Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  I found last year’s edition of Ridgefield High’s oddly named yearbook. The Shield had a Roman shield on the cover and the motto “Prepared and vigilant” embossed in vinyl. Inside were all those smiling faces as if the photographer had waved a magic wand and made the students stupidly happy, as if the entire student body was this one gigantic mob of blissful teenagers headed on the bright yellow brick road towards beatific adulthood. It occurred to me that there are many kinds of lies in the world and a school yearbook is one of them.

  I was not prepared for what was to be revealed to me as I turned the pages heading towards Trina’s picture. The yearbook was a monument to alphabetical arrangement and the As the Bs had no surprises — pimply-faced boys and girls with last year’s hairstyles. And every student was listed with his or her first, middle, and last names. That is often not a kind manoeuvre on the part of the yearbook committee, or it was perpetrated as a joke, since some of us go through life trying to ignore the fact we have middle names. Mine is Archibald, a memento to my father’s grandfather, who was a miserly man who beat his son, my grandfather, until young grandpop ran away to work in lumber camp. I could hear the litany of three-part names being read at the future high school graduation by a cheerless principal, satisfied that another crop of youthful minds were about to move on. But I was not at all prepared for what I would find in the Cs.

  I found her. She too was smiling. Trina Connolly. Or, as the book revealed, Trina Andrea Connolly.

  With my finger holding the page, I closed the book and took a deep breath. I felt my heart race. The librarian was staring at me. I counted to ten and opened the book again. Trina Andrea Connolly. She looked younger, but it was unmistakably her.

  I dreaded the thought of entering a hospital. My memories of my own hospital days were not my fondest. How much could I trust my own instincts on this? In some ways, it seemed clear that I was supposed to go to her. But maybe it was already too late. Maybe she was too far gone. So many weeks unconscious and possibly her parents were at the point of letting her go, pulling the plug on life support. Or was that part of why Andrea had revealed herself to me? Was I supposed to be the one to release her?

  I made the mistake of entering the hospital by way of the emergency entrance and I walked in just as five car accident victims were being rushed past me. A child was screaming for her mother and blood was flowing out of her mouth. A woman, possibly the girl’s mother, had a massive head wound and was unmoving, possibly dead. A man, conscious and bleeding over the eye, was strapped down and shouting something incomprehensible.

  Everyone else sitting in the emergency room had a look of anguish on his or her face as this parade of human misery passed. Everyone except for a boy of eleven or twelve who sat alone, smiling. I remembered that boy’s face so clearly. It was Ozzie. The Ozzie I had known. I took two steps towards him but stopped. He saw me and stared intently, stopped smiling. I was thinking that I must be mistaken. This was not Ozzie, could not be. He began to say something. At least his lips moved, and I thought he was saying my name, but I could not hear him. I would go no closer. I turned and walked away.

  The one person I was certain I could not trust to be cool on this mission was the boy walking nervously through the hospital trying to discover the location of Andrea/Trina. Whenever I passed nurses or doctors, however, I pretended to be walking purposefully.

  By the elevator, I found an extremely helpful diagram of the entire building. Third floor: Intensive Care, ICU. A coma needed intensive care. The door opened and I stepped in. I pushed 3. Two doctors had charts in their hands just like on TV but they were talking about basketball, about who would win a game tonight in Seattle.

  I stepped out of the elevator into the hallway and discovered I was where I wanted to be. ICU. A quick flashback of my own hospital experience didn’t help. It was the smell of disinfectant in the air, the cold buzzing of fluorescent lights, the sound of hard-soled shoes on the linoleum floors. It triggered an interior shouting match between logic and intuition. Logic told me to take a deep breath, decide this was not something I should be involved in, not anything I could handle.

  Intuition (if that was the other debater) kept my feet moving forward. Right brain wins. There were ten rooms. Most had open doors. I didn’t want to appear to be searching or lost or in any way conspicuous. I chose door number eight. A woman, a very old woman with tubes up her nose, lay there with eyes wide open staring straight at me as if she were expecting me. Her eyes were a piercing blue and she had great blue veins prominent on her forehead. She had only a few threads of grey-silver hair and the bones of her skull seemed ready to split open the pale skin.

  Looking straight at me she held up one hand and crooked a finger. I somehow decided that what she was doing was pointing, pointing to the next room. I nodded.

  I moved quickly to the neighbouring room, number six. The sound of beeping monitors. A curtain around the bed. I walked into the room and then entered the closed private space inside the curtained sanctuary.

  A girl lying on her back. Motionless. A plastic mask fitted over her mouth and nose. A machine by the bed allowing her, or forcing her, to breathe. Pale skin. Eyes closed. Logic must have taken the stairs instead of the elevator and just then caught up with me here, telling me clearly and loudly: This is not her.

  But I did not leave.

  I looked up at the ceiling to clear my thoughts then back at her. I was convinced this was not the Andrea who had appeared to me. Not the girl from the yearbook.

  But what would all those months in a coma do to a person?

  On the night table was a photograph: a family. Mother, father, son, daughter. Outside, standing by a blossoming apple tree. The girl in the photo was most certainly Andrea. Radiant, alive. The great photographic lie of a beautiful young woman about to have the happiest of lives.

  Before me, a living corpse. And now I had an overwhelming stone of sadness in my chest. The well of despair seemed to be opening up in front of me again. To stay there one more minute would mean walking the rim of that pit as it begged me to fall in.

  There were voices in the room now. Hushed tones of adults talking.

  When the curtains were pulled back, Andrea’s parents saw this boy they had never seen before leaning over their daughter, then flinching back with a shocked look on his face.

  The father spoke first. “What are you doing here?”

  I tried to speak but nothing came out. I tried to frame the words in the air in front of me.

  “Who are you?” the mother asked, her voice quavering with accusation in the way she pronounced the first word.

  “I came to see Andrea,” I finally blurted out.

  “Andrea?” She looked puzzled.

  I nodded.

  “No one calls her Andrea anymore.”

  “Trina,” I said, correcting myself. “I came to see Trina. I’m a friend.”

  Her mother studied my face. “You still call her by her middle name, her childhood name. No one has called her Andrea for a long time. From the time she was small.” It was a kind of a question, I suppose. She wanted to know why. Everyone else knew her as Trina.

  “She liked it when I called her Andrea,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I startled you.”

  Andrea’s father cleared his throat, dropping his guard. “It’s just that, well, all of her other friends have stopped coming.”

  “They’ve given up,” Andrea’s mother said, dropping her head so she was looking at the floor.

  “Why didn’t you come to visit before this?” her father asked.

  “I didn’t know about her until I read the story in the paper.”

  “You’re not from Ridgefield.”

  “No. I’m from Stockton. I’m Simon. Andrea ... Trina, was a friend of a friend.”

  “Oh, I see. Emily Littleton moved to Stockton.”

  “Right,” I lied. “I was a friend of Emily’s.”

  Logic again reminded me I should leave. It said I could come bac
k at another time. At least then her parents would feel a little more comfortable with me when I returned.

  Her mother was opening up the curtain that surrounded the bed. Then she opened the blinds on the window. “I think we should let her have more light,” she said. But it was a cloudy day, brighter by far in the room than outside.

  And then suddenly it felt incredibly crowded in the room. I found it hard to breathe and I didn’t know why. I felt the presence of many, many others. No faces, no bodies, no voices. But I was aware of them. The people who had died in this room.

  “Are you all right?” Andrea’s father asked. He saw the look on my face.

  “I need to go now,” I said. I shuffled my feet towards the door, but the others in the room were assaulting me. Some seemed to be pleading for me to stay, others insisting I go. No distinct words, just the conflicting pushing and pulling that was going on inside. It made me slightly dizzy, but worse yet, I was afraid I was going to throw up.

  “Are you sure you are all right?” her father asked again.

  I nodded.

  Whatever I thought I had set out to do, it was clear I had done nothing. I had found her. And she was dying. Possibly already beyond any medical means of recovery. So many months in a coma probably meant she was brain dead. According to the paper, if the machines were to be turned off, her body would not keep her alive. She would be dead within minutes.

  I regretted having come here. I had solved the mystery of who Andrea was, but maybe I would have been better off not knowing. Now I would be burdened by what I knew. I could not help her and, as it turned out, she had been of no real help to me. It seemed to take forever to go down the stairs, walk out of the hospital, and make my feet find their way down the street.

  I walked past the library, past the bus stop, and out of town until I came to the abandoned rail line, the hiking trail that would take me towards the river and east, back home.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Taking a long hike home is always a good time to do some serious thinking. When you are young and being swept about in great stormy seas with rogue waves of emotion, you are not in control of yourself. I was beginning to understand that if I went back on the medication, these emotional responses, these great monster waves that overpowered me as they tried to pull me down and drown me, would subside.

  It was stress, one of my many doctors had argued. “Stress is all it takes and the mind of a young man can react in extreme ways. Emotional roller coasters. Sleep disruption. Lack of concentration. Auditory or visual hallucinations.”

  It had been pointed out to me before by these levelheaded, pill-pushing, over-educated, boring doctors that the various inexplicable things I saw and heard simply were not there. If I wanted to be normal, I would have to stick to the solution that science had to offer.

  I decided that I would ask my mother to set an appointment for a check-up. Like a kid with crooked teeth going to an orthodontist on a regular basis to get his braces tightened, maybe I needed regular tune-ups for my head. The kid with uneven teeth would one day have them straight and perfect. And me? Maybe if I just followed the plan, I would end up with a straight life.

  I stopped by the bend in the river where Andrea and I had once stopped before. It was there she appeared.

  “You were there in the room, weren’t you?” she said.

  “Could you see me?”

  “No, and I didn’t even sense you were there until you became so frightened.”

  I wouldn’t tell her what I was feeling. About the others, the ones who had died there. “Why didn’t you tell me who you really were?”

  “Trina, you mean. Well, when I was six, I decided I wanted to go by my middle name, Andrea. My parents went along with it for a while but insisted I go back to being called Trina. I don’t know why, but it was something we fought over. So, with you, I at least could use the name I wanted.”

  “Why did you stop coming to see me?” I asked.

  “You didn’t need me anymore.”

  “So you just drop in and out of a person’s life?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Besides, my life sucks now. I’m back to where I was before I met you. Only now it’s worse. And now that I know who you are — where you are — I want to be with you. But I’m not even sure I can go back there. To that room, I mean.”

  “Maybe that’s not really me. It’s just what’s left of my body. Maybe I’ve already left that behind.”

  “Well, maybe that’s the part that hurts me the most,” I said, feeling angry now. “It’s almost like you reeled me in like a fish on a hook. I took the bait, I got to know you, decided that I cared for you, and now you are just going to go away. For good.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. You weren’t supposed to find me in that hospital bed.”

  “Tell me what happened. How did you end up there?”

  “No,” she said and stared straight into the water.

  I expected her to be gone. This time for good. I was pushing her to take me someplace she did not want to go.

  The water flowed on. The sun split through the clouds but only for an instant, as if offering hope and then taking it away in a heartbeat. The trees leaned over the river, as if listening to it, or us, as if waiting for something to happen. Big, green, silent hardwood trees — patient, tolerant. Ready for the good weather and the bad. Oaks. Maples. Black locust. Ash trees.

  “My parents decided to split up after all,” I said. “They did it because they thought I was doing well. So they figured the time was right. It would be easier on me. Easier on us all. Some people look for the easy way out.” It was meant to be a kind of accusation.

  And it had its effect. I turned away from her. And when I looked back, she was gone. Again.

  Lydia was obviously stoned when I arrived at her apartment. I didn’t particularly like her when she was that way. Door open as usual. Anybody could walk in. Amazing, since she’d been busted once — simple possession. But she continued to smoke. Never tobacco, of course. She called tobacco the devil’s toolbox for some reason. But she argued that marijuana was a spiritual herb, a sacred plant. Ganja.

  Lydia was listening to a CD of Gregorian chanting. I had to ask her to turn it down. Her eyes were a little glazed. “It’s all about living in the present,” she said without a word of hello. “The past is what imprints itself on you and makes it hard to move on to the next moment of time. If we could eliminate any memory of the past, I think we could live in the perfect present.” The stoner’s logic.

  “If we couldn’t remember the past, we wouldn’t know who we were,” I said. “We would be a new person at every minute.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” she said. “No baggage. Total freedom. No ownership, no possession.”

  “Because you couldn’t remember from one minute to the next whether that CD player was yours or somebody else’s. Is this my house or my neighbour’s?”

  “Exactly. It would be wonderful.”

  “But it’s not that way, and it will never be. We have to live with who we are, where we come from, what we’ve done.”

  She lost the hazy smile. “Point made. So, Simon. Give.”

  I explained about the queen I was trying to protect. Lydia grew more serious, collected the several leftover snubbed out ends of smoked joints, pinched them with her fingers, and, one by one, dropped them into a little film canister. “Always collect the roaches and keep them safe,” she said, putting the lid on it. Then she shook the plastic film canister. “Never, ever throw away something you may need later.” She touched her fingertips to her lips, then waved her hands over her amethyst crystal and rubbed her palms together.

  She pulled her chair closer to where I sat. “Be still,” she said. And she put her hands over top of my head, not touching, just allowing them to hover there. Next she closed her eyes, and a look of great concern came over her.

  She opened her eyes and pulled back. “That’s a lot of negativity you have there,” sh
e said. “A lot of potential there, too, but you’ll have to get past whatever is holding you back. Let me see your hands.”

  It was like something my mother would have said when I was little, after I’d been outside playing in the mud with Ozzie or making some of our supposedly magical concoctions. “Let me see your hands,” she’d say before a meal. And they would always be dirty, soiled with the creative artistry of being a curious kid.

  But Lydia’s intention was different. She held them one at a time in her own. She pressed with her thumb in the centre of both palms. Then she shook her hands in the air, “cleansed” them over her crystal, and ran her thumb down each of my fingers. She did her classic reaction: took a deep breath as if she had just discovered something.

  “Focus on what you feel within you and do what your heart tells you to do. Don’t look back.”

  I almost laughed out loud. This was so Lydia. Performing some little silly ritual then offering up something vague like this. Something positive and encouraging but oh so vague. I’d heard her say one of many variations of this line many times before to her paying customers and always they looked satisfied and happy with the decree.

  “Now go,” she said, smiling and rather pleased with herself.

  The school had phoned. They always called to let my parents know if I was not attending. My mother wanted to know what was going on. So I lied and said I had had some bad headaches (my old stand-by) but that now I was better.

  “Guess we both had headaches today,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the people I had to deal with. They were all ready to buy the house. They’d been over every inch of it. And then they announced they found something better. Something perfect. So I wasted all that time.”