Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Dad said, “The hospital called us this morning. We had lunch with the McNeils today.”

  Mom added, “There’s no problem with us, Richard. Please remember that. Apparently there’s no problem with the baby, either. This has happened before—women being pregnant during comas. You know we love Karen like our own daughter.”

  My mind was steam-whistling.

  “There are many cases of coma patients giving birth, Richard,” my father said. “Richard?”

  “Yes. Yes. Just give me a moment here …” Fire; a throat that will not breathe: that joke isn’t funny anymore.

  “What about Karen?” I asked.

  “Apparently in this sort of—situation—Richard,” Mom said, “the mother is just fine. Birth will be by Cesarean section next September.”

  My mind flashed to abortion and as quickly flashed away. No. This child must be born.

  “Richard,” Dad said, “if news of this gets out, the media will eat you the way a snake eats rats. Karen and you will both be sideshow freaks.”

  “You must ensure, Richard,” Mom stressed, “that nobody—not even your friends—find out about this. We’re absolutely firm on this. In a few months when she starts to show, we’ll have to tell people she’s having breathing troubles and is unable to take visitors for a while.”

  “But what if she wakes up?” I asked. Sad stares shot down that question. I then asked, “Who’s going to take care of the baby?” I had pictures in my head of holding a swaddled youth. The word “diapers” sprang to mind unconvincingly.

  “Mrs. McNeil”—(oh God)—” has eagerly volunteered to take charge. We’re equally happy to help out, but she seems adamant. We’ll pitch in what we can to cover costs and so will you, too, Richard, once you start your working life. You’re a father. You’re to live up to your obligations as best you can. But as far as the world is concerned, the baby will be Mrs. McNeil’s ‘niece’ or ‘nephew’ to be taken care of after a family tragedy on her side.”

  “It’ll be called McNeil?”

  “Yes. Does that bother you?” my Dad asked.

  “I, uhhh …” I was too dazed to reply coherently.

  My parents’ tone followed their calm natures. They became silent statues when confronted by large events. I hadn’t even begun to digest the news; as with most events in life, ramifications would have a delayed onset.

  “What about the baby—will it have a proper brain? Will it have a normal personality?” I asked.

  Mom said, “That’s a long way off, dear. We’ll think about that when the time comes.”

  7

  THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE MEANS YOU WANT SOMETHING

  And so the time came.

  The seventies were over. With them left a sweetness, a gentleness. No longer could modern citizens pretend to be naïve. We were now jaded; the world was spinning more quickly. Karen’s Honda Civic was sold. Her clothing, makeup, childhood toys, and diaries were boxed and stored in a musty basement beneath the rear stairs of her parents’s house. Memories of Karen slipped away from those who knew her. She was no longer a person, only an idea—somebody asleep in a room somewhere. Where is she? Oh … somewhere, we think.

  The remains of high school flowed by like a wide, slow, pulsing river of cool chocolate milk. December and January’s fiery baptism of peers had come and gone, but classmates still offered sad looks, accusatory stares, or wordless hee-haws. The five of us had become down-jacketed, disheveled curiosities—young necks craned to view the killers as we headed to the parking lot, bystanders doubtlessly assuming we were off to break into the rathskeller of a country club, swig bourbon, and dribble messages on the walls with the blood of dogs.

  During schooldays, I preferred to cut class and sit down below the cedars above the fire station smoking and wasting time on the grass whittling twigs, thinking of the baby and of Karen and the things she saw. What did it mean?

  As I sat there assembling the puzzle, Hamilton ignited chunks of stolen laboratory sodium with rainwater while Pam combed and combed and combed her hair with a sky blue plastic comb. The last days of high school in particular were a hazy waste of time. I’d crossed a line—I didn’t care any longer. School became an activity I used to do. Wendy and Linus, though, veered the opposite way, losing themselves in science, memorizing equations for Teflon, gravity, and the Moon’s orbit. Come June, both graduated with honors, but he who was once a promising student—me—barely squeaked by with an undeniable tsk-tsk of the faculty, who saw their once-golden Richard thrown away on a life of cigarettes, scrubbing Buicks at the Oasis car wash, and dead-end tomcatting with Hamilton Reese.

  On graduation day in early June, Karen entered her third trimester, and was transferred into maternity. I was there for the move that afternoon, in my graduation outfit, a then-stylish baby-blue tux. I had just had my hair feathered in the style of the times and thought I cut quite a pretty picture as I entered the hospital room. Mr. McNeil wolf-whistled and said to Karen, “Karen, here’s your prince, honey.”

  The nurse allowed me to lift Karen onto the transfer gurney. How bony and light she felt!—as though I were picking up kindling wood. I hadn’t held her since that night on the ski slopes. Her eyes were open at that moment; our retinas met, yet we didn’t connect. I felt as if I were looking into the eyes of an aquarium fish—no, a photo of an aquarium fish. Her tummy bulged out like a goiter on a crone’s neck.

  A short while later, I pulled my Datsun up to a grad party on Chartwell Drive—rock walls, hedges, and dwarf shrubs. The sun shone brightly. It occurred to me I’d been asleep at the wheel since the hospital, yet I hadn’t crashed the car. Turning off the car’s ignition, it hit me that Karen would probably never wake up; her eyes had been—dead. My hopes for her then switched from cheerleaderish bluster into loss and remorse. I sank in my car seat there on the roadside, sucking in the air, heaving my chest, hiding from arriving partygoers. I’d nearly run out of air; my stomach felt like two hundred sit-ups when there was a gentle tap on the door. It opened just a crack and there stood Wendy, in a strange yellow dress she’d made herself, her new hairstyle tangled like brassy telephone cords. She was crouched down so that people driving by wouldn’t see her. My mouth fumbled; she looked at me calmly and said: “Karen was supposed to be here, Richard.” I nodded and she and I looked up at the car’s ceiling with its nicotine smudges and Hamilton’s boot scrapes, umbrella punctures and cigarette burns.

  She said, “Jared, too,” and sat cross-legged on the roadside gravel, her gown crumpled on the stones, and with those stones she built sad little totems. “Jared was supposed to be here, too.” Wendy took a breath and relaxed her shoulders, then I relaxed, too. “I was in love with him,” she said.

  “Yeah, I think everybody kind of knew you were hot for him, but I mean, really, Wen—take a number and stand in line. He was humping half the girls in class.”

  “I’ve never told anyone this—I mean about me loving Jared. Not even my mom. Funny. Now that the words are out of my mouth—outside my body—they feel different to me.” She knocked over her small rock pile.

  I said, “They would have been the center of everything tonight, wouldn’t they? They would have been the stars.”

  Muscle cars swooshed up and down the road. From the party house rose shrieks and patches of Bob Seger. I was calm. I reclaimed my normal breathing and sat up.

  “You want to go in?” asked Wendy. “Not really.”

  “Let’s go for a walk instead. We’ll catch up with everybody later at the hotel.”

  We drove down to the Capilano River canyon, then entered its pathways and didn’t say much, which was best. On the lower branches of a maple we found a robin’s nest with a crop of three chicks inside. Their necks were weak, their heads scrawny. They were waiting for mom-bird to cough up some worms. Jesus-loves-you sunbeams pulsed through the trees, and the chicks were illuminated from the inside. They glowed like Christmas tree lights—their veins, their pinfeathers, their eyes, their tiny raptor beak
s. And then the sun lit up Wendy’s dress and I caught my breath.

  “Richard, there’s something you’re not telling me. Am I right, Richard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I guess? If I guess right, you can confirm it—fair?” “Okay.”

  “Karen’s pregnant.”

  I turned to her. “Yeah.” “How far along?”

  “Six months.”

  “I was right.” She picked a maple leaf. She looked through it. “How are you feeling?”

  I threw a stick. “I’m too young to be a father. I’m too young to be anything. I’m seventeen. I haven’t even left home yet. It seems unreal. You won’t tell anyone, right?”

  “Sealed lips.” She wiped a twig from her dress. “It’ll be like having part of Karen back. I miss her. We never talk about these things. But I miss her. Do you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But we don’t ever say it out loud, do we?”

  “I guess not,” was all I could reply. “I don’t like the silence, either.” I didn’t realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

  The forest colors smudged together. The sky was darkening into the color of a deep clean lake. I picked some late-blooming rhododendron flowers; the last magic light of the fallen sun cut through the petals in tropical purple brilliance.

  We drove the Datsun to the hospital to see Karen. Wendy placed her ear to Karen’s stomach; I placed the rhododendrons in the bud vase still beside the bed. After that we left the hospital to drive downtown for our grad party at the Hotel Vancouver.

  That summer I worked full-time at a Chevron station, barely conscious of the pumps or customers, most of whom must surely have taken me for an idiot. That summer remains a fuzzy dot of sunburned necks, beer bottles clinking in the Datsun’s trunk, huckleberry picking with Wendy and Pam, and beachside bonfires. End of an era.

  At the hospital, anyone inquiring about Karen was to be told that she was stable. No visitors. Nobody questioned the switch. By summer, Karen’s only daily visitors were me and George. Wendy, with her clean scientific voice, helped talk me through the willies. Hamilton, Linus, and Pam had trickled away. I wasn’t mad at them for this diminuendo. Truth be told, Karen never did change from one week to the next; cruelly, there was only so much that could be seen or said.

  I’d think of Karen often, too. Our first and only time together had been so wonderful. I replayed it over and over in my head, savoring each nuance, her skin like milk atop the snow, the smell of the snow, her underwear’s frilled cotton, cold and dry. I never told her I loved her. Schmaltzy, but these things rankle; they count. By summer’s end, I’d finally decided that I didn’t even know Karen too well—who was she on the inside? This only fueled her mystery. At night, when such moments tended to strike, I’d have a self-indulgent little cry, walk around the yard, then come inside where my parents would be cheerfully watching the national news. I’d go sit with them, putting a good face on everything.

  By late August, waiting for the birth, I felt as though I was breathing the air inside a capsized boat—steamy, biological and ominous—an activity that could only continue for a little while longer. George, as ever, visited his daughter each day. I showed up less frequently, often in midweek. George and I never talked much; when we did, we’d end up saying the same old vapid niceties that somehow made Karen’s coma time seem even longer. He’d also lapse into a mist of maudlin boo-hoos. He’d remember Karen singing ‘Oklahoma’ in the school play. “She was a pretty girl, wasn’t she, Richard?” “She still is, George.”

  “Remember the time she played guitar for our anniversary party?” “I do.”

  “Such a pretty girl.” Then he would sigh and sing a show tune from Oklahoma: “When I take you out tonight with me—honey this is what you’re going to see—”

  “How’s business?” I asked, moving away from this gooey patch.

  Lois, on the other hand, while not having completely written Karen off as dead, was certainly the more pragmatic of the two. She had read the statistics on coma patients and the persistent vegetative state. She knew that with each succeeding day, chances for an awakening approached absolute zero.

  At the pregnancy’s start, Lois treated me about one notch friendlier than she might a sperm donor, but Lois realized that in order to build her custody case for the baby, she would have to try harder to be nice, which must have been torture for her.

  And as time went on I became increasingly angry at Lois for shanghaiing the baby. Not that there were many other alternatives, but still—she just barged right in and swiped my kid. It was only through discussions with my father, who painted some all-too-clear pictures for me, that I understood that Lois keeping the baby was the best solution—for the time being.

  We met in the hospital corridors. “Oh, hello, Richard. Well. Another day, isn’t it? Another day older and another day wiser.” Camel-hair coat, white gloves. Her small talk was rather limited; she was not a particularly creative woman, new attitude or not. What chunks of creative fuel she possessed must have been expended on her hideous accumulation of owl knickknacks. Bumping into her in the hospital’s hallways or down on Rabbit Lane, I would brace myself for her curious overtures at warmth. “Richard, you’re certainly not looking sick at all. I’d heard you were fluey.” (Awkward pause.) “Hmmm. That’s a very handsome color on you, you should wear it more often.” (Awkward pause.) “Well. She’s in there. Everything looks fine.” (Lois never again referred to Karen by her own name. Karen had been downgraded to “she.”) Lois removed her gloves. “And your parents?”

  Lois was definitely changing for the better, though I didn’t entirely trust her motives. Lois wanted the baby—as though it were her own. I’m sure she wanted to be right there with the obstetrician, ripping the baby from the womb, herself cutting the cord with her dentures, then taxiing off with her loot, leaving Karen behind in her eternal repose, as though that daughter could be checked off her list, allowing Lois to start on her next project, a new child to raise occupying Karen’s old slot.

  I still felt as though the secret of the pregnancy was mine to bear alone. Aside from Wendy, there was no one that I could tell who really knew me, which only added to my own feeling of unreality. The two families were taking such pains to appear casually pragmatic: no emotion. My head felt like a watermelon the moment before being whacked with a baseball bat. Kids at seventeen? I could be a grandfather at thirty-four. What kind of role model could I possibly be for my kid? What help would I be with Lois efficiently covering the mother front and nobody expecting anything from me?

  My parents seemed serene about the whole birth, digging through the garage for mildewed boxes of baby goodies for Lois. My parents visited Karen once a month. Mom also made effort-filled visits to Lois next door every week or so. Mom would gird herself the moment she rang Lois’s doorbell, activating the McNeil’s astoundingly nervous bichon frise into a frenzy of sterile yapping.

  “Hello, Lois.”

  “Oh, Carol, hello, please come in. My, you do look tired.” Careful, I just bought that owl figurine, and it’s fragile—here, let me move it out of your way. Well, what have you brought—more clothes for the baby? Stack them next to the other boxes. You’re really outdoing yourself; you shouldn’t go to so much trouble. Careful! That owl—I’ll just move it into the other room. Don’t move a muscle. My—the dog never barks like this. And what else—coffee? I suppose you’d probably like some. Why don’t I go make some, stay right there. Oh, Carol, please—remove your shoes if you could. I have guests coming over tonight.”

  “Thank you, Lois.”

  The child was to be born via C-section, September 2, Karen’s birthday. The night before, rain stomped the roof like hooves, yet the night air was warm and inviting. I stepped outside onto the rear patio underneath the eaves and sat on a lawn chair. I had been unable to sleep; in order to konk me ou
t I had taken a plump, green chloral hydrate left over from my wisdom teeth extraction a few months earlier. There, under the drum of rain in a lawn chair, I experienced what was to be the only vision of my life. It was this:

  My head was the nucleus of a sparking, dazzling, steak-sizzling halo. I rose, I floated from under the eaves, up off the patio, being yanked up into space, toward the Moon. There I met Karen walking on the Moon’s dark side, lit only by stars. Karen was so clean, wearing her ski jacket, brown cords, and red clogs, holding her purse. There was wind in her hair, even there on the Moon. She took a drag from her cigarette and said to me in a voice I’d lost for so long, “Hey, there, Richard. How ya doin’, Beb? Just look at me! One day we were all walking across the surface of the Moon, then we discovered a way home. Didn’t we?”

  I said yes.

  She said, “I’m not gone, you know.”

  I said, “I know.”

  “Take care of Megan, Richard.”

  “I will.”

  “It’s lonely here.” “I’m lonely, too. I miss you.” “Good-bye, Richard. It’s not forever.” “Karen, where are you?”

  She tossed her cigarette into a dusty gray crater the size of an aluminum ball-barbecue and said, as though I’d asked her the answer to a simple algebra equation, “Well, duh! Until we meet again, Beb.” Then she leaped over a crater to disappear behind its edge.

  There was a flash of aqua-colored sparks. I rubbed my head. My vision was over.

  I returned to the patio; rain still drummed.

  The Moon.

  Home.

  Energized, still not sleepy from the pill, I put on boots and walked down to the McNeil’s, making my way through the backyard trees. I came down to where I could see Karen’s old room—her light still burning. I came up closer, hidden behind a laburnum tree. I saw baby clothing stacked up against Karen’s wall mural of the Moon. Mrs. McNeil came into the room carrying a box, stopped, heaved down the box, sat on top, and sighed with all her body. I’d never seen her in a pose of exhaustion before.