Page 10

10

The Worst Happens, Then Worse

A doctor, three nurses, and a young man on a career path that could not easily be determined crowded around the bed, working with dramatic flair to bring Ernie back to life. The paddles of a manual defibrillator were applied—“Clear!” the doctor announced—and then again, and a third time. “Clear! Clear!” An injection of something or other was administered, followed by an injection of something else. Eyelids were peeled back, stethoscopes were applied, and other actions were taken with an air of urgency shared by everyone, quite like a scene from an episode of Grey’s Anatomy , though without the strain of troubled personal relationships and extreme sexual tension among those laboring so heroically on this resuscitation team.

Ernie did not share their urgency. Eventually his stillness quieted those attending him, and a professional sadness overcame them. As they disconnected their patient from all the devices that had failed to keep him alive, they favored the gathered friends with compassionate so-it-goes looks and with murmured condolences. Then they went away to save someone less determined to be deceased.

Tears gathered in Rebecca’s eyes. They were genuine tears, not conjured with a tear stick or a slice of onion, not the product of superior acting talent (though she had a little of that). She loved Ernie, her amigo, and the sight of him lying there as white as the bedsheets was intolerable. However, her tears did not spill down her cheeks, and she didn’t sob, because suddenly she knew that Ernie was not really dead.

“He’s not really dead,” she whispered at the very moment that Bobby and Spencer whispered the same words, as if they were a Greek chorus informing an audience of a significant dramatic detail that everyone needed to know but that the action alone might not have properly conveyed.

No word other than stupefaction could describe their fraught expressions. In a case like this, the apt definition of stupefaction is usually the second entry in most dictionaries—“overwhelming amazement,” stunned disbelief of an emotionally charged nature.

“Back in the day,” Bobby recalled, “the people we knew who were in comas, they just woke up. Didn’t they just wake up? I sure don’t remember them dying, then waking up. I don’t like this seeming-to-be-dead phase. Especially when it’s Ernie.”

More bewildered than his amigos at having heard himself declare Ernie was not dead, Spencer said, “People in comas? I don’t ... I didn’t remember people in comas until you mentioned them. I don’t remember who they were, or where or why. But, by God, there were people in comas, weren’t there? More than a few of them.”

Rebecca went to the door and closed it, lest they be overheard. “On the phone this morning, Bobby and I were remembering people in comas. We don’t know who they were or why they were in comas, but we encountered more than a few of them back in the day. I can sort of see them, you know, in my mind’s eye. They were creepy.”

Just then everything got creepier when the door opened and Britta Hernishen entered the room.