Wraith (33 page)

"I came straight from the airport," I
answered. As much as I appreciated the woman's optimistic gaiety, my own
anxiety continued to climb. Now that I was so close, at last… I was afraid.

"How is he?" I asked as we walked.
"In a coma, still?"

The nurse nodded solemnly. "Yep. Still in a
coma. But it's a miracle he's alive at all—you know that?"

I nodded.

You don't know the half of it.

"He's been through hell and back—that boy.
Crash like that could have killed a buffalo. But he hung in there. Only problem
now is bringing him back." She stopped at a half-closed door, then turned
and looked at me. "You can ask the doc more about his condition when he
gets here. In the meantime, don't be afraid to talk to the boy out loud, even
if you feel like an idiot. It's good therapy."

The nurse pushed the door the rest of the way open.
Then she stood back and waved me in.

My heart beat violently against my rib cage.

My feet wouldn't move.

I called up a vision to memory—a vision of Zane on
his beloved waves, his curls wet, his eyes bright, his suntanned face lit up
with joy.

I inhaled a sharp breath and stepped forward.

Only one of the two beds was occupied. On it lay a
pale figure, stiff and still. He was covered to the neck with sheets and a
blanket. One arm rested outside the linens, the wrist hosting an IV tube
attached to a pole.

I took a step closer.

Scruffy curls spread out over the thin pillow. The
face within them was wan, the chin and neck covered with blondish stubble. The
eyes were closed.

The room around me spun.

It was Zane.

"Yo there, Zachary!" the nurse boomed,
stepping in around me and leaning down to pinch a toe through the covers.
"Got a little surprise for you. And she's a looker, too," she added
with a wink.

"Zane," I corrected automatically, my voice
ragged.

"What'd you say?"

I cleared my throat. "His name is Zane. That's
what he goes by."

The nurse smiled. "Well, hell! No wonder he's
been ignoring us. Ha!" She turned towards the door to leave. "You
just keep talking honey. Doc'll be in soon."

She walked out and shut the door behind her.

We were alone.

My eyes remained riveted on the figure in the bed. I
couldn't seem to move.

Staring at the blankets that covered his chest, I
held my breath, waiting for the movement that would confirm his own.

The blankets lifted slightly, then fell.

A rush of heat spurred my frozen limbs to motion;
tears welled up behind my eyes. I crossed the distance to the bed in a
heartbeat. "Zane," I said unevenly. "It's Kali. I'm here now. I
found you."

I leaned in closer, reached out a trembling hand.

"You
didn't
die, Zane," I
sputtered. "You wanted to live, and you
did
. You have a second
chance!" My vision blurred with moisture. He looked so weak, so fragile.
So terribly, terribly… tenuous.

My fingers were inches from his, and I ached to
touch him. My body trembled with the need—to actually
feel
him, warm and
solid. And yet I was terrified. Terrified that if I asked for too much, if I
pushed for one more miracle, he would simply crumple away and disappear. His
being alive at all was too fantastic to be true; my finding him and reaching
him in this bed in this hospital in the middle of this vast stretch of country
was too much for anyone to ask for.

Surely, at any moment, I would wake up alone again.

I blinked.

He was still there.

I stretched out my fingers. Slowly, shakily.

Their tips grazed the back of his hand.

My breath halted again. He was solid. He was warm.

He was real.

Sheer joy flooded through me, and with a strangled
sob, I reached out and folded the limp, unresisting hand into both of mine. I
held it tightly for a minute, reveling in its solidness, then slipped my
fingers forward to his wrist.

He had a pulse.

My knees caved in on me, and I dropped down on the
edge of the mattress. I raised his hand unashamedly to my face, feeling the
warmth of his beautiful skin against my cheek, my lips. My tears dripped over
both of us.

"It's going to be okay, Zane," I promised,
unable to keep from smiling, even as I looked into eyes that were closed and
unseeing. "It's all real, believe it or not. And I'm here now. You're
not
alone."

"I sure am glad to hear that!" a man's
voice rang out from the doorway. I glanced back—briefly—to acknowledge the
arrival of the physician.

The doctor stepped to the opposite side of the bed,
laid a chart down on the end table, and extended a hand to me. "Phil
Caldwell," he introduced.

I withdrew one hand reluctantly from Zane's. The
doctor's shake was so hearty it was painful. "Kali Thompson," I
returned.

"Can't tell you how glad I am to see you,"
he continued, performing a cursory examination of Zane as he talked. He felt
the patient's pulse, his neck, checked his feet. "I have a feeling you're
exactly what our boy here needs."

I swallowed. "Really?"

"Absolutely. Coma patients hear and take in a
lot more than people used to think. He may not look responsive, but trust
me—there's a part of him that knows exactly what's going on."

The doctor lifted one of Zane's eyelids with a thumb
and shone in a penlight. I rose slightly, eager for any glimpse of the twinkle
that meant so much to me—but it was not to be. The exquisite sea-green eye was
perfectly, frighteningly blank.

I looked up at the doctor, my heart pounding again.
"What makes you so sure?"

He studied me a moment, then pocketed his instrument
and stood with hands folded. "You know about the accident?" he asked
mildly.

I nodded. "A little. I know he swerved to miss
another car and"—my voice wavered at the sudden, ghastly memory of the
mangled guard rail—"his car crashed into the concrete."

"That's the nuts and bolts of it," he
agreed. "It wasn't his fault, that's for sure. The other car was driven by
an 85-year-old woman with early-stage dementia whose son had taken away her car
keys three times already. She drove down the entrance ramp to I-80, took a left,
and headed East straight into oncoming traffic."

I gulped. "Was she… I mean, did he hit
her?"

The doctor smiled crookedly. He cocked his head in
the direction of a small flower arrangement which sat near the window.
"No, he didn't. Though the poor woman feels so guilty I imagine she wishes
he had. She sent those flowers herself. She's been calling almost every day to
check up on him."

At least someone has
, I thought. But I was
glad the woman was all right. Zane had worried about her; he would be happy to
hear it.

I would be happy to tell him.

"What kind of injuries—" I asked
haltingly, unable to talk coherently, for all my racing thoughts. "I mean,
besides the coma, does he have… broken bones? "

"Surprisingly few, for a crash so
violent," the doctor answered. "What could have proved fatal—and
would have, in nearly anybody else—were his internal injuries. He lost a
tremendous amount of blood at the scene, before he could be removed from the
car."

I winced. Unwelcome images shot through my mind, an
involuntary moan escaped my lips. I squeezed the limp hand firmly in mine.

"He suffered head injuries as well," the
doctor continued, "which is why none us were surprised by the coma—at
least at first."

The doctor cleared his throat. "The truth is,
Miss Thompson, that almost no one on that trauma team expected this young man
to come out of the ER alive. The fact that he kept on breathing… well… it says
a lot about him."

I allowed myself a smile. Anyone could tell how much
Zane loved life. I had always believed that. No matter how bad things got.

"But what happened next was a bit of
mystery," the doctor added, invading my reverie.

I looked up at him questioningly.

"Once he survived the initial assault, all that
remained was to keep on healing," the doctor explained. "All signs
were that his body was doing great. But when he should have regained
consciousness, he didn't, and none of us could figure out why. This boy fought
like a tiger to live—but then he wouldn't come back to us."

The doctor sighed. "Some of my colleagues would
laugh at me for saying this, but I don't believe his failure to thrive had
anything to do with our medicine—or lack thereof. Never in my life have I dealt
with a patient this young who didn't have a single person at his bedside. We
found out he had no family, but still, a kid like this—I figured he had to have
friends. There had to be somebody who cared about him. But we couldn't find a
soul. And I think that matters.

"So I had the staff talk to him. Put it in the
orders and everything. I wanted them to encourage him, tell him he was missed
and wanted, urge him to wake up."

The doctor chuckled a little. "Of course, I
found out just now we were all calling him by the wrong name, weren't we? I'm
sure that didn't help. But maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway. What
patients who survive coma tell us is that what did matter was their loved ones.
They hear their voices; they know they're there. They feel loved, and it gives
them something to live for."

A strangled sob rose in my throat.
I'm so sorry,
Zane
, I pleaded, clutching his hand tighter still.
I didn't know
…

"At the worst of it, his brain activity was
nearly stagnant," the doctor continued, leaning over to extract a tissue
from the bedside, then extending it to me. "He just wasn't with us at all,
and I was beginning to believe he didn't want to be. But then something
happened."

I blew my nose. The doctor's tone had changed.
"What happened?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I haven't the faintest idea. We
weren't doing a thing differently on our end. He got moved to long-term, but
his treatment was the same. He still didn't have a single visitor. But the
nurses thought they saw something. They couldn't quantify it—maybe his color
was a little better, or his hands felt warmer. But they seemed sure he was improving,
and so yesterday I ran some more tests. Sure enough, they were right. Over just
the past couple days, his brain activity's got back to near normal. About as
near to normal as you can get and still be in a coma. Which I'm not entirely
sure he still is."

My heart began to race again. "The last… few
days?" I repeated.

The days when he was fading…

The doctor nodded. "Yesterday seemed to be the
turning point. I've been expecting those green eyes of his to pop open any
minute ever since. And now that you're here, holding his hand, looking at him
like that"—he smiled at me broadly—"I believe I'd put money on
it."

I stared at the still face on the pillow. I moved my
hand to feel his pulse again.

He was coming back. All the time he had been fading
away from me in Oahu, all the time that both of us had thought he was dying… he
was actually growing stronger. His memories were reconnecting him—the pull he
had felt was his own body, calling his spirit back into itself, trying to be
whole again.

Of course
.

The day I had met Zane on the beach, when he had
seemed so solid—it was
then
that he was closest to death. Just like the
old man, who I was sure now would get exactly what he wanted—and might have
already.

"I'll leave the two of you alone, Miss
Thompson," the doctor said gently, retrieving his chart and turning away
towards the door. I made no effort to hide my steadily dripping tears; he made
no effort to call attention to them. "I'll tell the nurses to let you stay
as long as you like."

Once his words sunk into my already overflowing
mind, I opened my mouth to thank him. But he was already gone.

I touched Zane's hand once more to my cheek. My
other hand stretched out to his face, brushing a curl from his forehead,
lightly tracing the strong curve of his cheekbone, his jaw.

I wanted desperately to kiss him. But the Sleeping
Beauty imagery was just too much. Besides which, it seemed there was something
vaguely wrong in taking liberties with an unconscious person.

I contented myself with a kiss on his hand.

I let go of him just long enough to pull up a chair,
then sat where I could lean my head and shoulders on the mattress beside him,
his hand cradled snug against my cheek.

"I want you to wake up, Zane," I ordered,
even as the relatively comfortable position, combined with the overwhelming
emotional relief—and unmitigated joy—I now felt to the tips of my toes made my
own eyelids wonderfully, contentedly heavy. "You've been playing around in
your precious waves long enough, you hear me? It's time to come back to the rest
of us mortals. All those things you
think
you did? Surfing the pipe,
jumping off airplanes, heck—even managing that arabesque on a shortboard—well,
guess what, my friend? They weren't real. And if you want to do them for real,
you have to get your act together. Now. You've got to go that last nine yards.
You've got to come back to me."

I sniffled a little more. Then I laughed. "In
fact, you
have
to come back to me, because I need you to teach me how to
swim. You can fulfill that promise now, you know—and I'm holding you to it. In
fact, I'm making you teach me how to
surf
."

I cuddled farther into his side; my words became
stream of consciousness. I went over every day we'd spent in Oahu, reminding
him of the fun we'd had, laughing at the antics he'd been so proud of.
A New
Jersey boy!
I thought with near hysterical giggles. Had he ever even surfed
a wave more than waist high?

I told him about my journey back—about the old man,
my mother, and Tara and Kylee. I told him how much it meant to me that he'd
cared enough to extract the promise—a promise I still intended to keep.