If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  “I’ll stick to the back roads,” Abby said. “Then take Route One down to Old Orchard. That’s the safest way.”

  “We’re not going to Old Orchard.”

  Abby looked at him. He was positioned at an angle, the gun resting on his leg, finger not far from the trigger.

  “I thought that was the plan,” Abby said. “The pier and the house, all that.”

  “That’s for Gerry. Something for him to chew on while I got a sense of the world through his eyes. The actual plan is a little different. We’ve got a few stops to make along the way. Starting with Boston. I have to determine whether our girl Tara is really the key to the lock.”

  Boston. I-95 in the rain. All that traffic. Some of the bees left their hive in the engine and took up buzzing residence in Abby’s brain. They brought gray light with them, clouding her vision, and their stingers injected adrenaline that rode through her veins, made her heart rate quicken and her throat tighten and her fingertips tingle.

  Dax studied her and said, “While you’re thinking of the chessboard, Abby, you might add this to it: People who see me are likely to die. You’ve probably noticed that trend by now. I’ll get to Tara one way or the other, but you can help pick the path.”

  “Okay. Back roads are still smarter, though. If anyone is aware of this car, we’ll be—”

  “I’m not worried about the car. I’m worried about time. Take the interstate. It’s faster, and speed’s going to count for us tonight. You’re just the woman for the job. I need to stay on schedule, and time’s wasting, so let’s go a little faster.”

  Faster, Luke’s voice agreed from somewhere behind the droning bees.

  Abby pulled out of the parking lot and drove into the darkening night.

  39

  The day of joy has given way to a contentious night. A showdown is brewing, and Tara doesn’t understand it. Two people are determined to test her memory, and each one is determined to do it alone.

  Tara imagines that Dr. Pine is used to winning these battles. He is also probably not used to having them with the likes of Shannon.

  Mom and Rick conceded without argument. The doctor said it was time to see what Tara remembers about her accident, and the doctor must be right. The doctor said this should happen in private, with less “external stimuli,” and, again, the doctor must be right. It’s his business, after all. Mom and Rick are the type of people who trust doctors.

  Shannon, though, is not having it.

  “I want to be the one who asks her what happened,” she insists, and she waves Rick’s objection off before he can gather steam. “I agree with you that there shouldn’t be a crowd in the room. So it will just be me.”

  “We don’t have family members conduct medical tests,” Dr. Pine says acidly.

  “Dr. Carlisle encouraged us to engage with her. She said, in fact, that in most cases of locked-in syndrome, it is a loved one who detects progress. Not a doctor.”

  Ding—put a point on the board for Shannon.

  “My colleague is right,” Dr. Pine says, “but I’m not talking about simple engagement, I’m talking about specific memory testing, and with all due respect, I am the primary—”

  “This could be traumatic for her,” Shannon cuts in. “I think she’d feel less trauma if she were with someone she knows. You have no idea what she’s been through in life, what fears she has, what triggers. I do. If she remembers the night, she’ll share it with me.”

  Mom tries a timid “Shannon, let the doctor—”

  “No!”

  Even Tara is taken aback by the fierceness of Shannon’s response. She’s always been tenacious, but there’s something different here, a humming tension under her skin. Shannon is afraid.

  But why? What scares her about leaving Tara alone with a doctor now?

  “I’m simply going to have to insist—” Dr. Pine begins, but Shannon cuts him off again.

  “Ask her.”

  “What?”

  “Ask Tara. You have a patient who can communicate her own wishes, Doctor. Let’s respect those.”

  They stare at each other like gunslingers, and then Dr. Pine takes a deep breath and says, “Very well. We should know her opinion. I can’t argue with that.”

  He seems disappointed and also to be speaking largely to himself. As with Shannon, there’s something different about Dr. Pine’s demeanor, something beneath the surface, but Tara doesn’t know him well enough to guess what it is.

  As he reaches for the alphabet board, Shannon turns and focuses her fierce green eyes on Tara. She doesn’t say a word, but she doesn’t have to. Tara feels like she’s nine years old again, being quizzed by a child protective services worker about Mom’s drug use. Shannon would fix that stare on her, and Tara would say what Shannon had prepared her to say. Things were under control. That was Shannon’s mantra. Things were always under control. Even when things were absolute chaos, Tara believed that her big sister would wrestle it all back to order.

  Dr. Pine swivels his stool to face Tara, slides closer to the bed, and extends the alphabet board. He’s moving distractedly, his usual focus lost. There is definitely something else on his mind. What’s going on here?

  “You don’t need the board yet,” Shannon says. “Can’t we just ask her yes or no?”

  A good question, and while he seems disgusted that she’s right, he nods grudgingly. “I’ll ask her. You can watch. There is no deceit here, Ms. Beckley.”

  He focuses on Tara. “Tara, are you willing to communicate your memories of the accident with me?”

  She’s a ghost again; she’s the thing on the other side of the Ouija board being summoned into the real world. Are you willing to communicate? When she and Shannon were kids, they would sneak up to the attic with a Ouija board and candles and play this game, and inevitably Tara would grow scared, and Shannon would never admit that she was moving the planchette. Mostly, though, Shannon wouldn’t use those moments to scare her. The planchette’s messages were always positive. Yes, the board would say, Mom will get better. Yes, Daddy can hear you when you talk to him at night, and he loves you. No, they will not break up this family.

  You have to believe it, Shannon would say, because what reason would a ghost have to lie?

  Tara, now the half-ghost, has no reason to lie. She flicks her eyes up. Yes, she is willing to communicate her memories of the accident.

  “Thank you,” Dr. Pine says. “Now, Tara, are you willing to be alone with me when—”

  “Don’t phrase it like that,” Shannon snaps. “Ask her if she wants me to stay.”

  Dr. Pine turns and regards Shannon as if he’s considering new uses for his scalpel, but he submits. “Fine. Tara—do you need your sister present for this?”

  She doesn’t need Shannon present for this. Why would she? But she remembers those looks from her big sister across the years, and she remembers the messages the Ouija board carried. She’d known that Shannon was the force that moved the planchette across the board, but she never minded because that force was love. A fierce, protective love that carried Tara through the worst of her life.

  She flicks her eyes up once. Yes—she needs her sister to be present for this.

  Dr. Pine seems to deflate, and Shannon offers him a tight smile. When he turns away, she gives Tara a wink and a thumbs-up.

  “Maybe we all stay, then,” Rick says, and Dr. Pine and Shannon answer in unison, both the word and the tone:

  “No.”

  “I think we want to limit the stimuli and the pressure,” Dr. Pine says, gentler. “But we can ask Tara again if you’d like.”

  “I trust your judgment,” Rick says, clearly more for Shannon’s ears than Dr. Pine’s. “We can let you do your job.”

  Shannon doesn’t react. Mom squeezes Tara’s hand as she and Rick pass by, and then it is just the three of them: Tara, Dr. Pine on his stool beside the bed, holding the alphabet board, and Shannon standing at the foot of the bed, arms folded across her chest, eyes hard on Tara’s.
>
  “Okay,” Dr. Pine says. “Let’s just begin with some basics, Tara. Yes-or-no questions to start. If there is any trouble with the process or if at any point you feel you wish to stop, I want you to give me three looks upward. Do you—”

  He stops abruptly because Tara’s thumb twitches. This time, he sees it. Shannon does too. They both stare at her hand, then at each other, and then Dr. Pine says, “Tara, can you do that again?”

  Not yet, she thinks, but soon. I’m getting closer. Because she knows what triggered it this time, just like with the clicking of the pen—old muscle memory, a delayed response to the thumbs-up Shannon gave her. Tara wanted to return the gesture, and she just did. Or came as close as she could, at least. There’s a lag, but there’s something opening too, a door between brain and body cracking open, and in time she may be able to push it wider.

  She flicks her eyes up twice. No, she can’t do it again. She wants to say, Keep trying me, though, but there’s no way to do that.

  “Did you feel it?” Dr. Pine asks.

  One flick.

  Dr. Pine reaches for a notepad and jots something down. When he turns back, he’s frustrated again, running a hand over his face as if to refocus. He’s conflicted in some way. Why?

  “Okay, back to the memory test. Yes-or-no questions to start. Tara, do you remember anything about the night of your accident?”

  One flick.

  “Do you remember the man in your car?”

  One flick. Oltamu, the doctor from Black Lake. Yes, she remembers.

  “Do you remember the moment of the accident?”

  One flick.

  Dr. Pine wets his lips and shifts forward. The stool slides beneath him, moving soundlessly on the tile, bringing him closer to the bed. He lifts the alphabet board, then hesitates and lowers it again. He glances at Shannon, who is motionless, still standing with folded arms. She hasn’t interrupted him yet, a surprise to Tara, so surely a shock to him.

  “Tara,” he says, “was it an accident?”

  This sets Shannon in motion. She takes a step forward, staring at him, and says, “Why would you ask that—”

  He lifts a palm. “Let her answer. It’s important. Tara—was it an accident?”

  She’s not sure. There’s no way to respond I don’t know, though. She’s supposed to answer yes or no, period, but what she remembers of the night doesn’t fit neatly into either of those categories. Those memories are fragments laced with unease and an unidentifiable fear. She remembers the doctor looking behind them, over and over, remembers the way he wanted her to secure the phone, remembers the sound of an engine and terror of…of something, no clarity here, just an overwhelming memory of her fight-or-flight response, and she’d tried to flee.

  Then there was blackness. The long dark.

  Tara recalls Oltamu pressing that phone into her hand, and she thinks of the engine that roared, no lights, black on black, the vehicle seeming as much a creature of the night as the wolf. A predator.

  She flicks her eyes up twice. No, it was not an accident.

  This is a showstopper. Dr. Pine doesn’t ask another question, doesn’t really respond. Shannon, who had been advancing toward him as if to physically prevent him from asking anything, is frozen in midstride, halfway around the bed, almost like Tara was halfway around the CRV before the impact—the blackness—came. She’s staring down at Tara, but when she finally speaks, the question is for Dr. Pine.

  “Why did you ask that?”

  “Memory assessment.”

  “Bullshit,” Shannon says.

  He turns to her and the two of them gaze at each other in a silence so loaded that it seems to have texture, like an electric fence.

  “What do you know?” Shannon asks. “And who told you?”

  He doesn’t answer. Shannon lets her gunslinger gaze linger, then pivots away, leans close to the bed, and says, “Tara, did Dr. Oltamu take pictures of you?”

  “Hang on,” Dr. Pine says, but Tara responds immediately, one flick. Yes, there were pictures, the strange and awkward pictures, but how in the world does her sister know this?

  “You need to step back and let me do my job,” Dr. Pine says, rising from his stool as if to block Tara from Shannon’s line of sight. Shannon fires off another question.

  “Was there something strange about Oltamu’s phone? Something different?”

  The camera grid. It wasn’t an iPhone camera. Not a normal one, at least.

  Tara gives one flick: Yes. How does Shannon know this? How is she inside of Tara’s brain, moving through the dark corridors of her memories?

  Dr. Pine is now attempting to physically get between them, determined to keep Shannon from making eye contact with Tara, but Shannon evades him, prowling to the other side of the bed like a cougar stalking prey.

  “Tara, do you think—”

  “Stop this,” Dr. Pine says, nearly hissing the words. “We’re not interrogating her, that’s not my role or yours, and that is not going to—”

  Shannon speaks over him. “Tara, do you think someone killed Oltamu because of that phone?”

  Because of the phone? Tara has no idea. Shannon now has access to something more than Tara’s memories. Shannon is capable of passing through the locked doors and joining Tara in her lonely house of memories, and she can also move outside it. Tara can’t match that; she’s bound to the cellar, with no idea what is happening anywhere else. But the question Shannon posed makes sense to her, though she’s never considered it in such precise terms.

  Because of the phone? Maybe. Yes, maybe it was all about the phone.

  She gives one flick, signaling affirmation, even though she’s not sure it’s correct. She knows it’s possible, at least, and the recognition fills her with hot anger—she is trapped in her own body, paralyzed and mute, all because of a phone?

  Dr. Pine doesn’t lose his focus on Tara even while he’s trying to shut Shannon up, and he sees Tara’s eyes move, understands her answer and the weight of it. He and Shannon both do. Tara’s doing more than passing awareness tests now; she’s describing a murder. There is a long silence, and then Dr. Pine speaks in a soft voice.

  “I think it’s my turn to ask who has been talking to you, Ms. Beckley.”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Shannon says.

  “You’re going to have to.”

  “No.” Shannon shakes her head, and Tara sees the fear lurking beneath her frustration. Shannon is scared, and Shannon is never scared. Both she and Dr. Pine seem to know more than Tara, which is infuriating, and when Dr. Pine suggests to Shannon that they step into the hall to speak in private, Tara is so outraged that she wants to scream.

  No sound comes—but her thumb twitches again.

  I’m building a connection, she thinks. Restoring one, at least. That cracked-open cellar door is swinging a little wider, scraping across the damp concrete, the rusty hinges yielding, as if pushed by a relentless wind that is capable of rising in sudden swift gusts.

  For the first time, Tara understands the source of that wind: her own willpower. Her willpower is not gone yet, and she is certain it is capable of gathering strength. She will continue to widen the crack, keep pushing until she can slip through the gap.

  “You want us to stay,” Shannon says to Tara, and though it isn’t really a question, Tara flicks her eyes up gratefully.

  Dr. Pine is reluctant, but Shannon is firm. “If we talk, we talk in front of her. She’s got to be scared in so many ways, scared of things we can’t even begin to understand. We can’t build more silence around her.”

  Thank you, sis. Thank you, thank you.

  The doctor sighs, rubs his eyes, then nods once and sits heavily on the stool.

  “I don’t know much,” he says. “That’s the truth. I have been warned that Tara might have been a witness to something more than an accident. That’s all.” He looks up at Shannon. “You know it too.”

  She nods.

  “Who told you?” he asks.

  Hes
itation. Shannon doesn’t want to give up her source. She looks at Tara, considering, and Dr. Pine apparently takes her silence as a refusal to cooperate, because he gives up.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” he says. “I probably don’t even want to know.”

  “She’s in danger,” Shannon says, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I have been told that she is in danger. I don’t know how to help her. Who to call.”

  “I can help you with that,” Dr. Pine says.

  “How?”

  He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and studies Tara. When he speaks, his eyes are on her, not Shannon.

  “There is an investigator with the Department of Energy who will be very interested to know that Tara has memories of the night. All of this talk about the phone and the pictures—I know nothing about that. But you’re going to need someone to trust. Tara, I’m asking you this, doctor to patient—do you want to meet with the investigator?”

  Department of Energy? This shouldn’t make sense, and yet it touches off a faint chord of familiarity, something that Tara has either forgotten or never really paid attention to, something that once seemed trivial and was quickly shuffled off into the mists of memory.

  Tara flicks her eyes up once: Yes, let’s meet the investigator.

  Dr. Pine says, “Okay.” Then, turning to Shannon, he repeats, this time as a question, “Okay?”

  Shannon looks from Tara to the doctor and nods, then stops and grabs his arm as he starts to rise.

  “Hang on. What does he look like?”

  “What?”

  “The investigator. How old is he?”

  Dr. Pine stares at her, bewildered. “The investigator is a woman. And she is probably around forty.”

  Shannon releases his arm, but he looks at her with narrowed eyes. “Would you like to be more candid about who’s spoken to you?”

  Shannon considers. “Is your response going to be any different if we talk about that now? Or are you going to make the same call?”