Samantha would read books to Sally everyday, hoping that she would notice the familiar literature and come out of this catatonic state. She read "Alice in Wonderland" every other day, because it was Sally's favorite when she was younger. Every time she got to the part when Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she couldn't help but think that Sally was falling down a hole, maybe not a rabbit's, but one where she is alone and scared with an end that is unsure.
Standing there, she remembered three years earlier when she was seventeen and Sally was twelve. Sally first started complaining about being unable to sleep because of voices she heard and the headaches she had. When the doctors asked what the voices sounded like she would just look at the floor, wiggle her toes, and say with conviction, "They sound like whispers, no... they sound like yells. Well it starts as a whisper then it gets louder." She claimed the voices would scream and tell her how stupid she was. She said they also knew things, things she only told one or two of her friends. She said the voices knew about Bobby Davidson, feeling her up during English class when they were watching "All Quiet on the Western Front," with the lights turned down. They knew about the Spice Girl, glitter, nail polish she stole from the mall. They knew about the wine she abused at Sarah Goldman's Bat-Mitzvah party. They knew everything. There was one time when Samantha walked into Sally's room and saw her under her covers. Samantha spoke quiet and said in a singsong voice, "Sally. You can't breath under there." A scared voice from under the covers cried,
"If they can't see me, they can't get me. It sounds like their getting closer. Can you see them? One sounds big. Can you see them?" "No" was the obvious answer, but Samantha could not just come out and say that, so she just said as innocent as possible,
"There are no monsters. I scared them all away. Now come out from under there." In a muffled voice, Sally replied,
"They aren't monsters.'
"Whatever they are, they aren't here anymore. Now quit being a baby and come out from under there, you'll suffocate in your sleep."
Sally complained about the voices all of the time and the voices did not appear to have any physical effect on her. At fifteen, she was five foot eleven, tall for her age. She towered over her twenty-one year old sister. Sally had blond hair, which she wore in pig tails most of the time. She weighed one hundred and thirty pounds, a lightweight for someone as tall as she was. She was made the center of everyone's jokes all of the time. Samantha, on the other hand, was five foot seven, light brown hair, which she wore down, and was often complemented on how her skin looked like silk, and she weighed one hundred and forty-nine pounds. The same people that complimented her on her hair could be heard, in hushed tones, remarking on how she had the body of a sixteen-year old boy. No matter how everyone thought she looked, Sally looked worse lying in that bed.
It was just the voices, but one day, Samantha came home from school. She called for her sister. No answer. She dropped her books off on the dining room table, forgetting her parent's rule of being careful as to not scratch the surface, and walked into the kitchen to find her sister on the floor. An uncut loaf of bread had absorbed a spilt glass of blue, Tropical Punch Kool-Aid. She ran to the phone and dialed 9-1-1. She was almost unable to give the operator her home address, but did. The ambulance drove to the hospital, Sally on a stretcher and Samantha sitting shotgun. They reached the hospital, ran the tests, did the scans, took the pictures and x-rays, but not a word or a movement from Sally the entire time. She wasn't dead, that was one of the only things the doctors could say, but her lifeless body acted that way.
Although the doctors gave no answer to Samantha's perfectly logical questions, they did seem to be able to humiliate her by speaking to her like she was a toddler. They told Samantha that something was wrong with Sally's brain. They said her brain is tired and needed rest and can't tell her arms to move or her legs to stand. The doctors made Samantha feel like an ignorant schoolgirl. She took biology, she knew how the brain worked, but she skipped the psychology class. So, when she would ask the doctors about the voices, they would just label Sally as a paranoid schizophrenic. They went on with the mortification by telling her the voices were just a symptom of a mental seizure. They said that the coma was textbook for an Epileptic seizure, but was rare for the seizures experienced by Sally. Samantha wanted answers, not vague responses. When the doctors gave her the diagnosis, they didn't even look her in the eye, they just paged through their charts, scribbled things down, and nodding their heads. Samantha refused to believe what they told her. What she did know was that the doctors can see Sally is never going to wake up. When the doctors would turn to walk out of the room, they would each let out a deep, hopeless sigh. Everyday she stays here is just another dollar in the doctor's, newly pressed GAP, khakis.
The doctors always looked at their mother as if she had something to do with the voices, like she beat or hurt her and told her to lie to the doctors. Samantha knew what they talked about when she left the room, but it wasn't her place to judge her mother. Samantha knew she didn't do anything to her sister and felt insulted that they accused her mother of such things, but she saw TV, she knew that they always check to rule out abuse.
This is what Samantha did everyday for the past three years: visited her sister, asked questions of the doctors, read Alice in Wonderland, and left embarrassed. She hated to see her younger sister like this: Tubes feeding her and breathing for her, a tube in her to empty her stomach of its waste with a catheter, and straps across her chest, to prevent her falling from her bed in the middle of the night.
Samantha sat in the cushy, padded chair across from her sister's bed. She knew what she had to do. There were times when she would leave the hospital crying and not stop until she either, cried herself to sleep, or drank three or four glasses of Merlot she took from her mother's collection. At the same time, she hated Sally for making her life an endless tea party with the Walrus and the Carpenter. One flip of the switch and the machine would stop giving her oxygen. One flip and the machine would stop feeding her. One flip and the voices would stop.
She waited until dark, when most of the hospital staff had gone home.They make final rounds, then go to their desks, do paperwork, and eat their brown-bagged or hospital cafeteria dinners. Sure nurses would walk around, but most were lazy, assumed everything would be all right, and just waited for patients to use their call buttons. The hospital allowed family members to spend nights with their loved ones; fathers with their newborn babies and wives. Samantha took this opportunity to release her sister from the nightmare, they both lived.
She walked to the machine that was living for Sally. She didn't know the first thing about medical machinery, high school biology was the limit of her medical knowledge. She was sure they could tell whether the machine was on or off from the office, but she decided to take a chance. She switched all of the levers that were up, to down. She didn't look at her sister as she terminated her discomfort. She knew Sally would not feel anything, she was sleeping, but would see her chest stop moving. When Sally flatlined and her machine beeped its monotonous beep, Samantha said goodbye and placed the copy of Alice in Wonderland; under Sally's pillow. What seems like a forced tear fell from her eye as she took two steps back from her sister's bed. She did not know whether the tears were joyous, for making her sister's pain go away, or because she lost her best friend in the world. She slowly walked out of the room and felt her sister was free from suffering, free from falling down the long rabbit hole, and on her way to her own Wonderland.