Where He Belongs
Chapter 1
He was hot, he was cold, he was sweating and he couldn't remember why. "Get me another cloth," he vaguely heard his mother say and soon one cloth was removed from his forehead and a cooler one took its place.
His family was with him, all of them, because he was very ill, critically ill. Some infection, the doctor said, but he couldn't tell where it came from. Maybe just some insect, maybe some break in the skin he didn't even know was there, but now he had a fever that was so high he didn't even know where he was.
Nick looked at his brother in the bed, and when Jarrod began to pull at the blankets and groan and thrash about, he said, "Heath – hold onto him, don't let him get out of hand." On the other side of the bed, Heath held him down by the left arm and shoulder while Nick held him down by the right. In the meantime, Audra gave their mother dampened cloths and Victoria tried to bathe the sweat from his face and chest. He struggled and moaned and tried to push them off, but Nick and Heath kept hold of him, keeping him from hurting himself or anyone else.
And then it happened. He stopped struggling. His eyes cleared for just a moment and grew brighter. He inhaled sharply, and stopped breathing.
"Jarrod – " Victoria tried.
Nothing. Jarrod wasn't breathing.
Nick shook him, crying, "Jarrod!" and he and Heath moved to try to push on his chest, to get him to breathe, to get his heart to beat. He couldn't be dead. He couldn't be dead.
He didn't breathe. He didn't breathe. Long seconds went by and he didn't breathe. But then suddenly he inhaled sharply again, and the craziness was back in his eyes, but he was breathing. Hard, fast, but breathing.
Victoria slumped, crying, but just for a moment. "We need ice," she said.
"I'll get it," Audra said and hurried out.
Then they were immediately back to bathing his face and chest in cool water. They had to get that fever down. Please, dear God, we have to get it down.
XXXXXXXX
Two weeks later….
Alone in the library, Jarrod was doing more thinking than reading. For a long time he sat behind the desk and looked out of the French doors, even though the opaque curtain sheers obscured his view. Then for a while he got up and roamed the room, looking at objects he hadn't paid any attention to in a while, picking them up, putting them back down again. He stood by the mantle and looked into the empty fireplace for a time, thinking. Or maybe it was more like feeling than thinking. He wasn't sure about the difference anymore.
He didn't even hear the buggy come up to the house, and when Victoria's voice at the door to the library said, "Jarrod?" he didn't hear her at first either. She came in closer and called him again. He turned from the fireplace and saw her, and Dr. Merar with her.
"Oh, hello, Doctor," Jarrod said, and just stood there.
Dr. Merar extended his hand, saying, "Just checking up on you. Doctor's prerogative, you know."
Jarrod looked at the doctor's hand and reached to shake it, but to him it was like reaching for a shadow. He finally managed it and shook hands with him as Victoria said, "I'll talk to you later, Doctor," and left.
"Is Mother that worried?" Jarrod asked, motioning the doctor to sit down on the sofa. He sat himself down in one of the chairs.
"Well, you did give your family quite a scare when you were ill," Dr. Merar said. "How have you been feeling?"
Jarrod took a deep breath. "I'm fine," he said. He thought about saying something else, but he wasn't sure what.
But Dr. Merar wasn't convinced. "No fever, I take it then," he said anyway.
"No, no fever," Jarrod said.
"Well, then," Dr. Merar said, "let's get straight to the point. Your mother says that while you seem to have your physical strength coming back, you've been quite distracted since you came out of that fever. I tried to tell her that it's not unusual to be a bit disoriented for a while after something like that, but she's worried it's something more. Why don't you tell me about it?"
Jarrod sighed. "There's not much to tell. I'm still a bit tired, a little bit foggy."
"Not unusual," Dr. Merar said, "but you did have a very unusual event while you were sick."
"Yes," Jarrod said, and seemed faded again. "I died."
"Well, medically, no, you didn't die. You're still here. But is that what you think happened?"
Jarrod tried to look at the doctor, but it was like seeing him through that opaque curtain sheer at the French door. He tried to think of words to describe what he thought and how he felt, but they wouldn't come. He could think, just very slowly and disjointedly. Everything around him seemed to be about ten feet away from where it should have been. In another era, he'd have said he felt like he had severe jet lag, but no one knew there could be such a thing in the 1870s. "That's what did happen," Jarrod ended up saying. "I died, and didn't die."
The doctor was struggling to get sensible thoughts out of his patient. "You know you were very feverish."
"I know. It's hard to explain."
"Is your thinking unclear?"
"No, not unclear. But what happened – " Jarrod swallowed, frowning. He spoke unusually slowly. "I felt terrible – feverish – hot and cold, for I don't know how long. But then, somewhere in the middle of it, I felt a calm come over me. I was very calm, very comfortable, very content – almost like I was floating. Then very suddenly I felt like I was sucked back into that body and I was sick again."
Dr. Merar remembered his family describing what they saw happening to him while he was most feverish. That sudden calm, and the stopping of his breathing, then when they feared he was gone, the gasp of breath.
Jarrod tried again, but it was an effort and he didn't know why. "I don't know what it was, but ever since then I've been different."
"Different how?"
Jarrod took a deep breath, tried to find the right words, but could only come up with, "I don't belong here anymore."
Dr. Merar made a face. He didn't know what to say at first, but then he remembered something. "Jarrod, do you remember a while back when you came to me after being hurt up toward Rockville, when you had amnesia?"
Jarrod nodded slowly.
"Is that the way you feel now?" the doctor asked.
Jarrod thought about it. "No. I know who I am. I just feel like I should be somewhere else. I feel like even though I'm sitting here talking to you – even though I know this is my home – I feel like I should be somewhere else. I feel like I don't belong here."
Dr. Merar thought about that. His first thought was that the high fever had done some brain damage, but how to say that to a man who lived by his brain, by his mind? How do you tell him he might be irreparably injured and forever without his full faculties? And if he had suffered brain damage, would he even be able to understand if the doctor told him he thought so?
Dr. Merar decided to be plain and simple. "Jarrod, a high fever can leave a patient with some damage to the brain."
"I know that," Jarrod said, "but this doesn't feel like damage. I just feel like – " He fumbled for words again. "Like I'm always supposed to be somewhere other than where I am. I don't belong here."
"Where do you think you belong?"
"I don't know. Just not here."
The doctor took a deep breath. He had never had a patient tell him anything like this. Of course, he had patients who acted disjointed and confused, but he never had one of them tell him that the way they actually felt was something like what Jarrod had just told him. When they were injured in that way, they didn't know it. Jarrod knew it.
He had also never had a patient who had stopped breathing for that long and started up again like that. He had heard from other doctors about patients who seemed to have died but woke up and were changed somehow by the experience. He'd had one or two whose breathing had paused for just a moment, but not someone who knew it had happened when he recovered. Not someone who could describe the experience. Jarrod Barkley was proving to be baffling, and Dr. Merar was struggling with what to say to him.