Before I Wake (2 page)

“Mary, why are you—?”

“Is everything okay?”

I tucked myself into a pay-phone cubicle on the wall, my
back to the noise and the bustle, my voice dropping. “There's been an accident. Sherry was hit by a car.”

“Oh God, Simon. Is she all right?”

“They don't know yet. She's still in surgery. Karen—Karen's hurt too. She's okay. She fell. Hit her head. She's okay.”

“How are you holding up?”

I shrugged, then realized she couldn't see me. “I'm fine.”

“I was worried.”

For some reason, the idea surprised me. “Why?”

“It's not every day you get taken away by the police before lunch.” She laughed a little, awkwardly. “When will you know more?”

I could feel my shoulders tighten as I realized that I had no idea, that things were completely out of my control. “I don't know. Sherry's still in surgery. We won't hear anything until after that. Even then it will probably be too early to tell.”

“But she'll be all right, right?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you okay?” Her voice was nearly a whisper.

“I'm okay.”

“Let me know if I can do anything, okay? I'll be here, or on my cell.”

“I know. Listen, work up Berkman and…check the records on Radinger, then call it a day. I'll contact you later.”

“You can—”

A hand fell onto my shoulder, gripping it tightly. I jumped and turned in a single motion.

Karen had climbed out of bed, wheeled her IV stand into the emergency lobby and found me. She was still pale, but her cheeks were red from the exertion. She mouthed, “Who?”

“The office,” I mouthed back. Then, into the phone, “No, nothing that won't keep.”

“Is Karen there?” Mary asked.

“I'll be in later to check on things. I left my briefcase—”

“Will I see you? Will you call me?”

“Right. Later then. Thanks.”

Karen was shaking her head. “Not a moment's peace. Not even now.”

“They're all just worried. They saw me leaving with the police. Should you be up?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “Who was it?”

“Sheila,” I lied, taking her shoulder and guiding her to one of the orange plastic chairs.

MARY EDWARDS

Simon had been distant with me, but that wasn't anything new.

Sometimes I feel like I am the only one who really knows him. And sometimes he's a complete stranger. Like in court, when he cross-examines a witness or makes a summation, sometimes I don't even recognize him. The speech might be everything that we had talked about, everything that we had planned, but he'd make it fresh, like he was making it up as he went along. It was amazing how he could be a completely different person at different times.

Or at this past year's Christmas party, when Sheila brought me over to where they were standing and introduced me to his wife. It didn't even seem to faze him. “Oh, yes, this is Mary. She's been a big help to me. You two should get to know each other. You've got so much in common…”

I just about dropped my punch cup when he said that, as if we hadn't spent the afternoon in my apartment.

I moved stuff around on my desk. I opened up the Berkman and Radinger files. I told Sheila that Mr. Barrett had phoned to explain what was happening. She must have known that I was lying—all incoming phone calls go through her desk—but she didn't let on. I'm sure she knew about Simon and me, what had been going on for months.

I had noticed the way she had started to look at me. I'm sure she had seen it all before.

I'm not a home-wrecker or anything. I'm not one of those little twenty-year-olds that come to the Christmas party and are introduced as “My wife, Tiffany,” all dressed up in Armani or Versace, when it's perfectly obvious that not so very long ago Tiffany was going to school with her current husband's daughter.

I wasn't interested in marrying him. Not really. I just liked what we had, those times when we were together, at work and alone.

I'm a lawyer. His junior, but he really listens to my opinions. Respects my thoughts. I like the way he looks at me, the way he nods and kind of smiles when I say something that he is not expecting. We respect one another. That is the main thing.

But just once I wanted to be able to watch him sleep. Our afternoons were too short, so cramped by the time and excuses for being out of the office that we had never had time to relax, to really let go.

Instead, I would watch him as he dressed, his tight butt and legs, his narrow chest with its light dusting of dark hair. And after he disappeared into the bathroom I would dress hurriedly, ensuring that my clothes were right, that my makeup was perfect by the time he returned.

I wanted to watch him sleep, watch his face as he drifted away, as the mask loosened and disappeared. To watch his face soften, just to see what it was really like, to see if I really knew him as well as I thought I did.

SIMON

I think time passes so slowly in hospital waiting rooms because there are so many ways to keep track of it. The rhythmic beeping of machinery, the patterns of security guards and orderlies with carts, the Muzak, the grating laugh tracks from
the television mounted on the wall, the ongoing misery of the other people waiting. Time is an almost physical presence.

Nevertheless, I kept checking my watch until Karen put her hand over mine to stop me.

“Sorry.”

Every time a doctor or nurse emerged from behind the desk we both half-rose, and every time we were disappointed.

Karen paced. She sat. She called her mother in Winnipeg. She paced more. She waved away the offers of more painkillers. She finally allowed a nurse to guide her back to the curtained bed just so that the IV could be removed from her arm.

I bought us each a cup of coffee from the vending machine near the nurses' station. The paper cups sat on the table in front of me, mine black, hers with a little cream. Piled alongside them were several packages of sugar.

“I thought we should try to keep your blood sugar up,” I explained. “Not being on the IV anymore…”

She laid her hand on my thigh and squeezed it gently.

“Mr. and Mrs. Barrett?”

The doctor, a vague shadow in green scrubs, was reading from a metal clipboard. We both stood before he finished saying our names.

“How is she? Is she going to be all right?” Karen asked. “Will she be okay?”

I watched his face—his mouth and his eyes—as he spoke.

“Mr. and Mrs. Barrett, let's sit down.” Karen grasped my hand as we sat back down, and he took the chair opposite us.

“I'm Dr. McKinley. I'm on call today.” He didn't extend his hand. “I performed the surgery on your daughter.”

“How is she?” I asked, watching.

“I wish I had better news for you…”

I took a deep breath. “Is she…?”

The doctor shook his head. “We had to open her skull,” he said. “There was a lot of bleeding. A lot of pressure that we had to let off. We managed to stop the bleeding and we removed
some debris that could have caused some problems. The surgery went very well.”

“Oh my God,” Karen cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Oh my God.”

“Then she's going to recover?” I asked.

“In situations like this there is quite often a lot of damage that we can't see, at least in these early stages.” He took a deep breath. “I'm sorry. Your daughter is in a coma. It's too early to tell…”

We waited for anything that might sound like reassurance.

“It's important to remember that the coma is a resting state, a chance for the body to heal itself in the places that we can't get to. In cases like this, quite often the patient will spontaneously pull themselves out. That's the way we're treating this. Your daughter is having some problems breathing so we have her on a respirator, and right now it's just a matter of waiting.”

Karen leaned toward me, whispering. I draped my arm around her.

“I'm sorry,” the doctor said, leaning forward to hear better. “I didn't hear what you said.”

“Sherry,” I said. “She was telling you that our daughter's name is Sherry.”

The doctor flinched. “I know.”

“Our miracle,” she whispered. I don't think the doctor heard.

HENRY DENTON

I didn't kill that little girl. She just floated away.

I turned away for a second, that's all. I saw her and her mother in the crosswalk, and I changed lanes to go around them. I checked my mirrors as I changed lanes, and when I looked back…

She rose up into the air.

She floated away.

I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. I just watched her as she floated away. I watched her mother scream, but I couldn't hear it over the Tragically Hip tape and the sound of the engine. She was reaching out for her child.

I cut back around the block and parked the truck in my usual slot by the air and I called 9-1-1 from the pay phone at the gas station. My hands shook as I punched in the numbers. I wanted to try to explain, but I couldn't find the words. As I hung up the phone I couldn't help myself—I threw up all over the wall of the phone booth, the concrete floor. I managed to miss my pant legs and shoes. I kept heaving until nothing else came out, until I could see these patches of light and dark with my eyes closed. My head felt like it was going to split open. I wanted to scream.

I kept seeing her, floating up, hanging in the sky just above me, watching me. Watching me.

I stumbled out of the phone booth, dropping my keys on the ground beside it. I felt like I was going to be sick again.

One of the day-shift guys called after me, but I heard him the way you sometimes imagine hearing your name in a crowd. I don't think I could have answered even if I had tried. Instead, I turned toward Hillside, stumbling across the intersection. I followed the walk lights wherever they guided me, and everything behind me fell away.

KAREN

On television, hospitals always seem so clean, so new, so carefully organized and arranged. Even on
ER
the chaos is rendered attractive. Television did nothing to prepare me for the reality of this place. Crumbling plaster, leaking ceilings, gray floors that didn't even look swept, let alone waxed. I was expecting nurses who would be able to tell us what was going on, to help us. Instead, they treated us like children, doling out information in careful measures. I was expecting technology, a glassed-in room where doctors would fight for Sherry's life as we stood outside the
window looking on. Instead, we were able to stand by her bed in the critical ward, no barrier between us and her profound silence.

Her head was bandaged tightly, a tracery of pink along the edge of the dressing. Her blood. Tubes entered her nostrils and her mouth, taped down to the soft skin of her cheeks. They ran to the respirator at the side of the bed, its accordion bag rhythmically inhaling and exhaling, filling and shrinking, Sherry's chest rising, falling, rising, falling. An IV line ran into her arm, and under the covers she was catheterized, cloudy urine collecting in a bag at the edge of the bed.

But she was still my daughter. Still my Sherry, so tiny in the full-sized bed. So fragile that she needed all of these tubes, these adhesives, these machines to keep her together. I gently rubbed the inside of her left arm, the only place I could, telling her that she would be okay, that Mommy and Daddy were here, that everything was going to be all right.

At the beginning we had spent so much time in the hospital with our Sherry. The first few weeks of her life we spent huddled around the incubator, our arms around each other, our faces pressed to the clear plastic. Those days brought us closer than we had ever been before. Parents. Together.

And now another hospital. Another bed.

Simon stood perfectly straight, fingers tight around the cold steel rail. The set of his jaw, the tightness of his shoulders, frightened me.

I lightly touched the back of his hand. “It's gonna be okay,” I whispered, willing him to turn toward me. “She's gonna be all right.”

He slowly faced me. “I know,” he said, after too long a pause.

“She is,” I urged him. I could feel the heat of tears on my cheeks. “She really is.”

He rubbed away the tears on my face with his thumb, nodding in agreement.

“She seems so small, lying there.” My words were too loud in the small room.

Simon took a deep breath and checked his watch. “I have to go into the office for a couple of hours. I need to clear some stuff from my calendar, move some stuff around.”

“Really? Can't you—?”

He continued to speak, directing his words to the air above Sherry's head. “If you need me, call me on my cell. I won't be long.”

I wanted to argue with him, to tell him how much we needed him here, how much
I
needed him here, but I just stared at him.

“I can clear my schedule for tomorrow. That way I don't have to worry about it.”

I pulled him close. “Don't be too long,” I whispered into the wool of his jacket.

His hand came up to cradle the back of my head. “I won't be. A few hours.” He kissed me fleetingly on the forehead. “I'll be back soon.”

He looked at me from the doorway, and I could see the worry stretching his face, but he was already reaching for his cell phone.

Already gone.

MARY

I went to him the instant he came through the door. I had been sitting on the couch with a Diet Coke, pretending to read A. S. Byatt. He had called me from the hospital to let me know that he was on his way to my place, that his daughter was in a coma.

He looked terrible. His skin was gray, his hair unkempt, his tie askew.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

His eyes met mine before he could answer, and his expression seemed to break open. “Oh God, Mary,” he said. “Oh God.”