It was raining when she got to Boston, and she was soaked by the time she caught a taxi driven by a man who smelled like he would have benefited from a few minutes in the downpour, perhaps with a little shampoo mixed in. But, hey, simpler times. She reached the hospital a little after one—five hours to get here for a ten-minute conversation that she could have had over the phone. The shoe box was wet now, the cardboard starting to soften and peel, but the phones inside were dry. She wished she’d thought to put them in a briefcase or something more formal.
Tara Beckley could be seen by visitors if the family and doctor approved it, but Abby made it clear to the receptionist that she did not want to see Tara.
“I’m here for her sister,” she said. “Shannon Beckley. I’ll wait here for her.”
She sat in a vinyl-covered chair and jittered her right palm off a closed left fist as if drumming along to a song and she tried not to think of the hospital in Los Angeles where Luke had died. Abby had done a good job of making visits there. At first. Maybe not so good of a job later. But what was the point? Luke’s eyes were empty, and his family’s eyes were not. His mother stared at Abby with hate, his father stared at her with a naked question of Why couldn’t it have been you?, and Hollywood magazines featuring the story piled up on the bedside table. The reporters called endlessly, and everyone advised Abby to say nothing.
She was the only one who could say something, though. Luke couldn’t say a damn thing, couldn’t defend Abby.
Would he have defended you? Sure, he would have. He’d have understood. He wanted to see how far you could push it. That was for him, not you. He loved risk, and he cast no blame.
And, yet…had he yelled at her to slow down just before the last curve? He’d said it so many times, but he’d been laughing, and it wasn’t a command or even a request, just the delight of a kid on a roller coaster saying, Slow down, slow down, but not really meaning it. That was how it had gone. His tone hadn’t shifted when Abby pegged the needle at 145. No way. That was her revisionist memory seeking to take blame, but it wasn’t reality.
Slow down! His hand on her arm, tightening, his nails biting into her skin.
In a hospital three thousand miles away from that scene, the receptionist cleared her throat loudly, and Abby realized how she’d picked up the speed and volume of the drumming of her open right palm off her closed left fist. She looked like a drug addict in need of a fix. Looked like a…
Speed freak.
She flattened her hands and pressed them together as if in prayer, giving a weak smile of apology to the receptionist.
I’m not a speed freak, ma’am. If you’d watched me driving around lately, you’d know I was anything but that.
The doors between the waiting room and the long hallway opened and a tall young woman with red-brown hair and very green eyes, bright enough to stand out above the puffy purple crescents of fatigue, strode through the doorway like a marshal summoned to a fight in a saloon.
“You’re the investigator?” the woman said.
“Yes. Abby Kaplan.” She rose and offered her hand. The woman seemed to consider rejecting it but then shook it grudgingly. Her fingers were long and slender and strong, like a piano player’s. Or like the Boston Strangler’s, judging from her grip.
“What’s this crap about her phone?” she said. “What does her phone have to do with anything?”
Abby saw the receptionist give a tired little shake of her head, as if she were all too familiar with this woman.
“Uh, I was just hoping to meet with the family and introduce myself and then we can get into any questions you all might have,” Abby began, because she knew there was more to the family than this woman, and she figured she might find more friendliness in that group. Or in a rattlesnake den.
“You don’t need to bother meeting the family,” Shannon Beckley said. “I’m the family’s legal representative.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
“I’m the closest thing they have right now,” Shannon said. Contrasted against the dark red hair, her green eyes seemed aflame. “And in point of fact, I will be a lawyer.” She paused, and her voice was softer when she said, “Maybe a little later than I’d expected now. Stanford doesn’t stop. Not even for tragedy.”
She gave a cold smile that made Abby pity whoever would have to face this woman in the courtroom in the years to come.
“So I’ll lose a semester maybe.” She shrugged, but it was forced indifference. “Whatever it takes, fine. Because that girl in there?” Shannon pointed to the closed double doors. “She and I have been through…” She caught herself, and Abby had the distinct feeling she was walling off a rise of emotion, brick by brick. She wouldn’t allow herself to fall apart. Not in front of Abby, at least.
“So,” she said when she’d composed herself, “tell me what you’re doing, please, and why her phone matters.”
Yes, the emotion was gone now, and cold steel was back in its place.
“Her mother—your mother—is here, correct?” Abby asked, not because she had any desire to speak to the mother but because she wanted to counter this woman somehow, however politely, and show that she had at least a little power in this situation.
“My mother is glued to Facebook, where she posts updates every ten minutes on a Team Tara page that my stepfather created so she’d have something to do, something that calmed her down that did not involve a tranquilizer. Do you really need to interrupt that?”
Abby remembered Luke’s Facebook fan page, the blog, the Twitter account, all the endless updates fading from hopeful to resigned. She shook her head. “No. I don’t need to interrupt that. I’m just trying to answer your questions, and I was told you needed to see me in person to address them.”
“That’s right. But your boss said you wanted to show me her phone. What’s on the phone?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure if I have it.” Abby lifted the wet shoe box, feeling like a fool, and pulled back the lid. “The guy at the salvage yard gave me this. He’s pulled them all out of cars. I was wondering if one of them belonged to your sister.”
Shannon Beckley’s eyes narrowed and she reached in the box and sorted through the phones quickly with those long, elegant fingers.
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Hers was a rose-gold iPhone in a case.”
“Okay. Well, maybe one of them belonged to her passenger, then. The guy who towed the car was positive that he found one of these inside.”
“What does it matter when you’ve got a driver whose guilt is already established?”
“I’m just trying to find out whether the phones survived the wreck,” she said, and then she regretted that phrasing—survived was not the right word for a phone. “If one did, it might contain something useful.”
“Useful to whom?”
“To…I mean, to everyone. It could provide clarification on a few points of—”
“Are you trying to get out of a claim? Is that the idea? Because I promise you, if you guys pull any bullshit to make this more expensive to my family than it already is, I will get that story on the front page of the New York Times.” She looked Abby up and down and then added, “Or on Fox News. Whatever hits your company harder.”
“That would actually be the Portland Press Herald, then.”
“This is funny to you?”
She was leaning in, and Abby almost stepped back but then decided not to give her the satisfaction. “No. But before you start shouting threats, you might want to remember that I’m working on her behalf.”
“Oh, that is such crap. The college hired you to find out if they had any risk. That’s the truth.”
She wasn’t wrong, of course. Abby started to offer a pat reply about how the college intended to work hand in hand with the family, but something about Shannon Beckley’s heated eyes made her dispense with the bullshit. “They’re going to have someone do it,” Abby said. “It’ll be me or it’ll be somebody
else, but they will have someone ask questions.”
Shannon studied Abby for a moment and then said, “Come see her.”
“What?”
“If you’re working on her behalf, I’d like you to come see her with me. We can talk with her, right?”
Abby blinked at her. “I thought…I was told that…” Shannon waited, eyebrows raised, and Abby felt she was talking her way into a trap. “That she’s nonresponsive,” she finished finally. “Was I misinformed?”
“We’re not sure.” Shannon Beckley softened her tone. “Maybe she’s hearing it all, maybe she’s not. We just don’t know. At first it was a medically induced coma to try to limit the swelling in the brain, but now they’re bringing her back out of it, and…” She cleared her throat. “And we’re waiting on more tests.”
“I understand,” Abby said. “And I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
Bullshit, Abby. Why lie?
For an instant, she almost corrected herself. Almost told the truth to this sleep-deprived stranger with the searing stare, almost told her that she knew the situation all too well.
All she got out, though, was a question: “Has she had an fMRI yet?”
“No, but it’s scheduled.”
Abby nodded. “They usually start there. Then other scans. There are lots of ways to try to determine if she’s…aware of things. Different doctors have different ideas.”
“Too many ideas. I’ve been reading about all of them, and it’s exhausting. There’s a university hospital nearby where they have the patient watch a movie while undergoing an MRI, and they scan the brain for an emotional response. They’ve had good results with that.”
“Like that Hitchcock film,” Abby said. Shannon Beckley looked offended, and Abby realized she thought that Abby was comparing Tara’s situation to a movie and headed her off. “Some researchers use an episode called ‘Bang, You’re Dead’ from Alfred Hitchcock’s old black-and-white TV series. A kid picks up a loaded gun, and the audience knows it’s loaded, but the kid doesn’t know. So the audience reacts emotionally as he goes from place to place carrying what he thinks is harmless and what the audience knows is deadly. That activates different areas in the brain of someone watching it. It shows awareness.”
“Tara hates anything in black-and-white. If she’s not in a vegetative state now, the sight of a black-and-white TV show might put her into one.” She forced a laugh that choked at the end, like an engine running out of gas, and then she looked away and tried to gather herself. Abby didn’t want to offer any canned condolences or well wishes, knowing exactly how exhausting and hollow those grew, and so she tried to follow the attempt at humor.
“Tell the doctors she’s got to see a favorite movie of hers, then, because you want to know if her memory is activated. That sounds legitimate.”
She was kidding, but Shannon Beckley said, “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”
“Actually, it probably is a bad idea. The doctors have their protocols for a reason. They tend not to like input from an insurance investigator.”
“I’ll find a more credible source, don’t worry.” Shannon regarded Abby curiously. “So you’ve dealt with a case like hers before?”
“Not a case.” Now Abby regretted telling her anything. This woman, who was just a few years younger than Abby’s thirty-one, was clearly not in the Luke London fan club, because she hadn’t reacted to Abby’s name. But she would Google it at some point, and then she’d have new questions.
“You spend that much time reading about coma patients? It’s a hobby?”
“I get a lot of newsletters, trade magazines, crap like that.”
“Your trade magazines deal with advanced coma protocols?”
“They’ve got to fill space,” Abby said. “Listen, let me just introduce myself and explain what we are—”
“Let’s go into her room for all this talk.”
The way she said it made Abby feel as if Shannon were baiting her, as if she sensed fear. “It’s not my job, I mean, it’s not my place to be in there.”
“Actually, it’s anyone’s place. The doctors have encouraged us to talk to her. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now. So join me. Who knows—maybe she’ll respond to you.”
Luke? Luke, baby, if you’re in there…do something. Speak, blink, squeeze my hand, slap me, just do something so I know!
“Okay,” Abby said, her mouth dry. “Sure.”
She followed Shannon Beckley through the double doors that parted automatically as if hurrying out of her way.
13
The nurses think Tara is brain-dead.
They treat her as an empty shell. They adjust her in the bed to prevent sores from forming, turn her and spread her legs and clean her, unaware of the horrifying humiliation, handling her roughly and without interest, talking around her and above her. They don’t bother to speak to her, to introduce themselves. She can’t even be certain they’re nurses. Therapists of some sort, maybe? How do you know what they are doing when they don’t bother to explain it? If they have any hope for her future, they don’t indicate it. All she picks up from them is apathy; all she feels is pain and shame.
A young blond woman wipes Tara’s ass and complains to a gray-haired black woman about the amount of time her fiancé spends with his friends smoking cigars in the garage right below their bedroom, which fills her clothes with the awful smell.
“He just doesn’t get it,” she says, and then she rolls Tara back over without so much as a glance at her face, holding a soiled diaper with her free hand.
“A phase, maybe?” the black woman suggests. “Something he’ll get out of his system now, and after the wedding it will be different?”
“I’d love to believe that. But I’m not sure that I do.”
The blonde discards the diaper, peels off her gloves, and looks down at Tara without any interest, then she consults a clipboard and makes a note. Is there a box you check when you wipe someone’s ass? If so, can they add that you’re required to do it discreetly and with apology or compassion? Or tell the patient your damn name, at least?
The nurses finish with her, add a few more checks to the clipboard beside her bed, and then the black woman hesitates and looks down into Tara’s eyes for the first time.
“This one is supposed to be on the move tomorrow.”
“Yes,” the blonde agrees without looking over, and then they are out of sight, crossing the room and vanishing out the door and into the hallway.
This one.
A body, nothing more. That’s what Tara is to them.
Also a body that is supposed to be on the move tomorrow. Where are they taking her? And why?
Of all the agonies of her condition, none is worse than the lack of explanations. She reentered a world that has moved on without her, and because no one is aware that she’s back in it, no one slows down to clarify anything. Even her most basic questions—How long have I been here? What happened to put me in here? Is there a diagnosis? Is there a plan? Is there hope?—are unanswered, because everyone around her has already had these conversations, probably countless times. Why go backward, then? Instead, they move forward, following a course that was charted while Tara was lost to the blackness. She doesn’t know where it began, let alone where it will end.
An accident? An attack? An illness?
She has no idea. The coma she understands, but its cause remains a mystery. Was she felled by a club or a clot? Her lack of memory in this regard is terrifying. She knows who she is, where she lives, what she does, likes, hates, loves; everything related to her identity is clear. What brought her here, though…she can’t even begin to retrace the steps. She remembers getting out of the shower and checking the clock, which was important because she couldn’t be late for…
For what?
She has no idea. Something important and time-sensitive. Time was her primary concern.
Did they find me there in the bathroom, naked on the floor, steam st
ill on the mirror?
Every now and then, flickers of images will rise and then sink, like leaves carried in a swift stream, but she believes those images aren’t memories, just pieces of the awful nightmare she’d endured prior to waking. A stranger, a cold wind, and a wolf.
The door opens again. She feels Shannon’s presence before she actually sees her. This is how it has always been with Shannon. She buzzes with a different energy than most people, moving through the world with a swirling, nearly chaotic force. It is a force that Tara clings to now, because she can feel the hope draining away from her mother and Rick. They aren’t as bad as the nurses yet, and she expects they never could regard her with such indifference, but…they are drifting that way.
Shannon is with an unfamiliar young woman with short, dark blond hair and blue eyes. She is lean and slim-hipped, an almost boyish figure, though her eyes and athlete’s grace would stand out if she weren’t shuffling in so unhappily, like a child dragged into the principal’s office. She glances at Tara only briefly, and while Tara is growing used to cursory glances, this one feels different. It isn’t that the new woman sees no point in making eye contact with her; it’s that she’s afraid.
“Tara, I’ve found a new friend,” Shannon says with false cheer. Shannon keeps up a steady stream of conversation most of the time she is here, and when she does finally fall silent, she usually leaves soon after. It reminds Tara of the years when they shared a bedroom—when Shannon stopped talking, it meant she’d fallen asleep.
Now Shannon rests her hand on Tara’s arm. The touch is warm and kind. Tara wonders what her skin feels like to Shannon—the same healthy human warmth or the clamminess of sickness? Or something worse?
“Abby’s an investigator,” Shannon says. “She tells me she’s working on your behalf.”
If She Wakes Page 8