Pretend She's Here(69)

If I survived.

My parents huddled close to me, on either side of the bed, holding my hands. My mother, my beautiful mother with her blue eyes, so full of love and worry, as if she’d lost me and found me and was afraid of losing me again.

Mrs. Porter hadn’t killed her. She was here. I kept thinking that. Hot tears scalded my cheeks.

“Oh, Emily,” Mom said, her voice breaking. She bent down to hold me, even though I was bandaged and stuck with a thousand tubes.

I tried to stay awake. I heard my mom and dad say how much they loved me, how they knew I was strong, how I had to fight to want to live and return home. I felt flooded with love for them. I focused on my mother’s blue eyes, my father’s wide mouth, his hand so rough, her voice so tender.

“Live, Emily,” my mother said. “Please, I love you so much.”

I love you, too, I tried to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come out. Do you know what I did to save your life? All I ever wanted was to go home. I prayed you wouldn’t drink. I just want everything to be okay.

But a breathing tube ran down my throat, and the best I could do was croak.

“Emily,” my mother said over and over. “Emily, my Emily …”

I stared at her as long as I could, before my eyelids got too heavy to stay open, before they fluttered closed again.

Morphine kept me in a sick, sleepy twilight state. That meant I was mostly aware but not totally, and not quite sure whether I was dead or alive. My life hung in the balance—literally. That’s a dramatic phrase you hear on soap operas, like the ones Lizzie and I used to watch on snow days, and it meant the person was in a coma, balancing on the tightrope between living and dying. Fall, and you never get up again. The state of my aliveness was minute to minute.

*

When the EMTs put me in the ambulance, I was legally dead. Casey kept my blood pumping as long as he could, but my heart stopped, and so did my breathing.

I heard Dr. Dean tell this to my parents. She told them that my brain was deprived of oxygen for over a minute, so even if I lived, I could have brain damage. I didn’t think I did because my thoughts were pretty clear and my imagination was more vivid than ever.

Or maybe this was just how it felt to be dead.

My parents were generous, I heard Dr. Dean tell me. Some families don’t let friends visit the patients in intensive care because visiting time is so limited—only a few minutes each hour because the patient needs her rest. But my brothers and sisters were here in Maine, and each one took a turn with me.

And every three or four times, Casey came.

I longed for those times.

His touch was so gentle, the way he smoothed my hair, stroked my arms. His long hair brushed across me, tickled my face when he lowered his head to kiss my forehead, press his cheek to mine.

“Patrick and Bea told me a lot about you,” he said. “Things I didn’t know. Because we haven’t had enough time.”

He was holding a library book. I could see the protective clear plastic wrapping, the sticker on the spine, but his hand covered the title. “Patrick says you like plays. You write and perform in them, and I can’t wait to see one. Maybe you’ll write one about what happened here.”

I will, I thought. It will be a killer, not just because the girl was kidnapped and stabbed and lives through it, but because she fell in love with the boy next door.

“I know you can hear me, Emily,” Casey said. “Some people are saying you can’t, the coma is too deep, but I feel you. You have so much energy, it’s filling this room. The whole hospital is humming with it. So I thought, since you love plays, I would read one to you. That means I have to play all the parts, so try to forgive me because I’m no actor, and I’m sure you’ve read this a few times already, but it, well, it’s a love story.”

He started to read:

“Act One, Prologue, Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene …”

Romeo and Juliet.

The breathing machine, the thick tube down my throat and taped to my mouth, kept my respiration steady, a constant rhythm that didn’t vary. But if only Casey knew how fast my heart wanted to beat. The fact he chose this play to read me, the way he’d said, Well, it’s a love story.

I wiggled my fingers. He didn’t see, because they didn’t actually move. But inside me, where I was most awake and alive, my spirit most restless, they did. They were signaling to him that I loved his choice of plays, I loved the way he read each character with such feeling, and I loved him.

*

“She lives!” Iggy said.

He and Mick happened to be the ones at my bedside when my eyelids fluttered open and didn’t close again right away, when I started gagging and pulling at the tube in my throat and the little plastic oxygen prongs in my nose, trying to rip the needles from my arms.

“Whoa, sweetheart,” Mick said, restraining me with his entire 6’4” heft. “No going crazy here. Calm down, there you go. Look at those eyes, look at those gorgeous blue peepers. You know how worried you’ve had us? Well, I’ve said all along, ‘She’s a fighter, she’s a trouper, no one has more Irish in her than Emily Magdalene Bartholomea Lonergan.’”

I couldn’t wait to tell him I saw him crying when he said all that, big tough Michael Lonergan, older brother. Ha-ha, saw your tears, big guy.