Chapter 19
Chapter 19
Dr. Sadie is back.
She is a leading neurologist on the West Coast, and I’m fortunate to have her on my team, according to Austin. I’m still not sure what constitutes a team or why I have one. Or how I got here. Very little has been said about the situation, only that confusion and short-term memory loss is normal.
Each day—I think it’s been four now—is a new mountain to climb. Today, I reached the tiny tube of Vaseline and was able to apply it to my lips by myself. Yesterday, it was sipping water from a straw. I nearly wept with gratitude. Tuesday, it was being able to hold my head up long enough to see Lolly silently slip out of my room. She hasn’t returned since. And Monday, I croaked my first word, “Help.” Slowly but surely, my speech has returned, and I’m speaking in full sentences now.
“Hello, Chelsea. You look exceptionally well this morning.” Dr. Sadie beams at me while holding a chart in her hands. “Your brain function is good, exactly where we want it to be. It’ll just take a little time for everything else to catch up. The key is not doing too much too fast. A trauma of the kind you’ve suffered takes a long time to recover from.”
“What about Knox?” I manage in a scratchy, barely audible voice. It’s the first time I’ve been able to ask about him, the first time I’ve been able to face the fear that I might’ve lost him.
“Knox?” She tilts her head to one side, as if I’m speaking a foreign language.
“Knox.” This time my voice is strong. “He was with me on the bridge when it broke. He pulled me out of the river.”
“River? You were hit by a cable car on California Street. As far as I know, you were the only pedestrian injured, but you should talk to the police. I’m sure there’s a report.”
“Wait,” I say, completely befuddled. “How long have I been here?”
“Two weeks and four days.”
“That’s impossible. I was at the cabin in Ghost. My vacation cabin.”
“You may have been there before the accident, and that’s what you’re remembering,” she says. “It’s not unusual for our brains to try to protect us from the memory of trauma.”
“No, I was there after the accident. That’s why I went there in the first place, to recuperate.”
“Chelsea, you came straight here in an ambulance after suffering significant head trauma. You were put into a medically induced coma so that we could reduce the swelling and pressure in your brain.” She pulls the chair in the corner of the room to the side of my bed. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Dr. Sadie sit. In all her visits, she’s brisk and businesslike, in and out in record time.
“It’s not at all uncommon for patients in induced comas to experience dreams and hallucinations, even nightmares,” she continues. “I had one patient who swore he’d joined the circus and another who believed he’d passed the bar when he was still in his first year of law school.”
“So, I’m not here because the suspension bridge at the Ghost Mine Historic State Park broke?” I’m having trouble processing that news. Maybe she’s mistaken me for another patient. Or is confused.
“No. Let me ask you, do you remember getting hit by the streetcar?”
“Yes. But other than a minor headache, I walked away, then drove two hours into the mountains to stay at my lake cabin. That’s what I remember.”
“It was a dream, Chelsea.”
“You don’t understand. I went to the annual Halloween parade with my sister. Met with friends . . . went to the farmers’ market . . . happy hour at the local inn. I had a life there . . . a good life. I had Knox.”
I reach for my handbag for proof. Knox’s number in my phone, texts from Austin. I paw through the contents, ultimately finding my check register to show the payment for my roof or the 150 dollars to Misty. But the last check I wrote was to Corrie, my housecleaner, dated three weeks ago.
Dr. Sadie shrugs and plasters on a faint smile, her way of telling me that I’m not stark raving mad, but wrong just the same.
“Look at it this way,” she says. “It sounds like it was a wonderful way to the pass the time.”
I’ve been moved to the west wing of the hospital, which I’m told is a good sign. According to my nurses, it means that if physical therapy goes well, I’ll be leaving here soon.
It also means that I’ll have one less visitor. Uncle Sylvester left for LA this morning to get back to his life but promises that he’ll return as soon as possible.
I haven’t seen or heard from Lolly since the day she walked out of my room without even a backwards smile or the decency of saying goodbye.
The one constant is Austin, who hasn’t missed a day since I got here. The nurses have all told me that the only time he’s left my side is to go home to sleep and shower.
But it’s different in the west wing. For one, I’m sharing a room. And from what I’ve heard, the staff enforces strict visiting hours. Besides, Austin has a law practice that needs him and presumably a fiancée who’s furious that he’s neglected her for his ex-wife.
That’s okay, because I can use the alone time to come to terms with what has happened—or rather, what didn’t happen—in the last three weeks. Despite assurances from Austin that no one has been to the cabin in over a month, I’m having trouble separating fact from fiction.
Katie and her bright red hair and the bough of flowers tattooed across her chest, serving up Ghost Ghouls at a furious pace. Sadie and her cheating husband, whom she doesn’t want to leave because she needs financial stability. Ginger talking endlessly about the boy who saved his dog from drowning. Amanda and her cousin, the firefighter who stole Sienna away only to make her miserable. Madam Misty, Universal Diviner.
And Knox.
Sweet, wonderful Knox and the countless times I start to call him to tell him about my day. About Dani, the former pediatric nurse who transferred to trauma but still wears her bright and festive kiddie scrubs. About Michael Hart, the ER doc who looks strikingly like Knox (the coincidence of that is not lost on me). And Rihanna Prince, the duty nurse who claims I saved her marriage (so take that, Mr. Naysayer).
How can there be a hole in my heart from missing all these people so much when they didn’t even exist? The truly desperate part is that I sometimes wish I could’ve permanently stayed in my own hallucination. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to come to terms with losing the life I had there. It’s like waking up from a dream that you’ve won the lottery only to learn that your bank account is as empty as when you went to sleep.
I find myself crying a lot. The nurses say it’s normal to be depressed after a long illness. How do I explain that it has nothing to do with my injuries and everything to do with all that I’ve lost? Or more accurately, all that I never had.
Ronnie visits me in the afternoon and brings me a new screen saver for my phone. The old one was cracked in the accident. But my actual phone, along with the rest of the contents of my purse, survived.
“I guess we’ll have to reschedule all of November’s lectures,” I say.
“Don’t worry about that now.” Ronnie is removing my old screen saver and putting on the new one. “Just focus on getting well, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
I acquiesce, though the truth of the matter is, we’ll probably have to reschedule the rest of the year. It’s impractical to assume I’ll be up and running full speed even by December. It’s a light month anyway, with only a few appearances before the holidays start.
“Ronnie, did I have my laptop with me during the accident?” The question only occurs to me now, even though I distinctly remember having it in my dream.
“No. It’s still in the office. Why?”
“Can you bring it to me tomorrow?”
“Not if you’re going to work. Doctor’s orders are that you rest.”
She’s right. But other than a few hours of tests and therapy, the days here are long and boring. “I won’t. But I’d like to be able to email my uncle and sister. It’s difficult on my phone,” I say, which is the truth.
“Okay, but only if you promise that’s all you’ll use it for.”
“Scout’s honor.” I give her a three-finger salute the same way Knox did on the bridge, except it never happened. And yet, everything about that day is still so vivid and clear.
“I have a little gossip if you’re up for it,” Ronnie says.
“Yeah?” Ronnie and I have always maintained a professional distance, a tone I set when she first came to work for me, so I’m somewhat surprised that she’s willing to share gossip with me. And a little touched.
“Before you tell me, I just want you to know that I bought you a lovely handmade bar of basil soap at the farmers’ market in Ghost during my coma-inspired hallucination.”
“Uh . . . okay. Thanks, I guess.”
I laugh, realizing how ridiculous I must sound, realizing that people are tired of constantly having to tell me that none of it was real. “So what’s the gossip?”
“I met Mary, Austin’s new fiancée. I didn’t even know he was engaged until she came to the hospital that first day when you were brought in. At first, I thought it was really nice of her. I mean, we were so scared that we were going to lose you, and Austin was a mess. It was great that she was here to support him, right? Except, I’ve since come to learn that she’s not as nice as she seems.”
“How so?”
“Well, this is going to sound horrible, and maybe I shouldn’t even tell you, but I actually think by the third or fourth day, she was hoping you would die, that she’d begun to realize alive you were a real threat to her and Austin’s relationship.”
This is the most personal Ronnie has ever gotten with me. But you can’t work with a person, share an office with them, and travel together all over the country without gleaning some personal information. For instance, I know about her mooch of a roommate, that her cat died sixteen months ago and she’s too grief-stricken even still to replace it, and that the last guy she dated stole fifteen hundred dollars from her. In return, Ronnie knows my sister and I have a complicated relationship, and that my divorce from Austin was extremely hard on me.
“Why did you get that impression?” Not that I doubt she’s wrong. One of the characteristics I’ve come to rely on from my assistant is her deep insight. Sometimes I think Ronnie would’ve made a better psychologist than me.
“She still came with him every day that first week, but she was resentful. You could see it all over her face. She was bitchy to the staff and bitchy to Austin, even though he was going through hell. Quite frankly, that’s the reason why. It wasn’t that she hated that he was going through hell, it was that she hated that he was going through hell over you.”
“This is going to sound warped, but I’m flattered.” And I don’t say this to Ronnie, but I’m also sort of vindicated that Austin’s new fiancée isn’t the second coming, though he’d certainly intimated that she was. Or maybe that was just my interpretation.
But this is petty stuff for someone who has just had a near-death experience, I remind myself.
“At the end of the day, I get the sense that Austin saw right through it,” Ronnie says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he calls off the engagement. That last week you were out, Mary was nowhere to be found. My Spidey sense tells me that Austin told her not to come anymore. My Spidey sense tells me almost losing you made him see the light.”
“The light of Mary’s faults?” I ask.
“No, the light of what he gave up when he left you.”
There was a time when the sentiment, if it’s even true, would’ve thrilled me, but I’m too exhausted to care right now. Too messed up to think of anything other than getting well again.
“Can you do me a favor?” I ask.
“Sure, whatever you need.”
“Could you see if there’s a floral shop in Ghost called Flower Power?” I figure if I start small, I can retrace my steps and disseminate what is real and what isn’t. Who actually exists and who doesn’t. Because even if no one believes me, including Ronnie, I couldn’t have built an entire world out of thin air.
“You sure that’s such a good idea?” Ronnie says. “Even if I find it, it doesn’t prove anything. You have a place up there, Chels. I’m sure a lot of your hallucination is based on real shops and real people.”
“I know. But can you please just do this for me? I’d do it myself, but until I get my laptop, the strain of searching and reading on the small screen of my phone hurts my eyes.”
“I will, but nothing good can come of it.”