“Go home,” she said, like she was giving him a prescription. “I’ll call you if there is any change at all.” Simon looked at her name tag again: Libby Marks.
SIMON WAS SURPRISED by how dark it was outside. The snow had stopped and the streets were now plowed. There were sled tracks on the road where the kids must have played. Someone had made a series of snow angels, all the figures looking as if they might take flight.
He didn’t realize how cold he was until he was back in their apartment, and as soon as he saw the empty wine bottles, two of them, he flung them in the trash. He couldn’t sit still, couldn’t keep the image of their drinking out of his mind. And those pills.
To stay sane, he’d have to get busy. He cleaned the whole place, attacking the bathroom and then the kitchen. He did laundry, changing their sheets, trying not to think about what was happening only a few blocks away.
He was wiping down all the surfaces when he noticed the message light on his phone. He picked it up to listen. The first call was Kevin, wanting to know how Stella was. Kevin told him that they got lucky, that they’d all been bumped to an LA flight the next day, and he wanted to know if Simon and Stella could make that.
Simon shook his head. What the fuck was wrong with Kevin, asking that? How could he go now? He’d have to call Kevin. He’d have to call Stella’s and his friends. And then he’d call his parents. He’d also call her mother, Bette, who lived in Spain. He hadn’t been around her much. He’d talked to her on the phone every Sunday when Stella called her, but he didn’t really know her. What would this news do to her? Tomorrow, he thought. I’ll call her then. Tomorrow, when he was supposed to be getting on a plane with the band and going to California. Tomorrow, which was supposed to be the start of his whole new life.
ALL THAT NIGHT, despite Libby’s warnings, Simon stayed on the internet. Coma was an ugly word. He remembered that cheesy old horror film with Michael Douglas and what was her name, the pretty French actress—Genevieve Bujold—lying on a gurney about to be put under permanently. He thought of that book, Girlfriend in a Coma. Like it was something funny, and the whole idea of that made him feel crushed.
He clicked on another link. A fireman had been in a coma for a decade and he woke up speaking Mandarin, then quit his job to teach the language at Stanford. Another man came out of a coma after only a week, but his memory skittered around like a ball in a pinball machine.
Simon studied articles on the brain. Neuroplasticity could make the brain reroute signals and operations, but the personality could change. A person who has gone into a coma could come out completely different.
Simon called the hospital. “Stella Davison,” he said.
“Are you family?”
He couldn’t risk telling them that they weren’t married, so he lied. “Yes,” he said.
“Stable,” a voice said, but what did that even mean? He shut his eyes, but when he started to drift off, he bolted awake. If he slept, would he wake up?
It was four in the morning, but he dialed Kevin.
“What the fuck,” Kevin said.
“You know I can’t leave right now,” Simon said. “You know that. Not for a while.”
Kevin sighed deeply. “Fuck, man. We need you.”
“I need her,” Simon said sharply.
“You know what I mean—”
“Look, if we get the tour, I can be there when things calm down here,” Simon said. “When they get back to normal. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He picked up a pen and drew a series of x’s on the paper. “Did you find a bassist?” He wanted and didn’t want to know.
There was a funny silence. “Yeah. We got someone. A young guy, and he’s good.”
“You told Rick Mason?” He squinched his eyes shut, just imagining. Was Rick mad? Or even worse, did he not care?
“He’s sad about it for you, but he’s also cool with it. He’s a good guy. He knows things can change.”
“You’ll let me know how it goes?”
“We’ll call you from the coast. We’ll keep calling you. Write us some new songs so you stay in the loop.” Kevin hung up, but Simon sat there, the phone pressed against his cheek.
HE COULDN’T SLEEP after the call. He stayed up watching whatever was on TV, unable to concentrate. When he went to visit Stella later that morning, he took her iPod, which was full of songs. The faster he could get her better, the faster normal life could resume. He found her alone in the room, attached to a ventilator, a breathing tube snaking out of her mouth. He forced himself to keep his eyes open, to make his body stop quaking. He turned on the music, and there he was, singing to her, but she stayed motionless.
Libby, her fiery red hair tamed into a braid, whisked in. She nodded at him and he felt suddenly embarrassed about the music. “I read that it helps,” he said, and she waved a hand.
“It does. Sometimes.” She glanced at the machines, tapping her finger on the IV. “Her numbers went down and that’s what you want.” Libby tilted her head for a moment at the iPod. It was playing “You First,” a song he had written for Stella after their first date. He had so wanted her to like him, had wanted to impress her. He had stayed up all night writing it for her, aching for her.
“I always liked that song,” Libby said. “I remember it on Pandora.”
He waited, wondering if she was going to ask him about his music, but she was ignoring him. She didn’t know who he was other than Stella’s partner. She said nothing more and then glided out of the room.
However, when he walked out of the room, everyone at the hospital suddenly seemed to know who he was. A doctor passed by and nodded encouragingly at him. When he sat in the waiting room, staring into space, a nurse came in and handed him a cup of tea. “You need it,” she told him. He was so grateful and lonely he wanted to tug her down to sit with him. Who did he really have now? His parents were old and living in a Florida retirement community. His father had a bad heart and disapproved of Simon and his life decisions. His mother had diabetes and went along with anything his father said.
He walked back into Stella’s room. A new doctor was there with two metal pots, striking one against the other with a loud clang. “What are you doing?” Simon cried. The doctor moved closer to Stella and did it again, and then he placed the pots on Stella’s chest. “Wake up!” he shouted. “Wake up!” The doctor’s face furrowed. “Stella, wake up!”
“Who are you?” Simon said.
“Dr. Alberson. The neurologist. One of the team.”
The doctor turned to Simon. “Sorry,” he said, and his voice was so soft that Simon had to lean forward to hear it. “Sometimes it works to stimulate the person by assaulting their senses,” he said. “We never know what might work, so it’s beneficial to try everything. Strong smells. Loud sounds. Cold. Heat.” Then he picked up the pots and left the room. Simon leaned over Stella. “Wake up,” he said gently.
While the doctors were racing around, brusque in their actions, the nurses seemed more compassionate. Stella had always told him that the one thing she loved about being a nurse was her interaction with patients. “You get to really know people,” she said. Doctors might see a patient for five minutes, but nurses were in and out of the room all day. An obstetrician would deliver the baby, but that would be the end of the doctor’s impact on the baby’s day-to-day life. It was the nurses who fed the infants, wheeled them in to be with the mothers. The joke was that most of the doctors could identify a child by his sonogram but not by a face.