“Twice for no, once for yes,” he says in his deep, warm voice. They are alone in the room; Shannon objected to that, but Dr. Pine insisted, and Dr. Pine won.
He is the first medical staffer to introduce himself to Tara and explain who he is. Hello, Tara, I’m Dr. Pine, your neurologist. We’re going to need to work together to get your show back on the road, okay? This will be a team effort. But I promise you I’m going to do my part.
All of this is so nice to hear. So encouraging. But then...
“Blink for me,” he says again. “Please, Tara.”
And she wants to. She has never wanted anything more in her life than to blink for this man.
She can’t do it, though. She tries so hard that tears form in her eyes, but tears are always forming in her eyes, and she doubts this means anything to him. It’s not crying so much as leaking, and nobody seems to notice it except Shannon and the black nurse whose name Tara still doesn’t know. Sometimes they will dab her tears off her cheeks.
My sister used to call me Twitch, she thinks. I was that jumpy. If you showed me a scary movie or slammed a door when the house was dark, I’d jerk like I’d been electrocuted. Now I can’t even blink.
Dr. Pine stares at her, says, “If you’re comfortable, give me one blink. If you’re not comfortable, give me two,” and Tara begins to feel exhausted from the strain of effort, an exhaustion that’s only heightened by the outrage that there’s no evidence of her effort, no sign that she’s fighting her ass off in here. She doubles down on the effort of the blink, every ounce of her energy going toward her eyelids. Come on, come on...
And that’s when her thumb twitches.
She feels a wave of elation; Dr. Pine shows nothing. He didn’t see her thumb. He’s watching her eyes, and so he missed the motion in her hand.
“That’s okay, Tara,” he says, and he pats her arm and stands up and turns his attention to his notepad.
But my thumb moved! It moved, how could you miss that, I need you to see that I can move!
Twitchy Tara the scaredy-cat girl is back and better than ever. Twitch is no longer a shame name; it’s a lifeline.
Pine looks up, smiles at her, and then says, “Let’s bring your family back in, shall we?”
Damn it, Doc, where were your eyes when I needed them!
But he’s gone, and her thumb is still again. The lifeline lifeless. He opens the door and they all file in, Shannon in front, then Mom, then Rick with his hand on Mom’s arm. Always the reassuring touch.
“Remember,” he tells Mom, “the truth is always progress.”
He keeps talking, his voice rising and falling with the softly melodic tone that Shannon always claims is attempted hypnosis. When she and Tara were kids, that was one of the inside jokes about Rick that kept them laughing and made his endless optimism and stream of life-lesson-inspiration bullshit tolerable. That and the way he kept Mom away from the pills. She’d been in her fourth stint at rehab when she met Rick, and nobody expected this one to work any better than the first three had. It would buy a few weeks maybe, but then Tara would come home and find her mother hadn’t gotten out of bed, or Shannon would open a DVD case and Vicodin tablets would pour out.
Rick, with his relentless What is your intention for this day? mantras, his vegan diet, and his awful taste in music — lyrics were an unfortunate interruption of melody, he always said — connected with Martha Beckley in a way no one else had been able to, and that was enough to make him tolerable to her daughters. Because while Mom’s obvious vulnerability was to medications, not men, there were always plenty of the latter. The construction accident that had claimed her husband’s life, taking from Tara a father that she scarcely remembers, left Martha Beckley both a psychological wreck and a wealthy woman.
Rick has been a good influence for Mom, an absolute relief in some ways, but Tara has never completely trusted him, and she certainly doesn’t like the sound of the statement The truth is always progress. He’s preparing her mother to hear a truth that will be hard to take, and he wants her to believe that it’s progress.
“Why don’t we let the doctor tell us what progress is,” Shannon snaps.
Get him, Shannon, Tara thinks.
Sometimes Mom will joke about her “guard daughters.” Mom thinks of it as a joke, at least, but Shannon and Tara take it literally. When Dad died, their lives became a revolving door of people offering help and people seeking to take advantage. Shannon, the older and the alpha, led most of the battles. Now, voiceless, motionless, helpless, Tara can only hope that her sister redirects that same fury to fight on her behalf. You are a redheaded Doberman, she’d told Shannon once. It was a joke then. Now, though, she needs the guard dog.
Do not listen, Shannon. Do not let anyone convince you that I’m just a body, mindless and soulless in here. Please, oh, please do not let them convince you of that.
Dr. Pine studies the three of them and then says, “I really wish she could blink.”
Tara’s heart drops. Why did he have to start there? Why did he have to start with what she can’t do and not with what she might be able to do — listen, watch, think! And twitch her damn thumb every now and then.
“Based on my reading, that can often take time,” Shannon says. “We’re not even a week into this.”
“Correct. I didn’t say it was cause to lose hope; I simply said that I wish she demonstrated a blink response. She’s so far ahead in so many ways, you know. Breathing without assistance is, on its own, unusual in these circumstances, and encouraging. The question of awareness, however, would be helped by a blink response.” Dr. Pine shrugs. “But it hardly means the battle is lost. Tara’s brain was banged around the inside of her skull, quite literally pulled from its moorings. That caused bruising and swelling; blood vessels were torn and axons stretched. Critical communication regions were damaged. As you know, this is what the induced coma was designed to mitigate — it decreases the amount of work the brain has to do, which keeps the swelling down, and we have a better chance at restoring these processing areas.”
“But it didn’t work,” Rick says, and Tara wishes that it was her middle finger that could twitch instead of her thumb.
“We don’t know if it worked yet,” Shannon corrects, and Dr. Pine nods.
“Yes and yes. This is, of course, going to be a possibly long and certainly painful process. Each coma patient is different. Some make remarkable recoveries and fairly swiftly. Others make less complete recoveries and over much longer periods.” Pause. “Others do not recover at all.”
Shannon looks at Tara, and Tara does her damnedest to call up a sister-to-sister radio signal. She is certain that such a thing exists. There are some people who hear you without words. Shannon has always heard her, and Tara needs her now. Oh, how she needs her now.
“There’s a coma researcher at the university hospital eleven miles from here,” Shannon says. “A doctor named—”
“Michelle Carlisle,” Dr. Pine finishes. “Yes. I know her well. An excellent research doctor.”
It feels like there’s something slightly diminishing in the way he says research doctor, as if he’s indicating the difference between practice and theory with a mild shift in tone.
“I’d like to take Tara to see her,” Shannon says.
Rick says, “I think we need to let Dr. Pine make those decisions, Shannon.”
Shannon doesn’t so much as glance at him. “Of course I want to consult with Dr. Pine while we make these decisions.”