I awoke to a different kind of light sometime later, this one darker and colder. Emptier, even. The evening sun was dipping westward, its orange glow casting its good-bye kiss against the facing mountains, leaving me to wonder if I’d just missed one day or more. Noises entered through an open door to the hallway—phones rang, nurses gossiped. Shadows walked past. I felt my face where the man had touched me and reveled in a memory that would never fade. Kim came to give me comfort I no longer needed and to officially welcome me back to the world.
“Hey big guy,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” I answered. I tried lifting my head but couldn’t. The bandages were off but the heaviness remained. I lay there in my bed and took mental stock of my body, then smiled. The weight resided solely from the neck up. My heart was light.
Kim began her routine checks, everything from my IVs to the fluffiness of my pillow. She seemed slower this time, though still deliberate. Then she rested a hand atop my bandaged head.
“You’ll do anything to get out of talking to Jake, won’t you?” she whispered.
“Don’t tell me I missed him.”
“You did.”
“Well now, isn’t that a shame?”
Kim smiled and said, “It is, isn’t it? But he’ll be back soon enough. You had me pretty worried for a while there, Andy. Thought for a minute there was a little more wrong with you than we thought.”
“There was,” I said. “But whatever little more that was wrong with me is better now. Promise.”
“You let me be the judge of that.” Kim adjusted the blanket that she herself had draped over me while I was (gone? I thought. Was I gone? And to where?) unconscious.“I swear,” she said, “these docs don’t know what the heck they’re doing. I tried to tell them that was too big a dose for you, and with your head injury to boot. But they’ve backed off now. Everything should be fine. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, Kim,” I said. “Tired, but I’d say that was to be expected given the circumstances.”
She pushed a button and raised the upper half of the bed. “Vision okay? Anything blurry?”
“I can honestly say that I’ve never seen things more clearly than I do right now.” I smiled as I said those words, knowing the truth of that statement was something that would be lost to her even if I tried to explain it.
“Good. And I promise, no more…episodes…for you.”
I knew then. Knew that to Kim and the doctors Elizabeth had been a ghost, more anesthetic than angel. Something I had conjured through the magic of medicine and a misfire of neurons. Kim had visited me through the night. She had lingered at the door on her way out with those looks of concern. I had brushed them aside, thinking they had been given for my appearance and not my actions. It had never occurred to me before that Elizabeth had never spoken to Kim nor Kim to Elizabeth. Why would they? To Kim, that chair had been empty all night. Whatever conversation she overheard from her desk or her rounds was completely one-sided. Just Crazy Old Andy, acting like himself. Kim confessed that not only had there been no one in my room, the hospital employed no in-house counselors at all. The only constant between her recollections and mine was the wooden box that sat on the table by my bed. Someone brought it the day after I arrived, she said. Kim didn’t know who, but she knew it hadn’t been touched since.
I didn’t believe her—couldn’t—though everything I saw told me she was right.
“Who were you talking to all night, Andy?” she asked.
“I’m not sure who she was,” I answered. And despite the madness Kim would believe me to be suffering and the brokenness she wouldn’t know I carried within, I added, “But I loved her.”
I fought the notion it had all been a lie. The human mind may be a powerful thing, but I could not believe it was so powerful as to produce something—someone—so real and so perfect. Someone so needed. No, I thought. It was more an impossibility that Elizabeth was not real than that she was. Because if Kim was right, if Elizabeth had been an invention and nothing more, than perhaps so too was the Old Man. And as I lightly touched my face, I feared that meant the man hammering upon the anvil was a mere figment as well.
I needed to believe they weren’t, that they were real and that the truest things in this life were the things we could prove not with our eyes, but with the heart alone.
I needed to believe the world was not solid.
“I’m glad you’re back,” she said.
“Me, too.” And with a wonder I never thought possible, I meant those words.
“Rest, okay? I’ll be back soon.”
Kim moved toward the door. Her steps weren’t as clipped and purposeful as I’d seen them before. I thought that perhaps the heaviness that had fallen off of me was making its way to her.
“Kim?” I asked.
“Yes?”
I didn’t know how to say what needed to be said. What I knew I should. “I always saw my loneliness as God’s will. I just thought I was one of those people who wasn’t supposed to find love. But it wasn’t God’s will that kept me away from loving someone, it was just my fear. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
Kim leaned on the door. Her hand wiped at the corner of her eye. She tried to hide it by pushing her hair behind an ear in the next motion.
“Thank you, Andy,” she said.
*
A day passed.
There were doctors and tests and orders for both rest and motion. I took walks when I could, inching my way up and down the hallway in search of the legs I once had. I don’t mind saying many of those walks were taken with the hopes I’d catch a fleeting glimpse of a woman with long brown hair and glasses. I never did. Elizabeth was gone, left to wander in either a corner of my mind or a corner of heaven. I began to prefer my mind. She’d be closer there. I spent long hours listening to the television and staring at the empty chair beside my bed.
I couldn’t avoid Jake any longer. He arrived that afternoon with his notebook, a pen, and a look of absolute sorrow on his face for both what had happened and what still was. He had a look of someone who had just realized that what he’d found wasn’t what he was looking for. I went through everything that happened that night, leaving out only the Old Man (for obvious reasons) and Eric’s last words. I figured Jake didn’t need to know that, and he didn’t ask. It was his turn then to fill me in on everything that had happened after. The town was scared, he said. They were all holding out for things to get back to normal, but he wasn’t sure if it ever would.
“What about Taylor?” I asked him.
Jake’s eyes looked from me toward the doorway. “I got the state police lookin’ for him,” he said, “and I’m lookin’, too. My guess is they’ll get him. He’ll be anywhere but around town. They’re watchin’ his aunt’s house. That’s where he stayed.”
“Where’s he from?”
Jake shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. I wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but I knew he didn’t particularly care to say it. It was a surreal moment between us. Jake was interviewing me, and yet he was the nervous one.
“Happy Hollow,” he said.
“Happy Hollow?”
He stared at the doorway again, and I followed his gaze. There was only the emptiness of the hallway and Kim’s desk on the other side. She was on the phone. With Owen, I thought.
“Someone out there, Jake?”
“No,” he said, but I thought—to him, at least—there was. “I’m sorry, Andy. About all of this. Feels like the world’s just gone crazy. I’m fightin’ not to think there ain’t no hope left.”
“I think there’s always hope,” I said.
He looked at my box on the table. “I see you got that, huh?”
“You bring this to me?”
Jake shook his head. “Eric’s brother. Calls himself Jabber, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Called and said it was important to you and that you’d probably like it close, so I met him down at the gas station and fetched it for him. Not really procedure, but I figured I could bend the rules.”
“I appreciate that, Jake,” I said.
Jake tapped me on the leg with his notebook and said he’d be praying for me. “Folks say Taylor’s got the Devil in him, Andy. That he’s plain evil. I’m gonna get him. I swear to you I will. And I’ll see that he pays for what he’s done.”
“I’ll be prayin’ for you too, Jake. Don’t know why this happened, and maybe we never will. But I think everything has its reasons, however hard they may be. I hear the world’s not solid.”
Jake looked toward the door once more and said, “I’m hearin’ the same thing.”
Jake said much to me after that. Things he asked me not to share, and I will not. I suppose that’s his story to tell, if he has a mind to tell it. I told him I would pray. He said he would do the same. Then he and whatever his mind saw at the doorway left me to my empty room.