She watches me for a second. This girl I loved, one of my closest friends, brought back to life as if by magic. It’s a complete miracle, and I’m such an asshole because it also feels like I’ve lost someone all over again.
“Okay,” she says finally, taking the blanket. I can tell she’s upset, her jaw locked, her eyes narrowed. It’s a face I’ve seen hundreds of times over the course of our relationship, a silent storm brewing. She stuffs the blanket into her duffel bag, zipping it closed. Standing, she gives me a long, calculating look. “I guess I’ll just see you tomorrow?”
As I watch her go, the pain of it all crashes down on me. I press the call button, and the nurse comes to give me another dose of pain medicine.
I don’t want to think about what’s real or not real. I don’t want to think about why Kim is here and Marley isn’t. I want to be knocked out.
Finally the drugs start to do their job, and for a moment there’s relief.
* * *
“And her happily ever after was over.…”
Before I even open my eyes, I know I’m back where I belong.
I feel her fingers in my hair, lightly tracing the outline of my cheek. I press my hand over hers, holding it firmly against my face. I know this skin, this touch. This is real.
Marley.
Her fingers feel small beneath mine. Delicate. I squeeze them and gather my courage, praying with everything in me that when I open my eyes, she’ll still be there. I let my lids open slightly, peeking, hoping.
Marley’s face is inches from mine, so close I can count her eyelashes. I smile and pull her even closer, overjoyed at the feel of her, the realness of her.
“God, I missed you,” I whisper into her hair. “Where were you? Everyone was telling me that—”
Suddenly she sobs and pulls away.
“You promised me,” she whispers, her voice strained as she looks at me, her eyes full of pain and betrayal. “You said no more sad stories. You promised.”
It guts me.
I did make that promise.
My eyes close as I think of how to tell her what’s happening, how I woke up in a hospital room and my world was turned upside down. I grip her fingers and pull her hand back to my cheek, wanting to tell her that I won’t ever fail her again. That I’m back and everything is fine now.
“Marley, I…”
But when I open my eyes again, she’s gone. Oh no. NO.
Then I see her shadow leaving the room.
“Marley, wait!” I bolt from the bed to chase after her.
But the second I move, I jolt awake. Back in the hospital. Alone. My good leg hanging off the side of the bed.
I struggle to catch my breath as I look around at the beeping machines. I feel the tug of the IV in my hand. The stupid cast wrapped tightly around my leg.
“Marley,” I whisper.
I heard her, felt her touch on my cheek. I can feel the exact spot her fingers had been, the skin still buzzing.
She was real. I’m awake now. My brain couldn’t have just made her up. Right?
I see her face, the tears, the clouds consuming her expression.
You said no more sad stories. You promised.
I hear the hollowness in her words, matching the emptiness I feel every second without her. And it’s all my fault because I can’t get back to her.
I turn the light on, fumbling in the bag of stuff my mom brought me earlier for my iPad. I pull it out and open Facebook. Tapping the search bar, I type in her name, thousands of results cascading down the screen.
I scroll through, faces blurring in front of my eyes, blond hair, brown hair, blue hair, none of them the right Marley.
But I keep looking. Because she’s real.
I know she is.
30
The next afternoon I stare at a commercial with toilet paper dancing across the TV screen, trying to ignore the tension that’s been building between me and Kim since she got here fifteen minutes ago.
My mom left to give us some “alone time,” and I… really wish she hadn’t.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see she’s sitting with her arms crossed, her leg shaking, her jaw locked in a way that screams she’s biting something back. Finally she grabs the remote off the bed and the TV goes dark.
“Kyle. What is going on?” she says as she tosses the remote onto my bedside table.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say as I avoid her gaze.
She pushes her chair back and stands up, the legs squeaking loudly against the floor as she grabs her duffel bag and spins around to face me.
“If you’d just tell me what’s going on with you, maybe I can help,” she argues, clutching the bag to her chest.
“You can’t,” I insist. It would be impossible for her to understand. How am I supposed to tell her I’m in love with someone else when she thinks we just broke up?
“You don’t know that,” she fires back, her blue eyes flashing in a way that I almost forgot about, her cheeks blushing in anger.
I think of Marley, and all the days, all the hours, we spent together, how we never fought like this. A wave of longing comes over me as I watch Kim fume.
I remember our relationship before. Before the accident. Before Marley. The charm bracelet. Always trying to patch the holes instead of looking at what was making them.
Not this time. This time we have to deal with it.
“Look at us. Fighting again. Just like we always did,” I say, trying to keep my voice level. “We don’t have to anymore, Kim. I mean, we almost broke up seven times. Eight, if you count the night of the accident. We were terrible at communicating. About dealing with our problems. And that’s probably why you didn’t say anything about Berkeley. Because it would have started a fight, just like it always did, right? It’s ridiculous.”
“So I’m ridiculous now?” she challenges.
“Yes!” I say, throwing up my hands. “We both are. But let’s pretend for a second that we’re not. Let’s pretend that we can say anything, as long as it’s honest, and the other person will listen and understand. Without judgment.”
She looks stony, but she stays silent.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Berkeley? For some reason, you were able to tell Sam but not me. Why?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do,” I say. “I can take it. Tell me why. ‘I want to know what it’s like to turn around and not see you there.’ You were right. Why are you acting like you never said it?”
“If you’re trying to get back at me,” Kimberly says, looking hurt, “it’s working.”
She storms out, slamming the door behind her. I stare at the spot she was in, letting out a long, frustrated sigh.
“Brilliant.”
* * *
In the hours after she leaves, I feel restless, the four corners of the hospital room closing in around me the longer I sit here.
Should I have said something different? I spent so much time thinking about what I would say to Kim if I saw her again, and I screwed it up because I’m so hung up on the fact that Marley isn’t anywhere to be found.
I feel like I don’t have space in my brain for anything else. Every corner of my mind is dedicated to possibilities. Places she could be. Explanations. Memories.
I reach into the bag my mom brought from home to take out the dented blue jewelry box, salvaged from the accident. Flicking it open, I stare at the charm bracelet inside. It looks so different to me now. I remember staring at it for hours, thinking I could make her see what we had.
I don’t even know how to explain to her what I see now. Especially when I’ve had a whole year to figure it out and she’s only had a minute.
A whole year. I’ve had a whole year to let it go, to heal. I’ve lived what feels like an entirely new life, and I don’t know how to get back to it. To find Marley. To find our life together.
They keep telling me this is real, but how can it be without her?
I’m
relieved when a nurse rolls a wheelchair into my room to take me to my first physical therapy session seconds after my mom texts she’ll be back tomorrow morning for another five-star breakfast at the cafeteria. I stare down at my phone as the nurse helps me into the chair, her long brown hair moving in my peripheral vision, reminding me so much of Marley I have to squeeze my eyes shut.
Frustrated, I leave my mom on read and pocket my phone. I can’t talk to anyone right now.
Although, maybe being relieved about going to physical therapy is the wrong way to feel, especially when it turns out to be a grueling half hour of me discovering how weak a fractured femur and eight weeks in a coma can make a guy. Even the exercises we do sitting in a chair are rough. Basic leg extensions. Stretching.
Stuff senior citizens in an aerobics class at a nursing home could apparently now lap me in.
If I thought recovery was hard the first time around, this is a whole other animal.
“You’re doing great,” Henry, the physical therapist, says to me, his hands hovering just a few inches from me, waiting.
I look up to see his blindingly hopeful grin pouring positive energy out at me. I snort and white-knuckle the support bar, struggling to put just my body weight on both of my legs, my good leg even giving out a few times, so that I fall against him over and over again.
With a fractured femur, I should’ve been up weeks ago trying to regain my strength and range of motion, but I was a little too comatose for that.
My leg completely crumples just as Dr. Benefield walks in with an empty wheelchair.
“Just in time for the show, Doc,” I call to her, pushing the hair out of my eyes.
“That’s enough for today,” she says as Henry helps her get me safely from the support bars into the wheelchair. I’m drenched in sweat.
She pushes me out of the PT room and down the hall, my entire body completely drained. I can’t wait to get back in bed, and that terrifies me. I don’t want to be that guy again, the one who couldn’t drag himself out into the world. It feels like I’m starting all over.
I have to distract myself.
“When’s the last time you pushed a wheelchair?” I tease her, craning my neck to look at Dr. Benefield. “Don’t you have, like, people to do this?”
“Ha ha,” she says, shaking her head at me. “I wanted to talk to you.”
She wheels me into my room, parking the wheelchair by the window. I see her glance over at the iPad on my bed, the screen still on, lit up with a photo of me, Kimberly, and Sam at one of our home games. The three of us are smiling at the camera, arms wrapped around one another.
“Mind if I get nosy?” she asks, reaching out to scoop it up.
I shrug, waving her on.
She flips through the camera roll, looking at the pictures I scoured last night and this morning.
“Looking through old memories?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Looking for Marley.”
I zoomed in on every background. Every person in the stands. Every passerby. But I didn’t find her.
“You said my brain was making sense of things I saw, so I thought maybe I’d seen her somewhere.”
Dr. Benefield presses a button and the screen goes dark. She reaches out, putting it on my nightstand. “Did you find anything?”
“I didn’t make her up.” I blow past her question, trying to figure out a way to make her see. To get her to help me. “I swear.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Dr. Benefield says, taking a step toward me. “I’ve asked someone—”
She’s cut off by a knock on the door, and a doctor I’ve never seen before sticks his head in. She motions for him to come in, continuing what she was saying. “Kyle, this is Dr. Ronson. He’s a psychiatrist.”
My hopes plummet.
“So you do think I’m crazy.”
She leans down, looking me directly in the eye. “I think you’re sad,” she says. “You’ve been through a lot.”
Well, yeah. Of course I’m sad. I’ve lost an entire year. An entire year and a whole new life I was just starting to live, and more than all that, the girl I love more than I’ve ever loved anyone.
And no one will believe it.
“Just tell him what you told me. Okay? He can help you work through what you’ve experienced.”
She gives my arm a sympathetic pat and leaves as Dr. Ronson slides a chair over to sit next to me by the window.
“Kyle,” he says with an annoying amount of pep. He offers his hand to me, and I shake it. Either his grip is super firm or I’m just that weak.
“So,” he says, pushing his glasses up farther on his nose, his eyes narrowing as he studies me. “How’ve you been?”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes and glance out the window as the two of us begin to talk. I’m annoyed but so desperate for answers it doesn’t take much to open the floodgates.
Just like I did with Sam and Dr. Benefield, I tell him the story. Our story. Every moment leading up to now.
And just like them, he slowly starts trying to poke holes in it.
“Did she ever say anything that didn’t make sense? Did anyone?”
“I don’t know,” I say, frustrated. I push back at him, determined. “Everything made sense, I—”
“Or did you make it make sense?” he asks, talking over me. “That’s what we’re talking about here, Kyle. Did your mind take what you were hearing out here and turn it into a dream in there?”
He points at my head, like he knows everything.
“I could see her. Feel her,” I say. I could never make up that feeling. “I could even smell her. She smelled sweet, like orange blossoms, or jasmine, or…”
He pushes open the window, and a sweet scent drifts in from the outside, making my stomach drop another flight.
“Honeysuckle,” he says, finishing my sentence for me. He nods to the other side. “It grows wild all over the courtyard. The scent is very similar to jasmine. Or orange blossoms.”
“But…”
I try to cover up my disappointment, turning my gaze to a giant oak tree, the sunlight streaming through its branches. I think of Marley at the park, the sunlight trickling onto her face, her hazel eyes shining up at me.
“I’m sorry,” he says, staring at me. “The fact is that some people wake up with memories that never happened. Our unconscious brains process outside stimuli in ways that sometimes translate into—”
“Dreams,” I say, cutting him off. “Yeah. I get it.”
31
My mom wheels me through the courtyard after breakfast while I continue my scroll through all of the “Marley” Facebook profiles within a two-hundred-mile radius. No matter what search filters I’ve tried so far, I’ve gotten nowhere.
I try to think of new filters I can add to the search. I pore over my memories for mentions of her last name but still come up empty.
Her school? I brace my fingers eagerly over the touch keyboard, but my brain has nowhere to direct them. An entire year, and I never asked her about that? Not once?
I can practically hear Dr. Ronson already: Does that make sense, Kyle?
Dick.
The more I think about it, the more it actually does make sense that I don’t know these things. I think about all the times that Sam told me how much I was making things about me. My stupid freaking selfishness. We spent so much time talking about me when Marley and I were together, there must have been a hundred things I forgot to ask her.
It just means I wasn’t paying attention to anyone but myself.
Just a usual day in Kyle’s world.
My eyes blur as I turn back to the profiles, searching for her features, her familiar smile, frustration slowly getting the better of me.
I shut off the iPad with a sigh. I mean, who even uses Facebook anymore besides my mom and her friends? It’s no surprise I haven’t found her on there. Sam deactivated his last year.
Instagram. I need to try Instagram.
I look
around at the sprawling trees and shrubbery and gardens taking up the entire center of the hospital grounds. There are brightly colored flowers everywhere, framing the small plants and wrapping around the roots of the trees.
I freeze when my eyes land on a patch of pink Stargazers, identical to those sprouting around Laura’s grave. The warm breeze brings with it the sweet smell of the honeysuckle growing around the oak tree, and my stomach twists as Dr. Ronson’s face pops into my head.
The wheelchair slows as we near a huge fountain at the center. I reach out to lightly touch the stone, little sprays of mist floating toward me from the frothing water.
A blossom falls slowly into my lap, and I pick it up, staring at it. When I look up, I see cherry trees lining the path, blowing softly in the wind. For a moment I remember the identical soft pink petals blowing around Marley, her eyes fixed on mine that day at the park.
I’d do anything to get back to that moment. A moment that everyone and everything is trying to get me to question.
I crush the blossom in my fist; then my head falls into my hands, a single flower somehow bringing with it a tiny wave of doubt. And that scares the shit out of me.
“What is it?” my mom asks.
“Do you think it’s true?” I ask, throwing it onto the ground. “Do you think Marley is really gone?”
My mom stops pushing the wheelchair and kneels in front of me, her face serious. Just like it is every time I’ve brought up Marley. “She’s not gone, honey. She was never here.”
She’s so sure about it. So matter-of-fact.
I stare back at her. I need to make her understand.
“What if you woke up tomorrow and I was gone and everyone told you I never even existed?” I ask quietly. “Would you stop loving me, Mom?”
I see her falter, her hand finding the armrest of my wheelchair, just the thought of it overwhelming her. Tears fill her eyes, and her fingers grab ahold of my arm and squeeze, almost like she’s checking I’m really here.
All This Time Page 17