The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant (36 page)

A cell phone rings. My eyelids barely lift, my eyes resist focusing, but eventually I see my father standing in the doorway to this white room. He’s talking to someone on his phone. How long has it been since I’ve seen a cell phone, since I’ve heard one ring? Feels longer than the time I’ve been at Cania.

And then there’s the other noise in the room. The dominant noise. The
beeping.
It comes steadily from the machine that’s attached by tubes to my arm.

“Am I dreaming?” I try to whisper, but my voice is so hoarse. So I stop trying to talk. Instead, I listen.

“If she wakes, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her here,” my dad says to the caller. More words follow, but they fly out much too quickly for my slow-moving mind to get a hold on, to sort through, to make sense of. And then, before I can blink, my dad is snapping his phone closed and turning to me.

When did his beard get those gray patches?

His eyes are glazed over, like he’s been staring at me for an eternity, even though he just looked my way.

“Dad?” I choke.

He just
stares
at me like he can’t process my words. And then, after lengthy hesitation, he leaps into the air, clasps his hands in his hair, and hurls himself across the room at me, choking me in his enormous bear hug, threatening to collapse the frail bed under us both. I cough and try to breathe.

The machine next to me beeps faster, and he pulls back immediately.

“Dr. Zin just said you were on your way home,” he murmurs as he kisses my forehead. He grips my cheeks in both his hands and holds my barely lucid gaze. People have always commented on how identically colored our eyes are. But his look so tired now, so puffy, as if he’s been rubbing away tears for years. “I didn’t believe him.”

“Dr. Zin called you?” I ask.

“I just got off the phone with him.” Grinning, he sits with a heaving sigh and braces his knees. “I just need a sec. This is unbelievable. It’s been so long.”

Like my dad, I need a moment to take everything in. So I use the next five minutes of my dad gawking, staring, gushing, running to get me water, hugging me, and gushing more to make sense of what exactly is happening here.

“My baby,” Dad whispers in my ear as he crushes my head to his chest another time. I lie limp in his arms, unable to move. “Just give me more time to take in this moment, okay?”

I try to nod, but his huge hand is pressed against the back of my head, smooshing my face against his shoulder. I’m lucky I can breathe, let alone nod. He hugs me in that bear-like embrace for an eternity until, finally, his face and beard wet with tears, he draws back and collapses in the chair next to my bed. But the distance of one-and-a-half feet proves too great, and he shifts his chair so he’s right next to me. Taking my hands in his. Tears still rolling down his cheeks. In my life, I’ve never seen him shed a single tear, not even when Mom threw a stitch-ripper at him on one of her bad days and tore the flesh near his eye. No one can prepare you for the shock of seeing your big, burly, protector dad weep at your bedside.

“Kiddo, have I missed you,” he breathes, stroking my arm, evidently forgetting that I’m bound to this bed like some sort of prisoner. “Let me see those pretty eyes.” As he presses his hand under my chin and searches my eyes, I can’t help but drop my gaze.

“Are you dead, too, Dad?” My throat is still dry, so he lifts the glass of water from the bathroom to my lips again. I sip and pull away. “Is Mom here? Are we all here?”

“Baby,
shhh
now,” he soothes. “What do you mean?”

“I’m dead. And so’s Mom,” I sputter. “And I guess you are, too.”

Flinching, he leans back. “Dead? Oh, sweetheart, you’re not dead. There was a moment, sure, when your heart stopped and you were technically dead, but you came back. That was more than two years ago, back when Mom died.”

Hang on. What?

“Whatever made you think you’d died, baby?” he asks softly, stroking the hair away from my forehead like he used to do when I was little. Then he notices the tethers on my wrists and unties me, shaking his head and asking my forgiveness for taking so long.

“Because everyone else. All the others. At school.” The beeping. The white room. “Is this a hospital? A real one? With real living people here?”

“The night nurse just stepped out on a coffee run,” he says. “You’re at a long-term care facility in San Mateo. You’ve been in a coma since the day your mom killed herself. And now, sweetheart,” he peers deep into my eyes and smiles, “now you’re awake.”

Lots of words fly at me in the span of the next few minutes as my dad tries to explain everything. The ones that are most frequently repeated are the only ones that stick.

Fighter
is one of those words. I’m a fighter, according to my dad, because no one thought I’d make it longer than three months. It’s been twenty-eight months. I’m a fighter because I’ve had solid brain activity the whole time I’ve been in a coma, when I should be brain-dead. I’m a fighter because I shouldn’t even be talking yet, let alone asking my dad questions. As much as I want to care about all of that, the only reason the word
fighter
even resonates with me is because Ben once used it to describe me and his sister.

Ben knew I was in a coma this whole time, fighting to stay alive. He told me to wake up.

Another word is
sore.

I try to squeeze my dad’s hands. “I’m stiff.”

My dad strokes my hair. “For now. Therapy will help with that.” He kisses my cheeks, my forehead, my nose, beaming like he’s won the lottery. “You wouldn’t believe how much you’ve been jerking around in bed these last few weeks. You nearly fell out. It was mind-blowing, especially after years of just lying there. Even still, I didn’t believe anything’d wake you up. Not even Cania Christy.”

Those two words stick, too: “Cania Christy.”

I’ve been mentally preparing myself for the news that Cania Christy and everyone there—everyone on Wormwood Island—was nothing more than a fantasy, an illusion dreamed up by my comatose brain. Which would mean Ben is only an illusion. I’ve been telling myself that my dad
didn’t
say he was on the phone with Dr. Zin but with some other doctor. Could it be?

“Cania Christy?” I ask.

“You don’t remember? Maybe because it happened while you were under.”

“No, I remember. So you’re saying he’s real?” The beeping on my heart rate monitor accelerates.

“Who?”

“I mean
it.
It’s real? Cania Christy?”

“Yes, sweetheart, Cania Christy is real,” he breathes, smiling at the same time my monitors slow. “Best thing I ever did was sending you to that school.”

I stare at him. Try to process it all. Can’t.

“Water, please.”

This time, I help him balance the glass near my mouth. My throat’s feeling better. My voice has returned, though it’s as choppy as Weinchler’s. At least I know Ben is real, even if, now that I’ve woken, I’ll never see him again; the knowledge that he was really there sustains me as my dad hems, haws, and tiptoes around the idea of telling me more about Cania Christy. Instead he talks about the state I’ve been in. I’ve been in a coma since I was fourteen. Everything I’ve missed! No wonder I knew nothing of Dave Stone’s infamous sex scandal. No wonder I barely recognized myself in the mirror. I’ve missed over two years of my life lying, near death, in this very bed.

“A psychogenic coma,” he clarifies. “It’s the kind of coma brought on by mental trauma. It’s like your brain cocooned itself to save you from the memory of something you experienced.” He kisses my hands again. “I’m afraid that whatever I tell you might make you so upset, you’ll fall back in.”

“If you could just help me understand,” I groan desperately. “How could I be there, on Wormwood Island, when I’m in a coma, and here when I’m awake?”

He shakes his head, runs his hands over his face, and glances through his fingers to make sure I’m still with him, as if he’s honestly worried I’ll slip away again.

“Dad, please. Don’t I deserve to know what’s been happening with my own life?”

At last, with a sigh so deep it could collapse his lungs, my dad launches—finally—into an explanation.

twenty-three

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER

“I KNEW SENATOR DAVE STONE BACK WHEN WE WERE
both marines,” my dad begins, “but I hadn’t seen him in years. Then, a year ago this November, he came to Atherton for a funeral—his son Pilot’s funeral. Do you know him, baby?”

I nod. Do I.

“Just before I was about to embalm his boy, Dave asked me to do him a favor. He paid me ten thousand dollars to keep it quiet. I’m not proud of it,” he adds. “But I did what he asked, and I didn’t tell a soul. We needed the money.”

I gulp, though it hurts. Absently, my tongue presses against the back of my teeth, and I feel something I haven’t felt in a week: my tooth is crooked again.

“Before I embalmed Pilot, I filled a test tube with his blood. I had no idea what Dave was going to do with it, but I gave a vial of his son’s blood to him. And I took the cash.” He rubs his hands over his puffy eyes. “When the funeral was over, Dave stuck around and we got to talking. He’d mixed a lot of Valium with a lot of Jack Daniels by then, so I asked him what the blood was for. He wouldn’t tell me. Said he’d sworn an oath of secrecy and signed it with his blood. But after a few more drinks, he spilled. He had a doctor friend, a plastic surgeon who’d done Mrs. Stone’s nose. This doctor was now working at a school out in Maine.” He meets my eyes, and I nod. He means Dr. Zin. “What was special about this school was that its headmaster could bring kids to life again. Vivification, they call it.”

“Villicus. It’s really him.” My voice shakes.

“Evidently, your headmaster can essentially re-create a child using their DNA.” He pauses and tries to keep from smiling. “Only on Wormwood Island, which I understand Villicus has enchanted somehow. Well, months passed after that funeral. I didn’t even think it could work for you. Then one night last month, after another poor examination by the doctor, I couldn’t let you exist like this any longer. I called Dave. It took some gentle persuading, but I got him to admit that there’s no theoretical reason Villicus’s miracle couldn’t work on a coma victim.”

Here, I’m actually alive. There, where a vial of my blood rests, I’m only
vivified.
Reborn of dust, magic, and my blood, the core of what makes me
me.

“So you gave Villicus my blood?”

“I gave it to Dr. Zin. He came here to see you, take your blood, and have me sign some forms. We stood over this bed, watching you sleep, talking about your future. His son is an artist, too, you know.”

Oh, I know.

My dad reveals that Dr. Zin transported my vial from this hospital room across the country to Wormwood Island. Villicus met him, and I was, in a way, created then. When I think about it, I realize that I have no memories of the trip there or of anything prior to Gigi opening her front door to welcome me. My dad explains that students are normally awoken on Wormwood Island to find their parents there and are quickly told what’s happened, where they are, and what their future at Cania holds for them. My case was, as everyone kept telling me, special. And, because of that, I had to figure everything out from scratch.

“Why didn’t they just tell me what’s going on the way they told everyone else?”

“Because,” he says, “there’s a code of secrecy. Villicus couldn’t risk you waking up from your coma only to run around telling the world about his school, which would never survive if the world knew of it.”

“It was all to keep me from talking about Cania?”

“From
painting
it, in particular. I knew I’d have to tell you eventually. What’s important,” he continues, “is that we
keep
the code of secrecy.” Stroking my arm, he searches my face, his eyes pleading. Villicus’s distrust of me is finally making sense. “No matter what, you must never speak of this to anyone for as long as you live. You mustn’t create art reflecting it. Can I trust you, honey?”

I nod.

“I just wanted more time for you,” he continues, his grip vice-like. “The odds of you waking here were one in a million. Cania was my only option. Please forgive me for forcing you to keep this secret, but you must. You must.”