The Lost Queen of Crocker County: A Novel

by Elizabeth Leiknes

  Three: If I had to pick one day to relive over and over again, I would pick this one, with one major revision—Bliss would wake up.

  “What stories have you told her?” Rob says while staring, defeated, through the mud-splattered windshield. “That’s what you do, right? Tell stories?”

  “I’ve still got a lot of stories.”

  “What happens when you run out?”

  Both of us stare straight ahead, watch Bill Murray and Andi MacDowell dance in a gazebo as slow, fat snow falls.

  In the background above the drive-in screen, a falling star streaks across the black sky. I look at Rob, still staring straight ahead at dancing, happy people, larger than life, and I realize he missed the falling star. But this is his star, his shot at a wish, and since I can’t have a second chance, I use my wish on him.

  Listen to me, star—this one’s for Rob Anderson. Give this man what he needs. Make Bliss wake up, and let him find love again. With someone worthy of him.

  Bill Murray delivers his last bit of dialogue, tells us that it’s finally happened, that today has become tomorrow.

  The credits begin to roll, and Rob and I are forced to let this day come to an end, with nothing but a very uncertain tomorrow in our future. I look to the sky one last time, wait for the unlikely event of another shooting star, my own cosmic second chance, but all I see is a sky full of the brightest stars I’ve ever seen.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Rob Anderson sits next to a still Bliss while the warm, hopeful sun dares to pour through the hospital-room window.

  “Hey, Rob,” I say, peeking my head through the cracked hospital door, and search for signs, anything that will tell me if he regrets kissing me last night. I walk through the door, walk over to where he is slumped, defeated, in the chair next to Bliss’s bed. Something has happened. The way he looks between slow blinks, the way his hands, strong and capable, gently touch Bliss’s face, send a chill through my weary body. I look at him and feel outrageous things, like how I want to ride on the tractor again with him saying nothing at all. How I want to drink coffee with him early in the morning, before the sunlight shines a harsh light on impossible dreams, and I want to save Bliss and somehow be a part of this broken family. When I look at him again, I see True City’s chief of police, the man who will soon arrest me for hit and run. Just yesterday, he told me, told Kate, that he was making his case and wouldn’t stop until he found out who hurt his Bliss. I believe him, because I can feel it already. Rob Anderson is the good man who will never forgive me for this lying charade.

  “Statistically speaking…” he says to me, to the universe, as he stares out the window at the parking lot below. The unfinished sentence trails out of him, lingers in the sterile hospital air as an audible manifestation of one man’s rock bottom. “Statistically speaking,” he repeats, just like the doctors must have, “her chances of regaining consciousness are now very slim. It’s day twenty-one,” he whispers. “Three weeks.” He shuts his eyes, some sort of brief respite from a moment too heavy to bear all at once. “Time’s up,” he says, his voice breaking now.

  Chances are slim. Chances. Where are you, Dad? Where are you, Harold Hill?

  Rob could see the confusion in my eyes. But she was showing progress. But she was getting better. But she was coming back to life.

  He regurgitates what the doctor must have said. “This happens sometimes. A coma patient will have a short burst of activity, often all in one day, almost like some godforsaken, cosmic last hurrah, often signaling the end,” he says, staring at the shiny, buffed floor, a mirror for his dismal reflection. “And then, just like that…” But he is unable to speak anymore.

  I wondered why the doctor had been less than enthusiastic when Bliss had shown us a flurry of activity. He knew what we didn’t, what we weren’t willing to see. His job is to consider numbers, facts, statistics. That is to say, she is not his Bliss.

  The doctor walks in, clinging to his clipboard, moving slower than usual, probably postponing what he has to say with each exaggerated step. He looks as sad as a doctor can look. “Good morning,” he says, the declaration sounding ridiculous to all of us, including him. He walks to Bliss, shines a light in her eye, pokes her arm with some sharp-looking tool, and as if he knows what’s going to happen—nothing—he abandons the routine, stops, takes a big breath.

  “Don’t say ‘statistically speaking,’” Rob says, adding, “She’s not a statistic.” He pauses. “She’s all I have left.” I want to tell him that’s not true—he has me. And he still has her; he just doesn’t know it yet. She will wake up.

  The doctor raises his chin, pulls back his shoulders, looks like he’s trying to remember taking notes on this in medical school, some unit of study on grieving in which you learn how to tell a father his only child is going to die. “This is a very difficult prognosis to deliver.” He transfers his clipboard from one hand to another, giving him another two seconds before having to deliver the final blow. “Her pupils are unresponsive…and she’s not responding to painful stimuli anymore. It’s my job to tell you that, statistically, when these things happen”—he quickly adds historically like it’s somehow better—“historically, only 4 percent of coma patients recover consciousness after three weeks.”

  The doctor looks to me. “You’re the therapist, right?” When I nod, he adds, “She can attest to the same…data.” With the agility of a trained bad-news deliverer, he cuts his losses, prepares to move on to the next patient on his rounds. “I recommend getting a good night’s sleep and considering…tomorrow…making a decision.”

  Nobody is having trouble filling in the doctor’s words after he walks out the door, but I am the only one who isn’t accepting them.

  I start in, tucking Bliss’s hair behind her ear and smoothing her blanket. “That’s just one person’s opinion, Rob. Doctors are wrong all the time—”

  “Why do you care so much?” He’s now resorted to staring at his hands, folded in a half-abandoned prayer formation. “I’m serious.” He takes off in a new, angrier direction. “How dare you tell me how to feel? You walked in here out of nowhere… You know nothing about me…or Bliss.” He turns his head now, like he can’t bear to look at me. “Take your paycheck. Go home. This can’t be the first patient you couldn’t save.”

  His words shoot through me, send a sharp pain to my center. Does he really mean what he’s saying? Does he want me to leave? I look away and catch my breath. The reality is that I truly don’t know why I care so much. It now goes beyond the accident, beyond my feeling responsible. When I look at her, I want her to have the life I never can. I want to be her Harold Hill, help her realize her dreams, help her Believe so, even in the darkest of times. I want to revive my own forgotten dreams, will my dreams onto hers.

  So why do I care? There is no way to answer his question. There is no way to explain that I cannot give up on her, that I am responsible not only for her pain, but for something far beyond that, something that inexplicably feels like her happiness.

  “She’s going to wake up,” I say, standing by her side. “I just have to find the right words to—”

  “The right fucking words?” Rob Anderson explodes out of the chair. “What the hell is wrong with you? She’s gone! My baby girl is gone!” he cries, and with anger that has to go somewhere, he walks to the hospital door and punches it. “God…damn it,” he says, cradling his crumpled fist.

  “Oh my God.” I run to him, perusing the damage. “I’ll get some ice,” I say, but before I can get out the door, I run into someone coming in.

  “Charlotte!” I say as she walks in with Janelle and Connor. Panicked, I back up into the room, trying to pretend I’m not hiding behind the pink curtain dividing Bliss’s room from the adjoining one.

  She stares first at Rob and his throbbing hand, then back at me. I am now resigned to my whole world unraveling—me going to jail directly and losing Cha
rlotte, again, and Bliss drifting, uncontested, into oblivion.

  Charlotte’s face contorts into a scrunched-up confusion. “Janie?” she whispers, walking over to me.

  “Kate,” I say, my eyes wide and pleading. “Kate Snelling.” I extend my hand. “I’m here from the, uh, National Institute for In-Transition”—I sigh—“Coma Patients.”

  “Mom?” Janelle says, daggers back. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Let’s go out into the hall, um…” Charlotte searches for my fake name.

  “Kate,” I say, closing my eyes for a chance to swim in the blackness that is this nightmare.

  “Okay, Kate,” she forces out, raised eyebrows now pointing toward the door. “Let’s go out here, and I can introduce you to my daughter, a good friend of Bliss’s.”

  Rob, elevating his hand, jumps into the tension. “Do you two know each other?”

  “No,” both Charlotte and I say.

  “Totally,” Janelle snarls.

  “I, uh, met her a couple of days ago when you stepped out, Rob, but I just…forgot her name.”

  Rob takes turns staring at the two of us. “I’m…gonna…go get some ice,” he says and heads toward the door.

  When Rob leaves, Connor stands paralyzed, staring at Bliss, and Janelle, already wiping her eyes, walks over to the bed. “Hey, Blissy.”

  Charlotte spits out questions in loud, incredulous whispers. “Why are you wearing a wig? What are you doing here? How did Rob hurt his hand? Has Bliss moved at all today or talked or—”

  “No,” I say, touching my fake hair. “She hasn’t shown any response for two days, but she’s going to wake up; it’s just a matter of time.”

  Charlotte looks into my eyes the way a lifelong friend can and sees me in all my deceitful glory. She softens, waits for her oldest friend to tell her the truth. “You don’t even know Bliss. What’s going on, Janie?”

  Connor, Janelle, and Charlotte all stare at me, the stranger standing before them. “I…I did something unforgivable, and I’m trying to make it right.”

  “Janie? You’re freaking me out!” Charlotte says, but she’s interrupted by a knock on the hospital door.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” the nurse says and scurries in, carrying a new IV bag.

  “It’s okay,” Charlotte says, staring at her two solemn, red-faced children. “We were just leaving.” Charlotte looks at me. “When you want to tell me what’s going on”—she pauses, then adds “Kate” in a tone so sad I want to throw myself out the hospital-room window—“you know where to find me.” She collects her children, stops in front of the door, her back turned on me for once. “You always have.”

  I stand in the middle of the room, feeling more alone than I have in eighteen lonely years.

  “Ms. Snelling?” The nurse stops what she’s doing, stares at me with a nurturing concern that I both admire and detest. “Gettin’ pretty tense in here.”

  “What gave it away?” I say, still standing on my island of shame.

  “Let’s see,” she says, hanging Bliss’s IV bag on a small hook. “A grieving father’s injured fist, a coma patient who hasn’t so much as moved a finger in three days, and some serious tension between you and that red-headed lady.”

  She finishes her tasks and orders me to sit down. I am tired. She is convincing. So I sit.

  “Look, I don’t know much, but after watching you here for the last three weeks, I know one thing for sure—this girl means a hell of a lot more to you than just a patient on your list, and I’m not asking questions; you obviously have your reasons.” She walks closer to me. “I just want to say that I admire what you tried to do.”

  We both stare at Bliss, breathing in and out, wherever she is.

  “And it’s none of my business, but…” She folds her hands like she’s trying to will herself not to say any more. “But I see the way Mr. Anderson looks at you, and, well…”

  I turn to her, my silence asking her to tell me something, anything that doesn’t sound like how much he hates me, or should hate me.

  She unfolds her hands, puts them in her uniform pockets. “It’s like a little of the grief disappears from his face when you’re in the room.” She smiles. “Those lilacs… He asked me to bring them from my yard, because he said you like them. This whole town’s seen him go through a lot: first, his wife, now Bliss.” She stops, one eyebrow raised in a hopeful arch. “We’re all rootin’ for him, you know, that he’ll find love again.” Her face is soft but serious. “He’s a good man.”

  The lilacs are bursting out of an old mason jar, and their scent fills the room with memories of Mother. Be nice.

  “Have you ever wanted to will someone back to life?” I ask nicely.

  I expect her answer to be every patient she’s ever lost, or her mother, or some favorite aunt, but instead she nods, says, “It’s not a someone, per se.” Her eyes filled with tears now.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, it’s okay.” She blinks away her tears. “It’s so silly. I know she was just a dog.” She laughs. “I must sound crazy, crying about a dead dog.”

  “No, not at all. She was part of your family. Family is important,” I say, trying to control my own emotions as I think of my parents, my only family, gone forever. I take this kind woman’s hand. “I’m so sorry. When did you lose your…”

  “Allie,” she says. “Short for Alabaster. Prettiest white Akita I’ve ever seen.” She takes a deep breath. “Happened three weeks ago. Was my fault. I let her out after nine…way later than I usually do. That damn blacktop is a deathtrap after nightfall.” Her voice breaks. “She got hit by a car. Same night as Bliss, just a half mile farther down the road. What are the odds?”

  And then my knees buckle and I need to sit down. Images from that night flood my foggy brain. The shadow moving across the road. My vision distracted by grief. The flash of white. Speak. Find the words. Ask her. “Who… Where do you live?”

  “I’m Melinda,” she says. “Melinda Stephens. Been staying with my folks since my divorce.”

  The Stephens’ farm. Blacktop road. After nine o’clock.

  Give me a sign, Universe. That was what I’d said. That was what I’d asked for, to find out what I was here for.

  I still don’t have an answer for that, but I am one step closer to the truth.

  “I gotta go.” I give Melinda the most apologetic hug I can give. “I’m so sorry,” I say, and I mean it. “Tell Rob I’ll be back,” I say, gathering my things before giving Bliss one last kiss on her forehead.

  “Wait for me,” I whisper to her. “I’m coming back for you.”

  • • •

  I jump in Dad’s truck, drive home in a blur, run through the front door, out to the garage, and lift back the tarp covering the Aston Martin. When I’d covered the car three weeks ago, I’d been too devastated, too afraid to look closely at the damage because that meant looking closely at what I’d done. But here it is now, evidence waiting patiently for me to find the courage to look for its truth.

  The tarp flies back, revealing the front bumper, and the dent I vaguely remember seeing is still there, but there is something else—barely visible, but there. I crouch down, glide my trembling hand over the bottom edge of my California license plate until I feel it. Lodged between the left side of the license-plate frame and the underbelly of the chrome bumper is a perfect little tuft of silky white fur.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  INT. THE MIDDLE—TODAY

  FADE IN: Auditorium

  BLISS watches her life play out on the big screen. The crowded audience watches with her and eats popcorn. The screen shows BLISS and her boyfriend MITCH in his truck parked on a dark gravel road.

  BLISS

  (breathless)

  Can we slow down?

  MITCH

  (kis
ses her harder)

  Shh. You love it and you know it.

  BLISS

  (louder)

  Please, Mitch. It’s not that I don’t want to do it…just not yet. It’s only been a few weeks and…

  MITCH

  (drunk and agitated)

  What the hell, Bliss! We had fun at the party… I like you… Why are you being so lame?

  BLISS

  (lowers head)

  Why are you being such a dick?

  MITCH

  (grabbing her)

  You don’t mean that, baby.

  BLISS

  (trying to push him away)

  Just stop it, Mitch.

  MITCH

  (reaching under her skirt)

  I can think of plenty of girls who would just love to…

  BLISS

  (disgusted, reaches for the door handle)

  I’d rather walk home, thank you.

  MITCH

  (angrier now)

  Come on, Bliss!

  (anger turns to worry)

  I’m in deep shit if you walk home in the dark.

  BLISS

  (walking with a purpose down the side of the road)

  Go home, Mitch. Have a good time. You’ll make a better date for yourself than me.

  MITCH

  (accelerating, talking through the open passenger-door window)

  Goddamn it, Bliss. Get back in the truck! I’m serious! None of this ever happened, do you understand me? Not the party, not this bullshit in the truck, not you running back home like a crazy bitch. Now get back in the car, and we’ll get our stories straight. I’m not getting in trouble over this.

  The audience watches in horror as the big screen shows BLISS running faster down the road and a panicked MITCH accelerate one last time, and swerve, out of control, toward BLISS.

  BLISS gets out of her seat, the only person standing in the auditorium. She stares at the big screen, then lowers her head for a moment, a sort of realization of where she is, where she isn’t.

  BLISS