Arcadia's Gift(12)

It was all too much to process. To say that my heart was breaking over the loss of my twin was an understatement. My hands trembled with emotion that needed to escape but had nowhere to go. Ordinary tears were not enough of an outlet. Suddenly, I felt naked and adrift in the clouds. I never realized how tightly my life was bound to my sister’s until the comfortable weight of her was gone.
The doctor took a few minutes to examine me and make notes in my chart, but everything he did and said turned into a blur. Flashes of the dream —or were they memories? —roamed about in my head. The more I tried to hold them down, the more real they became. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Oh, thank God!” my dad cried as he ran through the doorway and fell on me with a tight embrace. Once my face was safely buried in the crook of his shoulder, I breathed in the comforting familiar scent and let the tears loose.
Dad rocked me in his arms and pressed his lips to the part of my hair. When he finally drew back to look at my face, he appeared ten years older. Huge gray bags hung below his eyes and his skin looked chalky. “The nurse called your mother. She’ll be here in a few minutes. Doc, do you know what happened to her yet? Will she be all right?”
Dr. Gibler nodded and gestured for my father to take a seat in the chair beside my bed. My father covered his hand in mine, holding on a little too tightly. One, or maybe both of us, was shaking.
The doctor’s kind eyes were surrounded by deep wrinkles. “I’m so sorry, Cady…about all of this. I can’t explain why you were overcome the way you were. Shock is still an area of the human mind that doctors are unclear on.” He went on to explain that there are two kinds of shock, emotional and physical, and they are the mind’s way of protecting a person from trauma. What I had experienced was an emotional shock, but for some reason, my body had responded to it as if I had been the one physically traumatized. “I’ve consulted with a shock expert at the University of Iowa and he has never seen a case of emotional trauma setting off physical symptoms to this extent. The erratic breathing and heart-rate, the drop in blood pressure, the coma. The only thing we can assume is that it was the extreme circumstances of witnessing the accident which caused it.”
My father’s face crumpled, and I knew he was thinking about Lony. So was I. She couldn’t be gone. Lony was so beautiful and fun and young—she loved life! And what about me? What is a twin without the other?
I didn’t have time to ponder it further. My mother burst in the door all tears and loudness. She seemed both overjoyed at my consciousness and deeply scarred from the death of her other daughter. She nudged my father out of the way so she could hug me and sob onto my hospital gown. There was a thick wall of tension between my parents. It was nothing that I could see really, more of an intuition. Something more was going on with them.
“Doctor,” my father asked, “How soon can we take her home?” Mom raised her head for the answer. For the first time in years, she had left the house without her face made up.#p#分页标题#e#
Dr. Gibler replied, “Well, Cady’s vitals are strong. Her heart rate and blood pressure are back to normal. I suspect the worst is behind her now, but I’d like to keep her overnight for monitoring. We still don’t know what caused her to lose consciousness for so long.”
My father nodded, but my mother’s lips formed a hard line. “Don’t you think she’ll be more comfortable in her own bed? It’s really inconvenient having her away from home, and she looks fine.”
Something else was off about my mom, other than her lack of cosmetics. Her gestures were a little too broad, her words slightly slurred. Dad must have noticed it too, because his eyes narrowed in on her face.
“Besides,” she continued waving her hands around, “We have a funeral to prepare for.”
Both my father and I flinched at the word funeral. All of a sudden, I felt the anguish my parents were going through with one daughter in the hospital and one in the morgue. My stomach rolled again. I started to gag and the doctor shoved a plastic pan in front of me. Nothing came out, but the heaves strained the muscles of my abdomen.
“Julia!” my father snapped, darting his eyes toward me. “Not here.”
My mother set her shoulders back and she stomped out of the room, shoving the door hard. My father gave me an apologetic look before following her out into the hall.
“It’s going to be fine, Cady,” the doctor assured me. “As you must know, they’re under a lot of stress. This isn’t easy on anyone. Can I get you anything?”