Authors: Cylin Busby
The outside of Wilson looked totally unfamiliar to me. I realized I had never actually seen it before. It wasn’t what I pictured from the inside, just a low gray building tucked in the foothills with an unassuming sign out front.
When we walked in, a long desk was on our left. I remembered this from my walks in the wheelchair. “I don’t
think we need to check in; we aren’t here to see a patient,” Mom explained to the man behind the desk. “Oh hi, Cheryl!” She waved to someone across the hallway, at the nurses’ station. “Go on in,” the man said, barely looking up.
Mom walked to the station desk and I followed on my crutches. “Oh my God, is this who I think it is?”
When I looked up, I recognized the bitchy nurse, now with a big smile on her face like she was so happy to see me. “So tall and handsome! We miss you around here. Look at him, would you?” She grabbed Mom’s arm. “You must be so tickled!”
Her face looked so different, smiling, that I was confused. I almost blurted out something about how she had always been a bitch to me, but thankfully I noticed someone else rounding the corner. Norris.
“Your mom told me you might come by today, so I switched my shift to get to see you.” Her huge grin felt like sunshine. “Come over here,” she said, pulling me into a hug. When she let go of me, I could see tears in her eyes. “I cannot believe what I am seeing. You didn’t get this boy a haircut yet?” she joked to Mom. Norris pushed my hair back from my face.
“You always did that,” I said. “You always pushed my hair out of my eyes….”
“Your mom told me that you remembered a lot of your time here, and I just couldn’t believe it. Do you actually
remember me?” She looked at me so earnestly, I almost laughed.
“I don’t know,” I scoffed. “You still counting those points?”
“Oh!” She covered her mouth. “Did I … ? I must have been complaining! Oh, who knows what else I told you! You poor thing!” She wrapped her arm around my waist and squeezed hard. “He is a tall drink of water, isn’t he?” she said to Mom and Nurse Cheryl.
“He’s been doing just great, going home next week,” Mom told them.
“Well, there is someone else who wants to see you. Mrs. Spencer, do you remember Dr. Yung?” Nurse Cheryl said, coming around the desk.
“I do, and I’d love to see him,” Mom said, following her down the hall. “Right back,” she said over her shoulder to me and Norris.
Norris didn’t say anything, just stood with her arm around me, squeezing.
“Can I see my old room?”
“Oh sure, honey. It’s still empty, come on.” She led me the other way down the hall, and two doors down on the left, she stopped. “This is it.” She flipped the light switch. It was as I remembered. The wall of windows. The green plastic chair by the bed. “All the machines are gone,” I pointed out. Just the beds and chair were in the room.
“You do remember it, don’t you?” Norris said, looking into my face as if she was searching for something. “It’s like a miracle, you know, it is just a miracle.”
“Nurse Norris,” I heard a woman call from a few doors down. “Could you help me with this cart?” I saw the woman but didn’t recognize her; she must not have been assigned to me.
“Stay right here, mister,” Norris told me as she moved down the hallway to help the other nurse. They pulled at the cart, trying to reattach a loose wheel without dumping the whole thing over. It was full of medical supplies I recognized—tubes and syringes, bandages and pill bottles. It would be a mess to clean up. I moved a few steps to go to them, automatically, to help if I could, but I stopped when I realized what I was moving toward, where I was standing. The place I didn’t want to be. Outside room 203. I was outside her room. But it wasn’t her room. Because the girl in my head didn’t exist. I made her up. I took my eyes off Norris for just a second and slowly turned my head to the left, terrified of what I might see. There was someone in the bed. There were machines—a ventilator, heart monitor, IV—everything I had around my bed when I was here. Seeing it all sent a sick wave of nausea through me. I never wanted to be in a hospital again.
I took a step into the room, then another, silently on my crutches. I could only see the legs under a neatly tucked blanket. The green curtain around the bed was pulled
forward just a little, just enough so that I couldn’t see who was there. But I had to see. I knew it wouldn’t be her. But I just had to be sure.
I stepped around the curtain and raised my eyes. It was girl. A young girl. With short dark hair and pale skin. I could hear my own heart beating in my ears, pulsing. I forgot to breathe. It was Olivia. But it wasn’t. Her hair had been cut. Something had happened to her face. It was softer than I knew it to be; one cheek had a long salmon-colored scar running across it. Her nose was not a straight line anymore, but crooked, off a bit. But she was still beautiful. My Olivia. I moved closer to her, listening to the heart monitor beeping out the rhythm of her body. She was real, and she was alive. I reached forward and touched her small white hand. It was warm.
“West, honey, oh, there you are,” Norris whispered. “Come on, that’s not it, it’s this room here, the empty one.” She steered me out of Olivia’s room and back into 201.
“What’s wrong with that girl?” I asked her quickly.
“Oh, she’s been here a while. She’s PVS, not like you.”
“PVS?”
“Persistent vegetative state,” Norris explained, moving a pile of linens to the bottom of the empty bed in my old room. “We all knew you were going to be okay—well, I did. Most folks like you do wake up—some don’t do as well as you’re doing, but they almost always come back to us.”
“And what about her?” I asked, fearing that I already knew the answer.
Norris shook her head. “No, she’s got no brain activity. It’s real sad, isn’t it? That’s why I think you are a miracle. You should always remember that, okay?”
Olivia was real. It had happened. But she would never wake up. The girl I met, the girl I fell in love with wasn’t alive—she was a ghost. Her body was in the room next door, but she wasn’t really here. I would never see Olivia, my Olivia, again.
When Mom found me, standing in my old room with tears running down my face, she wasn’t too happy. “What are you doing in here?” she demanded, looking at Norris.
“I wanted to see it, Mom. I asked her,” I told her quickly, wiping my cheeks, before she blamed the nurse.
“I didn’t know it would be so upsetting,” Norris explained. “I think he’s just happy, aren’t you?” Norris put her hand on my back.
“It’s time to go; they’ll be wondering where we are,” Mom said curtly. She touched my arm but I pulled away.
Norris could tell that Mom was pissed, but she just stayed calm. “West, anytime you want, you come back and visit me. I usually go on about six in the evening, okay? I mean that, anytime.” She winked at me as Mom led me out of the room.
“What were you doing in there?” Mom asked angrily as soon as we were out of earshot.
“What’s the big deal?” Inside I felt like my mind was bubbling over, about to explode. But she had no idea what I had just seen, what had just happened to me. How much my life had changed in just the few minutes she wasn’t by my side. Part of me wanted to turn her around and show her room 203. Show her Olivia. Show her it was real, it had happened. But the other part of me knew she still wouldn’t believe it. Just because the girl looked like the girl I imagined didn’t make it real to her. So I knew her name. So I knew how she looked before. Mom would find some way to explain it away. The psychologist would have some new diagnosis. Seeing Olivia didn’t change anything for anyone but me. How could they understand? No one would ever understand. No one but Olivia and me.
Mom went on talking: “I just … I didn’t know where you were.” She paused to smile and wave good-bye at the guard at the front desk, then turned back to scold me. “You scared me; I was looking for you.”
“Mom, I’m okay!” I practically yelled. “Just drop it. I don’t want to talk about it.” I just needed her to be quiet for a minute. I needed to think. We walked through the sliding door out the front sidewalk where a woman was standing, smoking.
“Fine. I’ll go get the car,” Mom said. “Stay here.” She looked at me pointedly.
“I won’t move.” I scowled at her. So much for our first outing. I looked over at the woman to see if she had caught any of our embarrassing fight, and realized that I had seen her before. Dark hair, long coat.
It was Olivia’s mom.
“Hello,” she said after I’d been staring at her for a few moments. I had forgotten about her beautiful voice, the lilt of her French accent.
“I’m sorry, you just—you look familiar.” I shook my head, trying to think of what to say next.
“You’re visiting someone?” She motioned toward the doors. When I nodded yes, she went on. “Also me. That’s probably why I look familiar.” Her smile was so much like Olivia’s, it startled me. “How old are you?” she asked, stubbing out her cigarette on the sidewalk with her heel.
“Seventeen.”
She nodded. “My daughter is about your age.” Her smile was sad.
“Oh.” It was on the tip of my tongue to say
I know. I know your daughter.
I could see Mom’s car pulling around and into the cul-de-sac. I had to make this quick, and not too obvious. “Is she a patient?”
She nodded. “Two years.” I held my breath, hoping she would say more. “When they found her, she wasn’t breathing. We don’t know how long.” She looked down at her gloves for a moment. “Long enough.”
“What happened to her?” I asked before I could stop
myself. Part of me didn’t want to hear the answer. Part of me already knew what she would say.
She cleared her throat. “She had been, how do you say it?
Violée
. Assaulted.”
Olivia didn’t have an eating disorder. That’s not why she was here. Of course she didn’t. She never told me what had happened to her. I never wanted to think too hard about it.
But I knew. Somehow, I had always known.
I was back in the dream. But this time, I wasn’t looking at him. At the blood on his hands. I was looking at her. For the first time, I looked down at the girl on the ground. Her white leotard torn and wrenched down in the front, splattered with dark blood. Around her neck a thin pink scarf, tight, cutting into the skin. She’s coughing, choking on her own blood.
Mom gave a short honk.
“I believe your ride is here,” Olivia’s mom said. “It was nice to meet you.” She leaned in and I could see that her eyes were exactly the same as Olivia’s—same color, same shape, but with small wrinkles around them. “I’m Sophie.” She took her glove off and put her hand out to mine.
I hesitated, wondering if I should make up a name, not tell her the truth. “I’m West.” I took her hand in mine and felt the same small, strong grip as her daughter’s.
“Well, West, until we meet again.” I knew Mom was
watching us, so I quickly turned away and headed to the car. Mom got out and put my crutches across the back seat. She watched as Olivia’s mom went through the sliding door and back into the hospital.
“Was that one of the other nurses?” Mom asked casually.
“No, just some woman.” As we pulled away, I watched out the window until the hospital disappeared on the horizon. It felt like a part of me had been left behind there, and there was no way I could ever get it back.
Mom talked the entire ride; I caught only some of it. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea … you should mention this to your psychologist….” Her words all jumbled together, I didn’t care about what she was saying. The sick feeling in my stomach was one of realization. No one—not Mom, not the psychologist, not Norris or Mike or even Olivia’s mom was going to be able to help me out of this. No one could understand. No one would believe me. I was alone. But I knew one thing: I wasn’t insane. It
had
happened. Olivia was real. And no one was going to take her away from me again.
The next day, when the psychologist came in for our meeting, I was ready for her. I knew my mom had probably already spoken to her, or the other doctors, and told them about the hospital yesterday, how I had freaked out, cried seeing my old room. They didn’t know the whole story, but it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t hide my reaction yesterday, but now I was ready to explain it away.
On the treadmill that morning, I had walked without using the handrails. Just walking, with braces on, but still. This was progress. And as I thought about what happened yesterday, what I had seen at that hospital, I realized something. No one had been where I had been. No one else—not my parents, my friends, not the doctors, the psychologists—none of them knew what I had been through. What it was
like to be in a coma. What things I had seen or done or felt. Who was there with me. They didn’t know. And trying to explain it to them would just make them think I was crazy. That I needed help. They would keep me here longer, think that I couldn’t cut it at home, or at school. So I needed to act like they wanted me to act. To stop talking about Olivia. To act like I had forgotten all about that. About her. It was the only way to get out of here and get on with what I needed to do. I had made Olivia a promise that I would come back for her, no matter what. I didn’t know what that meant, but I had to figure it out. And being stuck in here, or worse yet, in a loony bin, was no way to do that. I resolved to be the most normal, happy, cheerful former coma patient anyone had ever seen. I was going to put a smile on my face and act like everything was grand. That was the only way.
I took a shower and got dressed to sit down with the psychologist. I knew I couldn’t be too forced, too happy, but I was ready to say what she needed to hear. And it worked.
“Your mother tells me you had a visit to Wilson Center yesterday. Do you want to talk about that?”
I explained what it was like, the overwhelming emotions I felt at seeing my room. But how happy and grateful I was to be better, to be moving on.
“It can be very emotional to see those other patients
there, the ones who are in a similar situation to what you were in. Do you think it was seeing them that made you feel that way?”