Boundary Crossed

by Melissa F. Olson

  I hoped it hadn’t actually been months.

  The clock on the wall said six o’clock, and dim early-morning light was streaming in through the window. I made a noise in the back of my throat, and John started awake, his dark eyes pinning me to the bed. He leaned forward, looking at my face gratefully for a long moment. “I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered, pushing back a strand of hair that had fallen into my eyes. “I thought I’d lost you, too.”

  I made the noise again. “Charlie’s fine,” he assured me, relief in his voice. John was always good at knowing what I needed, often before I did. “I got her checked out; there wasn’t a scratch on her. She’s with your parents now. Elise is there too. We’ve been taking turns here.”

  My cousin Elise was a patrol officer with Boulder PD. I relaxed and managed a teeny nod. Then I was struck by a horrible thought: What if Victor and Darcy hadn’t decided to stop for diapers? What if they’d stopped anywhere but the Depot? I winced around my chest tube. We’d gotten lucky.

  My left hand was curled up by my cheek, and I raised it and made a scribbling motion. John nodded and took a small pad of paper and a pen off one of those wheeled tray tables. He placed the pad under my left hand and put the pen between my swollen fingers. It didn’t hurt, and I upped my assessment of the painkillers. What happened after? I wrote laboriously.

  “After you saved Charlie?” John finished for me, a tiny smile on his face. “I don’t know how much you remember, but you wouldn’t let go of her. The paramedics called me, and I drove to the store—” He paused, the echoes of terror etching lines on his face. John’s house is only five minutes away from my store, but I couldn’t imagine what that drive must have been like. “You handed the baby to me, and . . . and you died, Allie. They said your heart stopped. You looked . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head in wonder.

  I scribbled on the pad again, and he read it out loud. “‘Don’t call me Allie.’” He gave me a brief smile. “Right. Sorry.”

  I wrote, Bettina?

  “Your coworker? She’s fine.” A strange look passed over his face, so swiftly that my addled brain couldn’t decipher its meaning. “Actually . . . she has no memory of any of it. She doesn’t even remember pushing the panic button.”

  I blinked, surprised. The panic button is a big deal at my store: once a year our store manager holds a special meeting just to go over the rules of when to push it. How could you not remember doing something like that?

  John fumbled for the little remote thingy attached to my hospital bed. “Speaking of buttons, we should let them know you’re up.” Before I could ask, he added, “It’s Wednesday, by the way. You spent most of yesterday in surgery.” He pressed the button for the nurse, who promised to send the surgeon in to speak with me right away.

  I was getting tired already. It’s amazing how in a couple of days your body can go from perfect health to getting exhausted by two minutes of conversation. All it took was a little thing like your heart stopping.

  While we waited for the doctor, I wrote on the pad again. The couple—I think names were Darcy and Victor.

  John’s face darkened with rage. “I’ll tell the police that, but . . . they got away.” He looked away from me, and I saw the shame in his eyes. “I didn’t hear a thing, Lex. They came into my house and took my child, and I didn’t even wake up. How is that possible?”

  Not your fault, I wrote. I remembered the strange way the couple had moved, how the man had shaken off my blow with the baby food jar like it was nothing. There was something weird about them.

  John read the message. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Before I could respond, a petite Asian woman in a white lab coat bustled in, eyes glued to a clipboard in front of her. “Good morning, Miss Luther.” She looked up, her eyes taking us in. “And Mr. Luther?”

  “No, we’re not together,” John said quietly, not looking at me. “I’m her brother-in-law.”

  “Oh, sorry,” the doctor said with a shrug. “But I need to talk to Allison about her health, and if you two aren’t together . . .” She left the sentence hanging, and John picked up the hint.

  “Right.” He squeezed my good hand and stood up. “I’ll check on you later, Lex.” Before he could move away I snapped my right fingers to get his attention, then wrote a question on the pad and turned it to face him.

  “‘Is someone feeding the herd?’” he read. His face broke into a wide smile. “Yes. We’re taking turns with that too. Your dad has a three-inch scratch on his ankle where the gray cat attacked him.”

  I smiled back around the mouthpiece. That sounded about right. My gray cat, Gus-Gus, hated men for some reason.

  John left, and the petite doctor stepped up, fussing with some of the machines near my bed. “I’m Doctor Towne,” she told me. “Did I hear correctly that you go by Lex?”

  I wrote on the pad. Yes. Army nickname. My full name is Allison Alexandra Luther, named for my paternal grandparents, Allison and Alexander. I’d gone by Allie my whole childhood, but a few days into basic training, I’d gone to the barber on post and had all of my long reddish-brown hair buzzed off. I didn’t realize at the time that I was setting myself up for a nickname that practically wrote itself.

  The doctor just nodded. “Okay, Lex. Are you ready to get that chest tube out?”

  Was I ever.

  A few unpleasant minutes later, I was sitting up, more or less, though still angled sideways to keep pressure off the stitches on my back. Dr. Towne had given me a big glass of orange juice to sip through a straw. It was supposed to help with the scratchy feeling that the tube had left in my throat.

  While I drank, Dr. Towne extracted some X-rays from my file and carried them to the one of those light boxes on the wall to my right. Pinning them up, she pointed. “These are your injuries. You were stabbed five times in the upper back. Three of those wounds went deep into the muscle. We were able to sew them up without a problem, although you’ll have some tightness and pain. I’ll be recommending physical therapy to help with that.”

  She pulled that X-ray down and posted up another. “One strike damaged your left lung. Barring complications, it should heal just fine.” She pointed to another mark on the X-ray, which I could barely make out. “The last strike was sloppy. Your attacker nicked your left brachiocephalic vein, here, which is why you lost so much blood. We repaired the cut, and gave you quite a bit of blood, but it will take your body some time to stabilize your blood pressure.” She shook her head. “Your attacker was apparently determined to go for the heart, but the human body is built to protect that organ. If she’d gone for one of the other major arteries instead, she could have killed you.” She gave me a wry little smile. “Well, maybe not you.”

  “What does that mean?” I rasped, barely recognizing my own voice.

  “Well,” Dr. Towne said, looking a little uneasy, “that’s the other thing we need to discuss. Your heart wasn’t beating when the paramedics arrived. They tried to revive you anyway, which is standard, but frankly, they were surprised when it actually worked.”

  I nodded. “John told me.”

  For the first time, the woman’s straightforward demeanor faltered, and she looked a little unsure. “Lex,” she said gravely, “it wasn’t just the one time. Your heart stopped again while they were prepping you, for two minutes. And it stopped four times during surgery.”

  I blinked. That was a lot, even for me. “That happens, though, right?” I asked, my voice an ashy croak. “People die during surgery all the time.”

  “Not like this,” she insisted. “I’ve never seen anything like it. At one point, the attending surgeon actually called time of death, and stopped trying to revive you. They were about to turn off the machines, and suddenly your heart started beating again.”

  “Oh . . .” I said lamely. What were you supposed to say to something like that? Oops?

  Th
e doctor took a deep breath and pressed on. “When you finally stabilized, my attending surgeon called the army and got your records from the hospital in Germany. They were . . . kind of amazing.”

  I had been airlifted to Germany after I stumbled out of the desert in Iraq, covered in blood. I didn’t remember that part, though. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about any of it. I mostly just wanted this woman to finish her presentation, so she could leave and I could go back to sleep. “Is there anything else I have to know?” I asked.

  Dr. Towne gazed at me, a little wide-eyed at my indifference. I’d heard that some people get really freaked out about being “dead” for a couple of minutes, but it wasn’t like it was the first time it had happened to me. “We want to run some tests, maybe do an MRI to figure out why . . . I mean, how you managed to recover.”

  “Is there any indication that my heart’s going to stop again?” I asked blandly.

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then no more tests,” I interrupted her. “That’s final.” I wasn’t going to spend a minute more in the hospital than I absolutely had to. After a moment, Dr. Towne nodded tightly, and I suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion. I felt awful: weak and nauseous and aching despite the painkillers. “Imma sleep now,” I mumbled, and was out.

  Chapter 3

  The next time I opened my eyes, it was just after two o’clock, and my eighteen-month-old niece was doing a little bopping dance on the edge of my bed, her big blue eyes dancing with the secret merriment of babies. I felt something in my heart fill up at the sight of her, looking so happy and unaware. She really was okay.

  “Hey, kid,” I rasped. The juice and the rest had helped, but my throat still felt like it’d been rubbed with steel wool. My eyes focused in on my mother, who was sitting in the chair next to me, supporting Charlie so the baby could lean against the mattress. She looked exhausted and haggard, which was saying something. Mom was usually one of those women who’s always put together, with carefully styled red-black hair and a colorful scarf gracing her neck like a personal token. Everyone who knows her well can read her level of stress by the condition of her clothes and makeup. Today, though, her hair was matted against one side of her head, and she wasn’t even wearing powder or mascara. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother without makeup. She looks so old, I thought.

  “Hey, Mom,” I whispered.

  My mother looked up from Charlie, holding my gaze for a long moment before she burst into tears. “Hi, honey,” she managed to say. Charlie craned her neck once to check on Grandma’s crying, but then turned back to me, blissfully unconcerned. She pounded her hands happily against my sheet, obviously itching to climb up and crawl all over me.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” I ventured.

  “You’ve got to stop scaring me like this,” she said through her tears.

  “It was for a good cause,” I replied weakly, stretching out my right fingers to touch Charlie’s hand. She grinned and pounced on my thumb, trying to drag it into her mouth. I’d made the mistake of letting her do that before, though, and I wanted to keep all of my fingers. I pulled them back.

  “I know, but . . .” my mother began helplessly, then shook her head, unable to continue. I couldn’t blame her. She’d nearly lost me once, then Sam had died, and now I’d put her through another scare.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  She sniffed. “He was here all morning, but he had to go to the office for a couple of hours.”

  “How’s the herd?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Ugh. The two yellow dogs got out of the back gate again, but John rounded them up. Oh, and Raja wouldn’t let the other cats eat until this morning, which made them just vicious.”

  Raja was my biggest cat, and he fancied himself the lord of the house. “Sounds about right,” I said, smiling a little.

  “The police want to speak to you as soon as possible,” Mom added.

  I automatically sat up a little, and immediately regretted it. “Did they find the couple? Or at least figure out who they were?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “But they let us take your purse from the store. It’s in there.” She pointed to a closed closet near the door. “Oh, and Dad and your cousin Paul took your car back to the cabin when they were feeding the herd. The keys are inside on the kitchen counter.”

  I smiled wider this time. It was good to have family. “Thanks, Mom.”

  We chatted for a few more minutes about my dad’s upcoming sixtieth birthday and my mother’s new favorite nail salon, where she wanted to take me when I was out of the hospital. Charlie grew tired of smacking my covers after a while and made a serious effort to climb onto my bed. My mother pulled her off. “We should probably go,” she said regretfully. Her eyes were glued to me, like I might evaporate if she looked away. “It’s past Charlotte’s nap time. Your cousin Jacob is coming to sit with you in a few minutes.”

  “You guys don’t have to do that,” I protested. “I’m fine. I don’t need babysitters, especially when you all have—”

  “Allison Alexandra Luther!” my mother interrupted sternly. Full Christian name. Never a good sign. “You know darn well that that’s not how our family does things. Until you get out of intensive care, one of us will always be here during visiting hours.” She bent to kiss my forehead, giving Charlie the opening she’d been waiting for to reach down for a fistful of my shoulder-length hair. My mother patiently untangled my hair from her chubby baby fingers and straightened herself up. “I love you,” Mom said fiercely. “Get better.”

  I promised I would.

  I managed to stay awake for a full forty-five minutes of Jake’s visit. He chatted with me politely, showing me pictures of his daughter on his phone and making quiet jokes about his wife’s latest fitness craze without once mentioning the attack or attempted kidnapping. When my eyes started to close, he just kissed my forehead and picked up the remote for the overhead television. Jake was probably the most laid-back of all the cousins: always polite and soft-spoken, quick to smile or to go along with one of Sam’s madcap plans when we were kids.

  In fact, one of those madcap plans was how I came to acquire the herd. When I came back from the hospital in Germany three years ago, I was in rough shape. My physical recovery had gone well—too well, in fact. The army had never seen anyone recover from what had happened to me, and the doctors who’d treated me in Germany were baffled to the point of suspicion. No one came right out and said I must have been lying about those days in the desert, but I got enough sidelong looks that I wasn’t real surprised when they told me I was being honorably discharged.

  The first thing I did when I finally returned to Boulder was to have an enormous fight with my parents. I didn’t set out to create problems, but my overprotective, endlessly worried parents had just assumed I’d move back in with them and take a job working for my father. They were genuinely shocked when I refused to do either.

  Their next offer was to send me to college on their dime, which I also turned down. Finally, they tried just throwing money at me, offering me free access to a trust they would set up for me “until I got on my feet,” whatever that meant. I refused that, too. Instead, I couch-hopped at my cousins’ houses, took a job at the Depot, and started looking at apartments in one of the few really cheap—and really scuzzy—parts of Boulder. The crappy neighborhood didn’t trouble me in the least, mostly because I’d dealt with a hell of a lot worse than a couple of low-grade muggers who might be dumb enough to jump me.

  My parents, on the other hand, absolutely lost their shit when they heard about my housing search. Voices were raised, hurtful things were said, and for a moment there it looked like nobody was gonna get anything but coal that Christmas.

  It was Sam who finally brokered the peace between us. She and John were living in LA then, but she came back to Boulder for a month when I got out of the ho
spital, to make sure I was okay. Sam managed to convince our parents that I needed some time and space to myself, at a job that wouldn’t cause me any real stress or require me to sit motionless in front of a computer all day. Then she came to me, begging me to accept a compromise: I didn’t have to take a dime of our parents’ money, but I would allow them to give me, free and clear, the remote three-bedroom “fishing” cabin they barely used anymore.

  “Just let them do this for you, Allie,” she’d pleaded. “Let them take care of you a little, so they can sleep better at night.”

  “I’m not in charge of their sleep,” I’d told her stubbornly. “And that’s not my name anymore.”

  She’d sighed. “Babe, I am your goddamned twin. You can try to convince everyone else, yourself included, that you’re a different person now, but you will always be Allie to me. Now take the fucking cabin and get over yourself.”

  So I took the cabin.

  After a couple of weeks, the family’s excitement over my return died down, and everyone went back to their own lives. Sam flew back to LA, but she called me every night, and my parents insisted on weekly visits. Even so, I was only pulling about thirty hours a week at the Flatiron Depot, and I found myself with a lot of free time all of a sudden.

  That’s when the night terrors started.

  I dreamed of my dead friends from the Humvee, the sensation of being dragged through hot sand. I dreamed of the desert, of blistering lips and blood drying on my skin in the hot sun. Each night I woke up screaming, with the taste of sand in my mouth. I switched my work schedule to the night shift, hoping that sleeping in daylight would banish the dreams, but it didn’t help. Now it was just lighter outside when I woke up, drenched in sweat, frantic with adrenaline, desperate to save people who were long since dead. I never said anything about the nightmares, but Sam somehow knew. Maybe I sounded tired on the phone, or maybe she had a spy in the family who had noticed the bags under my eyes. At any rate, she tried to get me to talk about it, but I just couldn’t go there.