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 Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 10:45 am
She was in a dark room with a ceiling, and curtains -- but she swore she could see the stars. Some kind of glowing lights, flickering.
Such was waking up.
She didn’t remember much of it, later. There was beeping, a steady undulation of beeping in some unknown rhythm, and it swept around in her field of hearing in a way that let her know the beeps were coming from different places. Her pupils adjusted to the light, and she choked a little bit on her feeding tube (or maybe on her breathing tube -- she figured she could take her pick, really), and putting all these things together, her sluggish brain eventually told her she was in a hospital. It did not provide any help as to why.
But then, she was tired, and she could always figure that out later.
She looked around, and soon found some buttons on a plastic pad attached to the side railing of her bed. They were lit up with symbols in a soothing tangerine, mostly to do with making the bed sit up, or elevating her feet, or lots of other delightful combinations of adjusting her bed into YMCA shapes -- but there was one that was lit up with the silhouette of a person, and a plus sign over it, and using all her brainpower, she commanded her thumb very authoritatively to press that button.
Her thumb was not in a listening mood. All her fingers, in fact, seemed to be on an unauthorized vacation. She might have panicked, if she weren’t so groggy, but as it was, she could feel the bedsheets under her hands, and nudge them around just a tiny bit, so at least she wasn’t paralyzed. Her body was just a little bit derelict in its duties, that was all.
Pain announced its presence: feeding tubes and heart rate monitors, circles glued to her skin, IVs and catheters, anything to make the job of keeping a person alive easier when they weren’t doing anything to help. She guessed she hadn’t been. The pain was a help, though -- it woke her brain up just a bit further, and it made her most definitely want to press that stupid PERSON WITH PLUS SIGN button just a little bit faster -- and with that motivation, eventually she got her thumb over there and got it to push that button. Well, kind of. Really she sort of leaned the side of her hand against the plastic box, and nudged the button with one knuckle until it went from tangerine orange to lime green. There were some beeps overhead, and then she waited.
There was kind of a fuss about it all. Not being able to remember what it was they were fussing over, or what had quite happened to land her in a hospital on life support, made her feel anxious. “Can you take these out?” she tried to choke around the breathing tube and the feeding tube, but the words didn’t quite happen. Even to her own ears, it sounded like some kind of slurred mush, not just because her throat was full of tubes, but because things weren’t altogether jiving in the general tongue and lips and vocalization department just at the moment. Her body seemed to be just kind of vaguely humoring her brain’s whims. She felt sort of insulted about it.
“Landscape,” one of the nurses said in response to her hobbled gurgling, “Landscape, honey. It’s okay, it’ll come to you. You’ve been out a while. This is normal.”
She wondered how long “a while” meant. Had she been injured? Was there any surgery?
She leaned back, still feeling vague, and tried to pretend she didn’t hear another nurse say, quietly -- “not much of a world to wake back up to, is it?” -- but the words were pretty unsettling, even so.
* * * *
Laney found out, eventually, that “a while” meant “a year,” and that she had been in a coma all that time -- but for what it was worth, she really hadn’t noticed any year. She remembered waking up, and the beeping and the tangerine orange buttons, but everything else felt filmy, in a soup-haze of lost time. It was like chasing after something she couldn’t quite catch. “That’s normal,” she was assured. It was comforting to hear.
They took the feeding tube out, and replaced it with soup broth, and then graduated her up to pudding and a room that wasn’t in the coma ward. It was a welcome change: the coma ward was like sleeping in a morgue, and some nights she dreamed they shoved her in a drawer for storage.
“Do you want to call your friend Tara?” one of the nurses asked her, “to let her know you’re awake? She was always coming by to see you.”
That thought made Laney’s heart sing -- as did all of the decorations that they’d carefully moved to her new room with her, most of which, she was told, were from Tara. The fern, which Laney had privately named ‘Franz Ferninand,’ was apparently from another of her old classmates, though the nurses couldn’t recall which. It had been a while, they said. They could try to find out, they said -- but Laney wasn’t sure how they planned on doing that. It was alright, though. They were just trying to be nice.
“Yes!” she said immediately, exuberantly. Of course she wanted to see Tara. Tara was . . . she didn’t remember everything, but apparently not remembering Barren Pines was also normal, and Tara was her best friend. That much she remembered for sure.
But then, another problem: if Tara had a cell phone number, Laney didn’t know it. She had no idea where Tara was living, or how to contact her. Laney’s parents hadn’t really run into her on her visits, so they were no help either. In the end, Laney sat in her room watching soap operas all day long, and building up what she felt was a fair amount of awesomeness at the crossword puzzle in the daily paper, and she had no choice but to wait until Tara next came to visit her comatose friend. (Laney had no doubt that she would. This was Tara they were talking about here. Her Tara.)
This was probably a much less ideal solution for Tara -- who next arrived at the coma ward to find Laney’s bed was empty, the sheets had been changed out for fresh, and all her things had been removed. That . . . usually didn’t bode well for coma patients.
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Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2010 5:49 pm
Wednesdays meant meatloaf special, biology lab, and visiting Laney. Tara struggled through these with varying degrees of success every week, but it was easy to see which one was her favorite.
(It wasn't the meatloaf.)
Some people told her that coming every week wasn't necessary. Laney was asleep, unresponsive. Regardless of what the chances were of her regaining consciousness, she wouldn't know the difference if Tara came once a week or once a month. But Tara knew the difference, from when she was visiting her parents, or the rare instances when she had something more urgent to do on a Wednesday. So she came. Whether for Laney or for herself was unclear, and the more she visited, the more that distinction blurred. But she came, and kept coming.
Her visits were not terribly eventful. Sometimes she would bring the newspaper and read the comics aloud, or talk about whatever recent scientific breakthrough had caught her eye. NASA's discovery of arsenic-based lifeforms and the subsequent controversy had seized the spotlight for her past two visits. Sometimes she brought her homework and proceeded to ignore it while she chattered about Star Wars vs. Star Trek. Sometimes she'd bring her old discman and borrow a CD of some play or another from the library, and listen to the whole thing, one of Tara's earbuds in her ear, one in Laney's (or tangled in Laney's hair, which was the best that Tara could usually manage).
That day, she'd brought a tin of Christmas cookies sprinkled with red and green sugar, and one of her snowglobes. The snowglobe was hard, and Tara hadn't wanted to bring it at first, but she managed to take it with her in the end. The snowglobes were nice, and her research on them was important, but Laney was more important.
It had taken some juggling for Tara to push the elevator button, but she'd managed by tucking the cookie tin under her arm, holding the snowglobe in that same hand, and pressing it with her other hand. She whistled as the elevator went up, nodding to the nurses station as she passed, but not sticking around to chat. They would still be there later, after she told Laney all about the mysterious hypnotic snowglobes.
The first thing that Tara noticed, upon entering the room, was that the stars were gone. That happened occasionally, when the janitorial staff got pressured or just annoyed, but hadn't happened in a while. Possibly because they knew that Tara would just stick them up again, or possibly because taking them down was just tedious. Tara may or may not have used hot glue the last time she put them up just to drive the point home.
"Lucky I always bring spares," she muttered, elbowing the curtain back so she could put her things down.
The stars weren't the only things missing. The plants everyone had brought were gone. The chart, with LANEY written in green magic marker, was gone. Laney was gone.
"What would I do if you were gone?" Tara asked.
It was one of her first visits, before she'd settled into Meadowview. Tara was standing on the edge of the bed, sticking the stars back onto the wall. "I mean, you're not all here now, I know that. And I hate it, and I'm going to figure out how to get you back all the way. But at least like this, I can still talk to you. And I think you can hear, at least a little bit. So what I'm trying to say is... well, you're not allowed to go anywhere, okay? As long as I keep coming, you have to be here."
Laney would say yes, she decided. Laney was agreeable, almost desperately so. If Tara asked her to stay, she would. After assuring herself of that, Tara had dropped the issue, and never mentioned it again. Eventually, she even stopped thinking about it. But it was always there, in the back of her mind, ready. Just in case.
Tara dropped the snowglobe and the cookie tin. The snowglobe landed with a soft thunk on the linoleum, while the tin crashed noisily, the lid popping off. Later, Tara would recall a brief moment of relief that the snowglobe hadn't broken, but for the moment, all she could feel was terror.
If Laney wasn't there, that meant she was moved. There were three reasons Tara could think of for why they would move a comatose person after almost a year. Either she was no longer comatose, they were repainting the room, or...
A nurse came in to see what the commotion was. A welcome distraction, considering the circumstances. It was not one that she recognized, which was even more distracting. The regular nurses, as Tara had come to call them, knew exactly why she was there. This nurse glared at her as if she had come all the way to the hospital just to drop a tin of cookies and a (thankfully unbroken) snowglobe.
"Laney Sutton," Tara said tersely. "Where is she?"
"Landscape Sutton has been moved," the nurse sniffed, equally tersely.
It took every bit of Tara's self control, and several bits she thought she borrowed from somewhere else, to keep her from screaming at the nurse. "I can see that," she managed to spit out. "It's kind of obvious, judging by the fact that she's not here. So if you're not going to tell me something useful, then you can just-"
"Tara?" Another nurse poked her head in. Tara was pleased, or as pleased as she could be under the circumstances, to see that it was one of the regular nurses. "Oh, Tara, we thought you'd heard! Laney was moved, she-"
"I can see that, okay?" With the nurse she knew, Tara was less angry, more frustrated, and just as scared as before. It was a slight improvement over the woman she'd forever call the 'irregular nurse' in her head. "Where? And... and..." Why, she wanted to ask, but couldn't bring herself to do it.
The nurse smiled. Tara's heart suddenly started beating again, or at least, that was what it felt like. She wouldn't be smiling if it was something bad. Unless she was secretly sadistic, but Tara didn't think so. Which could only mean...
"They've moved her downstairs. Go on, I'm sure she'll be glad to see you." The nurse winked. "Ask her yourself."
Ask her yourself. Tara didn't need to be told twice. She ran out of the room before either nurse could say anything else, running back in a moment later to pick up the snowglobe and pile the cookies back into the tin. Every second she spent doing something that wasn't taking her where she needed to go felt like someone had strapped her to a chair for an hour. Every step she took felt like a giant leap, not for mankind, but for everything she and Laney had worked for.
"Downstairs" was a vague direction. Tara had assumed it meant the ward she'd been moved to after she woke up from her coma, but that still left a lot of ground to cover. Even after she'd asked the nurses station down there, she managed to get lost twice. Finally, she managed to track down the right room number, with Sutton, L. penciled in on the door.
She didn't go inside.
The door was right there, in front of her. The nurses assured her that Laney was waiting. But Tara couldn't go inside. She'd spent so much time convincing herself that what she was doing was right, that Laney would forgive her. Doubt had never entered the equation before, but now it was all over the place. It was one thing to assume, based on their friendship, that everything would be okay. It was another entirely to know, once and for all, the truth of that assumption.
"You've never backed down from a challenge before," Tara told herself firmly. The stakes were high this time, but that didn't give her an excuse to wimp out. If anything, it meant that her only course of action was to keep going full speed ahead. To do anything else was to say that she was wrong, and this wasn't something she was willing to be wrong about without proof.
Shifting the cookie tin and snowglobe to her other hand, Tara knocked on the door, once, twice. And then she waited.
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Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 7:15 am
Laney had never been all that terrific at what elementary school progress reports had termed "social fluency." She had been gawky and coltish from an early age, both physically and psychologically -- and she still was. Landscape Sutton (even her name was awkward) was skinny with knees like doorknobs and elbows like traffic cones, and both of them more apt to accidentally jab things without warning than the genuine article would've been. Where interpersonal relations were concerned, she was something of a chronic fumbler, perpetually out of tune with the mood of a conversation. She tended to say the wrong thing, or react with the wrong magnitude. She was over-friendly, or else too detached -- never seeming quite to get the hang of the thing. In eighteen years, this had never improved.
Although it seemed impossible that she could actually get any worse at it, having been out of practice for a year now did make Laney nervous. She'd made a slight mess of her hospital room with all the time she spent playing with things anxiously: a bedsheet with a loose thread that she'd now unthreaded an entire side of; a sign next to the phone, listing speed-dial phone codes, which was now wrinkled and whose nice cardstock corners had now been worn soft as an old dollar bill; the adjustable bed that she'd somehow managed to break by fiddling with the adjustments too many times (if she sat up too far, did she look over-eager? If she reclined too much, did she look like she was relapsing?). Now she had managed to crease hard wrinkles into her hospital gown by crushing the fabric between her fingers too hard and for too long.
All in all, the effect was less than presentable. Would Tara be disappointed? Maybe she wouldn't notice. Tara had always pretended not to notice before. She was a good friend (the best possible friend, ever, Laney silently amended).
The Suttons, Laney's parents (occasional parents, she thought a little bitterly, then swallowed it back down) hadn't raised her to act unsure of herself. They had raised her to be unsure of herself -- sometimes, with all the wan, smiling criticisms, she felt so uncertain of herself that she must've qualified as some new corollary to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. ("Landscape, that outfit doesn't really go." "Landscape, you have to breathe with your diaphragm, honey, you wouldn't want to hyperventilate." "Landscape, you know those dishes are only for company." "Landscape, you know we don't have time to come to school functions, why would you sign up for one?" "Landscape, why can't you remember something the first time? I shouldn't have to tell you things over and over again. You have a pattern of inconsiderate behavior, you know." "If you weren't so sensitive, they wouldn't pick on you, dear. Nobody picks on anybody who doesn't let it get to them." "Landscape, if you'd wear socks with those shoes, you wouldn't have this toenail fungus." Quod Erat Demonstrandum.)
Best to be insecure, really, but never to show it. Laney was emotional, weepy, a drama queen. She was annoying, abrupt, motor-mouthed. She was immature for her age, and socially graceless -- and really she was a whole host of qualities that were less than ideal, when it all came down to it. But she had her pride, too -- so when a knock came at the door, she didn't shrink down into her blankets or mumble or pretend to be asleep, no matter how much she wanted to. Whether it was one of her parents on the other side, or Tara, or just another nurse to look disapprovingly at the unraveled bedsheet, she sat up straight, tried to smooth her hair a little, and smiled so that her voice would sound pleasant. She was awake, after all, and wasn't that a lot to be grateful for? Wasn't it?
"Come on in, the water's fine!" she called out to the door.
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Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 9:39 pm
When she was little, Tara was the sort of kid who was always asking why. Some of this was the typical kid sort of curiosity: "Why is the sky blue?" "Why can't doggies talk like people?" "Why do men have to hold doors for ladies?"
Some was the typical kid pressing-your-luck variety: "Why can't I have cake for breakfast?" "Why do I have to go to bed before the meteor shower?"
Some was a little bit of neither: "Why can't you come to Parent's Day?" "Why are you always so busy?" And the one she never quite dared ask: "Why aren't I good enough for you?"
While neither of them was quite willing to acknowledge it, this was something Tara picked up from her mother, who was also quite fond of the word why. "Why can't you stay clean for longer than five minutes, Tara?" "Sweetie, why aren't you wearing the nice dress I got you?" "Why won't you eat the nice broccoli?" "For the last time, Tara, why is it so hard for you to listen to directions?" And the one she never said out loud, but asked with her actions often enough: "Why can't I understand you?"
Eventually, Melanie Kavanaugh stopped trying to understand, and Tara stopped asking why, at least around her parents. She was never going to please them? Fine. Better to just be herself. It was far easier to convince herself that she didn't care than try to make them happy. She could find other people to appreciate her. It didn't matter who, or how, or why, just as long as they saw her for who she was.
... right?
Tara was an expert at lying to herself. She had to be, to keep up the delusion that random attention from strangers was a substitute for her supposed lack of parental love. She'd believed for an entire year that Laney would wake up, and that once she did, everything would go back to the way it was. For a moment, when it was actually happening, she hesitated. But in the end, it was far easier to keep living the dream than think that anything could be different.
Or perhaps it was Laney's still-familiar voice that convinced her of the possibility. Either way, Tara shifted the cookie tin under her arm again and opened the door, breezing inside.
"Is that right? I'll have you know that according to the weather report, it's twenty-three degrees today. We're more likely to go skiing than swimming, not that I'm really prepared for either. How about we just stay in the chalet today?" Tara was looking everywhere: the table, where she set the cookie tin, the walls with the stars she'd put up so many times, the collection of plants. Everywhere but at Laney herself.
If she didn't look, even if this was some kind of dream, she could enjoy it a while longer.
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