Smoke and Mirrors Page 13

  “I’ll go to school tomorrow,” I said and walked off to my room.

  It was back in History of Civilization class that Andrea returned. Mr. Holman was lecturing about the rivalry between the Athenians and the Spartans, a subject for which the entire class had no interest whatsoever. There was a lot of fighting in those days between the two and people died for reasons we found hard to comprehend today.

  Andrea appeared here because she wanted to speak to me in a place where I could not respond. I was sitting in the back of the room by the window. I was staring out that window, trying not to think about Athens or Sparta. I was thinking about Andrea and then she was there, silhouetted by the bright light behind her.

  “I’ve made my parents suffer long enough,” she said, “and now I have to set them free.”

  I silently mouthed the word no. “I had a lot of unhappiness in my life and now I’m ready to leave it behind. I’m sorry things didn’t turn out better for you.”

  I could not let her make this decision. I raised my hand and asked for permission to leave the room.

  Andrea followed me into the hallway. It was empty. “Tell me what happened,” I insisted. I touched her arm. I was squeezing it. She was very real.

  “That hurts.”

  I was afraid that if I took my hand away, she would be gone so I held onto her. “Tell me how you ended up in that hospital bed.”

  She turned away.

  I let go of my grip. “Please. I need to know.”

  She looked back at me and then down at the floor. “Like you, I was upset about my parents. They said awful things to each other. All the time. I hated being around them when they were arguing. But it had always been like that at home. When Craig came along, he made me feel different. He made me feel better about myself. I began to love my life instead of hate it.”

  “You fell for this guy, Craig?”

  “Yes. I really did. He was a year older. I met him at a dance. He’d had other girlfriends before, but for me, he was my first real relationship.”

  “But something happened.”

  “He was never cruel to me. He didn’t want to hurt me. He was a great guy. He just lost interest. He said he was sorry. He said he knew it was a character flaw but he was like that. He couldn’t help it. Craig would lose interest in one girl and move on. In this case, he lost interest in me and moved on to a girl named Cheryl. He said he wanted us to stay friends, though.”

  “And it made you feel terrible.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t function in school. I became very depressed. My mother took me to our doctor, and he prescribed an anti-depressant and sleeping pills. That night I swallowed them all.”

  “Was it really that bad?”

  “You know, when you read about these things, when you hear about other people doing this, you always feel like there must have been another way for that individual. You always think that it can’t be that bad, or that time will heal if you just give it a chance. Tomorrow will be another day. All that kind of crap. But it isn’t like that.”

  Andrea was crying now. I didn’t know what to do but stand there and listen to her.

  “It isn’t like that at all,” she repeated. “All I could think about was trying to make the hurting stop. I wanted the pain to go away. And I wanted to punish my parents, I wanted to punish Craig, and I wanted to punish me.”

  I swallowed hard, not knowing what was the right thing to say. “And you did that. You punished everyone. I’m sure Craig felt it. I know your parents do. I saw their faces. But now you have to stop punishing them. Stop punishing yourself. I think you have to forgive them, forgive yourself, too.”

  She sighed. “That’s why I’m leaving. They can’t bring themselves to give the doctors the okay to end life support. I’m not sure the doctors can even do it. I could stay like that for months, years maybe.”

  “There must be some other way,” I said.

  “Simon, you better go back to class.”

  She started to walk away. “Don’t go,” I said. “Please don’t leave me.”

  “I have to,” she said and began to walk away down the hall.

  I tried to follow, but my brain could not make my legs move. I was left standing alone in the hallway with a terrible feeling of cold swallowing up my body.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I took the bus to Ridgefield, all the while sensing again that people were looking at me like I had committed a crime. My gut was tight, and there was an argument going on in my head. The two voices, one strong and confident, one pleading for me to leave everything alone, to go home and play chess against unknown adversaries on the Internet.

  The first voice, the confident one, was the voice of a crazy person, urging me to act. If you don’t go through with this, you’ll never be able to live with yourself. It’s something you have to do. I rubbed my hands together, and as I held out my index finger towards the seat in front of me, a charge of static electricity gave me a shock, a small thrill even. What was that about?

  As I got up to get off in front of the hospital, walking down the bus aisle, I accidentally touched the shoulder of a man and the same thing happened. He jumped in his seat. It made me feel a little giddy. But it was just static electricity. That was all.

  It was quiet in the hospital. Nurses and staff were moving about purposefully. I took the stairs instead of the elevator — maybe I didn’t feel like being in a cramped space with strangers, maybe I didn’t trust the technology today. Trying to stay focused on Andrea.

  The door to her room was open, and I walked in. Both parents were there. Andrea’s mother had been crying. Her father’s face suggested he’d been wrestling inside with something very troubling.

  “How is she?” I asked. “How is Andrea?”

  “The same. At least we can’t see any changes,” she said.

  “But the doctor says she’s passing through a stage. A point of no return.”

  “It’s been a long time. But I happen to know that Trina is strong,” her father said.

  “I’m a little surprised you came back. I know it’s not easy being here. We appreciate it.” Then he realized he was making me uncomfortable by saying that, reminding me how I had reacted before. He cleared his throat and tried to make small talk. “Did you, by any chance, ever know Craig? Was he a friend of yours?” her father asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I know who he is. Did he ever come to the hospital?”

  “He came once,” Andrea’s mother said. “He brought flowers, but he didn’t say much. He couldn’t even look at her. I don’t know why someone would bring flowers to an unconscious girl. Then he left and never came back.”

  “Trina took everything in her life so seriously.” Her father was speaking of her in the past tense now, not a good sign. “She was always so ...,” he fished for words from the air, “... so sensitive.”

  A word that had often been used for me. It is a condition of the mind and heart, I believe. Those like Andrea and myself, we feel things deeply. We sense there was more than what appears on the surface. When we aree happy, we soar. When things go wrong, we plummet.

  I experienced this great nervous energy in my chest, the blood pounding in my ears. I understood that even now, Andrea’s parents were feeling an intense guilt. As if this was their fault. Like Craig. He had felt it too when he saw her. That’s why he couldn’t bear to stay here.

  “She was trying to punish you,” I said out loud.

  “What?” Her father was stunned.

  “She was trying to punish you and Craig and the rest of the world.”

  “She said this to you?” her mother asked.

  “Yes. It was the wrong thing to do. But it made sense to her.”

  “Simon, how long did you know her?” he said. “Trina never mentioned you. We never met you. You never came to the hospital until recently. Who exactly are you?”

  I took a deep breath, considered telling the truth. At least my version of the truth — about how she had app
eared to me in class one day. And how she came to help me with my problems. I almost blurted it out. My grandfather, now long gone, had once told me that sometimes, the only way out of the tough spot is to forget about consequences and just “spill the beans,” tell the truth.

  My grandfather, the world’s most charming and kind man as far as I can remember, once “borrowed” money from a charitable organization he was volunteering for. He borrowed it to help a friend in trouble. The friend took the money, left town, and my grandfather was in a tight place. So he told the truth. And served three months in jail, lost his daytime job, and never did get back on his feet again. No, I would not tell the truth, after all.

  “I wasn’t aware that Andrea — Trina — was in the hospital until recently. I live in Stockton and hadn’t really talked to her for quite a while. I had lost touch with her and wondered what was going on, but it wasn’t until I saw your story in the newspaper that I came over.”

  Andrea’s mother wiped her eyes with a tissue. “I think sometimes that maybe it was God’s will that she be released. We love her so much, but maybe all of this is just unfair to her. The doctors don’t think she can ever recover, that her mind will never be able to function properly. Sometimes I think we should let her go. For her sake.”

  I didn’t know about God’s will. I didn’t know if I even believed in God. I could accept many notions of who we were and what we were. But I had not come to any conclusions about God. God was a big question mark in my life.

  Andrea’s father was angry at his wife now. They had probably had this discussion many times before. “It’s not up to us to decide,” he said.

  “But what if all this is actually hurting her? We can’t know what is happening to her, what she is experiencing.”

  Right then, I wanted to tell them the real story of me, of my accident, of what I had experienced while I was in a coma. But again, I knew that if I said too much, they would see how strange I really was. It wouldn’t take much to scare them, and I needed their trust. I decided to tell them one true thing about me that might give them some hope. “I was in a coma once when I was young. And I recovered. Maybe she will too.”

  “But it’s been so long,” her mother said.

  “Do you talk to her?” I asked.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “I sometimes think she can hear me and she can understand what I’m saying.”

  Her father let out a sigh as he spoke to his wife. “There is no visible reaction. It’s what you want to believe.”

  “You don’t speak to her?” I asked him.

  He looked at his daughter. “I did for a while. But I don’t anymore. I don’t know what to say.”

  “How long have you been here with her today?” I asked.

  “Three hours,” he said.

  “I’d like to sit with her for a bit, if that’s okay with you. I’d like to speak to her, but I don’t know if I can do it with you both in the room. It’s something I was thinking about a lot. It may not matter if she can hear me or not. It’s just something I need.”

  Her mother immediately nodded. Her father was not so sure, but he said, “We could use a break. Sure.”

  And so they quietly walked out and left me alone with Andrea in that devastatingly quiet hospital room.

  I came close to Andrea — the hospital Andrea — for the first time. Her face revealed nothing. The monitors made predictable noises. An artificial breathing machine put air into her lungs in a regular rhythm. Her chest would rise and fall. But there was no other real sign that there was life in this body. I wondered if Andrea had already done as she said she would do. I feared that she had already “gone away.”

  I sat in the chair closest to her and closed my eyes. I had no plan. Nothing. I guess I expected she would help me. I thought she would appear — the other Andrea. But nothing happened.

  I opened my eyes and began to speak to the girl lying in the bed. I told her my story. I told her everything about what kind of a kid I was, about my unusual qualities, my problems. I explained to her that I had spent my childhood so often alone, that my parents had tried to be good parents, but that I really was a big disappointment to them. I told her about Ozzie.

  And I told her that I was now fairly certain that Ozzie had never existed. I probably had imagined him and made him so very real that I was willing to take advice from him and do any crazy thing he suggested. Crazy things that would come very close to getting me killed. But I told Andrea that I knew she was different. She had come to me for a reason. That’s why I was here.

  I touched her hand first, felt the lifeless quality of it, the coolness. I squeezed gently and I talked some more.

  I told her that I could not explain to myself how a girl in a coma could have appeared to me. If it had not been for the discovery of her here, I would have soon concluded that she was another Ozzie, my next hallucination. No one, not even me, would deny that I had started out with problems, enhanced my problems with brain damage brought on by my accident.

  I held both of Andrea’s hands now and slid my hands onto her wrists, pressing them tightly. I could feel her pulse, the lifeblood still moving through her. I closed my eyes and had a sensation in my head of being weightless as if I was about to faint or in some way lose myself and drift. I let go.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw small stars of a light all around the room, those tiny bright fireflies you see when you come close to passing out. My own heart was beating wildly with a great pounding in my chest.

  In my head was a great stew of ideas and images. Medieval things. The laying on of hands. The curing of the sick by touch. Learning the truth of an illness by studying the lines on the palm of one’s hands or feeling the energy points in someone’s feet.

  None of this was anything I had any true knowledge of. I was someone who dabbled in the realm of unlikely possibilities, that was all. Nothing more. I knew what this would look like if her parents returned or if a doctor came into the room. At the very least I would be forced to leave and never be allowed to return.

  Holding onto her wrists, however, made me feel something that didn’t feel right. I sensed resistance. She did not want me here. I opened my eyes and stood back.

  Yes, I understood. She had already told me she would not reappear to me. The resistance I was feeling was understood. And very real.

  But it convinced me that she knew I was here and she knew what I was trying to do. I think I understood why she was pushing me away. She was still trying to punish us all — me included now. If she died, she would complete what she set out to do: hurt Craig, hurt her parents, hurt everyone. Like me, Andrea had her own duality. She wanted to help and she wanted to hurt. One had become weak and the other stronger. She would die still wanting to hurt the people in her life.

  And if she did, she would carry that with her to wherever she would go. Wherever her spirit went or her soul or whatever was left when we leave our body behind. And I could not let her do that. I realized then that I needed to change all that.

  I let go of her arms and I placed one hand on her forehead. Now the sense of resistance was even more powerful. An insistence that I stop, that I leave her alone. At first, my own insistence to continue was creating a battle of wills. I was trying to overpower her. I was angry with her for wanting to do this thing to her parents and to me.

  It was as if I could see this other Andrea in my mind now. I could hear her voice, insistent, edged with her own anger. Leave me alone. I could see that I needed to move past my own ego in this. I had to show her this was not a battle of wills.

  I opened my eyes to discover that other Andrea standing in the room, as real as she had been at school. I moved away from the bed and towards her.

  “I should have been gone by now,” she said. “Staying here any longer just increases the pain. You don’t know how badly it hurts.”

  “I can’t let you do this. I want you to wake up.”

  “That’s not fair. You should not be intruding like this. I’ll prove to you
why.”

  And at that instant I felt myself swept into a dark and terrible place without boundary and dimension, a hollow, hopeless realm of utter desolation. I felt diminished and experienced such loneliness and despair that it seemed those emotions were the entirety of my universe. And I realized this was how bad she had felt. Why she had wanted a way out. And then it faded.

  I was still in the room with the girl in a coma. In a way, I was convinced by that brief experience of how terrible it can be for someone to hurt so badly that she wanted to end her life. And so I made what seemed to be the only decision that would make a difference.

  I locked the door from the inside. I went to the wall and I pulled out the plugs on all the machines. The heart monitor did not have a chance to sound an alarm. The room was perfectly silent.

  I stood beside Andrea’s bed. Her chest was no longer rising and falling. I was convinced that if I touched her at all, she would in some way overpower me. So I stood there by the side of her bed and I simply said out loud, “I’m going to go with you.”

  I closed my eyes and felt myself swept into that darkness again. It was very real, very physical. It was not just the bottom of a well this time. I was in an overpowering vortex falling and spinning and losing all sense of control.

  And then it stopped. I crashed down onto a cold, hard surface where the pain translated to another form. I had fallen onto the hospital floor and hit my head hard enough so that blood dripped from where I had split the skin.

  I was breathing hard. Someone was knocking at the door. I couldn’t focus, but I got to my knees. An old familiar headache, a piercing pain, was inside my skull. I grabbed the rail of the bed and pulled myself up, realized what I had done by unplugging the life support and felt a tremor of fear.

  And I heard a human voice. A whimper, a cry, a kind of choking gasp. I saw her arm moving, almost waving as if she had no control of it. She was hitting at her face, at the mask on her face.