Wired Ghost

by Toby Neal

  At Sophie’s floor, he ducked into the men’s room for a quick wash and a shave with the plastic disposable he’d picked up in the gift shop. A couple of aspirin and a cup of coffee later, he felt ready to face her—and her intimidating father.

  Raveaux walked down the hall and turned into her room. Bright sunlight streamed in over the empty bed. “Sophie?”

  She was gone, already.

  The cowardly part of him sighed in relief—someone else would have to tell her about Jake.

  “She left with her father,” a nurse told him.

  Raveaux hurried down to the lobby, and sure enough, Sophie was sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk at the pickup area of the hospital.

  He slowed for a moment, just looking at her.

  Her short, curly brown hair gleamed in the sunshine. She turned her head, and he sighed a little inside—her profile was as perfect as the statue of Nefertiti in the Metropolitan Museum. She wore a loose purple velvet shirt and black pants that her father had picked up for her.

  He reached her side. “Good morning, Sophie.”

  Sophie looked up. Her eyes were the color of old tea; her lids were swollen, her skin blotchy. The scar stood out on her cheek like a badly stitched seam.

  She knew.

  Raveaux dropped to one knee beside the wheelchair, taking one of her cold hands in his. “I’m so sorry about Jake.”

  “Are you?” Her voice was scratchy. “I don’t recall your liking him much.”

  He ignored that. “Jake was a good man, a brave man. It should not go this way for someone like him.”

  “It should not go this way for anyone. But that’s the way things happen sometimes.” She stared over Raveaux’s shoulder. “My father’s coming. I’ll be taking a leave of absence from work to recover—from all of this. You can check with Bix for next steps.”

  “Of course.” Raveaux stood back up. He was being dismissed. He squeezed her shoulder. She did not acknowledge it.

  A big black Lincoln Continental pulled up. Her father got out and trotted around the front. Frank Smithson was a tall man with an elegant bearing; he moved quickly for someone in his sixties. They’d met briefly at Sophie’s bedside the day before, but the ambassador shook his hand. “Pierre Raveaux. Good to see you again. Thanks for all you did for my daughter.”

  Raveaux felt something small and hard slip into his palm. He slid it into his pocket. “It was nothing. Sophie is a friend.”

  “Colleague,” Sophie said, her eyes still facing front.

  “I will be in touch,” Raveaux said. “Get well, Sophie.”

  She did not acknowledge him in any way as she got into the car. Smithson raised a hand to him, though, as they drove away.

  Raveaux stared after them for a long moment, then opened his hand to look at what the ambassador had slipped into it.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sophie

  Eighteen hours later

  Sophie stood beside Jake’s sister Patty outside of the ICU, gazing through the window at her lover’s body on the bed.

  “He looks a little better today.” Patty’s hair roots were coming in, the same dark brown as Jake’s hair. Her eyes were gray with a blue ring—Jake’s eyes. Sophie’s heart squeezed in her chest as she met those eyes.

  “He’s going to wake up any time.” Janice Dunn, their mother, stood on the other side of Patty. Her voice sounded shaky. The two women clung to each other, and had since they’d arrived the night before. Patty had been warm toward Sophie, but Janice hadn’t spoken to her at all. Sophie could feel hostility coming off the petite woman in waves. Janice Dunn blamed Sophie for Jake’s injuries, and she could understand the woman’s rage.

  And as to Jake looking better, not really. if anything, he looked worse.

  The wounds he’d sustained while sheltering her during the quakes inside the tunnel hadn’t healed, and he was swathed with bandages. The bruising from the meth gang’s beating had spread unpleasantly, and his facial color was yellow and wan.

  His head sagged to one side, and Sophie longed to push it back upright against the pillow.

  She turned and went to the nurse’s station. “Jake’s head has fallen sideways. His neck is going to be strained. Can someone go in and check on him?”

  The nurse looked down at her monitors and tightened her lips. “He’s status quo on his vitals.” But her expression softened as she looked up and met Sophie’s eyes. “Of course.” She picked up the phone and called for Jake’s attending nurse.

  Jake’s mother approached Sophie at the desk. Janice looked haggard, her normally well-groomed ash blonde hair in disarray, her clothes rumpled from sleeping in the waiting room. “Tell us again how you’re fine, and Jake has barely survived?” She narrowed quartz-hard gray eyes at Sophie. “I want to hear the whole story. Why is he covered with cuts and bruises, and you’re not?”

  “Mom!” Patty exclaimed. She’d followed her mother over. “I’m sorry. She needs this to be someone’s fault.”

  “Don’t speak about me like I’m not even here,” Mrs. Dunn flared. “I want this bitch to give an account.”

  “I’m covered with cuts and bruises, too.” Sophie pushed up her sleeves, showed her black-and-blue, scratched arms. “But it’s true that Jake took more damage than I did. He tried to protect me.” She met the woman’s hard stare. “I love Jake. We had just gotten reunited. I’m devastated that this happened to him.”

  “Then why did you bring him out to this godforsaken island in the middle of an eruption to do this job?” Mrs. Dunn shrieked. “I wish it were you in there on the bed!”

  “I’m so sorry.” Sophie covered her face with her hands. Tears filled her eyes. “I wish it were me, too,” she whispered.

  “Mother!” Patty grabbed her mother’s wrists. “That’s enough!”

  But there was no stopping the hateful words that spewed from the woman’s mouth. “Felicia was so much better for him. Sophie’s a whore! Having a baby with another guy while she was with Jake. Then getting him shot . . . and now this!”

  Sophie turned and fled.

  She took the stairs down out of the hospital, even though the ICU was eight flights up. Her injured lungs burned and her sobs were harsh in the echoing concrete stairwell as her feet, in new athletic shoes, hurried down and down and down. She could barely see where she was going, but somehow, she made it to the bottom without falling, banging out through the exit into an alley reeking with bagged garbage from the hospital’s cafeteria.

  Sophie dashed the tears away. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt up, put her head down, and walked along the sidewalk, heading toward the ocean. She wanted to hear the sound of the sea, smell it. Breathe it. Something briny and clean.

  How could tragedy have struck the one she loved a third time? First, grieving through Connor’s fake death. Then, Alika losing an arm in a bomb blast. Hurting again when Jake broke up with her, and now—when they’d found each other again, when they’d been so close they could have been one flesh—he was in a coma with possible brain damage? Jake would rather be gone from this world than be brain dead.

  And the job of pulling the plug, of making that terrible decision, was going to fall to his angry, bitter, grieving mother. Sophie had no rights to him whatsoever.

  She’d been dealt more emotional pain than any one human should have to stand.

  Sophie could have retrieved her father’s rental car, but she needed to move. She exited the hospital parking lot with its decorative plantings. Heading downhill toward the curve of Hilo Bay, she could smell an occasional whiff of the ocean. She wanted to run, but her lungs were still too damaged to tolerate heavy exercise. Just walking was making her cough.

  Her phone buzzed and rang in her pocket. She picked up. “Hello?”

  “Sophie, it’s Marcella.”

  “Oh, Marcella.” Fresh tears. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “I heard about Jake. It’s the worst, darling, the worst. Where are you?”

&
nbsp; Sophie looked around. She was on the main thoroughfare that ran from Hilo Bay to the hospital, which was located up at the top of the town near Rainbow Falls. A light sprinkle cooled her hot cheeks. Cars whisked by. “Walking. Somewhere in Hilo.”

  “I’m still on Oahu, but I’m trying to get time off to come see you.”

  The rain increased to a heavy shower and Sophie hurried toward the banyans around Hilo Bay. “Please don’t. I can’t handle people being nice to me right now. Jake’s mother was hateful, and it—felt right somehow. I should have died, too.”

  “Survivor guilt. You gotta talk to Dr. Wilson.”

  “I don’t have to do anything but put one foot in front of the other.” Sophie reached the first of the series of immense banyans that bordered Hilo Bay. Gray and huge as the legs of elephants, the trees rose high overhead and blocked the rain with their thick, rubber-like leaves. She stopped underneath the natural umbrella and shut her eyes. “I think I will wander around for a while. But everywhere I look . . .” She glanced around, choked down a sob. “I see places where we spent time together. We ran and played with the dogs almost every day here in the park when we lived in Hilo. We breakfasted at that restaurant over there.” She pointed, as if Marcella could see. “It’s like he’s already dead, and his ghost is haunting me.”

  “Oh, Sophie. Gah, I hate this so much. Where are you staying?”

  “With my dad. At the Hilo Hilton.”

  “I’m on my way,” Marcella said.

  Sophie slid her phone back into her pocket and kept walking.

  She went to the waterfront, out onto the jetty that protruded from the park and ran alongside the river. Little old Japanese men lined the outer edges, fishing, as they had for all the years she’d taken a walk there.

  If only she could turn back time. Instead of accepting Jake’s choice to break up with her and go away with Felicia, she’d have fought it. Tried to win him back. He’d always loved her, even then. She could have won him back.

  But she’d been hurt too, and absorbed with her new baby, and she’d let him go . . . And they’d lost all that time. Time they could have been together, forging a life.

  Sophie stood at the end of the jetty, and watched the wind ruffle over the bay, felt its fingers in her hair. She sat down, cross-legged, on the sun-warmed stone, shut her eyes, and focused on the painful act of breathing.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sophie

  Two days later

  Sophie settled herself on the leather couch in Dr. Wilson’s cozy little office in a small, older plantation home off the campus of the University of Hawaii, Hilo. She looked around the space as the psychologist shuffled some papers at her desk in the corner of the room. The amateurish paintings were still on the walls and the sand garden on the coffee table was neatly raked. “I never expected to be here again.”

  Dr. Wilson looked up. Her bright blue eyes were prettily set off by a modern-looking blonde shag that fell to her shoulders. “Life has a way of being full of surprises.”

  “Some surprises are welcome. Some, terrible.” Sophie’s lips felt numb and tingly; an odd side effect left over from the sulfur dioxide exposure, the doctor had said. She rubbed her cheekbone, where the gunshot scar still gave off similar sensations. She’d worked for years to stop touching that area; today, feeling the rough ridge of tissue under her fingertips was oddly comforting.

  “Yes, some surprises are terrible. Lei called me and told me about Jake.” Dr. Wilson picked up her clipboard and came around her desk to seat herself in her puffy recliner across from the couch. “I’m so deeply sorry.”

  “I’m glad I don’t have to be the one to tell you.” Sophie met Dr. Wilson’s gaze with difficulty. “It was hard enough to make this appointment, and keep it—but Bix said I had to do a stress debrief meeting. Gave me a choice of you, or Dr. Kinoshita.”

  “I’m glad you chose me,” Dr. Wilson smiled. “Now. Where do you want to begin?”

  Sophie leaned forward to drag the tiny wooden rake through the smooth surface of the sand in the tray. “It seemed like any other Security Solutions operation when we started out. Jake and I were excited. We hadn’t worked with each other closely since we lived together on the Big Island. And we had a lot of relationship excitement mixed in, too, because we hadn’t slept together since we reconnected and he broke up with Felicia.”

  “Oh, interesting. I thought you’d have jumped in the sack first thing.”

  Sophie shook her head. “No. I wanted to take it slow. Begin again. Clear the past up first. I needed time. Jake wanted to move faster, but he was willing to let me take the lead. So, we’d been dating. Spending time together. We’d kissed a couple of times, but that was all.”

  “What changed?”

  “Jake and I talked honestly once we were trapped in the lava tube. I was still angry with him for leaving me when I was so vulnerable, caring for a newborn, and for not believing me that Connor and I weren’t a couple.” Sophie sighed, adding a pebble or two from a handy bowl to her design. “I wanted him to prove himself. Show me that he loved me, take time to rebuild the trust between us. . . Not just appear out of nowhere when his girlfriend kicked him out, and jump into my bed. Jake understood that. He told me he accepted that Connor would always be in my life, and so would Alika. But he still reacted jealously when he found out Connor had chipped me with a GPS, even though that’s what ended up saving our lives.”

  “Whoa! Now I need the story of what happened. All the gritty details.”

  Sophie told her the sequence of events. “We eventually found a place to clean up and sleep. A geothermal pool.”

  Dr. Wilson’s brows went up. “How perfectly delicious.”

  Sophie smiled. “We’d said what we needed to say to each other and cleaned up the past. So yes, we made love. It was incredible.” Tears pooled in her eyes, and she pressed the backs of her fists against them. “I can’t believe the time we lost. That we’ve lost, now, forever.”

  Dr. Wilson held up a hand. “Maybe yes, maybe no. He’s in a deep coma, that’s what I heard.”

  “Worse than that. They can’t find steady brain activity.” Sophie looked down—she was holding the little rake hard so that the tines stabbed her in the palm. She opened her fist. “He has an IV to get him the nourishment he needs. He’s still on the ventilator, but has a system-wide infection. His mother is in charge of his health care, but according to Patty, his sister, he has a Do Not Resuscitate order in place for a situation like this. He wants the plug to be pulled, and then they can harvest his organs for donation.”

  “Oh, no, Sophie. I’m so sorry.” Dr. Wilson reached for a tissue from the box between them and dabbed her eyes.

  “And to make things worse, I’m not allowed to see him.” Sophie watched her restlessly moving hands as they made designs with the rake: arcs, swirls, lines. “His mother blames me. Patty, his sister, texts me to keep me informed. They are planning to take him off all life support tomorrow. The organ donation is set to go the minute he dies.”

  “My God.” Dr. Wilson got up, clearly agitated. She went to her little refrigerator in the corner of the room and removed a couple of bottles of water. She handed one to Sophie. “Drink. Please. I need to give you something.”

  Sophie unscrewed the lid and took a long drink.

  She felt numb. Everything was happening around her in a distant way, a mere echo of reality.

  At the same time, her conscious mind was alive and well, bargaining like hell for something else to happen for Jake. “It would have been so much better if he and Felicia had never broken up.”

  “You’d never have taken this job together if that were the case.” Dr. Wilson sat down and sipped her water. “What ifs don’t serve us.”

  “And if he’d been with Felicia, likely I’d have taken this job with Raveaux. The outcome would have been different.”

  “How so?” Dr. Wilson cocked her head. “Tell me about Raveaux.”

  Sophie wriggled, settling dee
per into the cushions. “Raveaux is a good man, a complicated man. I like him. But he is not as big physically as Jake. I passed out early when the sulfur dioxide filled the chamber. Jake carried me up, all the way to the top of the wall, and pushed me onto the ledge nearest the ceiling. I got more good air because of that. Jake ended up where he was, lower than me on the cavern’s wall where we were trapped, because he carried me.” A giant, gasping sob overtook Sophie. “He gave his life to get me there. And it saved me.” She crumpled, folding her arms over her waist and belly, giving way at last to the grief. “I’m alive because he put me above himself, literally.”

  Dr. Wilson handed her a handful of tissues, and she sobbed into them, great hacking coughing sobs that hurt her lungs and throat.

  Dr. Wilson let a good while go by until Sophie had cried herself out. Finally, she straightened up and dabbed her face. She sat back against the cushions.

  So did Dr. Wilson. “You said the outcome would have been different if you’d been with Raveaux. Is Raveaux not capable of sacrifice?”

  “He is. I know he is.” Sophie told Dr. Wilson about the loss of Raveaux’s wife and daughter, about his arms, permanently scarred by the fire that had taken their lives. “He’s brave. I would trust him with my life in a situation like Jake and I were in. But, as I said, he is a smaller man. We are close in height. I can’t see him being physically able to carry me up that wall, push me onto that ledge, like Jake did.”

  “Then you both would have died.” They sat for a moment with the magnitude of what had happened, then Dr. Wilson shook herself visibly. “You can’t change the past. We must find a way to deal with what is.”

  “I don’t know if I can.” Sophie shredded the tissue, looking up into Dr. Wilson’s eyes. “I don’t know how I will get through tomorrow, and however long it takes for him to die. Without even being able to see him.”