Waking Up
August 10, 2007
I wake to the sound of a piano. No, not a piano. A keyboard. It’s a little tinny and electronic sounding, but the person playing it knows what they’re doing. The tune is familiar, but I can’t quite put a name to it. I lay with my eyes closed, just enjoying the soft, soothing melody for a moment before worrying about where I am or who is playing for me.
Something in me clicks, though, when the mystery keyboard player begins to hum along with the song. I try to open my eyes, but my eyelids feel too heavy. It feels like I might have to use my fingers to physically pry my eyes open, except I can’t quite feel my hands. There’s just a dull tingly feeling where they ought to to be, but gradually I gain control over them. One finger at a time, I begin to wiggle them, tapping them along the stiff, scratchy sheets to the beat of the song.
Suddenly, the music stops. There’s the scraping sound of a chair being pushed back and footsteps rushing to my side. “Zac. Are are you awake? Can you hear me?”
I would know that voice anywhere. I struggle to open my eyes again to confirm that it’s really him, and finally they cooperate. Light rushes in and threatens to blind me, but there he is, blocking out the awful fluorescent glow. Taylor. My Taylor.
I hear him calling for a nurse, but I can’t figure out why. I try to talk, but I can’t seem to find my voice. Nurses swarm around me and my eyelids close again of their own accord. There’s just too much going on around me and I don’t understand a bit of it. Finally, my eyes open and focus on the only person who matters.
“Georgia,” I manage to say, and my voice is a hoarse sound, barely above a whisper. I wouldn’t even have recognized it as my own voice if I hadn’t felt my lips move.
“What?” Tay asks, his brow furrowing in confusion. “The song? Are you talking about the song? Figures. You wake up after two months and all you want to talk about is music.”
Two months? Wake up? I have no clue what he’s talking about until I allow myself to look around the room I’m in. It’s a hospital. I’m in a hospital bed, with all sorts of nurses and a doctor milling around, fiddling with the equipment around me and attached to me. And Taylor’s still by my side, holding my weak hand.
Something seems familiar about all of this, but I can’t quite figure it out. The feeling of Taylor’s hand in mine… the song… but I can’t place it. It’s all just out of my grasp, buried somewhere in my brain that I just can’t get to. I squeeze Taylor’s hand as hard as I can, which isn’t very hard at all, willing him to understand that I don’t understand a thing at all that’s happening around me. He frowns and opens his mouth to speak.
“His vitals look fine for now, but we’ll need to do a few more tests later to see where he is,” the doctor says, interrupting whatever Taylor was about to say. “We can give you a little time alone with him, if you’d like. You can contact the rest of the family any time.”
Taylor nods. “Thank you, Doctor.”
The doctor makes a few more notes on my chart and then both he and the nurses leave the room. All the din of a moment before is gone, and it’s only me and Taylor, staring blankly at each other. Finally, I summon up all my strength and ask him, “What happened? Why am I here?”
“You don’t remember anything?” he asks, obviously trying to judge how much he has to tell me.
I shake my head, and the movement makes me dizzy. “No… I don’t know. I’m not sure what I remember.”
I’m sure that makes no sense to him, but he’s willing to accept that I’m more than a little confused right now. He nods his head and rakes his free hand through his hair before bringing it to rest on top of the hand he’s still holding. “Okay. Umm. We had a car accident, Zac. You were… you were driving my stupid drunk ass home. And I guess I distracted you. I didn’t mean to, but it all happened so fast and then we were…”
I nod. I remember all that, but it’s like watching a movie. It happened to some other Zac, some fictional Zac, not to me. It feels like there are a million different versions of events, a million different realities, swimming around in my head and I can’t latch onto which one is real and true.
“It’s not your fault,” I reply, and it’s the one thing of which I’m sure.
Taylor shakes his head. “No. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have… been drunk like that.”
“Well, I can’t argue with that,” I manage to reply, but I can’t seem to smile or laugh like I want to, to let him know it’s okay.
Taylor’s eyes cloud over and he doesn’t laugh at my joke. There’s something he isn’t telling me and I don’t know what it is. I’m still missing so many memories and so many pieces of what happened. All I really want to go is go back to sleep, because even if I was apparently in a coma for two months, it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve gotten any rest. Everything aches, especially my head – although I suspect that’s partially due to my brain going at a million miles an hour trying to process everything that’s happened and happening.
“I think… I think I need to sleep for a while,” I say.
Taylor squeezes my hand. “Okay. You want me to go call Mom and Dad? Or Kate? I took the, uh, night shift this time, but it’s pretty early morning now so I might not wake them up.”
“Nah, let us all get a little more sleep,” I reply, and he yawns at the end of the sentence, too. I wonder if he’s slept at all that night. I’ve got a feeling, from the bags under his eyes, that he hasn’t slept through a night in a long time.
He finally concedes and lets go of my hand, giving me one last sad smile before returning to his chair and leaving me to sleep. I’ve still got a few tubes and things attached to me, but mostly I’m free to curl up on my own without anything pulling me back. The hospital bed isn’t comfortable at all, but it still doesn’t take me long to drift off.
My dreams are completely beyond description, just a swirling mass of picture after picture that makes no sense at all. Flashes and scenes that might be real and might just be dreams pass before my eyes. I don’t know how long I’ve slept when a doctor finally rouses me from my rest, but I’ve got a feeling it wasn’t very long at all.
The doctor runs me through a battery of tests, only half of which I understand the purpose of, to figure out exactly what damage I’ve sustained in three months. He skirts over the issue of just how badly I was injured, and I’m not sure I want to know anyway. As far as I can tell, from his reactions, I’m doing a lot better than he expected. My voice is still hoarse, but it seems to be cooperating with me. I don’t really feel up to walking anywhere, but I can pull myself up in the bed and move my legs. The doctor assures me that I’ve got no permanent nerve damage – I just need a little time for my muscles to catch up with me and do what I tell them to do. As far as comas go, two months is long enough for some things to start deteriorating, but not so long that I’m going to have to relearn how to do everything. That’s a relief.
Of course, the biggest question on my mind, aside from all my missing memories, is the music. Will I ever be able to play the drums again? The doctor laughs at my melodramatic question. Of course. If my mind can remember how, and I assure him it could never forget, no matter what it’s been through, then my muscles will follow along in no time.
After I’m through with all the tests, he lets Taylor back in the room with me. I have no clue where he’s been gone all this time, but I am acutely aware that it’s lunch time. And I’m desperately craving some real food. Taylor’s hiding something behind his back when he walks back into the room, which he pulls out and sets on the bed’s tray with an impish smile.
“I brought your favorite, and I don’t care if the doc gets mad,” Taylor says, pulling a few wrapped items out of what I suddenly recognize as a takeout bag from Taco Bueno. “Just eat quick, before they notice that I didn’t bring the cafeteria food they sent me down to get.”
“I’m sure I’m going to regret this later, but fuck it,” I reply, digging into the taco he’s handed me.
We eat in silence for a while. I wonder if Taylor has as many questions running through his mind as I do, but I figure that isn’t possible. He isn’t the one whose mind is all jumbled up. The doctor assured me that it would all come back in a few days and that short term memory loss is pretty common with the kind of trauma I’ve been through. I didn’t bother telling him that I haven’t lost all my memories; I just have too many of them to figure out which really happened.
But maybe Taylor can help me figure all that out. I wait until he’s finished with his food before I push mine aside – I wasn’t really able to eat much of it anyway without my throat burning like a motherfucker, which is probably why Taylor wasn’t supposed to give me anything but bland hospital food. I don’t tell him that, though, because I know he was just trying to do something for me. So, when he’s done eating, I finally decide to start asking him questions.
“Tay… what really happened the night of the accident? I kind of remember it, but only in bits and pieces.”
He gulps and I can tell he doesn’t want to tell me, but that’s okay. He will. “Well, we made plans to meet at the office… we hadn’t done anything like that for a long time, and uh, I got a little drunk before I got there. Okay, a lot drunk. And then we… do you remember that part or do I need to draw a diagram?”
I try to laugh but it comes out more like a strangled cough. “No, I’m pretty sure I remember how that works.”
“Good to know,” he replies, but he doesn’t look that amused. “So you were upset about me being drunk, I guess, and you decided to drive me home. I kinda blacked out on some of this too, to be honest. But I think we were arguing in the car and you got distracted and ran off the road.”
“Into a tree.”
He nods. “You remember that.”
I remember way more than he knows, but at least now I know I can focus on what I know is true. “Yeah, sort of. So, it fucked me up pretty bad, huh?”
“You could say that,” he replies. “I had some cuts and scrapes from the windshield, but you took the broadside of a tree branch to the side of your head. You’re lucky there wasn’t brain damage.”
“With me, how would they be able to tell the difference?”
Finally he laughs, but it passes quickly. “All the paramedics and the cops who were there, they kept saying it looked like you had purposely steered your side of the car into the tree, though. Like you were trying to kill yourself. But you weren’t… were you?”
I can see the tears welling up in his eyes, but he’s trying to keep from crying them. “No, I wasn’t. I promise.” And I wasn’t. I was trying to save him, and that’s a very important distinction.
“Okay. Good. That’s good.”
I could tell there was more that Taylor wanted to say, but he was holding himself back. I wasn’t going to let him. I had to keep pushing. “What about… before the accident? We hadn’t done that for a long time, had we?”
He shakes his head, then looks down at his feet. “No. Not for a long time. There was once… since your wedding, but that was it. Until that night.”
I nodded. Things were starting to make a little bit of sense. Memories were flooding back to me, and slowly, I was beginning to pick out the ones that were real. We hadn’t been together since my wedding. Just as I had hoped, it had been the turning point. Things were normal, mostly. There was just one thing I didn’t understand. Why did I also remember things a different way? Why did it surprise me so much to wake up in a world where Taylor was alive?
And what about the song he had played for me just before I woke up?
“Taylor… why were you playing to me?”
He blushes. “Oh, the doctors kept telling us to talk to you. That on some level, you could hear us even if you weren’t able to respond. That it would help. I figured if talking could help a little, music could work miracles.”
“And the song?”
“Oh, that? Today?” He waves his hand dismissively. “That’s just something I was working on… about Natalie.”
He’s lying to me. I can always tell when he’s lying, yet he does it anyway. But I don’t have time to call him out on it. A nurse knocks on the door and tells me that my wife and family are here, and soon they’re all rushing into the room, ignoring her warning that only two at a time are allowed in. They bombard me with questions and chatter on about everything I’ve missed, but my mind is swimming and I can’t really process a word of it.
I should be happy. I’m alive and relatively healthy for someone who just came out of a coma, and I’ve got my family all around me. But I’m not. Somehow, I’ve still lost Taylor.