by Andrea Ring
Why would someone ruin such a beautiful view with safety glass?
“She’s ready,” Dr. Park says, interrupting my musings. “Nervous system is a bit jumpy, even under sedation. Will it make it difficult for you to work?”
I force myself to focus on Olivia. Just like with Tyrion, my view of her has suddenly changed. She seems more human now that she’s moving. Instead of the jerky movements, though, now she’s only twitching slightly.
“Should be fine,” I say.
I position my chair and settle into a comfortable position.
“Wait, where’s your backpack?” Rachel says.
Home, I think. Right where I left it.
I shake my head and take out my knife. “Fuck the backpack,” I say.
***
I do a final, methodical circuit of Olivia’s entire brain. Admittedly, I’ve kind of been jumping around in my healing—I just followed the damage. So I lay an imaginary grid over Olivia’s entire brain and systematically explore each square.
Things look great. Hell, they look better than great. I’m impressed with my work.
Until I hit the amygdala. Nerves that run there from the visual cortex are completely severed. This is odd, because the only severed nerves I’ve found before were where bone fragments had penetrated Olivia’s brain. All the other damaged nerves were stretched, not severed.
“Dr. Park,” I say, “I’ve found something.”
He cocks his head. “In the RAS?”
“No. I’m doing a final check on the rest of the brain, and I’ve found severed nerves leading to the amygdala. The injury seems out of place.”
“Can you heal them?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I just…there’s no other nerve damage of the kind nearby. What would cause that, do you think? If it were an old injury, Olivia would have had emotional difficulties, since the amygdala processes emotions. I mean, this is something that would have been noticeable, and there’s nothing in her medical history to suggest such a thing.”
He waves his hand. “I don’t think the why is important,” he says. “Her brain damage was so extensive…who knows what caused it? I don’t think you can rule out her accident. Maybe you cut them accidently.”
I grit my teeth. “I did not cut them.”
“Then heal them and move on.”
The nerves are damaged, so I should heal them. But something feels off about it. Instinctively, I know they weren’t cut during Olivia’s fall.
I made a promise to myself that I would bring Olivia back as close as I could to the person she was before the accident. Healing these nerves will certainly change her. And if I’m wrong, I can always go back in and fix them later.
I leave them alone and continue working.
***
Two hours later, I unhook myself and sit back in the chair. I swipe my forearm across my sweat-beaded brow.
“Give me a sec,” I say to no one in particular, and I make my way to the bathroom down the hall.
Olivia’s body is totally ready. I’ve bulked up muscles, fired every neuron in her body to make sure it’s functioning, healed her stomach lining and intestines in preparation for solid food. Physically, she should feel like she’s barely spent a day in bed.
I turn on the faucet and splash some water on my face.
I’m fine. Physically, I’m fine, except for a little dehydrated. I cup my hands under the running water, and swallow four big mouthfuls.
Mentally, my emotions are still running high. I’m mad at the world, and I recognize that. But healing Olivia has given me a purpose, and it’s helped. A bit.
I still have plenty of Protein T from my initial burst this morning. Holy hell, I let things get out of control. I didn’t even know I was capable of that kind of loss of control.
Scary, if I think about it too hard.
The smart thing to do would be to end the session for today. I healed a lot with little consequence. I should quit while I’m ahead.
Promise you’ll come back.
I should go.
Go home, Thomas.
I should stay.
Olivia is almost there.
I turn off the faucet and head back to her room.
***
“So this is it?” Rachel asks as I walk back into the room.
I sit in my chair and lean forward, elbows on my knees. “Maybe. We won’t know until it happens.”
“I know it’ll happen,” she whispers. “I know it.”
Wish I had her confidence.
“Have you had much experience with coma patients?” I ask Dr. Park.
He takes the chair across the bed from me and nods. “They’re my specialty. I’ve worked in private facilities with coma patients for my entire career.”
“Then you can tell us what to expect,” I say.
He sighs through pursed lips. “Normally, the process follows similar patterns. When everything in the brain is ready, the patient begins to gain awareness, slowly. Response to stimuli increases. Normal sleep patterns resume. A patient will begin to communicate, usually without speech. We start therapy, encourage them to respond to us, to indicate preferences and awareness. It’s different for every patient, but it usually takes a while. Days. Sometimes weeks.”
“But you don’t think that will be the case here,” I say.
“I’ve never had a patient wake up from being in a coma this long. And Olivia will be waking up without physical deterioration. She won’t have the physical barriers to overcome that all coma patients have. You’ve said that her long-term memory is intact. You’ve indicated that even speech and balance centers are intact. Maybe Olivia will wake up and speak to us. Maybe it will take a while. I just don’t know.”
“What’s you best guess?” I ask him.
“Well, you’ve seen how the nervous system is not functioning perfectly—it takes time. I would guess it will be the same with all her systems. She’ll gain awareness slowly, over a period of days. Things will take time to run smoothly.”
I glance at Olivia. She’s perfectly still, breathing evenly.
“I fixed the nervous system issues,” I say.
They both look at Olivia.
“I thought the sedative had kicked in,” Rachel says.
“Nope, you didn’t give her enough to stop the twitching. That was me.”
“Then maybe she will wake up talking and walking,” she says.
I rub my eyes. “I guess it’s useless to speculate. Let’s just prepare for the worst. There’s always the possibility that I missed something, that I hooked something up wrong. She might not wake at all.”
Dr. Park speaks. “Do you think you’ve missed something?”
I shrug. “Not really. But I’m not God.”
And I take out my knife, slash us both open, and tunnel through Olivia’s body to the RAS.
Chapter Forty
I sense the moment when Olivia gains awareness.
I’ve had access to her entire body for two days, so I now have a perfect snapshot of her brain, all her systems, and I can heal most cells without using Protein T. The healing came much faster once I had this access.
But it also caused some distractions. Her pain receptors were suddenly firing and the signals registering in the brain. It’s hard to work on someone, knowing that each move you make is painful.
But it was also pain that Olivia wasn’t aware of. I could ignore it, sort of, knowing that Olivia was oblivious.
Now she isn’t.
“She’s coming to,” I say, and Dr. Park initiates the blood pressure cuff on Olivia’s arm to take a reading.
“Blood pressure up,” he says. “Heart rate increasing.”
The first thing I do is temporarily numb her pain receptors. Then I tune in to Olivia’s thoughts.
I can’t move, I can’t see, I must be dead.
“You’re not dead, Olivia,” I say out loud. “You’re alive. Come back to us.”
Who’s there? Who’s…I’m not dead? I have to
be dead. I fell.
“I’m a doctor, Olivia,” I say. “We’re healing you. You’re gonna be okay.”
Olivia’s eyes roll in her head, but the lids don’t open.
“You can open your eyes. It’s okay. Everything’s fixed. Open your eyes for us.”
But I…I can’t. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be here.
“You’re at home,” I say gently. “Nothing scary is here. Just a couple of doctors and a nurse to take care of you. You’re healthy now. Open your eyes.”
Olivia thrashes from side to side, fighting it.
I don’t want…no! I don’t want to be here!
“Shhh, now,” I say, patting her hand in mine. “Relax. You’re going to be okay.”
I begin to unhook from her brain.
What are you doing?
“We’ve got you hooked up, so we could heal you. I’m just unhooking you. You won’t feel a thing.”
You’re leaving?
“No, no,” I say. “I’m right here. You’re all better now. You can open your eyes.”
Olivia scrunches her eyes tight, refusing to open them. Don’t make me, please don’t make me. I don’t want to be here.
I glance at Rachel and Dr. Park. They are riveted to my half of our conversation, and they’re both frowning.
Something here is off. I re-grow my neural connections, so I can think to her, rather than speaking aloud.
Why don’t you want to be here? I ask her.
I just want to die. I want to be with my mother.
Chills run down my arms. But you’re healed now. You won’t be disabled or anything. You’re perfectly healthy.
Olivia screams in her head. I don’t want to be healthy! I don’t want to live! I jumped for a reason!
I’m so startled at the venom, the absolute certainty, in her voice that I pull back from her suddenly, almost breaking the connection in our hands. Olivia screams again in her head, this time in pain, as the nerves pull taut. I recover and quickly numb the pain.
What do you mean, you don’t want to live? I ask her.
I jumped, she thinks. I smashed my window and I jumped! How did I live through that?
I don’t have an answer, since apparently everything I’ve been told about Olivia’s injuries was a lie.
My mother. Where is she?
I swallow hard. In Heaven, Olivia. I assume she’s in Heaven.
But she’s been with me forever. She’s been holding my hand. Where is she?
Olivia, your mother wouldn’t want you to die, I think carefully. She loves you and would want you to live. Live for her.
You don’t know her! she screams. You don’t know anything about her! She wants me to be happy. I can’t be happy…I just want to die.
I close my eyes and take a few measured breaths. You have to open your eyes. If you wake up, we’ll sort this out together. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.
You’ll let me die, then?
I choke on the marble in my throat. I can’t let you die. I’m a doctor. I heal people.
Then I hate you! I hate you! Leave me alone!
Olivia, you have to wake up. Open your eyes and yell at me. Tell me how horrible I am.
No, she whispers. No. It’s a trick.
I sit back, careful of our hands, and consider the situation.
I was tricked myself into thinking Olivia was in an accident. She wasn’t. She tried to commit suicide.
How does that change things for me?
It doesn’t, not really. What’s done is done.
I’m leaving now, I tell her. I’m sorry you hurt so much. I never wanted to hurt you.
Olivia doesn’t respond. She just waits, engulfed in sadness.
I won’t be able to communicate with you anymore unless you speak out loud to me. Do you understand?
Olivia doesn’t think anything, but I get the impression that she hears me.
My name is Thomas, Thomas Van Zandt. If you ask for me, I’ll come see you. I’m sorry, Olivia. If I’d known you didn’t want to wake up…I don’t know. Maybe I would have done things differently.
You didn’t know?
No. I thought I was healing a sick teenager who has her whole life ahead of her. I thought I was doing the right thing. Goodbye.
I don’t wait for her response. I unhook from her brain and back out her body. I heal our hands and cradle my clenched fists to my chest.
“She’s awake?” Dr. Park asks.
I nod. I slowly climb to my feet. “You knew.”
“Knew what?”
“You knew. How she hurt herself.”
Dr. Park’s Adam’s apple jumps as he swallows. “It changes nothing.”
“It changes everything,” I say softly.
“You mean you wouldn’t have healed her?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I would have given it a helluva lot more thought. I could have erased that part of her memory.”
“You balk at healing someone who was suicidal, then think nothing of altering her memory?”
“I don’t know!” I scream. “All I know is that Olivia’s back, because of me, and she doesn’t want to be! She’s exactly in the same mental state she was in when she attempted to end her life! How does that help anything?”
“She has a second chance now,” he says. “A chance at life.”
“Do you even know why she did it?” I ask him.
He shakes his head.
“Neither do I. What if it’s horrible? What if she’s being abused? She’s still here, in the lion’s den!”
“Thomas, calm down,” Rachel says. “I don’t believe for one minute that Cyrus would hurt Olivia. We’ve been living here, night and day, for months. We’d know if something like that were going on.”
“Would you?” I say. “You better be sure, because you guys are the only ones keeping her safe. And I’m holding you to that. Anything happens to Olivia, and I’ll make sure you’re held accountable.”
I walk quickly to the door but stop with my hand on the jamb.
“And you can be the ones to tell Cyrus she’s awake and aware and in perfect agony. I don’t trust myself to speak to him ever again.”
And with that, I fling myself out of Olivia’s life.
Chapter Forty-One
I screech out of the parking spot and haul ass down the picturesque cobblestone drive.
Why? Why did this have to happen? My greatest achievement, and it turned out I was duped and used and turned into the perfect weapon to fight the pastor’s daughter’s hell-bent soul.
He lied to me. Lied! I hate liars!
But Dad warned me. He warned me something like this was going on. He told me to look at the Big Picture.
Well, screw that. I’m a kid. I don’t have access to an army of private investigators like Cyrus has, or to classified information like my dad has. I’m one person. How am I supposed to know what the real story is?
An image of Grandma floats in my head. What would have happened if I’d healed her, against her wishes? What would she have done if she didn’t have this otherworldly gift to so easily and cleanly end her own life?
I would have endured, she whispers in my head. But I would have hated you a little bit.
I jerk to a stop just in time, almost blowing through a stop sign.
Did Grandma just speak to me? Did you just speak to me?
I don’t get an answer. Maybe it was Grandma, or maybe it was just my version of her and what I think she’d say if she were here.
Olivia has a second chance at life, true. But she doesn’t want it, didn’t ask for it. She’s sixteen years old, same as me. Aren’t we old enough to decide the course of our own lives? Shouldn’t she have had a choice?
I don’t support suicide, but I did make peace with Grandma’s decision. How do I reconcile that? If I agree that suicide is acceptable in one case, how do I say it’s unacceptable in another? How do you measure pain and suffering? I can’t tell someone their pain is worth less th
an, is not as bad as, someone else’s.
If I had a daughter…I have no idea how parents feel. Tessa, then. If Tessa tried to commit suicide, would I heal her, knowing she wanted to die?
Hell, yes! is my first instinct.
But let me really think about that. If Tessa were in so much pain that she wanted to end her life, the reality is…I’d help her. I wouldn’t want to, I’d do everything in my power to convince her otherwise, but ultimately, I’d help her.
I wonder if that makes me evil. Murder is evil. But it’s not really murder, it’s…
And now I’m just rationalizing.
Doctors take an oath to do no harm. I’m not a doctor, exactly, but what I do amounts to the same thing. I have no wish to hurt anyone. I only want to help.
Can assisted suicide be considered a help?
I feel itchy and unsettled even thinking it. My skin crawls. Perhaps the devil is whispering in my ear at this very moment.
“Hey, God!” I shout out loud in the confines of my car. “Are you there? Have you been paying attention? What am I doing? Am I on some sick crusade to make myself a hero, to validate all the effort I’ve put into my abilities, everyone else be damned? Or am I doing the right thing? Tell me, please. I want to do your will. Tell me I’m on the right path.”
A car honks at me from behind, indicating the light has changed. I step on the gas and hurtle forward.
“Tell me!” I scream.
Only silence.
I pull into our driveway, nearly clipping the mailbox, and slam on the breaks. I grab my keys and thrust my way into the house.
I feel dirty.
I take off my clothes and step into the shower, turning the water on as hot as I can make it. My skin turns red, the water stings sharply, but I ignore the pain.
Maybe I am evil. Maybe I need the scalding water to burn the devil right out of me.
When I get out of the shower, my fingers and toes are prunes. I half-heartedly towel myself dry and crawl into bed.
I feel wrung out.
I sleep.
***
Thomas?
I’m dreaming I’m in a hallway with thousands of doors, stretching miles, so many miles I cannot see the end. Tessa is calling to me.