I swallowed, and breathing through my mouth, repeated myself. “Leave.”
I saw him move forward and raised my head in warning. Whatever he saw prevented him from going any further, and the color newly returned drained from his face, leaving him resembling an etiolated flower.
“Why won’t you talk to me?”
“There’s nothing to say,” I replied, with a calm like a slowly metastasizing cancer.
“That’s not true. There’s plenty to say,” he argued, “I can see it in your face. What aren’t you telling me? Please, Foster, just talk to me. Whatever it is, let’s just talk about it.” Emboldened, he took my hand, held it very gently.
And I stared at our hands, burning the image into my mind, that way I could be sure to burn it out later, along with the rest. Then I looked straight into Dominic’s eyes and said the only thing I could say to him; the only thing he would believe: the truth.
“You and I are not possible.” Tears like acid rain built behind my eyes, but I held them at bay with pain as my bulwark. I smiled, and slipped my hand from his. “Please go home.”
How I managed to continue looking at him as my words tore his face like razors, I don’t know. Every atom in my body was shrieking at me to walk inside the house and close the door behind me. But I knew Dominic very well. I knew that if I did that, he would recognize it as a sign of fear and uncertainty.
I couldn’t run away this time.
His jaw clenched and unclenched several times before he spoke. “You need time,” he said remotely, and took a step backward. “I understand. I’ll give you as much time as you need, Foster, just—” He broke off, wincing. “I’ll be here. When you’re ready, I’ll be here. Okay?”
“To Virginia,” I said quietly.
He blanched. “What?”
“I want you to go home,” I began, and watched the light go out of his eyes as I said the last two words, “to Virginia.”
I don’t know when he left honestly. One minute I was looking through him, relieved to see that no more was necessary, and the next both Dominic and his car were gone. Disappeared.
I decided then was a good time for me to disappear as well. Crawling back into bed, with no ideas as to how I had arrived there, I closed my eyes and did the inconceivable. I fell asleep.
Chapter Thirty-eight
I came upon a beautiful girl sitting on a blanket, beneath a tree with long, undulating branches and purple blooms. Children crowded all around her. She was reading a story to them. Eyes wide and eager, the children hung on her every word. It occurred to me that, while I couldn’t see she was beautiful—she was no clearer than a blurry photo—I did know it.
“Sing us a song,” one child asked, after she had turned the last page.
The beautiful girl put the book down and began to sing for them. One by one the children drifted to sleep, curling into balls, or sprawling over one another like a litter of puppies. Safe and slumbering soundly, there she left them, and rose from the blanket. She walked away with what I thought was a sad expression on her face.
When I blinked, she had reappeared inside a hospital room. At the window, she picked up a chair and moved it so it rested against the side of the hospital bed where a girl lay sleeping. Still lacking a concrete, animate shape, I heard the beautiful girl begin to weep as she took her friend’s hand in her own.
From inside the hallway, I moved closer to the examination window, stopping short when I found Dominic staring back at me. I reached out to him, only for my fingers to meet with hard, cold glass. I traced a finger along the glass realizing it was not a window at all but a mirror.
I wasn’t staring at Dominic . . . I was Dominic.
And just as powerfully—if not more so—I felt his emotions surge within me. He—we—stared at the beautiful girl, inconspicuous and unnoticed. He began to talk then, boasting of her attributes: her kindness, her beauty, her bravery, her compassion. Unbidden, a great consuming love for this girl swelled inside me. But these feeling were met with my own and I resisted. I did not want him to love her. But I did. The desperation I felt at wanting to hold her, kiss her, spend all of eternity loving her—it burned.
I wanted out. I wanted out—now.
“Look,” he said.
My pain and sense of self-preservation rallied in defiance. Keening silently, and reaching with limbs I couldn’t see, I searched for a way out. I tried to run, flee to somewhere safe, somewhere the emotions I felt belonged only to me. With increasing alarm, a confirmation that I had no power here overtook me.
I began to cry, screaming at Dominic from an invisible place. I begged him to make it stop, to look away from her so I could. So I didn’t have to see this, feel this, one second longer. Tears sprang to my eyes and drenched my cheeks; but again, it wasn’t my cheek, it was Dominic’s. It was his eyes that spilled over, releasing salty rivulets that pooled above his lips, dropped off his chin. With a suddenness that literally shocked me, I realized the beautiful girl was no longer blurry. She came into such sharp focus that I tried to shy away. Of course this right, and every other, was denied to me and I was forced to continue seeing her.
“Look.”
Fighting against him was painful and exhausting; and so resigned, I stopped, surprised to see that the beautiful girl—along with her friend and the hospital room—had disappeared, and in their place was a white flower. But it wasn’t just white, and it wasn’t just a flower, and these eyes weren’t just any eyes; these eyes were all seeing. Glittering luminously, the opulent flower boasted a stunning array of every color in the rainbow, creating a true white, pure and incandescent.
We stood in a garden.
The beautiful girl was gone, and Dominic’s fear mingled with my relief that she might never be found again. But I felt our body flood with love and light, and knew that he would do whatever it took to get her back. Once again I fought, flailing arms and legs I didn’t have, struggling to shut eyes I had no control over. I didn’t want to see her. I couldn’t see her. Not like this, and not with these eyes. I was trapped inside him, tortured and elated, terrified and fearless.
What little strength I had waned as he found her. Once again she was sitting with the children, singing softly and stroking their hair. I stared at her . . . afflicted by his devotion, undone by his abiding love for her. And when his soul ached to touch her—mine did, too. I didn’t try to flinch away, and I didn’t supplicate him anymore. If this is what he wanted, then I would endure it for him. I would love her, too, with all of my heart.
This decision made, something happened. The beautiful girl, the one he pined for . . . she was me. I spoke to him, told him to go to her, that she wants him. But we shook our head, more tears spilling from our eyes.
“I can’t,” he said, despondently. “She won’t let me.”
“She will!” I shouted, renewed by faith. “You need to go to her. She loves you!”
“I know that. But she doesn’t love herself. She exists in a place where I can’t reach her. A world made of lies that she accepts as truths.”
“Tell her that.” My voice was urgent, as if I somehow knew that time was running out. “Tell her they’re lies.”
“I have.” He bled with love for her; it was heavy and warm. “It’s not enough.
“It has to be!”
“But it isn’t. Until she recognizes the lies for what they are, she and I aren’t possible.”
My own words, come back to ruin me. “She’s right there,” I said strongly. “She’s there! Just go to her.”
“The lies keep us in different places.”
Done with arguing, I fought to move him. I could see her perfectly. In less than five steps she could be in our arms.
“Move!” I shouted angrily.
“I can’t. It will only make it worse.”
The muscles and tendons running along our neck felt like they might burst. My eyes ached from strain. “You have to try,” I ground out, sweat trickling from our brow. “You have to move!”
I
remembered the girl from before, the one asleep in the hospital bed. I understood now that this, too, was me. The beautiful girl and the children began to shimmer, becoming less and less solid.
“Dominic, please!”
“Don’t you understand? I need her to wake up,” he whispered desperately. “I need her to wake up and let me love her.
“She is awake,” I said, sobbing now. “She is.”
“Wake up,” he implored. “Please wake up, Foster.”
“I am!”
There was the strongest of pulling sensations, of pressure like tugs on my skin; and then I was thrust backward, ripped from Dominic’s body as if sucked through an airplane window. The earth began fissuring and collapsing all around me; groaning and earsplitting cracking noises like thunder and lightning struck the earth, turned the sky as dark as ash. I could feel gravity forcing me down. I would be swallowed in seconds.
“Dominic! I’m falling!” On my hands and knees, I stretched a hand upward, straining in a last attempt to grab him. “Don’t let me go!”
He wept. I watched the split-second of indecision flare on his anguished face. Then it was gone.
“I have to,” he cried, and ripped a hand through his hair. “I have to!”
An abrupt force shoved me back; it lifted me from the ground and deposited me roughly a few feet from where I had been. I still had a chance. I used my fingernails to claw at the hard soil.
“Save me—please!” I wailed. “You can save me!”
He shook his head. “Only you can save you. Please don’t give up.”
For a moment I wondered if I was back inside him, for I had just been about to say the same thing to him. “Find me,” he said, and smiled. “I’ll be waiting for you to find me.”
The earth took me then; my body and shrieks plummeted into a dark abyss, away from Dominic, away from the oasis, and the girl and the children and the flower—all of it, gone.
In the benighted silence and stillness, I stirred to a voice.
Wake up.
I came aware of the rise and fall of my chest; of a pillow and damp sheets under my neck.
Wake up.
My eyelashes fluttered, heavy and encumbered by tears.
Wake up.
I remembered.
Like a shooting star, I lurched forward. “I’m awake,” I answered, frantically searching the room for Dominic. Dizzy and restrained somehow, I retrograded almost immediately and fell back into bed. A sharp pain sliced straight through my head and remained there with unabating vigor. With a voice like fillet gristle, I call out, “Dominic?”
The only reply I received was the shrill sonance of livid beeps confirming the truth: I was awake.
In the dimness of the room lit only by moonlight, I had barely enough time to register that I was neither in my room, nor in my bed, but lying in a hospital bed very much like the one I had been dreaming about. My arms were secured at my sides, metal railings bordered my bed, and an assortment of thin tubes seemed to grow from my body as if I were a tree and the tubes my roots.
The moments following that realization were packed with melee and chaos.
Over the beeping, I heard the sound of rapid footsteps coming closer, and people speaking to one another in a language I did not understand. A man’s voice, gruff and projecting authority, asked someone to disable the machine. That same man, I assumed, burst through the door seconds later, switching on a light that burned clear to the back of my eyes. I shut my eyes tight and reflexively moved to raise my arm but the straps around my wrists allowed nearly zero mobility.
“Is okay, baby,” a woman said to me in a strongly accented alto. It took me a second to realize the horrible moaning noise was me. “You’re okay.” I peered through slatted eyes and saw nothing distinguishable. My vision was so blurry it was like looking through a beveled mason jar.
I made a responding noise, something between a murmur and a groan. For whatever reason, I perceived the face hovering above me as a friendly one. There was something comforting and faintly familiar about her voice. I tried to deduce just what that was, and was stymied by untimely unconsciousness.
I woke again, no less unenthusiastic about the lights and the sounds, and the contraption tethering me down. It was like being trapped inside a lava lamp.
“She’s coming to,” the warmly accented voice alerted. “Should I page the front desk?”
“Mmm . . . no, not yet,” a distracted voice replied. “I want to do a quick examination before her parents are notified.”
My heart clenched. “Parents,” I groaned inaudibly. “How?” In my mind, I was asking how they were doing, but I could not seem to make my tongue and vocal chords perform to my liking. The man nearby was fluent in incoherent babble, however, and answered me immediately.
“They are both doing well. You’ll see them very soon.”
I opened one eye—which to me, felt like lifting a submarine with my eyelid. Glancing around blearily, however, I saw that rather than resting flat as I had been, I was now inclined to a forty-five degree angle.
At that point, my eye was pried apart by two thick fingers, and a light brighter than the sun was forced into my flaring pupils. I tried to wrench away, moaning grotesquely.
“Try and relax for me,” said a man whose voice lacked both the warmth and the consideration of the nurse. His accent was also much less overt than the nurses. He released my eye, only to do the same to the other. I wailed again and immediately two very warm hands consoled me—capacious and plump, but much too gentle to belong to the doctor. “Very good. Make a note, Geraldine,” he instructed peremptorily, “Slight cunctation. Retinal response normal. No projected pupillary abnormalities.”
Like an itch I could not scratch, my eyes ached, blinking furiously; globs like glue droplets streamed down my cheeks. “Can we get something for the weeping, please?” he inquired rhetorically, and the comforting brawny hands immediately released me. My skin was left cold in their absence, and the truth be told, I would have rather had the embrace, than a towel just this moment.
“How are you feeling?” I could hear him scribbling something.
I continued to blink, but managed a, “C-c-cold.”
“Let’s get her a blanket, too, please,” he added diffidently. A gust of air hit my feet. “And a heated poultice for her ankles.” To me, “Yes, that’s completely normal. By waking, your body has sustained a shock. You will experience intense flashes of hot and cold until it stabilizes. All normal. Other than that, how are you feeling? Any nausea?” More scribbling.
“No.” A not-at-all soft towel probed my eyelids, wiping away the wet and leaving a sticky residue. I then asked where I was, which sounded to my ears like, “Er-mam-I?”
“You’re at Healing Grace Hospital,” he replied. “I am your physician, Doctor Moncayo, and you have just woken from a coma. Can you tell me what year this is?”
He moved through information so quickly I had no time to process what he was actually saying to me, only hearing the very last question.
“Twelve.” I sniffed, something agitating plugged into my nostrils. Forgetting my confines, I went to reach for my nose to alleviate the discomfort and couldn’t.
“You can remove those, Geraldine. Yes, that’s right,” he said to me, evenly and without enthusiasm. “Two-thousand and twelve. And can you tell me your name?” When I opened my eyes, I decided that the doctor’s face was not unkind but only remote. It took a moment before my eyes focused, and even then my vision remained distorted. Still, I could see he was dark-skinned—the color of burgundy potpourri petals—and had very dark hair on the sides of his head, and even darker eyes.
“My name?” The sheet at my feet lifted, and something warm and weighted was placed above my ankles. Geraldine squeezed my feet three times, then let go.
The doctor scratched his neck with his pen. “Yes. Are you able to tell me your name?”
I was feeling very tired again. Submarines positioned themselves on my eyelids, pushi
ng them shut when I wanted them open, alert, awake.
Without impatience or irritation he repeated himself. “Can you tell me your name?”
A flash of gold passed before my eyes—sunlight. “Summer,” I replied shakily. “My name is Summer.”
And then the sun eclipsed, and there was only darkness.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Patient ID: 593-8372-4458 Healing Grace Hospital Quito, Ecuador
Summer Foster Kelly Age: 17BD: Feb 22, 1995
Intensive Care Unit Admitted: March 11, 2012
Admission Diagnosis—Medevac transport. Arrived unconscious to Healing Grace Hospital in Quito, Ecuador. Admitted into ICU for emergency surgery to repair scapula. Glenohumeral joint dislocated. Several low-grade lacerations to deltoid, clavicle, and humerus. Minor fractures to Radius and Ulna, first and fourth fingers, and left cheek. Swelling of left eye. Possible intracranial hemorrhage. Assessment and evaluation in effect. Craniotomy surgery TBD.
Physician—Moncayo
R.N.—Geraldine Andreta
Next of Kin
James Samuel Kelly (Father)
Marie Antoinetta Kelly (Mother)
No identified siblings.
Both parents involved in plane crash.
Discharge Diagnosis—Patient stable. Memories intact. Appears to have suffered no brain damage. Will be monitored at Mercy General, Los Angeles, California for ongoing treatment.
Discharge Summary—Released from ICU on March 15, 2012. Released from hospital March 21, 2012. Authorized for travel. Schedule to depart Quito with parents (both stable) March 25, 2012.
Glasgow Results—Patient score upon arrival (4) Progressed to (9) prior to waking. Stabilized at (15) upon discharge. Vagaries unidentifiable and incomprehensible. Several utterances made while unconscious—patient recalls vivid dreaming, however responded minimally to external sounds and independent stimuli.
Procedures—Anthroscopy revealed anticipated dislocations. Multiple fibers degenerated. 65% recovered. Patient expected to regain full mobility with therapy. EEG and EKG normal. MRI revealed zero swelling to brain.
Awakening Foster Kelly Page 95