Blink Once

by Cylin Busby

  I realized he thought I had meant Olivia from our school.

  I put my fingers over the bandage. “Not her.” I shook my head and motioned to the pad and pen Mom had left beside the bed. I had been told not to talk too much, but it was pretty hard to get across what I wanted to say in just a word or two. I quickly wrote, Olivia Kemple, from the other hospital. Long dark hair, room next door.

  Mike took the pad from me and looked at it for a second, then looked up at me. “The girl next door to you, at Wilson?”

  I nodded and took the pad back to write more. I had assumed he would know I was talking about her—I don’t know why. Stupid mistake.

  “So your parents told you I visited you there,” he said as I kept writing.

  I put my fingers over the bandage. “I know.” I had to keep clearing my throat to talk, it wasn’t easy. I handed him back the pad, where I’d written more information about Olivia, and what I wanted him to tell her.

  “West—” Mike started to say something, then looked at me. His face was superserious. “See, this is what I’m talking about. You couldn’t know this girl from that hospital. It’s impossible. You must mean somebody else.”

  He handed me back the pad and gave me a sad look, like I was crazy now, or brain damaged.

  I covered my throat. “Can you call her? Now?”

  Mike shook his head. “Look, there’s no girl. You must have, like, I dunno, dreamed her up or something. Everyone on that floor was a vegetable, including you.”

  No, I wrote, with a ton of exclamation marks after it. I didn’t understand why he was being such a dick about this. Olivia, next door, room 203. Call her.

  Mike took the pad, read it, then closed his eyes and put his head down a second. “West, the whole place was people connected to machines. I know, I was there. It was pretty funny, cause I would bring in some tunes for you, and one time this nurse—”

  I interrupted him. “Norris.”

  “Anyway, she was like, ‘Can you turn that down,’ and I was like, ‘Did someone complain’—get it? Because there was no way any of those vegetables had a problem with me playing … wait, how did you know the nurse’s name? Big lady?”

  “Norris,” I said again. “I remember.” I took the pad and wrote, You played Water Gun album, you talked about a new girl you liked, Erin, who wore a skirt. I passed him the pad.

  “No … no, there’s no way.”

  Mom rounded the corner just as Mike looked like he was going to lose it. “Hi, boys! So nice to see you two together, like old times.” She smiled. Mike stood up, his face white.

  “Something really weird is going on. West remembers stuff. He remembers me coming there, and the music and even Erin’s skirt—this is freaking me out.” He spoke so quickly my Mom could barely follow what he was saying.

  “He remembers what?”

  “Everything! He remembers when I visited him, when he was in the coma, he knows the nurse who walked in! What she looked like—her name!”

  As Mike was talking I wrote more stuff down on the pad, but I stopped when I heard the word coma. Why did he say that? Had I been in a coma, maybe after the surgery? It didn’t make sense. I know every visit, when you all came and put me in the wheelchair, when you took me down the hall—I wasn’t a vegetable. I shoved the pad at Mom and pointed to the last sentence. “Tell him,” I said.

  Mike read it over Mom’s shoulder and they both looked at me. “Do you remember me coming to visit you?” Mom asked.

  I nodded and covered the gauze. “Harry Potter,” I rasped out. “A Separate Peace.”

  “Oh my God.” Mom had tears in her eyes. “Wait, I’ve got to go and get Dr. Louis if he’s still here. This is amazing. I can’t believe this!”

  Mike sat back down and shook his head. “I’m telling you, you were … gone. They had you hooked up to a bunch of machines. I wasn’t sure you were ever coming back.”

  I took the pad from his hands and wrote, No, I was awake. I was blinking for yes and no—you saw me! I want to call Olivia now.

  Mike looked at what I wrote and took a deep breath. “I don’t know….”

  I pointed to the phone and said, “Call Wilson now.”

  Mom and the doctor came back before Mike could pick up the phone. “So I hear you’ve got quite the recall from your time at the Wilson Center,” the doctor said. He leaned over me and checked my pupils with a pen light. “No headache?”

  I shook my head.

  “So you can remember your parents and friends visiting you while you were there?” I nodded, and he went on. “And specific things that were said to you?” I nodded again. He turned to Mom. “This is not unusual, actually, and it goes back to what I was saying earlier. He’ll start to have these memories, almost like a dream coming back to you in the morning. He may remember great detail about one incident or one day, then have several days or weeks that are completely absent. It’s the case with a level four or five coma; we don’t know much about when they are cognizant and when they aren’t, but it sounds like your boy had a lot of brain activity, which again doesn’t surprise me given his age and general good health.” He smiled at me, then patted my shoulder. “You’ll be surprised at what you can remember, but mostly you’ll surprise your family and friends, who thought they were talking to themselves.” He laughed. Mom and Mike both laughed, too, but I didn’t get what was so funny. Clearly they thought I had been in a coma or something—that I had been asleep, but I wasn’t. I remembered everything.

  “How about when Allie and I got in that fight? When she was complaining about my driving, and then I just left her there, and she had to wait for a ride—do you remember that?” Mike asked.

  Allie and Mike fighting, in my room, together? I searched my mind, I didn’t …

  “And that nurse came in, the bitchy one, and was like, ‘Visiting hours are over,’ and Allie was like, ‘This is all your fault,’ because we were late.” Mike paused and looked at my face, like he was looking for recognition. “And then she was trying to make it seem like I caused your accident, too, like I had dared you or something, and I didn’t talk to her for a month after that, just so you know.”

  I didn’t remember it at all.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “How about Uncle John and the boys, do you remember that?” Mom asked quickly. “They flew in just to see you; they would be so happy to know that you actually heard them and knew they were there.” Her face was so open and hopeful, I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t.

  I didn’t remember them coming.

  I didn’t remember even hearing about it.

  Why didn’t I remember?

  “Well, three months is a long time,” the doctor added. “Some of this will come back to him in time, and some won’t. The brain is an interesting organ; the way it heals is, in large part, still a mystery to us.”

  Mike and Mom were nodding, enthralled with what the doctor was saying, while I could only focus on one thing: I had been in a coma. The whole time at the other hospital. They were saying three months. But I remembered things too clearly. Or did I? Some days blurred together, sure. There were drugs and those terrible dreams and the hazy mornings when I felt like I couldn’t wake up. But then there was Olivia, and she always helped me to get it together, to feel alive.

  “Olivia,” I said, pulling Mike and Mom from their conversation with the doctor. “I want to call Olivia.” I pointed to the phone.

  “Okay, sweetie,” Mom said calmly, reaching for her cell. I saw Mike shaking his head. “You don’t have her number?” she asked him.

  “He says it’s a different Olivia. She’s at the hospital. She was next door to West.” Mike shrugged, then looked to the doctor.

  “I thought Olivia went to your school?”

  I shook my head. “Call,” I asked her. “Call Wilson. Olivia Kemple.”

  Mom looked over at the doctor as she got out her cell and dialed the hospital. The room was quiet for a moment until Mom started talki
ng. “Oh hi, this is Cathy Spencer. My son was a patient there… . Oh hello, yes, he’s doing wonderfully, thank you. He wanted to talk to another patient there”—Mom paused to look at me—“an Olivia Kemple.” Mom listened intently for a few seconds, then said, “And you’re sure this is Olivia Kemple?”

  “Room 203,” I said.

  “He says she’s in 203?” Mom added, then said, “Okay, well, thank you so much.”

  She clicked her phone shut and looked over to the doctor again. “Well, there is a patient there named Olivia Kemple, and you’re right, she’s in room 203, but how you know that, I have no idea.” Mom shook her head.

  “If she was in the room next door, he could easily have heard her name mentioned and remember that, or have a memory of voices in her room, people talking to her. There’s a variety of ways he could be aware of another patient,” the doctor started to explain.

  I covered my gauze. “I want to talk to her.”

  “I would really prefer if you used the pad for now, talking in a day or two,” the doctor reminded.

  “It’s okay,” Mom cut in, “he can’t talk to her. West, she’s a coma patient. They couldn’t put her on the phone.”

  “No,” I moaned. “No.” I felt sick. What had she done? She must have pulled out her feeding tube, done something to herself. What did she do? Then I suddenly realized, she didn’t think I was going to make it. She did something—tried to kill herself. I didn’t realize she was being so serious. I didn’t realize.

  “West.” Mom took my hand. “She’s in a coma, like you were. She’s been a patient there for two years.”

  “No,” I said. “I know her.” I was going to throw up. Something felt wrong. Something wasn’t right about the information they were all giving me. Someone was playing a joke. I hadn’t been in a coma. I just couldn’t move. Olivia wasn’t in a coma, I saw her: walking around, talking to me, to everybody. Nurse Norris would remember, she would back me up. I tried to think of a time when Norris had seen us together, or talked to Olivia. There was that night in the hallway, when she caught her, the night I had my first bad dream. But was that Olivia? I couldn’t see who she was talking to. I searched my mind: I couldn’t remember a time when Olivia was in my room and anyone else saw her; she always raced out when the nurses came, didn’t want to get caught, to get in trouble. And when people came to visit her … she never spoke. But that was only because she was angry. She was angry at her mom, at the doctors. But she did talk, sometimes, didn’t she? I couldn’t remember. Things weren’t adding up. But I knew her. I knew her voice, her face, her touch, the smell of her hair.

  “She’s not in a coma,” I said, and the doctor leaned over and handed me the pad and pen.

  “Writing for now, okay?” he said, like I was a little kid. “We want to let that incision heal up nicely.”

  I flung the paper across the room, sending the pen flying against the wall. “No, I want to talk to Olivia!” I rasped out. “Call again.”

  “Oh, honey,” Mom started to say, then she turned to the doctor. “What can we do?”

  “It’s normal to be frustrated, West,” he said to me. “In time, these memories that you have will weave together, and you’ll be able to make sense of them, but as you’re getting them now, in bits and pieces, I’m sure it’s confusing and—”

  I clamped my hand over the bandage and yelled: “Call her now.” It felt like something in my throat tore open. I tried to sit up, jerking the IV tube so hard I almost pulled the bag down. I barely felt it rip out of the back of my hand. I couldn’t just lie here and listen to these people talk about stuff they didn’t understand. I wanted to talk to Olivia.

  “Okay, let’s calm down,” the doctor said, pushing back on my shoulders, forcing me to lie back in the bed. I saw the slick warm blood where I had torn out my IV. “West, I need you to calm down, it’s okay.” Suddenly a nurse appeared in the doorway. “I need ten cc’s of fentanyl stat,” the doctor said. He used a different voice with her and she disappeared quick.

  Mom looked terrified. Mike stood beside her, his face ashen. “Take a deep breath,” the doctor said.

  “I just want you to call her,” I cried. “Just call her.” I started crying and couldn’t stop. Everything was ruined. Everything I’d been living for. The whole reason I wanted this surgery was to be with Olivia—to get to my old life back, but with her in it. And now she had done something terrible. I just needed to see her. “Just call her,” I said again, as the nurse returned with two male aides. They held me down while the doctor injected a needle into my thigh.

  “This will help you to calm down, West. When you wake up, you’re going to feel a lot better.” He turned to Mom. “This type of agitation is normal; it’s the central nervous system trying to get back on track after months of inactivity. It can take a while for things to settle down. You can let him go,” he told the two guys who were holding me. When they released me, I had no desire to fight; I couldn’t even form words. My tongue felt like putty, my head fell back, and I rolled into darkness.

  Chapter 23

  The next two weeks were awful, maybe the worst of my life. I had wanted so much to be better; I had wanted to regain feeling and movement so much that I had wished for it, focused on it, thought it into being. When I was in the hospital, it was all I could think about. Getting better, getting out, getting back to my old life. I even blocked out all the warnings from Olivia, from my mom. I pushed ahead for this, stubbornly, blindly, without considering anything or anyone else. But now that I was here, all I wanted to do was go back. Back to a place where Olivia was my only friend, where seeing her face could make my day, where hearing her voice was the only thing keeping me sane. A place where I could feel her touch, she could curl up beside me, be with me. Because now, that was impossible. And if I believe what everyone tells me, it never even happened. But I know it happened.

  A few days after Mike’s visit, I was moved into a rehabilitation center where specialists worked on my movement—walking, using my arms, talking, and fine motor skills. There were other patients there; they were all older than me. Some had been in accidents—one guy had been in a terrible car accident a year ago and was just now learning how to walk again. A lady Mom’s age who was there had a pretty bad stroke, half of her body didn’t seem to work right. It was interesting to hear everyone else’s story, what had brought them to this place, and I got the feeling most people considered me the star—I was the youngest and I had come out of a long coma. The other patients seemed really interested in that. About half of the patients lived at the center, and the other half just came in for appointments. “Pretty soon, that will be you,” one of the therapists told me. “You’ll go to outpatient pretty quickly if you work hard.”

  My days were full, from flash cards in the morning with a cognitive specialist to a walk on the treadmill, and then weights, protein drinks and meals packed with calories, Epsom salt baths and deep-tissue massage. Mom joked that I had the life of a pro-athlete now—my body was the priority. Getting it to work normally again was the goal. The doctors were working on my mind, too, but it was clear that what was wrong with me there would be much harder to fix. My memory had problems—big holes of time, lost to being in a coma (or so they told me) and damage to my central nervous system. I had visions of disturbing things sometimes, when I was falling asleep: a bloody girl lying on a sidewalk, a burned man’s face—things that I had no control over, visions that had nothing to do with my life or my accident. The psychologist they brought in told Mom I was “depressed.”

  It seemed like my body would return to normal. “You’re young,” the physical therapists all pointed out. “This will all come back to you, muscle memory.” Due to the synthetic bond they had used to fuse my vertebrae, I would never be able to touch my toes or tie my shoes standing up. My body would not bend that way completely, not ever again. I would be able to walk, hopefully someday without the jerky movements I made now, and I would be able to hold a pen. I would never be able t
o ride competitively again. I knew this and yet I didn’t care. My garage full of bikes and gear—the equipment I had saved months for, the trophies and titles—all seemed like they belonged to someone else. A kid, a dumb kid. I didn’t want any of it anymore. I told my mom to give it all Mike, if he wanted. Or to donate it. Nothing held any interest for me, least of all riding.

  “I just don’t understand why he isn’t happier, when we’re all happy for him,” Mom complained to the doctor. “It’s like he doesn’t understand how lucky he is.”

  “He’s a teenager. This is a difficult thing to live through, even for an adult. His life was already in transition, and now this on top of it. He will come through it, you’ll see.”

  For the first few days, I still talked about and asked about Olivia. Was it possible that she had been okay when I was there and then fallen into a coma later, after I left? The answer was no. Could she have also been in the lightest state of coma, stage five, like me, and that maybe we were more aware than people thought we were? Again, no. The more I asked about her, the more insane I seemed. Mom finally called the hospital and got the answers I thought I wanted. She found out that Olivia Kemple had been in a stage one coma for two years. There was no way I could have known her, could have talked to her. It was impossible. Yet I knew it had happened. And I had to find a way to get in touch with her, wherever she was. It was as simple as that.

  When they brought in a psychologist, I knew I was in trouble. They even interrupted my walking time on the treadmill for a meeting with her. In our first meeting, she asked a lot of pointed questions about my time in the hospital, and what I remembered. When we got around to Olivia, I tried to hold back. I knew that everyone thought I had imagined our entire relationship. That it didn’t happen, that it was a dream. And until I could prove them wrong, talking about Olivia just made me sound crazy. Maybe I was. But then I gave up. Because if I couldn’t tell a psychologist, who else could I talk to about it? Maybe she knew something I didn’t. Maybe she had some explanation for how this could have happened. How I fell in love with a girl I’d never met.