ARI WOKE SUDDENLY.She was lying in bed, the bedroom lights on and her laptop open on the pillow beside her. It was 4:02 a.m. The last thing she remembered was writing an article about a local car theft for the morning edition, but she was so tired she must have dozed off and slept almost through the night.
It was too early to get up. She yawned, rolled over, and closed her eyes. Images of yesterday fluttered across her sleepy brain: the interviews, the traffic jams, eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich while barreling down the turnpike, her editor’s face peering through the window of her office at thePennsylvania Tribune.
It all began to run together, the people, the places, the faces, until she felt herself drifting into what appeared to be a sterile white hospital room. It was familiar. She recognized the table. It was stainless steel and ought to be cold to the touch, but she couldn’t feel it because she wasn’t lying on it. She was hovering just a few inches above it.
Am I dreaming?
She was on her back, looking up at a circle of people in green scrubs. Their hands were moving amidst intermittent flashes of silver instruments. Lights were blinking and monitors were beeping while a man hovered directly above her, bobbing up and down as if he was pushing on her chest.
Who are these people? What are they doing?
They were leaning so close she could smell their breath and feel the hot wind of their words on her face. “Ari! Ari! Don’t go. Please don’t go!” a woman sobbed from what seemed like very far away.
Gram? Is that you?
No one answered. She tried to talk but no sound came out. It was such a strange, frightening feeling to be invisible and yet in plain view. Why could she see them, but they couldn’t see her?
Am I dead?
The thought terrified her, made her struggle even harder to move, to speak, to do anything that might make the people realize she was trying to communicate with them.
Just then, a doctor’s commanding voice ordered, “Little girl! Wake up!”
There was a loud swishing sound that turned into a roaring whir, startling her awake.
Her eyes popped open, and she found herself sitting up in bed, staring into the familiar darkness of her bedroom, sweating profusely.
The dream. Again.
She sank backward in relief. It had been years since she’d had this particular dream, which was more of a flashback to the diabetic coma she’d fallen into at the age of sixteen. They said she died that day, but she didn’t remember. Only when she had the dream. Then she remembered it all. The doctors in their scrubs and masks, monitors beeping and blinking, nurses rushing around the table, Gram crying and squeezing her hand.
Her life was never the same again. From that day forward, she changed from being just Ariella Joan Dalton into Ariella Joan Dalton, Type 1 diabetic.
She looked at the clock. It was 5:45 a.m., which meant she could sleep for another forty-five minutes, but that would never happen now. It usually took two hours to calm down after “the dream.”
Instead, she flipped on the police scann
