The Last Battle


"We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate."

―Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses


II. Not Dreaming

x

"Darling, try a little."

"Can't." Kate Beckett offers her mother-in-law a weak smile, but no more words. Nothing will come; it's a Herculean effort to even say no. Nothing ever comes now, nothing comes at all. Martha gives up, withdraws the cup with its water and straw.

Alexis hovers. Smooths blankets until Kate flinches. She backs off again, brow plowed with furrows.

Kate used to like her. But Alexis has grown to be a nuisance, always nudging and prodding and pleading with those big blue eyes. Maybe it was cute when she was fifteen, maybe this is the consequence of encouraging the 'raising her parent' routine, but either way it's too much.

She can't.

Alexis lifts eyebrows and gives poignant and pointed looks to Martha, and they depart.

Finally.

Kate closes her eyes.

She just wants to sleep.

Perchance not to dream.

x

The doctor crosses his arms over his chest, regards her.

Perhaps it's supposed to be intimidating, big bad doctor who knows it all, glaring down at his recalcitrant patient.

Kate is beyond caring. Beyond.

She should have died. She knows that. She's on her last life; she knows that too.

She wants to bat them all away like flies. No one here offers anything helpful; people crowd her space and her head, while her heart is utterly empty.

Lanie gives the doctor a tight smile, offers a regular comment filled with her usual snark, and she ushers the man to the door. Throws Kate looks over her shoulder that could either mean, you owe me, or you ought to try harder.

Trying is overrated. She's been knocked entirely flat, all the air punched out of her, and trying involves muscles she doesn't have access to any longer. Like her heart.

This is not her.

But if not, who else could she be?

x

Once, there was the dream of a baby. Babies.

Well, a dream is like that - hazy, indistinct. A put-off concept that could happen 'later' when she has her shit together and the timing is right.

Then, she was shot.

In the stomach. Should have been fatal. The gods demanded a sacrifice, life for a life, blood for blood.

She bled, but-

The baby took the brunt of things.

No, sorry, the dream of babies took the brunt of things.

Kate should have died.

It would have been easier. Follow him.

Instead, dreams are dying in her place.

All their lovely dreams, how beautiful it would have been with him.

x

The IV is changed. Alexis is a pale ghost with a flaming sword. The nurse taps her elbow as if to check something. Kate turns her head to look. The nurse has disappeared as if she was never there.

Kate has done this before; she has been the gunshot victim, orienting to nothing, her days circling the drain. She knows what this is, and how false her reality, but she can't help linking the disparate pieces together, as if one day is one day.

But one day is an hour, one day is a thousand years.

She knows from past experience that she will look back on these days (hours? moments?) and be unable to connect the dots. Pain medication overlaying pain creates a jarring narrative, and she is the unreliable narrator.

She knows this.

And yet her brain continues to spin a timeline, laying out tick marks for every incident that occurs as if it is at all sequential or orderly. Alexis sitting on the bed. Martha complaining about the talk show host. The nurse erasing the white board and writing in her name Lucy.

It's not. Lucy is the home AI her husband bought. Alexis isn't really here. Martha always turns off the television and tries to hold a conversation; it is her father who watches it with her, volume turned up, not talking.

She can't begin to measure her time here. She keeps telling herself that the words that are said have no actual connection to each other, that the morphine slides one thing into another, that the world is melting.

The world is melting.

x

There is never any sleep. No one will leave her alone. If Martha is retiring for the night, it's Alexis interposing in the doorway, haunting the room like an extra from a Hitchcock film. Her hair is violently abnormal, her skin bleached, her clothing too grown-up for that fifteen year old girl who organized the lost and unclaimed.

Never alone. Nurses are always in and out, checking, blood pressure and pulse-ox and pupil dilation. A light shines in her eyes or the gurney is being rolled out under the hall's fluorescents and only then does Kate see the surgeon behind his mask, the IV in her arm.

The light in her eyes, the well-meaning crowd. Light comes in from the hall, a lamp on low behind her, artificial and harsh. She knocks their hands away, unwilling to be prodded at again, poked, and something washes hot and terrible across her body.

She panics and jerks inward; hands hold her down.

"No, no, honey, it's okay. It's my fault for startling you. I dropped the cath bag."

Catheter bag. It's my fault, she hears, it's my fault, she thinks.

My fault.

"These two are just in here to help me shift you onto clean sheets."

Clean sheets.

"No," she croaks, but she's paralyzed with the last of nightmares.

There are three of them, nurses again, the stocky one with the harelip that turns out to be a mustache, turns out to be a man. "No? You don't want to be on these sheets all night."

"No, you didn't drop the bag," Kate gets out, pressing words against her teeth. "I kicked you." She heaves a breath. "I'm sorry. I didn't-"

"It's okay, honey. Happens that some get like that after surgery, anesthesia takes you."

"Surgery," she echoes. "Think - bad dream?" She doesn't remember ever sleeping. But kicking out, instinct and reflex, the pain startling through her, she remembers that now, pieces. Her guts ache.

"There, there," the man says, fumbling to pat her shoulder. His gentle wide hands as he shifts her.

She grunts, but she can do nothing to relieve it. He adjusts her, and she tries not to smack his hands away, tries so very hard not to lash out, but she does anyway. "Sorry, sorry."

"We heard about your husband, what happened to you guys - and in your own home," the quiet one says. "You don't have to apologize. We're nurses in the trauma center, we understand."

"My husband," she cracks open. Sorry, sorry. She loves him; she never meant for this to find them, in their own home.

She's crazy about him.

And without the him, she's just - crazy.

Unraveling.

x

There are reassurances. A television is always on. Detectives and police officers from the Twelfth file by like mourners avoiding the open casket.

The remote control is velcroed to the hospital bed's railing. A lift of her arm and a reach with her fingers - but then she would have to pull. Tug. She would have to put some force and energy behind her movement to actually take up the remote and point it towards the tv mounted from the ceiling, and she does not have either of those things.

A lot of political bullshit. People talking. Comb-overs and old hags. Gums flapping. She is reminded, vividly, of who isn't running for President this election year, Bracken is dead, and how that one small tear in the fabric scattered a rat's nest - rats' nest - of terror and deception and death.

He always squeals when they find a rat. Even when they're standing on the platform waiting for the 1, and he catches the beady eyes in a sudden iPhone photo flash as a tourist throws a peace sign and presses cheek to cheek-

He squeals, and she rolls her eyes.

But no eye-rolling now. Movement is photo-flashes of agony against the retinas of her inscape, her very body is a monument and edifice to pain, and they tell her to keep her movements limited or they will restrain her again.

She isn't trying to be good. She isn't trying anything.

They are fooled into thinking she is good.

She got her husband shot.

He could be dead.

he must be dead

Why else would Martha and Alexis persist on attending her? Perpetuating a lie to keep her spirits up. They arrive like clockwork and sit and hem and haw and offer her water and smiles and reading aloud from other people's books and she lies there.

She does not stare at the wall because staring would require focus.

She leaves. Absents herself from the room of her body and its contingent pain.

Maybe this is dying.

Martha, brittle energy and muted flare. Alexis, acidic anxiety burning like her hair. Her father, silent with grief no one will name.

Kate closes her eyes.

Finally there's darkness.

x