If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  That’s when Mom falls on her knees beside the bed and presses Tara’s hand to her face, her tears soaking Tara’s palm, and then Shannon is there, saying how she always knew it, but her quavering voice gives her away, and Rick is the only one who holds back, but Tara can’t blame him for that, and she’s grateful that he’s actually pausing to thank the doctors and is touched by the emotion in his voice.

  “She’s hearing us?” Mom says, staring at Tara with wonder. “You’re sure? Right now, she’s hearing me?”

  “Every word,” Dr. Carlisle promises, pulling a chair up beside the bed. Dr. Pine stays on his feet, smiling but pacing. Like any shark, he must keep moving or he will die.

  “And she’s always heard us?” Shannon asks, and Tara wants to laugh at the poorly suppressed guilt in her voice. Shannon is probably conducting an inventory of everything she let slip in moments when she thought she was alone. No matter what confidence they all professed, none of them were sure that Tara could hear a word. Now they are getting an awareness of that ghost in the room.

  “I can’t tell you when she came back or whether she’s been alert the entire time; all I can tell you is that she is now,” Dr. Carlisle says.

  “What does that mean for her prognosis?” Shannon asks. Mom looks wounded by the question, as if it’s in some way undermining the joy of what they’ve just been told, but it is also the question Tara would ask if she had a voice.

  “Entirely unknown,” Dr. Pine says. “But it only helps. One of the greatest challenges in rehabilitating the brain is the constant testing and guessing it requires from the medical team, from the family, everyone. Based on Dr. Carlisle’s results, Tara is going to be able to help us enormously there. She may not have her voice, but she should be able to communicate. If we know what she’s experiencing, feeling, and requiring, that is a tremendous advantage in treating her successfully.” His eyes are locked on Tara with excitement.

  I’m an opportunity to him, she realizes. Something he’s been waiting for for maybe his whole career. It’s an odd sensation but not a bad one—he wants to see if he can bring her all the way back. That’s a goal Tara can get behind.

  “There may be even more reason for celebration,” Dr. Carlisle says. “When reviewing the video of Tara’s face during the test, Dr. Pine noticed what seems to be some oculomotor progress.”

  “Oculomotor?” Mom echoes tentatively.

  “She can blink?” Rick asks.

  “Not quite…or at least not quite yet,” Dr. Pine says. “But the progress she’s demonstrating since our initial tests may be more useful than even Tara knows.”

  He’s studying Tara’s eyes while moving his hand in the air like a conductor. The longer he does it, the more delighted he seems.

  “Vertical eye motion,” he says. He sits and perches with perfect posture on a stool beside her bed; he looks like a bird of prey. “She’s regained that. Consistent with locked-in syndrome.”

  “Locked-in syndrome?” Rick asks, and he looks at Tara with something between concern and horror. The name seems self-explanatory, and terrifying. They’re all learning now what Tara has been living with for days.

  “Charming name, isn’t it?” Dr. Pine says. “But it’s clear, at least. Tara is with us, but Tara is trapped.”

  Mom murmurs something inaudible and puts her head in her hands.

  “Not all bad, though,” Dr. Pine continues. “Locked-in syndrome prevents outbound communication, yes, but it also, perhaps, provides some protection. And now that we know she’s in there, we can work to bridge the void.” He studies her with a slight incline of his head, then smiles. “Excellent.”

  Tara tracked the motion with her eyes, and he saw it. The rush of euphoria this realization brings is almost overwhelming, and if she could cry, she would. He sees me. He sees me!

  “Locked-in syndrome is caused by an insult to the ventral pons,” he says. “But with vertical eye motion, she’s not as trapped as she was before. She should be able to communicate.”

  An insult to the ventral pons, Tara thinks. That’s the term for having your brain knocked around your skull and leaving you unable to move or speak—an insult? The word seems woefully insufficient.

  “Essentially, her condition has caused paralysis with preservation of consciousness and retention of vertical eye movement. She has some voluntary eyelid motion, but her response to the blink requests, as you saw, showed a lack of control.” He leans forward and lifts a pencil with his thumb and index finger. “But there’s progress. I think Tara is in control of her vertical eye motion now. Aren’t you, Tara? Show them.”

  He lifts the pencil slowly, then lowers it. Mom gasps; Rick puts a hand on her shoulder that seems designed to steady himself as much as her, and Shannon stares at Tara, enthralled.

  “Oh, honey,” Mom says. “Oh, baby.” She’s squeezing Tara’s hand and blinking away tears. Dr. Pine tolerates the interruption. Behind them, Dr. Carlisle paces and smiles.

  Competitive, Tara thinks. She found me in here first. He wants me now. That is just fine with her. The more the merrier when it comes to people invested in her return, but she wonders if they’ll remember who suggested she watch Jaws.

  Mom releases her hand, rises, gets her iPad, then rushes back, holding it with the camera lens trained on Tara. She’s shaking so badly it seems unlikely she’ll be able to keep it in her hands, let alone in focus. Tara wants to laugh. For years, she and Shannon made fun of Mom’s insistence on capturing every family moment on film, but even now?

  Dr. Pine says, “Tara, let’s try for yes and no. When you want to indicate a yes response, look up once. When you want to say no, do it twice.” He pauses and wets his lips, and for the first time Tara sees that behind the clinical demeanor, he’s nervous. “Okay,” he says. “Tara, do you understand what I just said?”

  She looks up. Once.

  “Tara, does two plus two equal ten?”

  She looks up twice.

  Dr. Pine lets out a long breath. “We’re batting a thousand,” he says. “Tara, is Shannon your sister?”

  Up once.

  “Am I your father?”

  Up twice.

  Mom is crying now, tears streaming down her face, over those purple rings below her eyes that have darkened with each day in here; her iPad shakes in her hands like a highway sign in hurricane winds.

  Shannon pushes in beside Dr. Pine, kneels, and looks at Tara with a trembling smile. “Tara,” she says, “did you ever quit?”

  Dr. Pine looks annoyed at the intrusion, but when Tara moves her eyes upward twice and they all burst into a clumsy hybrid of tears and laughter, he smiles charitably and lets them have their moment. He keeps watching Tara, though, his focus unbroken.

  “Tara,” he says, “would you like to try the alphabet board?”

  Up once.

  He stands. “Okay,” he says, “let’s see what she can do.”

  Yes, Tara thinks. Let’s see. It’s the first time she’s been given an active role—even the crucial fMRI was passive; she was shoved into a tube and shown a movie—and the opportunity is both exhilarating and exhausting. The joy that comes with being known, with being breathed back into existence in the room, is an injection of adrenaline, but the eye tests were oddly fatiguing, as if simple willpower drains her. Perhaps it does. But she’s got willpower reserves they haven’t seen yet, and she’ll figure out how to replenish them, locked-in or not.

  “This is all just a starting point,” Dr. Carlisle says. “Yes/no communication is, obviously, an enormous step. But we’ve got an open road ahead of us now.”

  Dr. Carlisle begins to talk about a combination of rudimentary alphabet boards and sophisticated computer software, and Dr. Pine chimes in with a discussion of tongue-strengthening exercises—those sound like fun. Mom returns to her chair and focuses on her iPad. Tara watches in astonishment as she taps away, seemingly oblivious to the conversation around her. Are you bored, Mom? I’m back from the dead, but you’ve got e-mail to check?
Then Mom rises with a smile and brings the iPad to Tara and turns it to face her.

  “You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted to be able to post this,” she says, starting to cry again.

  On the screen is the Team Tara Facebook page. Mom has pinned the video of Tara’s eye-motion test with a caption: We have blessed news! Tara is awake!

  33

  Back when he’d been rehearsing for the fugitive role, asking Abby countless questions about how she’d handle herself on the run, Luke had given her a simple but memorable piece of advice: “Never underestimate the helpfulness of your local library.”

  On her first day as a fugitive, Abby headed for the library in Rockland. In Luke’s script, there’d been dialogue about big cities being better to hide in than small towns, because nobody paused to look at a stranger in a place where everyone was a stranger. She believed that, but big cities were hard to come by in Maine, and so she settled for Rockland, the county seat, home to the courthouse and the jail and the BMV. A regular metropolis by Maine standards, with maybe twenty thousand residents.

  She parked several blocks from the library, near the harbor in a busy parking lot that was shared by two seafood restaurants and a YMCA, and she walked along the water for twenty minutes, watching her back, before she moved toward town. No one followed. In the library, she found a computer where she could sit with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door.

  When she logged on to the internet, her first instinct was to read about herself. Pragmatic fugitive behavior or clinical narcissism? She wasn’t sure, but a cursory review of news sites was reassuring to her invisibility, if not her ego—the reports were that Hank Bauer had died in a car accident whose cause was currently under investigation. Police in Maine were keeping Abby’s story quiet for a reason, or possibly they didn’t believe it, but in any case, they weren’t making a big deal out of her call to David Meredith.

  Not yet.

  She moved on to Amandi Oltamu. There was plenty to read here, because Amandi Oltamu had been an important man, but Abby was going to need a translator to help her understand half of it.

  The obituaries were helpful but vague, capturing his childhood escape from a war-torn Sudan and his education history (Carnegie Mellon and MIT) and revealing that his marriage had ended in divorce and he had no children. He was described as “renowned in his field.” Okay, Abby thought, let’s find out some more about that field. A few searches later she landed on a paper written by Oltamu. The title was “Improving the Coupling of Redox Cycles in Sulfur and 2,6-Polyanthraquinone and Impacts on Galvanostatic Cycling.”

  It wasn’t a good sign that Abby was tentative on the pronunciation of two of the words in the title.

  She didn’t waste time attempting to wade through the entire paper. If there was a clue in that paper, Abby wasn’t going to be able to identify it. Instead, she went to the Hammel College site and found a short press release on Dr. Oltamu’s scheduled talk. This one was at least a bit more civilian-friendly: He was going to speak on how batteries could combat climate change. The press release didn’t mention anything about teenage assassins, though. Less helpful.

  Oltamu’s bio on the site said that he’d consulted with the International Society for Energy Storage Research. The ISESR page noted that his work was focused on a new paradigm for battery energy storage at atomic and molecular levels.

  Terrific. And tragic. He’d been doing vital work, and then he was killed. Maybe the vital work was why he’d been killed. If so, that was going to require more understanding of the topic than Abby could glean from web searches. There was a better chance of her figuring out how to jailbreak the security on that cloned iPhone than of her determining the breakthrough Amandi Oltamu had made with regard to the new paradigm of galvanostatic coupling. Or cycling. Whatever. Understanding the importance of Oltamu’s work required an advanced degree, or at least the ability to pronounce polyanthraquinone without sounding like Forrest Gump.

  Jailbreaking the device Oltamu had left behind seemed like the better option, but Abby had failed once already. She’d tried Tara and not Tara Beckley, but if Tara Beckley was wrong, she was down to one swing of the bat. She still didn’t understand the security approach either; shouldn’t it be more advanced, a fingerprint or a retina scan or facial recognition?

  Maybe it was. Maybe the prompt asking for Tara’s name was a ruse, and the only way the device unlocked was with Oltamu’s retina. That would be a problem, considering that by now he’d been buried or cremated.

  Had Oltamu been trying to protect himself at the end, adding Tara Beckley’s photograph as a lock just before Carlos Ramirez drove into him? Or was Abby’s instinct wrong, and Oltamu hadn’t taken the picture? Even if Abby was right about the location, and she was pretty sure that she was, it didn’t mean that she was right about when it had been taken. For all she knew, it was Tara Beckley’s Facebook profile picture.

  Bullshit it is. Not with that smile. Something was wrong when that picture was taken. She wasn’t sure what yet, but she knew something was wrong.

  Tara’s Facebook profile was private, but Abby found an open Facebook page called Team Tara, the one Shannon Beckley had said kept her mother occupied and away from tranquilizers. Abby opened it without much hope, then froze.

  The first post was a video with a caption claiming Tara was awake.

  She moved the cursor to the video and clicked Play. The camera was shaking, but Tara was clear, and so were her eyes. As a doctor asked her questions, she looked up. Once for yes, twice for no. The motion was unmistakable.

  Her mother wasn’t being optimistic; Tara was awake and responsive.

  Abby whispered, “Oh, shit,” loudly enough to earn an irritated glance from an old man reading a newspaper a few feet away.

  Abby lifted a hand in apology and returned her attention to the screen. The video had been posted only a few hours earlier but already it had hundreds of shares, people eager to distribute this good news far and wide.

  A blessing, yes. And maybe a terrible invitation.

  She logged off the computer, picked up the case file, and left the library, then walked back down to the harbor and stood about five hundred yards from the Tahoe. She pretended to stare at the sea, but she was really looking for people watching the car. There was no obvious sign of interest in the vehicle, but right now everyone felt like a watcher. Paranoia was growing. She forced her eyes away from the parking lot and looked out across the water. The wind was rising, northeasterly breezes throwing up nickel-colored clouds, as if the morning’s sunshine had been a mistake and now the wind was working hastily to conceal evidence of the error.

  Abby knew that making contact with Tara Beckley’s family would be a suicidal move. They’d rush to the police, bring more attention, and, quite possibly, kill whatever faint hope she had of trading the phone in her pocket for evidence that exonerated her in Hank’s death and for the chance to send his murderer to prison. It was too early to reach out; she’d be better off walking into the police station.

  Unless the family believes you.

  Unless that, yes.

  She watched the ferry head out from Rockland toward Vinalhaven, and she thought of the way Tara’s eyes had flicked up at the doctor’s questions, the responsive motion so clear, so undeniable, and then she thought of the countless tests Luke had failed. Then she withdrew the working cell phone from her pocket, the one she’d promised herself she wouldn’t use again. Just by turning it on, she was broadcasting her location.

  But she had to try.

  She opened the case file she’d taken into the library and flipped through it in search of another number. Not Oltamu’s this time. Shannon Beckley’s. She dialed.

  Shannon answered immediately. “Hello?” A single word that conveyed both her confidence in herself and her distrust of others. She wouldn’t have recognized the number, so she was probably already suspicious.

  “This is Abby Kaplan and it is very important that you do not hang up. You need t
o listen to me, please. You’ve got to listen to me for Tara’s sake.”

  She got the words out in a hurry. She had to keep the conversation short on this phone.

  “Sure,” Shannon said. “Sure, I remember you.” Her voice was strained, and Abby heard people talking in the background and then the sound of a door opening and she understood that Shannon was leaving a crowded room. She was at least giving Abby the chance to speak.

  “Have they told you I killed Hank Bauer yet?” Abby asked.

  “They have.” She spoke lightly, as if trying not to draw concern or attention, and Abby heard her footsteps loud on the tiled floor of the hospital. She was walking away from listeners.

  “It’s a lie. We were both supposed to die and I made it out.”

  “That’s different than what I’ve heard.”

  “I’m sure it is. If I could explain it, I’d have gone right to the police. But Hank is dead because whoever killed Oltamu—and Ramirez, there are three of them now, all of them dead…” Her words were running away from her and she stopped and took a breath, forcing herself to slow down. “Whoever did that wants a phone. Not your sister’s, and not Oltamu’s real phone. One that he had with him, maybe. I’m not sure it’s actually a phone; it might just be a camera designed to look like one. But I’ve got it.”

  “What does—”

  “Hang on, listen to me. I just read a post from your mother’s Facebook page that claims Tara is alert. I saw the video. That needs to come down.”

  “What? Why?”

  Abby looked at how long she’d been on the call—twenty-five seconds. “I’ve got to hurry,” she said, “and I don’t have all the answers you’re going to want, but you have to limit access to Tara. And you have to limit the questions she’s asked. Because if she remembers what happened that night, then she’s a threat to somebody. Three people are already dead, and that’s just the ones I know of. I was supposed to be the fourth.”

  Shannon Beckley didn’t speak. Abby wanted to be patient, but she couldn’t. Not on this line.