The Long Sleep

by Caroline Crane

  “Of course he’s alive,” said the nurse. “He’s just not conscious.”

  “Will they move him out of ICU?” What if they sent him someplace too far away for me to visit?

  “That’s up to the doctors. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  If they moved him to another room that wasn’t ICU, I could visit. I could hold his hand and talk to him. That thought gave me a warm feeling.

  I asked the nurse, “Is he allowed to get flowers in here?”

  “Not here,” she said. “But in a regular room he can.”

  I had another idea. “If I make a tape, could I bring it and have somebody play it for him? There’s something I want him to know that I think would encourage him, if he can hear it.”

  That made her curious. I explained about the newspaper, the series, and that we were going ahead with it. She thought it was worth a try. I promised her a copy of the issue when it came out.

  With that incentive, I went home to make the tape. I had a small pocket recorder. Not very good sound quality but it was something I could leave there with them. Its mini tapes only ran for fifteen minutes.

  I closed my door so Ben wouldn’t hear and laugh at me. But I had to talk loud enough to record something.

  Hank, it’s me, Maddie Canfield. The new girl with The Tiger’s Roar. I’m so sorry about what happened to you. I’m sorry it was my car.

  I said that so he’d remember who I was, if he could remember anything.

  But you’re getting better. I know you are. Anyway, I wanted you to know that we’re going ahead with the newspaper and the series you planned on the right to die.

  I sort of choked at that point, wondering if I should even say it now that he was there himself.

  Anyhow, I thought you should know we’re using your research as well as mine, and I wish you could be working with us. I hope you don’t mind that we’re not waiting for you to come back. It’s such a good idea, I figure we should just do it and get it out there.

  I didn’t want to wait on delivering that message to him. I wanted to be sure that it was the same nurse, so I went back to the hospital.

  She was still there. And Hank had a visitor, an older woman who must have been his mother. The nurse expected me to know her, probably thought I was a close family friend since I came so often. I ducked out of there before his mom could see me.

  It was all so strange, so weird, and so unreal. I wondered what it seemed like to Hank. I hoped he could remember me. I’d heard that when a person suffers head trauma they often have no recollection of what went on right before it happened. Since we’d only just met that day, there wasn’t any history of me to remember.

  Once he regained consciousness, we could catch up. On everything.

  The elevator took its time. I was about to look for some stairs when it opened. I had to wait while a couple of orderlies maneuvered a gurney out with somebody on it. A few other people collected and one of them was Rick Falco, not in uniform.

  His eyebrows went up. “Are you living here now?”

  I could have asked him the same question, but he had a better reason to be there. I tried to think of something clever to say.

  “Only sometimes.” That wasn’t very clever.

  I wondered how old he was. Maybe his early twenties? I glanced at his hand and remembered that I’d already done that a few times. He didn’t wear a ring, but that proved nothing.

  “He’s still out of it,” I told Falco, and added, “They extubated him.” Was that the right word? It was what the nurse said.

  “Good. Good. That’s progress.” Apparently Falco knew what it meant. “He’s doing okay without it?”

  “I guess they’d put it back in if he wasn’t. Anyway, I could see he was breathing.” I rushed on to explain my presence there at the ICU. “I was bringing him something. From school. A tape to let him know we’re carrying on with the newspaper. The nurse said she’d play it for him. If he can hear it, it might cheer him up.”

  “That’s very thoughtful.”

  Was he patronizing me?

  “I’m sure he can hear it,” Falco went on. “They usually can, as I understand it. We talked about that, didn’t we?” He moved us both aside as the elevator came back and another gurney waited to get on.

  “Busy place,” Falco observed. “Are you in a hurry, or how about some lunch?”

  That startled me. “Aren’t you on duty?”

  “They allow me to eat now and then. How about it?”

  “Um . . . sure.”

  He pressed the elevator button. We went down to B for basement. The hospital must have been carved into a hillside because the back wall of the cafeteria was all glass and looked out on a sloping rock garden.

  “People eat out there in warm weather,” he said as he picked up two trays and handed one to me.

  “Do you spend a lot of time here?” I asked.

  “More than enough since that shooting.”

  I took lasagna and a small green salad. Falco had lasagna and a side of fries. No greenery. He dietary choices needed work. We took a table next to the glass wall. It was late enough that the big lunch rush was over.

  I thought of Hank upstairs, out cold. Even colder when I compared him with Falco, who was so competent and full of life.

  “Have you found any—” I almost said clues, “—any leads yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, after the fiftieth time we looked . . .” A smile quirked his mouth. “Maybe it was only the fifth or sixth, and the first time, you’ll remember, it was dark. They looked again and found a small piece of fuzz stuck on one of the middle branches. Dark red. Maroon? Wine?”

  “Burgundy?” I tried.

  “Isn’t that wine, more or less?”

  “Yes, but there are different shades of wine.” He should know that. Unlike me, he was of legal drinking age. But I probably knew more about fashion colors.

  “Okay, we’ll call it maroon,” he said. “Dark red with a hint of purple. Do you know anybody who wears something like that? I did say fuzzy, didn’t I?”

  I tried to think. Maybe Evan bought new clothes when he went to Garson Academy.

  “I’ll look around,” I said. “On Monday. It might not be anybody from Southbridge High.”

  “I’m aware of that. It seems the most likely. Have you had any more phone calls? Other nuisances?”

  I looked out at the rock garden. It must have been really nice in summer.

  “I don’t know if it’s a nuisance or a threat.” Nuisance seemed too mild. “He sent some pictures. Of him and me. Six different pictures, all taken last summer with him. In every one of them my face is marked up. There’s an X or a beard or blacked out teeth. Anything to make me look ugly. It’s as if he wants to obliterate me. That time at the police station, I thought he was going to throw acid in my face.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have them with you?”

  “I should have thought of that. I tossed them, but I can fish them out. It makes me feel so stupid. Why didn’t I know what he was like before all this happened? By the time I did, I was in too deep and he wouldn’t let go.”

  Falco reached across the table and put his hand over mine. “How could you know? Guys like that can be very charming.”

  “Psychopaths.”

  “I thought the newer term was sociopath,” he said.

  “I just happen to like the word psychopath. It sounds so—psycho. My mom’s a psychologist. I keep asking her how they get that way. She doesn’t have any easy answers.”

  He smiled. “Does she have any uneasy answers?”

  I laughed. “My mom’s too careful for that. She wouldn’t say anything she can’t prove.”

  As we left the cafeteria, he rested his hand on my back. It was a comforting gesture and felt a lot better than when Mr. Geyer did it. I wondered if Hank and I would ever be able to touch one another. If he’d ever so much as wake up.

  Chapter Eight

  Hank came up behind me in the hospital—or wa
s it at school? —and put his arms around me. All the bad thoughts vanished from my mind as we stood hugging. And kissing. I couldn’t taste him the way you usually can when you kiss somebody. Maybe he had no taste because he’d been asleep so long. I was about to ask him, when the dogs started barking.

  That woke me. I didn’t want to wake because it meant Hank was still in the hospital, still unconscious. Before I had time to think about it, a shower of rain hit my window.

  Not rain. It was more like sleet. The first time I heard it was back in October when sleet wasn’t so likely, although sometimes you can get a winter storm as early as that. But this was November, when you could have sleet, but I knew it wasn’t that. It was pebbles.

  Evan had done it before. He did it the time in October when he broke into our house. He’d made a point of cutting a hole in the glass in the mudroom door so he could reach in and turn the lock. He threw pebbles to make me go downstairs, and I fell for it. I was such an idiot.

  I would put that in an article I planned to write on how obsession isn’t love. I would put in all the times I’d done something stupid, so other girls could learn from my stupidity.

  Rule number whatever: Girls, THINK TWICE! Don’t follow your first impulse and rush downstairs to see what’s going on.

  I hadn’t actually rushed that October night. I had tiptoed. But it got me where he wanted me, right by the door.

  Stupid, stupid. As I lay there reliving the whole thing, another shower hit the window. Did he really think I was dumb enough to fall for it a second time?

  I turned cold all over just knowing he was out there. Not in New Hampshire, but right outside my window. How long had he been home? Was he back here to stay?

  I lay not moving, not even getting up to get my cell phone. I couldn’t trust Evan not to see me, even though the room was dark and the blinds were closed. It wasn’t that I thought he had superhuman powers, only a sharp, malicious mind.

  The red digits on my clock said 2:20. Even if I had the phone, Rick would be sleeping. Unless he had night duty. I could have called the station, but Evan would be gone before they ever got here.

  I was never going to fall asleep in that lonely room. I crept to the head of the stairs and called softly, “Petey! Pumpkin!” They were comfortably snoozing on their cushions in the den, or more likely on the living room sofa. But they came when I called.

  “Good dogs.” I should have brought up their cushions, but I didn’t want to go downstairs. He might be right outside.

  I invited them both onto my bed. It left scarcely any room for me, but I felt safe. I didn’t care what Rhoda would have to say about dogs on beds.

  * * * *

  In the morning, I went out to see if there were pebbles in the back yard under my window. I couldn’t help hoping it was all part of my dream, although it seemed very real.

  It was real. The pebbles were there, the kind of gravel people put on their driveway. I wanted to call Rick right away, but it was too early. The pebbles weren’t going anywhere.

  I called him in mid-morning. He got back to me an hour later.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Where does this guy live?”

  I had to admit I didn’t know, exactly. “I never went to his house. He always came here. He made friends with my dogs, but I think they’re beginning to catch onto him.”

  Rick said he would look into it. That made me feel a little better, but I wouldn’t be entirely safe until Evan was caught. And sent to Devil’s Island, where the French used to exile their worst criminals.

  After finishing my homework, I baked cookies. It hardly seemed an adequate payment for a whole new windshield, but it was something I could do. I’d have been thrilled if Rick had gotten bulletproof glass, but what were the odds of being shot at again?

  I called the police station to ask if he was on duty. He wasn’t, and they wouldn’t tell me where he lived. I would have to take my chances on Monday after school.

  Ben wandered into the kitchen to make a baloney sandwich. He peeked in the oven. “Is that for your sleeping giant?”

  “Hardly. Cookies wouldn’t go through the feeding tube and I doubt he could taste them anyway.”

  “He has to eat through a tube?” Ben slathered mustard on a piece of bread.

  “Not eat, exactly. It goes in through the nose or the tummy.”

  “You saw them do that?” He got out the rest of his ingredients. Baloney, provolone, pepperoni. He knew processed meat wasn’t all that good for you, but he liked the way they rhymed.

  “Of course not,” I said. “They wouldn’t let me in. I read about it in my research.”

  “Through the nose? I hate things going up my nose.”

  I lifted out the first batch of cookies. “Well, then, you’d better have an advance directive. We’ll be showing an example in our final installment. People can use it as a model to write their own, or get a printed one and check things off. Then you sign it and have it notarized.”

  “Too much trouble,” Ben said.

  “It’s not that much trouble. You’ll probably never need it, but if you wait until you do, then it’s too late.”

  “Does your sleeping giant have one?”

  “I don’t know. He’s the one who brought it up. But if he doesn’t, then he’s a good example of people thinking it won’t ever apply to them.”

  I had tried Glyn earlier, but didn’t get an answer. After the cookies were done, I tried again. That time she was there.

  “Girlfriend,” I said. “Are you sure Evan is in New Hampshire?”

  It took her a moment to answer that. “Last I heard. Why? What happened?”

  “Somebody threw pebbles at my window last night and nobody’s ever done that before except him.”

  “It’s hardly a new idea,” she said.

  “Glyn, nobody else has ideas like that. And who would want to?”

  “Are you sure that’s what it was?”

  “I went out this morning and looked. There were pebbles in the grass under my window.” My suspicions festered and I was getting angry.

  “Oh, Maddie,” she sighed. “He’s so hooked on you.”

  “Why isn’t he at school in New Hampshire? Why me?”

  “I thought he was.” She sounded apologetic.

  She added brightly, “Maybe he’ll go back!”

  She did know where he was. Why would she do that to me?

  “He’s an idiot,” I said. “Why can’t he just move on?”

  “He’s hooked. He loves you.”

  “Glyn, knock it off. There’s nothing cute about him, or even normal. It’s sick, and you know it.”

  “I do?”

  “You did,” I said. “Back when we were friends.”

  She gasped. “Aren’t we still?”

  “I don’t know. It seems to me there are a lot of secrets going around.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What I’m talking about,” I said, “is it looks as if some of us know more about certain people than they’re letting on.”

  That sounded really stupid. I should have said it all straight out.

  “Like where Evan is,” I clarified. “He can’t still be in New Hampshire if he threw pebbles at me. And you keep insisting it was somebody else.”

  “I said it might have been somebody else,” Glyn replied. “You’re not keeping an open mind.”

  I had a mildly cheering thought. “I wonder if he got kicked out of there, too.”

  “I absolutely wouldn’t know, and that’s the truth. I’m not holding out on you, Mads. I do know he’s gone from Lakeside, so why don’t you come back there? I really miss you.”

  That thawed me just a little. She’d been my buddy since prehistoric times.

  “Thanks.” I said. “I miss you, too. But I’m not going to keep changing schools. It’s not that much longer until we graduate.”

  “It seems like forever.” Then she perked up. “How do you feel about pizza? It would be like old times.”

>   I loved pizza, but it came with baggage. “Pizza was the first date I had with him.”

  “Mads, you can’t give up everything. Don’t let him take over your life.”

  He took it over anyway. I didn’t let him.

  But she had a point. I couldn’t live my whole life with Evan pulling the strings. With him confining me and making me afraid. If he was back in Southbridge, I’d be looking over my shoulder all the time.

  If he could do that to me, then he had the upper hand.

  She prodded. “See if you can forget him for a couple of hours.”

  I really wanted to see her. Evan couldn’t keep me locked up at home.

  “Okay, then. Half an hour?”

  Perrino’s was all white stucco on the outside with an arched wooden door. Inside there were red checked tablecloths and loud recorded music. We found a table with a view of the parking lot, ordered a small pie with eggplant topping, and sugar-free sodas.

  Glyn had on a yellow sweater that emphasized her figure. I used to think she wore a padded bra, but she’d told me she didn’t. As we waited for the pie, she asked, “Are you hurting yet?”

  It took me a moment to figure out she meant my memories of Evan.

  “No,” I said, “I’m just nauseated. Why can’t I live in peace?”

  “You have to not let it get to you.”

  “That’s easy to say. You didn’t have to put up with him. He wouldn’t even let me talk to my own brother.”

  “Why not? Ben’s your brother, for gosh sakes.”

  “That’s what I kept telling him. His reasoning was that Ben was adopted, which leaves out any DNA connection. Therefore there’s nothing to stop me from having a relationship with him. That’s so sick. He’s my brother. I grew up with him.”

  “I forgot he was adopted.”

  “He’s one of the family.”

  “He’s older than you.”

  “So? I know people seem to expect the adopted one to be an afterthought, but he wasn’t. My parents almost gave up on having kids. They were in the process of adopting when I happened. Big surprise. That’s why we’re so close in age.”

  She studied my face. “You don’t look much like him.”

  “No, I think he’s more exotic. We don’t know anything about his history. He was a foundling.”