Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

“You just carry that with you, do you?” Sam said, and he didn’t like how unsteady his voice sounded. He’d been around guns all his life. Why did this one scare him?

“Yeah, I guess.” The kid pocketed it again, and while Sam was glad it was out of sight, he was aware of how natural it fit in the kid’s hand.

“Where are you from?” Sam asked.

“All over. Moved around a lot, growing up.”

“Because of the fires,” Sam said, thinking of the kid’s dead father. “They don’t stay in one place, nice and tidy, do they?”

The kid smiled. “No,” he said. “Fires tend to move around.” He started to pour again, and Sam waved him off, because at this point if he tried to drive even as far as the corner store for pizza, he’d be taking a hell of a chance. His vision was blurring in a way it usually didn’t from whiskey.

“Aw, come on,” the kid said. “Just one more, for my dad. His burned bones are on some mountain out there I’ve never seen. Right now, they’re probably already under a blanket of snow. Have a drink for him, would you, sir?”

How could you say no to that? A kid asking you to toast to his dead father’s bones, burned black by fire and now buried by snow, and the kid was offering his own whiskey, and you were going to say no? That didn’t seem right.

“Pour it,” Sam said.

The kid poured it tall again, but what the hell. If Sam needed to doze off here in the chair for an hour or two until he was ready to get behind the wheel, that was fine. He’d done it before. He saw no reason to be troubled by his heavy eyelids.

“The card?” the kid asked loudly.

“Huh?” Sam jerked upright. He realized he’d actually been on the way to sleep, and he’d let his eyes close.

“You said you couldn’t remember the woman’s name, the one you gave all of the phones to, but that she left a card.”

“Oh, shit. Yes. Yes, she did.” Sam tried to stand, but he was woozy. Damn, that new Jack Daniel’s had a different kind of kick to it. Sneaky as a snake in the grass. He’d stick to the old classic in the future. He fumbled around on the shelf behind the desk and then he turned around, triumphant, the card held high.

“Here ya go.” He tossed it on the desk so the kid could read it. No way Sam could pick the words out of that blur, not now.

“‘Hank Bauer, Coastal Claims and Investigations,’” the kid read. “Hank was a woman?”

“No, but that’s the card she left. She must work for him. She wasn’t as young as you, but not very far from it either. Maybe thirty. Tiny little thing, with blond hair. She was decent, I suppose, but she might be a smart-ass. And like you said, she should’ve left the... the... uh...” Sam couldn’t keep his thoughts steady, and he was beginning to sweat. “It should’ve been the police that came, is what I mean.”

“Sure. Well, Mr. Jones, consider your problems solved. I’ll take care of this whole matter, and I’ll do it discreetly.”

Sam tried to nod. Tried to say thank you. Instead he felt his eyes close, and this time he didn’t fight them.

“That’s some damn strong liquor,” he said, and the words were hard to form and seemed to echo in his own ears.

“It’s a proprietary blend,” the kid said. “I add a little custom touch to it.”

Wish you’d mentioned that earlier, Savage Sam Jones thought but didn’t say, couldn’t say. His eyes were still closed, and he felt his head lolling forward on a suddenly slackening neck.

I need some water, he thought. I need some help.

When Savage Sam Jones slumped forward in his chair, Dax Blackwell didn’t move. He waited a few minutes, calm and patient, before pulling on thin gloves and checking for a pulse.

Nothing. The old man’s flesh was already cooling. His heart had stopped.

Long after he was certain of this, Dax Blackwell kept his hand on the man’s wrist and his gaze on the man’s closed eyes. He studied the tableau of death where life had flourished just minutes ago, until Dax’s arrival on the doorstep of this man now turned corpse.

Finally, reluctantly, he released him.

There was business to do, and time was wasting.

He kept the gloves on while he wiped down the whiskey glass and the PBR can and the desk. Sam’s old chair swiveled under his weight, turning the dead man away from the door. Dax carefully turned the chair back so that his face would greet the next visitor.

When he left, he took the bottle.

The neurologist’s last name is Pine, and if he has a first name, he doesn’t offer it to Tara. He is Dr. Pine, period. He has a pleasant smile and smart, penetrating eyes and the kind of self-assured bearing that gives you confidence.

It gives Tara confidence, at least, until he asks her to blink.

“Twice for no, once for yes,” he says in his deep, warm voice. They are alone in the room; Shannon objected to that, but Dr. Pine insisted, and Dr. Pine won.

He is the first medical staffer to introduce himself to Tara and explain who he is. Hello, Tara, I’m Dr. Pine, your neurologist. We’re going to need to work together to get your show back on the road, okay? This will be a team effort. But I promise you I’m going to do my part.

All of this is so nice to hear. So encouraging. But then...

“Blink for me,” he says again. “Please, Tara.”

And she wants to. She has never wanted anything more in her life than to blink for this man.

She can’t do it, though. She tries so hard that tears form in her eyes, but tears are always forming in her eyes, and she doubts this means anything to him. It’s not crying so much as leaking, and nobody seems to notice it except Shannon and the black nurse whose name Tara still doesn’t know. Sometimes they will dab her tears off her cheeks.

My sister used to call me Twitch, she thinks. I was that jumpy. If you showed me a scary movie or slammed a door when the house was dark, I’d jerk like I’d been electrocuted. Now I can’t even blink.

Dr. Pine stares at her, says, “If you’re comfortable, give me one blink. If you’re not comfortable, give me two,” and Tara begins to feel exhausted from the strain of effort, an exhaustion that’s only heightened by the outrage that there’s no evidence of her effort, no sign that she’s fighting her ass off in here. She doubles down on the effort of the blink, every ounce of her energy going toward her eyelids. Come on, come on...

And that’s when her thumb twitches.

She feels a wave of elation; Dr. Pine shows nothing. He didn’t see her thumb. He’s watching her eyes, and so he missed the motion in her hand.

“That’s okay, Tara,” he says, and he pats her arm and stands up and turns his attention to his notepad.

But my thumb moved! It moved, how could you miss that, I need you to see that I can move!

Twitchy Tara the scaredy-cat girl is back and better than ever. Twitch is no longer a shame name; it’s a lifeline.

Pine looks up, smiles at her, and then says, “Let’s bring your family back in, shall we?”

Damn it, Doc, where were your eyes when I needed them!

But he’s gone, and her thumb is still again. The lifeline lifeless. He opens the door and they all file in, Shannon in front, then Mom, then Rick with his hand on Mom’s arm. Always the reassuring touch.

“Remember,” he tells Mom, “the truth is always progress.”

He keeps talking, his voice rising and falling with the softly melodic tone that Shannon always claims is attempted hypnosis. When she and Tara were kids, that was one of the inside jokes about Rick that kept them laughing and made his endless optimism and stream of life-lesson-inspiration bullshit tolerable. That and the way he kept Mom away from the pills. She’d been in her fourth stint at rehab when she met Rick, and nobody expected this one to work any better than the first three had. It would buy a few weeks maybe, but then Tara would come home and find her mother hadn’t gotten out of bed, or Shannon would open a DVD case and Vicodin tablets would pour out.