Chapter 5 #3
Desperate to prove she wasn’t losing it, she sent a message to a few old high school acquaintances through social media, telling them she’d wanted to catch up to see what they were up to.
While she chatted with each person, she casually asked if anyone knew Lucas still, telling them she thought she saw him back in Nashville, but no one had had any contact with him at all.
It was as if he’d fallen off the face of the earth.
In a last-ditch effort, she sent an email through her patient portal to her nurse in New York, asking if they could pass along a message to Lucas as he’d overseen her care for a day and she wanted to connect. It was a long shot, but she was out of options.
Feeling deflated and needing another cup of coffee before she tackled the mound of work that was probably waiting for her, Ava got up from the desk.
As she opened the door, she stopped at the quiet mention of her name in another room.
It sounded as if her mother was talking to someone on the phone.
Her voice was low. Ava strained to hear it.
“I think she’s having some sort of delusional episode. She thinks God told her to find someone from her past … Mm-hm … Yeah … Okay, thank you.”
Ava closed the door and tiptoed back to the desk. She couldn’t blame her mother for being worried. She would’ve thought the same thing before her accident. She definitely wouldn’t have been open to understanding someone who said they were hearing voices.
Ava didn’t feel crazy. She felt completely coherent, but then again, if she were having some sort of delusion, she probably wouldn’t know it, would she?
She opened up a search tab, typed in people who have been outside of their body, and hit search.
She wasn’t quite sure how to word something like that, and she had no idea if anyone else had ever had a similar experience, so she was floored when a string of results came up. She read the first entry.
Instances of people leaving their bodies are often referred to as an out-of-body experience or OBE.
During an OBE, at times, many people can see their bodies from a separate viewpoint, usually while the body is under duress.
These events often go hand in hand with near-death experiences or NDEs, in which a patient dies, and the patient reports that their consciousness separated from their body.
When the patient is resuscitated, they will often explain that their consciousness and body became one again at the moment of their first breath.
Some of these patients report having a new outlook on life or extra-sensory perception after the episode.
Ava had felt separated from her body after the accident, but she hadn’t seen anything in the way the article explained.
And, as far as she knew, she hadn’t even died.
She clicked a few more links and read through them, but none hit the mark.
Then she stopped on a link that said “I saw darkness during my NDE …” She excitedly opened it, but it was about a terrifying experience, and hers wasn’t scary. She’d felt comforted.
If she had been in the presence of God, she surmised, what she’d experienced might be in the Bible. She searched scripture online and typed in w hat do we see when we die?
A string of results came up, with Second Corinthians chapter five, verses six through eight at the top.
She read the passage. It gave two alternatives to describe one’s existence: a worldly reality in the body that was separated from God, or a reality that was away from the body and at home with God.
Away from the body and at home with God .
So if she was away from her broken self in the accident, she must have been with God.
But wasn’t he in heaven? Why weren’t they in heaven?
With no clear answers, Ava clicked her way back into the patient portal to see if she could delete the message she’d sent to the nurse about Lucas, but—of course—there was no way to retract it. She rested her head on the desk, feeling overwhelmed.
When she finally emerged from the office, her mother was making a pot of stew, the starchy scent of potatoes and vegetables filling the kitchen.
“I had groceries delivered. I’ve been putting them all away, and I made us an early dinner since we skipped lunch.”
Ava’s eyes widened. “So we can get deliveries out here?”
Her mother grinned. “Get some good work done?”
“Oh, I just perused the internet,” she replied, picking up a carrot stick from the cutting board and taking a quick bite. “I wasn’t quite ready for work just yet.”
“It’s good to take things slowly.” Martha stirred the pot with a wooden spoon that had flowers carved into the handle that Ava remembered from her childhood.
“Also, while you were in there, the hospital called to give me your first cognitive therapy appointment date at Vanderbilt. They want to do a full workup just as a precaution.”
After eavesdropping on the phone conversation, Ava thought it was no wonder they wanted to do a full workup. But all she said was, “Okay.”
Truth be told, she’d like to know if she was delusional or not.
But deep down, Ava wanted to prove to them that there was nothing wrong with her cognitive abilities, and that what she’d experienced had been genuine.
She wanted to believe that she’d survived with minimal injuries because she’d promised to find Lucas.
But a part of her doubted whether it was real when everything around her was telling her it wasn’t.
“It’s first thing tomorrow,” Martha said.
“That’s great.”
Her mother eyed her. “You’re not fighting it? That’s uncharacteristic.”
“I’ll do whatever I have to do to get back to work.”
Plus—crazy or not—the more time she spent in Nashville, the more chances she had to run into Lucas if he was there.