Waking Lazarus (12 page)

He hadn’t packed lots of clothes for the trip, though enough to put on a few extra layers. But when he checked his fuel gauge, he realized he wasn’t sitting in the best place: just above an eighth of a tank. Okay, so much for feeling good about being the smart college kid.

He could start the car and run its heater intermittently, but if he was here for more than a few hours, he’d be sitting with an empty tank. And it wouldn’t take long for the frigid winds whipping across South Dakota to find the cracks in his car, slide in their fingers and grab hold.

On the radio, a caller was asking some blowhard about American dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf. Jude sighed, turned off his ignition. If he were going to wait out this storm, it wouldn’t do him any good to conserve gasoline and waste his battery.

Jude slid down in his seat and tried to nap. He had no way of knowing the blizzard would be the worst one the Midwest had seen in more than a decade.

Nor did he know it would take three and a half days for his car to be found.

Jude woke up, yet again, in a hospital bed. And yet again, he needed a few moments to get his bearings.

He knew instantly what had happened. The taste in his mouth, the sickly taste of pennies at the back of his throat, told him. He had died again. Ghost images, images of the recent past, whispered in his mind, but he pushed them away. He’d never asked to go to the Other Side once, let alone three times, and he wasn’t about to dwell on its lingering aftereffects now. Other people would do plenty of that if they found out. The copper taste told him more than he wanted to know.

A nurse walked into the room, her face calm and composed until she noticed he was awake. She stopped as if hitting an invisible wall, then gave a weak smile and backed out of the room again.

Jude heard hushed whispers outside his door before a middle-aged, white-haired man walked into the room and fixed his gaze on Jude. He waited a moment, pursed his lips as if struggling to find the right words. ‘‘Let me just say,’’ said the doctor, ‘‘that I can’t explain why you’re here.’’

Jude felt a familiar draining sensation in his extremities—actually
heard
the blood slowing in his own veins. He knew what the doctor was about to say, and he wanted to shut him up, tell him to turn around and forget about it all. It wasn’t possible once, let alone three times.

Still, he had other things to consider. Other people to consider. If others found out, it would be mayhem. Perhaps, if he talked to the doctor, convinced him to keep all of this quiet, he might be able to get ahead of it and squash the flare-up before it became a raging fire.

‘‘Does anybody else know?’’ Jude asked the doctor, trying to seem nonchalant.

‘‘Know what?’’

‘‘That I . . . about me.’’

‘‘You came in yesterday. And when you . . . um . . . revived, and we figured out who you were, well . . .’’ He paused, filled his lungs with fresh air. ‘‘It just snowballed from there. The hospital held a press conference this morning.’’

There it was. Already he was facing a monster, a monster with giant, sharp teeth ready to grind him to nothingness.

Even worse, the doctor still had something on his mind. ‘‘When you came in, you were dead,’’ the white-haired man of medicine began. ‘‘And let me be clear here: not just clinically dead, but stone cold dead, if you don’t mind my harsh language.’’

‘‘I’ve heard it before.’’ He knew the doctor would assume he meant the language, but he really
had
heard it before.

‘‘You were past
liver mortis
, when the blood settles into the lowest parts of the body; your blood was even jelled and coagulated due to the temperature extremes. For that matter, you were past
rigor mortis
, when your muscles stiffen.’’ The doctor stopped, waiting, Jude assumed, for a comment or reaction. Jude simply closed his eyes and waited to ride out the wave; the doctor had to get through his epiphany, and Jude had to listen. He knew that. He didn’t like it, but he knew it.

‘‘You have no frostbite on your extremities, no lung or brain function abnormalities. As far as I can tell, you didn’t even catch a cold.

All I can say is: there must be a very good reason why you’re still here, because there are a thousand reasons why you
shouldn’t
be.’’

Jude kept his eyes closed.

‘‘Do you understand what all of this means?’’ the doctor asked, his voice going shrill and strident. The doctor wanted some meaning, some bit of philosophy from Jude that would put his mind at ease and restore his faith in natural order. But Jude didn’t feel like playing the part yet. He needed time to build himself up.

It was like having a broken arm. The first time, it’s a learning experience, because it’s new. The second time, it’s worse, because you remember how long it took to recover. And if you’re unlucky enough to break your arm a third time, well, you just want to chop the damn thing off and be rid of it.

Jude rolled his head toward the sound of the doctor’s voice and opened his eyes. ‘‘I have a pretty good idea, Doc.’’

The doctor stood in silence for a few moments, then looked down. ‘‘Well, if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them,’’ he said, defeated.

‘‘Just one,’’ Jude said. ‘‘When do I get out of here?’’

Jude half expected the doctor to keep him for a few days, make him his pet project of discovery. It had happened before. But in reality the man had reacted the opposite way: he seemed eager to get rid of Jude, forget all about the incident. So, he only kept Jude for twenty-four more hours of observation before releasing him.

Jude was ready to leave, of course. Now, more than ever, hospitals had come to represent everything that was wrong in his life. And his death.

When the discharge orders came, he dressed quickly, then sat on the bed to tie his shoes. That morning on the phone, his mom had said she wanted to drive to South Dakota and meet him, but he nixed the idea. He just wanted to book a quick flight and get home. His three-hour drive had somehow stretched into a five-day nightmare, and he was ready to wake from it as soon as possible.

As he finished with his shoes, he noticed a few uniformed police officers step inside the doorway. Had he hit someone before sliding off the road? Was he getting slapped with a DUI? No, that couldn’t be, he knew.

He nodded at the officer closest to him, and the officer nodded back.

‘‘What’s up?’’ Jude asked.

‘‘Not much.’’

Jude smiled. ‘‘What I mean is, why are you here?’’

‘‘We’re to escort you to the airport.’’

Escort? ‘‘Any particular reason?’’ he asked.

The officer smiled. ‘‘Haven’t you seen?’’ he said. Jude shook his head. ‘‘A few people out there,’’ he said as he glanced at his partner.

Jude didn’t like the sound of that, but he stood. ‘‘Let’s get rolling, then.’’

Jude walked out the door with the two officers. Six more waited in the hallway. All of them avoided eye contact, but most stared when they thought he couldn’t see.

An escort of eight police officers. Not a good sign. He ran a hand across his face as he expelled a wearied sigh. ‘‘Well, let’s get this over with.’’

The policemen formed a phalanx around him and began to march down the hallway toward the swinging metal doors. Even from this distance Jude could hear people on the other side of the doors. Already he could tell the police officer’s comment about ‘‘a few people out there’’ might win a contest of understatements.

He’d been to the Other Side once again. Now it was time to face the other side of the hospital doors. He gulped in a few deep breaths, smelling and tasting the artificial, antiseptic air of the hospital. He pictured the air of the hospital drying him out like a raisin in the sun; only the fresh air outside would restore him, make him whole again. He closed his eyes for a few steps, imagining himself walking on a forest path covered with pine needles and aspen leaves, the smell of earth and dew thick and fragrant in the air around him.

They came to the doors. The policeman in the front looked through the small windows into the hospital lobby and appeared to exchange some brief communication with people on the other side.

Some sort of signal must have been given, because in a heartbeat they crashed through the doors and into chaos. Popping flashes blinded him, and everywhere he felt the yellow-hot glare of television cameras, all trying to capture the first images of Jude Allman trying to leave the hospital.

A sea of mechanized whirs, shouted questions, and jarring bodies washed over them. Jude thought of British soccer matches he’d seen, when masses of spectators joined and became one mindless beast, swaying out of control like a drunkard.

He didn’t realize he’d stopped until he felt the officers behind him pushing, inching him through the crowd toward the other side of the lobby. The policemen all had their clubs drawn now, and some were using plastic shields to clear a pathway. As they moved, individual faces emerged from the mass and somehow managed to reach Jude, even through the small army of uniformed officers surrounding him.

A television reporter with stiff hair thrust a microphone in his face. ‘‘Can you tell us what you saw?’’ he asked before the officers closed the breach and pushed him back into the masses.

A Hispanic woman somehow managed to pace the officers for a few steps. She lifted a young girl into the air. ‘‘My daughter is blind,’’ she shouted. ‘‘Heal her!’’

A sweaty bald man with a paunch crawled into Jude’s circle on his hands and knees. ‘‘The lottery numbers,’’ he hissed. ‘‘Gimme the lottery numbers.’’ He grabbed Jude’s pant leg and tried to stand, but people outside the tight circle were clawing and pulling him back even before the officers had their hands on him.

The sea spat another woman into the circle, this one with a look of wild-eyed panic in her eyes. ‘‘A lock of hair,’’ she chattered. ‘‘I just want a lock of hair.’’ She lunged; one of the policemen caught her and started pushing her away, but not before she had Jude’s hair in her hand. A patch came off in her hand, and his eyes immediately watered in pain.

The moving mass of uniformed policemen stopped. It was too much. Their exit still seemed too far away. Jude dimly wondered how all these people had managed to crowd into the lobby area; local fire marshals were probably having brain aneurisms.

For a moment, Jude panicked. When they had stopped, the ring of police officers had closed in, forming a tight ball around him, and he was sure the crowd would continue to push until he was crushed.

But then they started to move again, this time to the right. Jude struggled to see. Someone had opened an emergency exit. The alarms must surely be sounding, he thought, but he couldn’t hear them above the melee.

They approached the emergency exit, and Jude spotted the woman who had obviously opened the door. She simply looked at him, a warm smile on her face, as he passed. Jude felt as if all of it must have happened in slow motion, except he knew that of course it couldn’t have. She made no effort to join the crush and break through. She simply stared at Jude as he passed, then gave him a slight nod.

Bodies closed the gap around her as groping hands pushed Jude through the doors into the street outside and on toward a waiting police car.

16

CONFESSING
Now

On a crisp autumn morning Jude stood on Rachel’s porch. Again. Unsure what to do. Again. Maybe even more so, since Rachel hadn’t really invited him over this time. And, because it was morning, she’d probably be getting ready for work.

His legs wanted to back off the porch, then stretch out and run forever. Most of his body agreed with his legs. But his mind, with its newfound sense of both wonder and deep puzzlement, wanted him to ring Rachel’s doorbell.

He pressed the button and waited. Muffled sounds inside made their way toward the door. It still wasn’t too late to listen to his legs; with just a few steps he could be—

The door swung open. For an instant, the fine line of a pucker crossed Rachel’s lips, followed by a forced smile. ‘‘Oh, hi,’’ she said and dropped her gaze. ‘‘I . . . I guess I didn’t know you were coming over today.’’

‘‘Neither did I. Can I come in?’’

‘‘Um, Nathan’s not here. Nicole and Bradley already picked him up for school.’’

‘‘That’s okay. I’m actually here to see you.’’ He had obviously caught her in the middle of her morning routine; her hair was still wet, and the makeup on her face was somewhere between just-started and ready-to-go.

She stepped back and let him in, then closed the door and followed him into the living room. ‘‘Do you want some coffee?’’ she asked. ‘‘I still have some warm.’’

‘‘No, thanks,’’ he answered. ‘‘I usually stay away from coffee. It makes me nervous.’’

‘‘Scary thought,’’ she said. He nodded at the joke. Paranoia humor. He was fond of it himself, occasionally.

‘‘Am I making you late?’’ he asked.

‘‘Not at all. I own the place. What are they gonna do, fire me?’’ She smiled. ‘‘Um, if you could just give me a few minutes to finish up. . . ?’’

‘‘Oh, sure, sure. Sorry to just, you know, barge in.’’

‘‘No big whoop. Actually it’s kind of a nice surprise,’’ she said, and he could tell from the look in her eyes that she meant it. He looked down at the floor, uncomfortable to have her eyes on him. After a few moments he heard her move down the hall.

He had been in Rachel’s home many times, but he’d never really paid attention to it. This time, as he sat, he discovered plenty of interesting knickknacks and doodads populating her shelves and walls. Rachel was obviously a collector, like his mother had been. His mom had always loved to garage sale (in his mother’s world, the term
garage
sale
was a verb), always bringing back an armful of junk—or
junque
, depending on your point of view—and a mouthful of stories each time she went.

Jude liked to garage sale with her. Sometimes. He always started the day filled with hope and excitement. What kinds of toys might he find? Books? Comics? Records? But his body could only run on excitement for thirty minutes, and garage-saling was never a thirty-minute activity. His mother spent whole afternoons scanning table after table, watchful for
uh-ohs
.