MY BELLY DIPPED, returning to gravity. I could breathe again, too. The weighty fullness of my body swelled into being around me, and each warm, corporeal cell of flesh dazzled. My second breath brought the raspberry scent of roses, cloying and near.
An indifferent twilight lingered inside my eyelids. The strands of honeyed light that I last recalled spinning around my sister and me were gone, and so was the euphoria of release. My hands felt small and empty.
Are you there? I asked silently.
I lay waiting for the familiar shift of my inner voice to stir at the back of my mind, but my mental corners remained as clean and still as a swept pine floor. I felt odd. Not just awake, but new. Inhaling deeply, I filled each tiny pocket of my lungs. My muscles came painfully alert, like they might respond if I tried to move, but I didn’t dare to test them or open my eyes until I had my bearings. If I was still in the vault, someone could be watching.
Approaching wheels gathered volume until they squeaked to a stop.
“Good morning, Mr. Flores,” a woman said. “Coffee?”
A man spoke up in a deep, weary voice, as American as a cowboy’s. “Thanks. Black will do. What time is it?”
As liquid poured audibly into a cup, the aroma of fresh coffee cut through the redolence of the flowers, and the clues of normalcy thrilled me. Let this be real, I thought, and not some dream.
“Five eleven,” she said. She had an unfamiliar accent and a lilting voice. “Looks like a beautiful day out there. How’s your daughter? Any change?”
“Her heartbeat’s up slightly,” he said. “I don’t know if that means anything.”
Me. They had to mean me.
“There it goes again. See that jump?” he said.
“Right. This will be the day,” she said. “I have a good feeling about it. You said black, right?”
“Yes, perfect. Thank you,” he said.
The coffee lady wished him a good day, and the rolling noise receded into the distance. No way could I still be in a vault of dreamers. Whoever these people were, wherever I was, I must have escaped, which set me teetering on the possibility of joy. For a last moment, I primed myself, readying for anything and guarding myself against disappointment.
Then I opened my eyes on a painfully bright world.
I blinked, squinting at a hospital room, and my gaze shot to the window. Just outside, a pine stood under heavy snow, bulging and clean against a fresh blue sky. Each minute, crystalline surface of the flakes glittered, and my heart ached at the pure beauty of it.
Beside the window, a man turned a paper cup idly in his hand and aimed his attention outward, toward the view. He was a regular, middle-aged guy, not some attendant in a lab coat. That alone was reassuring, but he also had a fit, big-boned frame, and rugged, dark-skinned features that appealed to me as unaffected and down home.
It hit me, with growing pleasure, that I had surfaced in a safe, normal place among everyday people instead of TV stars or the victims of a maniac. A black-and-silver rosary rested beside a vase of yellow roses. A TV was mounted near the ceiling, and a white board was covered with scribbles. I didn’t see a single camera anywhere. My happiness soared.
The man turned to look my way, and when his eyes met mine, he lowered his cup to the window ledge so rapidly that a few drops spilled. He touched a hand to his heart. He shook his head, as if overcome, and then he seemed to both melt and levitate at the same time.
“Hello, m’ija,” he said. “¿De veras estás despierta?”
I recognized Spanish, but I couldn’t understand him.
He came over to set a kiss on my forehead, and then he beamed his warm eyes directly into mine. “Are you back with us again?”
Yes, I’m here, I thought, but trying to transmit the words to my lips brought only a thickness to my tongue. I felt my first flicker of fear.
“It’s all right,” he continued. He laughed and straightened and wiped at his eye. “I can hardly believe this. You’re actually awake, aren’t you?”
He went off in another stream of Spanish, but I hardly heard him.
I couldn’t speak. What else couldn’t I do? I moved my head slightly and twitched my fingertips, but I wasn’t getting any signals from my toes. When I tried to shift my legs, they were too heavy, as if instead of the sheet I could see, a lead apron pinned down my lower limbs.
I wasn’t going to panic yet.
“She moved her head, Madeline,” the man said, now speaking into a phone. “I swear. She’s looking at me right now, clear as can be. Get yourself down here.” He smiled at me, a stiff pinch of lips. “You’re hearing every word I say, aren’t you? Unbelievable.” He set down his phone and reached forward to lift my hand into his.
Except it wasn’t my hand. The hand at the end of my arm was all wrong: too knuckly and stubby. Too dark. What on earth? My heart pounded, and a simultaneous beep startled me from behind. Wait! I checked the other hand and it was wrong, too.
“Forgive me if we’ve done wrong,” the man added. “We’ve only wanted what’s best for you, and if this was a mistake coming here, I beg you to forgive us.”
Just explain what’s happened to me, I thought. Cut the apologies and spell out the facts. I needed my inner voice now. Where are you? I asked her insistently.
A nurse strode in, and I turned to her eagerly.
“Will you look who is awake? Welcome back!” she said. Her voice had a lilting, unfamiliar accent. “Are you not a sight. Tracking is dead on already, I see. Very nice. I’ll inform the doctor. You’re probably a little confused, are you not?”
What is this body? What am I doing here?
She smiled. “It’s perfectly natural. We will fill you in, I promise. For now, you just relax, okay? You’re doing very well. Beautifully, in fact.”
She flipped back her brown braid and reached for a computer screen at the side of my bed. Tapping followed. I tried to see her screen, but the angle was wrong. I tried to read her nametag, but it was written in some foreign script.
“Can she talk?” the man asked.
“Those eyes are certainly expressive,” she said. “We will have to see where her language is. The doctor will be able to tell you more, but her tracking is a very good sign. Does she seem to know you?”
“I couldn’t say. Ha pasado mucho tiempo, mi niña. ¿Conoces a tu papito todavía?”
I had no idea what he meant.
The nurse leaned near me. “Where is your father, dúlla? Can you look at your father?”
There was only one man in the room, and he wasn’t my father, but I felt his need pulling like a vortex. I flicked my gaze in his direction, and a dawn rose in his features.
“This is unbelievable. You have no idea,” he said, choking and then clearing his throat. “If you’d seen what they scraped up after her motorcycle accident, you’d have sworn this day would never come.”
“It’s no less than you deserve,” the nurse said kindly. “Careful, here.” She set a straw to my lips. “See if you can sip. Go on.”
I didn’t want to sip. I wanted answers. But I complied. It took concentrated effort to open my lips and set them tightly around the straw. When I sucked up my first taste of water, my eyes closed in pure pleasure. More, I thought.
“They are always thirsty,” the nurse said. “To be honest, your daughter was the worst case I have ever seen Dr. Fallon attempt. She won’t normally take on anyone who is so far gone.”
Fallon. I felt an instinctive spike of fear as I tried to place the name.
“My wife can be very persuasive,” the man said. “And my daughter’s a survivor.”
The nurse laughed. “Indeed she is.”
It hit me. Dr. Fallon had been Dean Berg’s contact in Iceland, the woman he had sent dream seeds to. My pulse jumped and set off the beeper again. The nurse reached behind me to make the noise stop.
“Is her heart okay like that?” the man asked.
“She is a little agitated, understandably,” the nurse said. “We can give her something to keep her calm.”
I didn’t want anything to keep me calm. I needed to stay awake. With Dr. Fallon involved, whatever they’d done to me could only be bad. She could have hooked me into some sick experiment. This all seemed real, but it might still turn out to be some illusion. My parents weren’t here, either—another bad sign. I needed to get out of here and go home to Doli.
Quick footsteps approached, and then a small, angular woman stopped in the doorway. She clasped her hands together against her chest. Around her pale, strained face, a shock of short, silvery hair stuck out in all directions.
“Good Lord,” she whispered. “Diego, is it true?”
He rose out of his chair to a lanky height. “I tell you, Madeline, she’s following every word we say. She just had a sip of water from a straw, our very own girl.”
Madeline moved closer to me, slowly, disbelief visibly warring with her hope. “Hello, my little Althea,” she said. “I am so happy to see you. Praise God. I have lived for this day, honey. I have prayed for it, as the Lord is my witness.”
Althea.
Althea was not my name. The intensity of this woman rolled over me in a pounding wave of claim, but she was not my mother.
I’m Rosie, I thought. I’m not your daughter.
No matter how hard I tried to summon the words, I couldn’t get them past my lips.
Madeline gave me a tender kiss on the cheek and set her hand on my belly. She smiled at me with brimming eyes. “Have they told you? You’re baby’s just fine,” she said. “All this time you’ve been in a coma, your little baby has been growing along just perfectly inside you.”
My ears stopped working. Her mouth kept going but my mind froze.
No.
No baby.
I could not be pregnant. I could not be in some other girl’s body. This whole thing with the snow outside and the hospital and the strange hands attached to my arms had to be a nightmare. It had to be some new torture from Dean Berg, some dream seed or mining gone wrong.
Just then, my belly dipped again, only now I recognized that it wasn’t just gravity pulling at me. I had a creature in there. Nudging. Horror should have woken me from a nightmare, but it didn’t. It couldn’t.
This was real. This body was real, and it was mine.