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grateful that she’s not awake, that she doesn’t know what’s going on….”
    Except she did know, Casey was forced to acknowledge, as the direness of her predicament suddenly reasserted itself, spreading through the dark space around her like a nasty stain.
    The patient is a thirty-two-year-old woman who was the victim of a hit-and-run accident approximately three weeks ago…. She’s on life support … multiple traumas … extensive surgeries … external fixators … massive bleeding to the abdomen … A splenectomy was then performed…. the patient might be in a coma for the rest of her life.
    A coma for the rest of her life.
    “No! No! No!” Casey shouted, unable to block out the truth any longer. No amount of denials, no amount of rationalizations, no amount of pretending her doctors might be mistaken could hold back the horrifying truth of her condition—that she was a thirty-two-year-old woman trapped in a possibly irreversible coma, a coma that cruelly enabled her to hear but not see, to think but not communicate, to exist but not act. Hell, she couldn’t even breathe without the help of a machine. This was worse than being lost in some dank underground cave, worse than being buried alive. Worse than death. Was she doomed to spend the rest of her days in this dark, free-floating limbo, unable to distinguish between what was actually happening and what was merely imagined? How long could this go on?
    Subdural hemorrhage … burr hole into the skull to remove the blood … major concussion to the brain … Casey Marshall could be on the ventilator for years, or she could wake up tomorrow.
    How many hours, days, weeks could she lie here, suspended in blackness, hearing a succession of voices float about her head like passing clouds? How many weeks, months, years—God forbid, years!—could she survive, not being able to reach out to those she loved?
    The patient’s brain has been rocked.
    For that matter, how long would it be before her friends stopped visiting her, before even her husband moved on? Gail rarely talked about Mike anymore. And Warren was only thirty-seven. He might hover over her for a few more months, maybe even a year or two, but eventually he’d be coaxed into someone else’s all-too-eager arms. The others would follow, lulled back into their everyday lives. Soon everyone would be gone. Even the doctors would eventually lose interest. She’d be carted off to some rehab facility, abandoned in a distant corner of a stale-smelling corridor, propped up in a wheelchair, and left to listen to a succession of lost feet shuffle by. How long before she went mad from frustration and rage, from the sheer boredom and predictability of it all?
    Or she could wake up tomorrow.
    “I could wake up tomorrow,” Casey repeated, trying to draw comfort from the thought. Judging by what she’d heard, the accident had happened three weeks ago. So maybe Gail’s optimism wasn’t entirely unfounded. Maybe the fact she could now hear was a good sign, a sign that she was on the road to recovery. Her hearing had returned. Her eyes had opened. Maybe tomorrow the darkness would lift, and she’d be able to see. Maybe once the tube was out of her mouth—Was it out already? Had the doctors already performed the tracheostomy they’d been talking about … when? How long ago?—she’d regain the use of her vocal chords. She was already getting better at being able to distinguish between outside voices. They no longer all blended together or sounded as if they were coming to her from the far side of a thick wall. Maybe tomorrow it would be better still. She might even be able to blink in response to any questions they might pose. She might find a way to show everyone she was alert and cognizant of what was being said.
    Maybe she was getting better.
    Or maybe this was as good as it was ever going to get, she realized, feeling her spirits suddenly deflate, like air whooshing out of a child’s half-blown balloon. In