Noggin (3 page)

“Do you remember anything about being gone?” Dad slid a plate of scrambled eggs across the counter toward me.

“Not a thing. I remember closing my eyes and I remember opening them. And now this.”

“Your mother used to ask me if I thought you were dreaming.”

My dad started to cry as soon as he’d gotten that last sentence out. He gripped the sides of the counter with both hands and held his head down, shaking it. It looked like he was about to apologize, you know, for showing emotion, but he stopped himself and it was quiet for a while longer.

“We’re so happy you’re home, Travis.”

“Me too.”

Before bed I walked up to my parents’ room and knocked on the door. My mom said to come in, and I found her lying there with puffy eyes. She’d already put on her pajamas, black ones with little red hearts all over. She sat up and smiled a little as I walked to the other side of the bed and sat down next to her.

“Well, Sharon Coates.” I held an invisible microphone up in front of her. “Your only son’s just come back from the dead—what do you have to say?”

She paused, looked over at me the way she used to in
church when I’d try to make her laugh during the sermon, and smiled, shaking her head.

“Go on, Sharon. Tell us what you’re thinking about.”

“I’m thinking about how I must be the only mother in the world who has ever gotten to have this conversation.”

“Maybe Lawrence Ramsey’s mom did,” I said.

“Maybe,” Mom said. “And what about you, Travis Coates? You’ve just been brought back to life, what are
you
thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about how long it’s gonna take me to remember that everything’s so different. I can’t quite understand it yet, I guess.”

She leaned over and hugged me, set her head down on my shoulder, and patted my back a little.

“I think we’ll have to get used to a lot of things we don’t understand.”

She was right about that one. I didn’t understand a damn thing that was going on. So how come it felt so familiar, every motion and breath and sound? How could it feel like nothing had changed at all when I wasn’t me from the neck down?

Healthy or sick, Jeremy Pratt’s body was better than mine. I knew this because the only thing separating me from him was a straight, pink line that circumnavigated my neck. There were no stitches, though—I was told this was a thing of the past. Connecting us together, Jeremy’s body and me, was a spinal cord, blood vessels, nerve endings, and this swollen scar right in the middle of my neck about halfway between my clavicle and my chin. In time it would fade to a dull, more permanent purple.

This kid was an athlete, though—I can tell you that much. He did sit-ups and push-ups and other things that I suddenly felt pressured to try to do, just to maintain this impossible physique. But not just yet. I was still getting used to standing without help and to breathing without coughing up a lung. It was like this body was taking care of me until I was ready to take care of it. There
was a six-pack, a real one, and arms that looked like real man arms, like they could actually lift something without too much effort, and a chest that was much more than the almost concave skin board I’d always known.

That first night back at home, I stood in front of the mirror that now hung on the backside of my bedroom door and just stared at myself. My hair was mostly gone, but the rest of my face looked exactly the same. Green eyes, dimples, that one little brown mole on the top of my right cheek. It was sort of like my head had been photoshopped onto someone else. I took my shirt and jeans off, stood there in only a pair of boxer briefs, and looked over every inch of my new self.

Just so you know: yeah, shit got weird. Imagine most of you is suddenly someone else, and this is the first moment of privacy you’ve gotten. The weirdest part, I guess, wasn’t seeing my new chest or stomach or legs. It wasn’t turning around to see that someone else’s ass was there below someone else’s back. And, surprisingly, it wasn’t the moment I dared to just go for it and take a good, long look at my new dick. Sure, it was weird, but it wasn’t disappointing
at
all
, to be quite honest. The weirdest part, truly, was realizing I’d been doing all this undressing and examining and making sure the door was locked with hands that were different from my hands, with hands that had never touched Cate or knuckle-bumped with Kyle or opened my locker at school. These were Jeremy Pratt’s clever hands, and they’d fooled me into thinking they were mine.

That night in bed I couldn’t stop staring at them. The palms, the fingernails, the knuckles and backsides. The skin tone was nearly the same as the rest of me, maybe a little more tan, but not so different that I thought anyone but me would notice. The nails were longer than I liked to keep mine, so I went into the bathroom and clipped them down to the skin, like the ones I’d seen every day of my life.

“You’ll get used to it faster than you think, I bet,” Dad said the next morning at breakfast.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. And I didn’t. Again, I had someone else’s package.

“You’re taller now, you know?” Mom said.

“Taller than Dad,” I said, nodding his way. “It’s weird.”

“Six foot one,” Mom said. “You always wanted to be six feet. Well, mission accomplished.”

“There has to be a better way,” I said.

“You made the news this morning,” Dad said.

“Second miracle patient comes back to life!” Mom added, coming up behind me and squeezing my shoulders.

“I saw.”

I’d stayed up the whole night before, pretty much every night since I’d been back, flipping to different twenty-four-hour news channels to try to catch stories about me. They always said something about my return being a “miracle,” and every time I heard that word or saw it spelled out on the little scroll at the bottom of the screen, I had to close my eyes and breathe in deeply. I was back, yeah. And it
was ridiculous and impossible all in one. I just wasn’t all that ready to call it a miracle.

“School’s gonna be pretty weird,” I said.

“There are lots of things that’ll make it pretty weird for a while,” Dad said. “But you’ll manage. I know you will.”

“Has anyone called for me?”

“Your grandmother. She wants to see you as soon as possible. Your aunt Cindy may drive her down next week.”

“Great. Anyone else?”

“You’ll have to give them some more time, Travis.”

“Time. More time,” I said, a bit frustrated.

“They’ll show up. Wait and see.”

I couldn’t believe I’d been awake for nearly three weeks and hadn’t heard a single thing out of Cate or Kyle. Mom and Dad kept telling me to try to understand what it must be like for them, to just try to be patient. And that only got me thinking that maybe my parents were just faking their way through all of this, that they were actually freaking out inside, their brains quietly exploding. Maybe they’d been carefully coached by Dr. Saranson and his staff. Maybe they were told to be as calm and collected as possible, at all times, for fear that too much excitement could throw me over the edge.

But I had to talk to someone. Maybe it would have to be Lawrence Ramsey. He’d be the one person on earth who could relate to what I was feeling. We were two people unstuck in time, and as much as I wanted to forget what happened to me, I knew I’d need some help.
It’s pretty sad when you feel like a complete stranger is the only person you can turn to.

Sure, I was
trying
to be hopeful and not waste this opportunity like the nurse said or didn’t say that night at the hospital. But wasn’t I always going to be
Travis, who died
to these people? No matter what I did, wouldn’t they always remember the way they had to let me go? I guess it turns out you don’t have to be all that dead to be a dead guy.

Before we had left Denver, Dr. Saranson had given me his card and told me to call him any time I needed anything. He had said this while firmly shaking my hand and looking me right in the eyes.

“Travis,” he said, picking up the phone. “I’m so glad you called.”

“Thanks.”

“How are things going? You adjusting okay? Everything back to normal for you yet?”

Was he kidding me with this? Did he really think anything would ever be even close to normal for me?

“Things are okay, I guess.”

“That bad, huh?” he asked, his tone changing from a higher-pitched fake professional to a “Let’s cut the shit” serious.

“It’s just weird, you know. Everything’s pretty
different.”

“And every
one
’s different too, right?”

“Right.”

“Did you ever hear from your friends?” he asked.

“Not a word. It’s really hard to understand.”

“I know it is, Travis. But if you can, try putting yourself in their shoes. They lost someone very close to them, and it took a long time to move past it, I’m sure. For you, it’s been a few weeks, but for them, it’s been a lifetime since seeing you, since hearing your voice.”

“I guess I thought they’d be excited I was back,” I said.

“You know they are, Travis. They have to be. They’re just scared, I bet. We have this way of putting certain ideas out of our minds . . . we do that. Humans, I mean. We have to bury things, hopes and dreams, so deep sometimes that it takes a little while to access those things once we need them again.”

“So you think they just need more time to understand that I’m really back?”

“It’s not that, no,” he said. “I think they just need more time to understand
why
you’re back and what that means to their lives. Maybe you think that’s selfish, but I’d bet you anything they’ve been talking to each other just about every day since you’ve been back and trying to figure out how to deal with this thing. You woke up from a nap and everyone was older and different, but they’ve stayed up a lot of nights thinking about you, Travis. They’ve grieved you for years and now they’re being asked to un-grieve you, and, sadly, that just isn’t something that very many
people understand because, well, it’s never been a possibility before now.”

“Did Lawrence go through this too?” I asked, feeling like this wasn’t the first time Dr. Saranson had had this conversation.

“He did. Yeah. But I’ll let him tell you about that. I think it would be really good for you. For both of you. What do you say?”

“I think I’m ready.”

“Great. I’m going to give him your number, and I bet he’ll be calling you very soon.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Travis?”

“Sir?”

“It’s all going to work out. I promise.”

“Sure it will,” I said.

“And I’ll see you next week, right? For your first checkup? I’m flying down on Wednesday. You can tell me all about school.”

•  •  •

Three days before my first day back to school, Mom came into my bedroom and woke me up. I looked at my alarm clock, and since I was in that just-awake haze, it took me a second or two to figure out if it was midnight or noon.

“Lawrence Ramsey’s on the phone for you,” she whispered, sitting on the edge of my bed.

“What?” I sat up, squinting my eyes. It was definitely
daytime because sunlight was filtering in through the curtains and heating up the side of my face.

“Lawrence Ramsey. He’s waiting for you.” She held a cordless phone with one hand, her other covering the bottom of it.

“Can you give me, like, five minutes?” I said, yawning.

“What do you want me to do, Travis? Chit-chat?”

I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed or amused, but I didn’t care. I nodded my head and got up to use the bathroom. When I came back, she was sitting in the same spot and repeating “Yeah . . . yeah . . . uh-huh” into the receiver. She waved me over.

“Okay, Mr. Ramsey. Well, here’s Travis. Yes. You too. Okay. Bye-bye.”

“Hello?” I said, sitting down.

“Well, if it isn’t the man of the hour!” he said.

He had a kind voice, one much less animated than his public persona used. I’d seen him in so many interviews that I knew his whole story. I knew how he lost both of his parents to cancer by the time he was out of college. I knew he met his wife ten years before by accident when he, then an air-conditioner repairman, showed up to the wrong house and she pretended her A/C was broken just to get to know him. I knew they named their twin daughters after their respective grandmothers, Francine and Delilah. And I knew that he was thirty-six years old when they told him he would die. You could ask anyone you met and they’d tell you
something about the life of Lawrence Ramsey and how it was a miracle that such a “good man” had been given a second chance to be happy, that he would get to see his children grow up after all.

“Huh?”

“You’re all over the place, kiddo. Letterman even made a joke about you in his monologue last night. Funny stuff.”

“Am I ever going to get used to all this?”

“Well, the public’s known about you for, what, a week or so? They’re still hassling me and I’ve been back for six months. So sorry to say, but I doubt it.”

The Saranson Center had officially announced my reanimation the week before, so the news had been flooded with all these stories about how I got sick and volunteered for the surgery and all. They kept showing old photos of me because, thankfully, my age allowed me a little more privacy than it had Lawrence, and they couldn’t show up at our house or anything like that.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “Lucky you’re so young. They’ll probably be at your school, though. I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Just be ready. Duck your head down and walk past them as fast as you can. Vultures. All of ’em.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Travis. I’m sure you’re still feeling really overwhelmed, and here I am shooting even more crazy stuff at you.”

“It’s okay. Thanks for calling. Dr. Saranson said
it might help us both.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “We’re the sole members of a very exclusive club, you and me.”

“It’s just all so . . .”

“Fucked up?” he said. “Excuse me. I’m sorry.”