The Lost - J. D. Robb [38]
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.