Gone

“I’m glad you got out of it.”

Janie nods. “Then for a split second, the walls disappeared and there was a woman there, way at the end, but it was too late for me to see. I was already pulling out of it. It felt like I was about to glimpse a piece of a real dream, maybe.”

“Can you go back in?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried that,” she says. “Maybe if I go out of the room, shut the door, and come back in. But I don’t really think I want to, you know?”

Cabel nods. He takes a step closer to the man. Picks up the chart that dangles from the foot of the bed. Stares at it intently for a moment and flips the top page over to look at the next page. Hands it to Janie. “I don’t really understand this stuff. You want to know what’s going on?”

Janie takes the clipboard uncertainly, feeling like she’s intruding on a stranger. Still, she looks at it. Tries to decipher the terminology. But even with her experience working at Heather Home, there’s not much Janie can understand.

“Huh. Looks like they detected sporadic, mild brain activity.”

“Mild? Is that good?” Cabel sounds worried.

“I don’t think so,” Janie says. She puts the chart back.

“Can he hear us?” Cabel whispers.

Janie’s quiet for a moment. Then she whispers too. “It’s possible. At Heather Home, we always talked to the Hospice coma patients as if they could hear us, and told the families to do it too. Just in case.”

Cabel swallows hard and looks at Janie, suddenly tongue-tied. He nudges her and nods toward the bed.

Janie frowns. “Don’t rush me,” she whispers.

She peers at the man. Steps closer. A shiver overtakes her and she stops when she’s just a step away from her grizzly father. What if he’s faking and he jumps up at me? Janie shivers again.

She takes a deep breath, and for a moment, she’s Janie Hannagan, undercover. Looks more closely at Henry’s distressed expression. Under all the long, black facial hair his skin is rough. Pockmarked. Janie wonders if he’s the one she has to thank for her occasional zitbreaks. The hair on his head is patchy and thin in spots—as if great bunches of it had been pulled out. In places, she can see Henry’s scalp. It’s covered in red scratches.

She looks at his hands. His fingernails are clean but chewed down to the quick. Little scabs dot his cuticles. The hair on his chest that protrudes from his hospital gown is also patchy and decidedly grayer than the hair on his head. His complexion is grayish-white, as if he hadn’t seen much sun all summer, but his arms have a light farmer’s tan line.

“What happened to you?” She whispers it, more to herself than to him.

He doesn’t stir. Still, the look of agony on his face is more than a bit unsettling. She wonders if the static is still going on in his mind. “That must be very painful,” she murmurs.

Abruptly she looks at Cabel. “This is too weird,” she mouths. Points at the door. Cabel nods and they step out. Closing the door again. “Too weird,” Janie says aloud. It’s more than she can deal with. “Let’s go. Let’s just . . . go work out or mess around or get lunch or something. I gotta get this guy out of my head.”

12:30 p.m.

They stop at Frank’s Bar and Grille and run into half a dozen cops who are on their way out.

“Come back from vacation early just because you missed us?” Jason Baker teases.

Janie likes him. “You wish. Little family emergency brought us home early. It’s all fine now,” she says lightly.

Cabel and Janie sit up at the counter for a quick lunch. Janie gets a free milkshake for being narc girl.

It’s not all bad.

1:41 p.m.

Janie slings her smooth leg over Cabel’s hairy one.

Their toes play together quietly while they work in Cabe’s basement.

Janie searches WebMD for brain illnesses and injuries and gets nowhere—there are way too many to narrow down.

Cabel Googles “Henry Feingold.” “Well,” he says. “There’s no information on a Henry Feingold in Fieldridge, Michigan. There’s a pretty prolific author with that name, but he doesn’t appear to be the same guy. Whatever your dad does—er, did—for a living, it’s not out there on the Internet. At least not under his real name.”

Janie closes the lid of her laptop. Sighs. “This is impossible, trying to figure him out. I wonder why they’re not doing anything for him, you know?”

“Maybe he doesn’t have insurance,” Cabel says in a low voice. “Not trying to judge him by the way he looks, but he’s no corporate exec, obviously.”

“That’s probably it.” Janie closes her eyes. Rests her head on Cabel’s shoulder. Thinks about the two people that are related to her. Her mother—alcoholic-thin, greasy, stringy hair, old and brittle-looking in her mid-thirties; her father some sort of weird cross between Rupert from Survivor and Hagrid. “How can you even stand to think about what I’ll look like in fifteen years when I’m all blind and gnarled, Cabe? Good fucking grief, what a familial circus of deformity.”

“Why do you care so much about how you’ll look?” He strokes her thigh. “You’ll always be beautiful to me.” He says it casually, but Janie can hear the strain in his voice.

“Still, they’re both such freaks.”

Cabel smiles. He sets his laptop on the floor, takes Janie’s from her and does the same, and then slowly pushes against her until she’s lying on her back. She giggles. He lies on top of her, pressing against her, squeezing her just like she likes. She wraps her arms around his neck, pulling his nose to hers. “I lurve you, circus freak,” Cabel says.