Comfort & Joy

“He wants to see you. ”

“Does he? That’s quite a turn around. ”

We stare at each other; neither of us knows where to go after that.

“It’s like napalm, the way it comes and goes,” Stacey says.

“Yeah. ”

“I can stay. ”

“Go home to your . . . ” Despite my best intentions, I trip up. What do I call him, my ex-husband? Her lover? Boyfriend? What?

“Fiancé. ” She stares at me hard, biting her lip. I know she wants to say just the right thing, as if the perfect words are a bleach that can remove this stain between us.

The silence lingers, turns awkward. I want to mention her wedding, perhaps even say I’ll be there, but I don’t know if I dare promise such a thing.

I can see how the quiet between us wounds her. She tries valiantly to smile. “Did you tell Mom about me and Thom, by the way?”

“You think that’s what was on my mind when I was dying?”

“You always were a tattletale. ”

I can’t help smiling at that. Her words take us back to a time when there was no silence between us. Suddenly we’re six and seven again, fighting in the smelly backseat of Mom’s VW bus. “You’re right. And, yes, I told her. ”

“What did she say?”

“She told me to wake up. It’s good advice. ”

Stacey reaches out, brushes the hair from my eyes. “When you were . . . sleeping, I didn’t think I’d get another chance with you. ”

I don’t know what to say except, “I know. ” The nurses have told me that her devotion to me was legendary.

“I was there at the hospital, you know,” she says. “From the second we heard. I almost never left. ”

It’s what I would have done for her, too. “I missed you, Stace. ”

She finally smiles. “I missed you, too. ”

By the end of my first week at home, I’m ready to scream.

I spend the better part of my days on pain pills, trying not to move. Everything hurts, but pain is not the worst of it. What I hate most are the nights.

I lie in bed, staring up at my ceiling, trying to tell myself that the rainforest was a construct of my own mind. Before the plane crash, I was lost and lonely, desperate to want someone and be wanted in return. I can admit it now; losing both my sister and my husband unhinged me somehow. Without them, I was adrift.

So I made up the man I wanted to love me and the boy I wanted to love.

In the cold light of day, it makes sense. I was tired of hot, dry Bakersfield; I imagined a magical world of green grass and towering trees and impossible mist.

On paper, it pencils out, makes perfect sense in a psych 101 kind of way. At night, however, it’s different.

Then, the darkness—and my loneliness—just goes on and on and on. For the first time in my life, I can’t read to pass the time. Every hero becomes Daniel; every heartfelt moment makes me sob. Even movies are useless. When I turn on the television I remember Miracle on 34th Street and the Grinch; not to mention the fifteen Winnie-the-Pooh videos we watched.

God help me, in the darkness, I believe. Over and over again, I try to “return. ” Each attempt and failure diminishes my hope.

I can’t stand it.

It’s time for me to either fish or cut bait. I’ve spent too long floating on a drug sea, dreaming of one place, and sitting in another. I need to believe in my rainforest, to find it, or to let it go. It’s a cinch what my shrink would advise. There’s no room in the real world for the kind of fantasy realm I’ve imagined. But I keep thinking of moments—the way Daniel and I said “fate” at the same time; the way our wish on the star was the same. The television broadcast with Stacey. I didn’t hear her broadcast from my coma; I saw it. And there’s the fix-it list Bobby had on Christmas morning. Maybe that was somehow real. If it was, I was there, however impossible that sounds.