by J. D. Robb
Okay, no.
I have one last tactile memory, quite vivid and distinct: the instant-l ong but somehow-f orever feel of my foot sliding across a slick, slimy rock. After that, zero.
During
For how long? Two months, I’ve heard since, but that’s not right. It was zero, literally nothing, for a time, but then—a week later? three weeks? five?—rips began to show in the matte black curtain, like the difference between a thick blindfold and a thin one. No, that’s not right, either, because the first sense I got back was hearing, not seeing. So—the difference between a set of Bose headphones and Benny’s flannel earmuffs.
Sound instead of silence. Such a blessing, like being saved. Word fragments at first. You know how, when you close your book, turn out the light, and prepare to go to sleep, bits of the author’s syntax and rhythm float around in your mind for a while before you drop off? But if you ever wake up enough to concentrate on one of the bits you’re remembering, it turns out to be nonsense? Like that.
Bits of music, too, jumbled, unrecognizable, like when you spin a radio dial too fast. And voices. Strangers’, and then, mercifully, Sam’s. That was the moment I began to heal. Or hope, which is the same thing. I didn’t always know what he was saying, especially in the beginning when he might as well have been speaking Italian, but it didn’t matter. Just his voice. A rope to the drowning woman.
Touch came next. The unutterable comfort of it. Skin on sentient skin, and it didn’t matter whose then, just the nearly unbearable relief of not being alone anymore. To the nurses and aides and rehab people it must’ve felt like massaging a corpse, but I couldn’t get enough bending, stroking, manipulating. I even liked it when they put drops in my eyes. Sam used to rub lotion into my hands and I’d drift off into something like nirvana . . .
Sight was last. “She can open her eyes,” somebody mar veled, and I remember feeling a surge of childlike pride, like a toddler praised for uttering her first complete sentence. It was narrow sight, just the thing I was looking at, everything else wavy as old glass.
The problem was, nobody knew any of this but me. And not that I was chugging along on all cylinders—it wasn’t like in a movie when some guy gets injected with a drug that paralyzes his body but his brain still works fine. My brain was spongy, plagued with craters and holes, like the moon. But I progressed, is the point, and no one knew it except me. I couldn’t tell them. The frustration! In hospitals they’re big on asking you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. If they’d asked me to rate my loneliness, I’d have said a hundred and fifty.
Then came the day when I thought I might break through, finally jab a big enough hole in the veil to stick my head through and yell, “Look! It’s me!”
That didn’t happen, but something else did. The sort of thing that, shall we say, inspires incredulity. Ha-ha! I love understatement. Also the sort of thing that could get one returned to Neurology for evaluation if one were to reveal it to just anybody.
Another reason not to tell this story to anyone but myself.
“We’ll have to bring her back inside now. BP’s up. A little too much stimulation, I’m afraid.”
God, how I hated those words. They meant my family was about to leave me. The worst thing about being in a coma isn’t the inability to speak, move, eat, make yourself understood—none of that. It’s being left alone.
Benny was fidgeting at the foot of my geri-bed—a soft reclining chair I loved, because now they could wheel me outside for a few minutes on nice days, all my tubes and lines still attached to the beeping machines inside. Benny was out of my line of sight down there, but occasionally some part of his dear, jerky body would bump against my blanketed legs, and each time the careless touch would fill me with a warm, melting love. “She’s skinny” was all he’d had to say to me today, and “Her hair’s too long.” When the nurse spoke, he jumped off the end of the chair like a racer who’d just been waiting for the starter gun. I could feel his heart lighten. I could feel mine sink.
“Let me do that.” Sam’s voice. A pull on the chair, and the precious blue sky began to swivel out of sight. A bump as we crossed the threshold, and there we were, back in the room, the dreaded room. My gray prison.
“She seemed better today.” Sam had that desperate, hope-against-h ope animation in his voice he used in front of Benny. I hated it. “I think there’s been real progress.”
The nurse that day was Hettie, my favorite. Very gentle hands, and she never over-enunciated like some of them, as if their patients were not only comatose but also idiots. “Well, no actual change, though, not on the test scale. But no, I know what you mean, she was pretty alert today,” Hettie added quickly, kindly. “Tracking movements with her eyes sometimes—”
“She looked right into my eyes.” My husband loomed over me, moving his head until we were gaze to gaze. He looked so tired, his eyes so sad. Don’t go, I begged him. Stay with me. “She can’t be completely unconscious if she can open her eyes. Right?”
“There are so many degrees of consciousness,” Hettie started saying, and something about metabolic versus anatomic comas, every case is different, you have to balance hope with practicality—I gave up trying to follow. Too hard. I was a mummy, encased in gauze. If I could get out one feral grunt, raise one scary, wrapped arm . . . but everything was so exhausting. I only had the strength to look back into Sam’s eyes.
He put his cheek next to mine. Oh. Oh. The scent of him. He whispered that he loved me. Was I crying? If I could cry—he’d know. I stared hard, hard, at the lock of his hair that tickled my face, concentrating, wide-eyed.
Dry -ey ed.
“See ya, babe,” he murmured. “Don’t be scared. Everything’s okay. See you soon, sweetheart.”
I had no sense of time. Soon. It was the same to me as later. Or never.
“Benny? Come say bye to your mom. Ben? Come on, guy. Hey, Benny—! ”
Sam disappeared.
If I couldn’t cry now, I never would. What’s the point of trying to get well if your son is afraid of you? You might as well be dead. As dead as I must look to Benny in this stupid chair, these stupid pipes and lines filling and draining me, keeping me in this ugly gray twilight jail I couldn’t break free of, couldn’t penetrate, couldn’t smash my way out of—
“There you go, buddy. Give Mommy a kiss.”
Oh, Sam, don’t make him. He had his arms around Benny’s waist, holding him up, pressing him toward me. Poor Benny! His face looked blotchy with distress. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“It’s okay, it’s just Mom. Come on, pal.”
Don’t, Sam. Oh, but I wanted it, too. If Benny would look at me, really look, I believed I could make it happen—the miracle. Look, darling. It’s Mommy. Please, honey, open your eyes. He had to see me; otherwise I would truly be nothing. I would disappear. Benny, look at me, see me! Open your eyes!
That’s when it happened.
What happened? At first, a period of pure nothing. So pure, if my brain had been working, I’d have thought I had disappeared. But there wasn’t any “me” anymore, no one to think thoughts. No time, no space, and not even darkness this time. Sound, maybe, a low-pitched hum, a comforting whir or drone . . . but then again, maybe not. That would presuppose someone had ears to hear it, and I’m saying I was not there. Laurie Summer: gone.
“Daddy, is she dead? Please don’t die. Is she dead?”
Benny! His beautiful, wide-open brown eyes were looking into mine. “I’m not dead,” I tried to tell him, but nothing came out but a sort of . . . yip. But I could move my legs! It hurt, but they moved, and they . . . they . . .
They were covered with hair?
“Careful, don’t touch her. She’s hurt, she might bite you.”
I might what? Crouched over me, Sam had a pitying but distracted look on his face. This was not how I had pictured our miraculous reunion.
“We have to take her to the doctor, Daddy. We have to fix her up.”
God, not more docto
rs. Where were we? My ears ached; everything was so loud. And the smell was amazing. Smells, rather, millions of them, all strong and incredibly interesting. Cars were whipping by—that’s what was making all the noise. Why were we outside, in the street? A familiar-l ooking street, too. Weren’t we on Old Georgetown Road? In Bethesda?
“Come on, buddy, back in the car. It’s dangerous out here.”
Sam and Benny got up and left me in the road.
A lot of bad things had happened to me lately, very bad things, but I can say without hesitation that that was the worst.
Then Sam came back. Happiness! Joy! He was carrying the smelly flannel blanket we kept in the back of the car to set plants on, or wet bathing suits, anything messy or unsavory, to protect the upholstery.
He wrapped me in the blanket and lifted me up with a grunt and put me in the backseat.
I had an inkling now, a sense, like glimpsing something from the corner of your eye that reveals everything but is too outlandish to credit. Maybe I should’ve figured it out sooner—the evidence was pretty much everywhere—but let’s not forget I wasn’t in my right mind. I had been in a near-drowning-i nduced coma for eight weeks. Then, too, if this was a cross-species metamorphosis, it made sense that my normally sharp, analytical mind was already being blunted by something softer and more accepting. I’m saying my retriever instincts were kicking in.
Sam started the car and pulled out into traffic. Benny, buckled up in front, craned around to look at me. His mop of chestnut curls needed cutting. I wanted to lick him all over his freckled face. Here we were, all together again. The family. “Sam, Benny, Sam, Benny!” I said, overwhelmed with the wonder of it. It came out “Arr! Urra! Arr! Urra!”
Another clue.
The car smelled wonderful, like Sam and Benny multiplied by a hundred. And lots of other things, especially McDonald’s, that fabulous greasy-h amburger smell.
The ride was short. As soon as Sam parked, Benny unbuckled himself, shoved open the car door, and ran off. “Wait—” Sam called, halfhearted. He sighed, then hauled me out very gently and carried me toward a low brick building. Inside, the predominant smell was panic.
Benny was already jumping up and down in front of a counter, yelling, “We hit a dog! We hit a dog!”
Dog.
I was a dog.
As I said, the clues were abundant, but it wasn’t until Benny said the actual word that the truth hit. I started to shake.
Nothing like a vet’s exam on a cold metal table to knock the nonsense out of you. I credit it with shortening considerably what would otherwise have been a long and tedious period of No, it’s impossible! How can this be? I don’t believe it! Is this a dream? Et cetera, et cetera. I’m not saying I accepted what seemed to have happened to me in half an hour. But there’s just something about having your temperature taken rectally that really wakes you up to reality.
Blood was drawn. X-rays were taken. I was poked, prodded, listened to, felt, and, in the end, the doctor, who smelled like tick poison, said what I could only partially agree with.
“It’s a miracle.”
“Nothing wrong with her?” Sam asked.
“Nothing serious. Bruises, mostly, and the scrapes you can see. But no broken bones or internal injuries, and that’s pretty amazing if you were going as fast as you say.”
“Can we keep her?”
“I was going the speed limit.”
“And to hit her head-on and throw her as far as you did—that’s just amazing.”
“Can we keep her?”
“She must belong to somebody,” Sam said. “What kind of dog is she?”
“No collar,” said the vet, “no ID. Hmm . . . some sort of Lab-golden mix is my guess. And maybe something else smaller—she only weighs about sixty pounds. I’d say she’s four or five years old.”
This was helpful. All I’d seen of myself so far was my feet, basically. Good to know what I was. A big, middle-aged mutt.
“So can we keep her?”
“She must belong to someone,” Sam tried again. “I’m sure somebody’s—”
“No, Daddy, they’ll put her in the pound, then they’ll put her to sleep! They’ll kill her!”
That’s right. I read a story to Benny last spring about a dog with no collar who gets taken to the pound and is almost euthanized before a little boy comes in and saves him. You tell him, baby.
“They won’t kill her,” Sam said, putting his hand on top of Benny’s head. “Um, what does happen here, Doctor? Do you put up flyers or something, keep the dog until she’s claimed—”
“We don’t have the facilities for that, unfortunately. No, she’ll go to the humane rescue and they’ll keep her there. As long as they can.”
“Then they’ll kill her!” Benny wriggled away from Sam and ran to me. I was still on the metal table—he had to stand on tiptoes to put his arms around my neck. “Please can we keep her? Please?”
“Benny, you know your mother never wanted . . .” Sam trailed off, looking pained.
Benny took the words out of my mouth. “But Dad—she’s not here.”
I don’t know why I was worried. My heart was pounding, I was trembling uncontrollably, I had more saliva in my mouth than I could swallow. “The pound” was no abstract concept; I knew what would probably happen to me there. But that wasn’t what I was afraid of. Abandonment was.
It’s me, Sam! It’s Laurie!
Everything hurt—miracle or not, get thrown twenty feet in the air by a car, believe me, everything hurts—but when Benny let go of my neck, I gathered all four slipping, sliding paws under me and made a lunge for Sam.
Who has good reflexes. He stepped aside in shock.
The vet’s were even better, luckily. He caught me—otherwise I’d have flown into the wall. “Whoa,” he said without surprise, and calmly set me on the floor. “Looks like this one really wants to go home with you.”
Sam never had a chance, I see now, but at the time it felt like touch and go. I had sense enough to hold still, not jump on him again, and let Benny wind his arms around me. What we must have looked like, cheek to cheek, four brown eyes yearning up at him. “Pleeeease, Daddy?” Beel zebub could not have resisted that plea. I echoed it with a warbly, “Arroooo?”
The vet laughed.
Sam put his hands on top of his head. “All right, all right, all right. But she’s going to have to be spayed.”
Home!
My house, oh, my house. I couldn’t get enough of it. My muscles still ached, but I ran into every room; I sniffed everything; I peed in the foyer—
My God!
Nobody saw. Oh, thank goodness, they didn’t see, and on the dark part of the Oriental it didn’t even show. It was just a little pee, anyway, only a drop, really. From the excitement.
Behave, I thought, letting Benny catch me. We wrestled on the rug in the living room—“Gently,” Sam kept saying—and it was pure bliss, utter contentment. As myself, I’d have been in a lot of pain from the accident, but as a dog I couldn’t stay focused on my body long enough to care. There wasn’t a thought in my head. Whenever Benny laughed, I wagged my tail—or rather, my tail wagged, a completely involuntary response, like crying when somebody else cries. We lay on our backs, panting and grinning up at Sam, whose cautious look slowly faded and turned into a smile.
He’s making sure I’m not dangerous, I realized. Making sure I won’t hurt Benny. Good; I’d do the same. I turned my head and licked Benny’s face very gently, for Sam’s benefit. Play with us! I thought, but he was already heading for the kitchen, mumbling about dinner.
“Hey, dog. Hey, girl. You like it here, don’t you?” Benny patted me on top of the head, pat pat pat, making me blink. I yawned in agreement. “Want to see my room?”
We ran upstairs.
Fabulous room, I thought, and then, Good Lord, where is the cleaning lady? But so many things to smell and taste and roll around in, toys and clothes and food, a smorgasbord for the senses.
Except sight. Strangest thing, but it was like seeing sepia in blue instead of brown. I couldn’t see red, and everything was muted, like the loveliest twilight. Except blue. With flashes of yellow. Hard to describe, but I liked it. I found it very . . . calming.
Benny showed me his dinosaur floor puzzle and his new Batmobile that lit up, made sounds, and shot out a weapon. He showed me all his dump trucks and bulldozers. I heard about his best friend, Mo, his second-best friend, Jenny; first grade was starting soon; Dad built him the coolest playhouse in the backyard; wait’ll I saw it. He had a new bike; he could write the whole alphabet and count to “a billion.” He had two loose teeth. “And my dad can throw his voice.” Music to my ears, every word, even when my attention wandered. “And my mom’s in the hospital” grabbed it back.
I worked my nose out of an old tennis shoe and joined Benny on top of the unmade bed.
“She fell in the river and hurt her head and she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t drown but now she’s got a coma. It’s like sleeping a really long, long time and not waking up.”
I nudged him with my head until it was under his arm. We sat like that awhile.
“Dad says she’ll wake up. He promised. We do prayers at night. We go look at her. He pretends like she can hear and reads stuff to her.” He flopped down on his back. “She can’t move or anything.”
He stretched his arms up and played with his fingers. Dear, stubby, dirty, little-boy fingers. “She worked a lot, but we used to ride bikes. And run and stuff. We played games. She talked a lot. Spaghetti!” He bolted up and scrambled off the bed.
I’d been smelling it, too. “He makes it all the time,” Benny said, “but it’s good.” His mood changed again and he stood still in his wreck of a room, staring into space. He’d grown in two months, or maybe it was all the curly hair making him look taller. But it was his face that broke my heart. Not as round, the bones more prominent. And this new silence. How many times I’d wished he would put a cork in it, my nonstop talker, my sweet If-I -think-i t-I - must-say-i t son.