Finding Casey (33 page)

But I was Casey now.

Mrs. Clemmons talked on her phone. The doctors were discussing steps in the procedure.
Proceed, prod, cord, cure.
The student doctors wanted to watch everything, and for me to step aside and let them because they had to know how to be doctors someday. “No,” I said. I wished I could say, “Stand behind me or go away. I'm not moving,” but I was too tired to make words.

The one thing I knew for sure was that I never wanted to be called Laurel Smith again. Laurel Smith was someone whose skin I put on because my real skin was buried deep inside me, like when a tree dies from the inside out. Daphne turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo; I turned into Laurel but couldn't escape.
Pace. Peas. Sea.
That day it all happened was right there inside me. I shook my head no. Mrs. Clemmons with her pearl necklace and matching earrings, her wire glasses and her brown eyes; everything about Mrs. Clemmons was a smile. “Your name is Casey McGuire,” she said, and she took hold of my hands. “You never have to be Laurel Smith again.”

The first thing the doctors did was unhook the breathing tube from the breathing machine, just to try it, they said, like when Susie the nurse had to clean the tubes. They talked to each other in the secret language that only they understood, but I made myself listen and store the words in a list inside my head.
“Hemoglobin eight,” and “Suction, please,” and “What is the patient's ABG,” and “What is her PA02,” and “Administer bronchodilators.” I watched and listened and inside my heart I thought how weird it was that here I was, praying for real, and whatever Seth thought of that didn't really matter. The shot doctor came back to wait with us. She said, “Would you like me to explain what the doctors are doing?”

I nodded.

“Aspen has been under sedation since her seizure and cardiac-arrest episode,” she said.

“You mean the crashing?”

“Yes. That medicine is what helped her to lie still while the ventilator breathed for her. The doctors are titrating that medicine down to see if Aspen will take a breath on her own. If she does, then they'll slowly decrease the mandatory breaths coming from the machine, and let her fill in the gaps with her own breaths. Right now she's at twenty breaths. Next, they'll decrease it to eighteen and see if she breathes two breaths on her own. This could take a long time, maybe all day.”

“If her body forgot how to do the breaths, how do they make it remember?”

“Casey, I want you to take a look at all the people in her room. Two doctors, one nurse, one respiratory therapist, and the pharmacist. He's in charge of the medicine. Each of them is doing one step. The respiratory therapist is making sure she starts to remember how to breathe.”

“What if she doesn't?”

“Then they hook the machines back up.”

“And if she remembers?”

She smiled at me. “Now you're thinking positive. Once Aspen is breathing on her own, they'll extubate, which means
that they'll take out the tube that goes down her throat and into her lungs. It's a critical moment.”

“What if she forgets again? Can they put the tube back in time? What about the feeding tube?”

“That's why they do this in steps. If she doesn't breathe on her own, they'll hook her back up until she seems stronger, and they'll try again a little later. The feeding tube will come out once she starts eating on her own. “

Big pharma, Seth would say. Treating people like lab animals. Like he had room to talk. If it worked, I wondered how to explain to Aspen that we weren't going back to the Farm. Then it hit me, where would we go? One week after they took me, after Abel had raped me three times in a row, I asked if I could go home now. Abel laughed. I asked if I could at least have my clothes. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my face. Please let me go, I begged, back to my family, and he said, Do you honestly think they'd want you back now?

I said maybe since it wasn't my fault they would want me back.

“Too late. Seth and I went back last night and killed your parents,” he said.

“Not my sister,” I said. “She's still in elementary school.”

“And that is supposed to matter to me? Maybe I took her, too. Maybe I've got her tied up in the van.”

“Please don't hurt her,” I said. “She's still little.”

Abel took hold of my neck and I shut my eyes. He whispered into my ear, “If you want me to be nice to you, then you'd better start being nicer to me.” Then he tied my hands up behind my back and left, locking the door. Shutting out the light. I had to do deep breaths to not panic at being closed in, in the dark at first. I cried that night, but by morning I realized he was telling
me the truth about one thing; I had to be nicer. It wasn't until much later on that I accepted that he'd never tell me the truth, but that never stopped me from hoping. Probably my family didn't want me back. But they deserved to live. They worked hard and took care of me, made all those dinners and bought me new clothes for school. They weren't stupid, like me, to think running away would change anything. I couldn't really see their faces in my mind. Just flashes of things: my mom's silver bracelet with the moon face. The hairs on my dad's wrist that went under the face of his watch and then came back out the other side. My sister was only a set of braids in my mind. She ruined my clothes, touched my things. Maybe sometimes my mom wasn't as nice as I wanted her to be, but after Abel and Seth took me, I would have rather been beaten every day of my life and on restriction forever than go through what Abel, and later Seth, did to me. When Aspen was born I thought that meant I had to marry Abel. That we'd become a family and then Aspen would go to school and I would have to make the dinner and vacuum the floors. Things wouldn't be great, but it would be a different way, something I could learn to do so he didn't get angry and hurt me. There was so much I didn't want to think about, that I had to forget about my
Before
life.

Instead, it was like living a new life in the camp with the redwood trees. It was our life until the cops started coming around, and then it turned into something different on that car ride from California to the Farm. The first night we stopped in the desert to go to the bathroom at this rest stop. They wanted me to sleep, and gave me pills, but they made me sick to my stomach and I threw them up, so eventually they stopped trying and told me I could stay awake, but they'd better not hear one peep out
of me or they'd leave me in the middle of nowhere. They both took drugs back then, smoked things, and sometimes like during the drive, Abel said they needed to get “jacked up” so they could drive all night. I pretended to be sleeping when they got into the terrible fight, but that was one thing I remembered. It was so real in my mind it could have happened yesterday.

The tube was unhooked now, and the doctors were talking in louder voices, asking, “What are her SATS?” and “What's her PEEP?” And “tidal volume,” as if Aspen had been under the ocean all this time, waiting for us to pull her to the surface. Mrs. Clemmons and the shot doctor talked on the phone to other people and whispered to each other. I kept my eyes on Henry without a gun. Sometimes he smiled. Once he even winked. I wondered what had happened to him that he could stand there that long, not saying a word. Had he known someone like Abel? Was he secretly a cop, with a gun hidden somewhere in his uniform? Maybe I could get his kind of job in the Outside World because I could go without talking for the longest time, too. Even after my neck healed I could be silent. Not Abel, though. All “jacked up” he talked nonstop about things that made no sense like alien abductions and radio frequencies and secret underground radioactive government shelters in case of nuclear war. Five times during that drive Seth told him to shut up, but he wouldn't.

When they stopped at the rest stop, Seth took me into the pit toilet so I could pee. When we came out, Abel was smoking a cigarette of Seth's, and that did it. Seth yelled and Abel yelled back and Abel took out his knife and Seth grabbed it, cutting his hand and it must have hurt really bad because he made the noise, and then he turned the knife around, and it happened so
quickly, I didn't have time to scream. Seth cut Abel's neck the way Abel cut mine, but deeper, and he was right, it was only four seconds before he stopped being alive.

Seth put Abel in the backseat and told me to get in the front or I would be next. “This is your fault,” he said. “I'm tired of taking care of you. Now that you have the brat you're even more expensive. What the f——am I supposed to do with you?”

I said, “You could let us go.” It was the wrong answer. “Hit me,” I said, “not Aspen,” and he did.

Abel took drugs he was only supposed to sell. He'd get himself all “wired,” his pupils huge, and he did stupid things like call attention to himself, which was why cops came, and we had to leave. Just get in the car and go.

Was I lonely and afraid? Yes, but after Aspen I could stand it. Before, when Abel and Seth were arguing, I used to wish they would hit each other so hard they would both fall down and die. If that couldn't happen, I wished they'd hurt each other so bad they would need my help. I would help. I'd show them how to be a nice person. I'd help them go back into the Outside World. But after Abel died, we drove around for hours until Seth found a place to leave his body. Take his bracelet. That's worth money. After that, I just wanted the car ride to be over, for us to be at the next place we were going to, so I could change Aspen's diaper and then I could go to sleep.

The pharmacist explained to the nurse how much less of a drug to give Aspen so she would wake up. Dr. Armstrong was arguing that it was more important that Aspen wake up on her own time, not to stress her. A student doctor in blue pajamas was telling another one how exciting it was to watch this play out, like it was a skit they were putting on. I got tears. Mrs. Clemmons said, “Children are resilient, Casey. Dr. Armstrong
is a huffy old guy, but he's the best at what he does. If my little girl was sick, he's who I'd want taking care of her. I wouldn't exactly like to go to dinner with him, but he's very accomplished at his job, Casey. Focus on that.”

Mrs. Clemmons had a little girl?

I saw Aspen's neck when the doctors moved out of the way, a pale pink half circle that reminded me of a baby bird that hasn't got its feathers. Aspen and I used to try to save the robins that fell out of the nest at the Farm. Better than anybody, I knew how a person's neck is the strongest and the most vulnerable part of the body. I was never going to allow anyone to do to Aspen what had been done to me, and I was imagining how to explain all that to the police without making the sound when I heard a different sound, the best sound I ever heard, which was Aspen coughing. “Ready to extubate,” Dr. Armstrong said, and the other doctor said, “Wait. We need to suction again, please.” Susie the nurse was standing close to Aspen and the respiratory doctor held onto a blue round ball connected to a clear plastic face mask. The student doctor told the other one, “Whether you're intubating or extubating, hold your breath. It's the perfect test of time. If you need to take a breath, so does your patient.”

“This is my first extubation,” the other doctor said, as if Aspen was going through all this just for him to learn it.

The shot doctor got a page and told me she had to go, but she'd check back with me soon, but I kind of hoped she was busy enough with other problems that she wouldn't come back. “I'm tired of talking to people,” I told Mrs. Clemmons. She found me a chair to sit in, but when I sat down I couldn't see anything, so I stood back up.

Dr. Armstrong let the other doctor pull the tube out of Aspen's throat, and everyone was holding their breath, not just
me. He pulled kind of slowly but maybe that was how things like that had to be done. After it came all the way out, everyone sighed, and the nurse put the ball/breathing mask thing on Aspen's face and squeezed. Then she took it away, and after a few times, back and forth, we could all hear the sound of Aspen coughing. The student doctors clapped. I heard Mrs. Clemmons say, “Thank God,” very quietly, like she didn't want anyone to know. Another nurse came out of the room to get me. She was smiling, and she hardly ever smiled. “She'll be disoriented,” she told me. “Now that she's off the paralytics, she might have some jerking muscle spasms, but that doesn't mean it's a seizure. Don't expect her to start talking all at once.”

Dr. Armstrong called Aspen's name, but she didn't answer him. He rubbed her chest with his knuckles, and she whined. It was the first sound she made since the cough and I held my breath. He pressed a pen against her fingertip and she whined again, and moved away from him all on her own and I was so proud of her for being that little and to know to move when someone was trying to hurt you. That was a lesson it took me a long time to learn, but I never stopped trying to teach her how to do it. “GCS?” Dr. Armstrong said, and the respiratory therapist said, “Nine.” I whispered to Mrs. Clemmons, “What does that mean?”

“The Glasgow Coma Scale. Aspen's score right now is a nine, but you watch, it'll rise as time goes by. The higher the number, the better it is.”

Then she went into the room to watch Dr. Armstrong put a different kind of oxygen mask up Aspen's nose. The clear tubes went around her ears. He told the nurse, “Any drop in SATS, I expect to be paged immediately.” People started to leave the room, and when I turned to give them space, I noticed Mrs.
Clemmons wasn't there. Had she told me she was going somewhere, and I forgot? Or was this going to be my life now, on my own? When Dr. Armstrong left the room, he told me, “I told you she was ready.”

“I'm sorry I didn't believe you,” I said. “Thank you from my heart.”

His face got that flushed color and he said, “Go sit with your little girl,” and then he went next door to the nurses' room, and it was just Aspen and me and Aspen blinked at me. I held her hand.