The Living Lie { 2004 }
She slept in the same black t-shirt her parents had found her wearing three nights ago: their oldest daughter, lying unconscious on the kitchen floor, her handbag and its contents scattered across the tiles; no blood, no bruises. Airia’s father suspected drugs. Her mother was simply worried.
Now the girl lay in her bedroom under a heavy down comforter. Doctors had come and gone and made no difference at all. Airia’s eyes remained open but blank as milk, her body motionless but tense. She could not see the syrupy, gold-specked afternoon sunlight which swam through the skylight. She could not see much of anything, other than one very long and disconnected dream. Behind her eyes a colder light played liquid and monochrome, filled with silence. She was alone there, somewhere far away from the large cream-colored bedroom where she slept, far from the posters on her walls and the spotless carpet of her room on the highest floor of her parents’ spacious house. Somewhere else, waiting with the warmth of an unclear distance, where there was a mushroom-soft sky and a shore of endless pebbles, washed by the sound of an absent ocean, she stared out at forever. Run; in a dream the rocks and shells cannot hurt your bare feet.
Run.
Laral had gone jogging while it was still dark. She tried anchoring her thoughts on each jolt of her feet hitting the pavement, not thinking about what she’d become. The brisk morning air led her to forget, somewhat; but in the shower afterwards she could not help crying, picturing her sister, and as she dressed in her bedroom, her gaze fell on the long smooth skirt of her bridesmaid gown and stayed there among its dark violet folds. Dawn crept into the sky outside, and Laral stood with her towel at her feet on the floor, staring, feeling hungry, regretful, and thinking inevitably about panic and blood.
Run.
“Her blood type?” the doctor questioned, shaking a thermometer and poking it between Airia’s lips. “Any allergies?”
“It’s all in her records,” the girl’s father said. This white-coated woman was the fourth specialist he and his wife had called to the house. All three of the others had asked the same questions, done the same tests, met with the same contradictory measurements and left with the same bewilderment. Three times Airia’s parents had trembled to hear the same uncertain conclusions.
“Clearly a coma. I can’t be thoroughly sure of the causes yet, but it looks blood related.” She took the thermometer from Airia’s mouth and studied it, furrowing her brow and clicking her tongue, pressing her palm to the girl’s forehead. Three thermometers later she muttered, “... but she feels so warm.”
Clearing her throat gently she addressed Airia’s family again. “There are no signs of bruising, so it isn’t a concussion. Her blood is very thin. Worse than the other doctors have indicated—but she doesn’t look pale. The fever…if it is a fever, will probably get worse… She’s been like this for three days?” The doctor reached out and put her hand through Airia’s brown hair. Her look of concentration tightened and she murmured something to herself. “Three days and no change at all…?” she asked again, expecting no answer. The doctor clicked her tongue and stared at her clipboard. “Not one drop of sweat. Her metabolism is very, very slow, and her digestion seems to be… almost frozen…from what I can tell. We’d need an X-ray to be sure, although I really don’t know… It’s…. well…I don’t understand it. Three whole days… She shouldn't look so clean, for one thing. She shouldn't look so healthy when she clearly isn’t.”
Airia’s parents clung to each other; Laral shivered and stared into her sister’s still face.
The doctor looked up again. “I would like to do a few more blood tests but I’m afraid I can’t take any more blood from her. She might need a transfusion, have the previous doctors mentioned that?”
“Laral gave blood yesterday, didn’t you darling?”
The younger sister nodded.
“She did? But—” The doctor tried to hide her alarm under a professional-sounding voice. She swallowed and asked, “Are you sure you want to keep her here and not in hospital? It would be eas—”
Airia’s mother looked up at her husband. “I won’t have her in a hospital bed to be gawked at and fiddled with. There’s nothing you can do there that we can’t have brought in. People have already beg—”
The doctor noticed the woman's husband shush his wife, but said nothing and knew that as a professional, she must consent. After a long pause she began again, “This is the worst case I have ever seen, and this fever—” her eyes flicked to the sleeping girl, to the clipboard, to the clock above Airia’s bed which said twenty past nine. “Well, I can barely make out her heartbeat, but she is alive. There’s been no change at all from what the previous doctors have noted, even after the blood transfusion. Her temperature…I don’t know how to explain it but she— I don’t know. The thermometers all read below freezing, but her skin is as warm as anything. Her blood must not be regulating it properly….”
Laral walked out of the room staring distractedly at the floor. “As you probably know,” Laral could hear the doctor saying carefully, reluctantly, to her parents, “we will not be able to tell when or if…”
The door at the bottom of the stairs closed on the end of the sentence. Laral was hungry. She locked herself in her own bedroom, opened the window and dug her headphones out of a drawer. Throwing back the comforter of her bed she climbed in and curled up, pulling her sheets tightly around her, singing apathetically along with Evanescence. Now that I know what I’m without, you can't just leave me. Breathe into me and make me real; bring me to life. Wake me up inside, wake me up inside, call my name and save me from the dark… And she stayed there under the covers until sunset.
Run.
Airia’s fiancé arrived after five days. His white mustang convertible pulled into the drive and idled there. A waning moon threw several long shadows across the wide porch as he, after a moment, walked from the car to the front door of the large white house and rang the bell. The door opened to Airia’s sister, looking tired, still in her school trousers and a bright red sleeveless top.
“Damien?”
“Sorry it’s late… Jet-lag, and I couldn’t sleep. I tried to call. Can I come in?” he said. “Are you alright?”
“How was LA? You look really tan,” she said with a tired smile. And then, more seriously, “Mum told me not to tell you.” And then, softer, looking at her feet, “I wanted to, but...”
“What’s the matter, Laral? What’s happened?”
“It’s Airia.”
Run, Damien.
“Where is she? She didn’t call when I left a message for her this morning.”
“Mum said not to tell you. But—”
“Laral, what’s happened?”
“She won’t wake up. She doesn’t—” Several moments slipped by with Laral’s sniffling.
“Let me inside, Laral. Please?”
The girl didn’t move but neither did she protest when he forced the door open and came inside. Damien put a hand on Laral’s shoulder and tried to be patient as she closed the door and stood with him in the hall.
“I wanted to tell you, but Mum said… she said…”
“What’s happened, Laral? Where’s Airia?”
“She’s—Mum and Dad came home and found her passed out, in the kitchen. She— She won’t wake up. I—”
“Sh, Laral,” he said, attempting consolation. “Where is she? Let me see her.”
“Well, Mum… Mum’s not… Her and Dad went out.”
There was a pause in which Damien decided not to ask about where.
“Where is she?” he repeated.
“Upstairs,” Laral told him. “In her attic room. Damien, she—”
Without a thought, Damien ran. Outside her bedroom door he could hear her breathing. He went in and felt his heart tighten at the sight of his fiancée so still.
“Damien, don’t.” Laral came to the room and found him leaning over the bed, about to reach out and touch her sister’s warm cheek. “Damien, I told you— She won’t wake up. We tried everything.”
“Everything?” Damien dropped his eyes for a moment, and then pulled his fiancée up in his arms.
“She’s been like that for days, Damien—”
He held her limp, warm body close, absorbing the scent of her hair, her skin, her silence, before pressing his lips to her warm face, waiting for the catch of her breath and the waking flutter of her eyelids.
“Damien.”
He ignored Laral and kissed Airia again, and again, and the moonlight vaporized into a cold blackness, thin and teasing. Damien trembled; Airia’s unconscious body slid away from him. “Airia,” he said. Laral heard him sigh.
“Damien, don’t. Don’t. Mum and dad will be home and—”
“I don’t care.”
“She won’t wake up. It’s been five days already.”
“I’m going to stay with her.”
“But why, Damien?”
“I love her, Laral. Why even ask me that? You know I love her.”
Laral lowered her eyes and laughed a quiet, derisive laugh. There was a pause.
“Do you?” she said, so soft the words were almost lost in the night. Damien longed in silence, leaving Laral to wonder. His eyes became hard with impatience. All he could remember was the last time she had kissed him and the happiness in her eyes.
Laral stepped back and her expression, in the darkness, changed. She reached out and flicked the light switch, looking blinkingly at Damien. He watched her dark green eyes. They moved away from his and focused on her sister’s hot, motionless body.
“What have you done to her?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled, nearly choking on the word. “It was her fault. I didn’t know.” Then Laral looked down and stared at the red of her toenails and the impressions her feet made in the thick carpet. Suddenly, with a dramatic, shallow sigh, she threw herself out onto the floor and looked blankly up and the ceiling. “Kiss me, Damien,” she mocked him. “Kiss me and see if I will wake.”
“Laral, what are you doing?”
She laughed at him. “You think it’s all some fairy tale, Damien. You think you can say a prayer and kiss her and it’ll all be okay but it won’t. She won’t.”
“Laral—”
“Damien, you weren’t there. You don’t know what the doctors said—you don’t know—”
And awkward silence warped the atmosphere in the room.
“You don’t know. Airia did love you. She said.”
Damien narrowed his eyes, suspicious and uncertain all at once. “What happened?”
Laral turned her head towards him and said nothing for some time. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know what?”
“Guess, Damien.” She smiled slyly. “Guess.”
“Laral.”
She rolled her eyes and shifted her position on the floor. “Damien you’re no fun.”
“Fun? Your sister is in a coma.”
Laral snorted. “That’s what the doctor said, but you should have seen them all, all those doctors. They don’t know anything.”
“And you do?”
“Damien,” she began, in a voice more smooth and dark, “I’m only sixteen.” Then she laughed a dismissive, horrible laugh. “And I'll be sixteen forever.”
“Laral, will you leave?” Airia was close enough to touch but Damien may as well have been three thousand feet up on a plane to Tokyo, he felt as lonely.
“Still looking forward to that wedding?” Laral smirked.
“Where have your parents gone, Laral?”
“Out.”
“Aren’t you upset at all? She is your sister.”
“And your fiancée,” she said. “Do you really love her?”
Damien didn’t bother to say again that he did love her, more than anything.
“You probably did. Mum doesn’t like you but that doesn’t mean that you only want Airia for her money.”
“What?”
“Come on, you know our mum doesn’t like you. It’s obvious…” Laral twisted her blonde hair with one hand and used her left toe to tug absentmindedly at Airia’s sheets. “But I know…” she began after a moment, “I know you have your own fortune. You don’t need her at all.”
Damien stood, growing angry in silhouette. The clock on the wall showed a picturesque ten past eleven.
“Staying all night, Damien? Need me to open a spare bedroom, or will you share with our coma victim here?”
“No, Laral. Get up off the floor and go to bed.”
“You,” she snapped. “I can’t sleep either and you can’t tell me what to do.”
“Laral, you’re being very—”
“Don’t tell me I’m being childish. I’m sixteen years old.”
“Only,” he said, “sixteen. Haven’t you got school tomorrow?”
“I don’t. It’s summer, silly.” Laral grinned at the light on the ceiling.
There was another pause before Damien asked carefully, “Were you…at her bridal shower? It was just last week, wasn't it?” Laral’s shape was half hidden by Airia’s bed but he could tell that she nodded.
“She got loads of presents. Mine was the best. I gave her…” this last in a whisper, “I gave her a dream.”
“Was she happy?”
“She did love you.”
Run.
Laral went on, “She did love you, and you did love her, but now—”
“I still love her.”
“Do you?” She shifted around again on the carpet. For a long stretch of the night three people breathed to the tick of the clock in the night. Laral, when she was bored enough, filled the blank by humming the wedding march. “Damien,” she questioned a moment later, “can I try on the dress? I know it’s just in the closet over there—but Airia would have killed me if I’d touched it. I bet it fits me.”
“No. Laral, No.”
“Aw, please Damien? I wouldn’t hurt it and she’s not going to wear it again.”
“Laral, go downstairs.”
She laughed and rolled over onto her stomach, humming again. Damien looked at Airia and could not bring himself to shout at her sister. Another quarter of an hour went by before Laral went silent and still. Then she said, “It was a long time ago, really, that it happened to me. Damien? I didn’t mean it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Weeks and weeks. Maybe months, I never know anymore. I didn’t know she would—or that she would go into a coma, or whatever it is. I didn’t know what would happen. I wish I could have.”
Run.
Airia rolled over and kicked at her comforter, settling her face deeper into the pillows. Her dream changed, molding a fiercer, quicker web of visions, full of a bright electrical storm. None of it hurt, and she was not uncomfortable, but as her dream grew continually older something began to whisper behind her sleep, something of a memory, offering small questions like smooth round holes, heavy and dark, but hollow. She felt Damien’s touch and murmured in her sleep, but his words, and Laral’s, were lost in the thunder.
She dreamed vaguely of people, pale figures with voices that said nothing and faces that looked familiar. A kiss, a sweet word, a soundless dance in a room with large windows, all balanced on a shadow. The dance with some tall stranger cut to a red sea and froth, cut to a green hill freckled with unnamed flowers, empty like the sea-less beach, the breezes beckoning like that invisible tide. Run; in a dream you will never fall behind.
Run.
“I wish it all had never happened. Airia shouldn't have introduced me to her; she shouldn't have wasted her friendship on a freak like that. I could have fixed it—kind of—but then they wanted me to give blood, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell them. Don’t tell them, Damien? Mum and Dad don’t know what I am. Don’t tell them.” Laral stood up and met the next question with a pleading look.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Damien, I didn’t know. I only… It’s not my fault.” As she said this she stepped around the bed and stood as close to Damien as she could, breathing sweet, patient desperation into his face.
“Laral get— Calm down. I—hey those are…” he protested, faltered.
“Damien,” she interrupted sweetly as she took the car keys from his pocket, and his mobile phone, then his wallet.
“Laral, what are you—?”
Laral shook her head and clutched the keys in her hand, smiling with a broken innocence. Damien tried to take his keys back from her.
“I’ll let you keep your wallet,” she decided, after removing the credit card and the cash. “Are you sure I can’t try on the wedding dress? It would look so good on me.”
“Give me my keys, Laral.”
She only grinned and backed further away, tossing her hair. “Kiss her again, Damien. It might work this time. Midnight’s in ten minutes.” He didn’t move. “Maybe,” Laral said as she leaned on the light switch and returned the room to darkness, “it’s better this way. You can’t marry her now. You wish, and I wish, that she’d wake up. But she never will.”
“How do you know?”
Laral’s face said everything she could have thrown back at him in words.
“Laral—”
“No, Damien. You want her to wake up—you want last Christmas back, and her kisses, your wedding.” Laral’s voice sounded dead. She waited for Damien to say something. He didn’t. “You want it,” she began again. “But she never will. Not for you.”
He stood up and found Airia’s hand. It was so warm. “She will.”
Laral’s head shook imperceptibly.
“She will,” Damien repeated. Laral began to laugh. “Kiss her again. I know nothing else will work, but that might.”
Run.
It was always dark now. Laral felt blind, even in the light. She closed the door to her sister’s room gently behind her and went downstairs. In her own room, in the dark, she shoved the bridesmaid dress, her favourite jeans, her headphones, and all the spare batteries she could find into a bag. Outside it began to rain.
She took Damien’s car and drove north until it ran out of petrol a few hours later. She frowned and looked through the dark windows at a memory of her reflection. I’ve been sleeping a thousand years it seems; got to open my eyes to everything…without thought without a voice without a soul—don't let me die here… she murmured the lyrics as their loud accompaniment rushed on. Her shaded eyes watched the pavement shining, the unpleasant silver music of the rain growing louder, the night colder. She filled up the wet, deserted streets with thoughts of her sister.
Nobody would understand this, and nobody could ever be to her what Damien had been to Airia. Even if Airia did wake up, would she remember him? Laral remembered. She could remember everything. She remembered chocolate and sunlight and not having to slather her skin with fake tanning cream, and the stupid wish that started it all. She got out of the car and began walking, refusing to let herself cry, trying to find a thread of hope. She couldn’t change it. If Airia never woke up, there would be no more late nights eating cheerios in their pajamas, whispering over the counter top in the dark. No more long phone calls, no parties, no tennis matches. No wedding. Instead, she was always so hungry. And afraid. She was so hungry, but her sister never would be again.
Run.
Damien kissed his fiancée again at midnight. Her eyelids twitched but no breath of relief escaped her warm lips, and her body remained tense in his arms. Finally he took up her hand and slowly removed the diamond ring from her finger. He went to stand at the door to her room and let his heart crumble in the sunrise before closing it and walking away. He stayed in the kitchen until Airia’s parents came home, intending to ask them about Laral, explain about his stolen car and his decisions; but her mother, coming in after two, only met him with an unfriendly, impatient glare, and her father asked him to leave and never come back.
Upstairs Airia lay still, dreaming of a colorless, constantly moving mist. In the dream she chased it and it chased her and strange voices hid themselves in her puddlelike thoughts. Run; in a dream you can see no horizon. In a dream your heart will never break. So Airia slept, and she never woke up.
