1
Ellie was changed when she came out of the coma.
Not that I expected the exact same flaky, sixteen-year-old we’d all known and loved, not after she’d been dead to the world between Christmas and May Day, all the while constantly shuttled in and out of a hyperbaric chamber to help heal her burns. The doctors warned me that some cognitive changes were inevitable.
But this was something else. This was someone else.
She awoke looking just like her sixteen-year-old self—the same straight black hair, the same round face and pale skin. But she wasn’t really Ellie. Not anymore.
Someone else looked out through her owlish blue eyes.
Perhaps I should have suspected things weren’t quite right when her burns started to heal, but I was too happy to imagine any sort of downside. I mean, third-degree burns aren’t supposed to heal. They run the full thickness of the skin and beyond, down to the fatty layer and sometimes through that and into the underlying muscle. They require tissue grafts to fill in and skin grafts to close.
But Ellie’s burns started filling in by themselves as fresh new skin—skin, not scar tissue—slowly irised in from the periphery. It bothered the doctors because they couldn’t explain it, but I was ecstatic. My Ellie wouldn’t be horribly scarred for life.
I’d been with her every day. I’d even brought Blanky—yes, that’s what she still called the ratty old blanket she’d kept since childhood and slept with every night, even as a teen—and I kept it by her side.
And then in early May she came to. Like someone awakening from a nap, she opened her eyes and said, “I want to go home.”
No disorientation, no asking what had happened. It seemed as if she’d been aware all along.
As I looked at her I felt my initial burst of joy wither in the cold certainty that Ellie wasn’t back. Not really. Not my Ellie.
As I was hustled out of the unit by the nurses flocking around her, I heard her voice rise about the hubbub: “Mother? Mother, did you hear me? I want to go home!”
Ellie has never called me “Mother.” Never.
I stood in the doorway, staring back at my younger daughter, and thinking this has to be the strangest moment of my life. But I was wrong. So, so wrong. Things hadn’t begun to get strange.
Shaken and sweaty, I retreated to the waiting room and relived that week in December, looking for a clue as to when things had started to go wrong.
2
Bess had begged us to spend Christmas week in the city.
“It’s the best time to be in New York,” she’d said.
“The city’s beautiful,” she’d said.
“You’ll love it,” she’d said.
Why, oh, why, did I listen?
Bess was a second-year student at NYU. She’d always dreamed of attending college in Greenwich Village, though how a girl from rural Missouri got that idea into her head I’ll never know. Maybe it came from devouring the Beat poets like Ginsberg and Corso. Maybe from incessantly playing Dylan’s early albums. She knew well that the Village of the Beat Generation was long gone, but still she wanted to be there.
Ellie missed her older sister and loved New York almost as much as Bess, but for different reasons. The Museum of Natural History was like Mecca to her, and a trip to NYC her Hajj.
So we decided to make it a major holiday outing. Bess used Airbnb to secure us a ten-day rental on a two-bedroom apartment in the East Seventies that perfectly suited our needs. We cabbed in from JFK on Thursday the 18th to find Bess waiting for us at the front door. We all walked to the local Gristedes to fill the refrigerator, then went out for an early dinner at a little Tex-Mex place on Second Avenue.
How different my two girls. Bess takes after me: long-faced, wavy, honey-blonde hair, brown-eyed, a bit on the plump side, but pleasingly so, I like to think. Ellie is lanky with a round face, straight black hair, and can’t stand contacts so is never without her owlish tortoise shell rims. Bess fancies herself a Bohemian, while Ellie the scientist turns her nose up at “artsy-fartsy stuff.”
After dinner Bess left us to return to her dorm and Ellie and I went to bed. The start of what looked to be a perfect family trip. If I’d had any hint of what was coming, I’d have packed us up right then and caught the next non-stop back to St. Louis.
I’ve always gotten along well with my two daughters, but we’ve become especially close since Ray’s sudden death five years ago. He was stopped at a railroad crossing when a texting teenage girl rear-ended him and pushed his car into the path of the oncoming freight train. He died instantly. Over the years he’d made a fairly good living as an insurance salesman and, true to his own sales pitches—and taking advantage of his employee discount—he’d accumulated a number of valuable term policies on himself. His death benefit came to a little over three and a half million dollars.
So financially, he left us very well off, though I’m sure the girls would much prefer to have their father around instead. I take a different view. I’ve never told them that one of the clerks at the coroner’s office—an old rival from the high school cheering squad—made sure I overheard her mention that when they extricated the bodies from the car, Ray’s young secretary, killed along with him, was found with her face buried in his lap.
I wasn’t all that surprised. So as a consequence I’ve managed to find perfect contentment in the money, and spend it lavishly on the girls.
In New York, the first hint of the strangeness that lurked ahead came the very next day as we cabbed down to Washington Square Park to meet Bess for a personalized tour of the Village. We were making our way along Fifth Avenue past the lower reaches of Central Park when Ellie, who’d been immersed in Snapchat with her friends back home, suddenly straightened and looked around, her blue eyes wide behind her round glasses.
“What is that?” she said.
“What’s what, honey?”
“That noise.”
I listened but heard nothing beyond typical traffic sounds.
“I’m sorry. I don’t hear anything special. What’s it sound like?”
Her expression turned annoyed. “You really can’t hear it?”
“Hear what?”
She rolled down the window, letting in the cool air. “Now do you hear it?”
I shook my head. “Sorry.”
After a frustrated growl, she said, “It’s like a hum but real loud and real low, you know like those bass beats when Phil Oliver drives by with his rap blasting?”
I knew. Thumping notes so loud and low you felt them as well as heard them, even when his windows were up.
“Got it.”
“Okay, it’s like that, only steady—one steady note.”
I strained my ears but finally had to shrug. “Sorry.”
Another growl, and then the driver rapped on the Plexiglas partition between front and back seats.
“Maybe you hear Balto,” he said, grinning.
The license info taped to the divider said his name was Zarim Sheikh, but his English was good and obviously he’d been listening.
“Who’s Balto?” Ellie said.
“A hero dog who helped children.” He pointed into the park. “He has statue past those trees.”
“That’s right where the noise is coming from.” Smirking, she turned to me. “See? He hears it too. So I’m not crazy.”
“No, miss,” he said. “I do not hear this noise.”
She pressed her hands over her ears. “It’s so loud, how can anyone not?”
I surveyed the pedestrians on this chill December morning, but none seemed bothered in the least as they bustled along on the sidewalk that bordered the park.
I felt a twinge of unease as I watched Ellie sit there holding her ears in such obvious distress. When I was a child my Aunt Tilda used to hear things—voices and such. Her doctor called them auditory hallucinations, but they were part of her diagnosis of schizophrenia. Did it run in the family? Was this the first sign that Ellie was losing her mind?
For years we’d playfully called Ellie “our little weirdo.” Not because she truly believed in flying saucers and alien abductions and Sasquatch and Nessie and all the rest. She didn’t. She was super rational, but she wanted those stories to be true. She studied TV and Internet accounts, looking for irrefutable evidence. She was the living, breathing embodiment of that X-Files line, I want to believe!
Were those quirks also aspects of some sort of mental illness that had now evolved into auditory hallucinations?
As we moved farther downtown, she removed her hands from her ears.
“It seems to be fading a bit.” She craned her neck to look at the park. “It’s a little behind us now. Definitely from the park.”
As we neared the end of the park, she tapped on the partition.
“Mister Taximan, can you turn right, please?”
“But Washington Square is straight ahead,” he said. “At the very end of Fifth Avenue.”
She turned to me. “Mom, can we? Can we? The noise is over that way.”
She seemed so anxious and I didn’t see how it could hurt.
“Go ahead, driver,” I said.
So we turned onto Central Park South, past the Plaza Hotel to our left and the line of handsome cabs with their huffing horses on our right. Even if they’d all been out with fares, their smell was unmistakable.
“See, it’s getting louder now,” she said, “but not as loud as before. Louder…louder…”
But as before, I heard nothing and, as far as I could tell, neither did anybody else on the crowded sidewalks. As we passed Seventh Avenue, she pointed straight uptown into the park.
“It’s right in there somewhere—right there!”
For a moment I was afraid she’d jump out of the cab, but then I realized hearing the noise disturbed her as much as not hearing it disturbed me.
And then, with a look of profound relief, she lowered her hands and looked around.
“It’s stopped! Whatever it was, it’s gone. Just like that.” She turned to me. “What was it, Mom? How come only I could hear it?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, honey.”
I didn’t see how I could tell her my greatest fear. But I might as well have, because schizophrenia would have been a blessing compared to what was to come.
3
We spent a wonderful weekend around the city—including the Museum of Natural History, of course—topping it off with a Sunday matinee of The Lion King followed by dinner at Bond 45 in the theater district. Then, on Monday morning, Ellie announced that she wanted to visit the Balto statue. She’d heard the cab driver mention it, looked it up, and decided she wanted to see it in person.
At least that was what she told me.
Bess thought it a dumb idea, especially with a major snowstorm due the next day. But when I suggested we visit the zoo after Balto, then ride on the carousel before lunching at Tavern-on-the-Green, she agreed to meet us on Fifth Avenue.
We entered the park near Sixty-seventh Street and Ellie used a Central Park walking tour app on her phone to lead us to Balto. The bronze statue of the famous huskie stood high on a rock outcropping where a plaque told the story of how, back in 1925, he guided a sled team through an Alaskan blizzard to deliver diphtheria antitoxin to a group of sick children.
But despite the fact that this had been her idea, Ellie didn’t seem the least bit interested in Balto. In fact she kept her back to the statue while she stared at her phone. I had a feeling she wasn’t on Snapchat…
Bess said, “Okay, why don’t we head for the zoo now? It’s just—”
“I want to go this way,” Ellie said, pointing deeper into the park. “There’s someplace I need to see.”
“Are you kidding?” Bess said. “I’m f-f-freezing!”
Bess had a bit of drama queen in her. Being cold was her own fault. Despite the chilly temperatures, she’d arrived dressed in an NYU hoodie. She could have been comfy warm in the Patagonia Micro-Puff jacket I’d bought her but I’m sure she felt it lacked sufficient bo-ho cred.
I had a gut feeling about Ellie, though…
“Is this about—?”
“The sound,” she said, nodding, her look pleading. “I need to see where it came from. Please?”
We’d had such a nice trip so far, I figured I’d indulge her. We had no schedule, after all.
Of course Bess wanted to know “What sound?” and, as we followed Ellie, I explained the episode on Friday as best I could.
“That’s not normal, Mom,” Bess whispered.
“But it’s not necessarily bad. Maybe her ears are just…different.”
I wanted so very much to believe that.
Ellie led us this way and that way along intersecting paths and across the wide, bench-lined mall that seems to pop up in so many films set in Manhattan, past volleyball courts, and then into a wide-open field.
“This is called the Sheep Meadow,” Ellie announced, continuing to the center where she stopped and pointed downtown toward the apartment buildings and hotels that lined Central Park South. “And right down there is where Seventh Avenue stops.”
“So?” Bess said.
“So this is where I think the sound came from. At least it’s my best guess.”
Bess made a face. “That doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing around but grass. Unless someone drove a speaker system into the middle here and started broadcasting a sound only weirdoes can hear—”
Ellie screamed then. A piercing, agonized sound ripped from her throat as her face paled and I swear her sneakers lifted a foot off the turf. She dropped her phone and clapped her hands over her ears and took off at a dead run, screaming all the while. With shock and terror spiking my chest, I chased after her, Bess close behind.
Ellie slowed when she reached a pathway at the far edge of the Sheep Meadow and staggered in a circle with a finger jammed into each ear.
As Bess and I approached she turned toward me and shouted, “Don’t tell me you can’t hear it now?”
Her distress was so genuine, and I felt so helpless.
“I don’t know what else to tell you, Ellie. I don’t hear anything.” I turned to Bess. “Do you?”
She shook her head. “I hear the traffic up on the street but that’s all. What’s it sound like?”
“Like a moan—a long moan that never stops. And so loud! Not as loud as it was back in the field, but—” She jammed her hands over her ears again. “I can’t stand it!”
I hovered beside her. “I don’t know what to do!”
“Make it stop. Please, Mom, you’ve got to make it stop!”
“We can’t hear it, Ellie. That means it’s in your head. Does covering your ears help?”
“No, it’s all around.”
A man had trotted up and skidded to a stop before her.
“You hear it too?” he said, staring.
Ellie nodded as her face paled further, and her cheeks…they seemed to be sinking.
I looked at the man—tall and wiry with ruddy skin, high cheekbones, and a sharp nose. He looked Indian—not the Hindu kind, the Native American kind. If he heard it, that meant it wasn’t just in Ellie’s head, not some mental aberration.
“It’s making me sick. I wanna go home!”
“You mean like back to Mizzou?” Bess said.
Ellie retched. “I’m gonna puke!”
“No, don’t! You know I hate that smell. It makes me wanna puke!”
“Hush, Bess!” I said. This wasn’t about her.
The man started to turn away. He looked like he was in pain—from the sound?
And then, as she’d warned, Ellie vomited—not her breakfast but a long stream of bright red blood.
“Oh, no!” I cried, horrified. “Ellie, no!”
She dropped to her knees and did it again. So much blood…
And then she fell onto her side, but never took her hands off her ears.
“Make it stop, Mom,” she gasped, her face so white. “Make it stop!”
And then her eyelids fluttered and she passed out.
The stranger knelt and slipped his arms under Ellie’s back and knees. As he lifted her, he said, “Call 9-1-1!”
“What are you doing?” I screamed as he started carrying her away. “Put her down!”
“The sound’s not so loud up by the street,” he said.
“What sound?”
“You really don’t hear it?”
“No! And put her down!”
“Just follow me, lady. She’ll be better on the sidewalk.”
He increased his pace and I stared to scream for help.
“He’s taking my little girl! Someone stop him! Please, someone stop him!”
But people simply stared. No one moved to intervene, so I ran after him.
He reached the sidewalk and darted to the nearest bench where a young couple sat staring at their phones.
“Move-move-move!” he shouted
As they jumped up and stepped away, he laid Ellie on the bench and began slapping her cheeks—gently but insistent.
“Kid? Wake up, kid. The sound’s not so loud here.”
I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away, then pushed myself between them.
“Get away from her!”
“Did you call the EMTs?”
“I was too busy chasing you!”
He made a face as he pulled out his phone and stabbed at the keypad. After a few seconds he said, “Little girl vomiting blood at Sixty-Ninth and CPW,” then ended the call.
A moment later, Ellie woke up.
“The noise…”
I kissed her forehead. “It’s gone now?”
“No. But it not as loud. It’s not making me sick anymore.”
I looked up and met the stranger’s concerned eyes. I realized he’d only been trying to help.
“Thank you. I’m sorry I panicked. I just—”
He shrugged and smiled. “A strange man carrying my daughter off? I’d panic too.”
“But what’s this sound she’s talking about? I thought it was all in her head, but you seem to hear it too.”
He looked from Bess to me. “And you don’t? Neither of you?” When we both shook our heads he turned to the small crowd that had gathered out of nowhere. “Who here hears that noise, that loud low hum?”
Not one person raised a hand. They looked at him like he was crazy.
“What is it?” I said. “Where does it come from?”
He shrugged. “Wish I knew. Heard it Friday, now again today.”
Just like Ellie…
“Thank you again. May I ask your name?”
He hesitated, then said, “Hill…Tier Hill.”
Tier…an odd name. I wanted to ask him about the sound but just then Ellie started to sob.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“It stopped! It finally stopped!”
And then she passed out again.
The police and EMTs arrived together and made me back off while they checked Ellie. I looked around for the stranger. I wanted to ask him more about what he’d heard, but he was gone. Then one of the EMTs grabbed my arm.
“That’s your daughter, right?” Something hostile in her expression.
“Yes…”
“Where’d she get those burns?”
“What burns?”
“She’s burned all over.”
Panicked, I pushed past the police and the EMTs to Ellie’s side. They had one arm out of her sleeve—to start an IV, I suppose—but her skin was covered with red, angry, inch-wide blisters. They’d pulled up her sweater to reveal her abdomen and the blisters were even bigger there.
“What?” I screamed. “What did you do to her?”
“That’s what we were about to ask you,” said a cop. “Her clothes aren’t burned. She must have had those when she got dressed.”
“No wonder she’s passed out,” said another EMT. “Those look like third-degree burns.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off those horrible marks. “But we just walked all the way across the park.”
“Really?” said a black cop. “A woman over there says she saw a man carrying her out of the park.”
No…they couldn’t think…
Before I could reply, an EMT shouted, “She’s going into shock. We’ve got to get her to a burn unit and fast!”
4
And so it went.
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 by the curb. Someone was renovating.
She started pulling out lengths of two-by-four and molding and handing them to me.
“Hold these.”
She dug further and pulled out some galvanized metal strips. These she kept herself as she started walking again.
“I’m going to need some supplies,” she said. “I’ll need a hammer, nails, screws, a cordless drill, some of that Gorilla Glue, a soldering iron, oh, and a protractor.”
“Why on Earth…?”
“I told you: I need to build a shelter.”