Maybe it wasn’t a bird, he thought. Maybe it’s a frog or a wolf or a man. Maybe it’s some new kind of talking tree.
As he climbed the foliage became thinner and the sun shone brighter. It got brighter and brighter, louder and louder, until Thomas was at the crest.
He opened his eyes and saw the beeping machine against the far wall of his hospital room. Next to his bed was a chair in which sat a black-haired girl.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“I am?”
“You’ve been in a coma... for six months.”
“What’s a coma?”
“Deep sleep. So deep that no one can wake you up.”
“I don’t feel tired now.”
“I should get the doctor.” The girl leaned forward, preparing to stand.
“No. Don’t go away.”
She smiled, and Thomas felt a tingle of happiness.
“Where have you been?” she asked him.
“In my coma?”
“No. Before. Eric said that you went away to live with your father and grandmother but ended up on the street.”
Thomas felt good in his bed. He sat up, and an electric whistle began to sound. He thought about his life in terms of the girl’s question, leaving the house he was raised in and then ending up on the street.
“Is Eric going to come see me?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’d be here now, but he had to take Mona to the doctor for a rash on her forehead.”
“Are you Eric’s girlfriend?”
Raela nodded solemnly.
“Oh my God!” the nurse coming into his room exclaimed. “You’re awake.”
Doctors and nurses bustled around him soon after that. They hurried the girl away and rolled Thomas into a room where they examined him from head to toe. The chief doctor probed his body with her fingers and kept asking how it felt. They looked into his eyes and ears and talked to one another, expressing surprise.
Finally the woman explained that he had experienced severe trauma to his system. He’d been in a coma for nearly six months, and it would be a while before he would be able to walk or take care of himself.
“Where’s my cart?” he asked when the doctor had finished.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“My shopping cart. That’s where I got all my stuff.”
“I don’t know. Maybe the police took it after the shooting. That was a wonderful thing you did.”
After a while they wheeled him back into his room. He had hoped the girl would still be there, but she wasn’t.
“Would you like me to turn the TV on, hon?” a plump redheaded nurse asked while pulling the blankets up to his chest.
“No thanks. I don’t like TV too much.”
“I wish my kids felt like that,” she said. “All they do is watch that thing. Between the one-eyed monster and video games, they don’t have the sense to come in outta the rain.”
When she left, Thomas thought about his books and the look in the doctor’s eye when she complimented his bravery.
The room was very quiet and white. Painfully, he pulled himself to a seated position at the head of the bed. This made him a little dizzy, but it was manageable. He realized, a little sadly, that his travels in the valley were a dream.
“Maybe this is a dream too,” he whispered. “Maybe everything is. Maybe it’s not even me dreaming.”
With these thoughts he fell into a light doze.
As he slept he tumbled down mountainsides, was attacked by feral dogs, and was raped unmercifully by boys from the desert facility whose names he had forgotten. But none of this pained him. His mother died, but she came back to console him. His brother got lost in a wilderness but still made it home in time for dinner. He found himself adrift on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean, floating in circles and being laughed at by cruel dolphins. In this last ordeal Thomas thought that it might be time to fall over the side, allowing himself to sink under the waves. He wanted to die and be with his mother and Alicia, Chilly, Bruno, and Pedro. He could look for Eric’s wife.
Eric.
When he opened his eyes again he was still sitting upright. The sun through the window had moved a good six feet across the wall. The door was open, and a moment later Eric was standing there.
“Are you a dream, Eric?” he asked.
The blue-eyed Titan came up to the bed and cupped his brother’s face with both hands.
“I’m sorry I let them take you, Tommy. And for making Mama Branwyn sick.”
“Ahn said that she thought you would hurt me,” Thomas replied. “But I told her that you always saved me.”
Eric pulled up the visitor’s chair, and the brothers talked for hours. In a haphazard, rambling manner, Thomas told his story. He started out with drug dealing and Monique and Lily. Then he talked about his alley and his father’s arrests.
“He isn’t really a bad guy,” Thomas said. “But he was just mad all the time because people were always trying to take things from him.”
When Eric told his story, it started with the beached green fish that he caught with his hands and unfolded event by event until Raela came to his house and said that they were meant to be.
In the middle of his story, a nurse popped her head in to tell Eric that visiting hours were over.
“This is my brother,” he said. “We haven’t seen each other since we were six. I can’t leave him.”
The nurse, a middle-aged Chicano woman, smiled and nodded, then quietly closed the door.
Eric confessed his crimes against the people he should have loved. He killed his mother and Branwyn and Drew and Christie. He won every game he ever played that was important. He failed to bring happiness into his father’s life.
“But Dad doesn’t think that,” Thomas stated with certainty. “All that stuff is just in your head.”
Eric thought about his self-portrait and the worried look on his art teacher’s face. Something fell together for him. He wasn’t complaining or distraught — just feeling empty.
Thomas took Eric’s hand and asked, “What about that girl? Do you love her?”
“No. I mean, she’s the only one other than you or Mama Branwyn that ever made me feel something. But it’s a little like I’m afraid of her, the way I used to feel about Ahn, but more.”
“Because why?” Thomas asked.
Eric smiled, remembering those words from their childhood, because why.
“I guess I don’t want anyone to know what I’m like on the inside. I feel ugly, you know? Except when I think about you or Mama Branwyn.”
They talked without holding anything back. It had been more than a dozen years and the boys hadn’t had one thing in common since the day they were separated, but still it was as if they’d been apart for only a day. They giggled and awed each other; they played and vowed never to be parted again.
“I will never let them take you away, Tommy.”
“And I won’t go nowhere.”
Eric didn’t leave the hospital until Thomas was asleep, and he was back the next morning with his father, Ahn, and Mona.
“I’m so sorry,” Minas told Branwyn’s son. “I should have done something to keep you. Or at least to find you once we knew that you were lost.”
“That’s okay,” Thomas said. “It’s really not all that bad. I mean, it’s kinda like a dream. I’m not mad at you. And I don’t care about what happened to me. I mean, even when you get shot it only hurts for a while. And if you don’t get all upset about it and nobody shoots at you again, then it’s okay. Or if you’re hungry it’s like that too. Because sooner or later you’re gonna eat, and then you’re not hungry no more. Right?”
Thomas liked being with the whole family, but it wasn’t the same as his time alone with Eric. With Eric he could say anything without thinking, but with the family it was more like he had a part to play. He didn’t mind though. He liked the role.