Maidenstone Lighthouse

by Sally Smith O'rourke

  Damon was painfully squeezing my hand again. His eyes had taken on a wild, hunted look and he was struggling to get up.

  “It’s okay now,” I crooned, terrified that he was going to seriously hurt himself. I looked frantically toward the ICU windows in hopes of attracting the attention of Alice or one of the nurses. “It’s all over,” I told Damon. “You’re safe. Please be still.”

  “Sue.” Damon was gasping for breath, his face contorting exactly like the face I had seen in my dream of two nights earlier. “I have to tell you first…”

  “Hush,” I whispered. “Please, Damon, just lie still and don’t try to talk. We’ll talk later, after you’ve rested…”

  “Bobby!” he gurgled, throwing his chubby legs over the side of the bed and strangling on his own saliva. “I saw Bobby,” he gasped. “You’ve got to listen, Sue!”

  “What in the name of God did he mean?” I asked the unanswerable question for the tenth time. My hands were trembling so badly I was having trouble lifting the Styrofoam cup of cafeteria coffee to my lips. A moment after Damon made his incredible pronouncement, Alice and two nurses had rushed into his ICU suite and wrestled him back into bed. I had been literally pushed out the door by an arriving orderly as a needle was slipped into Damon’s naked thigh and his frantic, high-pitched voice faded to a weeping, incoherent babble.

  Dan sat across the Formica-topped table, watching me with worried eyes and obviously trying to think of something to say that would not increase my level of agitation. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “Are you sure you heard him right? I mean, you did say he got pretty irrational in there.”

  “Bobby,” I slowly repeated, trying to keep my voice absolutely calm. “Damon said he saw Bobby.” I sipped the hot, bitter coffee, searing my tongue. “What does that mean, Dan?”

  Dan’s eyes left mine and I could see the relief in them as Alice entered the cafeteria and crossed to where we were sitting. I noticed that there was a long scratch across her cheek as she slumped heavily into a chair beside mine and gratefully accepted the cup of coffee that Dan had already bought for her.

  “Sorry about what happened up there,” she said after she had taken a cautious swallow of the steaming liquid. “He obviously wasn’t ready to see anyone yet.”

  “Is he…?” I searched for the proper words to frame my question about Damon’s condition.

  “Sleeping like a baby,” she replied before I could get my thoughts together. “Mostly because I popped him with a good, strong dose of Valium and put him on 100 percent oxygen. In his weakened state, the combination hit him like an elephant tranquilizer.”

  Alice hesitated, and I could tell she was silently reviewing the wisdom of her summary decision to render Damon unconscious again so soon after his miraculous emergence from the coma. “Normally the last thing you want to do in a situation like this is depress the patient’s system with drugs,” she explained. “But the alternative was risking some severe secondary injury while he was thrashing around.”

  She reached over and patted one of my shaking hands. “Don’t worry. His vitals are still strong and I think he’ll be okay after he sleeps it off.”

  “Thank God,” I breathed.

  “So,” she continued, gazing at me with her cool green eyes, “exactly what happened in that room before I came in and found you trying to keep your little pal from jumping out of bed?”

  I stared at my hands and shook my head helplessly.

  “When Sue asked Damon if he remembered anything about the crash,” Dan answered for me, “he suddenly became extremely agitated and told her that he had seen her dead fiancé. He seemed to be positively terrified.”

  “Just before that, he was talking about a very bright light,” I interjected. “But that part seemed to have been a good experience for him.”

  I took another sip of my only slightly cooled coffee and thought for a moment. “At first I assumed he was remembering having seen the lights of the boats and rescue helicopters searching for survivors.”

  Alice Cahill leaned back in her chair and looked into her coffee cup. “I don’t think that was what he was remembering at all,” she said slowly. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before.” She paused and tested the dark liquid with the tip of her finger. “Do you remember my telling you that Damon’s heart had stopped when he first arrived here at the med center?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I’m not sure exactly how long he’d been gone—clinically dead, as we call it—before the rescue chopper got him here,” the worried doctor continued. “It might only have been a minute or two…But it could have been a lot longer. The Coast Guard paramedics were having trouble with their monitoring equipment that morning. So we can’t know for certain. Damon might well have been technically dead—his brain deprived of oxygen—for as long as ten minutes…”

  “Ten minutes?” Disbelief registered in my voice. “But you said he didn’t have any brain damage—”

  Alice raised her hand, cutting me off. “He doesn’t,” she assured me. “One of the happier side effects of hypothermia is that extreme cold preserves brain cells that would normally die within a few minutes without oxygen. Except for the concussion, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Damon’s brain.

  “However,” she continued, lowering her voice and glancing furtively around the nearly deserted cafeteria, “there is a fairly common…delusion that may explain the bright light and his belief that he met with someone who is no longer living…”

  I managed a stupid look. “I guess I really don’t understand,” I confessed.

  Dan, who had been listening quietly, suddenly spoke up. “I think what Alice is trying to say is that Damon may have had a near-death experience,” he said. “I’ve read a little on the subject. Essentially, it’s a set of memories that are often claimed by people who have been clinically dead for short periods of time. Afterwards, they recall having left their bodies and being drawn upward toward a bright light.”

  He looked over at Alice, who was nodding encouragingly, obviously relieved at having a layman describe the highly controversial near-death phenomenon for her.

  I frowned, vaguely recalling that I, too, had heard something about near death. In the first weeks following Bobby’s disappearance my attention had been grabbed by a thumbs-down Times book review on the subject. “I saw a review of a book written by an accident victim who claimed she left her body to go to some sort of heavenly light,” I said, remembering that the reviewer had flatly dismissed the author’s claims as syrupy pop mysticism and unworthy of serious consideration. “But what does that have to do with Bobby?”

  “Those who reach the center of this very beautiful light,” Dan continued, “frequently report having met people there that they know have died previously, especially friends or relatives.” Dan shot Alice a piercing glance. “Though thousands of people have reported them, the implied spiritual nature of near-death experiences is not accepted, however, by medicine or science,” he concluded.

  “My God, why not?” I breathed, looking at the silent physician beside me and thinking about my own recent experiences with the ghost of Aimee Marks.

  Alice sighed and regarded the two of us like slightly backward children. “Admittedly, such stories are pretty common,” she replied. “But there is absolutely no proof that anything really happens, outside the dying patient’s own imagination.”

  “In other words, Doctor,” Dan responded with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “if you can’t prove it, then it must not exist.”

  Alice accorded him a tolerant smile that made it clear she’d encountered similar remarks from the misinformed in the past. “Well, that’s scientific method for you, Dan,” she shot back. “You can’t prove what can’t be proven. On the other hand,” she conceded with a shrug, “who am I to say there’s no heavenly light where dear friends and loved ones are waiting to greet us when we die?”

  Then she turned to me. “Whether the so-called near-death experience i
s real or imagined is really immaterial, Sue. Because it definitely does happen, and it could explain why Damon thinks he saw your fiancé.”

  “I suppose,” I reluctantly conceded, “except for the fact that when Bobby was alive he and Damon could barely tolerate one another.”

  “Oh!” Alice laughed. “Well, I can’t say I ever heard anyone claim they were drawn up into an ethereal light and found their annoying next-door neighbor waiting for them there.”

  “And why was Damon so frightened, anyway?” I wanted to know. “True, he and Bobby never got along, but it was never anything more serious than the two of them avoiding one another. Damon certainly wasn’t afraid of him.”

  I could see that Dan was anxious to express another opinion. But he ended the discussion by saying, “Well, I guess we’ll all just have to wait for Damon to wake up and solve the mystery for us.”

  “When can I see him again?” I asked Alice.

  The doctor averted her eyes and frowned into her coffee cup. “I expect him to sleep for quite some time,” she said, swirling the dark liquid round and round the plastic rim.

  She looked up at me again. “However, Sue, I don’t want you sitting there at Damon’s side when he comes around the next time.”

  “Why not?” I demanded. “Damon is my dearest friend. You were the one who said he wanted me to be here.”

  Alice nodded patiently. “I know I did, my dear,” she admitted. “But I’m beginning to think that your devotion to him might actually be at the heart of the problem right now. Because seeing you obviously placed a great emotional strain on Damon, perhaps because you two had argued just before his accident and he was feeling guilty.”

  Alice paused for a moment to sip her coffee. “He may also be feeling guilty over his dislike of Bobby, now that Bobby’s gone. Anyway, Damon is still obviously quite disoriented and I’m afraid that seeing you was just more than he could handle.”

  “I see,” I murmured, hurt by the implication that the mere sight of me could have triggered my friend’s emotional crisis.

  Alice suddenly reached out and put her arms around me. “I want you to trust me on this, Sue,” she said gently. “Let’s give Damon a few days to adjust to being back among the living before we risk upsetting him again for any reason.”

  “If you really think that’s best,” I very reluctantly agreed, pulling free of her embrace. “Of course, I only want him to get better.”

  I swiped at a tear forming in the corner of my eye. “But you must know that I love him like a brother.”

  “I know you do,” Alice whispered. “I will personally call you every day to tell you how he’s doing. And I promise that you can come back the minute I think he’s strong enough. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I murmured.

  “But first I’ve got to dispel this dangerous delusion of his,” she said worriedly.

  “If it really is a delusion,” I murmured resentfully.

  “Go home,” she ordered. “I’ll call you.”

  Chapter 22

  Life seldom wraps things up in tidy packages with neat endings, happy or otherwise. I know that sounds like another one of those insipid truisms that I’m convinced Laura makes up just to kill time during her twice-weekly sessions at Elizabeth Arden. So laugh if you must, but that particular piece of homespun philosophy happens to be one that I concocted all by myself.

  First Bobby had disappeared without a trace, leaving me hopelessly suspended between the unbearable extremes of bitter grief and unreasonable hope. Then Dan Freedman had suddenly exploded into the shambles of my life and, within days, claimed to be falling in love with me, a painful situation for us both that, under any other circumstances, I could have found deliciously reciprocal.

  Now, in the midst of that already impossibly emotional tangle of guilt and self-recrimination, Damon, dear, sweet Damon, had nearly died in a plane crash and was lying doped up in a Boston hospital room, terrified out of his poor battered skull by an otherworldly encounter with my dead lover.

  The situation was beyond all rational analysis or explanation. But because of it, sick with worry, half in love and steeped in my own guilt, I felt as though I was literally coming apart at the seams.

  If there was any solace at all to be drawn from the confused emotional triangle in which I now found myself trapped it was only my slowly growing conviction that I probably wasn’t crazy after all. Or at least no crazier than poor Damon, who thought he’d taken a meeting with Bobby at the Pearly gates, or Dan, who actually believed that Damon had seen Bobby in Heaven, and, bless him, who had also believed me when I said that I’d seen the ghost of Aimee Marks.

  When the bizarre becomes commonplace it’s time to stop dwelling on the absolute strangeness of life and get on with living it, otherwise you’ll probably never sleep again.

  No. Laura didn’t make up that one, either. It was simply how I decided I would have to personally cope if I was going to avoid a future filled with rubber rooms and heavy trancs. In effect, I had made up my mind to stop questioning what was happening all around me and try instead to figure out why it was happening.

  First and foremost I wanted to know why Damon had encountered such a seemingly frightening visage of Bobby during those lost moments as he hovered between life and death. Because I was thoroughly convinced that what Damon had experienced when his heart had stopped and his vital signs flat-lined was no delusion but an actual event.

  And, no matter what Alice Cahill thought, I also knew that when Damon again regained consciousness his physical wounds could not really begin healing until his terrifying otherworldly experience could somehow be explained.

  Since I was temporarily powerless to do anything else for Damon I decided to find that explanation for him. And I was convinced that the best place to start was right back in Freedman’s Cove, where I happened to have a unique source that just might have some of the answers I so desperately needed.

  Who could better explain the odd circumstances of Damon’s near-death experience than Aimee Marks? I truly believed that Aimee was real. And, further, I believed that she had attempted to communicate with me, on the night I had awakened to find her sitting beside my bed, easing me out of my own terrible dream of Bobby.

  Perhaps, I thought, it would be possible for me to expand that first halting communication into a dialogue with Aimee’s gentle spirit.

  Though I did not share these thoughts with Dan—mostly because I was afraid he would try to prevent me from exposing myself to any further emotional shocks—they were the ones running through my mind as he and I drove back to Freedman’s Cove late on the afternoon of the day Damon first awakened from his coma.

  After leaving the hospital we had returned to the Hyatt, where, after a few hours of rest, I had spent the remainder of the day phoning friends and clients in New York, to explain why St. Claire & Marks would be closed for an indefinite period of time.

  Fortunately, Damon’s name had finally been released to the press the previous evening. So a fairly large news report about the lone survivor of the Narragansett Bay commuter-plane crash had already appeared in the Manhattan morning papers, greatly easing the difficulty of my explanations.

  Of course, everyone with whom I spoke had expressed nothing but concern for Damon’s condition. And our largest clients had all assured me that St. Claire & Marks would remain on retainers until we were back in operation again.

  Still, I was genuinely worried about the survival of our business, and wondering how I could possibly manage without my brilliant partner. I am enough of a realist to know that events move with blinding speed in the high-stakes world of antiques. And the fact that Damon and I were out of action would not stop the next big auction from going ahead without us.

  As it turned out I need not have worried. For when I finally got around to calling Sir Edward North at Christie’s, the scholarly old curator who’d started Damon and me in the business staggered me by announcing that he was taking a long-overdue holiday from his duties at
the auction house. Until Damon and I were back on our feet, Sir Edward informed me, he was applying for a temporary position as St. Claire & Marks’s chief appraiser.

  I was so relieved and grateful that I blubbered my thanks into the phone for five minutes before Sir Edward managed to convince me that he was actually looking forward to abandoning his stuffy uptown offices and getting “back into the trenches again.” Brushing aside my tearful professions of gratitude, the old darling had gruffly ordered me off the line, after making me promise to fax him a list of our clients, so he could begin calling to advise them of the new arrangement.

  Chapter 23

  Aunt Ellen’s grand old Victorian house loomed cold and forbidding in the heavy mist that was rolling in from the sea as Dan pulled his Mercedes into the drive behind my Volvo late that evening.

  During the long drive down from Boston we had spoken little of the day’s startling events, content in the warm confines of the Mercedes merely to be together, listening to music and the rhythmic sweep of the wipers across the windshield. Now Dan switched off the engine and looked across at me.

  “Do you feel like going out somewhere for dinner, or have you had enough of my company for one day?” he asked.

  “Neither,” I smiled. “Why don’t you come in and build a nice crackling fire while I fix us something to eat? I warn you it won’t be up to the standards of the Hyatt’s four-star chef, though.”

  Dan laughed, nobly protesting that too much haute cuisine got on his nerves, anyway. So we went inside, debating the relative merits of frozen fettuccini Alfredo versus tuna salad—the only two dishes I could put together in a reasonably short time. We settled on the pasta and I went off to the kitchen while Dan headed for the parlor to see about the fire.