Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

“Did you feel it?” Dr. Pine asks.

One flick.

Dr. Pine reaches for a notepad and jots something down. When he turns back, he’s frustrated again, running a hand over his face as if to refocus. He’s conflicted in some way. Why?

“Okay, back to the memory test. Yes-or-no questions to start. Tara, do you remember anything about the night of your accident?”

One flick.

“Do you remember the man in your car?”

One flick. Oltamu, the doctor from Black Lake. Yes, she remembers.

“Do you remember the moment of the accident?”

One flick.

Dr. Pine wets his lips and shifts forward. The stool slides beneath him, moving soundlessly on the tile, bringing him closer to the bed. He lifts the alphabet board, then hesitates and lowers it again. He glances at Shannon, who is motionless, still standing with folded arms. She hasn’t interrupted him yet, a surprise to Tara, so surely a shock to him.

“Tara,” he says, “was it an accident?”

This sets Shannon in motion. She takes a step forward, staring at him, and says, “Why would you ask that—”

He lifts a palm. “Let her answer. It’s important. Tara — was it an accident?”

She’s not sure. There’s no way to respond I don’t know, though. She’s supposed to answer yes or no, period, but what she remembers of the night doesn’t fit neatly into either of those categories. Those memories are fragments laced with unease and an unidentifiable fear. She remembers the doctor looking behind them, over and over, remembers the way he wanted her to secure the phone, remembers the sound of an engine and terror of... of something, no clarity here, just an overwhelming memory of her fight-or-flight response, and she’d tried to flee.

Then there was blackness. The long dark.

Tara recalls Oltamu pressing that phone into her hand, and she thinks of the engine that roared, no lights, black on black, the vehicle seeming as much a creature of the night as the wolf. A predator.

She flicks her eyes up twice. No, it was not an accident.

This is a showstopper. Dr. Pine doesn’t ask another question, doesn’t really respond. Shannon, who had been advancing toward him as if to physically prevent him from asking anything, is frozen in midstride, halfway around the bed, almost like Tara was halfway around the CRV before the impact — the blackness — came. She’s staring down at Tara, but when she finally speaks, the question is for Dr. Pine.

“Why did you ask that?”

“Memory assessment.”

“Bullshit,” Shannon says.

He turns to her and the two of them gaze at each other in a silence so loaded that it seems to have texture, like an electric fence.

“What do you know?” Shannon asks. “And who told you?”

He doesn’t answer. Shannon lets her gunslinger gaze linger, then pivots away, leans close to the bed, and says, “Tara, did Dr. Oltamu take pictures of you?”

“Hang on,” Dr. Pine says, but Tara responds immediately, one flick. Yes, there were pictures, the strange and awkward pictures, but how in the world does her sister know this?

“You need to step back and let me do my job,” Dr. Pine says, rising from his stool as if to block Tara from Shannon’s line of sight. Shannon fires off another question.

“Was there something strange about Oltamu’s phone? Something different?”

The camera grid. It wasn’t an iPhone camera. Not a normal one, at least.

Tara gives one flick: Yes. How does Shannon know this? How is she inside of Tara’s brain, moving through the dark corridors of her memories?

Dr. Pine is now attempting to physically get between them, determined to keep Shannon from making eye contact with Tara, but Shannon evades him, prowling to the other side of the bed like a cougar stalking prey.

“Tara, do you think—”

“Stop this,” Dr. Pine says, nearly hissing the words. “We’re not interrogating her, that’s not my role or yours, and that is not going to —”

Shannon speaks over him. “Tara, do you think someone killed Oltamu because of that phone?”

Because of the phone? Tara has no idea. Shannon now has access to something more than Tara’s memories. Shannon is capable of passing through the locked doors and joining Tara in her lonely house of memories, and she can also move outside it. Tara can’t match that; she’s bound to the cellar, with no idea what is happening anywhere else. But the question Shannon posed makes sense to her, though she’s never considered it in such precise terms.

Because of the phone? Maybe. Yes, maybe it was all about the phone.

She gives one flick, signaling affirmation, even though she’s not sure it’s correct. She knows it’s possible, at least, and the recognition fills her with hot anger — she is trapped in her own body, paralyzed and mute, all because of a phone ?

Dr. Pine doesn’t lose his focus on Tara even while he’s trying to shut Shannon up, and he sees Tara’s eyes move, understands her answer and the weight of it. He and Shannon both do. Tara’s doing more than passing awareness tests now; she’s describing a murder. There is a long silence, and then Dr. Pine speaks in a soft voice.

“I think it’s my turn to ask who has been talking to you, Ms. Beckley.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Shannon says.

“You’re going to have to.”

“No.” Shannon shakes her head, and Tara sees the fear lurking beneath her frustration. Shannon is scared, and Shannon is never scared. Both she and Dr. Pine seem to know more than Tara, which is infuriating, and when Dr. Pine suggests to Shannon that they step into the hall to speak in private, Tara is so outraged that she wants to scream.

No sound comes — but her thumb twitches again.

I’m building a connection, she thinks. Restoring one, at least. That cracked-open cellar door is swinging a little wider, scraping across the damp concrete, the rusty hinges yielding, as if pushed by a relentless wind that is capable of rising in sudden swift gusts.

For the first time, Tara understands the source of that wind: her own willpower. Her willpower is not gone yet, and she is certain it is capable of gathering strength. She will continue to widen the crack, keep pushing until she can slip through the gap.

“You want us to stay,” Shannon says to Tara, and though it isn’t really a question, Tara flicks her eyes up gratefully.

Dr. Pine is reluctant, but Shannon is firm. “If we talk, we talk in front of her. She’s got to be scared in so many ways, scared of things we can’t even begin to understand. We can’t build more silence around her.”

Thank you, sis. Thank you, thank you.

The doctor sighs, rubs his eyes, then nods once and sits heavily on the stool.

“I don’t know much,” he says. “That’s the truth. I have been warned that Tara might have been a witness to something more than an accident. That’s all.” He looks up at Shannon. “You know it too.”

She nods.

“Who told you?” he asks.

Hesitation. Shannon doesn’t want to give up her source. She looks at Tara, considering, and Dr. Pine apparently takes her silence as a refusal to cooperate, because he gives up.

“You don’t need to tell me,” he says. “I probably don’t even want to know.”

“She’s in danger,” Shannon says, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I have been told that she is in danger. I don’t know how to help her. Who to call.”

“I can help you with that,” Dr. Pine says.

“How?”

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and studies Tara. When he speaks, his eyes are on her, not Shannon.

“There is an investigator with the Department of Energy who will be very interested to know that Tara has memories of the night. All of this talk about the phone and the pictures — I know nothing about that. But you’re going to need someone to trust. Tara, I’m asking you this, doctor to patient — do you want to meet with the investigator?”