A man at a desk told us someone would come and speak to us and that we had to wait, so we stood in the waiting area, confused, staring between the desk, the television bolted to the wall, and the vending machine full of chocolate bars and bags of crisps.
“Thorpe,” Boo finally said. “We should phone him. I’ll do it. Give me your phone.”
So she did that, and Callum and I continued to stand around, pacing the tiled floor. About a half an hour later, a young, red haired doctor with a carefully trimmed beard came out into the waiting area and asked who was here with Stephen Dene. We got up and hurried over.
“You’re his friends?” he asked. “You found him un- responsive?”
We said that was us.
“We’re going to need to speak to his relatives. Do you have contact information for his parents, or…”
“His parents are dead,” Callum said quickly.
This surprised Boo and I, but we didn’t contradict him.
“I see,” the doctor said. “Is there someone else?”
“His…uncle,” Boo said. “He’s coming. But…what’s going on? Please. We’re the people he’s closest to. Please.”
After a moment of hesitation, the doctor nodded and took us to a small consulting room. “You stated he had been in a motor vehicle accident?” he asked, closing the door.
“Just a knock,” Callum said. “He seemed fine.”
The doctor nodded and leaned back against the door, looking down, as if thinking.
“In this kind of injury, that often happens. It’s called a lucid interval. The injured person seems to have no symptoms. It’s not the severity of the blow as much as how it occurs, which part of the head is hit. Maybe he complained of a headache, nausea?”
“A headache,” Boo said. “But it didn’t seem bad.”
The doctor scratched at his eyebrow. Then he looked at us with the kind of directness that never means something good has happened.
“Stephen has suffered something called an epidural hematoma,” he said. “The blow to the head caused a rupture, and he’s bleeding between the skull and the dura matter. When this happens, pressure is put on the brain. We’ve attempted to relieve this pressure…the thing about an epidural hematoma is that it has to be treated immediately. This injury occurred somewhere around eleven or twelve hours ago. We’ve drained the blood, but his brain has suffered damage. He is comatose, and we’ve put him on life support.”
“Life support?” Boo said. “But he’ll be fine, right? You fixed it, yeah?”
There was a pause and in the pause, there was everything. All the air went out of the room, and nothing was real. I couldn’t feel my hands and my head was tingling.
“We’ll keep him comfortable,” the doctor went on. “He’ll be in no pain. But decisions need to be made by the family. Do you understand what I am saying?”
No, actually, what he was saying made no sense at all. But it didn’t stop him from saying it. And then, we were moving again, into an elevator, down a hall.
Stephen had been moved to a room on the third floor. He was in a room by himself, much of which was taken up by a large piece of equipment. The window blinds were half-open, and slants of morning light cut across his bed. He was under a hospital blanket, which was tucked midway up his chest. He wore a blue hospital gown. Something about him being stripped out of his uniform, out of his serious sweaters or scarves, stripped bare of the things he wore in the normal world that gave him that appearance of authority, of seriousness…something about that papery gown stamped with the hospital name made it all true.
Boo made a sobbing gasp.
“Not this,” Callum said. “Of all the things it could have been, you know? All of us…all the things that could have happened, and just some little knock in the car…”
“Callum.” Boo was crying freely now, her voice thick. “Callum, don’t.”
“But of all the things that could happen to us…the Ripper. The things we see. The things we do. And some car accident…not even a bad one. It’s just stupid…”
He started to laugh, and the laugh got stranger and louder. He sat down on the floor by the bed and put his head down and laughed. Boo sat with him, and he put his arm over her shoulder. I thought dimly how this was one of those moments Boo had been waiting for for so long, when she would just hug Callum and hold on. She could probably do anything she wanted. But that didn’t matter anymore.
Stephen’s glasses were off. His face was the most relaxed I’d ever seen it, the worried crease between his eyes finally relaxed. I could look at him now in a way I never could before—I could stare as long as I wanted. I had never noticed how high his forehead was, high and elegant, sloping down toward his nose, which was also long and fine. His eyes were darkly lashed, and his eyebrows thicker than I thought they were. The glasses had obscured much of his real aspect. There were the lips I had pressed against mine last night—a slender mouth, long, with a strong tendency to pull down at the corners. He was almost smiling now.
I remembered how, at first, I had felt the tension in his lips, as if he was trying to make a barrier between us—then they had relaxed, parted slightly. And that’s when I had known he wanted to kiss me, wanted to give in. That little parting of the lips, the little sigh that came out…
I would hear that sigh forever. That little, little sound when the whole world seemed to open up.
“He told me if anything happened to him, he didn’t want his family contacted,” Callum said.
I had almost forgotten the two of them were there on the floor on the other side of the bed. They’d gone silent, and I had gone so deep in my thoughts that I was lost. Callum’s hysterical outburst had calmed, and he was leaning forward over his knees, as if ready to spring straight up from the floor.
“We have to call them now, don’t we?” Boo’s voice was hoarse. “Don’t we?”
“No. I think he meant it. It’s about what he wants, not what they want.”
“What does he want?” Boo asked.
“We should wait for Thorpe,” I said. I didn’t even mean to say it. The words came out, dry and automatic. Maybe I was channeling Stephen.
“Thorpe can’t decide,” Callum said. “Thorpe doesn’t know him. We have to decide. We have to do it. Stephen needs us to take care of this for him, not some bureaucrat.”
In the end, we took a vote.
I say that like it was possible. Like we could vote if Stephen lived or died. Like we were even thinking about this like it was really happening. It was more academic, like a question on an exam. If Stephen can’t live without the machine, would he want to live? Would he want to go on, his body forced to breathe, his mind not present or active? It was obvious to all of us that no, he would not want that, but we couldn’t quite say the words that followed. That the machine should go off. That he should be allowed to die. My head was feeling funny and light and my knees were shaking, and I got hiccups at one point and kept playing with the window blinds.
Then we talked to him. We told him stories. I told him about my grandmother’s discount boob job. I told him stories I would never have wanted him to hear, in the hopes that he would suddenly wake up just because I was saying something horrible and embarrassing. Getting my first period. That kind of thing. I didn’t care that Callum and Boo were there. They did the same thing. We told him jokes. Callum offered to show him paperwork to make him wake up.
Thorpe arrived, and brought the doctor back in with him. Every time I’d seen Thorpe before this he was just some guy from the government. The only thing I’d ever noticed about him was that his face looked too young for his white hair. This time, he didn’t wear a suit or a dress shirt or a tie, but a polo neck and some fancy jeans and when he saw Stephen, he fell silent and put his hand over his mouth.
That’s when I thought I was really going to lose it. That’s when the bile came up the back of my throat and there was a roaring in my ears and I wanted to be anywhere but in this terrible room. I wanted to erase the last few months a
nd run back to Louisiana and be back in my bed at home.
“What happens?” Thorpe asked the doctor. “When the machine is off?”
The doctor had positioned himself discreetly in the corner of the room, his arms folded in gentle, professional resignation.
“The body takes over. Things take their course. It can be minutes or hours.”
Thorpe nodded and sniffed once, then looked at the rest of us.
“We’ll need a few moments to talk,” he said to the doctor.
The doctor excused himself again. Thorpe came to the foot of the bed and looked long and hard at Stephen.
“You’ve talked?” he asked us quietly. “I think we all know what he would say.”
Our silence confirmed this.
“This should never have happened,” Thorpe said. “I should never have allowed it to happen. It all went too fast. There should have been more time, more training…”
He trailed off, and shook his head once.
“I can speak to the doctor,” he said. “I can…”
I missed the rest of what he said, though I got the gist that it was something about dealing with actually giving the order and saying he was Stephen’s uncle. I was distracted by what I remembered. I remembered being on the floor of the bathroom, after the knife had gone in. I remembered the curious feeling of the wound. My body, unable to make tactile sense of the slash, told me it was an itch with a faint tingle. The blood was coming out so quickly—it couldn’t possibly be mine. And through the roaring in my ears, I heard Newman explain to me what he was going to do. He gave me the terminus and he told me that he had a theory—a little theory—that people with the sight who died with a terminus might come back.
“I can fix this,” I said. It was sudden. It just popped out of my mouth, and it got everyone’s attention.
“What?” Thorpe said.
“I can fix this,” I said again. “Newman…he had a theory…about people who had the sight. If they died in contact with a terminus they might…”
Callum stood, and the look on his face was like thunder.
“No,” he said. “No.”
Boo leapt up right after, but there was a very different expression on her face. Her face said yes.
“What are you saying?” Thorpe said. “You can keep him from dying? You can…”
“She’s saying she wants to keep him here by making him some thing that isn’t alive or dead,” Callum replied. “And she’s not doing it.”
“You need to get over your prejudices, yeah?” Boo snapped.
Callum moved past Thorpe and came around to my side of the bed, and the way he was moving, I got the distinct impression that he would not hesitate to use force on me. I gripped the bedrail.
“You won’t do this to him,” he said to me. No one had ever quite spoken to me in this tone before, not even Newman. It was a clear threat, and the message was that I was the enemy. I would be stopped.
“Callum,” Boo said. “Callum, she can save him.”
“You don’t do this!” Callum’s voice was a roar, and he yelled right into my face. “You don’t do this to my friend. You don’t touch him.”
He shoved the adjustable bed table, hard. He didn’t shove it at me, but at the wall, as a warning. I became stone. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, my hand was now welded to the bed.
“Callum.” Thorpe’s voice didn’t have the anger, but the threat was no less serious. “Step away from her and leave the room.”
“I’m not leaving.” He was over me, looking down into my face.
“You’re leaving now or you’ll be removed.”
“So remove me.”
“Is that what Stephen would want? Now?” There was enough emotion in Thorpe’s voice to make Callum turn and look at him. “Would he want you to be fighting over him?”
“He wouldn’t want to come back like that,” Callum said. “Maybe you want it, to study him or something. Maybe you want it”—this was to Boo—“because you think that would help. And you…”
He had nothing for me. “But he would want to just be allowed to go.”
“You don’t know that,” Boo said. “You don’t. You’ve always been angry at them. You think they’re evil, that they don’t belong. They’re ghosts, not monsters, and they can be happy. They can be productive. You can’t decide what he would want based on how you feel.”
I took Stephen’s hand. It was very cool. Not cold, but it was definitely not the hand of someone full of life. And already, I felt a kind of strange feeling. It wasn’t like the times I would touch a ghost and feel myself being drawn in. This was a light sensation that started in the fingers and spread along the back of the hand, up the side of my arm, resting a moment at the pulse point inside of my elbow. It was a gentle numbness, like pins and needles, but without any discomfort. And my hand and arm grew warm as they touched his cold skin. In fact, I was starting to feel warm all over.
I looked at the machine that told me Stephen was still alive. The fight continued around me, but I was no longer part of it. I wasn’t in this room at all. I was somewhere with Stephen that was entirely separate from the hospital or anything else I had known. It wasn’t that I was certain of my decision. I wasn’t really thinking anymore. I wasn’t blind or deaf. I mean, I saw security come. I saw Callum deciding to leave rather than be pulled out. I saw Boo crying, and Thorpe shutting the door and putting a hand on her shoulder. I saw friendships being ripped apart and hearts broken, and it wasn’t that I didn’t care…it was just all happening behind some kind of pane of glass that kept me and Stephen separate.
It surprised me how clinical the next part was—how calm. The smoothness of it. I just watched and held on, and I thought about how there are systems for things, about how all things have happened before. People die every day, and there are systems for it. The doctor heard the decision and nodded and told us it was the right one. A few people came in, and we gathered around, and things were shut off. I hadn’t noticed just how noisy the machine was until it was off.
The monitors were still plugged in, and they still beeped away, but slowly. And we were left in privacy.
• • •
It happened at nine forty-six in the morning.
Right before that, things had gotten very slow—the beeps and wiggles. People started to come in more often. I held his hand harder. The beeps became a flat, droning noise. I closed my eyes. Then something was pulling on me. Not something muscular, not something I could see, but something gentle yet unyielding. It reminded me of a science lesson in grade school when they gave us a box of magnets and let us play with them, and I made one tiny magnet pull another across a small distance and lock together.
You are not going anywhere, I said to him, in my mind. You are not going anywhere. You are staying here. You are staying with me.
I could still feel the activity around me. I was profoundly aware of Boo at my left side.
DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU ARE NOT…
It almost knocked me down. I was pulling on something, or it was pulling on me. And the space behind my eyes went white. The world went away entirely. Even the white went away, and everything was a bright nothing. Unlike the other times, it wasn’t just a flash. I was calm and still and the world was gone, but that was fine. I had become something else, I had joined something larger. Maybe I was water. Maybe I was a drop of water in the ocean. Maybe I was a particle of light. I was the same as everything around me, and everything around me was peaceful.
I wanted to stay here.
There was whiteness. There was falling. I was falling a hundred feet, a thousand feet, but at no particular speed.
And then there were edges of things. Round things. A red line and a black lump. A face—Boo’s. My head was forced between my knees, and when I opened my eyes, the hospital floor came back into violent, sudden focus.
“Sorry,” I said. Because I knew what was coming next.
I threw up. A plastic basin was shoved in the approximately right
spot and I did my best to aim for it. Someone helped me into a chair. I was put in a forward-facing position, slumped over my knees. Boo knelt down next to me.
“Is he—”
She nodded.
“Did it work?” she whispered, stroking my hair.
“I…don’t know. Something happened.”
“I’ll look for him,” she said. “You all right? I’ll look.”
Boo was gone for what seemed like forever. I finally lifted myself up and sat back normally. When I did that, I saw Stephen lying there, exactly as before. He looked no different, but all was silence, and his chest did not move.
Thorpe’s eyes were red.
“How long does it take?” I asked when Boo returned. “Before they…you know. Appear.”
“Jo said that when it happened to her, she thinks she woke up right after, but she was never sure,” Boo said. “It could have been hours, or even a day or two.”
“Alistair said it was right away,” I added. “He was asleep, and then he was standing outside of himself. Do they always show up where they die?”
“He could be anywhere,” she said. “It’s often tied to the place of death, but not always. I’ve heard of other places people end up. He could be at the flat. He could be at his parents’ house, though I doubt that. He’s bound to be somewhere. We just have to find him.”
“Unless it didn’t work,” I said.
“I know he’s here,” Boo said, nodding. “We need to start looking. We do the hospital. We do the flat, both the old one and the new one. And if that fails, we come back here and do it again. Yeah?”
It was then that I understood everything. There would be no train to Bristol. There might be no return to Wexford, or America. Life was being written, right now, in real time. I was not going home. I was staying here. I would find Charlotte. I was going to make Jane pay.
And I would find Stephen.
maureen johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of more than ten young-adult novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, The Last Little Blue Envelope, Devilish, The Bermudez Triangle, Let It Snow, and Suite Scarlett. She divides her time between New York City and Guildford, England. Maureen also spends far too much time online.
The Madness Underneath Page 23
