I have a computer, sort of. It’s the one Dad got back when Tess was sixteen. I got it when she went away to col ege, and by then it was stil sleek-looking but bordering on outdated. Now it’s basical y useless, and the hard drive that Tess careful y wiped clean, her “gift” to me (“It’s just like new, almost!”) churns whenever I turn it on, and if I open more than one program, it freezes.
Tess had a job at col ege, filing papers for some archive project the library was doing. The school gave al incoming freshmen laptops, but Tess saved her money and got a nicer one, and part of me wants it.
I could use it for just a little while, until she wakes up. I could experience being able to write papers without having to save them every ten seconds, look something up online without wondering if the browser wil be able to show the whole page.
I turn her computer on, and am met with a password screen. I didn’t expect that, but I guess it’s something you have to do in col ege.
I try Tess’s birthday: month-day-year.
Nothing.
I try it backward.
Nothing again.
I try her name, then Beth’s name and everyone else she’d ever talked about from col ege, al the guys smiling at her in the pictures she’d brought home.
Stil nothing.
“Abby?” Dad says, and I freeze, fingers hovering over the keyboard, but he doesn’t ask me anything else, just says, “I was out for a walk. I used to—I haven’t gone on a long walk in ages.”
He comes over and picks up the pictures lying next to the laptop. “She looks—doesn’t Tess look happy?”
I nod, a little frightened by the intense and yet somehow lost look on his face.
“I hope she was,” he says, looking down at the pictures.
“Is,” I say, and he blinks at me.
“She is happy,” I continue. “That’s who Tess is. She’s happy, she’s pretty, and everyone likes being around her. Just look at the photos. She’s happy. That’s Tess.”
“Her fingernails match her outfit,” he says, and I look closer, see that they are the same pinky-red as her shirt.
“Just like Mom.”
“Just like Mom,” he says. “When she was in high school, her best friend, Lauren, would talk about that sometimes, about how Katie always made sure her nails matched her outfits.”
“You used to talk about Mom’s nails with her best friend? The Lauren Mom talks to al the time?”
“I used to—I dated Lauren,” he says quietly. “Back before—wel , a long time ago. Before your mom and I real y knew each other.”
“Oh,” I say, because what else can I say? I don’t know what’s weirder, that Dad went out with Mom’s best friend before he dated Mom, or that I’m finding it out now, in the middle of the night.
The fact that Dad dated Mom’s best friend is definitely weirder. I mean, Lauren? She’s come to visit before, with her husband, Evan, and their kids and everything. And I never even guessed that … I mean, Dad? And Lauren? If Tess knew, she’d freak out.
Tess. She’d know what to do now, what to say. Shocked or not—and she would be—she’d appreciate this moment for something, while I—I don’t even know what to say.
I settle for “I’m going back to bed,” and start to head to my room.
“Did you real y see her move her eyes?” Dad asks.
I stop and look back at him.
“Yes.”
“So you think—you think she can wake up?”
I nod, surprised he’s even asking this. It’s not like you can fake a coma, and Tess has so much to live for. The pictures he holds are proof of that, of Tess leading the life she’s always had: easy, ful . Happy. “Don’t you?”
“I’d do anything to have her come back to us.”
“I know,” I say. “And she wil . I mean, this is Tess, Dad.”
He smiles, and I slip away, go to bed. I don’t sleep though, and it’s a long time before Dad leaves Tess’s room, almost daylight, and I wonder what he saw in those pictures that had him asking the things he did. I wonder if there are things I’m not seeing.
I got out of school early. My last two classes were canceled so we could al sit through an assembly about improving our academic performance, and there was no way I was sticking around for that.
It’s too early for Eli to be here, but I look for him anyway. I don’t see him, and why should I?
I remind myself of that when I’m disappointed.
If only I could wire my brain to think the way it should, instead of the way it does.
I head up to see Tess, but when I’m buzzed in to the unit I stop, frozen, and stare into Tess’s room.
Beth is there. Beth, who hasn’t come to see Tess since before classes started up again, and when she left the last time, something about the look on her face, a sort of bitter sadness, made me think she was never coming
