Kiss

by Ted Dekker

  “He’s on his way back.”

  “So I hear.”

  Wayne didn’t say anything to that. Really, what could he say? Shauna didn’t wish her family’s dysfunctional dynamics on anyone.

  “Thank you for all you’ve done these last few days.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I feel really bad about . . . about not . . .”

  Wayne placed a finger on her lips, giving her a light static shock. She flinched. He looked surprised, then grinned.

  “Don’t worry about any of that,” he said. “We’ll figure it out as we go. Right now, you have bigger things to worry about.”

  He placed his free hand between her shoulder blades and guided her into the office, rubbing her back gently.

  Dr. Siders was already there, his gangly body folded into a chair too small for him. The office had been painted uninspiring shades of mauve and green that failed to calm her. The colors clashed with the hyper arrangement of chairs and a chaos of paperwork on every flat surface.

  “I’ll wait outside,” Wayne said.

  “You can stay.”

  “This is your private business,” Wayne said. “Tell me as much or as little as you want later. I’ll be here for you.”

  His sensitivity took the edge off her nerves. She would press for information about Rudy until they told her what she wanted to hear or discharged her.

  Dr. Millie Harding, a devil-may-care psychiatrist with frizzy red hair and glowing lipstick, crossed paths with Wayne at the door, then greeted Shauna with a kind touch on the shoulder.

  Shauna hardly noticed it.

  “You promised to tell me about Rudy,” she said to Dr. Siders.

  “Absolutely, Shauna. But you’re our main concern right now. Let us bring you up to speed on our evaluations, and then—”

  “I’ve spent three days imagining the worst.”

  “You’ve had a terrible crisis to face,” Dr. Harding said. Her gravelly voice suggested she had smoked for decades. “Memory loss is catastrophic enough to process. One thing at a time, dear.”

  “If someone would just say, ‘Rudy’s fine,’ I would—”

  The door opened again and sucked in a rumpled man straight from the eighties. He wore a tan corduroy blazer and sage green tie. His sandy brown hair stood in a wave off his forehead.

  Dr. Siders stood. “Rudy’s fine. Shauna, allow me to introduce Dr. Will Carver.”

  “You look remarkable, Ms. McAllister,” Dr. Carver said, taking his hands in and out of his trousers’ pockets. He did not sit when Dr. Siders did. “We’re so pleased.”

  “Dr. Carver is the clinical sponsor-investigator overseeing the administration of new drugs to you during your coma, Shauna.”

  “New drugs?”

  “From a trial still in its earliest stages. Your father was able to enroll you under expanded-access protocols—”

  “My father.”

  Dr. Carver hesitated.

  Dr Siders said, “You realize that this hospital is closely affiliated with McAllister MediVista’s research and development.”

  Shauna had not known this.

  “What protocols, again?”

  “Expanded-access,” Dr. Carver said. “In the simplest terms, these are reserved for exceptional situations in which physicians believe the promise of some experimental drug, even in the earliest stages of development, holds out a patient’s only hope of recovery.”

  “We couldn’t explain why you slipped into a coma at all,” Dr. Siders said. “You had no evidence of brain injury, and no other explanation for your condition.”

  “It is possible for a drug overdose to push a person into a coma,” Dr. Carver said. Dr. Siders frowned at him.

  “Overdose?” Shauna echoed.

  “A blood test showed traces of MDMA in your system, enough to make you unsafe on the road—”

  “MD what?”

  “Ecstasy. It’s impossible to know how much you actually had—”

  “I never had any !” Even though she couldn’t remember, Shauna knew in the deepest part of her that she never would have done such a thing. Never.

  Would she?

  “The tests were quite—”

  Dr. Siders held up two hands. “Let’s slow this train down. No one is being attacked here.”

  Dr. Carver raised his eyebrows but finally sat and let Dr. Siders take over the explanation.

  “When your coma entered its second week, Senator McAllister ordered the pharmaceutical branch of MMV to take your case. Coma patients’ chances of full recovery decline sharply after five weeks. Even without a brain injury to worry about, everyone was pressed with the need to bring you around, if we could, before then.”

  Shauna was sure her father’s campaign had applied most of the pressure. MMV would’ve loved to get their hands on her in the midst of a presidential campaign. It made sense, at least when it came to generating sympathy for the frontrunner. That kind of medical breakthrough in a personal crisis would be huge for soft-hearted voters.

  Dr. Carver cleared his throat. “We’ve been testing the applications of a new drug cocktail in trauma patients, and we believed it might stimulate your brain out of its coma. We theorized that your brain shut down as the result of some kind of overwhelming shock rather than physical injury.”

  “You’re saying my brain couldn’t handle a simple car accident?”

  “It was hardly simple, Ms. McAllister, but yes. This was the idea anyway.”

  “And your psychological tests so far have supported this,” Dr. Harding said.

  Dr. Carver continued. “The cocktail includes a complex combination of antianxiety meds, including propranolol and D-cycloserine—you’ve heard of these?” Shauna shook her head. “It’s got a few other things in there too. These were originally developed to treat conditions like hypertension, but they’ve been successful in recent years in treating victims of violent crimes, war injuries, that sort of thing. They reduce patients’ stress and speed up their recovery time.”

  “By erasing memories?” she asked.

  Dr. Harding shook her head hard enough to give her mass of curls a lift.

  “No no no. Though that kind of technology isn’t so far out of reach anymore. No, these drugs work by suppressing the intensity of the emotions associated with your memory. Their impact becomes less traumatic over the long term.”

  Less traumatic than what the last three days had been like?

  “And these drugs work two weeks after the event?”

  Dr. Carver crossed his arms. “In your case it did, though that was an unknown. MMV’s formula is unique in that it also incorporates the latest pharmacogenomics technology.” He hesitated, as if explaining it to her might be an insult. She was, after all, the daughter of MMV’s founder and president. When she blinked, he continued, “That means we adapt the chemical balance of the drugs to match your personal response to each element—a response determined by your unique genetic code.”

  Shauna blinked again.

  “You messed with my genes?”

  Dr. Carver chuckled, which Shauna found irritating. “No, we ‘messed with’ the drugs, based on what we know about your genes.”

  The weight of her already heavy heart grew. She had taken drugs—unbelievable—and been given drugs, and now her mind was a black hole she might never climb out of. Her hands began to tremble. She wished Wayne had stayed.

  “It’s complicated, but progressive. We’ll keep you on the regimen for several more weeks, then taper it off while we monitor your recovery. It’s important that we keep the chemical balance of your brain stable. I’ll come by later to go over each medication with you.”

  “Overall,” Dr. Siders said, “your recovery couldn’t be going more smoothly. You’re already progressing faster than we expected.”

  “You mean physically.”

  “You had extremely minor injuries for such a violent accident. Some trauma to your abdomen, glass cuts mostly. We think that happened post-accident,
when you escaped the car. But no internal injuries. Not even a broken bone.”

  “You might have the Ecstasy to thank for that,” said Dr. Carver. Shauna’s cheeks warmed. Was it possible? Why couldn’t she remember ? Her despair took on the bonus element of frustration.

  “What about my mind?”

  The men turned to Dr. Harding. “Think of your mind as shielding you from something it knows you can’t handle yet,” she said.

  “You think the trauma of the accident caused my memory loss?”

  “It’s the most convincing culprit.”

  “Not all these experimental drugs?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “But when will I remember?”

  “When your mind is ready. It’s not something you can force or rush.”

  “How can I . . . help it along?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  Shauna wasn’t sure. But if she had to decide in this moment, she would lean toward the affirmative. She might die by falling into this gaping hole of nothingness. More important, their silence regarding Rudy could only mean that she was responsible for some horrible tragedy, some unspeakable harm she had done to him. She should be punished for it! And if they refused to punish her, she would do it herself by remembering every detail.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Carver cleared his throat.

  Dr. Harding tilted her head to one side and contemplated her answer for several moments.

  “For many people, amnesia is traumatic in the beginning, and then they find it to be more of a mercy. I’m not sure how it will be for you, but if you can find a way to embrace this, if you can think of your situation as something not entirely bad, you put yourself in the most positive frame of mind.”

  “Not entirely bad?”

  “A clean slate. A new beginning.”

  Shauna shook her head, unsure how else to respond. She could imagine how some kind of selective obliteration of certain memories might be merciful. But a gaping hole in the past? That didn’t make sense to her.

  Dr. Harding seemed to see that Shauna wasn’t convinced. The redheaded psychiatrist leaned toward her and spoke more slowly. “Then . . . I suggest you face forward. Look forward down the road of your life rather than over your shoulder. Don’t try too hard to remember. Leave the past behind you and let your mind decide when it’s ready to revisit your history.”

  “I should do nothing, you mean.”

  “Not exactly. Pick up in life wherever it was you remember leaving off. I can help you with this. Let your memory, if it chooses, reconstruct itself in context.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What are some threads that you might be able to hang on to or revisit? A church, a job, a social scene, a hobby, a boyfriend?”

  Shauna lifted her hands, at a loss. All her life she had kept herself at a distance from close friendships. Mostly, the choice had been a coping mechanism for her, a way of shielding herself from pain upon pain, a way of conserving her emotional energy. She had reduced her world to a small, manageable size. Now she wished she hadn’t.

  “I don’t . . . I can’t . . .” She shook her head. “Wayne Spade?” He was far more a question than an answer in her own mind.

  Dr. Harding folded her hands across her lap. “Tell me about Wayne.”

  “I don’t know much to tell.”

  “Then maybe that’s where you should begin.”

  Maybe. Maybe? Was that all these people were good for, pronouncing one possibility after the other, never certainty? When would she get the answers she needed? The real answers, not these speculations?

  She had been patient for long enough now. It would end here, beginning with her most urgent question of all.

  “When will I see Rudy?”

  Dr. Siders set his charts beside him and leaned forward. “As soon as we know—”

  “What is so hard about my questions about my brother? I’m asking for the most basic level of information—”

  “Shauna, when you’re ready to—”

  “I’m ready now! I want to see him now !”

  Shauna’s frustration dissolved into gut-wrenching tears. If only Rudy were here to calm her. Without him, without her memory of that terrible night, she was lost.

  “What did I do? What happened that is so awful no one can talk to me about it? I deserve to know the truth!”

  She put her hands in her hair and gripped it by the roots. Rudy hadn’t come to see her in the days since she’d come out of this coma. That fact alone should have been all the information she needed to confirm the monstrosity of her situation.

  She lifted her head and stared at them through blurred eyes. The room tipped. Dr. Harding was shaking her head and saying something, but Shauna could only hear her own guilt, screaming at her. She closed her eyes and saw nothing but Rudy.

  In a gasp for air she heard Dr. Siders say, “We’ve got to sedate her.”

  She shook her head and moaned. Rudy. Rudy.

  When a needle penetrated the thickest muscle in Shauna’s upper arm, she welcomed the pain. She allowed it to cover and quiet her grief.

  Dr. Harding’s coarse voice reached Shauna’s ears at the same time the sedative reached her brain. “You’re all fools.”

  Millie Harding barreled down the hall after Will Carver, taking one stride for the pharmacologist’s every three.

  “What was all that in there?” Millie asked.

  Carver pulled up and turned on his heel, saw who it was, then resumed his walk without answering. She caught him in four more strides.

  “Were you and Siders planning to tell her everything?”

  “I thought that’s what you were doing.”

  Millie got in Carver’s way, hands on hips. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re going to hand her memory to her on a silver platter?”

  “I was perfectly misleading. And I didn’t give her any ideas that will actually help her recall what happened.”

  “I’ll be the one to decide that.”

  “No you won’t. I don’t even get to decide anything except whether I want to get paid at the end of the day.”

  “We’ll all get paid. But only if we behave like professionals.”

  Millie grabbed the arm of Carver’s jacket, stopping him. “You two might want to become better liars.”

  Carver jerked his sleeve out of Millie’s grip. “The only lies that ever really work are the ones that can actually be mistaken for the truth.” He stalked off. “Don’t question me again.”

  3

  A light touch on her brow stroked away the pounding in Shauna’s head. She opened her eyes onto her hospital room, dimmed by evening hours.

  Wayne was leaning over her. “Shauna?”

  Exhaustion weighed her down.

  “They told me what happened.” She focused on the face of the man who, so far, had been her only ally. If she committed his high temples, narrow cheeks, and square chin to mind, maybe she would remember him. Maybe she could find her way back to the truth.

  There were all those maybes again.

  “You know, your Uncle Trent was supposed to be the one to explain all this to you.”

  “All what?”

  “Everything about Rudy. Everything that I don’t know and the docs won’t say.”

  “Why hasn’t he?”

  Wayne shrugged. “My guess is he doesn’t want you to have to deal with so many issues all at one time.”

  “And so everyone thinks that it’s more beneficial to stew over the grim possibilities rather than face reality?”

  Wayne raised his eyebrows as if to say, It’s twisted, I know.

  “We’re a backward group, my family.”

  “Each family is, in its own way.”

  “Trent Wilde isn’t even really my uncle, you know that? He’s Landon’s best friend.”

  Wayne nodded. “But he’s always proven himself worthy of the endearment.”

  “Except for instances such as these, yes.
I can’t hold it against him. He means well.”

  Shauna shifted in the bed and heard a clank of metal on metal. Something pinched her ankle. What on earth? She lifted her blanket. A leather strap was cinched low on her right leg, and its metal clasp locked onto a bed rail.

  A padlock? Was this legal?

  She pointed to the strap. “Does this fall into the category of ‘so many issues’?”

  “We have some business to take care of before you go home.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Dr. Siders told you about the Ecstasy?”

  “Dr. Carver did.”

  “There was also some in your car. And in your loft.”

  Her home? Patrice’s accusation that she had harmed Rudy intentionally landed on Shauna’s mind like a jumping spider.

  “How much?”

  “Not much, but enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “They’re charging you with possession and reckless endangerment.”

  “But they’re just now locking me up?”

  “You got a little . . . hysterical earlier. They thought it was necessary.”

  Every revelation was a fresh betrayal, a concussive blow to what she might have believed about herself. How much more was she guilty of?

  “What else don’t I know?”

  “Um . . . there’s a guard outside your door.”

  Shauna’s mouth fell open. “What do the charges mean?”

  “There will be a trial. You’ve already been indicted.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want a trial. I don’t even know what I did. I can’t even deny anything.”

  Wayne reached for her hand. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her to his shoulder. Her forehead pressed into his cheek, and she was comforted by the warmth of his skin. Resting like this, it wasn’t at all hard for her to believe she’d been close to him before.

  The cologne he wore was faint and breezy. She couldn’t name it.

  Shauna closed her eyes. She would stay here as long as he would allow her to, leaning into his warmth . . .

  Not warm, hot. His skin was hot, like he had a fever, but dry. Did he notice this heat? Before she could mention it, before she could straighten up, her face seemed to be consumed by a blaze, a flash of energy so hot that she thought her skin had burned.