A middle-aged nurse on her rounds looked into Jennifer’s bay and observed her sitting upright in bed and crying while seemingly talking to herself.
Jennifer’s bed complained a little as the heavy-set nurse sat next to her. She smiled warmly and put one of her thick arms around Jennifer. “OK, take it easy,” she comforted. “You need to lie down. Rest in the first forty-eight hours is critical to your recovery, so I’m going to bring you something to help you sleep. I’ll be right back.”
Jennifer nodded in response to the words, but her eyes were on John the entire time. She waited for the nurse to be out of earshot before she asked fearfully, “What if you stay like this, John?”
“You mean watching you go ahead with your life, meeting someone new, eventually having a family . . . and me seeing everything I’m missing out on? No, wait . . . I can’t even do that because you’ll see me watching you. That would be weird.”
“And creepy,” she added, trying to hold back fresh tears.
The nurse returned before Jennifer could say anything more. She was given a pill to swallow and the woman sat with her, waiting for it to take effect. Jennifer could see John in the corner of her eye and turned to look at him.
The nurse frowned. “Don’t fight it,” she said. “Sleep is the best medicine for you now. I’ll be looking in on you just to make sure you’re fine.”
But Jennifer couldn’t help but look because John had started to move around excitedly.
“I didn’t show you all the cool things, I can do now,” John said, his tone brightening as he made his hand disappear into the wall, then his arm, and finally the rest of his body.
She waited in anticipation for him to reappear, ignoring the nurse’s concerns over her sudden interest in what seemed to be a plain wall. But just as he re-emerged from the wall, with that same roguish grin that she adored, her eyes closed.
John thought about lying down and sleeping on the floor next to Jennifer’s bed, just to be close to her, but he couldn’t trust himself not to sink through it. It was that feeling of sinking that had roused him from his previous sleep in the waiting area of the ICU. When he awoke, his father and Donovan had gone and, according to the clock on the wall, only an hour had passed. He had felt less than fully regenerated—just as he would have done after so short a nap in the real world. He had gone to see Jennifer all the same, but now he was in desperate need of more rest. He decided to get to the basement as quickly as he could. At least there, if he sank through the floor, the earth would only be a few inches beneath to support him. He would see her again in the morning. Perhaps her father would know something more about the attack, he thought, recalling her father’s seemingly good relationship with the detective.
Fifteen minutes later, John was back in the same basement storeroom where he had met the old man, except the spirit was nowhere to be seen. His risk in taking the elevator had paid off; he had managed to summon the several seconds of intense concentration required not to fall through the floor and saved himself a slow walk down six flights of stairs. He didn’t know what would have happened to him if he’d fallen through an open elevator shaft, but he figured it wouldn’t have been good.
He lay resting on the storeroom floor, confident that the dirt below it would support him should he start to sink through the slab while asleep. He wondered if all coma patients went through what he was going through and why, as Jennifer had pointed out, did only some of them recover? How did they rejoin their bodies and return to the living? What was their secret? Did they pass some sort of test? He was far from religious, but something from his strict Catholic school education in Dublin had obviously stuck with him as he couldn’t shake his previous feeling that, to reverse all this, he would have to do something good. Something that would show a higher power that he was worthy of returning to the living. He figured the attack must be somehow connected. It was, after all, what had thrown him into this nightmare. Perhaps if he found the killer, the motive, he would get a clue as to what he should do. John shook his head slightly and wondered briefly if he was going mad. As incredible as his theory sounded, it was no more incredible than what he was experiencing, and he was desperate to try something—anything. Before drifting off, his final devastating thought was that he might never again be close to Jennifer.
Four
The next morning, Jennifer was woken by what seemed to be bursts of orange light passing through her eyelids. Nervously, she opened them. She saw nothing more than sunlight flashing through gaps between the vertical blinds of her hospital room window as they gently swayed, like corn in a field, in the air blown in from the ventilation grille above. She saw around her plain white walls and utilitarian furniture. Everything looked sterile, cold, anonymous. There was no faint orange glow lurking. This was reality, and it comforted her. She convinced herself that she must have dreamt seeing John.
She felt a soft hand on the side of her head and flinched. Cautiously rolling over, she was relieved to see her parents. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” she rasped.
“Thank God! You can see and talk!” her mother said before shooting her father a brief, accusatory stare that said the entire situation was all his fault.
He deftly avoided the scowl and leaned in; she could see his expression change from initial relief to one of concern. “I know
