Girlfriend in a coma Read Online Free PDF Page A

dawn. Their Buick Centurion's right front wheel nudged over the yellow-painted curb beneath the Emergency's port cochere. Already inside sat my parents, Hamilton, Pammie, Wendy, and Linus, all of us worn out from worry and fear. The McNeils had faces like burning houses. I could see they'd both been quite drunk earlier and were now throbbing in a headache phase. They refused to speak with any of us younger folk at first, assuming that we were all entirely to blame for Karen's state, Mrs. McNeil's accusing red eyes saying more than any shouted curse. The McNeils spoke with my parents, their neighbors and moreor-less friends of twenty years. At sunrise, Dr. Menger emerged to lead the four of them into the room where Karen was lying.
"Thalamus ... mumble... fluids; brain stem ... mumble... cranial nerve . . . hypoxicischemic encephalopathy . . . breathing . . . "
"Is she alive'? Is she dead?" asked Mrs. McNeil.
"She's alive, Mrs. McNeil."
"Can she think?" she continued.
"I can't tell you. If this continues, Karen will have sleep and wake cycles and may even dream. But thinking ... I have no idea."
"What if she's trapped inside her body?" asked Mr. McNeil. "What if she's - " Mr. McNeil, George, was fumbling for words, " in there hearing everything we say. What if she's screaming from the inside and she can't tell us that she's stuck?" "That's not the case, sir. Please."
Meanwhile, Linus was glurping and snorkeling through a cup of vending machine hot chocolate. Hamilton called him an asswipe for being so disrespectful, but Linus said slowly, "Well, Karen likes chocolate. I think she'd want me to have it." There was a pause and a straw poll of eyes indicating this was the conventional wisdom. Hamilton calmed himself but remained in a piss-vinegar mood.
"Richard," barked Mr. McNeil, rounding a corner with the other older folk, "Dr. Menger said Karen took two pills. Did you give them to her?"
I was alert: "No. She had them in her compact. They were Valiums. I've seen her take them before. Mrs. McNeil gives them to her."
    Mr. McNeil turned to his wife, Lois, who nodded her head and motioned her hand gently, confirming that she was the pusher. Mr. McNeil's posture slackened. I said, "Karen wants to look good for your trip to Hawaii. She's trying to lose weight." My use of the present tense shook them. "It's only five days from now," said Wendy. "She'll be fine by then, right?"
Nobody responded. Mrs. McNeil, whispering like a calculating starlet, asked Wendy, "Were . . . were you girls drinking? . . . Wendy? . . . Pammie?"
Wendy was direct: "Mrs. McNeil, Karen couldn't have had more than a drink and a half. Weak stuff, too - Tab and a drop of vodka. Honest. It was mostly Tab. One moment she was standing there wondering if she'd lost her watermelon lip smacker, the next she was on the grass beside the road moaning. We tried to make her throw up, but there couldn't have been more than half a French fry inside her, tops. She was trying to lose weight really fierce. For Hawaii."
"I see, Wendy."
Dr. Menger cut in with the results of the blood-alcohol test, which confirmed next to no alcohol in her system. "Virtually clean, he said. Point-oh-one."
Almost clean. But not clean. Dirty. Tainted. Soiled and corrupted. Shitted. Malaised. Poxed and pussed. Made unclean by her sick teenaged friends who wreck houses. And we sat there in silence far into the next day, six friends, wretches of transgression, feeling deserving of punishment, sipping lame paper cones of Foremost eggnog brought to us by a nurse leaving night shift, anticipating our burdens, and castigating ourselves with silence. Sunday morning. Already news would be traveling throughout the school community - the early risers off to skate or ski. Karen's mental state would be glamorously linked to the house-wrecker, as though the damaged house had been the actual cause of her ails. And drugs.
I developed a cramp and went to the bathroom. There I found a stall, took a deep breath, and