No point jumping in the water here-I’d catch Monica faster if I ran. Mud flew behind my feet as I tore along the bank, dodging rocks, trees, bushes, brush. Monica sailed downriver like a kayak, her dark head bobbing in and out of sight. I caught up when she slammed into a tangle of wood and debris swirling in the middle of the stream. She flailed for a branch, but her grip slipped. I made a running jump from an outcrop of bank and landed in the same roaring surge that took her down again.
Rocks! One sheared my side; another cracked me in the forehead. I recognized the pain more than felt it. The current flipped me over; I swallowed water. Over the tumult, I heard shouting, a man’s voice. Sam’s? Had he heard me barking? Monica saw me for the first time and reached out-to save herself or me, I’ll never know. She missed, but we flailed side by side long enough so that I could snatch up the shoulder of her blouse in my teeth. We smacked violently into something hard and stationary. Another fallen tree, anchored to shore. Grab it, I told her, but she was too dazed; she just hung there between me and the tree, limp.
Yes, it was Sam; I recognized his voice yelling her name. All that was keeping me afloat was the force of the water battering me against Monica. Grab something, I begged her, shaking the glob of wet cotton in my mouth. It was hard to breathe. I shook her again. Her eyes stayed closed, but she reached out for the log and hung on.
Now I could spit out the cloth and get a breath. Sam was forty feet away, sprinting for us along the muddy bank. “Hang on!” he kept shouting. Except I couldn’t-no hands. Monica began to cough and retch, reviving. The one paw I could keep on the tree trunk suddenly felt it vibrate. Sam was trying to walk on it, arms out for balance. He slipped and fell to his knees. But he kept coming at a crawl.
At the last, he stretched out full length, slapped his hand over Monica’s hand, and she was safe.
I couldn’t hold on to anything anymore. I slipped under the log, resurfaced on the other side. The drag of the current felt like heavy, coaxing hands pulling me down. I fought the temptation to let go as long as I could. Good-bye. Good-bye. It wasn’t so much sad as inevitable. The last I saw of Sam, he had one arm around Monica, the other stretched out to me. This is so stupid was my final thought the first time this happened to me. This time it was I love you so much.
Same sky, different trees. Where was I? This upward view looked familiar, painfully so, but when I turned my head to the side, I didn’t recognize anything. Scattered benches, tidy walks, trimmed hedges. Brick building. Institutional neatness.
Wait a minute.
“What did she say?” asked a tense female voice behind me.
A different tense female voice answered. “I think she said-I think she said-‘I love you.’ ”
That voice I recognized. “Hettie?” I asked in a croak.
The nurse loomed over me, gaping, the whites of her eyes eclipsing the irises. “Laurie?”
I nodded. “I do love you, but”-I had to clear my throat-“ I was thinking of Sam. Would you call him? On his cell-he’s not home.”
The other woman must be an aide; her name tag read “ Victoria.” She and Hettie grabbed each other’s hands and started to cry. So of course I did, too.
Hettie pulled herself together first. “Yes, call,” she told Victoria. “Call the husband. And go get Dr. Lazenby. And Dr. Pei. Hurry!”
Not much time for reflection after that. Nursing homes for the incurably comatose don’t experience miracle awakenings very often, I guess. For mine, Hope Springs went quietly wild. Doctors and nurses surrounded me, then aides, staff, social workers, custodians, even other patients-you’d think there would be a protocol for times like this, rare though they might be. But nobody seemed to be in charge, and everybody was so happy. Dr. Lazenby himself wheeled me back into my room, so then the crowd had to disperse. “Keep talking,” he told me, passing a file or something up and down the soles of my feet. “How do you feel? What’s your full name?”
“Laura Claire Marie O’Dunne. Summer. I feel… awake. Where’s Sam? And Benny? Did you call?”
“On their way.” He peered into my right eye with a lighted scope. “Count backward from twenty, please.”
In a lull in the excitement, I had a little cry myself. “It’s natural,” Hettie assured me. “Strong emotion can very often follow a prolonged period of semi- or unconsciousness. It’s relief, confusion, the stress-or nothing at all. You just go ahead and cry.”
Such a nice woman. I did love her. But I wasn’t weeping from relief or stress or confusion; I was weeping for Sonoma.
She gave up her life for me. That was how it felt, although in another sense you could say I gave up my life for me. Some sort of better me. And Monica was almost irrelevant, just a vehicle, you could also say-but then again, trying to save her was the very thing that had restored me to myself, that act. Wasn’t it?
So confusing. Hettie might be right-these tears were just from stress.
No, they were for Sonoma. When she drowned, I lost the best of myself. But I would spend the rest of my life trying to find her again. In me.
Sam saw me before I saw him. Hettie was raising the bed and punching up the pillows when I heard a sound and looked behind her. He stood in the doorway with his arms held out a little from his sides, knees flexed. His face looked tender and dumbstruck, his body poised as if to fly.
“Hey,” said Hettie with a huge smile. “Well, I’ll just finish this up later, won’t I?” I bet she was Sam’s favorite nurse, too. “They’re getting set up to do a lot of tests, so this visit will have to be quick. Plenty of time later, though. Plenty of time.”
She hugged Sam on her way out, but I’m not sure he noticed. He didn’t seem to be able to move. Even when I held out my hand, he only came a step closer. It took my voice to uproot him.
“It’s me, Sam. I’m back. I’ve come back to you.”
Then I had him, tight in my arms, holding me, warm and breathing and alive. My Sam. Both of us laughing, crying, saying, “Thank God,” and “I love you,” and “I missed you,” and things that made sense only to us. We started to kiss everywhere, as if welcoming each other back in pieces. Then we rested, just holding on and breathing together. Then we kissed again.
“Benny?” I said, and Sam said, “He’s here.” And there he was, shy as a fawn, holding Hettie’s hand in the door. But unlike his dad, he came to me on his own.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, comically matter-of-fact; I thought he might shake hands. But something, maybe my tears and gluey-voiced “Oh, Benny!” cracked his bashful shell, and he landed beside me in a bound, all arms and nuzzling head and sharp shoulders. Just under my joy and the intense need to hold him closer, tighter, an odd thought drifted: I can’t smell him. Even when I buried my nose in his hair, I couldn’t completely get that smoky-sweet scent I loved so much. Oh, well. I had Benny.
“You woke up! I knew you would. Daddy said and said, and at first I thought you might not, but then I knew you would.”
“That was clever of you.”
“What were you doing? What were you thinking?”
“Umm…”
“Where were you? Did you know when I was here? I came a lot.”
“I did know. Sometimes, anyway.”
“But you couldn’t wake up until now?”
“Not till now.”
“Because it was hard.”
“It was so hard.”
“And your head hurt.”
“Well, at first. But then it didn’t, and I was just sleeping.”
“Could you hear us talking? We did. We talked all the time. Dad… Dad, mostly. Sometimes, Mommy.” He mumbled this against my neck. “Sometimes… I just played.”