unsuccessfully to rouse her. It quickly became clear that something was very wrong. They rushed her to Maine General, where doctors diagnosed her comatose state, but were unable to provide answers as to why she had become that way. Within days, Natalie was transported to Boston Children’s Hospital, one of the top in the country for pediatric neurological care, where she has been under the treatment of several world-renowned neurologists, are all of whom are baffled by her condition.”
They cut to her parents, who are seated in what appears to be a hospital waiting area for an interview. Her father speaks as her mother wipes tears from her cheeks with a tissue. “It’s been a long and frightening waiting game and the fact that we know nothing more now than we knew six months ago is the hardest part.”
The anchor resumes his voiceover as they show visuals of Natalie in her hospital bed, connected to enough monitors to fill half of the room. Wires and tubes extend from her body in every direction creating life-saving highways for medicine and nourishment. They show nurses tending to her and doctors surrounding her and conversing with each other over her care.
Zoë turns away from the television. A photograph on my nightstand catches her eye. It’s us in second grade at my birthday party with our arms around each other, my favorite photograph of the two of us. She grabs the framed photo off my nightstand. “Wow, Emma. That girl looks almost exactly like you when you were her age.”
I reluctantly turn away from the television to see what she is looking at. She hands me the photo. It takes my breath away. A flash of the walk with the castle, the unknown creature, and the torrential storm pops into my mind. I hear my father’s life-long warnings and feel the pain of the gut-wrenching decision I made to follow his advice.
I turn my attention back to the television. As interviews with her doctors take place, they once again show photographs of Natalie. I look at her, then at my photograph.
“Zoë, this is the little girl from the walk I took without you, when you were out of town.”
“The castle walk girl?”
“Yes. It’s her!”
I hit the pause button on the television while her photograph is up.
“She’s the little girl who was in my castle walk. She’s not in a coma. She’s lost.”
3. REALIZATION
“Emma, how can you be sure? That was months ago. This girl’s face has been all over television and the internet for days now. You could just be confusing her for the other girl.”
“No, Zoë, it’s her. The girl in my walk looked almost exactly like me when I was younger. That was part of my whole dilemma, my reason for not wanting to wake up. I kept telling myself that my imagination could have created her. I didn’t know if I saw the picture of us before I fell asleep and imagined her—imagined me, as a kid. But I didn’t imagine her and this proves it. She was real…and I left her there. And now she’s lost and her parents think she’s in a coma.”
“Emma, this is not your fault. There is no way you could have known who she was, or that she was even real. Think of how many times you have seen other people in your walks and didn’t pay attention to them. It’s just normal. It's what we all do.”
I walk over to my desk and wake up my computer. I quickly do an internet search for ‘Natalie Jacobs’. Thousands of websites are instantly available to me. I open photo after photo of her face, most of them repetitive, pulled from news channels and social networks. I stumble across a video that was uploaded to the internet nearly a year ago. I take a deep breath before I click play.
The girl in the video is almost identical to the girl from my castle walk. She wears a knee length gray dress, gray tights, and brown winter boots that almost reach her knees. Her wavy golden brown curls are pinned back on one side with a black barrette. Her enormous blue eyes burn through the camera lens and into my heart. “Do you want to see my new baby?” she asks the camera.
“Yes, I would love to see your new baby,” says a woman’s voice excitedly from behind the lens.
Natalie leads the camera into her pink bedroom. A teal blue birdcage rests on a table near a large