If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  “Smart question,” he said, and his voice softened in a way that made her think he hadn’t considered the possibility before. “Is Tara the key that opens the lock, or is she a ruse? And if she is…” He let the sentence drift, then said, “I think she’s the key. Smart play by Oltamu, if I’m right. Tara Beckley would have been anonymous to anyone who took the phone. She was a stranger. That’s quite brilliant, really. The problem is that she stopped being a stranger that night. But he wasn’t counting on that.”

  Abby didn’t speak, but that didn’t stop the kid from talking. It seemed nothing would stop the kid from talking. He liked conversation, and he liked to watch people. He reminded Abby of some demented dentist, poking and prodding, testing nerves, coaxing a reaction.

  “I wonder if he told her what he was doing,” the kid mused. “Was she just a face, or does she know something? If he was feeling urgency…maybe Tara knows a lot more than we think.”

  “Too bad she’s gone,” Abby said.

  “Don’t rush to judgment on that. I received an encouraging update on her condition this morning.”

  Fuck, Abby thought, and she was so defeated by that news that she let the speed fall off. The kid leaned forward and tapped her head with the gun.

  “Pick it back up. Speed limit or five miles over, no more.”

  Abby accelerated to five miles over the limit. She tried to look indifferent to the discussion of Tara, but all she could think about was whether the kid had heard her talking to Shannon, whether he knew what Abby had disclosed to her.

  “In fact,” the kid said once he was satisfied with Abby’s driving, “the news about Tara is particularly encouraging after seeing this. She can move her eyes, Abby. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Abby was silent.

  “Okay, maybe you’re not a member of Team Tara. Rather coldhearted, but to each her own. As a proud member of Team Tara, though, I’m especially encouraged after seeing the phone, because a lot of facial-recognition systems depend on active eyes. While once she might have been useless, now…”

  He let the thought hang unfinished, then said, “Do you get it yet, Abby?”

  Abby didn’t want to engage with him again. Each time she did, she felt like the kid was seeing more of her brain, learning her heart. It was through his strange dialogue that he opened you up somehow, laid you bare on the table and decided whether there was anything in you worth keeping alive. If he decided the answer was no, that was the end.

  “I think you do, but you’re in a sullen mood. Understandable. It’s been a tough couple of days for you. I’ll explain what you already know, then, since you’re not willing to play along. If I’m right, Abby, then what we have is a lock…” He lifted Oltamu’s phone. “And Tara Beckley, bless her miraculous survivor’s will, is the key.”

  He put the phone back into his pocket, braced his gun hand on his knee, and said, “That makes our next move pretty easy, doesn’t it? We’ll need to bring the lock to the key. Usually it would work the other way around, but we’re in very atypical circumstances. Tell you what, Abby—we’re going to detour. Forget the house and turn around. Right up here will work.”

  He nudged Abby with the gun. They were approaching the Tenants Harbor village center, which amounted to a general store and the post office on the left, a volunteer fire department up ahead, and the school and the library somewhere off to the right. The street was empty save for one man in a rusted pickup filling plastic gas cans at the general store’s pump. He didn’t even look up when Abby pulled in behind him and then backed out. She didn’t leave the parking lot, though. The clouds had obscured the sun and now the first drops of rain fell, fat and loud as they splattered on the hood.

  “Where am I going?” she said.

  “Southbound,” the kid answered. “Boston or bust.”

  Abby kept her foot on the brake, and this time the gun muzzle found her ribs, a jab with more force.

  “Don’t sit here waiting to be noticed. Get on the move.”

  Abby eased her foot off the brake. She wasn’t sitting there hoping to be noticed or expecting to find help in this isolated fishing village.

  She was thinking about I-95 southbound in the rain. They’d hit the Boston area around rush hour, although every hour seemed like rush hour in Boston. Cars and trucks squeezing you from all sides, tens of thousands of drivers oblivious to the killing power controlled by their hands and feet.

  And a sociopath with a gun in her backseat.

  This was the first time she’d shared a car with anyone since Luke. Always, she’d made sure to drive alone in the days after that, making any excuse. No excuse offered itself now.

  “Let’s go,” the kid said, and Abby moved her foot to the gas.

  The Tahoe rolled out of the general store’s parking lot and passed the post office; the North Atlantic was visible briefly to the right, then gone. Abby drove on through the gathering gray as the coastal fog swept in. She told herself this would be fine, this was the simple part, whatever came next was the trouble.

  Faster, Abby, Luke had whispered just before the end. Faster.

  Or had it been Slow down? It was so damned hard to remember.

  36

  The hospital room is abuzz with joy, yet Shannon seems distant.

  Tara doesn’t understand this at all. Shannon, her champion, the one who would never quit on her, is somehow the most distracted person there. She’s left the room four times now, and each time she returns, the phone in her hand, she seems farther away. She’s stopped looking Tara in the eye and she seems, inexplicably, more concerned now than she was before Dr. Pine and Dr. Carlisle arrived with their good news.

  What does she know that I don’t?

  Recovery prognosis. That has to be it. Either the doctors have been more honest with Shannon than they’ve been with Mom and Rick or Shannon is doing her own research. Maybe Shannon understands already what Tara fears—it would have been better if she’d failed the tests, because there’s no return to real life ahead of her. Nothing but this awful limbo, only now they all know she’s awake and alert, and that means they feel an even greater burden of responsibility. Endless days of one-way chatter, countless hospital bills, all to sustain an empty existence. This would defeat even Shannon’s willpower.

  But the doctors are excited, and the disconnect there is confusing. It’s also something Tara can’t focus on any longer, because Dr. Pine is demanding all of her attention. In his hands he has a plastic board filled with rows of letters, each row a different color. The first row is red, the second yellow, the third blue, then green, then white. At the end of the red row is the phrase end of word. At the end of the yellow row is end of sentence.

  This is Tara’s chance to speak.

  “It’s going to feel laborious,” Dr. Pine warns, “and you might get tired. It’s more work than people would guess.”

  He’s right about that. Even the yes/no answers were draining. But Tara is a marathon runner. She knows how you keep the finish line from invading your thoughts too early.

  “Do you have enough energy to give this a try?” Dr. Pine asks.

  She flicks her eyes up once.

  “Terrific. What I’m going to do is ask you to spell something. You get to pick what it is. You’re in charge now, Tara, do you understand?”

  She flicks her eyes up again and feels like she could laugh and cry simultaneously—she’s paralyzed, but he’s telling her that she is in charge, and right now, that doesn’t seem as absurd as it should. The simple possibility of communicating is empowering, almost intoxicatingly so. Her message is within her control. Such power. So easily taken for granted.

  “Tell us whatever you want to tell us,” Dr. Pine says, “but I’d suggest a short message to begin. The way we get there is simple—we’re going to spell it out together. That means I’ve got to narrow down the first letter of the word. So I’ll ask whether it’s red or yellow or blue. You will tell me yes or no. Once I have the color, we’ll go through the letters.
You’ll tell me yes or no. If I’m trying to go on too long, you’ll tell me that we’re at the end of the word or the end of the sentence.” He studies her. “It’s not easy. But stay patient, and let’s give it a try. Do you have a message ready for your family?”

  Does she have a message? What a question. She’s overflowing with messages, drowning in them. There is so much she wants to tell them that the idea of picking just one thing freezes her momentarily, but then she remembers to flick her eyes upward, because he has asked a question and is waiting on the answer. Yes, she has a message.

  “Great,” he says. “Now, is the first letter red?”

  Two flicks. No.

  “Yellow?”

  No.

  “Blue?”

  One flick.

  “Is it I?” No. “J?” No. “K?” No. “L?”

  One flick. Tara is exhausted, but she has her first letter on the board.

  Next letter. Not red, yellow, or blue. Green. Then she gets a break—finally, it’s the first letter in the column. One flick, and she has her second letter on the board: O.

  It’s harder than any race she’s ever run. She’s exhausted, and the focus makes her vision gray out at the edges, blurring the columns and letters, but she’s not going to quit now. Not until it’s out there. Her first words, tottering forth into the world like a newborn. She has to deliver them, even if they’re also her last.

  L

  O

  V

  E

  End of word

  Y

  O

  U

  They’re all crying now, Mom and Rick and Shannon; even Dr. Pine might have a trace of mist in his eyes, but maybe that’s Tara’s blurring vision.

  “Tara,” he says, “you just spoke. And they’ve heard you.”

  She wants to cry too. She’s so tired, but she has been heard, and it is remarkable. It feels like all she has ever wanted.

  “Do you have another message you want to share with us right now?” Dr. Pine asks.

  Two flicks. No. She got out the one that mattered most. She can rest now.

  She fades out, grateful for the break, as Dr. Carlisle begins to talk excitedly about computer software that should make this a faster process, and Rick asks if there’s a more holistic approach, which makes Shannon tell him to shut up and let Dr. Carlisle finish, and Mom tells her not to talk like that. The conversation is a chaotic swirl but Tara is not put off by it because they know she’s there now, they know she’s hearing it all. She’s so relaxed, relieved, and so, so tired. The last thing she hears before she drifts off is Dr. Pine excusing himself from the room. That makes her smile. She thinks he’s happy to leave Dr. Carlisle to handle this mess.

  “I have to make a phone call,” he says.

  Yeah, right, Doc. People have used that excuse around my family before.

  The last sound she hears before sleep takes her is the soft click of the door closing behind him.

  37

  Boone’s phone began to ring while the plane was still descending, and she caught a reproachful look from one of the flight attendants.

  “Airplane mode until we’re on the ground, please.”

  “Right,” Boone said. She’d never used airplane mode in her life, preferring to have her phone flood with e-mails and messages while they eased down through the clouds. If this habit were truly dangerous, a lot of planes would be tumbling out of the sky, she thought. But why quibble with the flight attendant—Boone’s business cards said Department of Energy, but her expertise wasn’t really in that field.

  Instead, she simply silenced the phone while pretending to put it in airplane mode. The caller went to voice mail. Boone looked at the number and didn’t recognize it, but the area code was Boston’s.

  It’s a big city, she thought, trying to tamp down the swell of hope. Could be anyone, about anything. Could be the boneheads in the Brighton PD calling to state their unequivocal confidence that Carlos Ramirez was killed in a drug buy gone bad.

  Or it could be her one hope: Dr. Pine.

  She held the phone in her lap as the plane made what now felt like an endless descent, and as the signal strengthened, the iPhone offered an awkward attempt at transcribing the voice mail. While some of it was clearly a mistake—she doubted the phrase jazz trombone would be involved—the first words were crystal:

  Hello, this is Dr. Pine.

  Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch. There was hope. Dr. Pine meant there was hope.

  The plane finally hit Tampa tarmac, tires shrieking, cabin shuddering. Boone was in the aisle seat, still staring at her phone, and when she didn’t rise instantly at the chime indicating they were now free to take off their seat belts and exit the plane, the passenger beside her cleared his throat loudly and made an impatient gesture toward the aisle, where people were attacking the overhead bins in a frenzy, as if they’d all boarded the last flight out of a failed nation-state. Actually, Boone had been on two of those flights, and they weren’t all that energetic.

  She unclipped her seat belt and rose, ducking her five feet ten inches to avoid the overhead bins but never taking the phone from her ear. Now she could hear what the transcription software had missed.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Pine, in Boston. I trust you’ll remember me. I just left a pretty jazzed-up room. Tara Beckley is alert. She has what we call locked-in syndrome. This means her ability to move and vocalize her thoughts is lost, at least temporarily, possibly forever, but her mind is intact, and she is aware. I just asked her to spell out a message to the family and she completed this task successfully. She is also capable of answering yes-or-no questions.” He paused, and Boone could sense both his pride in the moment and his conflicted feelings about sharing the information.

  “I’m not sure if I would have made this call if not for the mother,” he continued. “She’s making regular updates on social media, broadcasting Tara’s condition to the world. Since it seems the news will not be hard to find, I suppose I will take a chance on telling you. If, as you once suggested, her life may be in danger…well, we’re going to need to take swift action on that. I didn’t know how to keep the mother from sharing this joyful news. Perhaps this is why you should have dealt with the family to begin with. At any rate, this is Tara’s status at the moment. If you have any questions that don’t involve a deeper invasion of my patient’s confidentiality, I would be happy to answer them.”

  “You stupid bitch,” Boone said aloud, and though the sentiment was directed at a joyful mother two thousand miles away, her seatmate clearly thought it was for him as he rushed to pull his bag out of the overhead bin. Boone ignored his umbrage while she called Pine back. Answer, damn it. Answer.

  She was on the jet bridge being jostled by the crowd when he picked up.

  “You’ve got to shut her down,” Boone said without preamble.

  “Pardon?”

  “Protect that girl. Limit access to her and get the mother to pull that shit off the web.”

  “Isn’t this your role?”

  “Yes, it is. But I just touched down in Tampa, where I’m not even going to leave the airport, I’ll just get the first flight back north. In the meantime, I need your help.” She felt a rush of humid Florida air as she crossed the jet bridge and entered the terminal, and then the blast of air-conditioning washed it away and brought harsh reality along with the temperature drop. Boone was in the wrong city and she could not fix what had already happened. She said, “It’s too late to pull the news down, isn’t it? People will have gotten notifications as soon as she posted. They’ll be sharing it. So we don’t need to worry about the mother. We just have to limit the people who have access to the girl.”

  “This simply isn’t my role,” Dr. Pine said. “You need to get the police to talk with this family if they are—”

  “I understand your role, and I understand mine much better than you do. Bringing police off the street and into that hospital will only make things worse. I just need to interview
her. That’s all. You say she’s able to communicate.”

  “In a limited fashion, yes.”

  Boone fought through the crowd to a row of flight monitors and looked for the next departure to Boston. It was a three-hour wait. Not great, but not terrible either. She wouldn’t be able to charter a plane much faster, and until she knew if Tara Beckley had any memory of the event, nobody was going to approve that budget item.

  “Does she remember what happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. That wasn’t today’s priority. Again, this is simply not within the—”

  “A lot of the risk depends on whether she has any memory at all of the moments around Oltamu’s death,” Boone said. “You need to find out if she remembers the night.”

  “That’s your job!”

  “And I’m going to do it. But Doctor? You’re there. She’s there. Her protection and her threat are both still outside the hospital walls. Want to make sure the right one gets there first? Find out if she remembers the night. I don’t need you to interrogate her, I need you to assess whether she has any memory of it. It’s that simple, and it’s that crucial.”

  Silence. She thought about waiting him out but decided to press instead. “When you do that, make sure the mother is out of the room. Then call me immediately.”

  She hung up on his protest.

  Did it matter that Tara Beckley was back? It was surprising—stunning, actually, based on the initial diagnosis—but it wouldn’t mean a damn thing if she couldn’t remember her ride with Amandi Oltamu. If she had any memory of that night, she would be of use. Boone was confident of that because of Oltamu’s last message.

  Ask the girl.

  Boone walked toward the nearest Delta gate. If she could get on the next flight to Boston, she would ask the girl. And if the girl remembered?

  If she woke and remembered, they’d need the best in the game. If she woke and remembered, they’d need Boone.