Page 29 of Sparking Sara

“Even so, when she wakes up, she may be combative. Or angry. She may feel lost. Depressed. There have been studies done on patients with traumatic brain injuries and by-and-large, they all experience some sort of personality shift.”

“How do you mean?”

“It can be hard to explain,” he says, trying to find the words. “Think of it like teenagers who go off to college. When they return four years later, they are not the kids you remembered them to be. They are a different version of themselves.”

“Yeah, but that’s based on life experiences,” I say. “How can a brain injury make you a different person?”

“The brain is a mysterious organ, Denver. We still don’t fully understand it. But it’s also miraculous. And it can do things for your body that baffle doctors. The results of MRIs after a brain injury are grey at best. Sometimes all we can do is make an educated guess.”

I nod my head. “Sara’s doctor doesn’t seem to want to tell us anything either way.”

“Because he can’t. We simply just don’t know.”

I take the last bite of my food and ball up my trash. “I should get back now. Thanks for the company.”

“Anytime,” he says, reaching into the pocket of his lab coat. Then he hands me his card. “Feel free to call me if you have any questions, if you want me to explain anything to you, or if you just want to grab a bite together while you’re here.”

I take his card and stick it in my back pocket before thanking him and walking away.

When I return to Sara’s room, I pick my phone up off her bed, the episode ofThe Bachelorhaving ended.

I call Oliver again. And again, it goes straight to voicemail.

“Oliver, this is Denver Andrews. I’m wondering if you got the message I left two days ago about Sara. She’s been in an accident in New York City. She’s not alone. Her cousin has been here. And so has Lydia. But you need to get here as soon as possible. Please call me.”

The accident happened five days ago, and I reached out to him the day before yesterday. I can’t wrap my head around why he’s not here yet. Hasn’t he noticed that his girlfriend has gone off the grid?

Oh, shit. Suddenly, I wonder if Oliver could have been in the car with Anna and Sara. All the windows were busted out with the exception of the rear one. What if he was sitting in the back seat without a seatbelt and got ejected from the car and is lying dead at the bottom of the river?

I decide to call Jake at NYPD later and have him look into it. It should be easier now that I know Oliver’s last name.

I look closely at Sara and I can tell something is different. After days of sitting with her, I’ve gotten to know the exact position her hands tend to be in. The angle of her head. The curve of her elbows. I stick my head out her door. “Has anyone been here since I left?”

Her nurse looks up from a chart. “No, sorry.”

“What about you? Did you go in there and reposition her?”

“Not lately, why?”

“Her hands are different. Almost like she brought them together over her stomach and then lost her grip.”

“Let’s take a look,” she says, following me into Sara’s room.

“Sara? Can you hear me?” she says. She opens one of Sara’s eyelids. “Can you open your eyes, sweetie?”

No response. No movement of her hands. No flutter of her eyelids.

“These things can take time,” the nurse tells me.

I nod as she exits the room.

I put Sara’s hands back the way they were. That way, I’ll know if she moves them again. As I’m doing it, I think about what Kyle said about people being different after brain injuries. I hope she isn’t. I hope she can still paint—if she’s able to, that is.

Iget out my phone and Google more of her paintings. Then I talk to her about them. What they look like. The colors that she used. How they make me feel when I look at them.

I find one that I think must be of her parents. Joelle said they were older, and this painting shows an older couple with a young girl—a toddler. And I wonder if the girl is her.

“Remember how I told you my parents are gone, too?” I say. “I’d love it if you could paint them like you painted yourself with your parents. Except I have a sister, so she’d have to be in the painting, too. I think I told you that you’d have to go to Colorado to do your research. Man, my parents loved to ski. Every year, they’d drag us to one mountain or another. I think Aspen and I learned to ski before we learned how to ride bikes. I remember one vacation, it was blizzarding so badly that they closed the slopes to skiers. But my parents still took us outside. We walked up the bunny slope, and then Aspen and I tried to slide down on our butts. It didn’t work, though, because it wasn’t steep enough, so we decided to roll down, the way you would on the side of a grassy hill. For hours, my parents watched us, freezing their asses off while we rolled down the hill and then walked up and then rolled down again. It must have been miserable for them, but they wanted us to love the snow as much as they did. And I don’t remember being cold, even though I know I must have been. All I remember is laughing with my sister. And my parents—I can still see them clapping and cheering through the heavy snow.”

---