The Girl in a Coma

by John Moss

  Jaimie Retzinger used to say I have a wicked tongue and an evil temper. If he was right, then how come he still hangs around? Last week, out of the blue, he told me I’m beautiful. I mean, get serious. Anyway, it was only once. He could have been talking about the orchid on the table beside my bed. I imagine there’s an orchid with swooping white petals. There are probably no flowers in my room. I mean, what’s the point?

  It doesn’t matter. The orchid is real in my mind.

  Life hasn’t changed much since they moved me to Shady Nook. Mostly I lie here and think. At night, when it’s quiet, I lie here and dream. Until a few days ago, when I woke up, my dreams would fall apart, just like they did before Rebecca came into my life. She’s been so real she’s a part of me, the way your memories are from when you were a kid. I was inside her world. Like two hundred years ago. But I’m not anymore. If there’s such a thing as remembering blood—that’s what I call the memories we inherit—when they no longer shape who we are, we leave them behind and move on.

  Of course, I’m not moving much! But maybe that’s how it works, you have to take a bullet in the skull to make the past present. And then it becomes the past again. And then? Well, I don’t know, not yet.

  So.

  I’m in a stupidly named hospice. Jaimie is still around, I’m still alive, and Rebecca is gone.

  When I’m awake, I listen. That’s the only thing I can do. Listen. Or panic. And I refuse to panic.

  Jaimie Retzinger talks to me. But it’s like he’s talking to his television set.

  Before he saved my life, he was silent as the grave. Now he rattles on. For a while there, after I opened my eye, he thought I was going to rise up and do the polka. I didn’t, of course. I don’t know how to polka.

  Jaimie Retzinger has changed. He doesn’t study in my room anymore, like he did at the hospital. He says I’m a distraction. But he still comes in now and then to tell me what he’s been up to. Like, I’m a diary? Or maybe a sponge?

  I have mixed feelings about Jaimie Retzinger.

  My brother, David, is the only one who knows I can hear. Don’t ask me how. He just knows.

  He finished Grade Twelve this week.

  I was gearing up to drop out of school before I got shot. Now I’m kind of hanging in limbo. I was slinging double-doubles and doughnuts but I want to go back and finish school, go to university, then take a chef’s course at Sanford Fleming College. Sir Sanford, I think it is. He was a knight who invented time zones.

  I’d like to run a business of my own. I’ll call it “Allison’s Restaurant.”

  My mother doesn’t visit as much since I’ve come to Shady Nook. I understand that. A person has to get on with her life.

  She doesn’t believe I can hear. Same with the nurses. And my open eye doesn’t excite them. It doesn’t even blink when I try.

  The problem is, I can’t figure out how to let them know I’m in here and I really need to. Especially now.

  Listen!

  I’ve been in Shady Nook for a couple of months. Long enough to realize there’s too much death around here. I mean, yes, people die. It’s that kind of place. But there’s something going on that no one has noticed.

  Somebody is murdering patients.

  Someone is killing people like me.

  We aren’t actually patients. We’re called guests. Most of us are stuck in bed. At intervals, one of us dies. Nobody is surprised. I hear the nurses talking. If you listen, you can figure out what’s going on around here. And they talk about this guest and that guest dropping dead. There’s nothing suspicious about really sick people dying.

  But here’s the strange thing: one of us dies every seventeen days.

  There are other deaths of course, but for sure there’s one every seventeen days.

  And, glory, no one seems to have noticed but me.

  On the night after I arrived at Shady Nook, a cranky old lady died. Seventeen days later, a kid who stole a car and crashed it, he died. Everyone thought he was getting better. Seventeen days after that, a girl died. She was in a coma but stable, and then she stopped breathing, just like that. Last week a man with brain damage died. He couldn’t remember his own name but he was happy and he made people smile.

  It might be my turn next.

  Unless I can figure out who is killing us. And then figure out how to stop him. Or her. It might be a nurse. Most of my nurses are women.

  It would not be hard to murder me.

  I’m breathing on my own but I’ve got tubes going in and tubes coming out, and wires and monitors for everything. Cut them all off in the night and I’d probably be dead by morning. That’s what Russell Miller tried to do. He was never going to slit my throat, only his own. Or maybe you could smother me with a pillow. No one expects me to live, anyway.

  The killer couldn’t do it during the daytime. Nurses are wandering around. The door is left open. I have a roommate. They have to look after both of us. Anyway, they keep our curtains open and our lights on during the day in case visitors come. It would be too depressing if we were lying here in the dark.

  My roommate is Doris Blonski. She’s a year older than me. She’s in a coma. Just like everyone thinks I am.

  It would be funny if she’s lying there with a working mind, listening. Like, the two of us, side by side, both locked in bodies that don’t work. And we can’t even talk to each other to share our experiences. Not funny-funny. Funny-weird.

  When Jaimie Retzinger drops in, he chatters. He argues with himself. I try not to listen. He’s the only person in the world who can argue with himself and lose. Since he’s studying to be a chef, he’s got books to read. With lots of pictures. Jaimie Retzinger has never read a chapter book in his life.

  I’d break up with him all over again, but he wouldn’t notice, so why bother?

  Anyway, I know there won’t be another murder for ten days. So, for the time being, I sleep well.

  And during the night, I dream. Recently my dreams have been gathering into memories again. Last night, it was all very real. I dreamed of Lizzie Erb. Her world is as vivid to me as Rebecca’s. She has to live her life so I can live mine. Her story is terrifying and exciting and romantic and maybe a little bit strange.

  It’s 1812 and she’s a year older than me—sixteen, maybe seventeen. And she has just witnessed a murder.

  Now the killers want her dead.

  Lizzie

  Lizzie Erb was hiding from the Redcoats. She was covered in hay. She had climbed high into the haymow inside her uncle’s huge barn. She had trudged for three days from her home in the Grand River Valley to find General Brock and instead she was being hunted by his own soldiers. If she peered out she could see three men, two stories below. She burrowed deeper into the hay but she could hear them talking.

  “Are you really saying we should kill her, Captain?”

  Lizzie couldn’t hear what the officer answered, but it was clear what he wanted.

  “Yes sir, Captain Blaine. And then we’ll burn this place to the ground,” said the other soldier.

  Again, a muffled response

  “What about the house?”

  The officer’s voice rose and he snarled, “Don’t burn the house, you damned fool. We just moved in.”

  “Only the officers did, sir,” said the first soldier.

  “Do you have a problem with that, Mr. Cameron?”

  The voices faded. For a few minutes, Lizzie could hear nothing but the October wind seeping through the walls. She climbed up so she could see better. Narrow bands of moonlight shone between the boards. She could see across the huge space where her uncle, Matthias Haun, had stored enough hay to feed his animals until spring.

  Two voices became clear again. The Redcoat soldiers were standing by the ladder just below Lizzie. The officer was no longer with them. She wriggled back into the hay but kept her head
clear so that she could hear.

  “I don’t think we should kill a woman,” said one. “She’s just a wee lass.”

  “Me neither,” the other agreed. “But killing is killing, that’s what we do.”

  “Being soldiers, you mean. Well, there’s killing and there’s killing.”

  “There you go, Mr. Cameron, playing with words.”

  “I’m just saying we need to think about this.”

  “She walked here over the fields, she saw Captain Blaine shoot the farmworker in cold blood. He weren’t doing nothing, that farmer, but now he’s dead. So I guess she had better die, too. It isn’t complicated. We gotta find the young witch.”

  “There’s a full moon tonight. She’s sailed off on her broom. Come on, Beazley, I think we should go.”

  “The captain told us before we goes anywhere, we kill the woman who seen us.”

  “You’re very conscientious.”

  “I am not!” The man seemed indignant, as if he didn’t know what the word meant but assumed it was an insult. “I’m not conscience at all,” he muttered.

  “It wasn’t us, Mr. Beazley. We would have stopped him killing the man if we could.”

  “You would have, maybe. I’m not sure about me.”

  Lizzie saw sparks from a flint and then a flare as one of the soldiers lit his pipe. After a minute of quiet, she saw more flickering light, followed by voices:

  “Here! Damn you Beazley, what’ve you done?”

  “It were quite accidental, I assure you.”

  Flames leapt upward, catching the dry hay.

  “Damn it, man. The animals are still in the stable below.”

  Lizzie peered over from her loft and watched as the men scrambled to extinguish the fire. Sweat on the shorter man’s chubby cheeks glistened as he swiped at the flames with his jacket. The tall lean man had set his own jacket aside and was using a pitchfork to beat the flames down. After a flurry of activity, the two men recognized the futility of their efforts.

  “Come on, Beazley,” the tall man shouted. “We’d better get the animals out.”

  “Captain Blaine didn’t say to set the animals free.”

  “He thought we were smart enough to figure it out for ourselves.”

  The flames were licking higher. Clouds of smoke rose up under the roof beams and choked Lizzie Erb.

  “Too late for the critters,” yelled the one called Beazley. “We’d best save ourselves.”

  “Damn it,” Cameron exclaimed.

  “We’re in for it now. I think we’d better get a long ways away, Mr. Cameron. Let’s go upriver. We’ll join the Americans.”

  The two men were yelling to be heard above the roaring flames.

  “Damnation, Beazley. Let’s go then, we’ll make a run for it.”

  Lizzie listened as the roar of the fire smothered their voices. She slid down the haymow, shielding herself from the soaring flames. She landed with a thump on the wooden floor over the stable. It was right where the soldiers had been standing, but they had run off to join the American invaders. Or liberators. Depending on how you saw things.

  Lizzie pulled open a trap door and slid down a ladder into the stable below. Smoke filled the stone-walled room. Wisps of flame scurried across the ceiling. She ran from stall to stall, untying the horses and the oxen. She jumped over a barrier made of cedar rails into the cattle pen and pushed open a large door to the outside. Madly waving her arms, she chased the cattle out into the barnyard.

  Then she ran back and removed the cedar rails so the horses and oxen could get through. The boards in the ceiling were on fire. Chunks of burning wood dropped all around her. She edged past the horses, who were frantic with fear and kicking wildly. She slipped around the oxen, who were standing stupidly, waiting to die. When she got behind them, Lizzie Erb let out a blood-curdling series of screams. The horses and oxen stampeded out through the cattle pen into the open air.

  Captain Blaine and some of the Redcoats who had taken over her uncle’s farm were herding the animals to safety. Lizzie Erb stood in the burning doorway. Ahead were soldiers who wanted to kill her. Behind was a roaring wall of flames and certain death.

  Timbers crashed onto the stable floor, sending out waves of sparks. She could smell the fire singeing her hair. Her clothes were about to burst into flames.

  A man yelled at her, almost a scream. Someone she had never seen before. He was standing off to the side, close to the burning barn. Lizzie glanced over at him. He had a huge blond mustache and deep-set eyes. He was wearing a buckskin coat with fringes and beadwork. The stranger was holding a heavy workhorse tight by its halter. She recognized it as a gelding called Fleetfire which her uncle had invited her to name when it was a foal and she was a little girl. The man tied a blue scarf around the horse’s eyes. Lizzie could have sworn the man smiled. He slapped the horse hard on the rump. The horse reared. It plunged straight toward the flaming inferno. Right into Lizzie’s grasp.

  She seized the halter, tucked her long skirts up, and swung herself around and onto the big gelding’s back. She reached forward and whipped off the scarf from his eyes. Terrified, the horse reared again. Lizzie clutched her fingers into its mane. Then she dug her right knee hard into its side. The big horse bucked and took off, wheeling around and heading straight toward the Redcoat captain who wanted her dead.

  Captain Blaine dodged out of the way as Fleetfire sped by at a frenzied gallop. Lizzie was carried away from the burning barn, and from the soldiers who wanted to kill her because she had witnessed a murder.

  She rode into the moonlight along the Portage Trail, guiding Fleetfire by tugging his mane since he had no bit in his mouth and she had no reins. When she approached the top of Niagara Falls, she tied the blue scarf around her face to keep off the terrible chill. The Falls flowed like liquid thunder. And even though it was only mid-October, a cover of freezing mist had settled over the landscape.

  Turning up off the main road past Wilson’s Hotel, she pulled the huge gelding up to the gate in front of her intended destination. Leaning forward, she rubbed Fleetfire between the ears, then slid awkwardly down to the ground and took a deep breath. She needn’t tie him; he wouldn’t wander away. She stepped onto the porch of the solid frame house and saw welcoming candles ablaze in the ground-floor windows.

  Lizzie Erb had been nearly burned to a crisp and was almost frozen to death. She hesitated, then she knocked.

  Too late, she saw a Redcoat uniform approach from the side, coming around the corner of the house.

  She pressed against the thick pine door and battered it with her fists, urging whoever was inside to hurry, to save her from death impaled on a soldier’s bayonet.

  Fourteen

  Allison

  I immediately recognized the woman who opened the door, though she has been dead for two hundred years. Rebecca Haun was framed by flickering candlelight fluttering on the walls as she moved. She was not exactly a ghost, but she had aged since I saw her last in the Beacon Hill area of Boston.

  When I woke up, I recalled every detail through Lizzie’s eyes. It was like when I was back in Rebecca’s world. Now Rebecca is older; she’s someone I observe as a witness. Strangely, it doesn’t confuse or frighten me, this new adventure, although I’m scared for Lizzie as the Redcoat approaches. I can hardly wait to sleep. I need to get back into her life and find out what happens.

  Meanwhile, I don’t think my roommate, Doris, is doing very well.

  She gurgles and, unless you’re a river, gurgling isn’t a good thing. I’ve listened to her all day. It’s funny, because I really feel badly for her, but the noise is annoying. I hope I don’t ever gurgle.

  David comes in but since school is over he doesn’t have any more jokes for me. I can tell something is bugging him. He calls me Allison instead of Potato. Whatever is on his mind, it must be serious. He leans into my field o
f vision. I try to bring him into focus but he moves away. Still, I did see him, or a shadowy version. When he leaves, I can hear him talking to a girl. I listen carefully. I know the voice. Who is it? I know who it is!

  Maddie O’Rourke.

  The two of them are speaking quietly. As if they’ll wake us up, for glory’s sake. It’s like in a funeral home—young people speak quietly there. Older people use ordinary voices. They’ve seen more of death. They’re not so impressed by it.

  David leaves and then I hear Maddie talking to Doris in a low soothing voice. I try not to listen. I don’t want to be nosy. I try hard to think about Lizzie Erb, but Maddie O’Rourke’s words are warm and friendly. I don’t have many friends these days. It’s funny. Her warmth makes me lonely.

  Then she comes over to me. She touches me. I can’t tell where, but it’s a gentle touch. Then she says, just as if we were having a conversation:

  “I love your medallion, Allison. I’ve always liked amber better than diamonds and pearls.”

  She laughs and says:

  “My only real jewels are on the models in Vogue.”

  I know she reads Vogue. She lives a Vogue life in a strange and lovely way.

  Maddie O’Rourke was two years ahead of me in high school. She works at a cosmetics counter in the People’s Drug Mart on Chemong. She is small, only four feet tall, and has a twisted back. But she stands as straight as she can and she is fiercely proud. No one has ever teased her. Even when she was a kid, she could burn a hole in your heart with her eyes.

  In her teens, Maddie discovered Vogue. She came from a poor family but she was smart. She had flare. She sewed and made beautiful clothes. The rest of us learned about fashion from watching her. And her hair! Good glory, no one in Peterborough has hair like Maddie O’Rourke. Jet black, tumbling in waves around her face, wild and tame, all at the same time. Perfect complexion! Pale like a china doll, flawless, and not much makeup, except lip-gloss and lots around her eyes. Her eyes! Dark blue like huge blueberries, as big as Angelina Jolie’s. Better lips, though. She doesn’t look like she’s blowing bubbles all the time.