Wake for Me (Life or Death Series)

by Irons, Isobel

  Viola might have confessed to dreaming about him while she was in a coma, but Sam had been secretly dreaming about a girl like her his entire life.

  And just like his other lifelong dreams, now that he’d finally found her, he was terrified of screwing it up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.” –Sigmund Freud

  I’m falling. The ground comes up to meet me, greeting me like the arms of a waiting lover. I close my eyes, too afraid to see myself hit the ground.

  I shatter, like skin-colored glass.

  A pair of weathered hands collects me, and puts me back together. I can hear her cackling as she glues each of my pieces, the witch in the little stone cottage. I watch from somewhere unseen, suspended above her shoulder as she hums a familiar tune. Au claire de la lune….

  When I’m mostly back together, she puts me into a closet and locks the door. I scream, but no one can hear me. I’m trapped, alone in the dark.

  I’m lying in the field. The one with the purple flowers. Violets, I think.

  “Enlightenment,” says the distinguished German man with the snowy white beard. He’s never been here before, and somehow that small detail seems terribly important. He points to the flowers—Sigmund, that’s his name—and looks at me, licking his lips. His teeth are sharp, like the teeth of a wolf. “People say you’re shy, but they’re wrong. The violets are a lie.”

  I shake my head, wanting to laugh at him. “No one ever calls me shy.”

  But he’s gone. I stand up and walk carefully toward the weeping willows, waiting for the birds to fall. But they never appear. Instead, thunder rolls across the sky.

  For some reason, this scares me more than the birds.

  I plunge into the willows, fighting to push the blonde leaves out of my face. When I arrive in the woods, the cabin is gone. In its place sits Our Lady of Mercy. It looks abandoned.

  Tentatively, I move through the woods. Before I know it, I’m inside. The long white hallway stretches in front of me. Behind me, something howls. I start to walk faster toward the elevator, trying to get to my room.

  Somewhere along the way, I get lost. The walls twist and change around me, until I find myself standing in front of Julia’s desk. She’s sitting behind a gigantic wall of books, their pages yellowed and curling like dead leaves.

  “Julia, can you help me?” I try to climb over the books, but they fall, and I fall with them. “There’s a monster. He’s after me. I need to get back to my room. I need to find Sam, so I’ll be safe.”

  Suddenly, Julia is my mother. She stands up and walks around the desk, taking me gently by the shoulders. Her fingernails dig into my skin. It hurts.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, in the same soft, sickeningly sweet tone she would use on me as a child. “If you go back to sleep, everything will be better. Just close your eyes, and you’ll be safe.”

  But I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want to go back to sleep.

  “No!” I shout, pulling away from her. “Where is Papa? He won’t stand for this!”

  With a sad smile, my mother stands and points to the door behind the desk. Without hesitating, I leap over it and shove the door open. The moment I do, everything around me goes dark.

  But I don’t let that stop me, I’m used to the darkness. I’m used to finding my own way, with no supervision. “Papa? Papa, where are you?”

  I stumble forward, and in front of me, a dim circle of yellow light appears. A hospital bed sits in the middle, cradling the blanket-draped form of my sleeping father. His breathing sounds labored and shaky, like the rattle of a snake. But he is breathing.

  “Papa, you’re alive!” I throw myself onto the bed, holding him and crying from joy. My heart feels like it might burst. “I knew it was a lie. I knew you couldn’t be gone.”

  As I look up at my father’s face, a hand reaches out of the darkness, clad in a starchy white coat. Thick, tan fingers cover my father’s face, smothering him. His body jerks, as I scream and try to fight off the disembodied hand of my father’s murderer.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” says a voice from behind me. Sam’s voice.

  ***

  Viola woke up in a strange place, feeling disoriented by an urgency that pulsed through her, even though she’d clearly been resting only a few seconds ago.

  The clock on the bedside table blinked 10:00. Because it was light out, she assumed it was late morning. From another room came the smell of something cooking. It was probably their maid, Francesca. Any minute now, her father would be calling her to come down to breakfast.

  No. Wait. That wasn’t right.

  Sitting up, Viola took a closer look at her surroundings. The bed she lay on was soft, covered in plaid flannel sheets. The walls of the tiny room were dark wood. A small desk sat empty in the corner, and a bookshelf was piled high with disorganized paperback science fiction novels. She didn’t recognize any of the authors—romance was more her style.

  Looking down, she realized that she was wearing an oversized cotton shirt. The front of the shirt read ‘Syracuse High Matheletes.’ Well, that was just absurd.

  And yet…in spite of the fact that everything looked, felt and smelled unfamiliar, Viola wasn’t afraid. In fact, she felt safe, almost at home here. Standing up—and blushing slightly over the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath the shirt—she walked over to a tall dresser that stood by the door. On top of the dresser, there were some books and framed pictures.

  Viola ran a finger lightly over the stack of yearbooks, from middle school through high school. A framed report card from eighth grade, with all A’s, of course. She smiled, as recognition took hold. There was a framed picture of Sam with his parents, and another boy—probably an older brother, from the looks of it. Even a portrait of Sam at his high school prom, in which he nervously palmed the waist of a cute blonde girl with glasses.

  With a sad smile, Viola thought of all the ‘normal’ childhood experiences Sam had lived through. Experiences she’d never allowed herself to have, because she’d been too busy trying to grow up too fast. By the time she’d been old enough for co-ed dances, she’d already moved on to full-out parties. At seventeen, when she was supposedly old enough to start sneaking out and going to parties, she’d been dating Aiden long enough that watching his fellow wannabe rock stars snort coke or shoot up after every show seemed like no big deal.

  Aiden—the guy she’d only brought home for the first time because she thought it would upset her mother. In the end, though, it had been Papa who’d hated Aiden. Her mother had secretly adored him. What in the world had her parents been thinking, anyway, letting her wander around Croatian clubs by herself at seventeen, the summer right after she’d been expelled from Catholic school? Looking back, she tried to remember what it had been about Aiden she’d thought she could love. Then again, standing there in Sam’s bedroom, wearing Sam’s clothes and looking at pictures from his comparatively boring, normal life, Viola honestly couldn’t remember a single thing she’d even liked about her ex-boyfriend of two years.

  It was funny, she thought, how a near-death experience could lend so much perspective.

  As she reached for the door handle, Viola caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror on the inside of Sam’s closet door. Goodness. She was starting to look a bit greasy around the edges. Opening the door as quietly as possible, she poked her head out through the crack.

  From where she stood, she could just see a small wedge of the kitchen. Sam moved around quietly, his back to her, chopping things into a bowl next to the stove. Soft music played from a stereo, and Viola thought she remembered the tune from somewhere. It was a raunchy song, something about sex and booze. Maybe he’d played it for her before, back when she was asleep. For some reason, though, the song made her want to see Sam without his clothes on. Then again, a lot of things seemed to trigger that impulse, these days. Breathing, for example.

 
Smiling wickedly to herself, Viola slipped out of Sam’s room and tiptoed quietly down the hallway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “The ego is not master in its own house.” –Sigmund Freud

  Sam waited until everything was perfect before chancing a look into his bedroom.

  After several hours of tossing and turning on the couch, he’d finally decided to get up and take a run around the neighborhood. He’d ended up back at his old high school, about five miles away, watching the sun rise from the bleachers that surrounded the football stadium. It was amazing how much smaller his past seemed now, when faced with his current problems.

  With renewed vigor, Sam had set about making breakfast. After finally deciding on a menu of what his mom called ‘fancy omelets’—spinach, mushrooms and ricotta cheese—and pancakes with chocolate chips, he’d used almost a dozen eggs and finally come up with a pretty good selection of things that would be acceptable to someone with Viola’s undoubtedly picky tastes. Not that he was trying to impress her. Honestly—oh, who was he kidding? He was totally trying to impress her.

  But when he went to get her, Viola wasn’t in his room.

  Frowning, Sam walked down the hall to the bathroom. The door was slightly ajar, and when he tentatively pushed it open, a wave of steam hit him in the face. Although he found his math team shirt crumpled up on the floor, the shower was disappointingly empty.

  “Viola?”

  Sam tracked back down the hallway, thinking that maybe she’d gone into his mom’s room, but when he passed Ben’s door, he stopped. Feeling his chest tighten with a familiar uneasiness, he turned the knob.

  She was standing with her back to him, staring up at the football jersey that hung above Ben’s dresser, right above the small shrine of trophies and photos that stood in lasting tribute to his older brother’s too short, but accolade-filled life.

  As his eyes trailed downward, Sam noticed Viola was wearing nothing but a very small towel. Long, smooth legs stretched abruptly out from the bottom of the glorified terry cloth band-aid, prompting him to bring his gaze back up to where it belonged before she caught him staring. Her hair was still wet, and that struck him as a huge turn-on. Inexplicably, he’d always had a thing for wet hair.

  Clearing his throat, Sam said the first thing that came into his mind. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Slowly, she turned to look at him. Her face was completely blank—no makeup, no attitude. Just an unspoken question.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk. What I meant was, this room is really depressing—you probably don’t want to hang out in here.”

  “What was his name?” She asked, with no trace of her usual smirk.

  “Ben.”

  “What happened to him?”

  For a second, Sam tried to think back to whether or not he’d mentioned Ben to her before, even when she was asleep. Why would she automatically assume that something had ‘happened’ to him? How stupid of him. The answer to his unspoken question was obvious: of course something had happened. Why else would someone have an entire room in their house that just sat there undisturbed, full of memories and covered in dust?

  “He died when he was seventeen,” Sam explained, lamely.

  Viola waited. Blinked at him. Ran a hand through her wet hair as small droplets of water fell, soaking into the towel that she held knotted around her chest. As if she knew exactly what it did to him, how nervous it made him.

  Sam sighed, then started talking. Honestly, it seemed safer somehow than just standing there, staring at her while she was wet and half-naked. It was too surreal, too good to be true.

  “He had appendicitis. It was during football practice, and he’d been having stomach cramps. But he didn’t tell anyone, and it ruptured. My dad took him to the hospital—he was Ben’s coach. He was young, otherwise healthy. It should’ve been a routine operation with a short recovery, but something went wrong. He went septic.”

  Sam looked away, staring up at the football jersey, so she wouldn’t see the flash of guilt in his eyes. “He fell into a coma, and within twelve hours, he was gone. The doctors said they didn’t know what happened, why Ben’s body got hit so hard by the infection. Of course, I was too young at the time to get what they meant. I was fifteen. I thought it sounded like a lame excuse, like someone had messed up. That’s all I knew: someone had made a mistake that cost me my older brother. Someone had missed something.”

  Viola stepped closer, looking up at the pictures as she put a hand on his arm, so lightly.

  It was enough. Just like he had when she was in a coma and he would visit her room, Sam found himself spilling his guts to her. Confessing all the reasons he wasn’t worthy of the way she looked at him, like he was her savior. Like he was something she needed.

  “He was a senior in high school. He had a girlfriend, and things were looking good for a football scholarship. Everything great in life was still ahead of him, you know? But because some surgeon missed something, he was just…gone.”

  With her other hand, Viola reached up and ran her finger through the thick layer of dust on top of the dresser. Once again, Sam found himself wondering how long it had been since his mother had come into this room. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even opened the door, before last night.

  “That’s why you became a doctor.” It wasn’t a question. She’d already connected the dots, but unlike most people who found out about Ben, Viola didn’t have that look on her face. That piteous look which always made Sam feel as if he needed to downplay his brother’s unnecessary and fucking tragic death, or qualify it by explaining why it had ruined him for life. Which was probably why it didn’t hurt as much as it should’ve, when he made himself go a step further and told her the moral of his story—the most pathetic part of all.

  “I was so naïve back then. I thought I could do better. I told myself that if I became a doctor, I’d never make those kinds of mistakes.”

  Back then, he’d told himself that when he became a doctor, he’d never cause someone to lose the person they loved the most. That as long as he did his best, no one would lose their child, or their sibling, or their spouse, because of him. God, he’d been so wrong about that.

  “Even in med school…” he said quietly, as he stared at Ben’s smiling face in his senior class photo, taken just a few months before he died. “I thought I could prove it, that I could finally figure out where they went wrong, and make sure that never happened to someone else’s brother. I’d read the studies, I’d heard the statistics. But now, I realize that the guy who killed Ben wasn’t a bad person. He wasn’t even a bad doctor. He was just human, like me. Like everyone.” Sam clenched his jaw, his fists, everything. “I can’t save anyone. The harder I try to hold on, the faster they slip away.”

  Viola turned fully toward him, letting the hand that was on his arm slide up until it was cradling his jaw. She tilted his head down, forcing him to look her in the eye.

  “Go ahead, Sam,” she said gently. “Say it. I think you need to say it out loud.”

  His eyes were burning. Teeth cemented shut, blinking hard, Sam shook his head.

  “Say it.” Her voice was now hard, demanding.

  “It’s my fault.” The words seemed to rip themselves out of his chest. “The night you came into the ER, I was distracted. I was freaking out, thinking about how I’d just seen you, less than an hour before. I couldn’t focus. I just kept thinking about how cold you were. How blue your lips looked, when... I was so…helpless. There was nothing I could do to save you. So I lied. I told you everything was going to be all right, but I knew it was a lie. I knew something was…. Viola, I know that I missed something. I can feel it. It’s my fault that you were in a coma. You should’ve woken up after the surgery, but I missed something. I almost killed you.”

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “Yes!” He was yelling at her now, but Sam couldn’t stop. “Think about it! It’s my fault your parents are de
ad, too, because if you hadn’t been in the hospital for so long, they wouldn’t have been so stressed out. They wouldn’t have even been in the car in the first place.”

  When Sam finally stopped raging, he felt like he might actually puke.

  Viola had her hands on either side of his face, and her expression was severe. “Breathe.”

  Sam inhaled loudly.

  “Are you finished?”

  Feeling his pulse throb against her fingers, he nodded. Now that he’d said it out loud, there was some part of him that realized how outrageous it all sounded. And yet, no matter how kindly she looked at him, no matter how strenuously she might protest that it wasn’t his fault, he would never fully believe that he hadn’t played a part in ruining her life.

  But instead of babying him or trying to make him feel better, she rolled her eyes.

  “This is why you’re afraid of me? Not because you’re worried I’m crazy, but because…you think I’ll be mad that you couldn’t magically heal me? That you’re human?”

  “What?” Sam shook his head. “No, I’m not afraid. I’m just…being careful.”

  Viola laughed in his face.

  “I disagree. You’re scared shitless.” She moved closer, until the hand that held her towel in place was pressed up against him. “You’re afraid of asking for what you want. Hell, you’re probably afraid of even wanting what you want. If it wasn’t for me, I bet you wouldn’t have even asked Chocolate Barbie for a spot on that study.”

  Standing that close to her, trying not to freak out about how her hand was loosening its grip on the tiny little towel, Sam was unprepared to control the look of sheer panic that flashed across his face.

  Instantly, her look went from teasing to incredulous. “You didn’t ask, did you? You just waited around until he offered it to you.”

  Sam jumped to defend himself, although he really had no defense. “I would’ve asked him…eventually.”

  With her non-towel holding hand, Viola poked him in the chest with her finger. Hard.