Waking Lazarus

by T. L. Hines

  ‘‘Are . . . are you awake, Jude?’’

  It was Mom’s voice. Jude willed his lungs to breathe deeply, and when the air hit his mouth, the taste of burning copper overcame him. A memory, like a broken, interrupted dream, danced at the edge of his consciousness, leaving behind the bitter aftertaste.

  He swallowed, trying to clear the metallic residue, then slitted open his eyes and saw his mother at the side of his bed. She was a thin woman, but her face was a mismatched round circle with chubby cheeks. Jude recalled many nights from his childhood when his mother’s smiling face, topped by warm coffee-colored eyes, bent down to kiss him after a bedtime story.

  She smiled as she stood beside his hospital bed, although it wasn’t the smile of joy he knew from his younger days. It was forced, difficult, a smile that said more about pain than happiness.

  ‘‘Feel okay?’’ she ventured.

  He nodded his head, moved his hand toward her. She seemed grateful for the distraction and made a show of taking his hand tightly, then grasping it between both of hers like a sacred offering. She ran one of her hands up his forearm briefly, as if to confirm the arm was in fact there. When she looked back to his face, Jude saw a small tear trickling down her cheek.

  ‘‘Remember much?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘No,’’ he said.

  ‘‘You and Kevin—’’

  At the mention of Kevin’s name, he did remember. The door of his mind opened, and the whole afternoon came rushing in.

  ‘‘Is Kevin. . . ?’’ he asked, not wanting to ask the whole question.

  ‘‘He’s fine. A little scared, but perfectly fine. He carried you out.’’

  Kevin carried him out? That had to be five miles or so, with one hundred sixty pounds of dead weight. Newfound respect for Kevin started forming in his mind.

  ‘‘So Kevin saved me.’’

  He wasn’t looking at his mom, so when no answer came, he glanced back her direction. Her face seemed a bit whiter, nervous.

  ‘‘What’s the matter?’’ Jude asked.

  She looked down at their hands, still tightly clasped. ‘‘Well, you had another . . . episode.’’

  Episode? For a moment, he thought she might be talking about some strange television program. But then he realized what episode meant.

  ‘‘Do you remember anything?’’ she asked again. But this time she wasn’t just asking about the death; she was asking about the Other Side. Even his mother needed to voice the question.

  ‘‘It’s a bit fuzzy, but I think it will come back,’’ he offered. She seemed satisfied with his answer, so he continued. ‘‘What exactly happened? I think, I’m pretty sure, we got hit by lightning.’’

  She nodded, wiped at another tear on her cheek. ‘‘I don’t know why you have to go out there all the time. What’s so interesting about those woods?’’

  Jude waited.

  She exhaled, nodded again. ‘‘Okay. Yes, it was lightning. Kevin said . . . well, he said it melted your pack, knocked off your shoes.’’

  Jude nodded slightly, then tried to wiggle his toes. They moved. He fought the urge to peel away the sheet and look at them.

  ‘‘So he got you down to the end of the trail, flagged down help from some guys loading up horses, and they brought you here to the hospital.’’

  ‘‘How long ago?’’ he wondered. At first, he was sure he had only thought it, but his mom answered.

  ‘‘About three hours. You were, clinically, you know . . .’’

  ‘‘Dead.’’

  ‘‘Yes. They tried CPR and machines and everything. The doctor I talked to said you were probably killed instantly.’’

  She sobbed a little bit, and Jude waited patiently for her to regain control.

  ‘‘Did they send me to . . . the morgue?’’

  She shook her head, seeming relieved. ‘‘No, but they were getting ready. One of the nurses was cleaning the room, and you just suddenly, um, I guess you just moved.’’

  Jude smiled. ‘‘Probably scared her into next Tuesday.’’

  His mom put on another pained smile. ‘‘I think they let her go home early.’’

  After his mother left, Jude lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking. Trying to remember. Wondering. Soon his head felt like one big abscessed tooth in need of a root canal.

  He raised the hospital bed to an upright position, then fumbled with the attached remote control. He turned on the television and flipped through a few channels until he came to a local newscast. A reporter was standing outside the local hospital. He let his finger hover over the channel button a few moments, wondering what the story at the hospital was about.

  ‘‘In a unique twist, the young man struck by lightning was involved in a separate drowning accident eight years ago,’’ the reporter said.

  Jude felt blood rushing in his face. Of course. He was the story at the hospital. He hadn’t really thought about it, but if he’d now died and come back to life twice, well, that made him like a human lottery ticket. What were the chances? Jude found the volume button on the remote and pressed it.

  ‘‘According to the experts we consulted, this young man may be the first repeat survivor of a near-death experience. And so Jude Allman, now a patient here at St. Francis, is also a local celebrity.’’

  ‘‘Time for your dinner.’’

  Jude jumped. He hadn’t seen or heard the nurse come into his room.

  ‘‘Sorry,’’ she said, acknowledging his startled look. ‘‘Guess I have a way of sneaking up on people.’’

  ‘‘ ’Sokay.’’ He watched her as she set plates and platters in front of him. She was pretty, almost exotic in some way.

  Maybe that was what he needed to pound down this splitting headache: a bit of food. Hospital food, which mostly consisted of cold mush or warm mush, wasn’t his first choice. But his stomach rumbled a welcome anyway.

  On the television, the camera revealed a crowd of people outside the hospital. Not a throng of thousands, to be sure. But there were a good hundred or so, which represented a fair percentage of Bingham, Nebraska. Signs dotted the crowd, including one held by someone he recognized: Kim Oakley, his dream girl, holding a placard that read Get well soon, Jude. He smiled, half wondering if Kevin had put her up to it.

  The scene cut to the reporter interviewing Kevin.

  ‘‘So you knew it was lightning right away?’’ the reporter asked Kevin.

  ‘‘I don’t think we both got hit. I think Jude took the hit, and, I don’t know, the blast or something knocked me down.’’

  ‘‘And you carried him all the way out?’’

  ‘‘Well, yeah. What else could I do?’’

  ‘‘Were you surprised to hear Jude Allman seems to be fine after this ordeal? Did you ever think in your wildest dreams this could happen?’’

  Kevin paused a moment. ‘‘I don’t know. But I guess, in the back of my mind, I thought about how it happened to him before.’’

  The story cut to the reporter interviewing another person, a middle-aged man Jude didn’t recognize.

  ‘‘Why did you come here today?’’ asked the reporter.

  ‘‘I just want to meet him,’’ the man answered.

  ‘‘Why’s that?’’

  ‘‘I dunno, something special, I guess. Like a television star or something, when you think about it. Better than that, because it’s not like he just acts on a soap opera.’’

  Jude flipped off the TV, watched as the phosphorous dot in the center of the screen faded. He leaned toward the window, trying to get a glimpse of the crowd outside, but couldn’t quite see to the lobby area.

  The nurse finished putting out his dinner, then finally spoke again. ‘‘He’s right, you know.’’

  Jude jumped again, and she smiled this time. ‘‘You’re awfully jumpy,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Yeah, well. I’ve had a couple thousand extra volts today,’’ he said, ‘‘so I guess I have a little extra energy to burn off.’’

  She
laughed, then turned to go before he remembered what she’d said and stopped her.

  ‘‘Who was right?’’ he asked.

  ‘‘The man in the interview,’’ she said. ‘‘There’s something special about you.’’ She left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Jude stared after her for a minute, then turned his attention to dinner.

  5

  RINGING

  Now

  Jude pulled his mind from the past and focused on the painful present: his Spartan home, closed in on all sides by walls of Sheetrock. Kristina was still staring at him. He didn’t want to look her direction, certainly didn’t want to look her in the eye, but he felt her stare. A small trickle of sweat traced a wet line down his forehead, and his palms were starting to itch. Maybe they had sent her, maybe they hadn’t; he still wasn’t sure either way. But it didn’t really matter, because it was wrong, terribly wrong, to talk about deep things.

  Buried things.

  You didn’t bury bodies and then dig them up years later. It was best to take the same approach with memories.

  He stood and mashed the heel of his hand into his right eye. ‘‘I need to get something. I have a killer headache.’’

  Kristina immediately opened her purse and rummaged through it for a few seconds. ‘‘Here you go,’’ she said, holding out a white bottle of ibuprofen.

  Jude shook her off and headed to the bathroom for his own medication. He fumbled with the safety-proof cap, then popped it off and shook two tablets into his hand. He hesitated before shaking out two more.

  Jude popped all four tablets into his mouth, arched his head and dry-swallowed, then headed back to his guest and took his chair again. Silent.

  After a few moments, Kristina finally spoke. ‘‘So whatever happened to Kevin?’’

  ‘‘Hmmm?’’

  ‘‘Your friend Kevin. You keep in touch with him?’’

  He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. ‘‘Nah. Haven’t talked to him in, I dunno, ten years.’’

  She leaned forward as he leaned away. Stalker and prey. ‘‘So what about the third time?’’ she asked.

  He sighed, shook his head as he ran his hands across his face. ‘‘I can’t right now. I . . . I have to be somewhere.’’

  She grinned a bit. ‘‘You mean you actually leave this house sometimes?’’

  Jude said nothing, found the floor in front of his chair suddenly very interesting. His tongue felt thick, as if it were covered in long shag rug. He hadn’t spoken this much in years; he had moved to Red Lodge to avoid conversations, and while the people of the mining-town-turned-ski-town were always ready with a ‘‘How ya doin’ ’’ or a simple wave, rarely were they prone to prying. If a man walked down the street with hunched shoulders and a steady gaze fixed at the sidewalk, the people of Red Lodge knew he wasn’t the sort of person to stop and chat about the weather. And if a man boarded over the windows of his home with Sheetrock, well, that was his God-given right. He could do whatever he wanted inside his own home.

  But now this woman—this woman, who wasn’t from Red Lodge, but somewhere else—had invaded his comfortable world, stabbed at him with her questions, haunted him with past lives.

  ‘‘So what exactly are you doing now? What’s Ron Gress’s life like?’’ Kristina pressed.

  ‘‘Janitor.’’

  She huffed a bit. ‘‘Jude Allman as: Ron Gress, the resurrected janitor.’’

  ‘‘Like I said, I don’t have the answers you want, and now you’re ticked.’’ Jude looked up at her, secretly hoping his words would hurt. He saw no reaction as she stared back, forcing him to break eye contact first.

  Kristina stood, brushed the front of herself, then turned and walked toward the door. The sound of her footsteps bounced off the sheetrocked walls. Kristina reached for the chain, slid it out. She twisted both dead bolts, then unlocked the door and swung it open. Jude felt uncomfortable with someone else touching his locks—it seemed too personal—but he made no move to stop her.

  Suddenly she turned to face him. ‘‘For a janitor, you don’t seem too worried about your messes.’’

  Her comment rubbed him like eighty-grit sandpaper, and he lashed back. ‘‘Well, I wasn’t really expecting visitors, so I didn’t get a chance to clean up.’’

  Her lips became a thin line for a moment. ‘‘I wasn’t talking about your house.’’ She walked out the door and swung it shut behind her.

  Jude looked at the door briefly. His pupils refused to dilate. Or maybe it was his mind. As he sat, a large white bloom of light spread before his eyes; when he tried to blink it away, a ghost image stayed, floating in air. He closed his eyes, but the ghost image remained, now outlined in an electrical red current. Maybe it was his headache, pushing steadily against the backs of his eyeballs. Maybe it was a cancerous tumor in his brain, attacking the parts that controlled his vision.

  Cancer. Was that what was killing Kristina? She didn’t look too bad, but then, she probably wouldn’t wait until the very end to travel.

  Jude took a deep breath and wished . . . He was too tired to even know what to wish for. After all these years, the jangly, jagged thoughts he had put in the attic were dusting themselves off, and they were knocking on the old attic door. He didn’t have a lock on that door, and he knew it would be open soon.

  He needed a drive, a long drive to clear his mind. He felt for keys in his pocket, then cautiously opened his front door and peered outside before leaving. The white, static ghost still wavered before his eyes.

  Late that night at home, Jude sat watching the local newscast. Sometime—he wasn’t quite sure when—he had returned home and melted into the single chair in front of his TV. Where had he been? What had he done? It was there, perhaps, if he wanted to strain for it. But he didn’t. These memory lapses, these blackouts, were just a side effect of the old paranoia. Somewhere deep inside was his huddled psyche, trying to turn off all sensory information and lock out the world.

  He knew this, and he accepted it. Still, the blackouts seemed to be getting worse. And more frequent.

  Jude ran a hand over his face. He wanted to black out the visit from the woman who had knocked at his door and pulled him back into the skin of Jude Allman (what was her name, anyway?), but her image kept rattling around inside his head. ‘‘God gives some people special gifts,’’ she’d said. Right. Her God had given him nothing; instead, He’d taken everything away. Starting with his mother.

  Jude tried to run a mental eraser over it, tried to throw that soft, comforting blanket over all the memories again. But now those memories were ablaze, and every blanket fueled the flames instead of smothering them. His headache was a constant roar in his ears.

  Keep it secret, keep it safe.

  The news blared a breaking story about a missing girl in Big Timber. She’d been at the city park playground with a few other kids, just half a block from her house, when she suddenly disappeared. The image of a tear-filled mother filled the screen. She could see her daughter at the park, she said, and had been looking out to check on her every few minutes. One checkup, she was there. The next checkup, not more than five minutes later, she was gone. Vanished.

  Jude watched, trying not to think. He wanted to clear his mind of strange visitors, of Jude Allman—he was Ron Gress now, after all— of everything.

  The phone rang.

  He hurried toward the phone and looked at the caller ID. The readout told him it was Rachel Sanders of Red Lodge, Montana calling. He watched the readout, making sure it didn’t change. His machine picked up after four rings.

  Rachel’s voice blared. ‘‘Ron. It’s me. Pick up the phone.’’

  He grabbed the phone and put it to his ear. ‘‘Hello?’’

  ‘‘Why do you always wait for your answering machine to pick up, Ron?’’

  ‘‘I . . . I just want to make sure it’s you.’’ Jude looked back at the TV. A graphic on the screen showed a map of Montana and Wyoming, with white dots appearing wh
ere children had gone missing.

  ‘‘Yeah, well, that’s what Caller ID is for,’’ Rachel said. ‘‘And I know you have it. If you hear the phone ringing, and you see my name on the Caller ID, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s me.’’

  ‘‘I guess.’’ Jude looked at his front door, wondered if all the locks were secured. He quickly went over, phone between his ear and shoulder, and started checking them.

  ‘‘Anyway, I’ve been trying to call you for a couple hours now. Where you been?’’

  ‘‘Out.’’

  ‘‘Out where?’’

  ‘‘Just out.’’

  ‘‘Okay, well, I guess it’s none of my business anyway. Good for you for getting out. I just promised Nathan we’d call to remind you about dinner tomorrow. He wanted to talk to you himself, but he’s in bed now.’’

  ‘‘Tomorrow?’’

  ‘‘Dinner? Your son? About four feet tall, five years old, blond hair. You’ve met him.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, yeah. Okay. I just . . . is everything—’’

  ‘‘I’ll sterilize everything three times and make sure the secret service has the place under surveillance. Give it a rest.’’

  Jude frowned. He wanted to ask about Nathan, make sure no one had been around to bother them. If what’s-her-name had found him, she could also find his son, and (Kristina, her name was Kristina) he was sure there was something more going on. Something that made his stomach slowly roll, like the drum on one of those giant cement trucks. Still, this wasn’t the time or place to go into all of it with Rachel, who was obviously in her usual bad mood.

  ‘‘Okay. I’ll be there,’’ he finally said. He hung up the phone without waiting for an answer.

  6

  UNLOCKING

  When Ron hung up the phone, Rachel immediately felt like a witch. She sighed, gently replaced the receiver in its cradle, then sat down and began to pray. She couldn’t control her emotions with him. He was like the pathetic little puppy who’d been kicked around. Sometimes she felt sorry for him. She could tell he had stowed away deep, dark secrets from his past, unwilling to unlock the chest even to look at them himself. And in a lot of ways, she was fine with that; everyone had a few sins tucked away.