When I Close My Eyes

by Elizabeth Musser

In truth, I didn’t think I could stomach any more. Last night, barely three hours after the shooting, the doctor had called Daddy and me into a room.

  “There are two scales we use for measuring the severity of the coma and tracking the patient’s progress,” he’d explained, “the Glasgow Scale and the Rancho Los Amigos Scale. A three means very little hope of recovery. A fifteen means normal.”

  He’d lowered his voice. “Mrs. Bourdillon’s combined score upon arriving at the ER was a four. That is normal with a traumatic head injury. The first job was to stabilize her. We’ve put her on a ventilator, and we’re draining the fluid—the swelling is putting too much pressure on the brain. Hyperventilation may also be performed to help relieve the pressure. She’s also on antiseizure medication. . . .”

  Now Daddy shook his head. “I don’t think the police have any new leads, although they found the bullet”—the bullet that had passed straight through Momma’s brain and onto the parking lot pavement—“so they’ll be able to identify the type of gun.”

  But Daddy’s mind was not on finding the shooter, I knew. His mind was on how to get Momma back.

  He sat down beside her bed, reached under swaths of white sheets, and took her hand. “Feeny,” he whispered to her. “Can you hear me, Feeny? Squeeze my fingers if you can hear me.”

  His voice sounded so desperate, so broken, so different, that I sucked in air. I rubbed my head, feeling the throbbing beginnings of a glorified headache, and said, “I’ll leave you two alone for a while,” the knot in my throat causing my voice to sound as strange and foreign as his. I pecked him on the cheek and stepped into the hall.

  Just like that, our lives had turned upside down and inside out.

  I went down to the cafeteria on the second floor—Café 509—and was standing in front of the hot entrées when the sound of my own voice shocked me. It blared from the TV across the room.

  “We can’t imagine why anyone would possibly want to hurt my mother,” I was saying to the reporters, who had accosted us early this morning outside the hospital. “We just don’t know.” I ducked my head, but a woman stuck her mic right in front of my mouth.

  “Your mother’s latest novel, These Mountains around Us, describes lynchings. Do you think this could be the case of a deranged reader taking out his frustrations and disagreements on your mother?”

  “Her last novel? Um, it takes place a hundred and fifty years ago. . . .” My voice sounded so far away, and I looked really horrible—I hadn’t had time to wash my hair or put on makeup or anything—and Daddy had reached out his hand to shield the cameras from my face as we walked inside the sliding glass doors. But in my mind I was thinking, Well, we can’t imagine anyone except for some crazy person who wrote a couple of awful letters a few weeks ago.

  I kept my head down as I plucked from the shelf the one thing that had caught my eye—a chocolate-chip cupcake. I ordered a cup of chai and slid the off-white tray along the steel bars, barely lifting my eyes to inspect the other entrées—which nonetheless looked a lot more appealing than the food at my school cafeteria. I couldn’t stomach anything else.

  “Investigators are asking anyone who has any clues about the case to call . . .”

  JOSEPHINE

  1966 . . . The house was brimming with people, important people, laughing and talking, their tall, skinny glasses bubbling with the golden liquid that made them happy. They were so noisy! Terence, dressed in a black tux, came over to Josephine.

  “Hello, there Miss Josephine. My, ain’t you looking pretty tonight. Can I get you something to drink? A Co-Cola, maybe?”

  “Hi, Terence. I’m glad you’re here.” She reached out and took his hand and followed him back to the makeshift bar, where Daddy had all the drinks. “Could I have a ginger ale?”

  “Sure ’nuf, angel.”

  “Terence, do you like to dress up like this and go to the parties?”

  “Can’t say that I mind, Miss Josy. I like to change from my overalls into this tux.” Terence worked for her parents during the week, making the yard look as if he’d gone over it with a comb and brush and emery board. Every blade of grass in place, every shrub trimmed and even. And twice a year he acted as the bartender at her parents’ parties.

  “Do you like to watch the people get drunk?”

  “Miss Josy, you ask such interesting questions for a six-year-old. You know as well as I do that not all these fine people are getting drunk. Most of them are just enjoying themselves and having a little alcohol.” He handed her a tall clear glass with a gold rim, filled with ice and ginger ale. “Here ya go, angel.”

  Terence always called her angel, and he always looked out for her at the parties. She didn’t know why the parties frightened her. Why so many fancy-looking people in fancy-looking clothes and drinking fancy-looking drinks made her stomach cramp.

  Yes, she did.

  She shut her eyes, and in her mind she heard the screech of the tires and Mommy’s scream, remembered how she and Kit had been flung against the front seat.

  Daddy had cursed, rubbed his temples, looked around, his eyes red and wide and terrified. “Everyone okay?” he mumbled.

  Kit had grabbed her hand and said, “We’re okay, Daddy,” but Josephine tasted blood in her mouth where she’d bit her lip. She’d started to cry, but her big sister frowned and shook her head. “We’re fine.”

  ———

  1968 . . . Josephine didn’t want to go to camp. Not that spend-the-night-away-from-home camp, not any camp. She didn’t want to take riding lessons. All she wanted to do was stay in her room and read Nancy Drew mysteries and write her own stories. She loved to close the door and lose herself in another world where her pencil scribbled the words that were so jumbled in her head. So many stories! How would she ever get them all down?

  “Josephine, it’s dinnertime.”

  “But I’m not finished—”

  “Josephine! Now!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She traipsed downstairs, talking to herself, repeating the scene in her mind so that maybe she’d still remember it after dinner and the news. . . .

  But later, Josephine wound herself into a protective little ball on her bed and tried to hide from the world. Such a dark, scary world! Why did Mommy and Daddy have to watch all that news on TV? People were blowing each other up in some country far away, but it could happen here. It could happen in her neighborhood. Why last month, two hooded men had burst into Francie Lewis’s house and held a gun to her mother’s head.

  Every time they watched the news, more stories filled her mind—scary, sad stories that she didn’t want to write. But it could happen. It could. She crawled under the covers and shut her eyes tight, but she could still see the black-and-white images of soldiers and hear the missiles exploding and the screams. She could imagine the little boy back home whose father just got blown to smithereens. She could practically feel him inside her head, and it made her want to run. Or hide. She’d hide.

  HENRY

  The TV was still blasting out the news in the motel room. I hadn’t known anything about the person I was hired to kill. Just enough details to get the job done. And now, turned out this lady was a dang-blame-it bestselling author. I didn’t know what she wrote, but it didn’t sound like something that should get her killed. She wasn’t any Stephen King or some crazy terrorist either.

  That’s not your problem, Henry.

  No. My problem was that if Miz Josephine Bourdillon didn’t die, I wouldn’t be receiving another envelope in three days with all that cash inside. Jase’s surgery was scheduled for two weeks away. It made me feel weak to think about all the money we already owed. We were so far in debt we weren’t ever gonna get out.

  Jase was born with a hole in his heart. Three major surgeries had kept him alive for almost seven years, but after each one he’d have a complication. The doc said this surgery might fix his problem permanently, but it couldn’t wait any longer. I closed my eyes and could see Jase’s skinny, freckled fa
ce, his green eyes—pretty like Libby’s—all lit up with World Series hype. Then he was doubled over and wheezing, and I was rushing him out to the pickup.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, squeezed that crushing pain away.

  I knew I needed to get home quick, before Libby started on one of her worry fits. She got anxious when I was away for too long. But before driving home, I stopped off at a Books-A-Million. Nobody would have guessed from looking at me that I liked to read. Once my boss, Mr. Dan, saw me with a book while I ate my sandwich at lunch and said, “You a reader, Hughes?” He looked surprised.

  My last year in school, eighth grade, I was soaking up the books in my English class, to my own surprise. But then Ma got sick and died, and Pa took me out of school. If he’d ever seen me sitting in a chair, reading a book, well, I reckon he’d have taken the Remington and shot right through the book into my chest.

  I didn’t have the time or money to do much reading now. But the thing about books was once I got started on one, if it was really good, well, I couldn’t put it down. I liked going into the big bookstores and zigzagging in between all the shelves, touching the covers of the books out on the table, wondering what kind of stories the authors had hidden inside.

  I found Josephine Bourdillon’s novels back in the historical fiction section. Bunch of them. Maybe I should read her stuff, I thought, and I almost pulled one off the shelf. But then I thought, Are you crazy?

  Yes, crazy, but not stupid. I always got a bit reckless when I stopped taking my meds cold turkey. I ducked my head and pulled my baseball cap down low, hands deep in my pockets, and went back to the pickup.

  I scrolled through the messages on my phone. Libby’s message read, Jase is at the ER. They have to move the surgery up. I cursed. But no message from my contact. No. Of course not. My job was to finish my job.

  But how was I gonna do that, with half of America’s attention focused on a middle-aged lady lying in a coma in a hospital room somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina?

  CHAPTER

  2

  SATURDAY

  PAIGE

  “Can you get Hannah at the airport? Her plane gets in at seven. Delta 424 from Paris. You can take your mother’s car.”

  “Sure, Daddy,” I said, but even in the Mercedes I hated driving along all those hairpin turns, and the airport was almost two hours away. Momma would never have let me drive from the mountains near Asheville to the Charlotte airport—the only one where Hannah could get a flight from France on such short notice—in the dark. I’d gotten my license the year before and had only done the trip twice and never at night. But when Daddy looked at me with his deep, dark, and now vacant eyes from where he sat, glued to the chair by Momma’s hospital bed, I could only agree.

  “I think I’ll stop by home first and get a shower,” I said. I needed a warm blast of water and another cup of chai to wake me up enough for the drive. Daddy simply nodded as I kissed him on the forehead. I glanced at Momma, lying motionless, attached to life by a tangle of wires. Daddy didn’t look up as I slipped out the door.

  Our neighborhood was perched on a vast green plateau on Bearmeadow Mountain, the huge log-cabin-like homes separated by sprawling yards with lush green grass and towering trees. The colorful city of Asheville was about thirty minutes away, in a valley surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains on every side. Once a boring small town, Asheville had recreated itself into a cool, artsy village. That was in the eighties before I was born, but I’d heard Momma tell the story of how the downtown area was dying but not quite dead. With the battle cry Love Asheville, Don’t Level It!, a local businessman had led the fight against bulldozing eleven acres of the downtown to build a mall. That campaign preserved Asheville’s historic buildings, which provided a launch space for new small businesses into the 1990s. It also brought an influx of artists. But I think Momma was creating her stories before Asheville became the hip place for the arts community.

  Milton, our golden retriever, greeted me at the front door. I bent down and buried my face in his fur. “Hey, buddy.” He wagged his tail, anticipating a walk. “I’m in a rush right now, but Mrs. Swanson promised to take you out in a little while.”

  I showered quickly, threw on a pair of jeans and a sweat shirt, filled a travel mug with chai, and left Milton pouting by the front door.

  The surgeon’s words haunted me during the long drive to the airport. I tried to distract myself first by watching the palette of colors surrounding me—pale yellow and burnt orange, with an occasional burst of scarlet—as I zigzagged down the mountain road. Then I pictured my big sister in France doing her junior year abroad, lucky thing. Except that now Momma had gotten shot, and Hannah was flying home on a bright autumn day in October when she was supposed to be touring Cézanne’s art studio in the outskirts of this really cool town called Aix-en-Provence.

  ———

  Our father was French. The first time he stepped on American soil was in 1978 when he came to the States for college—on a soccer scholarship. Even after we were born, he still spoke English with the slightest trace of an accent, which to us sounded very romantic. For all of our growing up years, Momma and Hannah and I spent a month each summer in France at my grandparents’ beach apartment in a tourist town called La Grande Motte—literally “the big mole hill.” There was nothing old and charming about La Grande Motte. The town was developed in the late 1960s by an architect—he transformed a long stretch of beach on the Languedoc coastline of France into a tourist destination. Once, according to my French grandmother, the sun-drenched beaches were nothing but a desert of sand dunes and lagoons. After the architect finished, La Grande Motte was a fancy holiday resort. The architecture was supposedly inspired by the Inca pyramids in Mexico and the nearby Pic Saint-Loup—the highest peak in that region of France. But Hannah and I thought that from far away it looked like a bunch of gigantic Lego buildings, geometrically stacked beside the Mediterranean.

  The French either loved or hated the unique town, but for my family, there was no debate. This was a little taste of paradise—ten kilometers of the best beach in France, much better than the rocks of Nice. And if we got tired of the Legos, there was lots of old, old France just around the corner in Montpellier and Aigues-Mortes and the Pont du Gard. The architect had planned the town in such a way that every apartment had a beach view. Ours was magnificent.

  We always spent the month of June there. French children didn’t get out of school until late June or even early July, so we had a much more private experience before the mad rush of tourists in July and August. Most French got five weeks of vacation a year, and many chose to spend four of those weeks at some beach—the whole month of July or August. The French even had a name for these tourists: Juillettistes (who vacationed in July) and Aoûtiens (those who vacationed in August).

  Well, I guess we were Juinistes—at least Momma and Hannah and me—taking our vacation in June. At first Daddy could only take a week off from work, but as he climbed the insurance ladder, he eventually spent two and even three weeks with us—idyllic weeks where we rode bikes and Camargue ponies and sailed and built amazing sand castles that mirrored the Lego buildings around us.

  My best friend, Drake, came a couple of times too.

  And we spoke in broken French with our grandparents.

  So when Hannah had the possibility of studying in France she leapt at it, choosing Aix-en-Provence, about two hours from La Grande Motte, and enrolling in an art class in Cezanne’s territory outside of Aix. Momma had planned to head to La Grande Motte in November to do a little touring with her, and then Daddy and I were going to join them for Christmas.

  I wanted to go to France for my studies, too, and then I wanted to be a writer like Momma. Except I wanted to write crime fiction set in late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century England, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. Maybe even with a little history about Louis Pasteur included—we’d just seen a pretty interesting documentary about how he�
��d invented the vaccine against rabies. I wanted to write novels and live in a cobblestoned village like Aix-en-Provence and buy baguettes from the boulangerie every day like Hannah did.

  I turned on the radio, and it was of course on Momma’s favorite station. Christian music. Well, that was okay, but I flipped the dial.

  ———

  Hannah, in the words of one friend “the world’s sexiest co-ed,” looked anything but when she finally stepped through the sliding doors at the international baggage claim. She was completely undone, a total mess—and I’d never describe anything about Hannah as messy. Her thick blond hair was pulled off her neck in a clip, but strands dangled every which way, and she had no makeup, nothing on her face except dark rings under her eyes. She wore a bright blue T-shirt with Van Gogh’s Starry Night printed on it and skinny jeans and her bulky green backpack.

  We grabbed each other and stood there while other passengers whisked past us, pulling their shiny carry-ons. I held on to Hannah tightly, feeling desperate and relieved at the same time.

  “Let me take the backpack,” I said, and without waiting for her answer I hoisted it off her shoulders and onto mine, and we headed for the parking garage.

  “How is she?” Hannah asked, and I could tell she dreaded my answer.

  “Still in the coma. No change—at least that we can see.” I said it matter-of-factly and then burst into tears.

  We stepped to one side of the concourse to let the stream of travelers going to and from their gates pass us by, both of us wiping our faces with the backs of our hands.

  Finally Hannah asked, “Do they think she’ll come out of the coma? Do they know if . . . well, you know, if her brain function is normal?”

  I looked sideways at my big sister, still swiping a stubborn tear. “Has Momma’s brain function ever been normal?”

  Hannah just stared at me for a second, and then she burst out laughing, and so did I.

  “Sorry. I know that was awful, but if I didn’t say it, I’d say something else a lot more awful.”