The Girl in a Coma (7 page)

Book Two: Execution

Thirteen

Allison

It's not an ideal situation, my relationship with Jaimie. I mean, the walking dead don't know they're dead. And that's what I am, even though I'm not walking. I know how he thinks. He likes me better undead than alive. It's not an ideal situation, my relationship with Jaimie Retzinger. He used to be my boyfriend. We broke up before I was shot. We get along better now.

And like it or not, I'm still here! Even though things have changed.

They've moved me into a home for the hopeless. They call it Shady Nook Hospice, which is meant to be comforting. Sounds more like a cemetery. They think the only way I'm going to leave is feet-first, flat on my back, very dead. But they are wrong. For the last few months they thought I was only a vegetable, a corpse with a pulse. Then I shocked them. I opened my eyes. I'll shock them again, just give me time.

Okay, I opened
one
eye. My left. Not exactly like I'm running the Boston Marathon. Still, I'm making progress.

My eye opens and closes very slowly when it wants to. I can't control it. It droops and gets moist and opens again. I can see out of it, straight ahead. Everything is kind of fuzzy, but I'm learning to focus a little. Right now, I only see where the wall meets the ceiling on the far side of the room. It's not exactly like watching
The Wizard of Oz
.

Sometimes a nurse or an orderly will lean close but they never stay still long enough to be more than a blur. Jaimie Retzinger avoids getting in front of me. My brother, David, is the only one who looks me straight in the eye.

Even my mother avoids what David calls my “glassy gaze” as she ducks in to kiss me hello and goodbye and to drop a few tears. David picked up that phrase, glassy gaze, in school. We didn't read much at home. The only writers I remember at all are Stephen King and William Shakespeare, and the Twilight writer and whoever wrote
The Hunger Games
and, of course, the Harry Potter writer. I can't recall all their names.

Jaimie Retzinger used to say I have a wicked tongue and an evil temper. If he was right, then how come he still hangs around? Last week, out of the blue, he told me I'm beautiful. I mean, get serious. Anyway, it was only once. He could have been talking about the orchid on the table beside my bed. I imagine there's an orchid with swooping white petals. There are probably no flowers in my room. I mean, what's the point?

It doesn't matter. The orchid is real in my mind.

Life hasn't changed much since they moved me to Shady Nook. Mostly I lie here and think. At night, when it's quiet, I lie here and dream. Until a few days ago, when I woke up, my dreams would fall apart, just like they did before Rebecca came into my life. She's been so real she's a part of me, the way your memories are from when you were a kid. I was inside her world. Like two hundred years ago. But I'm not anymore. If there's such a thing as remembering blood—that's what I call the memories we inherit—when they no longer shape who we are, we leave them behind and move on.

Of course, I'm not moving much! But maybe that's how it works, you have to take a bullet in the skull to make the past present. And then it becomes the past again. And then? Well, I don't know, not yet.

So.

I'm in a stupidly named hospice. Jaimie is still around, I'm still alive, and Rebecca is gone.

When I'm awake, I listen. That's the only thing I can do. Listen. Or panic. And I refuse to panic.

Jaimie Retzinger talks to me. But it's like he's talking to his television set.

Before he saved my life, he was silent as the grave. Now he rattles on. For a while there, after I opened my eye, he thought I was going to rise up and do the polka. I didn't, of course. I don't know how to polka.

Jaimie Retzinger has changed. He doesn't study in my room anymore, like he did at the hospital. He says I'm a distraction. But he still comes in now and then to tell me what he's been up to. Like, I'm a diary? Or maybe a sponge?

I have mixed feelings about Jaimie Retzinger.

My brother, David, is the only one who
knows
I can hear. Don't ask me how. He just knows.

He finished Grade Twelve this week.

I was gearing up to drop out of school before I got shot. Now I'm kind of hanging in limbo. I was slinging double-doubles and doughnuts but I want to go back and finish school, go to university, then take a chef's course at Sanford Fleming College.
Sir
Sanford, I think it is. He was a knight who invented time zones.

I'd like to run a business of my own. I'll call it “Allison's Restaurant.”

My mother doesn't visit as much since I've come to Shady Nook. I understand that. A person has to get on with her life.

She doesn't believe I can hear. Same with the nurses. And my open eye doesn't excite them. It doesn't even blink when I try.

The problem is, I can't figure out how to let them know I'm in here and I really need to. Especially now.

Listen!

I've been in Shady Nook for a couple of months. Long enough to realize there's too much death around here. I mean, yes, people die. It's that kind of place. But there's something going on that no one has noticed.

Somebody is murdering patients.

Someone is killing people like me.

We aren't actually
patients
. We're called
guests
. Most of us are stuck in bed. At intervals, one of us dies. Nobody is surprised. I hear the nurses talking. If you listen, you can figure out what's going on around here. And they talk about this guest and that guest dropping dead. There's nothing suspicious about really sick people dying.

But here's the strange thing: one of us dies every seventeen days.

There are other deaths of course, but for sure there's one every seventeen days.

And, glory, no one seems to have noticed but me.

On the night after I arrived at Shady Nook, a cranky old lady died. Seventeen days later, a kid who stole a car and crashed it, he died. Everyone thought he was getting better. Seventeen days after that, a girl died. She was in a coma but stable, and then she stopped breathing, just like that. Last week a man with brain damage died. He couldn't remember his own name but he was happy and he made people smile.

It might be my turn next.

Unless I can figure out who is killing us. And then figure out how to stop him. Or her. It might be a nurse. Most of my nurses are women.

It would not be hard to murder me.

I'm breathing on my own but I've got tubes going in and tubes coming out, and wires and monitors for everything. Cut them all off in the night and I'd probably be dead by morning. That's what Russell Miller tried to do. He was never going to slit my throat, only his own. Or maybe you could smother me with a pillow. No one expects me to live, anyway.

The killer couldn't do it during the daytime. Nurses are wandering around. The door is left open. I have a roommate. They have to look after both of us. Anyway, they keep our curtains open and our lights on during the day in case visitors come. It would be too depressing if we were lying here in the dark.

My roommate is Doris Blonski. She's a year older than me. She's in a coma. Just like everyone thinks I am.

It would be funny if she's lying there with a working mind, listening.
Like, the two of us, side by side, both locked in bodies that don't work. And we can't even talk to each other to share our experiences. Not funny-funny. Funny-weird.

When Jaimie Retzinger drops in, he chatters. He argues with himself. I try not to listen. He's the only person in the world who can argue with himself and lose. Since he's studying to be a chef, he's got books to read. With lots of pictures. Jaimie Retzinger has never read a chapter book in his life.

I'd break up with him all over again, but he wouldn't notice, so why bother?

Anyway, I know there won't be another murder for ten days. So, for the time being, I sleep well.

And during the night, I dream. Recently my dreams have been gathering into memories again. Last night, it was all very real. I dreamed of Lizzie Erb. Her world is as vivid to me as Rebecca's. She has to live her life so I can live mine. Her story is terrifying and exciting and romantic and maybe a little bit strange.

It's 1812 and she's a year older than me—sixteen, maybe seventeen. And she has just witnessed a murder.

Now the killers want her dead.

Lizzie

Lizzie Erb was hiding from the Redcoats. She was covered in hay. She had climbed high into the haymow inside her uncle's huge barn. She had trudged for three days from her home in the Grand River Valley to find General Brock and instead she was being hunted by his own soldiers. If she peered out she could see three men, two stories below. She burrowed deeper into the hay but she could hear them talking.

“Are you really saying we should kill her, Captain?”

Lizzie couldn't hear what the officer answered, but it was clear what he wanted.

“Yes sir, Captain Blaine. And then we'll burn this place to the ground,” said the other soldier.

Again, a muffled response

“What about the house?”

The officer's voice rose and he snarled, “Don't burn the house, you damned fool. We just moved in.”

“Only the officers did, sir,” said the first soldier.

“Do you have a problem with that, Mr. Cameron?”

The voices faded. For a few minutes, Lizzie could hear nothing but the October wind seeping through the walls. She climbed up so she could see better. Narrow bands of moonlight shone between the boards. She could see across the huge space where her uncle, Matthias Haun, had stored enough hay to feed his animals until spring.

Two voices became clear again. The Redcoat soldiers were standing by the ladder just below Lizzie. The officer was no longer with them. She wriggled back into the hay but kept her head clear so that she could hear.

“I don't think we should kill a woman,” said one. “She's just a wee lass.”

“Me neither,” the other agreed. “But killing is killing, that's what we do.”

“Being soldiers, you mean. Well, there's killing and there's killing.”

“There you go, Mr. Cameron, playing with words.”

“I'm just saying we need to think about this.”

“She walked here over the fields, she saw Captain Blaine shoot the farmworker in cold blood. He weren't doing nothing, that farmer, but now he's dead. So I guess she had better die, too. It isn't complicated. We gotta find the young witch.”

“There's a full moon tonight. She's sailed off on her broom. Come on, Beazley, I think we should go.”

“The captain told us before we goes anywhere, we kill the woman who seen us.”

“You're very conscientious.”

“I am not!” The man seemed indignant, as if he didn't know what the word meant but assumed it was an insult. “I'm not conscience at all,” he muttered.

“It wasn't us, Mr. Beazley. We would have stopped him killing the man if we could.”

“You would have, maybe. I'm not sure about me.”

Lizzie saw sparks from a flint and then a flare as one of the soldiers lit his pipe. After a minute of quiet, she saw more flickering light, followed by voices:

“Here! Damn you Beazley, what've you done?”

“It were quite accidental, I assure you.”

Flames leapt upward, catching the dry hay.

“Damn it, man. The animals are still in the stable below.”

Lizzie peered over from her loft and watched as the men scrambled to extinguish the fire. Sweat on the shorter man's chubby cheeks glistened as he swiped at the flames with his jacket. The tall lean man had set his own jacket aside and was using a pitchfork to beat the flames down. After a flurry of activity, the two men recognized the futility of their efforts.

“Come on, Beazley,” the tall man shouted. “We'd better get the animals out.”

“Captain Blaine didn't say to set the animals free.”

“He thought we were smart enough to figure it out for ourselves.”

The flames were licking higher. Clouds of smoke rose up under the roof beams and choked Lizzie Erb.

“Too late for the critters,” yelled the one called Beazley. “We'd best save ourselves.”

“Damn it,” Cameron exclaimed.

“We're in for it now. I think we'd better get a long ways away, Mr. Cameron. Let's go upriver. We'll join the Americans.”

The two men were yelling to be heard above the roaring flames.

“Damnation, Beazley. Let's go then, we'll make a run for it.”

Lizzie listened as the roar of the fire smothered their voices. She slid down the haymow, shielding herself from the soaring flames. She landed with a thump on the wooden floor over the stable. It was right where the soldiers had been standing, but they had run off to join the American invaders. Or liberators. Depending on how you saw things.

Lizzie pulled open a trap door and slid down a ladder into the stable below. Smoke filled the stone-walled room. Wisps of flame scurried across the ceiling. She ran from stall to stall, untying the horses and the oxen. She jumped over a barrier made of cedar rails into the cattle pen and pushed open a large door to the outside. Madly waving her arms, she chased the cattle out into the barnyard.

Then she ran back and removed the cedar rails so the horses and oxen could get through. The boards in the ceiling were on fire. Chunks of burning wood dropped all around her. She edged past the horses, who were frantic with fear and kicking wildly. She slipped around the oxen, who were standing stupidly, waiting to die. When she got behind them, Lizzie Erb let out a blood-curdling series of screams. The horses and oxen stampeded out through the cattle pen into the open air.

Captain Blaine and some of the Redcoats who had taken over her uncle's farm were herding the animals to safety. Lizzie Erb stood in the burning doorway. Ahead were soldiers who wanted to kill her. Behind was a roaring wall of flames and certain death.