ... no, you don’t. Will you turn that off?”

She took her hand from mine and approached the table, carefully, her expressive face showing fascination. I followed.
 

Her left arm must have been broken and reset. It was immobilized now in an inflatable cast, but I could see a long line of sutures where they’d already operated and closed the wound.

Her leg ... I had to look away. From calf to mid-thigh, it was swollen to twice, maybe three times, its normal size. Her skin was red, bulging, and the doctors had cut a slit the entire length of her leg, exposing muscle and bone and blood, a three-inch wide open wound.

Sarah stared at it, frozen in place. Her eyes didn’t seem to be focused.
 

“You okay?” I asked.

She muttered, “I would be if they’d play some decent music.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “I know this is scary. But if it keeps you from losing your leg….”

“Yeah, I get it, Ray. I’m kind of wishing I could vomit right now.”

One of the surgeons spoke, giving instructions to a nurse. I didn’t understand half of what he said, but what I did get was reassuring. They’d stabilized her, and she was almost ready to come out of surgery and go to the intensive care unit. They were going to leave the fasciotomy open for at least several days, and monitor for infection and damage to the muscles. He talked about urine samples and kidney damage and elevated enzymes and something called rhabdomyolysis, which I gathered was something to do with the leg muscles dying. The nurse took notes, writing them up on a chart.

As we watched, the surgeons began wrapping up the surgery. The open wound on Sarah’s leg was loosely packed with bandages that looked almost like foam.
 

“I think I’m done,” she said, her voice considerably higher pitched than normal.

I nodded and followed her as she very quickly moved for the exit.

Outside, in the hall, I asked, “You sure you’re okay?”

She stood there for a second, not responding. One side of her lower lip was curled inward as she chewed on it. “Yeah. I am. In a way that helped a lot … I mean ... it looked like I was almost stable.”

“So you think you’ll live?”

She smirked. “Yeah, I just might. Although I bet my leg is gonna hurt like hell for a long time. Did you see that? They cut it open like it was a freaking sausage.”

I blinked, then said, “Nice image, Sarah.”
 

I don’t think she caught the sarcasm because she just kept going, still talking fast and high pitched. “I mean ... yeah, it’s going to suck. I bet I’ll have to go through physical therapy. But I’ll probably keep the leg. That’s something.”

“That’s a lot,” I said.

“Your turn.”
 

I sighed. “Not sure I’m gonna get so many warm fuzzies from this as you did, Sarah. You heard what the doc said back there.”

She looked at me, her expression sober. “Don’t you think ... knowing ... might help a little?”

I grimaced, then shrugged, helpless. “Yeah, all right. Let’s see if we can find it.”

The next operating room wasn’t me. An older guy, in his sixties, lay on the table with his chest open. “Not here,” I said, peering in the window.

The operating room after that was mine. It was obvious, because all the action seemed to be around the head. I really didn’t want to go in there, but at the same time, I did. What happens if you see yourself die? For that matter, what happens when you die? I didn’t know the answer to that. Somehow the whole question of pearly gates and clouds and angels playing on their harps struck me as so much bullshit, and part of me was terrified that
this
was what happens when you die. Either oblivion, or worse, being stuck out here alone forever.
 

I didn’t want to think about that.
 

All the same, I found myself entering the operating theater. I felt a completely irrational urge to tiptoe in; as if there was any way my presence could disturb the surgeons within. But we knew that wasn’t the case.
 

Inside, a deep, flowing classical music piece was playing. A surgeon with magnifying goggles sat on a stool at my head, with a nurse reaching over his shoulder. The surgeon had what appeared to be a tiny pair of tweezers, and the nurse some kind of suction device.

Sarah spoke. “Thank God they have better taste in music. I was half afraid they’d be in here listening to Justin Bieber.”

I ignored her. Instead, I slowly walked around the table. My left arm and leg had received the same treatment as Sarah’s leg, both of them crushed in the accident. I couldn’t even see my face underneath the chest tube and cloths that covered it.
 

I winced when I got to the other side of the table and got a good look at what was going on. The surgeons had completely removed the top of my skull at my forehead. As the nurse steadily sucked blood out of the way, the surgeon reached in with the tiny, tiny tweezers and extracted a bone fragment from the grey, folded matter underneath.

Then the surgeon said, in a matter of fact voice, “It’s times like this I think the family would be better off if we just stopped and let the patient go. Even if he lives, there’s not going to be anything in there.”

One of the other surgeons, working on my left arm, said, “We don’t know that for sure.”

“No,” the first one replied. “But I wouldn’t take a bet on this one.”

I winced.
 

Sarah put her hand on my arm. “Maybe we should go.”
 

“Yeah.” The words felt weird coming out, my lips numb like I’d been to the dentist. I could feel a nasty headache coming on, a blinding one, and that begged the question: how the hell does a ghost get a headache? It was like a bad joke where I was the punch line.

As we exited the operating room, Sarah gave me a worried look. “If it will help you feel better, you can go look at the goo coming out of my leg again.”

I coughed and said, “Um ... no thanks. I’ll pass on that.”

So we headed back to the waiting room, and I was so distracted I didn’t even notice the little boy at first. But I heard him, loud and clear, when he said, “Excuse me, mister? Can you help me find my mom?”

It was the kid I’d seen from the elevator. About four feet tall and thin as a rail, he wore sweats and a Spider-Man t-shirt. He had a Mets baseball cap on, twisted sideways, the brim pointed off toward his right shoulder.

Stupidly, I said, “You can see us?”

The kid looked at me like I was nuts. And then he said, “Well, yeah.” He was quiet for a minute, and said, “You’re the first person who answered me. Why wouldn’t anyone answer me?”

Crap.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I’m Daniel.”

“What are you like ... ten?”

“Eight. Almost nine.”

I looked toward the waiting room. I needed to get back to Carrie. But I couldn’t let this kid go alone. As I hesitated, Sarah said, “Let’s see if we can go find your mom.”

We all walked back toward the waiting area and the main hallway.

 
Out in the hallway, I said, “So um ... how long you been here?”

He shook his head. “I dunno. I think ... we were going to the zoo. And then I was here.”

Crap. The zoo? “You were with your mom?”

“And my dad,” he said.
 

“What do you say we head down to the emergency room? I know the way.”

The kid nodded.
 

Sarah said, “Hey ... didn’t your mom tell you to be careful of strangers?”

He nodded. “She says I can talk to police, and he’s a soldier, so I figured that’s the same.”

I blinked. How ... and then I realized. For the first time since the accident I became conscious of how I was dressed. In uniform. I don’t know why that bothered me, I mean, it’s what I’ve been wearing most of the time lately. But ... did how we appear here have something to do with how we saw ourselves? I didn’t know. Maybe. But then, if that’s the case, why was Sarah in a dress?
 

Who knew? Sarah was a hard girl to figure out. In any event, we needed to help this kid find his way to his mom.

“All right then, come on. My name’s Ray, and this is Sarah. And what’s with that cap?”

The boy shrugged. “I like baseball?”

“The Mets? Are you kidding me? I’m from New York, and that’s not baseball.”

He gave me a wry look, and we headed out into the hall. We chatted baseball all the way to the elevators, Sarah rolling her eyes the whole way. Then we rode downstairs with a nurse who, of course, didn’t notice us. I don’t think the kid realized the nurse couldn’t see us.