The problem was, nobody knew any of this but me. And not that I was chugging along on all cylinders-it wasn’t like in a movie when some guy gets injected with a drug that paralyzes his body but his brain still works fine. My brain was spongy, plagued with craters and holes, like the moon. But I progressed, is the point, and no one knew it except me. I couldn’t tell them. The frustration! In hospitals they’re big on asking you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. If they’d asked me to rate my loneliness, I’d have said a hundred and fifty.

Then came the day when I thought I might break through, finally jab a big enough hole in the veil to stick my head through and yell, “Look! It’s me!”

That didn’t happen, but something else did. The sort of thing that, shall we say, inspires incredulity. Ha-ha! I love understatement. Also the sort of thing that could get one returned to Neurology for evaluation if one were to reveal it to just anybody.

Another reason not to tell this story to anyone but myself.

“We’ll have to bring her back inside now. BP’s up. A little too much stimulation, I’m afraid.”

God, how I hated those words. They meant my family was about to leave me. The worst thing about being in a coma isn’t the inability to speak, move, eat, make yourself understood-none of that. It’s being left alone.

Benny was fidgeting at the foot of my geri-bed-a soft reclining chair I loved, because now they could wheel me outside for a few minutes on nice days, all my tubes and lines still attached to the beeping machines inside. Benny was out of my line of sight down there, but occasionally some part of his dear, jerky body would bump against my blanketed legs, and each time the careless touch would fill me with a warm, melting love. “She’s skinny” was all he’d had to say to me today, and “Her hair’s too long.” When the nurse spoke, he jumped off the end of the chair like a racer who’d just been waiting for the starter gun. I could feel his heart lighten. I could feel mine sink.

“Let me do that.” Sam’s voice. A pull on the chair, and the precious blue sky began to swivel out of sight. A bump as we crossed the threshold, and there we were, back in the room, the dreaded room. My gray prison.

“She seemed better today.” Sam had that desperate, hope-against-h ope animation in his voice he used in front of Benny. I hated it. “I think there’s been real progress.”

The nurse that day was Hettie, my favorite. Very gentle hands, and she never over-enunciated like some of them, as if their patients were not only comatose but also idiots. “Well, no actual change, though, not on the test scale. But no, I know what you mean, she was pretty alert today,” Hettie added quickly, kindly. “Tracking movements with her eyes sometimes-”

“She looked right into my eyes.” My husband loomed over me, moving his head until we were gaze to gaze. He looked so tired, his eyes so sad. Don’t go, I begged him. Stay with me. “She can’t be completely unconscious if she can open her eyes. Right?”

“There are so many degrees of consciousness,” Hettie started saying, and something about metabolic versus anatomic comas, every case is different, you have to balance hope with practicality-I gave up trying to follow. Too hard. I was a mummy, encased in gauze. If I could get out one feral grunt, raise one scary, wrapped arm… but everything was so exhausting. I only had the strength to look back into Sam’s eyes.

He put his cheek next to mine. Oh. Oh. The scent of him. He whispered that he loved me. Was I crying? If I could cry-he’d know. I stared hard, hard, at the lock of his hair that tickled my face, concentrating, wide-eyed.

Dry -ey ed.

“See ya, babe,” he murmured. “Don’t be scared. Everything’s okay. See you soon, sweetheart.”

I had no sense of time. Soon. It was the same to me as later. Or never.

“Benny? Come say bye to your mom. Ben? Come on, guy. Hey, Benny-! ”

Sam disappeared.

If I couldn’t cry now, I never would. What’s the point of trying to get well if your son is afraid of you? You might as well be dead. As dead as I must look to Benny in this stupid chair, these stupid pipes and lines filling and draining me, keeping me in this ugly gray twilight jail I couldn’t break free of, couldn’t penetrate, couldn’t smash my way out of-

“There you go, buddy. Give Mommy a kiss.”

Oh, Sam, don’t make him. He had his arms around Benny’s waist, holding him up, pressing him toward me. Poor Benny! His face looked blotchy with distress. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“It’s okay, it’s just Mom. Come on, pal.”

Don’t, Sam. Oh, but I wanted it, too. If Benny would look at me, really look, I believed I could make it happen-the miracle. Look, darling. It’s Mommy. Please, honey, open your eyes. He had to see me; otherwise I would truly be nothing. I would disappear. Benny, look at me, see me! Open your eyes!

That’s when it happened.

What happened? At first, a period of pure nothing. So pure, if my brain had been working, I’d have thought I had disappeared. But there wasn’t any “me” anymore, no one to think thoughts. No time, no space, and not even darkness this time. Sound, maybe, a low-pitched hum, a comforting whir or drone… but then again, maybe not. That would presuppose someone had ears to hear it, and I’m saying I was not there. Laurie Summer: gone.

“Daddy, is she dead? Please don’t die. Is she dead?”

Benny! His beautiful, wide-open brown eyes were looking into mine. “I’m not dead,” I tried to tell him, but nothing came out but a sort of… yip. But I could move my legs! It hurt, but they moved, and they… they…

They were covered with hair?

“Careful, don’t touch her. She’s hurt, she might bite you.”

I might what? Crouched over me, Sam had a pitying but distracted look on his face. This was not how I had pictured our miraculous reunion.

“We have to take her to the doctor, Daddy. We have to fix her up.”

God, not more doctors. Where were we? My ears ached; everything was so loud. And the smell was amazing. Smells, rather, millions of them, all strong and incredibly interesting. Cars were whipping by-that’s what was making all the noise. Why were we outside, in the street? A familiar-l ooking street, too. Weren’t we on Old Georgetown Road? In Bethesda?

“Come on, buddy, back in the car. It’s dangerous out here.”

Sam and Benny got up and left me in the road.

A lot of bad things had happened to me lately, very bad things, but I can say without hesitation that that was the worst.

Then Sam came back. Happiness! Joy! He was carrying the smelly flannel blanket we kept in the back of the car to set plants on, or wet bathing suits, anything messy or unsavory, to protect the upholstery.

He wrapped me in the blanket and lifted me up with a grunt and put me in the backseat.

I had an inkling now, a sense, like glimpsing something from the corner of your eye that reveals everything but is too outlandish to credit. Maybe I should’ve figured it out sooner-the evidence was pretty much everywhere-but let’s not forget I wasn’t in my right mind. I had been in a near-drowning-i nduced coma for eight weeks. Then, too, if this was a cross-species metamorphosis, it made sense that my normally sharp, analytical mind was already being blunted by something softer and more accepting. I’m saying my retriever instincts were kicking in.

Sam started the car and pulled out into traffic. Benny, buckled up in front, craned around to look at me. His mop of chestnut curls needed cutting. I wanted to lick him all over his freckled face. Here we were, all together again. The family. “Sam, Benny, Sam, Benny!” I said, overwhelmed with the wonder of it. It came out “Arr! Urra! Arr! Urra!”