Life Blood --III---Page 11

presumably set adrift somewhere upriver, left for dead. She was now in a coma, resting at Jackson's "Jesus es el Hombre" clinic, also located deep in the northwest Peten rain forest. He had no idea who she was.

Lou rented a car and drove there, almost a day on unpaved roads. It was Sarah.

Thus she was no longer missing; she was now the apparent
victim of an attempted murder. However, rather than being
helpful, the local policia appeared annoyed she'd been found,
thereby reopening the matter. A blond gringa was out hiking
somewhere she had no business being in the first place and
tripped and hit her head on something. Where's the crime?
        Lou brought her back to New York, using a medevac plane
supplied by the State Department, which, wanting no more CIA-
type scandals of American nationals being murdered in
Guatemala, cooperated with great dispatch.
        After that, he needed a job that would afford him time
flexibility, so he could be at her bedside as much as possible.
David was looking for a security head, and I realized it would be a
perfect match. Since we didn't really need a full-time person, Lou
could spend a lot of hours at Lenox Hill, watching over Sarah.
        She was just lying there now, no sign of consciousness, her
body being kept alive with IV I'd go by to visit her as much as I
could, and almost as bad as seeing the comatose Sarah was
seeing the grief in Lou's eyes. He would sit there at the hospital
every day, sometimes several hours a day, fingering an old
engraved locket that carried her high-school graduation picture,
just rubbing it through his fingers like a rosary. We always made
allowances when he wanted to take time off during one of our
shooting schedules, figuring maybe he was helping her. . .
        As I turned east, to go crosstown, I thought again about
Sarah's condition. She and I looked a lot alike, dense blond hair
for one thing, but to see her now you'd scarcely know it, since
hers had been clipped down to nothing by the hospital. Her
cheekbones, however, were still strong, a quality now
exaggerated by her emaciated state, and her eyes, which I had
not seen in years, were a deep languid, turquoise blue. But seeing
her lying there inert, being kept alive with tubes and liquids,
wearing pressure pants to help circulate blood through her legs,
you'd scarcely realize she'd been a strikingly beautiful woman
before the accident.

What's worse, from what I knew, the horrific brain traumas

that bring on a coma don't automatically go away when you regain
consciousness. If the coma is the result of a head injury, and if it
lasts more than a few days, the chances of regaining all your
mental functions are up for grabs. Lou once said there's a scale of
eight stages to full recovery. People who have short comas can
sometimes come out of them and go through those stages
quickly—from initial eye movement to full mental faculties. Others,
who've been under for months or longer can require years to
come back. Sometimes they can only blink their eyes to answer
questions; sometimes they babble on incessantly. They can talk
sense, or they can talk nonsense, incoherent fantasies, even
strings of numbers. The brain is a complex, unpredictable thing. . .
        I always thought about this as I took the elevator up to Lenox
Hill's third floor. The room where they kept Sarah was painted a
pale, sterile blue, and made even more depressing by stark
fluorescent lights. Everything was chrome and baked-on enamel,
including the instruments whose CRT screens reported her bodily
functions. None of the instruments, however, had ever shown the
brain activity associated with consciousness.

Lou was there when I walked in. He had a kind of wildness in his eyes, maybe what you get when you mix hope with despair. We hugged each other and he said, "She had a moment, Morgy. She knew me. I'm sure she did."

Then he told me in detail what had happened. A nurse

passing Sarah's room had happened to notice an unexpected

flickering on one of her monitors. She'd immediately informed the nurses' station, where instructions included Lou's home number.
        He'd grabbed a cab and raced there. When he got to her
room, he pushed his way past the Caribbean nurses and bent
over her, the first time he had hoped a conversation with her
would be anything but a monologue.

"Honey, can you hear me?"

There was no sign, save the faint flicker of an eyelid. It was enough. His own pulse rocketed.

"Where's the damned doctor?"

While the physician was being summoned, he had a chance to study her. Yes, there definitely was some movement behind her eyelids. And her regular breathing had become less measured, as though she were fighting to overcome her autonomic nervous
system and challenge life on her own.

Finally an overworked Pakistani intern arrived. He proceeded
to fiddle with the monitors, doing something Lou did not
understand. Then without warning—and certainly attributable to
nothing the physician did—Sarah opened her eyes.
        Lou, who had not seen those eyes for several years, caught
himself feasting on their rich, aquatic blue. He looked into them,
but they did not look back. They were focused on infinity, adrift in
a lost sea of their own making. They stared at him a moment, then
vanished again behind her eyelids.

He told me all this and then his voice trailed off, his despair returning. . .

"Lou, it's a start. Whatever happens is bound to be slow. But

this could be the beginning. . .    ."

We both knew what I was saying was perilously close to

wishful thinking, but nobody in the room was under oath. For the moment, though, she was back in her coma, as though nothing had changed.

I waited around until eight o'clock, when I finally convinced myself that being there was not doing anybody any good. Lou, I later learned, stayed on till well past eleven, when they finally had to send security to evict him.

Okay, I've been holding out on the most important detail. The
truth is, I hardly knew what to make of it. At one point when I was
bending over Sarah's seemingly unconscious face, her eyes had
clicked open for just a fleeting moment, startling me the way those
horror movies do when the "un-dead" suddenly come alive. Lou
was in his chair and didn't see it, didn't notice me jump.

The last thing I wanted to do was tell him about it, and I was
still shivering as I shoved my key into the Toyota's ignition and
headed for home. She'd looked directly into my eyes, a flicker of
recognition, and then came the fear. She sort of moved her
mouth, trying to speak, but all that came was a silent scream,
after which her eyes went blank as death and closed again.
        She knew me, I was sure of it, but she had looked through me
and seen a reminder of some horror now locked deep in her soul.