Sarah Durst - The Lost

Beside me, a doctor with bouncy auburn hair and green scrubs pats my hand. “How do you feel?” She’s the one with the soothing accent. She checks the monitors and feels my neck for my pulse.

“What happened?” I try to say, except my mouth feels dry and gummy. It comes out as a garbled, “Whaaa...ed?”

“You had an accident, but don’t worry. We’re taking care of you.” She beams at me with a megawatt smile.

I don’t remember an accident. All I remember is Peter and the barn fading around me... I must have reappeared somewhere dangerous, like in the middle of a highway. I remember the Missing Man saying Claire would reappear where she was lost. I’d been on a road.

“You’re very lucky,” the doctor says. “Do you remember the car accident?” I shake my head, and pain shoots down my neck. I wince. She checks one of the IV bags. There are three hanging from hooks beside my bed. “Probably just as well. Your ribs were broken, but they’ve healed now. You’ll feel some residual soreness in your chest, and your legs will feel stiff for a while. We kept your muscles active, but you’ll feel unsteady on your feet at first. Does anything hurt now?”

I feel achy, but not hurt. “M’okay. Want to get up.” It feels as though my mouth is remembering how to talk. My jaw feels wooden.

She laughs but it’s not an unkind laugh. “Not just yet.”

“How long asleep?”

“Let’s check you over, okay?” She doesn’t wait for my response. I feel myself poked and prodded. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Lauren Chase.” I’m here anonymously?

“That’s right.”

Not anonymously. That’s good. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?” she asks.

Peter and the barn, fading. I open my mouth and close it. I can’t say that. She’ll think there’s more wrong with me. “Don’t remember car accident.”

“Your memory may return in time, or it may not. Often traumatic events are lost to our short-term memory. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything serious.” She proceeds to ask me a series of basic questions. Where I live. Where I work. What’s five times five and other basic math and trivia. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

I think I can tell the truth but omit the impossible details. “I was in a little town with...some friends. Visiting them. My car broke down, ran out of gas, but the town was so small that it didn’t have a gas station. And lousy cell phone reception. And...” I didn’t sound any more believable that way.

Her smile disappears for an instant but then it’s back. She looks so cheery that I think she’s about to burst into song. They must teach that in medical school. Perkily, she says, “Your car was found upside down on Route 10. You’d driven off the side of the road, hit a ditch, and flipped it. A trucker found you. Saved your life.”

I frowned. That couldn’t be right. I hadn’t been in my car since it ran out of gas. It was still sitting outside Lost. It hadn’t flipped. “I was in Lost. The town was called Lost. I left home on March 23 and was stuck there for weeks. Months!” My voice is shrill. I struggle to sit up. She puts her hand on my shoulder. I flop back down. Wince. The hospital light is glaring in my eyes. I look down at myself. I see wires running to blue stickers stuck to my chest, and more wires running down my faded blue hospital gown. An IV is stuck in my right arm. The nurses and doctors are murmuring to each other, but the auburn-haired doctor stays by my side.

“You were in an accident on March 23.” The doctor’s voice is gentle, kind. “You have been in a coma for the past three months.”

Things I lost:

my clothes (I hate hospital gowns)

use of my bladder (though I’m told it will return)

the potential for true love (even if it was all in my head)

the little sister I never had

my wallet

my car

my sanity

I sit by the hospital window in a padded faux-leather chair. I still have one IV and various monitors attached, but they’ve removed a few of the more serious tubes: breathing tube, feeding tube, and catheter. My throat feels as though I’ve swallowed nails, and the two times I’ve tried to pee, it burned like a hot glue gun between my legs. A nurse with wrinkles and a thick accent told me not to worry. My insides need to remember how to work. And once they do, I’ll be able to go home.

Home.

It won’t feel like home. Mom’s not there. She’s here, in this hospital, three floors down. The auburn-haired doctor whose name I can’t remember promised that she’d have Mom’s doctor stop by to update me. In the meantime, I am to concentrate on getting better. My mother won’t want to see me weak. The doctor actually wagged her finger at me as she said that, as if I were an errant toddler.

Outside, the palm trees sway in a light breeze. Cars wait at a red light to enter the hospital parking lot. My car isn’t in that parking lot. It’s either outside an impossible town or it’s totaled in a junkyard somewhere. Or maybe it’s totaled and in Lost because I’ve lost it. Except that Lost doesn’t exist.

The auburn-haired doctor showed me photos of when I’d arrived, the X-rays from my initial examination, and the daily nurse reports. I had been here three months, which meant I couldn’t have been in Lost. I’d imagined it, like Dorothy and Oz. How cute. How quaint. I want to put my face in my hands and cry, but I don’t want another conversation with the nurses or the extra cheerful doctor.

At their insistence, I have eaten a little, liquids only. I didn’t have much appetite. A few spoonfuls of soup before I felt as if I was going to vomit. I pushed it away before I did. I’ve also walked around the room. Felt as weak as a baby and had to rest. They wanted me back in bed; I pleaded for the chair.

A man knocks on the open door. “Hello, Ms. Chase? I’m Dr. Barrett.” He carries a clipboard, and he has a koala bear clipped to his stethoscope. He’s young, early thirties I’d guess, and handsome, like a doctor in a soap opera. He has killer blue eyes and a lopsided smile to accompany his calm, baritone voice. In short, he’s exactly the kind of doctor that a coma patient is supposed to open her eyes and see and fall madly in love with.

Unfortunately, I’m already awake and don’t feel at all like Sleeping Beauty with my hair matted and my limbs shaking and bruises up and down my arms from all the needles that have been jabbed into me over the past few hours. Or three months.

“Are you the psychiatrist?” I ask. They promised one will come talk with me about my feelings regarding my lost three months. They said this completely oblivious to the appropriateness of the phrasing. My “lost” three months.

“I’m your mother’s primary oncologist,” he says.

“Oh.” I sit up straighter.

He lays out the diagnosis in plain terms in his soft, calming voice. Stage four ovarian cancer. It’s spread to the lymph nodes in the abdomen and to the liver. They suspect it may also be in her lungs and bladder. Her body is essentially riddled with cancer. As he tells me this, his blue eyes are full of compassion. I nod in all the appropriate places. And then I ask as calmly as I can, “Can I see her?”

He nods. “Of course. I’ll ask one of the nurses for a wheelchair...”

“I can walk.”

He looks at me dubiously but he doesn’t contradict me, which I appreciate. Pushing on the arms of the chair, I grit my teeth as I stand. My legs feel shaky, and my head spins. I wait for it to pass. Maybe my mom shouldn’t see me like this. I need real clothes. And a brush through my hair. Makeup wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. But handsome-doctor-guy whose name I have already forgotten has one hand under my elbow. “One step at a time,” he says. “You can change your mind whenever you want. It’s not as if it’s hard to find a wheelchair around here, being a hospital.”