Chapter One

The first thing Randolph Macklin noticed was the sound of surf. It was soothing, familiar, and safe. He caught a whiff of sea air, which prompted him to take a deeper breath. It made him feel good too. Then he felt the sun on his face, and the surf took on context. He cautiously opened his bloodshot blue eyes and found himself alone in a wooden deck chair overlooking a beach. The sun was low in the sky, and the scattered clouds were still frosted with pink. The pink of dawn? The air was still crisply chilled. Everything was wet from dew. Yeah, dawn, but beaches faced sunsets, not dawns. Unless he was facing east.

He was wrapped in a blanket and slouching down in the chair like he had been there a long time. Had he slept there? He started to sit up and his aching stiff joints made him take the motion slowly. He looked around. The wooden deck was on the front of a house that looked familiar. He didn’t connect why, but it was reassuring all the same. He decided he wasn’t dreaming after all.

He got up and started to stretch his six foot three frame, but didn’t want to drop the blanket. He noticed he has wearing jeans, a T-shirt and sandals. Like everything else around him, the clothes looked familiar, but he couldn’t remember putting them on.

He looked up and down the beach, and found that it stretched empty in both directions as far as he could see. The house was a cottage, and behind it were more buildings with trees all around. He knew this house.

He was working to recall who owned it when a neatly groomed Korean man with salt and pepper hair, wearing a Nike jogging suit stepped out of the cottage sliding glass doors. The man gave him a big smile.

“Young Nae,” Randy breathed with relief.

“Randy! You’re up.” He stepped up and gave him a hug around the shoulders, reaching up to cover their ten inch height difference. “You are also looking much clearer. Are you feeling any better?”

Randy squinted and blinked, and ran a hand through his short sandy hair. “I’m still pretty disoriented. I hardly recognized this place until you walked out here. I feel wrung out, like I’ve been crying or something.”

“Well, you have. A lot of crying. A lot of drinking.”

Randy stared at him as he felt the pieces fall back into place. “Oh, God. Now I remember why I’m here. Cheri is dead, isn’t she? We’re at your beach house in Malaysia, because she died here in a…” he struggled.

“Car crash,” Young Nae supplied patiently. “Four months ago.”

Randy blinked and shook his head. “Four months? I’ve been here for four months?” He shivered and pulled the blanket back around himself. “What, just moping around?”

“It’s called grieving. She was the love of your life. Do you want to come in and have a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.” He lingered on the deck for a moment gathering his thoughts as Young Nae went inside. “Thanks.”

He followed his friend into the living room, which was looking more familiar by the moment. The yellow Philippine mahogany paneling and the dark brown leather furniture all felt right.

“Have a seat,” Young Nae offered from the open kitchen.

“I feel like I’ve been sitting for too long already. I can’t believe four months have passed. So what is it now, May?”

“June. June 2005. Cheri died in February. You and Desiree came here for the funeral.”

“Right.” Randolph nodded. “I remember the country was just recovering from some kind of disaster.”

“Well, it wasn’t this country, but Indonesia, which is right next door. It was the day after Christmas, with a 9.2 earthquake, followed by a tsunami that killed 130,000 people. Back in February it was all anyone would talk about.”

“So, I’ve been out of it for four months since then? That seems unbelievable.”

“Well it’s not like you’ve just been sitting here looking out at the ocean all that time. We’ve had plenty to do with Desiree’s problems too.”

Randy could only stare at his friend in wide-eyed confusion.

It took Young Nae a moment to look up from his pouring the coffee to notice the reaction. “What? You’re drawing another blank, about your daughter’s accident?”

“Accident? What kind of accident? What are you fucking telling me? My nineteen-year old daughter has had an accident and I don’t even remember it? Is she okay?”

Young Nae crossed quickly to him and put his hands on his arms. “Slow down. Don’t panic. You’ve been in a bad way for a long time, but now you’re not making any sense. You don’t remember the snakebite? How we fought to keep her alive, how she slipped into a coma, and how we’re waiting to see if she comes out of it?”

Randy stared into his face, shifting his focus from one eye to the other trying to retrieve any memory of what his friend was saying, but coming up blank. “Jesus Christ,” he pushed through gritted teeth. “It’s like I’ve never heard any of this before. You say she’s in a coma? A goddamn coma! Snake venom is nerve toxin. If you stop breathing, the brain is damaged permanently. Is she going to live?”

“Yes, it seems so,” he assured Randy calmly. “She’s been stable for two months now. The doctors say we just wait on the coma.”

Randy slumped onto the couch. “Now I’ll sit.” He shook his head for a long moment trying to make sense of it. Young Nae sat down next to him and said nothing. The sound of the surf outside seemed to keep time. “My wife is dead, my daughter is in a coma, and I don’t remember hardly any of it. This isn’t fucking possible. How the hell did this happen?”

“Cheri was here on one of her UN charity junkets and she got broadsided by a truck down in Kuala Lumpur. The only good news is she died instantly.”

“That much I remember. I wish I didn’t, but that’s still pretty clear. There was a fire, or something, right?”

“Yes, the car caught fire, so we lost her body. Then you and Desiree came here for the funeral. A week later, Desiree went hiking and was bitten. We didn’t find her for almost half an hour, so the anti-venom didn’t do much. She fought on death’s doorstep for almost a month, and then she slipped into a coma. Her body stabilized and we moved her here.”

“She’s here?”

“Yeah. I’ve got her set up in a suite in the main house with a full time nurse. You don’t remember any of this?”

“No.” Frustration cracked his voice.

“You started drinking, understandably. I let you, figuring you’d come around in your own time. Here we are.”

“The memory loss is just scary.”

“I’m no shrink, but it’s probably your brain trying to protect itself. I loved the both of them too, but I cannot imagine what you have gone through.”

“Can I see Desiree?”

Young Nae slapped Randy’s knee and gave it a squeeze. “Of course.”

As they walked to the main house, the landscaped tropical gardens looked and smelled familiar, and gave Randy hope of piecing his memory back together.

“This is embarrassing, but I have to ask. Where is here, exactly?”

“You mean on the map? We’re just outside Kuantan, on the east coast of Pahang, facing the southernmost edge of the South China Sea. Straight out about five hundred miles is Sarawak, the eastern island of Malaysia.”

“So we’re not near Kuala Lumpur. I remember driving a long ways from the airport.”

“That’s right. We’re on the other side of the Malay peninsula from Kuala Lumpur, about 240 kilometers away. K-L faces west toward Indonesia. Does that help?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

When they stepped into Desiree’s room, all recollection vanished again. Was this all just too painful to remember?

The smell of antiseptic and soap was oppressive. Randolph wondered how even a strong smell like this wasn’t triggering anything. He noted out of the corner of his eye that Young Nae dismissed the nurse who was sitting across the room.

Randy stepped up to his daughter and took her hand. He was taken aback at how limp it was. She had an oxygen tube clipped to her nostrils and a clear plastic tube draped from the corner of her mouth, but was otherwise free from medical hardware. She was propped up slightly on pillows, but lay there so relaxed she seemed collapsed, much more than a sleeping person.

“Is there any higher brain activity?”

“Just baseline. We check her once a day for an hour, but we haven’t seen anything.”

“So what are the chances of her coming back?”

“The doctors say in cases like this it could happen at any time, or never at all. We just wait.”

Randy bit down hard and shook his head slowly. “Isn’t there anything else we can do? I just can’t stand to see my baby like this.” His voice tightened. “Are you sure we did absolutely everything we could have done for her?”

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

Sadness overwhelmed him. He felt guilty, not just because he had let this happen to her, but even more so because he couldn’t remember any of it. What kind of father can’t remember the near death of his child? He pulled up the chair next to the bed and sat. Taking up her hand again, he stared at her and tears trickled down his face.

“So, old friend, this is what I am left to,” he said to Young Nae while still looking at his daughter’s face. “We work our whole lives to give people longer, happier lives, and fate steals my family out from under me.” He turned to face Young Nae who was standing by the foot of the bed. “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done for us, for me.”

“We’ve been friends for thirty years, and I wouldn’t be the rich man I am without your discoveries. It was the least I could do. You’re welcome.”

“God, thirty years ago. UCLA. That was before you, me, and Cheri became the Three Musketeers. Now she’s gone, and this poor child is all I have left of her.” He looked back at her and touched her cheek. “Oh, Dez, how am I going to go on without you or your mom? What I wouldn’t give to see your impish smile again.” He looked up at Young Nae. “She gets the cutest little dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiles.” He looked back at her. “You’ve got to come around, you’ve just got to.”

He turned back to Young Nae. “What about stimulation? Isn’t talking to a coma victim supposed to help their brain wake up?”

“Yes, it does. I have the nurses read and sing to her pretty much all day.”

“Good.” Randy put on a brave smile and turned back to her. “We’re going to pull you through this. We can do it.”