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Chapter 4: Meetings

"Far away, Long ago,
Glowing dim as an ember,
Things my heart used to know,
Things it yearns to remember..."
-Deana Carter, "Once Upon a December"

Sunday, October 25th, 1987

The morning sun shone warm through her bedroom window, blossoming in red beneath the lids of her closed eyes. This was Daisy's favorite time of day; one of those rare mornings when she woke early, before it was time to get ready for school, the perfect time for daydreaming and wool-gathering. But she was still so tired! Just another ten minutes, and then she'd open her eyes and get out of bed.

Already, the edges of waking thoughts were softening as the warmth carried her to the edge of sleep, and her mind picked up the thread of her previous dreams. She had been chasing someone - someone she couldn't quite see, though the sun-scalded fields of Hazzard where the corn rattled in the wind.

The beeping woke Daisy, and her eyes flew open to see a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hovering over her. For some reason, she seemed to be in a hospital - in a funny little room with a curtain instead of a door. Machines beeped and whirred, and the air smelled like Bactine and peroxide. Too confused to be frightened, she tried to remember if she'd been hurt or sick and came up empty.

Hi there!" the man said, smiling cheerfully down at her. "I'm Doctor Haglen, and this is Doctor James." He nodded towards a woman in a white lab coat like himself. "How are you feeling this morning?"

"Iughk-" She stopped and coughed. Her throat felt like sandpaper.

The doctor picked up a plastic drink container with a straw from the bedside table. "Can you take a drink?"

She nodded and sipped the cool water, the remainder of sleep clearing away with her disjointed dreams. Her left arm was gussied up in some sort of a bandage surrounded by a round, metal frame with rods sticking down through her skin. It made her stomach feel funny to look at the contraption – kind of like one of those magician's boxes where they cut the lady in half. She wiggled her fingers, and they moved sluggishly. They felt tingly, like they were very far away and didn't really belong to her.

She tried her voice again. "Am I sick? Is my arm gonna be okay?"

Dr. Haglen handed the water to Dr. James who set it back down on the table. "No, you're not sick," he replied. Daisy thought he had a kind voice, soft and furry-like. "You had an accident, and it's very normal for you not to remember it if you don't. That scary looking frame around your arm is just keeping the bones still so it will heal."

"Was it on my bike? My Uncle Jesse's always saying I'm gonna kill myself if I don't stop trying to stand up on the seat of my bike." She'd thought he was just kidding.

"No, it wasn't on your bike. You were in a car."

"A car?" Her heart beat faster as she thought of the soft, gray upholstery of Uncle Jesse's Chrysler New Yorker. "Is everyone else okay? Where's Uncle Jesse?"

"They're fine," he assured her. "You were the only one in the vehicle. Your family is with you here at the hospital." He scribbled something down on a clipboard and lay it on her table. "Daisy, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions, and some of them may seem a little silly, is that alright?"

"Umm… Okay, I guess."

"Great! First off, can you tell me your name?"

"Daisy Duke. Daisy Mae Duke." Her voice was stronger now that she'd been speaking, but it sounded strange to her, like she had a cold. "Are my aunt and uncle here?"

"Your uncle and your cousins are here, and they'll be back to sit with you as soon as they get some breakfast." He held up the end of his stethoscope. "Do you mind if I take your blood pressure and listen to your heart?"

She shook her head, only then feeling the wires attached to her head. "Why're there wires coming out of my head!?"

"They're just taped in place," he explained, gently deflecting her hand away from where she was tugging on one. "Kind of like how I can listen to your heart with my stethoscope, those wires are attached to a machine that listens to your brain. How are you feeling? Any headaches? Sick at your stomach?"

"No," she said, "I don't feel sick, but my stomach feels sort of queasy when I look at my arm." She pointed to a spot just above her right temple. "My head hurts a little right here, but nothing else."

He leaned over to where the wires ran into a machine where rows of zig-zags traveled across the screen, then turned towards Dr. James. "We can go ahead and disconnect the EEG," he told her, "I didn't see anything concerning on the tracing overnight." He raised her bed to a sitting position, then placed the stethoscope against her chest and asked her to breath in and out deeply as he moved it around. "Everything sounds normal with your lungs, Miss Duke."

He took the blood pressure cuff and slipped it around her right arm, pumped it up and then listened with his stethoscope as the air whooshed softly out. Daisy watched his face, still wondering what had happened to her and how she had been the only one to be in a car accident. He smiled as he pulled apart the velcro holding on the cuff.

"Your blood pressure is good, too."

"Can I go home, then?" she asked, hopefully. "Since I don't feel sick or anything."

He tilted his head, considering. "I don't think you'll be in here for very long, Daisy," he answered. "But there are a couple of tests we need to run before we can let you go home, and we have to make sure your arm is healing correctly. It might be a week or two. I know that sounds like a long time."

She shrugged. As long as she felt okay and the doctor said she was fine, at least it got her out of school and doing chores. "Can I eat something, though? I'm awful hungry."

"Absolutely. I just have a few more questions, and then I'll have someone come in and see what we've got that you'd like to eat." He took a notecard from his pocket and with a red pen, drew a triangle. "Daisy, can you tell me what shape I've drawn on this notecard?"

"Uh, a triangle."

"Great! And what color is it?"

"Red." These were, without a doubt, the strangest questions she'd ever been asked.

"That's right. Now, I'm going to put this away, and in a few minutes, I want you to try and remember the color and the shape that's on the card." He stuck the card in a pocket of his labcoat. "But first, I want to ask you a little bit about yourself. Can you tell me where you live?"

"In Hazzard, in a farmhouse way down Mill Road. It's almost to Eagle Bluff, but not quite that far."

"Okay, and who do you live with? Can you name them?"

She ticked off them off on her fingers. "Well, there's my Uncle Jesse and my Aunt Lavinia. Her real name's Martha, but she said she always hated it," she confided to him. "Then there's Luke. He likes to think he's the one in charge of everything, just because he's two years older than me. Bo's the youngest."

"And how old were you at your last birthday?"

She thought back, but the birthday that came to mind couldn't have been her last one. For the first time, she felt panicked and unsure. She tried to recall the last cake her aunt had made for her, but the one she so clearly remembered - the one into which Bo had squeezed the entire bottle of blue food coloring - had been her tenth birthday. That didn't feel right. She didn't feel ten...or even twelve. Her mind counted upwards, all the way to twenty, but none of the numbers seemed to fit.

The doctor reached over and turned the sound off on the heart rate monitor. "That's okay, Daisy, we can talk about it again, later."

"But, I...I should know that," she insisted, looking up at the doctor with teary eyes and feeling very lost and small, her arm all but forgotten. "Is there something wrong with my brain?"

"It's very normal to be confused after and accident," he explained, "it doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong. After we move you out of ICU, we'll be giving you some tests just to make sure everything is okay - and some of them will probably seem pretty silly, like the card I put in my pocket. Speaking of which, can you tell me what color and shape the drawing was on the card?"

"A triangle," she said, then hesitated. "And...I think it was red?"

"That's right," he smiled, pulling it out of his pocket and showing it to her. "And what I was telling you about being confused, some of that is normal and some of it may not be. The important thing is that you tell us when something isn't clear. That will help us understand what's going on better so we can get you home faster." He checked his watch. "So... How about that breakfast?"

Daisy nodded, apprehensively, not looking forward to more confusion. "That sounds good."

Luke, Bo and Uncle Jesse had spent a long and uncomfortable night at the hospital. The cousins had traded places at Daisy's bedside in the early morning hours, while Uncle Jesse dozed in the recliner. The night had been broken often by codes and the beeping of alarms, followed by a flurry of activity and the sound of feet moving swiftly through the corridors.

Dr. Haglen had come in several times through the night to study the EEG readings and assured them that there had been no new seizures. Every hour a nurse came to check her vitals and take her temperature, and also monitor for infection in her arm.

In the morning, they decided to grab a quick breakfast in the hospital's dining room, only to find that she had regained consciousness while they had been gone, and a nurse escorted them back to the family room to wait for the doctor.

"I know it was a long night for you folks," began Dr. Haglen, "but I wanted to update you before you went back to Daisy's room."

"Is she awake?" Bo wasted no time in asking.

"She's awake and alert—" He laughed as he was interrupted by Bo's 'whoop' of joy. "However, she is experiencing some confusion after her accident."

Luke remembered all too well. "The memory stuff?"

The doctor nodded. "I'm at a disadvantage, not knowing your family very well," he apologized. "Does she have an aunt named Lavinia?"

"She did," said Jesse, "but she passed away back in '63."

"Daisy mentioned her when I asked her to name who she lives with." He held up his hand to calm their alarm. "Now, it's hard to say if this is due to an actual memory impairment, or simply the common confusion which is normal after an accident."

"Was there anything else that she said that didn't seem right?" Luke, who had experienced the muddled thinking after a bad concussion first hand, didn't think it sounded normal at all.

"Only that she thought she might have broken her arm by falling off of her bike," he answered. "and she couldn't come up with an answer when I asked her age. The not knowing appeared to upset her,. We have a follow up MRI scheduled after lunch which should tell us more."

"Well," said Jesse, "I reckon she's always been in the middle of things. It'll be hard for her not to understand what's going on."

"And that's why we'll need to start on the neurological testing as soon as she's able," he said. "It's important for us to find out what's really happening. I explained to her that if she's confused, she needs to tell someone. Seeing into the mind isn't an exact science, and sometimes what the patient tells us is more important that anything a machine can show."

"You've got that right," agreed Luke, wondering if this was what Uncle Jesse called "doctor speak" or if they really didn't know much about the brain. That in itself was a scary thought. "Should we tell her what happened, if she asks?"

"If she asks," he said. "But if she's having trouble processing it, try not to overwhelm her with too many details."

Hospital food was definitely lacking something, thought Daisy. She was pretty sure it was the flavor. The ICU's choices were limited to bland straight up or bland with fake butter. She tossed the other half of the toast back down onto the plate as the door opened.

The last bite stuck in her throat, and tears welled in her eyes at her uncle's haggard appearance. "Why, Uncle Jesse!" she cried. "What's happened to you!?" He looked as if he'd aged twenty years in the span of a day! How much stress did it take for a man's hair to turn white so fast? She'd just bet that no good, rotten cop had been chasing him again.

He came over to her bedside, wiping his eyes against his sleeve before he patted her hand. "Nothin's wrong, Daisy," he laughed, through his tears. "Nothin' at all, baby girl. I'm just so happy to see you sitting up and talking to me. How're you feeling?"

"Okay, I reckon," she said, indifferently, more worried about him than herself, "except for my arm." She tried to raise it, and remembered that she couldn't. "You're the one who looks like you oughta be in here! The doctor said you weren't in the accident."

"Uncle Jesse's been here sitting by your bed all night worrying about you," chided the dark-haired man who had come in behind him. "He's alright, just tired."

She pushed the rolling table with the stale toast away from the bed and turned her attention to him. "I'm sorry, mister," she said in the most polite voice she could muster. "The doctor said I might be confused since I had an accident. Who are you?" Maybe he was a cousin; she had a lot of those.

He and Uncle Jesse shared a startled look before he answered. "Daisy, it's me...Luke."

Anger bubbled up from deep inside of her. "Real funny, mister." She shimmied around until she sat straighter in the bed. "You look an awful lot like a Duke, but you picked the wrong cousin to pretend to be. Are you one of Uncle Harry's boys?" Uncle Jesse's brother, Harry, had black hair.

"Now, Daisy, just...just take it easy," soothed her uncle. "This is Luke." He gave her hand a squeeze, as she shook her head. "The doctor said you were having some trouble sorting things out right now."

"Uncle Jesse, I can't believe you'd try to shuck an' jive me!" She pulled her hand out from under his and tucked it against her side as though she were crossing her arms, minus her left one, while 'Luke' stared at her as if she'd grown an extra head. "Why, he doesn't even look like Luke."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "What about me doesn't look right?"

"Well, for one thing, Luke doesn't play tricks on people 'cause he's got no sense of humor," she scoffed. "And, anyway, Luke's just a kid." She scrutinized the lines around his eyes. "You've gotta be going on fifty."

"Fifty!?"

Uncle Jesse's face grew more serious. "Honey, this is Luke. He's not a kid, anymore."

She could put an end to this game real quick. "If you're Luke, show me something with your name on it."

He glanced at Uncle Jesse, before reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a worn, leather wallet. He took out a card and handed her a driver's license for 'Lukas K Duke' with her address in Hazzard, Georgia. The picture matched the man beside her uncle.

She stared between the two of them in shock. "Is this a dream?" she heard herself ask. "Have I been in a coma, Uncle Jesse?" She imagined herself, like a princess in a fairlytale, sleeping peacefully as the years passed by around her, waiting for her Prince Charming to come and wake her with a kiss. "How many years have I been asleep?"

"You weren't in a coma," said Luke. "That's not what the doctor said, anyway. You were only out for about ten hours, and part of that time was because they put you under to set your arm."

"But...but..." She looked back at Uncle Jesse, at his white hair and careworn face, and then at Luke, who was far older than she could account for him being.

No, she just couldn't accept it.

Uncle Jesse smoothed the hair back from her forehead, and she closed her eyes, concentrating on the familiarity of his weathered, callused hand. "The doctor said you might have some trouble remembering things, Daisy," he reminded, gently. "But we'll figure it out. You being safe and sound is the most important thing right now."

His words soothed the worst of her fears. The doctor had mentioned something about being confused, hadn't he? So, that meant this was only temporary, just until her brain got back to normal, although she couldn't seem to recall what 'normal' was right now.

"Uncle Jesse?"

"Yeah, baby?"

"Where's Aunt Lavinia?"