There was no steadying hand to root her in place, so she flitted between her chair and reception every fifteen minutes or so with no luck. She didn’t look my way a second time.
“Maura?”
The blonde leapt to her feet again as a doctor stepped through those doors. Familiarity brought them close. Abandoning Phil’s grip, I crossed the room in a handful of leaps, but I didn’t need to be at her side to hear:
“No oxygen”… “Brain damage” … “Can’t know until he wakes up” … “Comatose.”
I jerked to a halt. Zach’s mom erupted in tears. The world ceased spinning.
The truth of his words didn’t sink in for a while. My eye gravitated toward the ER doors, fully expecting Zach to make his exit now. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. Mrs. Ferguson seemed to come to similar conclusions; she collapsed, a broken, sobbing mess.
The feel of a towering presence at my back snapped me back to my senses. Phil’s skin radiated with heat so potent it leeched through my shirt.
It threw my head into overdrive.
Zach laid in that ER, broken and burned and bleak. Because of me. I’d been driving. I’d fallen asleep. I’d been plucked from death by the angel.
This was my fault.
The despair pulled me under in a grip so tight I couldn’t breathe. It threatened to buckle my knees. As the gravity of what I’d done weighed upon my shoulders, I leaned against the wall to hold myself up. I’d hurt Zach. I killed Zach.
No. Zach couldn’t die. I couldn’t let him die.
An unintelligible sob tore through my chest. What the hell could I do? I was only human, and, frankly, incapable of helping myself, let alone my friend.
And I’d have to figure out a way to live with that: knowing I’d single-handedly left Zach a vegetable. Or worse.
Phil’s hand met my shoulders. His voice breeched the dark cloud like nothing else could. My angel. My Phil. “It’s alright, Eden. You are safe.”
Everything snapped into place. I couldn’t do anything for Zach, but he…
Looking at all the faces around the room, all those who might’ve tried to listen, I pried myself free of his grip and ducked into the nearest stairwell. The light echo of his footfalls assured me that he followed close behind, even as I ascended the steps.
I rounded on him on the second-floor landing but the sudden grip on my wrists, holding me a mere hair’s breadth away from his body, left me breathless. “You are not afraid.”
“How could I be?” I laughed manically. “You saved me. Why would you risk yourself saving me just to hurt me now?”
“You may be in shock.” He gripped my chin, forcing me to look in his eyes. “Did you hit your head?”
I reveled in the unobstructed view of his face, noticeably devoid of any whispers or haze or alien thought. “I’m okay. Better than I deserve.” He pressed on, looking me over for injuries. That deep look of concentration made him glow brighter than that stoic look ever had. “Are you an angel?”
Phil froze. His wide eyes roved over my face, as though surprised by the look of awe he found there. He breathed, “Yes.”
“Thank God. So you can fix him!”
“No,” he gasped. “No, I can’t.”
The dark wave reared its curling head. His refusal hadn’t occurred to me. I struggled to comprehend it. “Phil…please—!”
“It isn’t that I take pleasure in refusing you, Eden. Quite the opposite. If it were in my power to make this right for you, believe me, I would. I can’t.”
“But you fixed me.” He said nothing and something inside me collapsed into dust. The prick of tears burned my eyes. “Why?”
The sight of Zach’s face, discolored and charred, played behind my eyes, taunting me. I wondered if he’d wake. If he’d be afraid. If he’d live. Phil gripped the part of his chest where his heart would be.
The simple gesture fanned a flame I didn’t even know I had. Phil didn’t know Zach. He hadn’t cared enough about him to pull him from the car. What gave him the right to be upset about my friend?
I chewed on my tongue until I quaked at the taste of blood. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you save him?”
“I have already told you I can’t—”
“No,” I snapped. “Why didn’t you save him?”
“I couldn’t—”
“You saved me! Why?” Phil reached for me but I ducked out of reach. “Why? Why not him instead of me? He’s a good person. Probably a better person than I am. He’s not the one who fell asleep at the wheel. He’s not the one who put his best friend in a coma! You should’ve saved him. Why didn’t you save him?”
Every word beat Phil down a little more. By the time he replied, face stricken, voice breathless, he stood half a foot shorter. “I couldn’t.”
Well that…didn’t further my need to yell in the least. And without the yelling, there was only the despair. “I will do anything.”
“Eden.” I couldn’t look at him so I just nodded with eyes set on the floor. “What good does it do to argue his merit now?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Why would it be better that you were in that room?”
“Because it wouldn’t be him.”
He frowned, forcing himself to stand up straight. “Could you really be so selfless?”
“I would take his place in a heartbeat. If that’s what it is, take it back. If I should’ve died in that wreck”—despite my noble words, I gulped— “then let me die. As long as you help him.”
He scrutinized me. “You don’t mean that.”
“I think I’d know better than you!”
“You feel guilty.”
Not anymore. Phil’s lack of sympathy in all of this had pushed me back into the yelling. “Of course I feel guilty. I was driving. I was too tired and I knew I shouldn’t, but I did it anyway.”
Something in him changed. It only surfaced for a split second, but the raw look of pain that flashed across his face came in such striking contrast to anything I’d ever seen from him that I felt it as potently as my own. Then he squared it away, back behind a cracking stoic façade. “You shouldn’t feel guilty.”
I cursed him for his lukewarm tone. Damned him for being inhuman. Hated myself for living. “How am I ever supposed to feel anything else?”
Phil evidently had nothing left to say. He sighed, dropping his head, and slipped off his borrowed gloves. He reached for me, unaffected by my flinch. “You said you were not afraid.”
From somewhere beneath my tears and despair, there came a challenge. “I’m not afraid!”
“I can tell when you lie.”
“I’m not—”
“I can taste your fear in the air.” His palms continued toward me, slower now that I all but cowered against the wall. They met my face and gingerly stroked my cheek. “I do not want you to fear me.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
He nodded in understanding, but how could he? “Do you trust me?”
“I do. I think I do?”
“Could you trust me enough to let me help you?”
I scoffed. “Haven’t you done enough?”
His hand halted in its circuit over my cheek. “Just one thing more.”
At first, I felt nothing. There was only Phil staring down at me, face tensing in true-constipation-fashion. Then came the warmth.
Not literal warmth, although it would be a lie to confess the heat wafting off Phil’s skin gave me no small amount of pleasure. Warmth like coming home after a bad day, knowing that whatever disparities had plagued you in the day could no longer reach you. Warmth like looking out the window at snow enough to close school and going back to bed. Warmth like sitting in the greenhouse at midnight, without care of strangers intruding on the silence.
Easy contentment.
“Is…is that you?”
It certainly wasn’t me. While I’d known contentment in these last seventeen years, it felt nothing
like this, although no better or worse. If my own thoughts came in shades of yellow, these came in a dizzying array of reds and blues and purples.
“What does it feel like?”
“Happy.”
He nodded. “I thought you would enjoy it.”
Even after his hand slipped away, I continued to relish in the pleasant feelings he left behind. “What is it?”
“Only memories. Things I have felt from others. Just like I can taste your fear and your pain and your confusion, I can feel when you are happy. When anyone is happy.”
“But how can you make me—?”
“The same way I was able to heal you in that wreck. I imparted some of myself into you.”
Even without his influence, the good feelings felt ever-growing, ever-spinning, ever-changing. I even smiled. “I don’t feel anything! Will it last?”
He shrugged. “So long as I’m there to help you.”
“And you’ll stay?”
“As long as you need me.” And with those red eyes glowing as they burned through me, I knew he meant it.
“Eden!”
I jumped, almost falling over in my haste to find Mom among the throngs of people below.
Phil’s body stiffened, once again the scared animal trapped in the corner, although he hid it well. “They are worried for you.”
“I don’t need to be an angel to know that.”
Phil smiled an honest-to-god no-fakery smile. “I suppose not.”
Before I could fling myself down the stairs, I stopped. Even now, as I looked over my shoulder, I half-expected that he would no longer be there. Perhaps it was the gifted emotion stirring in me, but even the accident felt like a rapidly disintegrating dream. “I will see you in school tomorrow?”
He grimaced. “Until tomorrow.”
7. Company
My mother gave me leave to take off Friday—meaning I had to stay home, despite my aversion to being alone with my thoughts. And, worse yet, the punishment extended to the store as well. Robbed of my singular comfort, as Phil’s intervention had worn off mere hours after I’d left him, I remained in my room. And I sat.
If one day in exile didn’t hurt enough, she’d insisted on it for Saturday and, preemptively, Sunday as well. Taking up her perch in the living room, she’d made it her duty to question me on how I was doing every time I passed her. Barring the absolute necessities, like eating and urination, I avoided it at all costs. Hearing her ceaseless concern made the horrors of Thursday real. Made Phil’s intervention a mere trick of a concussed mind.
Mom looked at me like Zach was already dead. So, I ate once a day and drank only when parched to cut down on trips in her direction.
It didn’t suit me much better to stay in my bedroom. That framed rose drawing, which had provided such pleasant food for thought at one time, now taunted me. Thoughts of Phil made me confused and, so, were unwelcome. Which meant thought in general was unwelcome, because if I didn’t think of him, I thought of Zach and if I spared anymore tears, I would shrivel up like a prune.
That left napping. In the spirit of maintaining my solitude, I restricted them to the day and crept downstairs in the night.
While I hadn’t thought my parents would neglect the seedlings in my forced absence, it disappointed me to some small measure that they didn’t require my expert hand in bringing them back from the dead. Even after a few days, they looked as green and as lush as when I’d last tended them. For the hours leading up to dawn, I worked needlessly, fighting a dizzying fatigue that wished to send me back to bed.
I’d wasted enough time.
Finally, I placed the last of the pots back on the shelf and took a seat beside it so the sign I’d printed, ‘No Sitting,’ hung behind my head. The exhaustion had gotten to me, near-crippling me; my body hung slack against the wall, turning cold at the feel of the glass. Even with my eyes closed, I winced against a bright light threatening to pry through my lids.
That was strange, some part of me noted. In the hopes of keeping my mother unawares, I’d kept all the lights off.
Another part, the lazier part, just wanted to forget about it and go the hell to sleep. But I was a curious person by nature, at least I’d become one, and I peered up into the luminescent greyness that lit up the wall.
It had to be the floodlight.
That Dad hadn’t been woken by this development came as something of a miracle. The light worked on a sensor. If it had sprung to life, it could only mean that someone walked around the parking lot at six in the god forsaken morning. And when he finally noticed, my excursion would be ended.
Pulling one of the gardening shovels into my hand, I tiptoed to the front door.
The moment after I noticed the floodlight, black as death, I found the dawning sky up above and stared, enraptured. For once in what had to be forever, no clouds obstructed the view of the stars for as far as I could see. They seemed brighter this morning, even diluted by the rays of the rising sun, although that had to be simply by way of comparison; of course the stars would be bright. Stars were always bright.
But I hadn’t come out for stars.
My eyes strayed to the moon, pinpointing its place over the roof of the greenhouse like a beacon. I could feel it. I could tell the light I searched for streamed from its hanging presence.
It waned. If not for Gregory’s offhand comment about the full moon only days ago, I never would’ve known. Never would’ve noticed. Never would’ve cared.
Something about it piqued my interest tonight. A nameless desire wished to lay me on the snowy ground to stare, allowing its light to warm my skin. Enough of my sense remained that I didn’t do that, but the moments ticked on where I stood entranced. Every mark and blemish on my nighttime sun burned itself into my retinas.
“Eden?”
The trance broke like a popping balloon. Hand going to my throat, I whirled around to face the road with bare feet sliding across a sheet of ice. By the time I recovered, Phil’s face had escalated from confusion to concern.
Despite it, I couldn’t help but feel unwarranted betrayal. He’d left me alone to sink. In my seclusion. In my guilt. In my grief. Try as I may, I couldn’t keep the traitor thoughts out of my voice. “What’re you doing here?”
“Apparently saving you from frostbite. Eden, your lips are blue.”
“I’m fine,” I stammered through chattering teeth. Nevertheless, gloved hands flitted around my face, pressing at my cheeks and the swell of my bottom lip. “I’m fine.”
His eyes gravitated downward toward the pink flesh that molded to his thumb and then snapped back up, as though recalling who the mouth belonged to. “I can tell when you lie to me.”
I merely narrowed my eyes until he pulled his hand away. For someone who hadn’t cared enough to check up, he looked remarkably frazzled. “Where have you been?”
Immediate regret. I hadn’t intended to sound like I cared more than I should. Scratch that. More than I did. I hadn’t intended to sound like I cared more than I did.
But the damage was done. “You missed me?”
“No!” I retorted with a blush. For the love of god, Eden, don’t speak.
He allowed the hint of a smile. “I apologize if you were lonely without me. I was under the impression you didn’t want to see me.”
“Why the hell would you think that?”
“Your mother. She said you were not seeing anyone.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course she did.” My chattering distorted the words to mush. Looking up at the window to my parents’ bedroom, the lights looked sufficiently dark, the sun having only just breached the tree line, and the store didn’t open until noon on Sundays. They wouldn’t wake anytime soon. “Do…do you want to come in?”
He nodded.
Creeping into the shop with Phil at my back, I made a beeline for the greenhouse. I wondered, if Mom woke to find me down here, which would be worse: a fierce reprimand for my lack of sulking?
Or…
Eden, those e
yes.
Eden, that hair.
Eden, that face.
As expected, the humid air and the heat soothed my stiffened limbs, although, if I moved in just the right way, I still felt more popsicle than person. Flopping gracelessly onto the bench, I leveled his stare with a bit of a dark smirk.
“How…” he chewed on his cheek. “How are you?”
Every muscle in my face rebelled, but I managed to keep on smiling, even though I didn’t mean it. “As if you need to ask.”
“I thought I would extend you the courtesy of asking—”
“If you could, please do me the courtesy of not making me say it out loud.”
He slipped off a glove. I zeroed in on his hand like I was a junkie and he was my fix, tense even after I lost him to the pacing that sent him behind the bench. The feather-light touch of his fingers on the nape of my neck made me jump. Then I melted, weightless with the pleasant feelings that cascaded off his fingers.
“Do you always wake so early?” he asked, continuing in his trek up the rows and down the rows. Rather than my skin, his fingers trailed over the petals of white roses.
“Usually. But, normally, I’d be starting now. Not finishing.”
“Having trouble sleeping?”
“All I ever do is sleep,” my newly chipper attitude disagreed with my droll tone. “I just need the time to be alone.”
“Oh. Would you like me to leave?”
“No.”
I must’ve imagined the relief that sighed through his lips. “If you’re finished, what will you do now?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll make a daisy chain. Take a nap.”
“A daisy chain?” He shot an amused look at me over his shoulder. “I didn’t know you were born in the nineteenth century.”
“Maybe not daisies. I’m not much a fan of daisies, but some other flower. Something that speaks to me.”
“Flowers don’t talk, Eden.”
I snorted. “Of course they do. You can tell a whole sentence just by what flowers you give to someone.”
He stilled, scrutinizing me with a funny look on his face. “What was that?”
The Amaryllis Page 7