They raced Ellie to Columbia-Presbyterian’s burn center and into its hyperbaric oxygen chamber. For a while the city’s Administration for Children’s Services was all over Beth and me, but video monitoring around the park showed Ellie in no distress at the Balto statue, so they eventually let us be.
No one ever figured out the origin of her burns. I mentioned the sound in the Sheep Meadow that only Ellie could hear as a possible source, but this earned me suspicious looks that I knew would eventually graduate to questions about my fitness as a mother if I persisted, so I zipped my lips.
The burn center—officially the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center—wasn’t in Washington Heights at the main Columbia-Pres location, but on East Sixty-eighth Street, not too many blocks from our Airbnb place. Way east. Past York Avenue. Any farther on and it would have been floating on the East River.
I stayed there for days straight. Not that I had much choice at first, what with the predicted “Snowmageddon” blizzard shutting down the city, but I wasn’t leaving Ellie’s side until I knew she was going to live.
Finally they gave me the word that her blood pressure and other vital signs had stabilized. The big danger now was sepsis. If they could keep her burns free from infection, she’d make it, although she faced a very long road to recovery.
I extended the Airbnb rental to six months and made the walk back and forth to York Avenue every day. The regular exercise and eating hospital caf food left no mystery as to why I lost weight. Not so Ellie’s burns, however. The mystery of how they healed without scars was never solved. No one could explain it, just as no one could explain her extended coma either. She had no brain damage, her brain waves were perfectly normal, yet none of the hotshot neurologists could bring her out of it.
Nor could they explain the strange proclamations she’d occasionally shout out at the top of her lungs.
Twilight has come…night will follow…
That was a favorite of hers. We heard it over and over.
It will begin in the heavens and end in the Earth was another fave, sometimes—but not always—followed by, But before that, the rules will be broken.
Winter passed and spring arrived without her knowledge, and then, on May 14, nineteen weeks after falling into a coma, Ellie opened her eyes and spoke.
I called Bess and she cried when she heard the news. She said she’d be up right after a seminar.
When the initial hubbub attendant to Ellie’s awakening passed, they let me back in to see her. I took her hand and she stared at me with those not-Ellie eyes.
“I have to get home,” she said in a perfectly clear voice. “I have something I must do.”
“I hope you don’t mean home to Missouri,” I said. “You’re not finished here. You need lots of rehab to tone up your muscles. You haven’t used them in months and they’re weak.”
She gave my hand a painful squeeze. “Does that feel weak? I don’t need rehab; I need out of here. I don’t need our home home, the apartment will do fine, but I need to build.”
“Build what?”
“A shelter.”
“I don’t understand.” And I didn’t. Truly.
“You will,” she said with a disturbing finality.
I tried to talk about what had gone on in the world while she was out of it, but she didn’t care.
“It doesn’t matter, Mother,” she said. Mother…the unfamiliar word from Ellie’s lips gave me the creeps. “None of it matters. Twilight has come. Night will follow. That’s all we need to know.”
“You’ve been saying that for months. What does it mean? I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
The bed was needed for a fireman recovering from burns, so they came to move Ellie to a semi-private room. I took the opportunity to step out for a bite to eat. I’d been making an occasional stop at this sushi place on First Avenue, so I walked there, hoping it was open on a Sunday. It was. I ordered a nigiri platter and had a second glass of wine to celebrate Ellie’s recovery. I felt as if I should be celebrating. I figured I was supposed to. After all, my daughter was back from a coma, wasn’t she?
But was it my daughter?
Of course it was, I told myself. How could it be anyone else?
The sudden, unexpected release of the unbearable strain of all these months had me imagining things.
Yes. That sounded good.
I wished I could have believed a single word of it.
Of course the strain of not knowing if she’d ever wake up had been crushing. I mean, how could these doctors bring her back to consciousness if none of them could say why she was unconscious?
Well, she was conscious now—or at least someone was conscious. But that change in her eyes…it sounds so tenuous, so vapid, so insubstantial, so stupid when I put it into words, but a mother knows her daughter, and that girl in the hospital…nope…not my Ellie.
I finished my half-dozen sushi pieces and stepped out into the spring air. As I started back toward the medical center I saw a teenager walking toward me. Something so familiar about her gait. And then I realized…
“Ellie! What—?”
“Oh, hello, Mother.” Calm, collected, and as cool as can be. “I told you I had to get out of there.”
She didn’t even pause as she came abreast of me, just kept walking. She had Blanky tied around her neck like a cape.
“But where…?” I pointed to her bare feet and baggy jeans and Hofstra T-shirt.
“Borrowed from my new roommate. She won’t miss them for a while.”
I fell into step beside her. “But what about rehab?”
“Do I look like I need rehab?”
I had to admit to myself that she didn’t. She’d lost weight during the ordeal—we both had—but I’d had excess pounds to lose, not her.
“But the doctors—”
“—can pound salt. I—oooh, looky here.”
She stopped short and stared at a pair of garbage cans filled with carpentry scraps sitting
