ran into a Reverend Ben Jackson, late of a self-styled Protestant
ministry in Mississippi, who was one of the ardent new Evangelicals
swarming over Central America. The man mentioned that some chicle
harvesters in the northwest Peten Department of Guatemala had found a
young woman in an old dugout canoe on the Guatemala side of the wide
Usumacinta River, near a tributary called the Rio Tigre, lodged in
amongst overhanging trees. She'd been struck on the head and presumably
set adrift somewhere upriver, left for dead. She was now in a coma,
resting at Jackson's "Jesus es el Hombre" clinic, also located deep in
the northwest Peten rain forest. He had no idea who she was.
Lou rented a car and drove there, almost a day on unpaved roads. It was
Sarah.
Thus she was no longer missing; she was now the apparent victim of an
attempted murder. However, rather than being helpful, the local
_policia_ appeared annoyed she'd been found, thereby reopening the
matter. A blond _gringa _was out hiking somewhere she had no business
being in the first place and tripped and hit her head on something.
Where's the crime?
Lou brought her back to New York, using a medevac plane supplied by the
State Department, which, wanting no more CIA-type scandals of American
nationals being murdered in Guatemala, cooperated with great dispatch.
After that, he needed a job that would afford him time flexibility, so
he could be at her bedside as much as possible. David was looking for a
security head, and I realized it would be a perfect match. Since we
didn't really need a full-time person, Lou could spend a lot of hours
at Lenox Hill, watching over Sarah.
She was just lying there now, no sign of consciousness, her body being
kept alive with IV I'd go by to visit her as much as I could, and
almost as bad as seeing the comatose Sarah was seeing the grief in
Lou's eyes. He would sit there at the hospital every day, sometimes
several hours a day, fingering an old engraved locket that carried her
high-school graduation picture, just rubbing it through his fingers
like a rosary. We always made allowances when he wanted to take time
off during one of our shooting schedules, figuring maybe he was helping
her. . . .
As I turned east, to go crosstown, I thought again about Sarah's
condition. She and I looked a lot alike, dense blond hair for one
thing, but to see her now you'd scarcely know it, since hers had been
clipped down to nothing by the hospital. Her cheekbones, however, were
still strong, a quality now exaggerated by her emaciated state, and her
eyes, which I had not seen in years, were a deep languid, turquoise
blue. But seeing her lying there inert, being kept alive with tubes and
liquids, wearing pressure pants to help circulate blood through her
legs, you'd scarcely realize she'd been a strikingly beautiful woman
before the accident.
What's worse, from what I knew, the horrific brain traumas that bring
on a coma don't automatically go away when you regain consciousness. If
the coma is the result of a head injury, and if it lasts more than a
few days, the chances of regaining all your mental functions are up for
grabs. Lou once said there's a scale of eight stages to full recovery.
People who have short comas can sometimes come out of them and go
through those stages quickly--from initial eye movement to full mental
faculties. Others, who've been under for months or longer can require
years to come back. Sometimes they can only blink their eyes to answer
questions; sometimes they babble on incessantly. They can talk sense,
or they can talk nonsense, incoherent fantasies, even strings of
numbers. The brain is a complex, unpredictable thing. . .
I always thought about this as I took the elevator up to Lenox Hill's
third floor. The room where they kept Sarah was painted a pale, sterile
blue, and made even more depressing by stark fluorescent lights.
Everything was chrome and baked-on enamel, including the instruments
whose CRT screens reported her bodily functions. None of the
instruments, however, had ever shown the brain activity associated with
consciousness.
Lou was there when I walked in. He had a kind of wildness in his eyes,
maybe what you get when you mix hope with despair. We hugged each other
and he said, "She had a moment, Morgy. She knew me. I'm sure she did."
Then he told me in detail what had happened. A nurse passing Sarah's
room had happened to notice an unexpected flickering on one of her
monitors. She'd immediately informed the nurses' station, where
instructions included Lou's home number.
He'd grabbed a cab and raced there. When he got to her room, he pushed
his way past the Caribbean nurses and bent over her, the first time he
had hoped a conversation with her would be anything but a monologue.
"Honey, can you hear me?"
There was no sign, save the faint flicker of an eyelid.
It was enough. His own pulse rocketed.
"Where's the damned doctor?"
While the physician was being summoned, he had a chance to study her.
Yes, there definitely was some movement behind her eyelids. And her
regular breathing had become less measured, as though she were fighting
to overcome her autonomic nervous system and challenge life on her own.
Finally an overworked Pakistani intern arrived. He proceeded to fiddle
with the monitors, doing something Lou did not understand. Then without
warning--and certainly attributable to nothing the physician did--Sarah
opened her eyes.
Lou, who had not seen those eyes for several years, caught himself
feasting on their rich, aquatic blue. He looked into them, but they did
not look back. They were focused on infinity, adrift in a lost sea of
their own making. They stared at him a moment, then vanished again
behind her eyelids.
He told me all this and then his voice trailed off, his despair
returning. . . .
"Lou, it's a start. Whatever happens is bound to be slow. But this
could be the beginning. . . ."
We both knew what I was saying was perilously close to wishful
thinking, but nobody in the room was under oath. For the moment,
though, she was back in her coma, as though nothing had changed.
I waited around until eight o'clock, when I finally convinced myself
that being there was not doing anybody any good. Lou, I later learned,
stayed on till well past eleven, when they finally had to send security
to evict him.
Okay, I've been holding out on the most important detail. The truth is,
I hardly knew what to make of it. At one point when I was bending over
Sarah's seemingly unconscious face, her eyes had clicked open for just
a fleeting moment, startling me the way those horror movies do when the
"un-dead" suddenly come alive. Lou was in his chair and didn't see it,
didn't notice me jump.
The last thing I wanted to do was tell him about it, and I was still
shivering as I shoved my key into the Toyota's ignition and headed for
home. She'd looked directly into my eyes, a flicker of recognition, and
then came the fear. She sort of moved her mouth, trying to speak, but
all that came was a silent scream, after which her eyes went blank as
death and closed again.
She knew me, I was sure of it, but she had looked through me and seen a
reminder of some horror now locked deep in her soul.