Emily's Ghost (44 page)

"Oh, cripes, I came too
early." The aide, no older than a college freshman, was clearly
embarrassed. "Your car's parked up the block. Here are the
keys."

"Wha—what time is it?" she
asked him woozily, holding out her hand for the keys. She was
having a tremendous problem focusing.

"It's not eight yet. But
the senator said he wanted the car here early for you. I guess I
got a little gung ho," he added with a loopy grin.

It looked loopy to Emily
anyway. She took the keys but then promptly dropped them on the
floor.

When she bent over to pick
them up, she went tumbling head over heels.

****

By the time they rushed
her to Mass General, Emily was barely conscious. Her thoughts came
and went in bits and pieces. She tried several times to speak, but
the best she could do was to mumble, "Have the publish ... paper
... now."

The surgeon on duty had
been told that Emily was a journalist. "Don't worry, Emily; you
have lots of publishing left in you," he said, shining a tiny
flashlight into each of her eyes.

He turned and gave some
instructions to a nurse to call in a neurosurgeon while Emily was
put on an IV solution and her vital signs were monitored. A few
minutes after that she heard the neurosurgeon order an emergency
CAT scan.

She didn't like the sound
of things at all. By now she could barely open her eyes. She tried
to ask questions, but all that came out was a jumble of syllables.
The neurosurgeon was hovering over her; his voice was crisp,
urgent. "We may have to evacuate the hematoma," he said. It sounded
like a military maneuver. She became frightened, far more
frightened than she'd ever been in Talbot Manor.

After that she was wheeled
here and then there on the gurney, presumably for the CAT scan. By
now she couldn't speak at all, couldn't open her eyes. All she knew
was what she heard, and all she heard were things she didn't
understand. She felt trapped in her own dream, yet it seemed to her
that she'd gone a long time without sleep. She thought about
letting herself nod off for a while.

But then someone said,
"Prep her for surgery," and that sent her into a silent panic. She
didn't want surgery. She didn't need surgery. Surgery was for the
old and middle-aged, for the gunshot and the cancer victim, not for
someone who'd hit her head on a stupid table. She tried desperately
to object, but no one heard her. Yet she could hear everyone else
with clarity.

"Have you got a consent
yet?"

"Not yet, Doctor; I've
faxed the forms to her father in New Hampshire."

No! Don't tell my dad!
You'll just upset him. He has a bad heart. You can't -–

"Can't wait. Come on;
let's go."

After that they put a mask
over her face, just the way they'd done for her tonsillectomy when
she was a kid.
This is silly,
she thought.
I had more
fight in me when I was five than I do now.
She tried to lift her hands, to pull the mask away and
breathe clear air. But her arms wouldn't lift when she willed them
to.

Ah, the hell with
it,
she thought tiredly.
I'll take that nap after all.

Comatose. Emily heard the
word distinctly. At first she assumed she was still caught in the
same boring dream, the one in which she was going around endlessly,
trying to get someone to hear her.

But it wasn't a
dream.

"Dr. Redd, my sister's
been this way for over twenty-four hours now! How much longer will
we have to wait?"

Gerry? How did you get
here? Who's minding the shop? You can't afford to --

"I understand your
concern, Mr. Bowditch. And again I'll tell you not to worry unduly.
It's perfectly normal for Emily to be in a state of coma at this
point. But we've relieved the pressure from the hematoma that was
threatening her. Now it's just a matter of time."

"But she looks so -- oh,
God. What am I supposed to tell my father? Is she really out of
danger? Can you guarantee that?"

Didn't you hear the man?
"It's just a matter of time." Don't be such a worrywart.

"Well, guarantee is a word
we don't like to use around here. This isn't an auto shop, Mr.
Bowditch. I wish it were. It would be nice to think that if we just
threw enough skill and spare parts at a problem, we could fix it.
Let me just say, I see no obvious reason for Emily not to recover
fully."

But no
guarantees?

"Yeah, sure, I understand.
I don't mean to ride you on this, but she's the baby of the family.
There's us four guys, and there's Emily, who has more guts than the
rest of us put together -- and that includes a cop and a Gulf vet.
The thing is, we were always tough on her for being a girl. And
that made her play harder, work longer, study more. Y'know? Because
she was a girl. If it's our fault she's like this ..."

"Nonsense. You can't go
blaming yourself. Emily ran into some bad company, that's all.
She's lucky she was able to get away in one piece."

"Thanks to the senator,
yeah. You know she never told us a thing about him? We're a pretty
tight family; she calls her dad once a week. Yet all we know about
the other night is what we read in
USA
Today
. It's --"

"Yes, well. I see the head
nurse glaring at us. The limit in the ICU is ten minutes. Maybe we
should take this outside."

Stay! Dammit, stay!
How could she possibly learn anything if they
took things outside? If she were more like Fergus, well, that'd be
one thing. She could hop around from room to room. But apparently
comas didn't give you that kind of flexibility; now she couldn't
hear anything except the hum of the monitors next to her
bed.

Don't panic.
She focused on what Dr. Redd -- or was it Wred?
-- had just told Gerry: "It's just a matter of time." God. If that
wasn't the story of her life lately. She tried to laugh, but no
sound came, not even a snicker.

Comatose. The panic roared
in anyway, despite her effort to stay calm. She tried desperately
to get out of bed. Within seconds someone was in the room with her,
making calming sounds but holding her firmly. After that she felt
sticky things being placed back on her chest while a hand -- a
nurse's hand, surely -- patted her cheek and gave her a little
squeeze of reassurance. Emily began breathing more easily. Just a
matter of time.

After that Emily drifted
off, she wasn't sure where. The next thing she realized was pain;
someone was sticking her thigh with a pin. "She's fairly deep," he
said in a businesslike voice. The pin hurt; she wanted to stick him
back. But even before they left the room, Emily went drifting off
again.

Eventually she heard
voices.

"Does she answer to her
name?"

"Not as far as I can
tell."

Ben? You're here, too? I
meant to tell you, I need more Mace. I can't seem to go anywhere
anymore without needing Mace ....

"Emily? Honey? It's
Benjamin. Hey, kiddo. It's time to wake up. You know how you hate
to oversleep ... wake up, kiddo. We miss you ..."

I miss you, too, Ben. I
miss all of you.

"You poor little kid, you
poor --" She heard a catch in Ben's voice, and then she heard him
break down. He was squeezing her hand in his huge paw and sobbing.
She'd heard him cry only once before, this tough cop brother of
hers, and that was at their mother's funeral.

I'm not dead yet! Don't
cry. Don't, don't cry, Ben. It scares me.

Gerry eased Ben out of the
room, and then she was alone again, alone and floating between life
and not-life. It seemed to her that she stayed there for a long,
long time, floating back every once in a while to check on things,
and then away again, she wasn't sure where. She felt like a
styrofoam cup on Cape Cod Bay, ebbing back and forth with the
tide.

Whenever she heard her
name, she tried to make her way back, but if the seas were running,
or the wind was blowing, there was nothing she could do, because
she was only a styrofoam cup.

"Emily, hi, darlin'. I'm
back."

Lee.

"So. What have you been up
to? I know, bad joke. It looks like the burned part of your hair's
growing out nicely. So's the shaved part. After this, let your hair
grow long. I said you looked nice at that Copley Plaza fund-raiser,
but I lied. I liked your hair better before you got it
cut."

Lee.

"The first time I saw you
-- in that hilarious palmist's getup -- it was all I could do not
to run my fingers through it. You were on the floor, madly plucking
flower petals ...."

Lee.

"I know you can hear me,
darling ... I can tell from the monitor ... I got a crash course in
reading EEGs from the head nurse."

Lee was holding her hand
in both of his now; she felt his heat wrap around her coolness,
insulating her. "I like your brothers," he said. "Both of 'em. Too
bad Gerry had to go back to New Hampshire. I guess your
sister-in-law's due any day now. Gerry was pretty torn up about
which hospital to park himself in. Of course, you still have Ben
camping out weekends in the waiting room outside the
ICU.

"Ben stays with a cop
buddy here in Boston -- Tim Reilly. You may remember Tim; he said
he met you at the policemen's picnic back home in Manchester a few
years ago. Big guy, built like a tank? Tim came around to say hi
last week. We had coffee downstairs together. He remembers you
well. No question, I was jealous, darlin'."

Lee knew Gerry and Ben and
Tim? Lee, a coffee klatcher? Lee?

She felt her hand being
lifted to his lips. "I have to leave you now. I ran into Cara Miles
in the lobby. We negotiated: I took seven of the minutes; she got
three. There she is, tapping on the windows as I speak. I'll try to
sneak in again after hours, but I'm not sure how much clout a
lame-duck senator can wield. I'll be back, Emily. I love
you."

She tried desperately to
will herself into consciousness. She was still struggling when she
felt Cara's cool, made-up cheek press close to hers.

Cara's voice was a
discreet whisper, as if she were afraid of waking Emily. "Poor
darling. The senator said I should talk to you just as if you were
alive -- or whatever; that's not how he said it – but
...

"I mean, I could probably
talk to a doorknob for three minutes if I had to, so .... By the
way, you did pick the world's worst time to do this; you've missed
all the excitement. There was an uproar after that awful business
with that Maria person. Someone, I think one of the paramedics,
leaked what they saw to the press, and that was it. They've been
all over the senator ever since. There's a pack of reporters in the
lobby right now.

"Not that they have a
prayer of making it up here. I've never seen such tight security. I
almost didn't get to see you. I suppose I should've brought a
People magazine to read to you. They say that's good for comas. But
I didn't, so-o-o I'd better run. Take care, darling. You look much
better than I thought you would. Hurry up and come out of this.
You're taking a lot longer than they said."

Emily felt Cara's smooth
cheek glancing over hers again, and then Cara, too, was
gone.

After Cara left, Emily
seemed to ebb farther than ever from wakefulness. In her drifting,
dreamlike state she became convinced that there was a full moon,
cold and white and serene, pulling the ocean away from the shore,
dragging her farther and farther out to sea. No longer could she
hear voices on the shore, even distant ones.

The tide will rise, and I
will be able to float nearer to shore again. I will wait for the
tide to rise.

And it did. When Stanley
Cooper came in, she was near enough to the shore to smell his
cigarette-smoked clothing. She heard his raspy voice with perfect
clarity. It filled her with hope that she was on her way
back.

"Well, you've done it this
time, kid," she heard him say in his familiar, sardonic tone.
"You've gone a step too far. You couldn't just stick to rent
control violations. You had to go for the big story."

The big story is stuck in
my computer, Stan.

"You vowed to take His
Highness down a peg, and by golly, you did."

I never said that! If I
did, I didn't mean it!

"The irony is, you're in
here while we're all busy mining your mother lode."

The mother lode is stuck
in my computer, Stan.

"I've heard that you
shouldn't say bad things to comatose patients; they'll hate you
later and not know why. I wish I was optimistic enough to believe
that. But the idea's hooey, and it's not going to stop me from
making a little confession: I'm the one who leaked the story of
your going to the séance with Lee Alden."

Impossible ... I never
said a word to you.

"I'll tell you how I found
out. Mrs. Lividus called the newsroom, wanting to talk to you. I
chatted her up -- I admit, I have a way with older women -- —and
she was very forthcoming. By the way, she's convinced Kimberly
produced something that night. The girl thought so, anyway, and was
scared half to death. That's why she took down her shingle and went
back home to California.