Thirty-Two

It was around two a.m. when Zach dropped me off at the emergency room and went to park the car. The place looked deserted, and the woman on duty at the desk told me that she couldn’t admit any visitors at this hour.

“But it’s my sister,” I said. “She’s in a coma.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Someone stirred on a couch by the doors, and as he re-moved the blanket covering him and stood up, I realized it was Officer Hantz. He looked exhausted.

“How is she?” I asked. He shook his head.

“Nobody seems to know anything, or they aren’t telling me. She’s still in a coma.”

Zach stepped through the doors, and maybe it was the fact that he looked tired or the poor hospital lighting, but he looked so much like a younger version of Donald that it was a little creepy. Who was I kidding? It was very creepy. The whole thing was creepy.

I introduced Zach and Officer Hantz, and our sleepy-looking group found seats in the waiting area.

“She seemed fine,” Officer Hantz said. “We went to that Italian place, the one just past the bowling alley. We were getting ready to leave and she said something about feeling dizzy; then she just passed out. I have no idea why, and nobody will tell me anything.”

“She’s sick,” I said. “She has been for a little while, but I thought she was doing better. I guess not. It’s sort of a hereditary kind of thing.”

We spent what was left of the night in a half-awake, half-asleep state in the uncomfortable waiting-room chairs. Visiting hours began at nine the next morning, but Officer Hantz had to be back for his shift. So it was just Zach and me there when one of the hospital’s volunteers said I would be allowed to go up and see Annie. It was a family-only thing, so I would have to go up by myself.

“You’re practically family,” I said to Zach, in a voice too quiet for anyone to overhear. “I mean, you’re the clone of the man I used to think was my father. That’s got to count for something, right?”

He didn’t bother to answer my question. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked. “Visiting her alone?”

“I think, with all I’ve been through in the past few weeks, visiting a comatose hospital patient will be like child’s play.”

“Okay,” Zach said. “But after this, I’m taking you home to get some sleep.”

It wasn’t child’s play. When I first saw Annie lying in that bed, I gasped. She was so thin and pale, she already looked dead. There were a bunch of tubes that snaked from her body to various devices in the room. One looked like it was measuring her heartbeat, and I took its steady rhythm as a sign that she was still alive.

A nurse came into the room and began checking on each of the machines. She changed out an IV bag.

“You’re her sister?” she asked. I nodded. “I could tell. You two look a lot alike.”

Never heard that one before. I kept my mouth shut. She was just trying to be nice.

“Is she going to wake up?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You know that she’s pretty sick.” I nodded again. “You can talk to her. We don’t really know if she can hear you, but sometimes it seems to help if you talk to them.”

I waited until the nurse left the room, then pulled up a chair so that I was sitting beside the bed, as close to Annie’s head as I could get. Then I talked. I told her all about Zach, how crazy I’d been about him, and then how I realized our meeting was engineered and not some twist of fate. I explained how I wasn’t sure what I felt about him anymore. Without mentioning Donald or the fact that I knew he was still alive, I told her that we were going to figure out a way to fix all this, that she was going to get better. Then I told her about how sweet Officer Hantz was, staying all night in the waiting room even though they wouldn’t let him up to visit her, even though he had to be at work in the morning. She needed to get better, I told her, because she had a sweet, handsome guy who wanted to take her out again. I talked until my voice grew hoarse, then lay my head down on the bed beside her. I shut my eyes and silently counted to fifty, promising myself that when I opened my eyes, Annie would open hers as well.

When I reached fifty and opened my eyes, Annie’s re-mained closed. I sighed and pushed my chair a few inches back from the bed.

“How was she doing before this?”

I half-expected it to be Donald, but when I looked up it was Dr. Feld. He gave me a lopsided smile that wasn’t at all reassuring.

“She seemed to be doing okay,” I said. “But things have been stressful. Our other sister ran off.”

“When you have a chance, I think we need to sit down and have a conversation. There are some things I need to tell you about.”

I thought of when we’d first brought Annie to the hospital, when she’d asked to speak with the doctor alone. He must still think I was in the dark.

“I know about the cloning thing,” I said, “if that’s what you want to talk about.”

His eyes grew large and he looked into the hallway to make sure no one had heard me.

“I tracked him down,” I continued. “Joseph. He goes by Donald now. He should be getting in touch with you. He’s going to figure out a way to fix her.”

“I see,” Dr. Feld said. He patted his belly as he considered this. “Of course, we will do whatever we can, but you need to understand that Annie is very sick.”

I told him I understood, but the truth was, I didn’t. I didn’t understand how someone who’d gone through as many bad things as Annie had should also have to have her life ripped from her at such a young age. It wasn’t fair—and I clung to the hope that she had to get better, if only to make up for all the suffering she’d patiently endured.

Someone who worked at the Italian restaurant where Annie had collapsed knew Shawna’s mother, and, in typical small-town fashion, the news of Annie’s coma spread quickly through the town. When Zach drove me home Sunday afternoon, Jenelle and Shawna were waiting for me on the front steps.

“My mom wants you to stay at our place,” Jenelle said.

“I’m fine here,” I said, but the truth was, being in our house alone spooked me out. Other than for a few hours here and there, I’d never been home on my own before.

A half-hearted debate ensued in which Jenelle, Shawna, and Zach insisted that I should stay with Jenelle, and I offered up increasingly feeble protests. In the end they won, and agreed to help me pack up some things to bring with me.

Annie’s room was in a sorry state from the ransacking it had received at my hands the previous evening. Shawna even wondered if a robbery had occurred, but I assured her that it was fine. I packed a suitcase with clothes and grabbed all my school things, though the idea of going to school the next day seemed out of the question. When I grabbed my pile of school books, my scholarship letter fluttered to the ground. Jenelle picked it up, but before I could grab it from her hands, she read what it said.

“This is fantastic! Bunting, why didn’t you tell us about this?”

“What is it?” Shawna asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said. I saw Zach standing awkwardly in the hallway and felt the need to keep the news from him. Fat chance of that with Jenelle around.

“She’s getting a full college scholarship,” Jenelle said.

“Awesome!” Shawna threw her arms around me, nearly suffocating me with her embrace. I saw Zach watching from the hallway.

“It’s just an offer,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything. I haven’t signed anything yet.”

My nonchalance did little to dim the enthusiasm of my two friends. Zach’s look was penetrating and accusatory.

“I’m not sure I’m going to be able to go,” I said, but nobody seemed to be listening to me.

We went back downstairs and were about to head outside when Jenelle gasped, and I turned around to see that she was looking into my father’s old office. I’d left the door open, and I saw what she saw—the urn tipped over on the ground, the ashes scattered across the floor.

“Somebody has been here,” Jenelle said. She quickly shut the door to block the view. “Bunting, you do not need to go in there.”

“What is it?” Shawna asked.

“It’s not what you think,” I said. I knew that explaining further would mean telling them that my father’s death had been faked, and I couldn’t think of any way to explain that without telling them everything. For a moment, I toyed with the idea of confessing the whole thing. I imagined the look of horror on their faces. I could see how the story would spread through the town. I imagined a Frankenstein-like revolt by the residents of Shallow Pond, in which they attempted to exorcise their little town of its demons. I imagined that the next time I came back to this house, it would be burned to the ground.

So I kept my mouth shut, and we filed silently out of the house.