Not Quite Dead Yet, page 3
“Nothing,” Dianne said, backing off. “We were waiting for you.”
“Guys, it’s OK,” Jet sniffed. “I already know. I remember everything. Someone hit me in the back of the head. Tried to kill me.”
Silence.
“Didn’t do a very good job of it,” Jet said. Jazz hands, for effect.
Dad cupped his fingers to his mouth, holding back a sob. A silent tear rolling down his knuckles.
“Mr. Mason, please,” Dr. Lee said, pulling up a chair to sit beside the bed. “Jet. I’m a neurosurgeon. You’re in Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.”
“How long have I been here?” Jet asked. “What day is it today?” What day, or what year? Fuck—had she been asleep a lot longer than she thought? Oh fuck, had she been in a coma for years—is that why everyone was being so weird? She hadn’t turned thirty already, had she? All that lost time.
“It’s Sunday,” Dr. Lee said, voice calming, reacting to Jet’s panicked eyes, “at 2 p.m. You’ve been here about thirty-six hours.”
“Fucking phew,” she said. “That’s a relief. I thought I was old.”
Dad turned away, faced the wall.
“Jet, you were in a bad way when you arrived at the ER,” Dr. Lee said, fiddling the edges of the file. “You were an eight on the GCS on arrival, which means you were comatose, had to be intubated. Suffered cardiac arrest from blood loss shortly after. We were able to stabilize you, get you into surgery. You had a subdural hematoma, here on the left side of your head, under that bandage. That means a buildup of blood on the surface of the brain. We evacuated the blood and there didn’t appear to be any significant brain trauma. But we believe you were hit three times. Once on the left side of your head there, and twice on the back of your head, near the base of your skull.”
Those were the ones Jet remembered.
Dr. Lee swallowed.
“Your skull was fractured. A longitudinal fracture across the occipital bone. The first blow would have caused the fracture, the second would have depressed the bone farther into your brain.” She paused, looked down. “Considering the site of the injury, the violence of the attack, it’s a miracle there isn’t significant damage to the vital tissues and vascular structures of the brain, that you’re able to move and think and function as you are. I’ve never seen anything like it. But.”
Jet knew there had to be a but coming. Because if it was a miracle, her family wouldn’t be looking at her like this. Like she hadn’t woken up at all.
Her head was throbbing, the base and the left side; now she knew where to pinpoint the pain. Hot and sharp, an imitation, a ghost of how it had felt at the time. When her head had exploded open.
Dr. Lee flipped the file in her lap.
“The fracture was successfully mended during surgery. We’ve reconnected the skull pieces with screws and wire mesh. Stitched up your scalp.”
It flared and itched as she mentioned it.
“And after surgery, you were sent for another CT scan.”
She pulled out a scan from the file, the plastic quivering with an almost comic wub-wub sound, not reading the room. Dr. Lee held the scan up, against the afternoon light streaming through the window. A black background. White writing glowed at the very top: Margaret Mason, Age: 27, 11/01/2025, more numbers Jet didn’t understand. Below was a grid of pictures. Different angles of her brain, dissected this way and that, rendered in a strange pale blue.
“There is a bone at the base of the skull, at the deepest part, right in the middle of your brain, called the clivus. The trauma to the back of your head has resulted in a fracture to the clivus.” The scan trembled in Dr. Lee’s hand, threatening that noise again. “A clivus fracture is an incredibly rare event, seen in less than 0.5 percent of traumatic head injuries. And if you look here”—she pointed to the scan, to an image taken through the top of Jet’s head—“you can see there is a small piece of bone fragment separated from the clivus.”
Dr. Lee’s finger pressed against a tiny pale white orb, floating there in the middle of Jet’s brain. She pointed it out in the side view too, checking that Jet could see. Not even an orb, just a speck really.
“OK,” Jet said. “But it’s tiny, right? And I’m fine. Look, I’m fine.”
Luke pulled out the chair on the other side, made Mom sit down.
“Jet,” Dr. Lee said, her teeth holding on to the t, chewing on it, so she didn’t have to continue. “That tiny bone fragment is leaning against the wall of your basilar artery.”
Jet breathed out. “That sounds important.”
“One of the major arteries supplying blood to your brain.”
Yep. Important.
“A surgery to remove the fragment would normally be considered impossible. It’s so deep, so hard to access without damaging other parts of the brain. Too easy to accidentally nick the artery and cause a catastrophic bleed. Chances of mortality far too high. Better to leave it and, in time, the fragment may migrate to the outer edges of the brain, where it could be more easily accessed and removed. But.”
Another but.
The throbbing was a drumbeat in Jet’s head now, mirroring her heart, answering fear with fear.
“You have polycystic kidney disease, Jet.”
“I’m well aware.” Jet sniffed. Again, those weeks of pissing blood, pain so bad it doubled you over, the phantom bruises, quitting her job and moving home because it all got too much, the high-blood-pressure pills she took every day, never smoked, not too much salt, even though she’d once loved fries. “What does that have to do with my brain?”
Dad was standing behind Mom now, hands on her shoulders, lips in a tight white line to stop him from crying.
Dr. Lee swallowed.
“A complication of PKD is that patients have much weaker arterial walls, in the heart and…and in the brain.”
“Right.”
“I’m sorry, Jet, there’s no easy way to tell you this. With the fragment’s position, putting extra pressure on an already weak arterial wall, an aneurysm will form at the site. A large one. And when it ruptures, the resulting hemorrhage, the bleeding, it…it would be fatal.”
“O-K,” Jet said, nodding, stopping when she realized that hurt. “And how likely is it that an aneurysm would form?”
“It’s a certainty, Jet. And it would be fast.”
“How fast?”
“It’s impossible to accurately predict, especially before the aneurysm has formed.”
“Give it your best guess, doc.”
“Jet,” Mom sniffed.
Dr. Lee straightened, looked at the floor instead of Jet. “Given the particular circumstances of your case, I would say we have just days. Maybe a week until it ruptures.”
Jet clicked her tongue, to hide the thrum of her heart, fight-or-flight fast. This couldn’t be happening. Was this really happening? “So…you’re saying that I’d be dead in about a week?”
No one answered.
Dad couldn’t hold it any longer, burying his face in the crook of his elbow as he sobbed.
“Dad, it’s OK,” Jet said, shifting in her bed. She’d only seen him cry once before like this. A guttural, primal sound. She hoped she’d never have to hear that sound again; seventeen years wasn’t long enough.
“It’s my fault,” he cried.
“Dad, it’s not your fault. It’s hereditary. There was a fifty percent chance that me or Luke or Emily could have inherited PKD.” That made Jet the unlucky one. She already knew that, because the other two had normal names and she was the one who got stuck with Margaret. “So, the surgery, then. Right?” Jet looked from Dr. Lee to her family.
Mom nodded, wiped her swollen eyes. None of them looked like they’d slept much, in the time Jet had slept too much. “It’s the only choice, Jet.”
“Please, Mrs. Mason,” Dr. Lee’s voice hardened. “I need to make something clear to you, Jet, before you make any decision. Like I said, under other circumstances, this surgery wouldn’t even be considered. The risk of mortality is high. I have to be honest with you: it was my colleague, Dr. Fuller, who performed the initial surgery on you. After the second CT scan, once the situation became clear, Dr. Fuller refused to even consider performing surgery to attempt to remove the bone fragment. I said that I would only do it if you had all the information—if you chose this, understanding the risk.”
The drumming in her head quickened, unnatural, like it was counting down to something, racing her heart.
“What is the risk?” Jet asked. “Can you give me a percentage or something?”
Dr. Lee hesitated, her tongue moving around inside her mouth, bulging through her cheek. “Less than ten percent chance of survival.”
The drumming stopped.
“So, more than a ninety percent chance that I’d die on the table?” Numb, detached, like she wasn’t here in this body, in this bed. Sometimes minds did that, didn’t they, to save you from the pain? Or was this a result of the brain trauma, the kind of broken that didn’t show up on CT scans? “I’m not a betting girl, but those don’t sound like good odds.”
Jet wasn’t good with chance. She’d already lost that game with polycystic kidney disease. And that was with fifty percent. Not ten. Less than ten.
“There’s nothing else you can do?”
“I’m sorry, Jet,” Dr. Lee said, a tremble in her voice that she coughed to cover. How many times had she had to tell someone they were going to die? Could you get used to a thing like that?
Jet looked at her family. Luke, gray and silent, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Dad crying, a quieter, more unsettling kind of cry. Mom leaning forward in her chair, taking Jet’s hand in her own, giving it a squeeze.
“So.” Jet hesitated, trying to stick her mind back together, to fix what the doctor couldn’t. “My choice is I can die now, or I can die in seven days?”
Three
The room was silent, but the world was not. It carried on; a high-pitched beep from a machine, a low-pitched scream down the corridor, the fall sun beaming through the window because it didn’t care about her and her little problems.
What kind of choice was that? Jet couldn’t even decide what to have for breakfast most days. Die now, or die in a week? Toast or cereal? Both?
There was a humming too, but that wasn’t down the corridor; it was in Jet’s head, behind her eyes, playing with her heart. A symphony of the damned. Her throat constricted; she wouldn’t let the others hear it.
“Damn,” Jet said. “You sure there isn’t a door number three?”
Her mom replied before the doctor could.
“Everything’s going to be OK, sweetie. It’s obvious which choice to make,” she sniffed, her grip tightening until it hurt. “One of them has a chance, the other doesn’t. I can’t lose you. You have to choose the surgery, Jet. Quickly. The doctor said every minute counts.”
“Mrs. Mason—”
“—Not much of a chance.” Jet looked at her. “Less than ten percent chance of survival. I know it’s been a while since high school for you, but that’s not great math, Mom.”
“Don’t make this a competition, Jet.”
“How was I making it a—”
“—You have to have the surgery.” Mom’s eyes filled but they didn’t spill. “I can’t lose another daughter. You can’t do that to me.”
The humming became a roar of thunder. Jet could normally leash it, back down and walk away, but maybe that had gotten broken too.
“I didn’t bash my own fucking brain in, Mom. I’m not doing this. Not everything is my fault.”
Dad stepped forward. “Jet, your mom didn’t mean it like that. She only wants what’s best for you. We all do, baby girl.”
He hadn’t called her that in years.
“Yeah,” Luke said, gruffly, like that added anything.
“But you’re going to choose the surgery,” Mom said, tears released, chasing each other down her cheeks. “You know that’s the right decision, don’t you? Scott, help me.”
Dr. Lee cut in, rising from her chair. “This really has to be Jet’s decision.” Her voice softened. “You don’t have to make it right this moment. The police are outside. They’ve been waiting for you to wake up. They need to ask you some questions about your assault, before you decide.”
“In case I choose the surgery and don’t make it,” Jet said, seeing through the doctor’s words. “They’re here, now, to i-i-in…” What was the word? Ah, fuck, you know the word she meant. What you do to get a job, same thing when the police ask you questions. Sounds like…Jet couldn’t remember what it sounded like. “I-in…” What was that fucking word?
“Interview?” Luke offered.
“Yes. Interview.” Jet smacked her hand down on the bed. “What was I saying?”
Dr. Lee’s eyes narrowed. “Jet, are you having trouble finding your words?”
“No.”
Yes. Not some of them. Like Fuck, fuck, I’m going to die, fuck. But she couldn’t find the word for that thing resting around Dr. Lee’s shoulders. That long thing with earbuds and a metal disc, for listening to hearts. Jet didn’t need one; her heart was too loud already.
Dr. Lee nodded, like she could read minds, even if she couldn’t fix this one.
“One of the blows was to the side of your head here.” Dr. Lee gestured to the stick-on bandage. “The left hemisphere, where the brain’s language center is. Sometimes trauma to this area can cause problems with understanding or producing language, called an aphasia. Your comprehension and speech seem mostly unaffected, so it’s likely anomic aphasia, the mildest kind.” She paused. “You may have trouble retrieving certain words, specifically ones you don’t use too often. It can be temporary, may only last a few weeks or months, and can be treated with speech therapy.”
Jet shrugged. “I don’t have weeks or months, though, do I?” Not really a question.
“If you have the surgery, Jet—” Mom began.
“—I think we need to let Jet speak to the police now.” Dr. Lee gestured with Jet’s medical file, sweeping Dianne to her feet.
Luke lingered by the door.
“Who was it, Jet?” he asked, mouth in a grim line, hiding his teeth. “Who did this to you?”
She exhaled. Three words she definitely knew how to find: “I don’t know.”
“Come on, Luke.” Dad patted him gently on the back. “Let’s let the cops ask their questions. There’s not much time.”
Mom pressed her hand to the lump of Jet’s foot, beneath the sheet. “I’ll be right outside, sweetie.”
The doctor was the last to leave, looking back at Jet, a sad half-smile. The smile of an execu-exec—fuck, what was that word? You know: the people who wore hoods in movies, swung the ax or dropped the platform?
“She’s ready for you,” Jet heard Dr. Lee say outside, muffled by the door swinging shut. “Please don’t press her too hard. I’ve just broken the news.”
The news.
Ha.
Extra, extra, read all about it. Jet Mason’s got a time bomb in her head.
The door was going to open any second now. Was that enough time to scream?
The hinges creaked. No. Not enough time. To scream. To live.
A man in a suit was the first in, a file clutched in his white-knuckle hands. All this paperwork; lucky her.
“Margaret Mason?” he said gently, overenunciating. “My name is George Ecker. I’m a detective with the Vermont State Police.”
“It’s Jet,” said another voice, one she recognized. Billy’s dad—sorry—Jack Finney walked into the room, his badge glinting at her. “She likes to be called Jet.” His face was wrung out, sleep deprived, but at least it was familiar under all of that.
Chief Lou Jankowski was the last in, shutting the door behind him with a click. He nodded. “Hello again, Jet.”
George Ecker cleared his throat. “The chief said you might want Sergeant Finney in here. That you know each other.”
“All my life,” Jet said.
Jack bowed his head, like it hurt to hold her gaze. Mourning her before she even had the good grace to really be gone. Pre-dead. Un-dead. Fuck sake, a zombie, that’s what she was. Talk about foreshadowing. And Jet was surprised she could talk about it—shouldn’t that be a word lost to the black hole in her head? So many syllables.
The three of them stood around her bed, like silent sentries, Jet’s neck craning to look up at them.
“I didn’t see who it was,” she said. “Before you ask. They attacked me from behind. I didn’t get a chance to turn around.”
Detective Ecker clicked and unclicked a pen, scribbled something in his file. “Did you hear or see anything that might help us identify them?”
Jet swallowed. “So you don’t know who it was either? Isn’t there evidence or something?”
“The scene is still being processed,” the detective said. “Anything at all?”
“Footsteps,” Jet answered. “Coming up behind me.”
“Did they sound heavy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you tell what kind of shoes? Boots? Sneakers?”
“I don’t know, it was just footsteps. It was so fast.”
“One set or more?”
“One. It was one person.”
Detective Ecker flicked to a previous page. “Do you know what was used to hit you?”
“No.” She paused. “Wait, so you don’t have the murder weapon either?”
She didn’t even realize until she’d just said it. The murder weapon. That’s what it was, though, wasn’t it? Because Jet hadn’t just been attacked, or assaulted—those paler, one-size-fits-all words. She’d been…murdered. Someone had killed her. More than ninety percent killed her, unless Jet was due another miracle and the surgery actually worked.
“The weapon was not recovered at the scene,” Ecker said, omitting the vital word that made them all uncomfortable.
“Guys, it’s OK,” Jet sniffed. “I already know. I remember everything. Someone hit me in the back of the head. Tried to kill me.”
Silence.
“Didn’t do a very good job of it,” Jet said. Jazz hands, for effect.
Dad cupped his fingers to his mouth, holding back a sob. A silent tear rolling down his knuckles.
“Mr. Mason, please,” Dr. Lee said, pulling up a chair to sit beside the bed. “Jet. I’m a neurosurgeon. You’re in Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.”
“How long have I been here?” Jet asked. “What day is it today?” What day, or what year? Fuck—had she been asleep a lot longer than she thought? Oh fuck, had she been in a coma for years—is that why everyone was being so weird? She hadn’t turned thirty already, had she? All that lost time.
“It’s Sunday,” Dr. Lee said, voice calming, reacting to Jet’s panicked eyes, “at 2 p.m. You’ve been here about thirty-six hours.”
“Fucking phew,” she said. “That’s a relief. I thought I was old.”
Dad turned away, faced the wall.
“Jet, you were in a bad way when you arrived at the ER,” Dr. Lee said, fiddling the edges of the file. “You were an eight on the GCS on arrival, which means you were comatose, had to be intubated. Suffered cardiac arrest from blood loss shortly after. We were able to stabilize you, get you into surgery. You had a subdural hematoma, here on the left side of your head, under that bandage. That means a buildup of blood on the surface of the brain. We evacuated the blood and there didn’t appear to be any significant brain trauma. But we believe you were hit three times. Once on the left side of your head there, and twice on the back of your head, near the base of your skull.”
Those were the ones Jet remembered.
Dr. Lee swallowed.
“Your skull was fractured. A longitudinal fracture across the occipital bone. The first blow would have caused the fracture, the second would have depressed the bone farther into your brain.” She paused, looked down. “Considering the site of the injury, the violence of the attack, it’s a miracle there isn’t significant damage to the vital tissues and vascular structures of the brain, that you’re able to move and think and function as you are. I’ve never seen anything like it. But.”
Jet knew there had to be a but coming. Because if it was a miracle, her family wouldn’t be looking at her like this. Like she hadn’t woken up at all.
Her head was throbbing, the base and the left side; now she knew where to pinpoint the pain. Hot and sharp, an imitation, a ghost of how it had felt at the time. When her head had exploded open.
Dr. Lee flipped the file in her lap.
“The fracture was successfully mended during surgery. We’ve reconnected the skull pieces with screws and wire mesh. Stitched up your scalp.”
It flared and itched as she mentioned it.
“And after surgery, you were sent for another CT scan.”
She pulled out a scan from the file, the plastic quivering with an almost comic wub-wub sound, not reading the room. Dr. Lee held the scan up, against the afternoon light streaming through the window. A black background. White writing glowed at the very top: Margaret Mason, Age: 27, 11/01/2025, more numbers Jet didn’t understand. Below was a grid of pictures. Different angles of her brain, dissected this way and that, rendered in a strange pale blue.
“There is a bone at the base of the skull, at the deepest part, right in the middle of your brain, called the clivus. The trauma to the back of your head has resulted in a fracture to the clivus.” The scan trembled in Dr. Lee’s hand, threatening that noise again. “A clivus fracture is an incredibly rare event, seen in less than 0.5 percent of traumatic head injuries. And if you look here”—she pointed to the scan, to an image taken through the top of Jet’s head—“you can see there is a small piece of bone fragment separated from the clivus.”
Dr. Lee’s finger pressed against a tiny pale white orb, floating there in the middle of Jet’s brain. She pointed it out in the side view too, checking that Jet could see. Not even an orb, just a speck really.
“OK,” Jet said. “But it’s tiny, right? And I’m fine. Look, I’m fine.”
Luke pulled out the chair on the other side, made Mom sit down.
“Jet,” Dr. Lee said, her teeth holding on to the t, chewing on it, so she didn’t have to continue. “That tiny bone fragment is leaning against the wall of your basilar artery.”
Jet breathed out. “That sounds important.”
“One of the major arteries supplying blood to your brain.”
Yep. Important.
“A surgery to remove the fragment would normally be considered impossible. It’s so deep, so hard to access without damaging other parts of the brain. Too easy to accidentally nick the artery and cause a catastrophic bleed. Chances of mortality far too high. Better to leave it and, in time, the fragment may migrate to the outer edges of the brain, where it could be more easily accessed and removed. But.”
Another but.
The throbbing was a drumbeat in Jet’s head now, mirroring her heart, answering fear with fear.
“You have polycystic kidney disease, Jet.”
“I’m well aware.” Jet sniffed. Again, those weeks of pissing blood, pain so bad it doubled you over, the phantom bruises, quitting her job and moving home because it all got too much, the high-blood-pressure pills she took every day, never smoked, not too much salt, even though she’d once loved fries. “What does that have to do with my brain?”
Dad was standing behind Mom now, hands on her shoulders, lips in a tight white line to stop him from crying.
Dr. Lee swallowed.
“A complication of PKD is that patients have much weaker arterial walls, in the heart and…and in the brain.”
“Right.”
“I’m sorry, Jet, there’s no easy way to tell you this. With the fragment’s position, putting extra pressure on an already weak arterial wall, an aneurysm will form at the site. A large one. And when it ruptures, the resulting hemorrhage, the bleeding, it…it would be fatal.”
“O-K,” Jet said, nodding, stopping when she realized that hurt. “And how likely is it that an aneurysm would form?”
“It’s a certainty, Jet. And it would be fast.”
“How fast?”
“It’s impossible to accurately predict, especially before the aneurysm has formed.”
“Give it your best guess, doc.”
“Jet,” Mom sniffed.
Dr. Lee straightened, looked at the floor instead of Jet. “Given the particular circumstances of your case, I would say we have just days. Maybe a week until it ruptures.”
Jet clicked her tongue, to hide the thrum of her heart, fight-or-flight fast. This couldn’t be happening. Was this really happening? “So…you’re saying that I’d be dead in about a week?”
No one answered.
Dad couldn’t hold it any longer, burying his face in the crook of his elbow as he sobbed.
“Dad, it’s OK,” Jet said, shifting in her bed. She’d only seen him cry once before like this. A guttural, primal sound. She hoped she’d never have to hear that sound again; seventeen years wasn’t long enough.
“It’s my fault,” he cried.
“Dad, it’s not your fault. It’s hereditary. There was a fifty percent chance that me or Luke or Emily could have inherited PKD.” That made Jet the unlucky one. She already knew that, because the other two had normal names and she was the one who got stuck with Margaret. “So, the surgery, then. Right?” Jet looked from Dr. Lee to her family.
Mom nodded, wiped her swollen eyes. None of them looked like they’d slept much, in the time Jet had slept too much. “It’s the only choice, Jet.”
“Please, Mrs. Mason,” Dr. Lee’s voice hardened. “I need to make something clear to you, Jet, before you make any decision. Like I said, under other circumstances, this surgery wouldn’t even be considered. The risk of mortality is high. I have to be honest with you: it was my colleague, Dr. Fuller, who performed the initial surgery on you. After the second CT scan, once the situation became clear, Dr. Fuller refused to even consider performing surgery to attempt to remove the bone fragment. I said that I would only do it if you had all the information—if you chose this, understanding the risk.”
The drumming in her head quickened, unnatural, like it was counting down to something, racing her heart.
“What is the risk?” Jet asked. “Can you give me a percentage or something?”
Dr. Lee hesitated, her tongue moving around inside her mouth, bulging through her cheek. “Less than ten percent chance of survival.”
The drumming stopped.
“So, more than a ninety percent chance that I’d die on the table?” Numb, detached, like she wasn’t here in this body, in this bed. Sometimes minds did that, didn’t they, to save you from the pain? Or was this a result of the brain trauma, the kind of broken that didn’t show up on CT scans? “I’m not a betting girl, but those don’t sound like good odds.”
Jet wasn’t good with chance. She’d already lost that game with polycystic kidney disease. And that was with fifty percent. Not ten. Less than ten.
“There’s nothing else you can do?”
“I’m sorry, Jet,” Dr. Lee said, a tremble in her voice that she coughed to cover. How many times had she had to tell someone they were going to die? Could you get used to a thing like that?
Jet looked at her family. Luke, gray and silent, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Dad crying, a quieter, more unsettling kind of cry. Mom leaning forward in her chair, taking Jet’s hand in her own, giving it a squeeze.
“So.” Jet hesitated, trying to stick her mind back together, to fix what the doctor couldn’t. “My choice is I can die now, or I can die in seven days?”
Three
The room was silent, but the world was not. It carried on; a high-pitched beep from a machine, a low-pitched scream down the corridor, the fall sun beaming through the window because it didn’t care about her and her little problems.
What kind of choice was that? Jet couldn’t even decide what to have for breakfast most days. Die now, or die in a week? Toast or cereal? Both?
There was a humming too, but that wasn’t down the corridor; it was in Jet’s head, behind her eyes, playing with her heart. A symphony of the damned. Her throat constricted; she wouldn’t let the others hear it.
“Damn,” Jet said. “You sure there isn’t a door number three?”
Her mom replied before the doctor could.
“Everything’s going to be OK, sweetie. It’s obvious which choice to make,” she sniffed, her grip tightening until it hurt. “One of them has a chance, the other doesn’t. I can’t lose you. You have to choose the surgery, Jet. Quickly. The doctor said every minute counts.”
“Mrs. Mason—”
“—Not much of a chance.” Jet looked at her. “Less than ten percent chance of survival. I know it’s been a while since high school for you, but that’s not great math, Mom.”
“Don’t make this a competition, Jet.”
“How was I making it a—”
“—You have to have the surgery.” Mom’s eyes filled but they didn’t spill. “I can’t lose another daughter. You can’t do that to me.”
The humming became a roar of thunder. Jet could normally leash it, back down and walk away, but maybe that had gotten broken too.
“I didn’t bash my own fucking brain in, Mom. I’m not doing this. Not everything is my fault.”
Dad stepped forward. “Jet, your mom didn’t mean it like that. She only wants what’s best for you. We all do, baby girl.”
He hadn’t called her that in years.
“Yeah,” Luke said, gruffly, like that added anything.
“But you’re going to choose the surgery,” Mom said, tears released, chasing each other down her cheeks. “You know that’s the right decision, don’t you? Scott, help me.”
Dr. Lee cut in, rising from her chair. “This really has to be Jet’s decision.” Her voice softened. “You don’t have to make it right this moment. The police are outside. They’ve been waiting for you to wake up. They need to ask you some questions about your assault, before you decide.”
“In case I choose the surgery and don’t make it,” Jet said, seeing through the doctor’s words. “They’re here, now, to i-i-in…” What was the word? Ah, fuck, you know the word she meant. What you do to get a job, same thing when the police ask you questions. Sounds like…Jet couldn’t remember what it sounded like. “I-in…” What was that fucking word?
“Interview?” Luke offered.
“Yes. Interview.” Jet smacked her hand down on the bed. “What was I saying?”
Dr. Lee’s eyes narrowed. “Jet, are you having trouble finding your words?”
“No.”
Yes. Not some of them. Like Fuck, fuck, I’m going to die, fuck. But she couldn’t find the word for that thing resting around Dr. Lee’s shoulders. That long thing with earbuds and a metal disc, for listening to hearts. Jet didn’t need one; her heart was too loud already.
Dr. Lee nodded, like she could read minds, even if she couldn’t fix this one.
“One of the blows was to the side of your head here.” Dr. Lee gestured to the stick-on bandage. “The left hemisphere, where the brain’s language center is. Sometimes trauma to this area can cause problems with understanding or producing language, called an aphasia. Your comprehension and speech seem mostly unaffected, so it’s likely anomic aphasia, the mildest kind.” She paused. “You may have trouble retrieving certain words, specifically ones you don’t use too often. It can be temporary, may only last a few weeks or months, and can be treated with speech therapy.”
Jet shrugged. “I don’t have weeks or months, though, do I?” Not really a question.
“If you have the surgery, Jet—” Mom began.
“—I think we need to let Jet speak to the police now.” Dr. Lee gestured with Jet’s medical file, sweeping Dianne to her feet.
Luke lingered by the door.
“Who was it, Jet?” he asked, mouth in a grim line, hiding his teeth. “Who did this to you?”
She exhaled. Three words she definitely knew how to find: “I don’t know.”
“Come on, Luke.” Dad patted him gently on the back. “Let’s let the cops ask their questions. There’s not much time.”
Mom pressed her hand to the lump of Jet’s foot, beneath the sheet. “I’ll be right outside, sweetie.”
The doctor was the last to leave, looking back at Jet, a sad half-smile. The smile of an execu-exec—fuck, what was that word? You know: the people who wore hoods in movies, swung the ax or dropped the platform?
“She’s ready for you,” Jet heard Dr. Lee say outside, muffled by the door swinging shut. “Please don’t press her too hard. I’ve just broken the news.”
The news.
Ha.
Extra, extra, read all about it. Jet Mason’s got a time bomb in her head.
The door was going to open any second now. Was that enough time to scream?
The hinges creaked. No. Not enough time. To scream. To live.
A man in a suit was the first in, a file clutched in his white-knuckle hands. All this paperwork; lucky her.
“Margaret Mason?” he said gently, overenunciating. “My name is George Ecker. I’m a detective with the Vermont State Police.”
“It’s Jet,” said another voice, one she recognized. Billy’s dad—sorry—Jack Finney walked into the room, his badge glinting at her. “She likes to be called Jet.” His face was wrung out, sleep deprived, but at least it was familiar under all of that.
Chief Lou Jankowski was the last in, shutting the door behind him with a click. He nodded. “Hello again, Jet.”
George Ecker cleared his throat. “The chief said you might want Sergeant Finney in here. That you know each other.”
“All my life,” Jet said.
Jack bowed his head, like it hurt to hold her gaze. Mourning her before she even had the good grace to really be gone. Pre-dead. Un-dead. Fuck sake, a zombie, that’s what she was. Talk about foreshadowing. And Jet was surprised she could talk about it—shouldn’t that be a word lost to the black hole in her head? So many syllables.
The three of them stood around her bed, like silent sentries, Jet’s neck craning to look up at them.
“I didn’t see who it was,” she said. “Before you ask. They attacked me from behind. I didn’t get a chance to turn around.”
Detective Ecker clicked and unclicked a pen, scribbled something in his file. “Did you hear or see anything that might help us identify them?”
Jet swallowed. “So you don’t know who it was either? Isn’t there evidence or something?”
“The scene is still being processed,” the detective said. “Anything at all?”
“Footsteps,” Jet answered. “Coming up behind me.”
“Did they sound heavy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you tell what kind of shoes? Boots? Sneakers?”
“I don’t know, it was just footsteps. It was so fast.”
“One set or more?”
“One. It was one person.”
Detective Ecker flicked to a previous page. “Do you know what was used to hit you?”
“No.” She paused. “Wait, so you don’t have the murder weapon either?”
She didn’t even realize until she’d just said it. The murder weapon. That’s what it was, though, wasn’t it? Because Jet hadn’t just been attacked, or assaulted—those paler, one-size-fits-all words. She’d been…murdered. Someone had killed her. More than ninety percent killed her, unless Jet was due another miracle and the surgery actually worked.
“The weapon was not recovered at the scene,” Ecker said, omitting the vital word that made them all uncomfortable.
