All This Time(52)

“You tell me,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Marley.

I try to push myself up, but the pain radiating from my leg is so overwhelming, I crumple to the floor again. Dr. Benefield stands over me for so long I start to think she’s not going to help me. Then she sighs.

“Wait here,” she says.

I slump down and try to fight the bile that’s just at the back of my throat, pushed up by the pain vibrating through my entire body.

A shadow falls over me. Dr. Benefield. With a wheelchair.

When she gets me back into bed, she has a nurse reattach my IV, increasing my dose of pain medicine in an attempt to give me some relief.

She grumbles under her breath as she checks my eyes with her penlight. I stare straight ahead as she clicks the light off and scowls at me, her eyes somehow both angry and sympathetic at the same time.

“I had no idea you were going to be so much trouble,” she says as the nurse leaves. When I don’t say anything, she reaches up to probe the healing wound on my forehead. “Blurry vision? Headache? Dizziness?”

“No,” I say. And it’s true. After all these months of wishing they’d go away, of waking up from nightmares with blinding headaches, it’s all just gone.

She sighs and sits down at the edge of my bed. “So, you want to explain the freak-out?”

No. I don’t. But I try anyway.

“This isn’t where I’m supposed to be,” I tell her. I try not to sound so frantic, but I can’t help it. I have never felt so completely wrong in my life.

“No one ever belongs in a hospital,” she says with a wry smile. “Except people like me, of course.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Where else would you be?”

I should be back at home, eating pancakes with Marley or walking to the diner in town for breakfast, the ground still wet from last night’s thunderstorm. I should be looking at all the different yellow notebooks in bookstores, deciding which is just right to get for her birthday. I should be taking Georgia for her walk and getting ready to cover preseason practice at Ambrose High and playing touch football in the park next Saturday with my friends.

I should be with Marley.

Not right back where I started.

A fresh wave of pain ravages its way through my body, and I squeeze my eyes shut, willing the meds to kick in.

A coma. I was in a coma.

“Dr. Benefield,” I say as I open my eyes to look at her. “Do people in comas… dream?”

“Tell me why you’re asking,” she says, “and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Okay. I have…” I pause, trying to find the right words. “I don’t get how I’m… here. For me, it’s been a whole year since the accident. I have another life. Kim died. I have a girlfriend. Marley. But now I’m here and everyone is telling me that I was in a coma. That reality is”—I gesture at the hospital room, but also at this entire world—“this.”

She gives me a calculating look I can’t read.

“I know it sounds crazy,” I say.

She nods. “Certifiable. Go on.”

“I have to get back there, to my real life,” I say, thinking of Marley and Georgia and our spot by the pond, missing them with all the agony of a missing limb. I don’t care if my leg never heals, if my brain stays broken. I don’t need them. It’s Marley I need.

She frowns. “I don’t understand. When was this?”

“Yesterday.”

She studies my face. “Yesterday you were here. And the day before that, and the day before that.”

I shake my head, thinking of the handful of doctor’s visits I went to, the times I came here to get my head checked, to make sure I wasn’t losing it. “You were there too,” I say to her. “You were my doctor.”

“You opened your eyes a lot,” Dr. Benefield says. “Looked right at me. Those dreams… You probably incorporated me, or other people, into them.” She motions to the beeping heart monitor. “Things you heard or saw could have found their way into your subconscious. It’s not uncommon in comas. Your synapses were healing, reconnecting, coming alive. I can only imagine what that looked like to you in there.”

“What about Marley?” I counter.

She thinks for a long moment, her voice quieter when she speaks again. “Your life with Marley, did it seem like the perfect version of your life?”

I feel a wave of dread wash over me.

Yes.

I had a job I was good at. A life. I was with the person I was supposed to be with. I was becoming the best version of myself, and every day got better.

She takes my silence as the answer she was expecting.

“Kyle, your life is here,” Dr. Benefield says, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “Your friends, your mom, have been in this room every day, waiting and praying for you to heal. Perfect or not, they love you.”

I let her words sink in, but it’s all too confusing, the pain too much, the feelings too overwhelming.

Where is she?

The medicine starts to take over, and the world slows down around me as my eyelids get heavier and heavier.

“Get some sleep now, okay?” she says. She flicks off the lights as she leaves, my vision growing hazy as I drift off.