Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

“Do you have enough energy to give this a try?” Dr. Pine asks.

She flicks her eyes up once.

“Terrific. What I’m going to do is ask you to spell something. You get to pick what it is. You’re in charge now, Tara, do you understand?”

She flicks her eyes up again and feels like she could laugh and cry simultaneously — she’s paralyzed, but he’s telling her that she is in charge, and right now, that doesn’t seem as absurd as it should. The simple possibility of communicating is empowering, almost intoxicatingly so. Her message is within her control. Such power. So easily taken for granted.

“Tell us whatever you want to tell us,” Dr. Pine says, “but I’d suggest a short message to begin. The way we get there is simple — we’re going to spell it out together. That means I’ve got to narrow down the first letter of the word. So I’ll ask whether it’s red or yellow or blue. You will tell me yes or no. Once I have the color, we’ll go through the letters. You’ll tell me yes or no. If I’m trying to go on too long, you’ll tell me that we’re at the end of the word or the end of the sentence.” He studies her. “It’s not easy. But stay patient, and let’s give it a try. Do you have a message ready for your family?”

Does she have a message? What a question. She’s overflowing with messages, drowning in them. There is so much she wants to tell them that the idea of picking just one thing freezes her momentarily, but then she remembers to flick her eyes upward, because he has asked a question and is waiting on the answer. Yes, she has a message.

“Great,” he says. “Now, is the first letter red?”

Two flicks. No.

“Yellow?”

No.

“Blue?”

One flick.

“Is it I ?” No. “J?” No. “K?” No. “L?”

One flick. Tara is exhausted, but she has her first letter on the board.

Next letter. Not red, yellow, or blue. Green. Then she gets a break — finally, it’s the first letter in the column. One flick, and she has her second letter on the board: O.

It’s harder than any race she’s ever run. She’s exhausted, and the focus makes her vision gray out at the edges, blurring the columns and letters, but she’s not going to quit now. Not until it’s out there. Her first words, tottering forth into the world like a newborn. She has to deliver them, even if they’re also her last.

L

O

V

E

End of word

Y

O

U

They’re all crying now, Mom and Rick and Shannon; even Dr. Pine might have a trace of mist in his eyes, but maybe that’s Tara’s blurring vision.

“Tara,” he says, “you just spoke. And they’ve heard you.”

She wants to cry too. She’s so tired, but she has been heard, and it is remarkable. It feels like all she has ever wanted.

“Do you have another message you want to share with us right now?” Dr. Pine asks.

Two flicks. No. She got out the one that mattered most. She can rest now.

She fades out, grateful for the break, as Dr. Carlisle begins to talk excitedly about computer software that should make this a faster process, and Rick asks if there’s a more holistic approach, which makes Shannon tell him to shut up and let Dr. Carlisle finish, and Mom tells her not to talk like that. The conversation is a chaotic swirl but Tara is not put off by it because they know she’s there now, they know she’s hearing it all. She’s so relaxed, relieved, and so, so tired. The last thing she hears before she drifts off is Dr. Pine excusing himself from the room. That makes her smile. She thinks he’s happy to leave Dr. Carlisle to handle this mess.

“I have to make a phone call,” he says.

Yeah, right, Doc. People have used that excuse around my family before.

The last sound she hears before sleep takes her is the soft click of the door closing behind him.

Boone’s phone began to ring while the plane was still descending, and she caught a reproachful look from one of the flight attendants.

“Airplane mode until we’re on the ground, please.”

“Right,” Boone said. She’d never used airplane mode in her life, preferring to have her phone flood with e-mails and messages while they eased down through the clouds. If this habit were truly dangerous, a lot of planes would be tumbling out of the sky, she thought. But why quibble with the flight attendant — Boone’s business cards said Department of Energy, but her expertise wasn’t really in that field.

Instead, she simply silenced the phone while pretending to put it in airplane mode. The caller went to voice mail. Boone looked at the number and didn’t recognize it, but the area code was Boston’s.

It’s a big city, she thought, trying to tamp down the swell of hope. Could be anyone, about anything. Could be the boneheads in the Brighton PD calling to state their unequivocal confidence that Carlos Ramirez was killed in a drug buy gone bad.

Or it could be her one hope: Dr. Pine.

She held the phone in her lap as the plane made what now felt like an endless descent, and as the signal strengthened, the iPhone offered an awkward attempt at transcribing the voice mail. While some of it was clearly a mistake — she doubted the phrase jazz trombone would be involved — the first words were crystal:

Hello, this is Dr. Pine.

Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch. There was hope. Dr. Pine meant there was hope.

The plane finally hit Tampa tarmac, tires shrieking, cabin shuddering. Boone was in the aisle seat, still staring at her phone, and when she didn’t rise instantly at the chime indicating they were now free to take off their seat belts and exit the plane, the passenger beside her cleared his throat loudly and made an impatient gesture toward the aisle, where people were attacking the overhead bins in a frenzy, as if they’d all boarded the last flight out of a failed nation-state. Actually, Boone had been on two of those flights, and they weren’t all that energetic.

She unclipped her seat belt and rose, ducking her five feet ten inches to avoid the overhead bins but never taking the phone from her ear. Now she could hear what the transcription software had missed.

“Hello, this is Dr. Pine, in Boston. I trust you’ll remember me. I just left a pretty jazzed-up room. Tara Beckley is alert. She has what we call locked-in syndrome. This means her ability to move and vocalize her thoughts is lost, at least temporarily, possibly forever, but her mind is intact, and she is aware. I just asked her to spell out a message to the family and she completed this task successfully. She is also capable of answering yes-or-no questions.” He paused, and Boone could sense both his pride in the moment and his conflicted feelings about sharing the information.

“I’m not sure if I would have made this call if not for the mother,” he continued. “She’s making regular updates on social media, broadcasting Tara’s condition to the world. Since it seems the news will not be hard to find, I suppose I will take a chance on telling you. If, as you once suggested, her life may be in danger... well, we’re going to need to take swift action on that. I didn’t know how to keep the mother from sharing this joyful news. Perhaps this is why you should have dealt with the family to begin with. At any rate, this is Tara’s status at the moment. If you have any questions that don’t involve a deeper invasion of my patient’s confidentiality, I would be happy to answer them.”

“You stupid bitch,” Boone said aloud, and though the sentiment was directed at a joyful mother two thousand miles away, her seatmate clearly thought it was for him as he rushed to pull his bag out of the overhead bin. Boone ignored his umbrage while she called Pine back. Answer, damn it. Answer.