Finally, reluctantly, he released him.
There was business to do, and time was wasting.
He kept the gloves on while he wiped down the whiskey glass and the PBR can and the desk. Sam’s old chair swiveled under his weight, turning the dead man away from the door. Dax carefully turned the chair back so that his face would greet the next visitor.
When he left, he took the bottle.
18
The neurologist’s last name is Pine, and if he has a first name, he doesn’t offer it to Tara. He is Dr. Pine, period. He has a pleasant smile and smart, penetrating eyes and the kind of self-assured bearing that gives you confidence.
It gives Tara confidence, at least, until he asks her to blink.
“Twice for no, once for yes,” he says in his deep, warm voice. They are alone in the room; Shannon objected to that, but Dr. Pine insisted, and Dr. Pine won.
He is the first medical staffer to introduce himself to Tara and explain who he is. Hello, Tara, I’m Dr. Pine, your neurologist. We’re going to need to work together to get your show back on the road, okay? This will be a team effort. But I promise you I’m going to do my part.
All of this is so nice to hear. So encouraging. But then…
“Blink for me,” he says again. “Please, Tara.”
And she wants to. She has never wanted anything more in her life than to blink for this man.
She can’t do it, though. She tries so hard that tears form in her eyes, but tears are always forming in her eyes, and she doubts this means anything to him. It’s not crying so much as leaking, and nobody seems to notice it except Shannon and the black nurse whose name Tara still doesn’t know. Sometimes they will dab her tears off her cheeks.
My sister used to call me Twitch, she thinks. I was that jumpy. If you showed me a scary movie or slammed a door when the house was dark, I’d jerk like I’d been electrocuted. Now I can’t even blink.
Dr. Pine stares at her, says, “If you’re comfortable, give me one blink. If you’re not comfortable, give me two,” and Tara begins to feel exhausted from the strain of effort, an exhaustion that’s only heightened by the outrage that there’s no evidence of her effort, no sign that she’s fighting her ass off in here. She doubles down on the effort of the blink, every ounce of her energy going toward her eyelids. Come on, come on…
And that’s when her thumb twitches.
She feels a wave of elation; Dr. Pine shows nothing. He didn’t see her thumb. He’s watching her eyes, and so he missed the motion in her hand.
“That’s okay, Tara,” he says, and he pats her arm and stands up and turns his attention to his notepad.
But my thumb moved! It moved, how could you miss that, I need you to see that I can move!
Twitchy Tara the scaredy-cat girl is back and better than ever. Twitch is no longer a shame name; it’s a lifeline.
Pine looks up, smiles at her, and then says, “Let’s bring your family back in, shall we?”
Damn it, Doc, where were your eyes when I needed them!
But he’s gone, and her thumb is still again. The lifeline lifeless. He opens the door and they all file in, Shannon in front, then Mom, then Rick with his hand on Mom’s arm. Always the reassuring touch.
“Remember,” he tells Mom, “the truth is always progress.”
He keeps talking, his voice rising and falling with the softly melodic tone that Shannon always claims is attempted hypnosis. When she and Tara were kids, that was one of the inside jokes about Rick that kept them laughing and made his endless optimism and stream of life-lesson-inspiration bullshit tolerable. That and the way he kept Mom away from the pills. She’d been in her fourth stint at rehab when she met Rick, and nobody expected this one to work any better than the first three had. It would buy a few weeks maybe, but then Tara would come home and find her mother hadn’t gotten out of bed, or Shannon would open a DVD case and Vicodin tablets would pour out.
Rick, with his relentless What is your intention for this day? mantras, his vegan diet, and his awful taste in music—lyrics were an unfortunate interruption of melody, he always said—connected with Martha Beckley in a way no one else had been able to, and that was enough to make him tolerable to her daughters. Because while Mom’s obvious vulnerability was to medications, not men, there were always plenty of the latter. The construction accident that had claimed her husband’s life, taking from Tara a father that she scarcely remembers, left Martha Beckley both a psychological wreck and a wealthy woman.
Rick has been a good influence for Mom, an absolute relief in some ways, but Tara has never completely trusted him, and she certainly doesn’t like the sound of the statement The truth is always progress. He’s preparing her mother to hear a truth that will be hard to take, and he wants her to believe that it’s progress.
“Why don’t we let the doctor tell us what progress is,” Shannon snaps.
Get him, Shannon, Tara thinks.
Sometimes Mom will joke about her “guard daughters.” Mom thinks of it as a joke, at least, but Shannon and Tara take it literally. When Dad died, their lives became a revolving door of people offering help and people seeking to take advantage. Shannon, the older and the alpha, led most of the battles. Now, voiceless, motionless, helpless, Tara can only hope that her sister redirects that same fury to fight on her behalf. You are a redheaded Doberman, she’d told Shannon once. It was a joke then. Now, though, she needs the guard dog.
Do not listen, Shannon. Do not let anyone convince you that I’m just a body, mindless and soulless in here. Please, oh, please do not let them convince you of that.
Dr. Pine studies the three of them and then says, “I really wish she could blink.”
Tara’s heart drops. Why did he have to start there? Why did he have to start with what she can’t do and not with what she might be able to do—listen, watch, think! And twitch her damn thumb every now and then.
“Based on my reading, that can often take time,” Shannon says. “We’re not even a week into this.”
“Correct. I didn’t say it was cause to lose hope; I simply said that I wish she demonstrated a blink response. She’s so far ahead in so many ways, you know. Breathing without assistance is, on its own, unusual in these circumstances, and encouraging. The question of awareness, however, would be helped by a blink response.” Dr. Pine shrugs. “But it hardly means the battle is lost. Tara’s brain was banged around the inside of her skull, quite literally pulled from its moorings. That caused bruising and swelling; blood vessels were torn and axons stretched. Critical communication regions were damaged. As you know, this is what the induced coma was designed to mitigate—it decreases the amount of work the brain has to do, which keeps the swelling down, and we have a better chance at restoring these processing areas.”
“But it didn’t work,” Rick says, and Tara wishes that it was her middle finger that could twitch instead of her thumb.
“We don’t know if it worked yet,” Shannon corrects, and Dr. Pine nods.
“Yes and yes. This is, of course, going to be a possibly long and certainly painful process. Each coma patient is different. Some make remarkable recoveries and fairly swiftly. Others make less complete recoveries and over much longer periods.” Pause. “Others do not recover at all.”
Shannon looks at Tara, and Tara does her damnedest to call up a sister-to-sister radio signal. She is certain that such a thing exists. There are some people who hear you without words. Shannon has always heard her, and Tara needs her now. Oh, how she needs her now.
“There’s a coma researcher at the university hospital eleven miles from here,” Shannon says. “A doctor named—”
“Michelle Carlisle,” Dr. Pine finishes. “Yes. I know her well. An excellent research doctor.”
It feels like there’s something slightly diminishing in the way he says research doctor, as if he’s indicating the difference between practice and theory with a mild shift in tone.
“I’d like to take Tara to see her,” Shannon says.
Rick says, “I think we need to let Dr. Pine make those decisions, Shannon.”
Shannon doesn’t so much as glance at him. “Of course I want to consult with Dr. Pine while we make these decisions.”
Dr. Pine adjusts his glasses and then closes his notebook. The gestures seem designed to delay the inevitable—he’s going to say there’s no point.
“I’m a fan of Dr. Carlisle’s work,” he says at last.
“It’s another opinion,” Mom says, “and that’s good, but we haven’t heard yours yet.”
Her voice trembles, but Tara is almost painfully proud of her for speaking up.
“Every case is different,” Dr. Pine says again, a hedge that no one, even Tara, wants to hear.
“Scale of one to ten,” Rick says.
“Pardon?”
“On a scale of one to ten, how…how close to dead is she?”
“Rick, you asshole,” Shannon says, whirling on him. “What kind of question is that?”
“A fair one,” he replies, standing firm. “Dr. Pine has treated hundreds of patients in similar conditions. He has an opinion, and I’d like to hear it. We all need to hear it.”
No, we do not, Tara thinks.
Dr. Pine looks at each of them individually. Tara is last. His eyes are on hers when he says, “On a scale of one to ten, if one is the most alive, then physically she’s probably a two or three. She needs assistance, of course, but her body is healthy and it will continue to survive, though obviously not to thrive, for the foreseeable future.”
“And what about the soul?” Rick says, and Shannon rolls her eyes on cue.
“I think he means her mind, Doctor. Is she with us?”
More than any of you want to know, Tara thinks, because they’ve all had moments in front of her that she is sure they wouldn’t have wanted her to witness. Moments when their love was buried beneath fatigue and frustration. She doesn’t blame them for this, but it doesn’t make those moments any less hurtful.
“I’d encourage more tests.”
“But right now? What would you say based on the tests you’ve already done?” Rick presses.
“Eight,” Dr. Pine answers without hesitation. “Based on what we’ve already done.”
Eight. On a scale of one to ten, he is rating Tara’s brain as far closer to dead than alive.
“Then we’ll do more,” Shannon says, but there’s a hitch in her voice.
Everyone’s faith is beginning to waver.
Not fair, Tara thinks. I was just giving a ride to a stranger. Why isn’t he trapped like this instead of me?
But Oltamu is worse off than her, of course. Oltamu is dead; she’s heard them say this.
Maybe the wolf got him.
If she could shake her head, she’d do it just to get rid of that strange recurring image of the wolf with raised hackles and narrowed eyes and pinned-back ears and exposed fangs. That wasn’t real, and Tara can’t afford to have any distractions in a brain that’s already failing to do its job. She’s got tests to take, and if she can’t pass them, she’s going to end up just like Oltamu.
Don’t think that way. Once you start that, you’re done.
A voice whispers that she is already done, that it is time to give up, give in, quit. She fights it off.
Oltamu is dead; Tara Beckley is not. Tara Beckley is alive and not only that, her thumb has twitched.
She thinks again of the cellar in 1804 London Street, where she once stood in the blackness, gasping, cobwebs on her face, tears in her eyes. She remembers that in that moment of panic, she turned her head to face that darkness directly, and she found the faintest glimmer of light. It was a long way off, and she wasn’t sure that she could make it there or if freedom existed beyond it, but she had seen it, and she had tried.
There’s a glimmer of light inside this vacant house too. Among all the dark hallways and unknown corridors and treacherous stairs, there are cracks and gaps. The doors might be locked, the windows sealed and shuttered, but there are always gaps.
Find one and force it open. Then someone will notice. Someone will hear.
Tara retreats into the blackness, imagining the corridor between her brain and her thumb, and she gets to work.
Part Three
On the Back Roads
19
Hank Bauer lived in what had once been a hunting camp. He’d purchased the cabin intending to keep the property’s purpose intact, but then his wife learned of his affair with a waitress at Applebee’s, and the hunting camp rapidly became his home. He often told this story as a cautionary tale of the risks of marriage—but never of the risks of having an affair with a waitress, Applebee’s or otherwise.
Those hunting-camp days seemed long ago and far away. He felt some shame over the way his marriage had ended but no real regret for how his life had gone. He was good on his own, always had been, and the marriage and the mortgages had been the real mistakes, the steps out of character. That had been trying on a suit he knew he’d never care for even though it sure looked nice and comfortable on other men. Margaret had called him an arrested adolescent during the divorce, and he didn’t disagree. His life had been mostly games and gambling, drinking and storytelling, hard rock and hangovers. It wasn’t an adulthood anybody should really take pride in, but he’d learned to lose his shame over it all the same. At sixty-one, he was too old to be embarrassed. He’d had fun.
And he’d done well too. Not well enough for the mortgage in Cape Elizabeth that had scared him right into the welcoming arms of Applebee’s, but well enough that it had been a long time since he’d worried about money. He’d found himself in the insurance business by accident—didn’t everyone get there that way?—but the money was steady, you got to meet plenty of people, and sometimes you actually had the sense that you’d helped to ease a person’s mind.
On the day that he returned to his home on twenty-seven acres of woodland and trout-brook frontage and found the kid in the black baseball cap waiting on him, Hank was largely content with his life. The only thing nagging at him that afternoon was Abby Kaplan.
He’d met Abby when she was just thirteen. Her mother had bolted after determining that raising a child was less enjoyable than being one, and so it had been just Abby and her father, who was a good man with a bad booze habit. He was also the most talented natural mechanic Hank had ever seen, probably capable of building a functioning engine out of duct tape and toothpicks if you spotted him the gasoline. Hank’s first encounter with Jake Kaplan’s daughter didn’t have the makings of a lifelong friendship: she had stolen his car.
Hank had a ridiculous, souped-up ’85 Trans Am back then, and he’d trusted Jake Kaplan to retool it. Then one day the police called to tell him they’d recovered his stolen car and had the thirteen-year-old thief in custody. The cops said she’d been doing ninety-four when they clocked her, and Hank’s first question was “How was she handling it?”
He’d told the cops not to press charges, which hadn’t pleased them, as they believed he was aiding and abetting the development of a local delinquent. And maybe he had been. But Abby was honest and apologetic when they spoke, ready for consequences, and Hank was struck by both the sadness of her demeanor—a good kid expecting bad things, as if that were preordained for her—and her infatuation with his old muscle car.
Jake Kaplan, a good ol’ boy’s good ol’ boy with a worldview shaped by drunks and dropouts, didn’t often mention Abby’s missing mother, but that day he did.
“Abby wants to race,” Jake told Hank mournfully.
“So let her race. Don’t need to have a driver’s license on the oval. Ed Traylor’s boy was racing when he was no older than Abby.”
“I can’t let her do that. I’m supposed to raise a daughter to be a woman.”
“Ever heard of Sarah Fisher?” Hank asked.
And so it came to pass that Hank Bauer sponsored Abby Kaplan’s first foray into racing. It was curiosity and amusement at first, and it made for a damn good st
ory; the boys at the poker games loved hearing about how Hank had become the sponsor for his own car thief.
Nobody chuckled after the first races, though. Hank watched her beat older men night after night, and then she went on to the bigger speedways, and when she lost, it was not to better drivers but to better cars. Hank saw that this game, like all of them, had a ceiling that could be cracked only with cash.
Coastal Claims and Investigations became a more serious sponsor then. It wasn’t just because Hank liked the girl and felt bad for her; it was also because he was damn curious to see what she could do with the right machine.
What she did was win. Early, often, and then always. She smoked the drag-racing circuit through northern New England and then got onto the oval and kicked even more ass, and everybody’s bet was on NASCAR or Indy when she’d fooled them all and gone into stunt driving instead. Hank had seen some version of that coming when Abby fell in love with the drift. Even winning a race didn’t put the same light in her eyes that a controlled drift did—a floating test of traction and throttle that looked wildly out of control to the average spectator. If you could control it, though…well, Hank supposed it was a special kind of high.
She’d gone to a couple stunt schools, caught the right people’s eyes, and ended up in Hollywood and then Europe. For a while she’d been shooting commercials in friggin’ Dubai or someplace, bouncing some bastardized supercar turned SUV around a desert. She’d been all over the world driving the finest cars known to man and making good money doing it, and Hank was awfully proud of her.
And now awfully worried about what was keeping her in Maine.
The crack-up she’d had out on the West Coast would have been bad enough if the boyfriend with her had been anonymous. But he was a rising star, his face was on magazine covers, and that crush of attention had made a bad deal worse for Abby. She’d come back to Maine to clear her head, she claimed, but Hank knew better.
If She Wakes Page 12