“You all right?” Nora asked.
Sweeney bit into the peppermint and nodded.
“The first year after Ernie’s accident,” she said, “I lost twenty-five pounds.”
He was still breathing heavily, but the sweats and the pain in the head were gone.
Nora watched him as she tongued her front teeth. Then she added, “And I’ve never put one of them back on.”
HE SPENT THE rest of the morning getting the Nora Blake Tour. It was an amazing performance, one part architectural lecture, three parts stand-up routine. And all of it seasoned with a little social commentary and a lot of staff gossip. Nora could spiel. Nora knew her shtick. Three decades showing new recruits the inside of the nightmare had honed her travelogue. She delivered it with a dry and deadpan voice that had been refined into gravel by years of cigarette smoke and stoicism.
The Clinic was a sandstone monster on fifty acres of private land near Quinsigamond’s western border. It sat between a wildlife preserve and an abandoned quarry. The Peck family had owned it from the beginning. Generations of doctors begetting doctors, a priestly clan of cool Yankees elected by God to care for the sick and the dying. They made their money in cotton and wool, but they gave their hearts to disease and deformity. And over time, the family hospital became the model for American health care, the kind of place where charity and science could lie together in order to breed healing.
This history weighed heavily on the current Pecks. They knew their tradition and they let it guide their decisions. Especially the decision, made a little more than thirty years ago, to alter their mission, to specialize. Many felt it was a radical break with the past, but Dr. Peck has never looked back. And today, the Peck Clinic is breaking new ground once again, setting the standard as the finest long-term care and research facility for patients trapped inside coma and persistent vegetative state.
What others might call grand or stately, Sweeney saw as ominous. The Clinic was heavy and dark on the outside, a Romanesque mausoleum with a central manse and two dark wings that fanned out from each side. And the inside was even worse, a maze of cavernous rooms and bad lighting and narrow, vertigo-inducing corridors.
At full capacity, the Clinic could maintain a hundred patients. But fees were so high and Dr. Peck’s criteria for admittance so stringent that there were rarely more than fifty sleepers at any time.
That was how Nora referred to the patients. Even though she knew the term was medically inaccurate and annoyed most of the staff doctors. “Drives them crazy,” she said. “As if I was insulting someone. But for twenty years I sat next to my husband’s bed. Room 103, I’ll show you. And that’s how I did it. I sat there and I held his hand and I told myself he’d just finished a plate of stuffed cabbage and was dozing. I told myself we were in the living room and he was watching his Red Sox and he’d just drifted off. And any minute he’d start up with the snoring and I’d have to wake him and send him up to bed.”
“But isn’t it harder that way?” Sweeney asked as they rode the elevator up to the third floor.
“How so?” Nora asked.
“If you tell yourself they’re just sleeping, then aren’t you also telling yourself that one day they’re going to wake up?”
Nora got a little stiff.
She said, “Mary Rowlands.”
Sweeney said, “Pardon me?”
“Of Rockhurst, Maryland. Went through the windshield of a ’72 Camaro. Severe head trauma. Fourteen years in PVS. One morning she wakes up and says, ‘Is my husband all right?’”
“I read about that case,” Sweeney said. “She died a week later.”
“So she died a week later. The point is, she woke up. She regained consciousness and she talked to her people.”
“I don’t know,” Sweeney said. “For me it would be harder. Imagining Danny’s dreaming about some cartoon or something.”
“Maybe he is,” Nora said.
“But they don’t dream.”
She gave a laugh that carried just a touch of pity.
“Who’ve you been talking to?”
Ordinarily he would have let it go. But two days away from Danny had him edgier than usual.
“No, I’m sorry, they do not dream,” he said. “They just don’t. There’s no activity in that area of the brain. It’s documented. If they’re dreaming, then it’s not true coma.”
The elevator came to a stop with a jerk that one of them finessed and the other did not. The doors slid open and as she unlatched the mesh gate, Nora said, “Jesus, we got to you just in time.”
They stepped out into a small foyer that led to the nurses’ station. No one was at the desk, but a tall black man in green scrubs was just beyond it, mopping the floor of the corridor.
“Hey, Romeo,” Nora called to him, and Sweeney cringed at her volume. “Where’s the princess?”
The janitor had a thick accent that Sweeney couldn’t place. “She gone to get the coffee,” he said.
Nora rolled her eyes for Sweeney’s benefit and in a mock whisper said, “We’d pay her in coffee but we couldn’t afford it.”
She led him down the hall and into the first wardroom. And though a year of daily visits to the St. Joseph should have steeled him to the sight, he had to fight the impulse to run as soon as he stepped into the room.
A shaft of sunlight pouring through the oversized windows made everything seem ethereal. Six beds were filled with six bodies. Men and women. Old and young. Dressed uniformly in hospital johnnies. White sheets covering them to the waist. Some skulls were heavily bandaged, the heads mummified. Some were intact but fully and freshly shaven. Others sported luxurious hair that looked newly washed and styled.
All of them were hooked to IVs. One young girl wore a crown of electrodes that coalesced into a fat braid that, in turn, fed into a machine at the side of her bed. Harsh respiration came from a shriveled old man, the only one turned on his side, his face bathed in sun. The noise did things to Sweeney’s stomach.
The first week that Danny was at St. Joe’s, the boy had shared a room with what the nurse called “a hard breather.” The sound never stopped, that chronic, laborious gasping and one night Sweeney caught himself in a suffocation fantasy, imagining himself holding the pillow over the roommate’s face until the lungs at last gave up and the brain, finally, shut down.
He realized Nora was watching him.
“You can see they’re well taken care of,” she said.
And it was true. The room and its patients were clean and well tended. There was nothing immediately horrific here. At least nothing particularly visceral. And he knew that this was exactly what unnerved him, this outward appearance of tidiness and normalcy. As if he’d wandered into some Victorian napping parlor and the lot of them would awake at three when the bell was rung for tea and cake.
“Third floor,” Nora said, lowering her voice again, “is for the shorttimers. Or, at least, those diagnosed as possible short-timers. They’ve indicated moments of consciousness since their incident.”
He flinched at the word incident.
“These are Dr. Peck’s prime candidates for arousal. Good brain activity. Promising response to therapies. These are the ones who have the best chance of walking out of here and suing somebody.”
Sweeney motioned to the young girl with the mane of wires.
“What happened to her?”
“Thrown from her horse,” Nora said. Then she began to point to each bed in turn. “Car crash. Car crash. Stroke. Car crash.” And turning to the last one, a woman about her own age, “And I think she was a fall down the stairs. The cellar stairs, I think. Her son found her.”
Sweeney led the way back into the corridor and started for the elevator before Nora could show him another ward.