Episode Four
The first thing I noticed was the sound. There was a quiet beeping, one whose steady rhythm in the darkness seemed like a beacon. I clung to the noise, letting it ground me, wondering if I was still tucked away inside a world of dreams. But there were other noises that came into focus the longer I listened—the hiss of air, the murmur of voices. I swallowed and the rawness of my throat stung. If I was still in a dream, it was no doubt a depressing one.
Opening my eyes, I was confronted with the brown rings of water stains on the ceiling. I wanted to laugh, but the sound that came from my throat was nothing more than a muddled croak. Moving hurt. Sharp spasms of pain ran down the length of my neck as I twisted my head toward the door, eyes squinting against the light. But this was what I had expected when I awoke inside my dream. A normal hospital room, not a thing out of place.
I sighed and let my head fall back against the pillow. That was when the door creaked open.
“Hello?” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. My throat felt tight and dry, and talking did little to help soothe it. Footsteps clacked against the floor, and then a face appeared before my eyes.
“Everett? Can you hear me?”
I nodded, swallowing against the shards of glass scraping my throat.
“Let me help you up, love.”
She was a plump, middle aged woman with a dour face and hooded eyes, nurse Cathy. And while she seemed like a soft, sweet thing on the outside, her ham-fisted grip suggested otherwise. With very little assistance from me, she pulled me up by the elbow and repositioned my pillows, slowly easing me back onto them once they were settled.
“How are you feeling?” she asked without waiting for a reply. She busied herself with the chart at the end of my bed, flipping through the pages at lightning speed.
“My head hurts,” I said, “and my throat feels like its on fire.”
“Mhmmm,” she nodded to herself, half-listening. “Paramedics said you took a nasty spill in the ambulance and hit your head. You’ve got quite the bit of a bump there, but you should feel better in a few days.”
“What about my throat?” I asked.
“That remains a mystery,” she said with a sigh, depositing the chart back in its place. “Let’s take a look at those vitals.” Cathy glanced at her watch and then at the monitor beeping to my right.
“Blood pressure looks good,” she said, mouth never wavering from its terse line. “Heart rate is steady…everything looks normal. That’s a good sign.”
Yet her face said something entirely different. There was the faintest ghost of concern in her eyes, and while her mouth never twitched, her eyebrows were drawn together.
“Then I’m good to go?” I asked, calling her bluff.
She barked a laugh. “No, not yet. Everett—”
“It’s just Rhett,” I corrected.
“Rhett…what can you tell me about the hours before you and the rest of your family started showing symptoms?”
My heart squeezed at her words. Meadow and Valerie. I’d been so busy taking stock of things that I didn’t stop to think of them.
“Are they okay?” I asked, ignoring her question. “Meadow and Val? Are they awake? When can I see them?”
“Relax,” nurse Cathy soothed, laying a hand on my shoulder. “You need more rest before you can see them.”
“But they’re alright?” I asked desperately. Hardly a muscle twitched on her face, but I could tell something was wrong.
“I’ll ask the doctor to come in and speak with you, all right?” She smiled. “You have a cup of water here. It’s probably a few hours old now, but it should help your throat. Remember to sip slowly, you’ve been out for a while.”
She grabbed for the cup and placed it in my hands, bending the straw toward my mouth.
“How long is a while?” Wrapping my lips around the straw, I took several long swallows. It was tepid and stale tasting, but she was right, it did help to ease the ache ever so slightly.
“Almost a week,” she replied, fussing with my chart again. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with something that’ll help ease the pain.”
Her words were like static in my ears. A week. I’d been out for nearly a week. It seemed impossible, and yet…
With a sigh I took another sip from my cup, trying to wrap my head around everything I’d been told. I still didn’t know if Val and Meadow were all right, didn’t know if they were awake, if they’d even been unconscious to begin with. Fear wrapped its anxious fingers about my heart and squeezed until I thought it would burst. The last time I’d seen Meadow, she’d died. And even though it was brief, it didn’t exactly instill confidence in me. I didn’t want to think about losing her, couldn’t let my mind focus on the terrifying prospect. Yet sitting there, alone with nothing but my thoughts for company, I thought of little else. So, it was a great relief when nurse Cathy appeared with a doctor in tow.
“Rhett, this is Doctor Rushtin,” the nurse explained. “He’s going to go over some things with you, okay?”
I nodded, and the barb of pain in my skull reared its ugly head.
“Listen, Doctor,” I said, holding up a hand. “Before we talk about anything else I need to know that my wife and daughter are okay.”
Rushtin nodded, his face forming an easy smile. “They’re all right,” he confirmed. “But they aren’t awake yet.”
The news was a hard pill to swallow. I’d hoped I’d fared the worst of it, that Val and Meadow had pulled through and had an easier time of things. But I couldn’t have been farther from the truth.
“They’re both in comas,” Doctor Rushtin continued, “but they’re in stable condition. We’re hoping it’s temporary, like it was with you. Your waking up today is a very encouraging sign, and there’s a lot to be hopeful about right now. Sometimes, when the body is dangerously ill, it needs more time to heal. Being in a coma isn’t exactly ideal, but it does give their bodies time to do that.”
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked. “With me?”
Rushtin cleared his throat. “Truthfully, we don’t know.”
“What?”
The doctor sighed, folding his arms against his chest. “I wish we had more answers for you, Rhett, but I won’t stand here and lie to you. We’ve run a battery of tests on all of you—pneumonia, influenza, norovirus, bacterial infections—but everything we’ve tested for so far has come back negative.”
“How is that possible?” I spluttered. “Clearly something is wrong with us…could it be a parasite?”
“We’ve tested for all the major ones we often see from Mexico,” the doctor informed. “Plus a litany of other viruses and diseases. Hep B, Hep C, kidney failure…we’re just at a loss right now.”
The doctor pulled a chair from the opposite side of the room, scraping it along the floor to my bedside, and sat.
“Is there anything you can tell me about the last few weeks?” he asked. “Anything at all that might help us identify what could be triggering this illness?”
I thought back over the last few weeks, unsure of what to tell him. So much had happened, so much that I had tried to bury and forget. I wasn’t sure what I could say, what I should say to help him, but I knew that mentioning the cartel was a mistake.
“We went to Mexico,” I began. “Most of our time was spent on the resort, but we did venture out on an excursion. We went to some ruins, and then…”
I faltered. And then everything in our lives had changed. Flashes of blood came back to me then. Blood spattered against the ground, against Gael’s neck, against the fabric of my life. I recoiled from the thoughts as if I’d been burned, casting them aside. I didn’t want to see it all again, couldn’t relive it. For weeks my dreams were filled with nothing else, nothing but torturous sights and the silent promise that I would see it all again the next time I closed my eyes. It was always the same, with minor variations here and there. That is, until my last dream.
“Rhett?”
Rushtin’s voice called me back, and I glanced at him, hoping he wouldn’t see the ghosts in my eyes.
“Then we got lost in the jungle,” I managed.
“How long were you out there?” I could tell by the light in his eyes that the doctor’s interest was piqued.
“A few days. Less than a week, that I know for sure.”
He grabbed my chart and made a few quick notes, his eyes flickering back and forth between me and the page. “Did anything strange happen when you were out there?”
“Stranger than being stranded in the jungle in Mexico?” I asked. “We slept outside on the leaves of plants I don’t know the name of. We ate bugs when we could catch them, drank rainwater where we could find it. One of the last days we found a cenote and rested there. We drank and bathed and filled up our bottles and we used that water the rest of the way home. So…I would say all of it was pretty strange, comparatively speaking.”
Doctor Rushtin nodded to himself, tapping his chin with the pen. “And how much longer did you remain in Mexico, after you were found?”
“Two days. It took some time for us to get new plane tickets.” The doctor opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. “Look, doctor…if you’re going to ask me what I think caused this, I don’t know. All I can tell you is by the time we got back we were exhausted, dehydrated, dirty and frankly disgusted by some of the things we had to do to survive. I don’t wish that experience on anyone. Especially not now.”
“I know reliving this must be traumatic for you,” Rushtin said with a nod. “We’re done for now. Get some rest. I’ll get the nurses to run a few more tests. Would you consent to an MRI?”
I nodded. “If you think it’ll help. But I’m not sure what you’re expecting to find.”
“Maybe nothing,” he said, the shadow of a smile on his lips. “But it doesn’t hurt to be thorough. And since we don’t have much to go on right now, it might point us in the right direction.”
Rushtin moved to replace the chart at the end of my bed, pausing in the doorway. “It’s going to take time, Rhett. Your mind underwent as much trauma as your body. You don’t heal from that sort of thing overnight.”
I didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say. I watched him leave the room, and a black mood crept upon me. I doubted that I could be healed in this lifetime, let alone overnight. With a sigh, I swung my legs over the side of the bed. They felt weak. Useless. Stripped bare of the muscle that propped them up, they were nothing more than fragile skin and bone. Still, I needed to see them. To see Valerie, and Meadow. The need burned inside of me, stronger than the fear that gnawed on my insides. Maybe I couldn’t save them, but I could be there with them. I could speak comforting words. And maybe, just maybe, they would hear them.
Valerie’s room was quiet. The only noise came from the whisper and thunk of the oxygen machine at her bedside, and the pulsing beep of her monitors. I swallowed past the tightness in my throat, my eyes drawn irrevocably to her face. She was pale, so pale her skin might have been translucent. I could see the river of blue veins as they spread out across her arms and chest, up her neck and into the papery skin along her jaw. The hollows beneath her eyes were plagued by shadows, the burrows beneath her cheekbones like bruises.
I reached out, pushing a few strands of hair back from her forehead, and leaned forward to kiss her face. Her skin was warm against my lips, an avid reminder that she was still alive, even if she didn’t look it. Her ghostly face haunted me, and the longer I stared at it the sharper the ache in my chest became.
“I’m sorry, Val,” I whispered, lips still pressed against her cheek. “If I had known this would happen, I never would have—”
My voice cracked then, and a sob escaped with it. My fingers trembled as I traced the curves of her face, trailing down the smoothness of her neck and shoulder until I held her hand in mine. Even now, she was remarkable to me.
“Come back to me, sweetheart. I…I can’t do this without you. You’re the tough one.” I sobbed a laugh, tears spilling over my cheeks. “You’re the one who always knows what to say. You’re the one that holds this whole damn family together. So you have to come back to me, Valerie. I’m nothing without you.”
She lay there, unmoving, her body still save for the gentle rise and fall of her chest. Wiping the wetness from my face, I sighed and stood. Much as I wanted to stay there with her, I could already feel my strength waning. I knew if I stayed any longer, I wouldn’t have the chance to see Meadow before my eventual collapse.
With one last squeeze of her hand, I left her room and headed further down the hall. Meadow’s room was two doors away, an immense kindness, given my weakened state. Seeing Valerie laying there in her bed, unable to move or speak had been a torment. But it was nothing compared to the torrent of heartache I felt looking at Meadow.
She seemed so small, laying there amidst the pile of white blankets. Her face was a pale imitation of her former self, one sunken with hunger and devoid of life. She was nothing without her wide smile and soft eyes.
“Baby girl,” I said, sitting next to her on the bed. “Daddy’s here.”
Her hand was small in mine, smaller than I remembered. It was limp and skeletal, like all the life it once possessed had long been eaten away. I tried to swallow back the tears, tried to be strong for her, even if she couldn’t see it. To know that she was suffering, to see with my own eyes just how sickly she was, that was a fresh sort of hell.
“We’re going to get you through this Meadow,” I said, forcing a smile to my face. “I promise you, I will do whatever it takes to get you back. I don’t know how, but I won’t stop until you’re better. You and mom.”
We sat there in silence for a while as I tried to memorize her face. I counted every freckle, examined every curve of her cheeks and chin. She was older somehow, or maybe I just remembered her as a little girl. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a woman, no matter how I wanted to fight it. She was strong in her own right.
“You have to fight, Meadow. You have to fight like your life depends on it. For all I know, it does. Whatever this thing is, it’s got a strong hold on you. But you’re stronger. So, fight, kiddo. And I’ll be here, fighting with you.”
Leaning forward, I kissed her forehead. “I love you. If you can hear anything, I hope you hear that.”
—
Once I was back in my room, I let the exhaustion win. Keeping it at bay had been a herculean effort, but I had nothing left in me to give. I collapsed on the bed, curling my legs against my chest, and closed my eyes. It was hard not to descend into the world of darkness that waited for me. Terrifying thoughts of death lingered there, just behind my eyes, and tired as I was, I used the last vestiges of strength to dispel them. I wouldn’t give in to the idea that Val and Meadow were doomed, wouldn’t toy with thoughts of their demise. They were all I had left in this world, and I wouldn’t entertain the notion that they could simply disappear.
A thought occurred to me then, as I wavered in the empty space between wakefulness and sleep.
Adaline and Hannah…
I hardly had time to think their names before I stumbled over the precipice and into the abyss of dreams. But I know they stayed with me, and I knew when I awoke, I would find out what happened to them, too.
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