Page 6 of The Sandy Page Bookshop

Lucy

The smell at Spaulding Rehab was different from the hospital’s smell, but not by much. As the sliding doors whooshed open, welcoming them into the lobby’s frigid interior, Lucy blinked beneath the fluorescent lighting. “Did you bring the book?” her mother asked again.

She held it up.

“Oh good!” her mother chirped. Her father said nothing.

It had been almost three weeks since the accident and just days since Ella had been transferred to Spaulding Rehab. The rehabilitation center was located on the Cape, in East Sandwich, closer to home and less foreboding than the dark beeping corridors of the hospital unit in Boston.

“She’s ready to go,” Dr. Kapoor had told the family, the day Ella was transferred. He’d smiled reassuringly, something he’d not done in the early days that followed the accident.

From the first frenzied visit to the ER, Lucy’s parents had allowed her in each room.

They let her listen in on all the conversations with the doctors, nurses and specialists, ask whatever questions she had.

On the one hand there was no way they could have kept her out, but on the other hand it was a dubious privilege.

Perhaps there was such a thing as knowing too much.

Because then you didn’t just know what to hope for, you knew what was at stake.

The pounding on the front door had begun at one-thirty in the morning. It was followed by the sound of her parents’ voices and a commotion in the hallway. Her mother appeared, illuminated by a slice of light from the doorway kneeling beside her bed. “Baby, your father and I have to go.”

“Where? It’s late.”

“It’s Ella.”

She did not need to hear anything more. “I’m coming,” Lucy had insisted, slipping into shorts, tugging a T-shirt over her head. There was no time to argue.

There had been an accident. On the eternal drive to the hospital in Hyannis, her parents whispered in urgent tones, like she wasn’t sitting right there in the back seat.

Like she couldn’t hear them. But she did.

The car accident was on Shore Road. The car belonged to a boy named Jep Parsons.

Ella was with him in the car and had been taken to Hyannis.

As she watched the dark scrubby brush flash by along Route 6, all Lucy could think of was the way Ella had looked when she went out that night.

Radiant, like she was certain the night ahead held something special.

“Jep and I are going to Aly’s party,” she’d gushed, ruffling Lucy’s hair before sailing out the door.

There had been so many graduation parties that summer already.

Their parents, normally strict through high school, had given up the fight.

Ella was eighteen, thriving, headed to Tufts in the fall.

They’d all made it. Or so they had thought.

Striding through Cape Cod Hospital’s ER doors, there was no sign of Jep or his family. The nurse at the front desk kept asking Lucy’s father to please sit down. Finally, a doctor ushered them back and into a dark room that did not contain the one person they were desperate to lay eyes on.

“Where is she?” Lucy’s parents kept begging. The doctor’s words were no comfort. CAT scan. Subdural hematoma. Boston MedFlight.

They would not be seeing Ella; she was already being prepped for air ambulance transfer.

“Comatose is a somewhat misleading term,” Dr. Kapoor had explained, what seemed like a lifetime later in the ICU at Boston.

“It may be more helpful to think of the patient as hovering between conscious states.” While her parents tried to take comfort in this medical explanation, Lucy did not.

Staring at her sister’s tanned motionless arms against the white sheets, she saw no hovering.

Every bright element of Ella’s being had been frozen, paused.

Her long dark hair fanned around her lovely face like an angel’s halo.

But beyond the sight of her, where was Ella?

That was three weeks ago. Three mind-numbing weeks. During that time, Ella had been moved from ICU to acute care to rehabilitation at Mass General in Boston. Only now had she returned once more to the Cape; but it was still not home.

Lucy and her parents had trailed her from facility to facility, room to room in a distraught pilgrimage.

Along the way the status of urgency changed, as did the faces of the doctors and caregivers.

Eventually Ella’s responsiveness did, too.

After a week, she began to make small noises in her throat and could squeeze your fingers, if weakly, when you held her hand.

The first time it happened, the family was there.

Lucy was reading aloud, her parents beside her.

“Here,” her mother said, rising from her chair to stretch at one point.

They’d been sitting for hours. “Hold her hand,” she told Lucy’s father.

Lucy had looked up from the page as they switched seats, her father’s face as expressionless as Ella’s.

It irked Lucy, and it felt unfair, as if he were leaving the burden of all the feelings to her and her mother.

Her mother had gone to the window to look out, and Lucy had resumed reading.

It took a moment before she heard the strange sound beside her and realized where it was coming from.

When she turned, she saw the tears streaming down her father’s cheeks.

She followed his startled gaze to his hand, gripping Ella’s.

His voice was hoarse with lack of use, but her mother spun around from the window as if knowing.

“She’s awake,” her father cried. “I felt her squeeze my hand.” A couple days later Ella’s eyelids began to flutter and open for brief periods. One rainy afternoon the nurses called them at home: Ella had begun tracking people with her eyes.

Her mother had actually cried and kissed Dr. Kapoor on the cheek when they left Mass General a week later.

“She’s ready,” the doctor assured them. “She’s recovering as well as we could hope.

” Try as she might, Lucy did not share his belief.

Despite the time passing and the purported states of consciousness Ella moved through, Lucy did not see the huge progress they proclaimed.

It felt like her sister was never really coming back.

Today, the occupational therapist was in the room when they arrived. “Oh, hello!” Judy looked like she had just graduated from college, and her constant good cheer grated on Lucy’s nerves. She’d have made a great kindergarten teacher. “Ella and I are just finishing up. She had a super session.”

Different hospital, same lies. Lucy stared at Ella, lying in the bed, eyes closed.

Even though they fluttered open these days, it made no difference.

The doctors had assured the family that Ella was emerging and had become responsive.

More lies. Not once had Ella looked at any one of them with recognition. Not one word had she uttered.

Lucy dropped the book on the table and fell into a chair as Judy updated her parents.

Outside the bank of windows the sky was cloudless, bright; the perfect summer day.

Normally both parents would be at the Shoreline Suites, the little motel the family owned and operated.

Summer was high season. Some nights her father slept there, in a cramped office behind the reception area, because guests needed things at all hours.

Her parents took turns working reception.

Her father managed the property, and her mother cleaned the rooms. It was hard work, the kind of job people called a burnout business because it was day and night, seven days a week.

Her parents were worn to the bone, but neither ever complained.

Nor did they let their daughters work there.

“Dad, I don’t mind. I need the money,” Ella had told her father.

“No. Go into town. Pick a gallery. A shop. A nice restaurant. Something else.” Their father didn’t even like them coming by the motel to drop off lunch or say hello.

“What’s the big deal? Is he ashamed of us or something?” Ella had joked.

“He’s not ashamed,” their mother whispered to Ella later. “Of the motel or you girls. It’s because he inherited it from his parents and felt he had to take it on. He wants more for you.”

Secretly, Lucy was relieved their parents didn’t want the girls working at the motel.

It was spotless and well kept and comfortable, but there was a sadness about it, too.

It was low-slung and dark, set off the side of Route 28; the kind of place you could drive right past without noticing.

Most people preferred the fancier inns on Main Street, or the resort on Shore Road.

Ella had the most fun job of them all lined up that summer, working at one of the boutiques in town where she got to wear all the cute shop dresses in bright coastal prints.

Otherwise the sisters would be at one of the beaches, meeting up with friends and soaking up the sun.

At fifteen, it was the first summer Lucy planned to get a job of her own. But now all that had changed.

Lucy watched Judy go over the exercises with Ella from across the room.

Ella’s limbs were like a rag doll’s as Judy gently manipulated them, exclaiming all the time about how much progress Ella was making.

Who were they kidding? There would be no running down the beach or diving into the surf.

There would be no afternoons of boogie boarding that they’d looked forward to all winter.

Ella was unable to sit up, to lift her arm, to bend her leg.

Lucy wanted to scream at them all: What are you talking about? She’s not getting better.