Never Wake (34 page)

Emma looked away from the rigid back and slender figure when she heard a sound at the door. Her father stood in the doorway hunched over the back of a wheelchair as if for support. There was a silent exchange between her parents that made Emma’s chest ache. She could feel the sense of loss and fear coming from her mother and a soul-shattering feeling of sad resignation coming from her father. His disappointment mirrored her own when they both watched Darby squeeze between the narrow space between the bed and the wheelchair and walk out of the room without so much as a glance in his direction.

“I’m sorry for bringing you into this, Daddy,” Emma said after getting over her shock.

“You’re my daughter,” he said. She could feel that deep down, what she had said had hurt him. And what her mother had not said had hurt him even more. How had she missed the pain in their relationship?

He loved her—loved her with a fierce, burning desire that she recognized. She hurt for her father. She would hurt for him more when she had time to think, but for now she was consumed with thoughts of getting to Troy.

Dr. Shorenstein came rushing in, and her mother trailed behind him.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t do this. She hasn’t been released yet.”

Her father turned dark, burning eyes on the young doctor. “My daughter has something she has to do. I’ll bring her back after she’s done.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t allow that.”

“Let me tell you something, son. For two months she lay in that bed, and I didn’t know if I’d ever hear her voice again. But she just told me that there’s some place she needs to be. I’m going to make sure she gets there and you don’t want to be in my way.”

The last part was said with a thread of steel that was strong enough to encompass the young doctor and her mother. Neither of them offered to help as her father assisted her as she slid into the chair. Emma had already forgotten about them. Her mind was on Troy.

Dr. Shorenstein had to hustle to avoid being run over as they wheeled through the door and out into the hallway.

Emma barely noticed when they passed through the halls of the hospital. Why hadn’t Troy awakened as she had? She remembered Dr. Shorenstein telling her parents that Dr. Dunham had died. What if he’d been wrong? The patients didn’t know anything about the drugs they had been given.

“Ready?” her father asked.

“One, two, three.” She counted along with him under her breath, and for once, she did not brace herself for the pain. The wheels of the chair whispered as they moved through the halls. Emma kept expecting someone else to try to stop them, but they were barely given cursory glances as they reached the entrance of the hospital. A cool breeze passed through her hospital gown, and she shivered. Across the street, a boy sat against a streetlight with a bag thrown across his back at an angle, a girl stood on the sidewalk waiting to cross, and a woman walked by with a black West Highland Terrier on a leash. The light changed, and as they walked across the street, Emma inhaled and shivered. She briefly set aside her worry for Troy and tried to feel the city.

“Emma, did you hear me? I need to pull the car around. Will you be all right if I leave you here alone?”

“Sorry, go ahead. I’ll be fine.” Emma assumed her father had walked away, but her eyes were riveted to the pedestrians on the street until they had disappeared and were replaced by others. She watched people awake and moving in their everyday lives until the long line of her father’s black Lexus blocked the street from view.

He buckled her into the passenger seat and shut the door behind her. She watched him through the side mirror as he struggled to fit the wheelchair in the trunk. His hair was full and dark brown, but she knew he had begun coloring it several years before. He had worn sideburns, even when they weren’t popular, but Emma thought they made him look stylish. He was a handsome man, and Emma felt proud of him for reasons she would need to explore later. He sat down in the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition before slamming the door.

“Thank you,” Emma said, “for this, I mean.”

He smiled. “You seem surprised.”

“You and I have never been the I’ll-break-you-out-of-the--hospital type of close. Mother and I neither, for that matter.” Emma winced, wondering how much of that was her fault. “Thank you for understanding how important she is to me.”

Emma watched the emotions play across his face as he struggled to find words. Confusion, sadness, and the need to say what he was feeling made the car quiet as he drove onto Interstate 5.

Come on, Daddy. Tell me what you’re thinking.

“You’ve never asked me for anything,” he said.

Emma looked at him sharply. “Are you kidding? I always asked you for stuff.”

“No, you asked your mother.”

Emma frowned. “That can’t be true.”

He looked away from the road long enough to look at Emma. “It’s true, and I’m not blaming you. It was easier that way for me, too.”

How could that be? How could she go through her life— Of course it was true, she realized. Even at a young age, she had known who ran the household, and it was never her father. She had asked her mother if she had known what it was to feel needed. Perhaps she had been asking the wrong parent.

“Who is she?”

“Her name is Troy Nanson.”

“Does she work at the clinic?”

“No, she’s a bike messenger here in town.”

“Dangerous job.”

“Yes, but she loves it.”

“Is that how you feel about the clinic?”

“Yes,” Emma said, looking at her father in surprise. “I thought I…” How could she tell him about the life she had led in her self-imposed dreamland? “I thought about what life would be like if I didn’t have the clinic. It was empty and without direction. I think I was waiting to die.”

Her father seemed to understand, and perhaps he did. Perhaps that’s the conclusion he had come to when he contemplated living without her mother.

“Almost there,” he said.

Emma found herself rubbing her hands across the front of her thin hospital robe. They exited Interstate 5. Emma watched the people on the streets in a daze. Troy lived close to here, she thought. She leaned her head back, closing her eyes, wanting to be there, yet not wanting to be there. Her father made a left turn onto a tree-lined road; a sign to the left of the road was almost obscured by trees and was so worn that it made it hard for her to read the writing. She didn’t have to, though; she knew that it would be Multnomah cemetery—the place where Patricia was buried. Her father drove for another mile or so and pulled into the driveway of a small, colonial mansion that had been converted into an adult-care hospital.

“Please help me out,” Emma said, her breath coming in short bursts. Her father was already out of the car and opening the trunk to remove the chair. Her legs trembled as she stood and allowed herself to be guided into the chair.

As he pushed her through the parking lot, she noticed a bike chained to a pole. “Daddy, push me over there.” A sob hung in the back of her throat as she struggled with her own warring emotions. On the one hand she was happy to see Dite intact and not destroyed as Troy had described. She reached up and touched Dite’s bars, her seat, and the duct tape on the handlebars. She was also ecstatic that everything, right down to the different colored rubber bands that Troy had daisy-chained along its frame, was as she remembered it. But on the other hand, it confirmed what she already knew. The things that she remembered, the time she had shared with Troy—the scary ones and the wonderful ones—had not physically happened.

Troy’s bike in all its glory.

Someone had placed a plastic bag over the seat, and there were little notes taped all over the bike. Emma flipped one back so she could read it.
Come back to us, Troy. Dite’s waiting for you.
She remembered Troy telling her the story about the messenger who had died in a traffic accident a few years before. “We chained his bike near his grave, and it had stayed until the city removed it.”

“You ready to go in?” Emma swallowed and released the note. She looked up at the windows of the hospital and felt the fear Troy had described when she had caught Abe cleaning up the room. She wondered which one of these windows was that room. Reba Stefani’s name had stuck fast in Emma’s mind.
At some point I’ll find out what happened to her in the real world, but I need to see about Troy first. What if he had come upon Troy’s room first? What if… Stop it. You can’t play this game. He didn’t find her first. She is alive. It may take her a little longer to wake up, but she is alive. That’s all that matters.

Emma gripped the armrest of the chair hard as her father pushed her up a ramp and toward the front doors of the hospital.

Fear crept like ice water into her veins. When her father hit the little blue button that swung the doors open, she had expected the sadness, the weariness, and the feelings associated with people being ill, but it didn’t make it any more easy to deal with.

The walls were painted white, though they looked like they were in need of a few new coats. Four chairs sat across from a large reception desk. The woman manning the desk smiled at them and pointed to the phone glued to her ear with her free hand.

The top of the desk was lined with birthday cards from what looked like friends and coworkers. There was one drawn with crayons, with the adorable little stick figures on the front. It made Emma think of Troy’s self-portrait with the sidewalk chalk.

“May I help you?” She had been so wrapped up with her memories that she hadn’t noticed when the receptionist ended her call.

“My…” What was Troy to her? Emma’s stomach lurched. “My friend is here. Troy Nanson. I’d like to see her.”

“Are you family?”

Tears filled Emma’s eyes at the thought that she might not be allowed to see Troy. “She doesn’t have any blood family that she knows of.”

“Please,” Emma’s father said, “my daughter’s been in the hospital for two months. She didn’t know her friend was here until today.”

The woman looked at Emma. She noticed the pallor and the bandages and the hospital-issue robe and wheelchair. “You’ll need to sign in first.” Emma watched as her father printed both their names in his neat, precise handwriting. By the time he had written the time, the purpose of their visit, and the patient they were visiting, Emma wanted to scream and snatch the pen from his hand. “She’s in Room 117, but there’s someone in with her right now.”

Emma’s father was already pushing her in the direction the nurse had indicated by her glance down the hall. He threw the nurse a dazzling smile. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and Emma had the briefest thought that her father could probably have his pick of any number of women, but it wouldn’t matter. He, like Emma, fell in love once in a lifetime. Emma pushed the thought away.

“Here it is. Are you ready to go in?”

Emma looked at the door. Was she ready? How could she ever explain to her father that she had been ready for years?

“Let’s go in,” she said, and her father pushed the door open and began to wheel her into Troy’s room. A man, perhaps her father’s age, sat slumped in a chair. He jumped up when he heard them push through the door. He was short—perhaps five three, maybe a little less. What was left of his wispy jet black hair was tasseled about his head. His bleary eyes flew to Troy’s bed and then back to Emma and her father. Her father topped him by at least ten inches, but he looked prepared to defend Troy if he had to. Emma liked him on sight.

“We’re sorry to disturb you. My daughter here is a friend of Troy’s.” The man seemed to relax when he heard Emma’s father say that.

“And here I thought I was her only friend,” he joked, but his words dropped off unconvincingly.

“You must be Raife,” Emma said.

“Yeah, I’m Raife.”

“She said you were all the family she had.”

Raife pressed his fist against his mouth. His eyes told Emma how choked up he was by what she had just said. Emma realized she had been avoiding looking at Troy. “Push me closer, Daddy.”

Troy’s mess of curls was all over her head. Her skin seemed pale, not golden brown like she remembered it. “She looks so thin.” Emma choked on her words.

“They’ve been feeding her intravenously, but she just—I don’t think she’s getting any better…” The words broke off, and Raife looked away.

Emma reached out and put her fingers in Troy’s hand. She felt the calluses that had created such an electric sensation when they had touched her body. She closed her eyes. Her heart ached at the thought that she and Troy had never actually made love, but there had to be something to her memories of it. After all, even though Troy looked a little different than she remembered, how could she remember Dite? How would she know how her hands would feel? It had not been a dream, not at all. She and Troy had grown close because of that shared horror.

“How long has she been like this?” Emma asked.

“Seven weeks, two days. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it. It was all over the papers. Messengers from all over came to help out with the medical bills for her.” Emma could feel Raife’s pride in how Troy’s “family” had come together for her.

“She said she didn’t have many friends.” It was a statement, not a question, from Emma.