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Where am I? Dead? Alive? Somewhere in between?
“Kate?”
I feel a whoosh of warmth come up beside me and my relief is enormous.
“Katie,” I say, turning. “Where were you?”
Gone, she says simply. Now I’m back. Open your eyes.
My eyes are closed? That’s why it’s so dark? I open my eyes slowly, and it’s like waking up on the face of the sun. The light and heat are so intense I gasp. It takes seconds for my eyes to adjust to the brightness, and when they do I see that I am back in the hospital room with my body. Below me, an operation is going on. Several people in scrubs stand around an operating table. Scalpels and instruments glitter on silver trays. There are machines everywhere, beeping, droning, buzzing.
Look, Tully.
I don’t want to.
Look.
I am moving in spite of my intention not to. A cold dread has taken hold of me. It is worse than the pain. I know what I am going to see on that sleek table.
Me. And not me, somehow.
My body is on the table, draped in blue, bloodied. The nurses and the surgeon are talking; someone is shaving my head.
I look so small and pale without hair, childlike. Someone in scrubs paints a brown liquid on my bald head.
I hear a sound like a buzz saw starting up and I feel sick to my stomach.
“I don’t like it here,” I say to Kate. “Take me somewhere. ”
We’ll always be here, but close your eyes.
“Gladly. ”
The sudden darkness scares me this time. I don’t know why. It’s weird, really, because I harbor a lot of dark emotions in my soul, but fear isn’t one of them. I’m not afraid of anything.
Ha. You are more afraid of love than any person I’ve ever met. It’s why you keep testing people and pushing them away. Open your eyes.
I open my eyes and, for a second it is still dark, then color bleeds down from the impenetrable blackness above, falling like those computer codes in The Matrix, solidifying in strands. First comes the sky, a perfect, cloudless blue, and then the cherry trees in bloom—tufts of pink blossoms clinging to branches and floating in the sweet air. Buildings sketch themselves into place, pink gothic structures with elegant wings and towers, and finally the green, green grass, inlaid with concrete walkways going this way and that. We are at the University of Washington. The colors are painfully vivid. There are young men and women everywhere—kids—carrying backpacks and playing hacky sack and lying on the grass with books open in front of them. Somewhere a boom box is turned on as high as it will go and a scratchy version of “I’ve Never Been to Me” comes through the speakers. God, I hated that song.
“None of this is real,” I say, “right?”
Real is relative.
Not far from where we are sitting in the grass, a pair of girls are stretched out side by side; one is brunette, the other is blond. The blonde is wearing parachute pants and a T-shirt and has a Trapper Keeper notebook open in front of her. The other girl—okay, it’s me, I know it, I can remember when I wore my hair all ratted up like that and pulled back from my face in a huge metallic bow, and I remember the cropped, off-the-shoulder white sweater. It had been my favorite. They—we—look so young I can’t help smiling.
I lie back, feeling the grass prickling beneath my bare arms, smelling its sweet, familiar scent. Kate does the same. We are together again, both staring up at the same blue sky. How many times in our four years at the UW did we do exactly this? The light around us is magical, as clear and sparkly as champagne glimpsed in sunlight. In its glow I feel so peaceful. My pain is a distant memory here, especially with Kate beside me again.
What happened tonight? she asks, ripping a little of that peace away.
“I can’t remember. ” It’s true, strangely. I can’t remember.
You can remember. You don’t want to.
“Maybe there’s a good reason for that. ”
Maybe.
