Maidenstone Lighthouse (12 page)

D
amon was propped in a half-sitting position as I rushed into his ICU cubicle. He was sipping water through a pink plastic straw from a cup held by a pretty nurse's aide and blinking owlishly at Alice Cahill, who was probing his chest with a forefinger.

“Ow!” he complained, looking over her shoulder and frantically waving a stubby hand at me. “Sue, darling, puh-lease get this awful woman off of me,” he demanded.

“Damon, you're awake!” I shrieked with relief.

Alice straightened and grimaced at me.

“Awake and uncooperative,” she grunted, though it was plain to see that she was immensely pleased with herself. She pocketed her stethoscope and stepped away from the bed so I could throw my arms around Damon's neck.

“Christ,” I sobbed into his ear, “I thought you were going to die on me, too.” I pulled away after a long interval and grinned down at him through my tears. “You look like hell.” I sniffed.

Damon gave me one of his patented rueful looks. “I feel like Death eating crackers,” he moaned, struggling to raise himself higher on the pillows so he could glare directly at Alice and the nurses. “When they're not draining off the last of my blood these philistines insist on sticking their damned freezing probes into every orifice in my body.”

Unimpressed by his rhetoric, Alice sternly wagged her finger at him. “Do not even attempt to sit up any higher than you are right now, mister, or I will have you tied to that bed,” she warned. “For your information, you have several broken bones in your right leg that are just itching to slice through those fat-lined little arteries of yours. And if that happens, I guarantee you'll find out what real bleeding is all about.”

“See what I've been putting up with?” Damon whined, wriggling around to look at me.

“You stop being such a wise-ass and listen to Dr. Cahill,” I ordered. “Because whether you know it or not if it wasn't for her I'd be planning your damn funeral right now.” I pointed a trembling finger at Alice. “This dear lady has just hauled your sorry, sarcastic butt back from death's door,” I informed him. “And I do mean literally.”

Damon immediately stopped struggling and the frown vanished from his round baby face. “She did?” he gasped, rolling his eyes onto Alice and fixing her with an awestruck gaze. “Please forgive me, Doctor,” he begged. “You are undoubtedly an absolute angel of mercy and I am a miserable and undeserving wretch.”

Alice winked at me, then she and the aide withdrew. “Five minutes,” she whispered as she brushed past. “He's not out of the woods yet by a long shot.”

“So,” I said, dropping into a chair and grasping Damon's hand. “Do you remember what happened?”

Instead of answering me immediately, Damon closed his eyes. A beatific expression spread over his shiny countenance, almost as if he was reliving a beautiful dream. “Oh, God, Sue, the light,” he sighed. “I remember mostly that there was a dazzling golden light…the beauty of it was…indescribable.”

I sat there transfixed by the sudden blissful transformation that had come over him, not certain whether to interrupt or not. Because, in asking what he remembered, I had only meant, of course, the details of the horrible plane crash and his nightlong ordeal in the frigid waters of Narragansett Bay.

But Damon was obviously remembering something else altogether.

His eyes remained tightly shut. Then, without warning, his placid expression turned fearful. “Sue,” he called out, squeezing my hand with such painful intensity that I actually feared he might crush it. “Sue, girl?”

I placed my other hand on top of his, gently prying his rigid fingers away. “Damon, I'm right here,” I assured him. “You're safe now, but you were in a plane crash. Do you remember that?”

Damon's wide brown eyes suddenly popped open. “The plane? Oh, God, how could I forget that damned little piss-ant commuter airplane?” he replied in genuine annoyance. “Remind me never to get on another one of those sons of bitches again…” Then his lower lip began to tremble like a child's, just before it cries. “Oh, Jesus, Sue,” he moaned, “I remember everything now. I was so scared…”

“I can't even imagine what it must have been like for you,” I empathized. “It must have been dreadful, lost in the sea like that…”

Damon shook his head impatiently. “I wasn't talking about the damned airplane crash,” he interrupted. Then the panic took hold of him again and his words were spilling out in a jumbled torrent. “Sweet Christ, Sue, I have got to tell you…I saw him glaring at me. Looking like a damned evil spirit…”

Damon was painfully squeezing my hand again. His eyes had taken on a wild, hunted look and he was struggling to get up.

“It's okay now,” I crooned, terrified that he was going to seriously hurt himself. I looked frantically toward the ICU windows in hopes of attracting the attention of Alice or one of the nurses. “It's all over,” I told Damon. “You're safe. Please be still.”

“Sue.” Damon was gasping for breath, his face contorting exactly like the face I had seen in my dream of two nights earlier. “I have to tell you first…”

“Hush,” I whispered. “Please, Damon, just lie still and don't try to talk. We'll talk later, after you've rested…”

“Bobby!” he gurgled, throwing his chubby legs over the side of the bed and strangling on his own saliva. “I saw Bobby,” he gasped. “You've got to listen, Sue!”

 

“What in the name of God did he mean?” I asked the unanswerable question for the tenth time. My hands were trembling so badly I was having trouble lifting the Styrofoam cup of cafeteria coffee to my lips. A moment after Damon made his incredible pronouncement, Alice and two nurses had rushed into his ICU suite and wrestled him back into bed. I had been literally pushed out the door by an arriving orderly as a needle was slipped into Damon's naked thigh and his frantic, high-pitched voice faded to a weeping, incoherent babble.

Dan sat across the Formica-topped table, watching me with worried eyes and obviously trying to think of something to say that would not increase my level of agitation. “I don't know,” he said helplessly. “Are you sure you heard him right? I mean, you did say he got pretty irrational in there.”

“Bobby,” I slowly repeated, trying to keep my voice absolutely calm. “Damon said he saw Bobby.” I sipped the hot, bitter coffee, searing my tongue. “What does that mean, Dan?”

Dan's eyes left mine and I could see the relief in them as Alice entered the cafeteria and crossed to where we were sitting. I noticed that there was a long scratch across her cheek as she slumped heavily into a chair beside mine and gratefully accepted the cup of coffee that Dan had already bought for her.

“Sorry about what happened up there,” she said after she had taken a cautious swallow of the steaming liquid. “He obviously wasn't ready to see anyone yet.”

“Is he…?” I searched for the proper words to frame my question about Damon's condition.

“Sleeping like a baby,” she replied before I could get my thoughts together. “Mostly because I popped him with a good, strong dose of Valium and put him on 100 percent oxygen. In his weakened state, the combination hit him like an elephant tranquilizer.”

Alice hesitated, and I could tell she was silently reviewing the wisdom of her summary decision to render Damon unconscious again so soon after his miraculous emergence from the coma. “Normally the last thing you want to do in a situation like this is depress the patient's system with drugs,” she explained. “But the alternative was risking some severe secondary injury while he was thrashing around.”

She reached over and patted one of my shaking hands. “Don't worry. His vitals are still strong and I think he'll be okay after he sleeps it off.”

“Thank God,” I breathed.

“So,” she continued, gazing at me with her cool green eyes, “exactly what happened in that room before I came in and found you trying to keep your little pal from jumping out of bed?”

I stared at my hands and shook my head helplessly.

“When Sue asked Damon if he remembered anything about the crash,” Dan answered for me, “he suddenly became extremely agitated and told her that he had seen her dead fiancé. He seemed to be positively terrified.”

“Just before that, he was talking about a very bright light,” I interjected. “But that part seemed to have been a good experience for him.”

I took another sip of my only slightly cooled coffee and thought for a moment. “At first I assumed he was remembering having seen the lights of the boats and rescue helicopters searching for survivors.”

Alice Cahill leaned back in her chair and looked into her coffee cup. “I don't think that was what he was remembering at all,” she said slowly. “I've seen this kind of thing before.” She paused and tested the dark liquid with the tip of her finger. “Do you remember my telling you that Damon's heart had stopped when he first arrived here at the med center?”

I nodded.

“Well, I'm not sure exactly how long he'd been gone—clinically dead, as we call it—before the rescue chopper got him here,” the worried doctor continued. “It might only have been a minute or two…But it could have been a lot longer. The Coast Guard paramedics were having trouble with their monitoring equipment that morning. So we can't know for certain. Damon might well have been technically dead—his brain deprived of oxygen—for as long as ten minutes…”

“Ten minutes?” Disbelief registered in my voice. “But you said he didn't have any brain damage—”

Alice raised her hand, cutting me off. “He doesn't,” she assured me. “One of the happier side effects of hypothermia is that extreme cold preserves brain cells that would normally die within a few minutes without oxygen. Except for the concussion, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Damon's brain.

“However,” she continued, lowering her voice and glancing furtively around the nearly deserted cafeteria, “there is a fairly common…delusion that may explain the bright light and his belief that he met with someone who is no longer living…”

I managed a stupid look. “I guess I really don't understand,” I confessed.

Dan, who had been listening quietly, suddenly spoke up. “I think what Alice is trying to say is that Damon may have had a near-death experience,” he said. “I've read a little on the subject. Essentially, it's a set of memories that are often claimed by people who have been clinically dead for short periods of time. Afterwards, they recall having left their bodies and being drawn upward toward a bright light.”

He looked over at Alice, who was nodding encouragingly, obviously relieved at having a layman describe the highly controversial near-death phenomenon for her.

I frowned, vaguely recalling that I, too, had heard something about near death. In the first weeks following Bobby's disappearance my attention had been grabbed by a thumbs-down
Times
book review on the subject. “I saw a review of a book written by an accident victim who claimed she left her body to go to some sort of heavenly light,” I said, remembering that the reviewer had flatly dismissed the author's claims as syrupy pop mysticism and unworthy of serious consideration. “But what does that have to do with Bobby?”

“Those who reach the center of this very beautiful light,” Dan continued, “frequently report having met people there that they know have died previously, especially friends or relatives.” Dan shot Alice a piercing glance. “Though thousands of people have reported them, the implied spiritual nature of near-death experiences is not accepted, however, by medicine or science,” he concluded.

“My God, why not?” I breathed, looking at the silent physician beside me and thinking about my own recent experiences with the ghost of Aimee Marks.

Alice sighed and regarded the two of us like slightly backward children. “Admittedly, such stories are pretty common,” she replied. “But there is absolutely no proof that anything really happens, outside the dying patient's own imagination.”

“In other words, Doctor,” Dan responded with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “if you can't prove it, then it must not exist.”

Alice accorded him a tolerant smile that made it clear she'd encountered similar remarks from the misinformed in the past. “Well, that's scientific method for you, Dan,” she shot back. “You can't prove what can't be proven. On the other hand,” she conceded with a shrug, “who am I to say there's no heavenly light where dear friends and loved ones are waiting to greet us when we die?”

Then she turned to me. “Whether the so-called near-death experience is real or imagined is really immaterial, Sue. Because it definitely does happen, and it could explain why Damon thinks he saw your fiancé.”

“I suppose,” I reluctantly conceded, “except for the fact that when Bobby was alive he and Damon could barely tolerate one another.”

“Oh!” Alice laughed. “Well, I can't say I ever heard anyone claim they were drawn up into an ethereal light and found their annoying next-door neighbor waiting for them there.”

“And why was Damon so frightened, anyway?” I wanted to know. “True, he and Bobby never got along, but it was never anything more serious than the two of them avoiding one another. Damon certainly wasn't afraid of him.”

I could see that Dan was anxious to express another opinion. But he ended the discussion by saying, “Well, I guess we'll all just have to wait for Damon to wake up and solve the mystery for us.”

“When can I see him again?” I asked Alice.

The doctor averted her eyes and frowned into her coffee cup. “I expect him to sleep for quite some time,” she said, swirling the dark liquid round and round the plastic rim.

She looked up at me again. “However, Sue, I don't want you sitting there at Damon's side when he comes around the next time.”