If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  Bless you, Shannon, Tara thinks.

  The pen descends to the notepad, but no words are written, and Shannon’s mouth screws tight. Then she says, “I know I’m not a police officer, that’s not a revelatory bit of information, but I still possess common sense, and maybe I should talk to the police, don’t you think?”

  Shannon lifts the ballpoint pen away from the pad and clicks it rapidly while she listens. The sound seems large to Tara; something about that small click embeds in her brain in a different way than other, louder things. Why was that?

  Suddenly, Tara’s thumb twitches.

  Stunned, she tries to do it again, without success. But…it just moved. She is positive of that. Now that her attention is on it and she can’t replicate the feat, though, the sensation begins to feel false, a phantom movement, a cruel illusion. And yet, for an instant, she’d been certain. It came from the sound, almost, from watching Shannon click that pen and hearing the accompanying sound and then it was as if her muscle memory had fired and Tara had mimicked the gesture.

  But she tries again and again, and her thumb rests limply against her index finger.

  She’s lost track of Shannon’s words, but now hears her say, “Listen, I might have been one of the last people to talk to her. I sure think it would be useful if I could talk directly to the police instead of through a handler from the college.”

  Pause, and Tara hopes she’ll begin clicking the pen again, but the pause is brief and then Shannon says, “Fine, just please give me a call back so I can explain this to my family.”

  Shannon disconnects, lowers the phone, and stares at the wall with an expression that Tara hasn’t seen many times on her sister’s face: helplessness. The only memories Tara has of this look come from early childhood, in the days after her father’s death, when her mother’s depression was the darkest, the battle with medications the worst; even big sister Shannon had no idea what to do.

  Put down that phone, Shannon had told Tara one terrible day after Tara had picked up the phone to call 911 for their unconscious mother. Shannon’s helplessness was gone from her face, replaced by fury. If you call, they’ll take us away, don’t you understand that?

  Tara had put down the phone. Shannon sat with their mother until dawn, washing her face with a damp cloth and making sure that her head was tilted to the side so she couldn’t choke on her own vomit. Then she made Tara breakfast and sent her to school with instructions to keep her mouth shut about the situation at home; Shannon was handling it.

  She had, too. Somehow, she had handled it.

  Shannon turns to her, one eyebrow cocked, and Tara could swear that they’ve bridged the void somehow. This happens with people occasionally, with Shannon more than anyone else and most frequently when they are alone in the room. Now Shannon looks at her and says, “I think you should have gone to a state school, mi hermana. You could’ve saved a lot of money in student loans for the same level of incompetence.”

  Tara laughs. She doesn’t move or make a sound, of course, but she laughs, and some part of her believes that Shannon knows it.

  “The college hired an investigator for your case,” Shannon says, “who then apparently killed her boss and ran away. Talk about bringing in the best and the brightest.”

  She’s smiling; she always seems happiest when she’s being sarcastic or cutting, a trait that makes relationships a struggle for her. Then the smile fades, her focus shifts away from Tara, and it is evident that she feels like she is alone in the room again.

  Which breaks Tara’s heart.

  “Abby seemed like she cared,” Shannon says softly, clearly speaking to herself now. Then she gives a little snap-out-of-it head shake, pulls a chair to the side of the bed, sits, and looks hard at Tara’s face.

  “Regardless, she gave me a good idea, T. I did some reading last night, and I made some calls this morning, and I have good news—you get to watch a movie.”

  Watch a movie? The television is always on. Mostly, Tara hates that. If she were able to change the channel, it wouldn’t be so bad, but when they leave it on just for background noise, like she’s a nervous puppy, it’s infuriating.

  “Dr. Pine himself approved it,” Shannon says. “Even Rick and Mom say it’s worth a try. Not just a movie, though, T.—you get a field trip.” She takes Tara’s limp hand. Her touch is warm and wonderful. So few people are willing to let their touches linger.

  My thumb can move, Tara thinks. Do it again, damn it, do it now, you stupid thumb, while someone has the chance to notice.

  But her thumb lies motionless against Shannon’s palm.

  “They’re going to put you in an ambulance and take you to a lab about an hour away, at a university hospital where there’s a coma research program, and then they’ll hook you up to even more of these…” She lifts one of the many wires that lead from Tara’s body to the monitors beside the bed. “And then they’re going to show you a movie and wait to see if the computers can tell whether you respond to it. Whether you can track it, whether you feel anything watching it.” Shannon’s voice wavers, and she bites her lower lip and looks away.

  Tara realizes just how important this test must be. If she doesn’t pass this one, if she can’t somehow let these computers know that she is in here…big decisions are going to be made soon.

  This may be her last chance to have a voice in them.

  “I did win one battle,” Shannon says, turning back to her with a sniff and that forced smile. “They usually use some crappy black-and-white film. I told them that my sister hates black-and-white. They didn’t like the idea of changing, but I can be persuasive.”

  An understatement for the ages. She could still sell tickets for the Titanic, Rick had once said of Shannon.

  “So I got to pick the film,” she continues, squeezing Tara’s hand. “And I’ll give you one guess what I picked.”

  Something scary, Tara thinks. Shannon loves Tara’s fear of horror movies, the way even the cheesy ones can make her jump, how she covers her eyes and watches them through her fingers.

  “That’s right,” Shannon says, “your test will be a familiar one. You get to watch Jaws.”

  Well, now. Tara has long proclaimed Jaws to be the most re-watchable movie in history. She hasn’t anticipated that being put to a coma test, though.

  “You’ll respond,” Shannon whispers. “I know you will. When Quint starts talking about the Indianapolis sinking or when Chief Brody realizes his own son is on the sailboat by the shark, you’ll respond. Just to the dumb music, you’ll respond.” She’s imploring now, a hint of desperation to her words that scares Tara. This test is going to be very important.

  “The people at the lab were encouraging,” Shannon says, seemingly more to reassure herself than anything else. “They’ve had good results.” She pauses. “Maybe I won’t mention where I got the idea.”

  27

  As Abby drove Hank’s Tahoe along the turnpike, she remembered that she’d already spent some time considering life as a fugitive, thanks to Luke. One of his first leads in anything that wasn’t a purely over-the-top action film where spiders fought robots was in a movie about a husband-and-wife team on the run, a Hitchcock knockoff that bombed at the box office. While he was reading the script and rehearsing, though, he enjoyed pondering the scenario.

  “It’s so much harder now than it would have been fifty years ago,” he’d said, stretched out on the chaise longue on their cramped balcony during one of the rare hours that sunlight fell on it. “Think about it—you could pay cash for hotel rooms and rental cars and plane tickets, there were pay phones everywhere and no surveillance cameras, and you could hot-wire a car with a screwdriver.”

  Abby interrupted and asked him to explain that process, to tell her just how he’d go about hot-wiring a car with a screwdriver in the good old days. Luke smiled. “That was the golden age of hot-wiring! Simple! But the newer cars are tougher.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.” He’d nodded emphatically. �
��Just trust me on this.”

  “Certainly.”

  “The first thing you’d have to do if you were running from the law or people who were trying to kill you is ditch the cell phone, obviously,” he went on. “They can always track those. But it’s easy to get a burner phone—if you have cash. Credit cards are no good, right? And how many people have enough cash to go on the run? How much cash do you have in your wallet right now?”

  Abby had four bills crumpled in her purse—and she was pleasantly surprised to discover one of them was a ten. She’d thought they were all singles.

  “So there you go, thirteen dollars,” Luke said. “I couldn’t get far on that. They’d find me before I hit the state line. I’d run out of gas—”

  “Is this in the car you hot-wired with a screwdriver?” Abby asked, and he grinned. For all of his physical beauty—and he was stunning, no question about that—he had a kid’s smile, awkward and shy, and his off-the-set laugh was the same, a little too big, too high, far too likely to end with a helpless snort. Abby loved that about him. All the surprising touches that turned the movie star into a human being were reassuring. The more human he became, the more she loved him. That first day, when he’d joked to her about the grief his friends were giving him for having a woman perform his stunt driving, she’d thought he was exactly what she’d expected: good-looking and charming and arrogant and false. The first date, she’d asked herself why she was wasting her time. But soon she realized that her initial wariness about him was understandable, but it was not the truth. The truth was complicated, as it usually is, and the truth of Luke London made him easier to love than Abby wanted. Her truth was that she wanted to stay far away from actors. Her truth was that she was breaking rules for him.

  “Sure it’s the car I hot-wired,” he said of his escape vehicle. “Because I’d have found an old car, right? As we discussed.”

  “Ah, of course.”

  “But then I run out of gas, and I’ve got no cash. What then? Pretend to be a homeless person?”

  “It doesn’t sound like it would be pretending by then.”

  Her pointed at her, sculpted triceps flexing under his T-shirt. “Good point! It would be method acting at its finest.”

  “And you suck at that.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed. I’d stand out, and they’d find me.”

  “Who?”

  “The people who are trying to kill me! So what do I do?”

  “You steal,” she said.

  “I’d get caught. I guarantee it. I have a naturally guilty disposition when it comes to crime. One try at shoplifting, and I’m getting caught and going to jail. Which means, obviously, another inmate will be paid to kill me. Or maybe a guard. But going to jail is not hiding.”

  “You steal carefully, then,” Abby had said. “Maybe break into a house. Just a matter of finding the right place.”

  Now, two years after that conversation and months after they’d taken Luke off life support, Abby drove along the turnpike and wondered where the right place was.

  She had some cash—a hundred and thirty bucks, enough for a hotel room somewhere, but hotels were dangerous. Her face was going to be on the news, and this was off-season in Maine, which meant that the employees of hotels that took cash were going to have time to pay attention to their guests, learn their faces.

  That was when she got it.

  Off-season. The right places, she realized, were plentiful. They didn’t call the state Vacationland for nothing—most people who owned property in Maine didn’t stay there year-round. There were thousands of vacant houses, cabins, and cottages out there for her, and plenty of them were isolated.

  She left the interstate in Augusta and moved on to the back roads. She realized only after taking the exit that the other cars hadn’t made her uneasy, nor had the speed. Her mind was too busy with a real crisis to let the imaginary threats creep in. When you were fleeing a murder scene and a murderer, a traffic accident suddenly didn’t seem too bad.

  As she followed one of the winding country roads east toward the coast, it began to rain again. That felt good, like protective cover. She was driving east because most of the summer people clung to the coast. There were exceptions at every lake and pond, of course, but nowhere was the population of seasonal houses higher than the Midcoast. When the patio furniture was moved into storage and the lobster shacks folded up their bright umbrellas, the population of those towns fell by at least half.

  How to pick the right house, though? Driving around some little coastal village and staring at houses would allow her to identify a few vacant ones, but it would also get her noticed by a year-round resident.

  She stopped at a gas station with a lunch counter, a place busy enough for her to feel like she wouldn’t stand out and big enough for her to suspect they’d have what she needed. Her clothes had dried but were still covered with mud, and she didn’t want many people to get a look at her. She waited until an older couple got out of their car and headed toward the door, and then she got out of the Tahoe, crossed the parking lot swiftly, and walked in on their heels. They turned toward the deli counter, and Abby stepped behind one of the merchandise racks and pretended to be looking at candy while she looked around the store. Just beside the door, she saw what she wanted—a rack of real estate guides, free of charge.

  She grabbed one, exited, and tried to keep her pace slow while her heart thundered and her every impulse screamed at her to run.

  Nobody gave her so much as a passing glance.

  She drove to Rockland and pulled off the road at a busy Dunkin’ Donuts where the Tahoe wasn’t likely to stand out. She’d have to change plates if she intended to keep the car, but right now her priority was finding a place where she could buy some time.

  The real estate guide offered plenty of them. Abby knew what she was looking for; the keywords were seasonal, which meant they’d likely be empty now, and motivated, which meant they’d been on the market for a long time, and the neighbors were used to seeing strange cars pull in for a look.

  She found both of those packaged with an even more golden word: isolated.

  There was a seasonal property in St. George, a rural stretch of peninsula about twenty minutes from Rockland, that boasted a reduced price, motivated seller, and fifteen isolated acres.

  A private oasis, perfect for artists, nature lovers, or anyone seeking beauty and seclusion!

  The Realtor didn’t spell it out, but the place certainly appealed to fugitives too.

  Abby drove south on Route 1, then turned in South Thomaston and followed 131 through winding curves that led out of the hills and down the peninsula, the sea on one side and the St. George River on the other. Past an old dairy truck that stood on the top of a hill like it was waiting to be used for a calendar photograph, past a few houses with tall stacks of lobster traps in the yard, and then through the little fishing and tourist town of Tenants Harbor. More fishing town than tourist spot now; this was far enough out of the woods to be unappealing to the leaf peepers, so it probably ran on a short season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, for most everyone but the locals. Just before Port Clyde, the road to the private oasis appeared. She followed it into an expanse of ever-thickening pines and then spotted a FOR SALE sign beside a stone post onto which the house number had been carved: 117.

  She followed a dirt driveway up a slope and around a curve and then the house came into view, a tall structure of shake shingles and glass that made her think of a lighthouse, everything designed vertically, with each floor a little smaller than the one below it, so it looked as if the levels had been stacked on one another. On one side of the home was a garage and on the other a small outbuilding that had probably been a studio.

  She got out of the Tahoe and stood in the silent yard. A light breeze carried the smell of the nearby sea, and the scent mingled with the pines. The place did feel like an oasis, and that was good, because her adrenaline was fading and exhaustion was creeping in. She needed rest. Hopefully
, David Meredith was making good on his pledge to do righteous work down at Hank’s house, and when Abby woke, it would all be done, nothing left to endure but a lecture from the cops for running and then listening to news of the kid’s arrest and identifying him in a photo lineup, maybe.

  Sure. It would be that easy.

  She tried the garage door first, and it was locked. The house was the same, but there was a Realtor’s lockbox on each door. She left the one on the front door intact and hammered the cover off the one on the side door with the butt of the SIG Sauer. There was a Red Sox key ring with three keys—house, garage, and studio, all helpfully labeled.

  Abby put the Tahoe in the garage, lowered the door, sealing it out of sight, and went in the house. It was a beautiful place, with gleaming wood floors and fresh white paint on the walls, so even on a gray day it seemed filled with light. There wasn’t any furniture. It had been a long time since anyone lived here. From the third-floor master bedroom, you had a view of overgrown gardens that would once have been spectacular, and, just visible over the treetops, a glimmer of blue ocean. You could also see almost the entire length of the road. There were only four other homes on it, and trees screened them out.

  The house was mostly empty, but in a closet she found some old drapes and a throw pillow that featured Snoopy flying a biplane. She picked a second-floor bedroom that faced away from the road and offered easy access to a porch roof. She opened the window, removed the screen, then closed it again, leaving it unlocked. If anyone showed up, at least she’d have a chance to run.

  Run where?

  Abby didn’t have the answer to that. She was out of answers and needed sleep in the worst way. She went back out to the garage and got the bag with the phones and carried that into the house and tucked it in one of the bathroom cabinets. Then she returned to the Tahoe and got the guns. She put the shotgun in the closet near the front door, brought the scoped rifle up to the third-floor master bedroom, and kept the handguns with her as she walked back down to the second floor. She felt nauseated and dizzy and weary. Adrenaline was an amazing thing. There was a certain gift to panic, to terror. As long as you could control it and channel it, there were fuel reserves in fear that most people didn’t know existed.