CHAPTER1
“Willow, can you hear me?”
A woman’s voice near my ear pierced the warm, dark cocoon I was floating in, drifting and dreaming of a sun-drenched beach in Spain.
“I think she’s waking up. Call the doctor,” the woman’s voice said from a distance away. Then again, she spoke, this time closer. “Willow, can you hear my voice?”
I felt something push into my hand, like a dog’s nose, and realized it was another hand. Her hand. “Squeeze if you can hear me.”
I focused all of my energy on my hand, and it took every ounce of my power to force my fingers to move. Then, somewhere in the back of my mind, the dark warmth of my cocoon tugged on me, pulling me back.
“She did it!” the woman’s voice exclaimed. She sounded friendly, older, like this one science teacher I’d had one time. What had her name been? I couldn’t remember anything other than her voice and her kindness. She hadn’t lasted long at…
Where? Where had I known her? The memory disappeared as soon as I saw it flash in the dark depths of my mind.
What had happened to her? She went away. To Spain.
The plane to Spain falls gently on the rain. But, wait, that’s not how the rhyme goes.
Was there a plane crash? Everything felt mixed up in my head, and I still couldn’t open my eyes. Had I been in a plane crash? That didn’t seem right. I couldn’t afford to fly.
“Willow, dear, squeeze again when the doctor gets here. You have to prove that you’re waking up.”
There was a change in the energy around me, like a gust of wind blowing the scent of acrid smoke towards my blissful dark peace.
“You’ve said this before, Flora,” a man’s voice cut into my head like a knife. He had that sharp, angled edge that always set my teeth grinding in the back. Like one of the coaches at school. The big one, with the dark, brooding eyes filled with determined anger whenever he was in his drinks.
Had he become a doctor?
“I believe it’s your flights of fancy that hope this worked,” the man continued. “I know how much you want this to work, so you’ll mistake anything for evidence of her consciousness. For all we know, we’ve got a beautiful slab of meat on the bed and nothing more.”
I was offended at being called meat. I despised men who saw women as nothing more. I despised him for calling me beautiful as if my looks were his to assess.
Out of spite against the cruel voice and to lend Flora some credence, I focused every bit of my being into my hand and squeezed hers again.
“Doctor Norris, I swear! I just felt her!”
“Let me try,” the man responded with impatient disgust. Her fingers were replaced with his thin, smooth, elegant digits.
“She’s not doing anything,” Norris said as if pleased by my failure. “This is another false alarm.”
For the sole purpose of proving Norris wrong, I poured everything I had into squeezing those delicate fingers of his. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted to feel his bones grinding against each other under my force.
All I could muster was a slight grip, though, so all plots of revenge were tossed to the wayside when he exclaimed, “Why, I’ll be damned! Get Remington. This might work out after all!”
He dropped my hand and left it dangling off the side of the bed, and I was again sent spinning into the dark.
* * *
“You can’t drink too much allat once,” Flora said, holding the cup of water to my lips.
I’d been awake for just a couple of days and was learning to live again. I hadn’t left my hospital bed for more than a quick shuffle to the bathroom or a short shower in the adjacent ensuite, and my legs burned every time I did.
I had just gone on my longest jaunt yet. A full seven minutes, down to the end of the hallway and back to the room, I was lying in bed and exhausted.
Flora, as it turned out, was in her forties. I liked her the moment we met. She exuded the gentle caring you had when you really loved somebody, and Flora loved her patients. I felt as if I hadn’t gotten a lot of love in my life, but I wasn’t sure. Nothing that made any sense worked through the fog in my mind.
She held the cup as I sipped cool water and sucked in a few ice chips to crunch between my teeth. The sensation anchored me to the room. To the bed. To consciousness. Despite being out of the coma these days, I was still occasionally overwhelmed by a sinking sensation. As if the darkness was trying to drag me back down into it. Into the cocoon, that blissful place that felt so good.