If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  “I guess,” Sam said. He sounded resigned to trouble. “Hell, I ought to stop taking cop tows. They ain’t worth the hassle.”

  “I’ll try to keep it from becoming a hassle for you,” Abby said, no longer caring much if the old man had intended to sell the stolen phone. He’d turned it over, at least. Savage Sam of the misspelled neon signs wasn’t such a bad guy. “I’ll get in and out, quick and painless, I promise.”

  “That’s what they told me the last time I had a colonoscopy,” Sam said.

  7

  Ghosts are real.

  Tara knows this because she is one.

  When clarity first returns, she sees her mother, her stepfather, and her sister. She sees them and she hears Shannon’s voice and thinks: The dream is done.

  She thinks, slower and more carefully, because it is so important: I am alive.

  There is relief with that realization, but it is a temporary relief, because she soon determines that she is invisible.

  Shannon is arguing with Rick and Mom, but she is arguing on Tara’s behalf, and Rick and Mom are facing Tara, staring right at her but not seeing her.

  “She wouldn’t quit on us, and so I am not going to listen to anyone say one word about what we must consider,” Shannon snaps. “Because what you’re considering is quitting on your own daughter!”

  Tara looks into her mother’s eyes and waits for recognition, awareness, something. Notice me, speak to me, touch me. But her mother just stares blankly, her eyes bloodshot and ringed by dark circles. She doesn’t seem to see Tara. Rick looks at Tara as well, his bearded face doing a poor job of hiding his annoyance with Shannon. He doesn’t see Tara either. She’s used to being ignored by Rick—and to ignoring him—but this is different. He’s looking right at her and yet for all the world he seems to be staring at a wall.

  I’m invisible. Maybe I’m not alive. Maybe I’m dead, and this is what it’s like?

  She is a ghost. The realization is sudden and certain. It is the only explanation for her condition.

  How did I die?

  “It’s too early to talk like this,” Shannon says, and Rick closes his eyes with fatigue. Mom just keeps staring. Shannon starts to speak again, then thinks better of it, shakes her head furiously, and stalks to the window. Everyone is quiet then. Tara wants to speak but her tongue is heavy and rigid and uncooperative in her mouth, and so she lies there and tries to gather her voice.

  It is then that understanding begins to come, agonizingly slowly, like filling a glass one drop of water at a time.

  Mom. Rick. Shannon. A television turned to CNN, but muted. A bed with a pair of feet resting on it. Wait—those are her feet. She is in the bed. The bed is not her own. The room is not her own. Her confusingly thick tongue is not a tongue at all—it is a tube. There are more tubes in other places, and she’s aware of them now, first with pain and then some shame. There are wires too, a seemingly endless amount of wires.

  Hospital.

  Yes, that is it. She is in a hospital, and she is not a ghost. Not just yet. What is she, though?

  “Every coma is different,” Shannon says without turning, her voice trembling with barely subdued anger, and in that sentence, in that single word—coma—Tara has her answer.

  She has been in a coma. This makes sense; it’s a better explanation than anything she’s come up with on her own. But she is out of the coma now, because she is awake and alert and she can see and hear. Why don’t they notice this? Why don’t they see that she is awake?

  Because you haven’t said anything, dummy. Tell them!

  Hello, Tara says.

  No one reacts. Shannon doesn’t turn; Mom’s stare doesn’t break; Rick’s slumped shoulders don’t tense.

  Panic rises then, a terrible, claustrophobic panic, and this time Tara screams, determined to be heard.

  I’m right here!

  Nothing. Shannon stares out the window, Mom bows her head, Rick stands slumped and weary.

  This time, Tara understands, though. She didn’t make a sound. Her scream had produced…nothing.

  Had she even parted her lips? Surely she had. She’d screamed at the top of her lungs, screamed in terror and confusion, and no one had reacted. How is this possible? Maybe there is a wall between them, some sort of glass partition, the kind with a mirror on their side like in the cop shows so she can see them but they can’t see her.

  This thought brings logic back to an insane world, and the terror subsides. She tells herself to sit up and figure out the two-way mirror, find that glass panel and rap on it and get their attention, let them know that she is here, she is back, awake again.

  Sit up.

  She thinks the words, visualizes the motion, and waits. Nothing happens. She’s still lying down, and she should be upright. Just…sit up.

  But she can’t.

  The terror is back now.

  She tries again but makes no progress, and, worse, she realizes there’s no sense of resistance, nothing holding her down, no weight or strap or anything that would block this simple command to her body. Even if she is injured—and she’s in a hospital with tubes and IVs in her, so of course she has been injured—she should be able to fight upward.

  She can issue the command, but her body can’t obey it.

  Paralyzed. Oh no, not that…

  She starts to cry then. To cry and shake.

  No tears come. No sounds.

  Shannon turns and looks down at her, right into her eyes, and Tara stares back into her older sister’s loving face and pleads for help.

  Shannon looks away.

  “I don’t want to hear any of the spiritual shit, Rick,” she says. “I do not want to hear it yet.”

  “I’m sorry that shit bothers you, Shannon, but I think it’s worth talking about!” Rick answers, taking a step toward her. “You need to begin to ask yourself who this is for, your sister or her body. You need to begin to consider that there is a difference.”

  “I am not considering a damn thing until we’ve seen a neurologist,” Shannon says.

  “Everyone says if we just keep our faith…” Mom tries timidly, but Shannon isn’t having it.

  “Everyone on your Facebook page says that. While you’re making Team Tara posts and people are offering advice from their phones between bites of their bagels, I’m suggesting we consult an actual expert.”

  Mom winces, Rick sighs, and Shannon lifts her hands in regret. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be a bitch, Mom, I’m really not. The Facebook page is important. I get that. But I don’t want us to begin premature conversations.”

  “Our job will be to imagine her quality of life,” Rick says softly, “and you can’t even reach that point until you know whether there is a life.”

  “She’s breathing!” Shannon shouts. “Her heart is beating! Her eyes are open, she’s watching us!”

  Rick points at Tara, a beaded bracelet jangling on his right wrist. He is looking directly at her but seems to see only an empty bed.

  “Her body is doing those things, yes. But where is Tara?” he asks in that pastoral whisper he uses so often to calm their mother. “Look into her eyes, Shannon, and then tell me. Where is Tara right now?”

  I am right fucking here! Tara shouts.

  They all turn toward her then, and for a moment she thinks she’s made contact. Then she realizes they are just following Rick’s outstretched hand and considering his question.

  “Tell me, Shannon,” he whispers, moving his hand to rub his graying beard. “Where…is…she?”

  When Shannon says, “I don’t know,” the tears overwhelm Tara again.

  No one in the room knows that she’s right there, and no one in the room knows that she’s crying.

  8

  The place where Amandi Oltamu had died was beautiful and peaceful. Crisp orange leaves glowed in the fading sunlight as they swirled across the pavement, and beneath them were glittering bits of pebbled glass that the cleanup effort had missed. The blood had been hosed off the pavemen
t.

  Abby stepped out of her car, looked at that bright, too-clean patch of asphalt, and tried to ignore the steady accelerating of her heartbeat.

  Exposure therapy, that’s what this job of studying car wrecks was supposed to be. You kept things from taking up damaging residence in your brain by meeting them on your own terms in small, planned doses, building up a tolerance. The mind was no different than the body—it could become immune to a bad memory just like it could to a virus.

  This was what a therapist in California had told her. Granted, the therapist hadn’t recommended changing careers, let alone moving back to Maine. She’d encouraged Abby to look at some pictures, that was all. And Abby had tried. But…

  But the therapist hadn’t killed her boyfriend in a car wreck, and once you’ve done that, well, those pictures can become harder to look at than most people would believe.

  The job Abby had now was an almost ludicrous outgrowth of a technique she’d been asked to embrace in California, but she was the only person who understood the bridge between the two. Nobody on the West Coast knew what she was doing now, and she hadn’t volunteered any of her stories to Hank or anyone else in Maine. She’d had absolutely no desire to.

  Until today, at least. When Hank had given her the overview of the wreck in Hammel, Abby had almost broken and told him the details of her horror story, told him about the way Luke’s hand had closed on her arm just before they left the road, told him that maybe his last words hadn’t been Faster, Abby, but rather Slow down, told him how his eyes had seemed to track hers in the hospital even after the doctors said there was absolutely no indication of awareness. For an instant, she’d been ready to tell Hank that under no circumstances could she investigate an accident that had put someone in a coma.

  She hadn’t said a word, though. In the end, she’d just taken the file and headed out to do her job—with that quick stop for a beer on the way. Because the past was the past, Luke was nothing but a memory, and Abby couldn’t afford to spend any more of her life with her eyes on the rearview mirror.

  But now, standing here in the cold fall air with the sun setting behind the wooded hills and the smell of the sea riding the wind, she couldn’t bring herself to look at the wreck photos. They would make her think of the miles of roads that lurked between here and home. Intersections and stoplights, sharp curves and banked slopes, all of those challenges so simply handled by basic instinct, and challenges that could be turned into creative triumphs if your mind was fast and your hands were steady. It was a bitch if that basic instinct ever wavered on you, but if you’d once had a fast mind and steady hands and a hundred and twenty miles per hour felt like fifty? In that case, it was worse. Deeper and darker. In that case, you began to feel like you didn’t really know yourself anymore.

  Focus, damn it. Focus on the job and then get out of here.

  She stood at the base of the hill and looked out at the two-lane bridge that crossed the river and led to the college campus. There was a concrete pillar on the sidewalk identifying the bridge’s place in the state’s history. This was what Tara Beckley’s CRV had struck after Carlos Ramirez, his head down and cell phone glowing, drove his van into the car.

  Lives ended from mere moments of distraction. Happened all too often.

  Doesn’t require distraction, though. There are variations on the lost-lives theme. Stunt drivers taking famous actors out for a spin, for example. Those trips can end badly too.

  Again, Abby could see Luke’s hand reaching for hers.

  She shook her head, then walked up the hill to put herself in the position the van’s driver had been in. She took out her camera and pivoted slowly, shooting a 360-degree view. The sun was sinking fast and lights were visible on both sides of the bridge. The campus was on the western side of the river, and atop the steep hill on the east, everything was residential. If Ramirez hadn’t already fallen on his sword, there might have been some mitigation from the lighting. The streetlights were toned-down replicas of old gas lamps, designed more for aesthetics than illumination.

  Abby was about 280 degrees through her 360-degree turn when she lowered the camera and frowned, thinking of the massive amount of destruction done to Tara Beckley’s Honda CRV. Carlos Ramirez had to have been hauling ass when he hit them to inflict that sort of damage. Down a steep hill and into those angled parking spaces…

  She paced up the hill a few steps and turned to look back at the parking spots.

  The wind that gusted and stirred the brittle leaves was getting colder. Abby zipped up her fleece and paced back down to the edge of the bridge and looked up at the hill, and now her old instincts were alive. This insurance investigator—could there be a less glamorous occupation?—had once been the fabled Professional Driver on a Closed Course, and while that was an adrenaline-jockey business, it was also a science-based business.

  Abby Kaplan didn’t need to run a calculation to know what was troubling her—the police photos didn’t do justice to the hill.

  That hill was much steeper than Abby had imagined. The road crested and then seemed to dive toward the river. The police had probably viewed that as a contributing factor to the wreck. Carlos Ramirez had been driving an unfamiliar cargo van, he’d been going fast, he’d been distracted, and he’d been on a dangerous slope. Check, check, check, check. All of that played well on paper. But…

  How come he didn’t roll it?

  Abby chewed her lip and stared at that steep hill rising from the river and thought about the nearly new tires she’d seen on the van.

  There were two types of rollovers, tripped and untripped. Most rollover accidents were tripped, which meant that some external object—a curb, a ditch, a guardrail—upset the vehicle’s balance. The rarer untripped rollovers were the result of the battle among three cornering forces: centripetal (tire friction), inertial (vehicle mass), and good old gravity.

  Untripped rollovers were caused or avoided by the driver’s ability (or lack thereof) to understand and control the car. The driver was alone in that critical moment, tethered to the world by nothing but four points of rubber and her own skill.

  Abby could remember standing on a course in Germany waiting to drive a Mercedes prototype while an engineer droned on about this; she kept wishing she could just get behind the wheel and go because her hands and eyes already understood everything the guy was babbling about.

  Back then they had, at least.

  He’d been talking about the CSV, or critical sliding velocity. She had started to pay more attention at that point, because he’d uttered the word that owned Abby’s heart: velocity. The CSV formula determined the minimum lateral speed at which the vehicle would roll.

  When he’d killed Amandi Oltamu and knocked Tara Beckley into a coma, Carlos Ramirez had been executing a fishhook maneuver. On test runs, that meant you followed a fishhook-shaped curve: You went straight, then turned sharply in one direction—as you’d do to avoid something in the road—then overcorrected in the other. On each run, you widened your path, steering at sharper and sharper angles, testing it until the tires howled and threatened to lift off the pavement—or until they did lift off.

  Abby had executed maybe two thousand fishhook runs. She didn’t need an engineering degree to see the problem with the scenario on the bridge across from Hammel College. The slope was too steep and the fishhook turn was too narrow.

  He’d have rolled first. He might have hit Beckley’s car, but he’d have had his van on its side by the time he did. The cargo van was too tall, its center of mass too high, to handle such abrupt cornering and remain upright.

  Unless he’d never tried to turn. Unless he’d been coming straight at them, targeting them.

  Abby didn’t hesitate to look at the photos this time. Her curiosity had overridden her apprehension, and she was able to see past the blood on the pavement and focus on the vehicle positions.

  The cargo van was upright, the CRV was upright, the damage was catastrophic, and all of that made sense until you
stood down here and looked up the hill and thought about the angles.

  Her phone rang, a shrill shattering of the quiet, and she closed the accident report and looked at the phone. Hank Bauer, her boss and friend and onetime sponsor, a man who’d paid the fees to get a teenage Abby Kaplan into stock-car races in Wiscasset, Scarborough, and Oxford.

  “Hey, Hank.”

  “How’s it going, Abs?”

  “Fine. Actually…well, it’s a little messed up.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Something’s wrong in that report. What Ramirez said happened is impossible. It might be what he thinks happened, but it isn’t right.”

  Hank’s voice dropped an octave. “He smashed directly into a parked car. How wrong can he be about that?”

  “He would have tipped that van,” Abby said. “Hank, I’m telling you, there’s no way he could have hit the passenger side of her car that hard if he’d swerved the way he said he did. He’d have rolled it into the river first.”

  “Let the police worry about Ramirez,” Hank said. “I just want our girl Tara to be clean as a whistle. Okay?”

  “Right,” Abby said, but she didn’t like it because she wanted someone who could talk on her level about this problem. She changed tack instead. “I might have good news there. I think I’ve got her phone.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  Abby told him about the trip to the salvage yard, and Hank began to laugh before she was done.

  “Only thing surprising about that is Sam hadn’t sold it yet.”

  “Well, I’ve got a box of phones now and I don’t know which is hers. I’ll charge them up tonight and test them.”

  “Save yourself the trouble—you can ask her sister tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “She wants to know what you’re doing, I guess. Wants to meet you. Wants to meet anyone and everyone who’s involved.”

  “She’s coming up here?”

  “No, you’re going down there, to the hospital in Massachusetts. Bring your treasure chest from Savage Sam along.”

  “The hospital? Why?” Abby felt a cold fist tighten in her gut. She did not want to go to the hospital. She most sincerely did not want to see that girl in the coma. “I’ll call the sister. I don’t need to go to Boston to see her in the hospital.”