by Cathy Lamb
“Mr. Shelton,” Detective Zadora says, “I need to speak with you.”
“All right,” he says, but it’s through gritted teeth.
“Can you step outside?”
“No. I will not be leaving my wife.”
“I understand,” the detective says. “Who do you think would do this?”
I hear Zack hesitate, for a second. “I don’t know.”
“Is someone angry at you? At your wife?”
Infinitesimal hesitation again. “No. Not that I know of.”
“I understand that you build homes. Your company is Shelton Construction, and your wife is a CPA. She is a co-owner of Knight and Fox Accounting. Do either of you have employees who are angry with you?”
“I don’t know of any.”
“Have you fired anyone recently? Has Mrs. Shelton?”
“No.”
The questions went on about our jobs and any arguments or disputes we’d had with other people, neighbors, any ongoing conflicts . . . then they got personal. How long have we been married? How was the marriage? Was Zack having an affair? Was I? Both of those questions infuriated Zack.
“No, I am not having an affair and neither is my wife.”
Are there money problems?
“I’m a homebuilder. Hit a rough spot.”
He had? What was wrong with his business?
“Do you owe someone money?”
Pause. Why the pause? “No.”
“Does your wife?”
“No.”
Someone else enters the room and says, “Here are the photos of that guy.”
Detective Zadora says thank you. “Who is this man?”
I think the question is directed at Zack, but my dad says, “Never seen him before.”
Zack says, his voice gruff, my hand squeezed tight, too tight, “I don’t know.”
“Are you sure?” Detective Zadora asks.
“Yes.”
The questions continue as I listen.
There are three mind-numbing problems, besides the nearly decapitated Barbie, that I detect from my Coma Coffin.
One, Zack didn’t react with shock, as my dad did, to learn that the Barbie and the hit-and-run could be tied together, as far as I could tell. He wasn’t surprised.
Two, Zack isn’t telling the whole truth. I don’t even know what he’s lying about. All I know is that he is. I can hear it. Feel it. He knows something about the Barbie.
And three, I can tell that the detective knows he isn’t telling the truth, too.
* * *
Eventually the police and security guards, the nurses and Dr. Tarasawa, and my father all leave. Zack’s fist suddenly hits the table by the bed. The same table—at least, I think it’s a table—the man put the Barbie doll on before knocking over a glass.
I feel the fury burning off him in waves. Then he cries, one gasp, and I know he’s had it. I’m in a coma and my husband is breaking. He’s at that point we all get to when we can’t take any more. He swears and cries and I want to hug him tight.
My beaten brain is struggling to tell me something. I try to find it, but I can’t; it’s darting into the shadows, like a dark secret. My brain knows a secret and it wants to tell me, wants to let me know, but it can’t because it’s damaged, like I am damaged.
* * *
I am moved to a new room that morning as soon as it’s “set up.” I hear Shea Zogg telling my dad and Zack that I will now be directly across from the nurses’ station. No one can call the hospital and get my room number. I am officially “anonymous”; I have been flagged. The hospital will not even admit that I am here.
Zack spends the next three nights sleeping in my room, despite a guard who is posted outside my door for the duration of my hospital stay as, Ms. Zogg says, my safety is “clearly at risk.”
In the middle of my third night in the new room, Zack takes a phone call that enrages him. He stalks out, the phone to his ear, his voice low and threatening.
What in the world?
* * *
A hit-and-run car accident. A coma. A knifed Barbie in my hospital room. A snake up my yaya. A feeding tube in my gut. Someone might be trying to kill me. Not the best time in my life.
* * *
I wake up to Justine. I can tell she’s drinking beside me. I hear her silver flask clinking on the side of the bed. We all have a silver flask. Chick had them made for us. The inscription? Maverick Girls Moonshine.
“I wish you’d wake up, Nat. You’ve had a long-enough nap. Like a grizzly bear. Only you’re not. Not a grizzly bear. Roar!” She drops the flask, and I hear her grunting as she picks it up. “You’re my best friend. You’re who I jumped off The Rocks with into the lake. We need to jump off The Rocks again. We’ll spread our wings out and fly like ostriches.” She hiccups.
“And this Barbie thing. Who the heck would do that to you? Who would kill Barbie? Chick and I are so upset about that.” She hiccups again, then she sobs. She’s had way too much to drink. When she visits me she always has a drink for herself, and for me. Then another drink for herself. “I’m going to pluck your chin hairs out just like we always promised one another if this very thing happened. Here.”
I wish I could move. Right at that second. I’d open my eyes and yell, “Boo!” at Justine. It would freak her out and she’d scream and fall back in her chair and probably land on her skinny tush, the flask and her four-inch heels flying up in the air. I do appreciate her efforts, though. I do not want Zack to see my chin hairs.
“I’m going to brush your hair, too, not only your chinny-chin-chin.” I picture her pushing her black hair back from her face as she plucks. “I’ll be careful on the shaved spot with the scar. Hang on, hold on, holler around. I have to cry because of your scar.”
I wait while she cries. Not that I have a choice. And I have heard that my head scar is long and frightening. It will probably make me cry when I see it.
“I can’t believe they have you in this ugly hospital gown. Why do you have to wear a hospital gown in here? You would hate it. If you had to wear it in your real life, you’d add a scarf and a bunch of beads and a cool belt with silver stars.” She burps. “Excuse me. You hippie-hip-hip dresser, you. Hip hip.”
It’s true. I may be an accountant, but I have a distinct hippie/ bohemian/country girl style. When I’m not in a suit for work, I’m in loose cotton blouses with ruffles, shirts with sequins, and colorful jeans. I like long, flowing skirts in pastels and short skirts with tights. I like embroidery, I like shirts that look as if they’ve been painted, and I like shirts with iconic rock stars on them, like Janis Joplin. I love lace.
I like wearing multiple necklaces that I’ve made myself and earrings that make statements. I like bright colors and bangle bracelets and boots. Leather boots, but boots in purple or red are my kind of jive, too. I like belts with bling and scarves with silver or gold threads.
Justine, on the other hand, likes modern, classic, and expensive. She is sleek and stylish. As the oldest of eight kids she did not receive many new clothes, or used ones for that matter, and she was expected to keep them as nice as possible so they could be handed down to her sisters.
“The firm is stumbling and bumbling and everybody is sad, so sad, which is why I’m having some sad scotchy scotch tonight,” Justine says. “They’ve all come to see you and they come back to the office and they cry.”
I knew they were upset. I lay like a dead sausage while they cried, and it upset me that they were upset.
“You are the brainiac of our business. Brains. Brains. Brains you have.” She hiccups. “You are the brains behind the numbers and our most delusional and spooky clients. I miss you so much there. I can’t even walk by your office without feeling like I’m going to . . . to . . . roar like a crying grizzly bear.”
She sighs, she sobs again, she gurgles down another swallow. The flask hits the bed.
“Okay. I have to talk about something else. So. Jed. Judicious. Juicy. Jacked-up Jed.”
“Can you believe he might be a judge soon? I can.”
I can, too. Jed had left our hometown of Lake Joseph for the Ivy League for undergraduate and law school. He missed one—one—question on the SAT.
He is tall and lanky, about six two, with short brown hair that’s conservatively cut and wears glasses. He has high cheekbones and dark brown eyes. He is quiet, reserved, brilliant. He is single. He works in the city, lives out in the country. He has twenty-five acres, three horses, two dogs, a bunch of sheep, and chickens. He has a city job, but he’s a country kid—an eastern Oregon man at heart. Like me. Like Justine. Like Chick.
Justine makes a sobbing-choking sound, and the Maverick Girls Moonshine flask hits the side of my metal bed again.
“I can’t tell him about . . . about . . . you know, Natalie.”
I know what she’s talking about.
“I wouldn’t be able to tell him. But I should tell him. If we were together I would have to, right? We shouldn’t have secrets. But I have a bad secret. If he knew my secret he would think I was bad. Bad, bad, bad.”
No, he wouldn’t think that, Justine.
“He would think I had no heart.” I hear her pound her chest.
No, he wouldn’t think that, either, Justine. That’s you thinking that about yourself.
“I would rather not be with him than tell him and have him think I’m a drunken and mean grizzly bear.” She burps. “Excuse me.”
And there is the problem. Justine is so in love with Jed. I think he loves her, too, but he is, despite his high-profile profession, a tiny bit shy about it. Justine pulls away because she doesn’t want to tell him the secret. Their timing has been off for years, too. She’s been in a relationship, or a marriage, or he has. Like two triangles hitting each other in the corners and bouncing away.
“Wake up, Natalie. Please, for God’s sakes. And for my sake, more importantly, mine. I need a pickle. And peppermint ice cream. You do, too, my friend, but I won’t eat them without you. We’ll eat them together again, it’s our Moonshine and Milky Way Maverick Girls tradition.”
It is. Justine, Chick, and I eat peppermint ice cream and pickles together. It started when we were young and a baby was born in a pool in a living room.
“Now, hold on there, Natalie!” she suddenly shouts. “I missed one hair. I’ll pluck it off your chinny-chin-chin.”
She plucks it straight out.
“I’m going to get a taxi and then I’m going to sling my head over a toilet like a drunken sloth, my friend, a drunken sloth. I have had way too much scotch to drink. Too much scotch. It’s the only way I can cope with you like this. Sleep tight, Maverick Girl. I love you.”
Sleep tight, Maverick Girl. I love you, Justine. It was good of you to pull my chin hairs out. I knew I could count on you to do that.
And you’ll be with Jed one day, you will.
I hope.
* * *
“Listen to me, Natalie,” Chick says the next day, leaning over me in my hospital bed like a friendly vulture and holding both of my hands in hers. “I can’t take this any longer. You have to wake up and help me. I am so stressed out with you in this coma. I mean, what the heck? You’re my sanity. You’re my best friend.
“The doctors say you might be able to hear, so I’ll talk about the kids and all the trouble they’re causing me. Ellie, the mad scientist, is growing bacteria under grow lights in the garage. I wouldn’t think she was so odd if she was growing pot, but she’s not. She says she’s going to take pictures of the bacteria at each stage to show it to you to make you feel better. What a strange kid.
“Hudson is mad we won’t let him up here. Sorry, son, no go. I mean, I can hardly look at you without losing my ever-lovin’ mind. You know how sensitive he is. He’d have nightmares for weeks. His new business idea is to sell frogs. We now have a frog farm in our backyard. Yes. You heard me. We have a frog farm.
“Joshua told me he wants to come and sing songs from Broadway shows to you. He’s gay. I know he is. His love of purple pants and his insistence we buy him a pink bike with a flowered basket were my first clues. He wants a flowered coat.
“Ally made up a dance that she said was named ‘Natalie, the Angel,’ and she jumped around like a stoned elephant for a while. You know how honkin’ big her feet are. Unnaturally big for a girl. She should be a swimmer with those feet. She could get a scholarship.
“Timmy and Tessie snuck out of the house on their trikes. Timmy was wearing his Batman outfit, complete with that black mask you gave him, and Tessie was wearing her warrior woman outfit. She’d attached a toy sword to it. They told me they were going to find Aunt Nat.”
Chick fell in love with her husband, Braxton LaSalle, when we were sixteen. He had been waiting for that glorious moment since their third-grade hopscotch days when he let her win so she would like him and stop throwing chalk at him.
Braxton was wide and lumbering, played football, and was super easygoing, which was perfect for her tractor-type personality.
The wedding took place the summer after we graduated, Braxton smiling the whole time, happy as could be. After the vows he threw her over his shoulder and walked down the aisle.
All of the kids were “whoops” kids, as Chick likes to say. As in “Whoops. We’re knocked up again.” Chick wasn’t able to take the pill because her blood pressure shoots sky high, she gets migraines, and she feels nauseated. They relied on condoms, to which Chick had said, “Sometimes we forget. It’s easy to get carried away in the passion. I mean, look at Braxton.”
I thought of friendly dough-boy Braxton, with a smile that brightened his cute face, a football body getting fat without the football, and a balding head.
“Who could resist him?” Chick had said, shaking her head. “I mean, who? The man is shakin’ it.”
Well, I could. So could Justine. Easily. But we’d nodded our heads anyhow when she said that. One has to be polite.
“I see what you mean,” I’d said.
“He’s irresistible,” Justine had added.
“I can’t get pregnant again, not one more time,” Chick said to us after the twins, who showed a penchant for trouble early on. “I told Braxton to go and get neutered. He hemmed and hawed and said something about his manhood and a rooster being made into a chicken, and I cut him off. This barn door is closed, I told him. The tractor is out of gas. The silo is locked. I slept well for a week, and he sighed and went to see the doctor for the ol’ chop-chop.”
When Braxton and Chick have a fight he gets upset because he’s sensitive and “Chick is my chick.” He goes out to his workshop and carves an animal until he stops snuffling. He’s extremely talented, and after seventeen years of marriage they now have shelves full of carved wooden animals in their rambling, blue Queen Anne home in Lake Joseph.
They own LaSalle Hardware, which is a destination place in eastern Oregon now. Chick saw that home furnishings sold well in other stores and knew there was a place for that in Lake Joseph. She wanted to cater to women shoppers. “We’re the ones who make the decisions about décor, right?” She started ordering curtains and outdoor furniture, pillows, plants, pretty tiles, flooring, carpets, lighting, kitchen counter materials, seeds, flowers, indoor and outdoor plants, etc. It was one-stop home shopping. You could come in for pliers and walk out with an outdoor fireplace, a fountain, and a tasty coffee from their in-house coffee shop.
“I need you, Nat. The kids need you. I love you. Please wake up.”
I want to reach out and hug Chick when I hear her crying.
* * *
Jed, Chick’s brother and Justine’s secret love, is up next. He holds my hand. “Hey, Natalie. It’s Jed. You’ve always been the sister of my heart. You’re one of the only people I trust, you’re one of the only people I really like. Please pull out of this. Please fight in there. Please try to wake up. Remember how we swam in the lake that one day in summ
er and you went out too far and I swam out to get you?”
Oh, yes, I do. Jed literally saved my life. He jumped in, grabbed me, pulled me to shore, then pounded me on the back until I stopped coughing up lake water.
“You thanked me for saving your life, but you’ve saved mine, Natalie. You and Chick and Justine. You’re all my little sisters. Well.” He coughs. “You and Chick are. Not so much Justine.”
Yep. There is the love.
“You’re all family. You know I didn’t have a father, but by extension I got your father and a brother in Zack, and all of Justine’s gang.”
That is true. Chick and Justine and I got one another’s families when we became friends. We were all “chosen family,” or, as Justine liked to say, “extended crazy family members with normal neuroses,” and as Chick liked to say, “family by love, beer, and tractor races.”
“If I could save your life now, Natalie,” he says, his voice a whisper, filled with tears, “I would. Please, Natalie. Save yourself. We need you. We love you.”
I make up another poem:
Natalie is in a coma.
She can’t stand her own aroma.
She has a snake up her Vee Jay.
She can’t go out to play today.
Her brain is a mess.
Her thoughts are less.
And she’s worried she’ll never have sex.
In my room are Dr. Doom, Dr. Hopeless, and Dr. Tarasawa. Dr. Doom and Dr. Hopeless are talking about “letting me go” again.
It would probably make this a more exciting story to say there was a “bad doctor” who wanted to do away with me as quickly as possible. We could have a villain! We could have evil, good versus bad, that sort of thing. I could wake up at the very last second and we’d have a dramatic ending!
But it’s simply not the case.
The doctors are doing their jobs. Part of me wants to smack Dr. Doom and Dr. Hopeless, who are advocating pulling the plug on me, so to speak, to let me die. The other part thinks, if I don’t wake up, if I’m stuck in this lifeless body, I do not want to live. As terrifying as it is to die, it is more terrifying to live like this. No one deserves this.