Never Wake

by Gabrielle Goldsby

  Dr. Shorenstein had been in her hospital room when she had awakened and although she wanted to quiz him about Troy’s whereabouts, intuition told her to wait and watch.

  Her parents might be fooled, but she wasn’t. Dr. Dunham had said his partner would bring them out. Although he avoided her eyes, she could sense his excitement every time he was around her. Excitement, coupled with fear and shame.

  One thing Emma was certain of: he couldn’t know what had happened to them in that other place. And although Dr. Dunham had called him his partner, she was sure this man was no more than a flunky. With Dr. Dunham gone, he was probably dreaming of the prestige this would bring him. Emma was pretty sure that without Dr. Dunham, whatever had been done to them would lack all credibility. All he knew was that she was awake. She didn’t ask about Troy again, and she answered his questions with as little information as possible. Her parents’ arrival saved her from answering any more. She listened to the small talk between them and the doctor until one of them saw fit to acknowledge her.

  “Hello, sweetheart. You’re looking much better today. Have you walked any?”

  Her walks were not quite walks yet. But they would be. She was determined to get back the use of her legs. She would not rely on the cane either. She would not become what she had been. She wouldn’t let herself.

  “Daddy, did you find anything?”

  “Find what?” her mother asked as she sat on the foot of Emma’s bed.

  He cleared his throat and sat down in a chair. “I did find her. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.”

  “Tell me.”

  He frowned. “How do you even know her?”

  “Know who?” Her mother was looking from her husband to Emma.

  “I’ll explain later,” Emma said to both questions. “Is she all right? Where is she?”

  “She was in an accident. She’s in a small hospital on the east side. Emma, I’m afraid she’s in a coma.”

  Emma stared at him bleary-eyed. “That can’t be right. No, she should be out now.”

  “Out? No, she’s been in the hospital about as long as you have.”

  Emma’s heart writhed. “Take me to her.”

  “You haven’t recovered enough to go out yet. Tell her, Doctor.”

  “Ms. Webster, I’m afraid that would be too much for you right now.” His anxiety had increased. She was done playing games with him. She was done lying around wondering when Troy was going to come.

  Emma forced herself to sit up, tears pouring down her face. She welcomed the pain that racked her body; she welcomed it, but it didn’t take away from the utter desolation and fear. Had Troy become stuck in that place? Was she alone and scared? Had she not made it back to the hospital in time?

  “I will check myself out of this hospital and your care right this minute if you try to stop me. I know what you did. What you tried to do, and I will tell the press and anyone else who’ll listen. And I’ll make sure you can’t put all the blame on Dr. Dunham.” She felt it when he became almost overwhelmed with shame. Emma realized that this man seemed to be nothing like Dr. Dunham, not yet, anyway.

  Dr. Shorenstein’s eyes grew large at the threat. “I’m sorry, ma’am.” He was talking to her mother as if Emma wasn’t there. “I can’t force her to stay here if she doesn’t want to.” He left the room before her mother could utter another protest.

  “What is she talking about?” Emma’s mother said in that no-nonsense-accepted voice that she used on everyone from children to adults. “What did he do to you?” she demanded, but didn’t pause long enough for an answer. “This is just ridiculous. You can’t go traipsing all over town to see some friend. You just came out of coma.”

  Emma ignored her mother and focused on her father. He met her eyes and his shoulders slumped. Help me, Daddy. You’ve never stood up for me. Do it now.

  “I need to see her. I need to help her,” Emma said to him. She was struggling trying to find the words to make him understand.

  “Don’t be silly. How can you help her if she’s in a coma?” Emma was used to hearing disparagement in her mother’s voice, but today it rankled.

  Emma gritted her teeth and directed her words to her father. “I need to be with her.” She held her hand out. “Please, Daddy.”

  “Emma, you need to calm down. Maybe you should get the doctor, Mark. I think Emma’s becoming hysterical. Maybe he’ll give her something to help her calm down.”

  “Daddy?” Emma flinched as her father turned and walked out the door without answering her.

  “Emma.” Darby’s voice had softened now that she believed her orders were being followed. I know how much you care about those…those people that come to your clinic, but you have to watch out for yourself now.”

  Emma tuned her mother out and kept her eyes on the empty doorway. What did you expect? It’s not as though you haven’t been guilty of giving in just to shut her up. Why would he be any different? Hell, he’s had more years than you have to learn how to deal with her. No, Darby was hard to argue with, but she had hoped that when she really needed him, her father would stand up for her.

  Emma realized that Darby was sitting on her bed when she reached across and grabbed her hand. Emma looked up in time to see her shaking her head. “You are too much like your grandmother—look what happened to her.”

  “She had congenital heart failure.” Emma closed her eyes. It was an old argument and it was making her weary.

  “She worked herself to the bone, and those people broke her heart at least once a day. Look what one of them did to you. This Troy is just going to do the same.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “I know the type.”

  “You don’t even know me. How can you know Troy or her type? And as for my grandmother…” Emma was almost speechless at her mother’s audacity.

  “My mother, Emma. Don’t forget that she was my mother.”

  “That’s right, she was your mother. But you didn’t know her. If you did, you’d know that the people she helped at the clinic gave her life meaning.”

  Her mother stood up and looked as if she was about to leave the room. Emma kept speaking because if there was one thing you could count on with Darby Webster, it was her need to have the last word. “You’re right, sometimes things broke her heart. When a baby she had given care to came in pregnant fifteen years later. Or a boy she had known all his life ended up in prison for life. But you didn’t know how happy she felt when she was able to help people feel better who had been sick for years but couldn’t afford health care.”

  “Where were all those people when she died, then?” Darby was glaring at Emma now her fists furled into tight little knots of displeasure. “I didn’t see any of them at her funeral. I didn’t see one damn person who wasn’t family or friends of Mark’s come to pay their respect. She gave her whole damn life to these people, and when all was said and done, she died alone.” A sob came out of Darby’s throat and Emma felt horrible for having caused it. Emma raised her hand toward her mother, but wasn’t surprised when Darby just folded her arms and turned away. “I don’t want that for you,” she said, refusing to look at Emma.

  Emma understood it now. All of the anger, the need for control, all of it stemmed from jealousy. Darby felt that the time Ida had spent at the clinic had been stolen from her. And she was afraid that Emma would be headed down the same path.

  “I’m not planning on dying anytime soon, Mother.”

  “I know that.” Darby sniffed. The anger was back. “But you’re too young to not have a life outside of work. You should be out with friends, maybe traveling. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “You’re acting like I’m a twenty-year-old kid.” Emma smiled to soften her words. “Maybe I have been burying myself at the clinic too much, and I don’t have as many friends as I should, but I do have one close friend. She’s more than a friend, actually.” Emma saw the “I don’t want to talk about this” look on her mother’s face as she turned awa
y to look out the window. Emma pushed on because she needed to express what she was feeling. “I miss her so much it hurts, and Daddy just told me that she needs me. Can you understand how I feel?”

  She had expected something other than the silence that settled on the room. I wonder why I keep being disappointed by her. She’s always been this way. Available only for the non-emotional things. Why would I expect any more than that? Emma knew what would happen next, as if she had read the script beforehand. Her mother would continue to stand there as she was, arms crossed, looking out the window, and then she would excuse herself and return with coffee or a sandwich that she wouldn’t eat and armed with a safe line of conversation.

  Emma looked away from the rigid back and slender figure when she heard a sound at the door. Her father stood in the doorway hunched over the back of a wheelchair as if for support. There was a silent exchange between her parents that made Emma’s chest ache. She could feel the sense of loss and fear coming from her mother and a soul-shattering feeling of sad resignation coming from her father. His disappointment mirrored her own when they both watched Darby squeeze between the narrow space between the bed and the wheelchair and walk out of the room without so much as a glance in his direction.

  “I’m sorry for bringing you into this, Daddy,” Emma said after getting over her shock.

  “You’re my daughter,” he said. She could feel that deep down, what she had said had hurt him. And what her mother had not said had hurt him even more. How had she missed the pain in their relationship?

  He loved her—loved her with a fierce, burning desire that she recognized. She hurt for her father. She would hurt for him more when she had time to think, but for now she was consumed with thoughts of getting to Troy.

  Dr. Shorenstein came rushing in, and her mother trailed behind him.

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t do this. She hasn’t been released yet.”

  Her father turned dark, burning eyes on the young doctor. “My daughter has something she has to do. I’ll bring her back after she’s done.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t allow that.”

  “Let me tell you something, son. For two months she lay in that bed, and I didn’t know if I’d ever hear her voice again. But she just told me that there’s some place she needs to be. I’m going to make sure she gets there and you don’t want to be in my way.”

  The last part was said with a thread of steel that was strong enough to encompass the young doctor and her mother. Neither of them offered to help as her father assisted her as she slid into the chair. Emma had already forgotten about them. Her mind was on Troy.

  Dr. Shorenstein had to hustle to avoid being run over as they wheeled through the door and out into the hallway.

  Emma barely noticed when they passed through the halls of the hospital. Why hadn’t Troy awakened as she had? She remembered Dr. Shorenstein telling her parents that Dr. Dunham had died. What if he’d been wrong? The patients didn’t know anything about the drugs they had been given.

  “Ready?” her father asked.

  “One, two, three.” She counted along with him under her breath, and for once, she did not brace herself for the pain. The wheels of the chair whispered as they moved through the halls. Emma kept expecting someone else to try to stop them, but they were barely given cursory glances as they reached the entrance of the hospital. A cool breeze passed through her hospital gown, and she shivered. Across the street, a boy sat against a streetlight with a bag thrown across his back at an angle, a girl stood on the sidewalk waiting to cross, and a woman walked by with a black West Highland Terrier on a leash. The light changed, and as they walked across the street, Emma inhaled and shivered. She briefly set aside her worry for Troy and tried to feel the city.

  “Emma, did you hear me? I need to pull the car around. Will you be all right if I leave you here alone?”

  “Sorry, go ahead. I’ll be fine.” Emma assumed her father had walked away, but her eyes were riveted to the pedestrians on the street until they had disappeared and were replaced by others. She watched people awake and moving in their everyday lives until the long line of her father’s black Lexus blocked the street from view.

  He buckled her into the passenger seat and shut the door behind her. She watched him through the side mirror as he struggled to fit the wheelchair in the trunk. His hair was full and dark brown, but she knew he had begun coloring it several years before. He had worn sideburns, even when they weren’t popular, but Emma thought they made him look stylish. He was a handsome man, and Emma felt proud of him for reasons she would need to explore later. He sat down in the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition before slamming the door.

  “Thank you,” Emma said, “for this, I mean.”

  He smiled. “You seem surprised.”

  “You and I have never been the I’ll-break-you-out-of-the--hospital type of close. Mother and I neither, for that matter.” Emma winced, wondering how much of that was her fault. “Thank you for understanding how important she is to me.”

  Emma watched the emotions play across his face as he struggled to find words. Confusion, sadness, and the need to say what he was feeling made the car quiet as he drove onto Interstate 5.

  Come on, Daddy. Tell me what you’re thinking.

  “You’ve never asked me for anything,” he said.

  Emma looked at him sharply. “Are you kidding? I always asked you for stuff.”

  “No, you asked your mother.”

  Emma frowned. “That can’t be true.”

  He looked away from the road long enough to look at Emma. “It’s true, and I’m not blaming you. It was easier that way for me, too.”

  How could that be? How could she go through her life— Of course it was true, she realized. Even at a young age, she had known who ran the household, and it was never her father. She had asked her mother if she had known what it was to feel needed. Perhaps she had been asking the wrong parent.

  “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Troy Nanson.”

  “Does she work at the clinic?”

  “No, she’s a bike messenger here in town.”

  “Dangerous job.”

  “Yes, but she loves it.”

  “Is that how you feel about the clinic?”

  “Yes,” Emma said, looking at her father in surprise. “I thought I…” How could she tell him about the life she had led in her self-imposed dreamland? “I thought about what life would be like if I didn’t have the clinic. It was empty and without direction. I think I was waiting to die.”

  Her father seemed to understand, and perhaps he did. Perhaps that’s the conclusion he had come to when he contemplated living without her mother.

  “Almost there,” he said.

  Emma found herself rubbing her hands across the front of her thin hospital robe. They exited Interstate 5. Emma watched the people on the streets in a daze. Troy lived close to here, she thought. She leaned her head back, closing her eyes, wanting to be there, yet not wanting to be there. Her father made a left turn onto a tree-lined road; a sign to the left of the road was almost obscured by trees and was so worn that it made it hard for her to read the writing. She didn’t have to, though; she knew that it would be Multnomah cemetery—the place where Patricia was buried. Her father drove for another mile or so and pulled into the driveway of a small, colonial mansion that had been converted into an adult-care hospital.

  “Please help me out,” Emma said, her breath coming in short bursts. Her father was already out of the car and opening the trunk to remove the chair. Her legs trembled as she stood and allowed herself to be guided into the chair.

  As he pushed her through the parking lot, she noticed a bike chained to a pole. “Daddy, push me over there.” A sob hung in the back of her throat as she struggled with her own warring emotions. On the one hand she was happy to see Dite intact and not destroyed as Troy had described. She reached up and touched Dite’s bars, her seat, and the duct tape on the handlebars. She was also
ecstatic that everything, right down to the different colored rubber bands that Troy had daisy-chained along its frame, was as she remembered it. But on the other hand, it confirmed what she already knew. The things that she remembered, the time she had shared with Troy—the scary ones and the wonderful ones—had not physically happened.

  Troy’s bike in all its glory.

  Someone had placed a plastic bag over the seat, and there were little notes taped all over the bike. Emma flipped one back so she could read it. Come back to us, Troy. Dite’s waiting for you. She remembered Troy telling her the story about the messenger who had died in a traffic accident a few years before. “We chained his bike near his grave, and it had stayed until the city removed it.”

  “You ready to go in?” Emma swallowed and released the note. She looked up at the windows of the hospital and felt the fear Troy had described when she had caught Abe cleaning up the room. She wondered which one of these windows was that room. Reba Stefani’s name had stuck fast in Emma’s mind. At some point I’ll find out what happened to her in the real world, but I need to see about Troy first. What if he had come upon Troy’s room first? What if… Stop it. You can’t play this game. He didn’t find her first. She is alive. It may take her a little longer to wake up, but she is alive. That’s all that matters.

  Emma gripped the armrest of the chair hard as her father pushed her up a ramp and toward the front doors of the hospital.

  Fear crept like ice water into her veins. When her father hit the little blue button that swung the doors open, she had expected the sadness, the weariness, and the feelings associated with people being ill, but it didn’t make it any more easy to deal with.

  The walls were painted white, though they looked like they were in need of a few new coats. Four chairs sat across from a large reception desk. The woman manning the desk smiled at them and pointed to the phone glued to her ear with her free hand.

  The top of the desk was lined with birthday cards from what looked like friends and coworkers. There was one drawn with crayons, with the adorable little stick figures on the front. It made Emma think of Troy’s self-portrait with the sidewalk chalk.