Mr. Dunready brought Tommy and Wendell to see Lucas after school, before taking them to a friend’s for the night.
I was pretty sure something had happened between him and Mrs. Dunready during the course of the day. I didn’t know what it was, but they seemed more relaxed with each other. And as he left, Mr. Dunready put a hand on Mrs. Dunready’s shoulder and said, “Maureen, try to rest.” He looked at Lucas long and hard. “I’m coming back,” he said. And then, as if afraid that his statement would be taken to mean more than it should: “After I drop the boys.”
Once they were gone, Lucas’s mom fell asleep in a chair, dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing the night before. Her sweatshirt had a dribble of coffee down the front, but she didn’t seem to know.
When the team of doctors came through, Dex blocked them at the curtained doorway. “Give her a minute, please,” he said. “She’s just waking up.”
I was impressed with him. I knew from my experience on rounds with my dad that doctors wait for no one, but Dex was so calm and confident he was able to hold them at bay.
In the conference that followed, the doctors wondered out loud why Lucas was sleeping so much and instructed the nurses to wake him every twenty minutes. They kept coming back to questions about his fever and why, even with antibiotics, they couldn’t lower it to the level they wanted to see.
“He presented with loss of consciousness, post–nonconcussive head injury. So where is this fever coming from? Why is he showing signs of dehydration?”
I saw Mrs. Dunready’s back straighten at the words “risk of sepsis” and “strokelike activity,” but she nodded and asked questions that made it clear she was a nurse as well as a mom.
Next the doctors woke Lucas, asking him the year, to spell his name, how many fingers they were holding up. You could tell he had to really think about the answers. But once the doctors were gone, he put out a hand for Dex to high-five, hockey-team-style.
Lucas’s mom never left the room again, so I didn’t get to talk to Lucas alone. Instead, I listened to Dex tell him stupid stuff about what was going on at school. Dex’s deliberately casual reporting seemed to calm Lucas, so I tried to match his tone. I think I said something like “I’m going to need your advice on what to do when you cut class on the day of a test.” Dex told him that the guys on the team were putting together a highlight reel from everyone’s parents’ game videos for Lucas to watch if he got bored and missed hockey too much.
Lucas slurred his words when he said, “That’s awesome.” Dexter looked at me a little puzzled, a little amused, as if we were at a party and someone was drunk.
At dinnertime, Dex offered me a ride home. Saying goodbye to Lucas, I held his hand. He said, “Jules, can you bend down?” I did. He said, “Closer,” and I bent down so far my face was inches from his and my hair was falling down around us. He turned his head into my hair and he inhaled, like he was smelling flowers. I looked at him as if to say, “Okay, that’s weird,” but the desperation in his eyes was too serious for me to make any kind of joke.
“That’s real, right?” he whispered. “You’re still real?” I nodded. Then he said, “This is why I came back. For this. I remember this.”
Out in the hallway, with the elevator door open, I stopped. I could not move.
“Juliet?” Dexter said. “You coming?”
“No,” I said, turning back toward the room. “You go.”
I called my mom. I told her I was staying late. Could she pick me up at ten? She didn’t like it—I could hear that in her voice—but she agreed.
The next morning, back at the hospital, I learned that Lucas had weakened overnight. His mom was in the cafeteria when I arrived, but his dad was sitting in the chair in the corner, his hands on his knees, staring at Lucas’s face. Once, when I left to go to the bathroom and came back, I saw him standing at the bed, his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. He moved as soon as he saw I was there.
Mrs. Dunready pulled a chair up next to Mr. Dunready’s. They sat together without looking at each other, without talking. Lucas slept on, and eventually Mrs. Dunready reached for Mr. Dunready’s hand.
“I can’t stop thinking,” she said, “that there’s something more we can do.”
“He’s a fighter,” Mr. Dunready said, his mouth tightening into a grimace. “We know that. The boy will fight.”
Later, on my way back from buying a newspaper, I heard Mrs. Dunready in the hallway, having a muffled argument with Lucas’s doctor. She couldn’t understand why they didn’t know what was happening. She couldn’t understand what was taking so long with the MRI results. She reminded him that Lucas had been having headaches for months—she wanted the doctor to reexamine the scans. “The headaches were severe,” I heard Mrs. Dunready almost wail. “I know my son. I’m a neurology nurse. I can tell when a person’s in pain.”
After, when a nurse was taking Lucas’s temperature and blood pressure—something they were doing every half hour, it seemed—Mrs. Dunready called me out into the hall.
“You can see how serious this is,” she said. I nodded. “So if there’s something you know about Lucas, something that for some reason he didn’t tell me, this is the time for you to explain it.”
I couldn’t tell if I was relieved that she was asking or terrified. I do know I instantly felt a little bit sick.
“I’m not stupid,” Mrs. Dunready went on. “I’ve been watching Lucas for the past few months. I thought it was you. I thought it was stress, but now I don’t know. Juliet, why is he quieter? Why is he … nicer? As a mother, I can see that he’s changed.” She paused. “Is this about drugs?”
“Drugs?” I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You think Lucas is taking drugs?”
“I don’t see what’s funny about drugs.”
I quickly squashed my laughter. “No,” I said. “Drugs aren’t funny.” She was still looking at me like she was waiting for something. “Lucas doesn’t take drugs.” She kept staring. “He drinks beer,” I offered.
“I know that,” she snapped. “You think I don’t know that?”
And it was seeing her frustration that made me realize I couldn’t withhold the truth. “There is something,” I began before I could think better of the impulse. Mrs. Dunready’s eyes immediately narrowed. “It’s going to sound strange.” I think I actually closed my eyes, the way you might when you’re ripping off a Band-Aid or waiting for a loud noise. “He thinks the headaches he’s been having are coming from memories.” I swallowed. “He feels like he’s having memories of the future.”
“What?” Mrs. Dunready hissed at me. Her face was contorted, as if she’d just noticed that I was a mutant zombie baby killer.
“He thinks he knows what’s going to happen to him in the future. That he’s lived in the future and come back, almost like a ghost, inhabiting the body of a younger version of himself.”
“That’s—” Mrs. Dunready sputtered. “That’s crazy.”
“He remembers being in a war,” I said. “After he becomes a marine. He believes that he will fight in a war in Iraq. He thinks he’s dying there. Of burns.”
She put her head in her hands. “It’s a tumor. I knew it was a tumor. How could they miss this?” I was standing in front of her, but she wasn’t talking to me anymore. “I work with this,” she said. “I know this. Personality changes. Headaches. I just thought … I thought he was maturing. Ha!” She turned to me now. “I thought it was you that had changed him. Or seeing me stand up for myself with his dad. I’d been hoping he’d abandon his great love of the marines.… I welcomed this change. I said nothing because I didn’t want to”—she took a deep, painful-looking breath—“I didn’t want to jinx anything. Oh, God.”
She started to cry. Gingerly, I put a hand on her shoulder, but she was already spinning away. “I have to find a doctor.” Her eyes rolled back in panic.
That afternoon, I met Dr. Katz, a neurologist with a specialty in psychiatric disorders who was a friend of Mrs. Dunready’s. He w
as very undoctorly, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses on Croakies, corduroys, and running shoes. His dark hair was on the long side and so curly it looked unbrushable. He asked all kinds of questions about Lucas’s dreams and headaches and what I thought was happening. I could tell that he was trying to decide whether I was lying. And that he was almost more interested in the girlfriend’s telling lies than the boyfriend’s being crazy.
But he wasn’t entirely dismissive. For one moment he even toyed with a theory that considered what I was saying. “It’s a fairly elegant proposition,” he said, “from a neurological standpoint, the idea that the brain’s ability to assemble memory could, with the right energy surge—the kind you’d muster in a life-and-death situation—reach outside of one brain through space and time and into another. That the host brain would manifest medical symptoms the future body was experiencing.” But then with a shake of his head, he abandoned the idea as impossible and returned to the only real option he saw: one of us, either Lucas or me, had completely lost our minds.
Scans were reexamined. Tiny pinpricks of irregularity were considered. Surgery was discussed. Mr. Dunready remained in his chair in Lucas’s room, silent, still, his eyes fixed on the bed like he was on guard duty and could keep Lucas out of danger through vigilance alone.
The next morning, I didn’t even pretend to go to school, and when I got to the hospital, Dex was already there, waiting on a bench in the hall outside the ICU.
“His mom’s meeting with a doctor again,” Dexter told me, standing. “I’m supposed to stay out here until they’re done.”
“How is he?”
“He was sleeping when I got here,” Dex said. “I think they tried to wake him up for the doctor.”
“Tried to wake him up?”
Dexter nodded, like he didn’t want to say out loud how bad things seemed. Then he put an arm over my shoulder in a very un-Dexter-like gesture and proceeded to give me the most awkward half hug I had ever received. I guess it was a sign of how scared I was that I was grateful for the contact. He’d heard what I’d said the day before about Lucas’s memories and dreams, but he didn’t mention it. He was being kind.
Mrs. Dunready appeared in the hall, walking with a doctor I hadn’t seen before. She was saying, “I’ve told you, he’s been having headaches for weeks. He reported dizziness. He’s been delusional. I agree the scans don’t show any hemorrhaging or lesions, but something isn’t right.”
“Mrs. Dunready,” the doctor replied. “I know you’re a nurse. I know you’re in neuro, but you have to trust us. We’ve looked at the scans three times.”
“So what’s happening to him?” Mrs. Dunready growled. “You must have a theory, at least?”
“I’ll tell you honestly, we don’t,” the doctor said. “The fever, that abnormal EKG, the lethargy, the pupil dilation—these symptoms together, they say physical trauma. I don’t have to tell you we see them in patients who present with multiple lacerations, internal organ damage, puncture wounds, broken bones.”
“I know.”
“But in the absence of a physical injury or evidence of brain infection, we can’t account for the symptoms.”
“What about the head trauma? Do you think he’s responding to the fall he took on the ice?”
The doctor paused. “Maureen, you’re fishing. Head trauma like Lucas experienced could result in some of these symptoms, but not all of them. It’s not enough. There’s something else going on.”
“I want a team meeting,” Mrs. Dunready decided. “Katz didn’t rule out a tumor. I feel like I’m carrying information between you all.”
“Of course,” the doctor said. “Great idea. Let’s set something up for lunchtime.”
As soon as the doctor stepped away, Mrs. Dunready noticed Dex and me. “Oh, you guys.” She sighed as though even the sight of us was exhausting. “Go on in.” She was still wearing the sweatshirt with the stain. When Mr. Dunready emerged, car keys in hand—I assumed heading out for an errand of some kind—they clasped hands before he continued on to the elevators.
This time, I wasn’t prepared for how sick Lucas looked. All the color in his often ruddy face was gone. Someone had shaved him, which should have made him look better, but it just made it clear how sunken his cheeks were. Something had changed about his hair too. Maybe it was the lighting in the room—the window shade was drawn—but it looked as gray as his skin. He couldn’t have gone gray overnight, could he?
“Is he sleeping?” I asked. I spoke quietly; I didn’t want to wake him.
“Very deeply,” Mrs. Dunready explained. “But we should wake him. We’re waking him every ten minutes now.” She stood by Lucas’s shoulder and gently shook him.
Lucas dutifully shifted, then regulated his breathing without fully gaining consciousness. “Lucas,” his mom said. “Open your eyes.” She lifted a cup with a straw from the table by his bed. “Drink something,” she said. She put the tip of the straw into his mouth. “It’s apple juice. Your favorite.”
Lucas tightened his lips around the straw, which darkened as juice passed through it. He opened his eyes. “Hey, Mom,” he said. I wondered if he knew where he was. If he was thinking he was in the other hospital he had described. His hand lifted and closed around her wrist. He looked up into her eyes. He said “Mom” again.
When I heard the way he said that word, so tenderly, I knew he was scared. Mrs. Dunready brushed Lucas’s hair off his forehead. “Your friends are here,” she said.
Lucas looked over at us, smiled wanly, then closed his eyes. Mrs. Dunready set a timer on her digital watch. “That’s about all he’s got right now,” she said.
“Whoa,” said Dexter.
Dexter and I sat in the room all morning, taking turns waking Lucas on a ten-minute schedule, listening to his mom ask every doctor who dropped in for a meeting of the whole team, which eventually was set for three, when Dr. Katz would be available.
My mom and Val showed up at lunchtime. Mom peeked through an opening in the curtain, saying, “Yoo-hoo!” Val followed her with a white shopping bag with handles made of silk ribbon, saying, “Debussy’s, anyone?” As if Lucas’s mom would know who Val was and the name of the Parisian-style sandwich shop she and my mom had just discovered.
But in the panic-meets-dreariness hospital context, Val’s cluelessness and my mom’s professional cheer came as a huge relief. At least for me. My mom’s freshly dry-cleaned cashmere sweater dress, Val’s funky glasses, the unfortunate Hush Puppies Val loves because they’re comfortable—this was my real life, my life before Lucas, my life when it was just my mom and Val, who thought everything I did was perfect, who believed nothing for me could ever go wrong.
At least the sandwiches gave us all something to talk about, with Mrs. Dunready debating between hard-boiled egg and ham, and Dex lifting the top of his tomato and mozzarella baguette, saying, “If you stuck this in the oven, you’d be inventing French bread pizza.” Mrs. Dunready drank half a bottle of Evian by herself and saved a roast beef and Boursin cheese baguette for Mr. Dunready.
Lucas didn’t eat the tuna salad Val had brought for him. Or even the chocolate mousse. He took two sips of broth and went back to sleep.
Dexter went back to school.
My mom and Val went back to their offices.
And suddenly, things got quiet and still.
Mrs. Dunready’s head was drooping when a nurse came in and put a hand on her shoulder. “No one’s in the lounge, Maureen,” the nurse said. “You’ll better understand what’s going on in the meeting if you’re at least a little rested. We’ll send someone to you before the doctor comes. You’ve been up all night.”
Mrs. Dunready stood. “You’ll wake him?” she said to me.
I nodded. The nurse explained what they’d already told Dexter and me that morning. They had Lucas’s vital signs displayed on a monitor at the desk, and a reminder alarm would sound at ten-minute intervals. It was better to have someone he knew waking him, but if I somehow forgot, we’d be cover
ed.
I woke him at 1:13 and again at 1:23. But then, at 1:30, Lucas’s eyes opened on their own. I was watching his face, so I saw his eyelids flutter. He said something I couldn’t understand.
I leaned in closer. “What?” I said.
“Juice,” he said.
I reached for the apple juice, which I’d just refreshed with new ice chips. I held the straw to his lips. He drank.
“It’s almost over,” he said. I was so focused on the here and now, on the job of waking him every ten minutes, on things like ice chips and the doctors’ meeting, that at first I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“The dream,” he said. I ducked my head. I knew I needed to be strong for him and listen, but considering everything else going on, I didn’t know if I could.
I wondered if I should explain that I’d told his mom about his memories, that he didn’t have to lie to her anymore, but before I could speak, he was talking.
“I know what happens when the bomb goes off,” he said.
“You saw?” I was trying to sound casual, but my hand was shaking. I could hear the ice sloshing in the paper cup. I put it down.
“I’ve been dreaming the same thing over and over. First just fragments, shards. The boy. A desk. The ceiling in the stairwell. Then other shards. Then they start to connect. It’s like my brain’s putting a puzzle together.
“Right before the bomb went off,” he went on, “there was a second, probably, between when I saw the boy and when I felt the explosion. That was important, that second. That was when everything became clear.”
“What became clear?” My voice was rising in panic.
“The desk I’ve been dreaming about. I know where it’s from now. It was in the room, with the boy, lying on its side. It must have been used to barricade the door, but then we pushed it aside when we came in. And in that second when I knew the boy was holding a bomb, I dove for it. The desk.” He laughed. “As if it could save me.
I Remember You Page 16
