The Color of Heaven Series [02] The Color of Destiny

by Julianne MacLean

  “I honestly can’t say,” I replied, not wanting to crush this woman’s hopes, even though I had very little faith of my own that Sophie would ever return to the world of the living, much less to the woman she once was, for I had quit believing in miracles a long time ago. “Every case is different.”

  “That’s what the doctors tell me,” Jen said, “but it’s hard, you know.”

  I glanced at Sophie and remembered exactly how it felt to wake up in a bed just like this one, then hear the news that my baby was dead. And my sister. And my aunt.

  Was there any life left inside of me? I wondered. Any hope? Sometimes I felt like a crazy person. I wanted to run screaming down the street, calling out for Mia and my baby.

  Sometimes I woke from a dream where I heard my child’s laughter, just as I had in the hospital that day when I chose not to have the abortion. I wanted so badly to go to her.

  Did that mean I wanted to die? That I wanted to go to heaven to be with her?

  There were times when the answer was yes. Glenn had certainly given up on living. Once he said, ‘I’d be better off dead. I just hope that when it happens, our daughter will be there at the pearly gates to greet me.’

  It had become my task these days to try and prevent the loss of Glenn, too. Maybe that’s why I became a paramedic. Maybe I knew I would one day need these skills to save his life. I certainly didn’t want to lose anyone else that I loved.

  I was always looking for the reason behind things. The purpose.

  Why, this? Or why, that?

  It had been almost twenty years since my accident, but I was still haunted by it – by all that I had lost that night. What was the purpose of that? Of all the suffering? Had I done something to deserve it? Or was it some sort of test?

  “Yes, I know.” I quickly shook the memories away and faced Jen. “I really should get going. My husband’s waiting for me at home. It was nice to meet you. I’m sorry about your sister. I hope she’ll be okay.”

  Jen appeared startled by my sudden compulsion to leave, but I just couldn’t stay in that room any longer. It was too close to death.

  When I arrived home, it was the usual scene. All the lights were off, but the television was on.

  I set down my purse and keys and walked through the kitchen. Glenn was passed out on the sofa with an empty bottle of vodka on the floor beside him. I saw the disturbing telltale signs of a cocaine binge – the hand mirror on the coffee table, the straw, and the credit card.

  God...!

  A sudden violent rage rose up within me. Why was Glenn doing this? I understood that life hadn’t been easy on either of us. We got married too young, hoping to replace the child we lost and find happiness again. But that wasn’t in the cards. Not for us. I’d had a string of miscarriages. My mother was gone now, and we didn’t even speak to my father. We had no family to lean on. There was nothing but grief.

  Yet somehow, I managed to cope. Managed to go on living.

  Tonight I saw a woman who had fought hard enough to come back from the dead, and she was still fighting to live.

  Meanwhile my husband was slowly killing himself, and ruining us financially in the process, for he had been fired from his job three weeks ago, and there was nothing left of our savings. A hot and bitter anger swept through me.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t go on enabling his addictions. It was time to make a change, and I vowed I would not accept any more false promises. Tomorrow I would ask him – one last time – to enter rehab. If he refused, I would tell him to leave. I would cancel all our credit cards, change the locks on the house, and consult a lawyer.

  That night, I didn’t cover Glenn with a blanket. I didn’t care about him, or anything. I left him there in the dark, and went straight to bed.

  It was a decision I would later regret.

  Another Life

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Ryan Hamilton

  I’VE OFTEN WONDERED why bad things happen to good people. Is it simply a matter of luck and timing? Or are certain people born under a shining star that emits magic fairy dust of good fortune? Maybe some folks have superstars for guardian angels, while others get stuck with slackers. It’s simply the luck of the draw. Or unluckiness...

  My name is Ryan Hamilton and I should begin by explaining that I am a man of science. I hold a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience, which I received with high honors. I also hold a medical degree. I have been an emergency medicine doctor for twenty-two years and I’ve saved many lives. Should I therefore know more than the average person about life and death, and the endurance of the human spirit? I wish I could say yes, but unfortunately science can only answer so many questions – those that can be tested and proven.

  But what about all the magic that surrounds us on a daily basis? What about fate and destiny and crazy, impossible good luck?

  We’ve all witnessed miracles of some kind or another in our lives. I’m sure you’ve experienced something that makes you wonder about the existence of a higher power? Cosmic forces? The electrical energy of life? Or God?

  I don’t know if God exists, but I do know one thing.

  There is much in our world that can’t be explained. Certain events defy reason or possibility. What seems unbelievable can occur before our very eyes and leave us speechless with awe.

  For this reason, I feel compelled to tell you my story, because I will continue to be awed by what I witnessed until I draw my last breath.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  I’M SURE, IF you’re like most people, you sometimes wince when you remember certain stupid things you did in your youth. Things you’re not proud of, things you would never do today, knowing what you know now. In fact, you probably consider yourself lucky to have gotten away with those bad decisions, but you’re thankful you learned something in the process. For me, those lessons came at a very high price one fateful night in Ontario.

  “Pass me another beer,” John said as he glanced over his shoulder at me in the car.

  We were seventeen years old. I was seated in the back seat, slouched low with the cooler at my feet.

  John was in the front passenger seat, and his girlfriend Lisa was driving. We were on our way to a party we’d gotten wind of earlier that day, way out in the country.

  Lisa was our designated driver, but that didn’t count for much. When I handed the beer to John, he broke the seal on the can and passed it to Lisa, who guzzled half of it before handing it back.

  “Ahh!” she said in a great exhale. “That’s good, but now I need to burp.” She fisted her chest, opened her mouth wide, and belched like a trucker.

  “That’s my girl,” John said, leaning close to kiss her neck. She smiled and turned to kiss him on the mouth, then swerved alarmingly when she returned her attention to the road.

  Luckily we were in the middle of nowhere, so there was no oncoming traffic. It was pitch dark and we were speeding along a flat, straight country road with cornfields on either side of us.

  I was so drunk I could barely focus on the yellow lines illuminated by the headlights, so I leaned my head against the side window, folded my arms across my chest, and closed my eyes.

  I’ll be the first to admit that I was an idiot when I was seventeen – a quintessential angry young man but I was also a product of my environment. Financially speaking, I came from a world of privilege. My father was a corporate attorney and my mother was a successful real estate agent. I am an only child because they waited a long time to start a family. First, they wanted to get all their social ducks in a row – to be in the right house, the right neighborhood. Since my mother was the one who would sacrifice the most in terms of her career, she put it off for as long as possible. She was thirty-seven years old and CEO of a multi-million-dollar real estate firm when she gave birth to me.

  She took a three-month maternity leave, but worked from home the entire time, then hired a live-in nanny to care for me, cook the meals, and keep the house tidy. Basically, my mother had
what she said all working women needed – a wife to keep the home fires burning.

  Unfortunately, when I was two years old, the home fires burned a little too hotly when my father began sleeping with the twenty-one-year-old nanny. A messy divorce followed, and my father lost everything. Not only did my mother get the summer lake house in the Muskokas and the downtown penthouse apartment, she also kept the Mercedes and received full custody of me.

  My father received limited visitation rights – I don’t think he fought hard for anything more – and a year later, the nanny left him for a younger man. My father lived alone in a Queen Street flat for about six months. Then he put a pistol in his mouth one night after eating a frozen pizza for dinner. When I was older, I was told he had been charged with embezzlement that day.

  What followed was a string of nannies who all left me eventually, to move on to other things. My mother was a workaholic who viewed me as another material asset to invest in, so I think it’s reasonable to conclude that I had some issues with abandonment.

  When I was twelve years old, my mother decided that a twenty-four-hour, live-in babysitter was no longer required.

  “Ryan,” she said, “you’re perfectly capable of making your own breakfast and lunch, and getting yourself to school on time.” She told me she wanted to raise a capable and independent young man who knew how to take care of himself, so Mrs. Puglisi was hired as a housemaid and cook, with instructions to keep an occasional eye on me when I was around. She was not to prepare my snacks, wash my clothes, or ‘coddle’ me in any way. It was time I learned how to do things on my own.

  With this new independence, and a lack of any personal connection to Mrs. Puglisi or my mother, I usually went to my friends’ houses after school, because their mothers worked, too – but they didn’t have cranky housekeepers with eagle eyes.

  I had my first beer at the age of thirteen in John’s basement. My mom showed homes and properties most evenings, which meant I had far too much freedom for a thirteen-year-old. I’m still not sure if she genuinely believed in me, and trusted me to behave like a mature, responsible adult, or if she simply preferred to stick her head in the sand and let me do as I pleased.

  At fourteen, John and I began experimenting with marijuana, and he was expelled from school for bringing hashish brownies for the entire homeroom class on Valentine’s Day. I knew about them, of course, but at least I had the sense not to help him bake and frost them.

  We remained friends, even when he was forced to attend a different school, and though he was a terrible influence on me and got me into all sorts of trouble and dangerous situations – like what happened to us that night – it was his friendship that taught me a lesson I desperately needed to learn.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  WHEN I WOKE in the back seat of John’s car, we were still driving, but now we were surrounded by thick dark forest on either side.

  “Where are we?” I asked, sitting up groggily and looking around.

  “We’re almost there,” John replied. He raised a pint of whisky to his lips, tipped it up, and chugged it.

  “Give me some of that,” I said, reaching out to take it as he passed it over the seat.

  “Whoohoo!” he shouted, and cranked up the radio when ACDC came on. “We’re gonna get shit-faced tonight! How do we open the sunroof?” he asked Lisa while he searched the dash for a button.

  She reached up and adjusted the controls. The tinted window above us slid open with a quiet hum, and through the heavy haze of my drunkenness, I could see the stars.

  John stood up on his seat and stuck his head out. “What a night! Yeah!”

  Lisa laughed again and cranked the music even louder until I could feel the rumble of the bass inside my chest.

  I felt a little queasy as I watched John struggle to find his footing on the center console between the two front seats, then hoist himself up through the small opening. Was he going to climb onto the roof? I couldn’t seem to make sense of what he was doing. My vision was blurred and I could barely think.

  “You’re nuts!” Lisa cried out with amusement. “Oh, Jesus!”

  Considering the state I was in, it’s a wonder I saw what happened because everything spun out of control so quickly.

  A racoon had waddled onto the road, and Lisa swerved to avoid him. I was tossed against the side window and John’s legs disappeared from view, as if he’d been sucked out by a tornado.

  Then Lisa drove us straight into a tree.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I DON’T KNOW how long I was out. It felt like only a few seconds, but when I came to, ACDC was no longer playing on the radio. It was some other band I cannot recall.

  I sat forward as if waking from a dream and touched my hand to my forehead. Slowly, dizzily, I realized my face was covered in blood, which dripped from just above my left temple. I wiped the blood away from my eyes and blinked a few times to see past the blur of my confusion.

  Lisa was hunched forward over the steering wheel. I tried to open the car door. My hands shook uncontrollably. Somehow I managed to flick the latch and push it open. Spilling out onto the forest floor, I fell to my hands and knees and vomited.

  The next thing I remember is pressing Lisa’s shoulders back to push her away from the steering wheel. Her head fell limply against the seat and she turned toward me. I thought she was looking at me, but her eyes were dead, unseeing.

  Horrorstruck, I sucked in a breath. What should I do? I needed help, but I had no cell phone. It was 1987.

  John...

  I laid the flat of my hand on the roof where the tinted glass window was still open. Where was he?

  Staggering weakly up the embankment and onto the road, it was difficult to make anything out in the darkness. The headlights of the car continued to shine into the forest, but John had been thrown out of the vehicle many yards back.

  “John!” I shouted, but only my voice echoed back to me in the clear, starlit night. Crickets chirped noisily while music from the car radio grew more distant as I trudged with heavy feet along the pavement. “John!”

  Then I spotted something – a heap at the side of the road, just ahead.

  I began to jog. My heart beat thunderously in my chest. “John!”

  Terrified that he would be dead like Lisa, I dropped to my knees beside him. It was dark, but my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight’s bluish glow, and I was able to make out his face.

  His eyes were wide open. A trail of blood from his ear formed a thick black puddle, like chocolate syrup, on the pavement. Those wide, terrorized eyes shifted to meet mine. His lips moved.

  “Ub... ub... ub...”

  He stared at me, desperate and afraid. I could barely breathe. I was now completely sober, all my senses buzzing with awareness.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder and glancing down at his mangled body, his legs and torso twisted grotesquely.

  “Ub... ub... ub...”

  I will never forget the eerie sight of his lips moving, and the faint, husky sound of his voice in the night.

  In that moment, twin headlight beams appeared from around the bend, and I rose to my feet. I waved my arms frantically over my head and moved quickly to the center of the road.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  IT SEEMED TO take forever for the cops and paramedics to arrive. When at last they put John on the stretcher, his eyes were still wide open, but he was able to answer their questions by blinking once for yes, twice for no. They took us together in the back of the ambulance. I was able to sit on the bench while John was strapped in with a neck brace.

  “Ub... ub... ub...” It was all he could say, and he kept uttering that sound over and over. What did it mean? Was he asking for something? Trying to tell us something?

  “Just try to relax,” the paramedic said as he checked John’s pulse. “You’re in good hands. We’re taking you to North York General Hospital.” He looked over at me. “What’s your name?”

  “Ry
an,” I said. “Ryan Hamilton.”

  “Do you know his parents? They’ll probably want to talk to you.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I know his parents.”

  His father would be disappointed he wouldn’t be able to smack John around for this. It’s how he usually dealt with such things.

  None of us had been wearing seatbelts. Lisa was pronounced dead at the scene and John survived. Barely. He was paralyzed from the neck down and suffered substantial brain damage caused by a fractured skull and an epidural hematoma, which was a bleed in the brain. The bleed had caused blown pupils, explaining the strange eyes I saw.

  He had a fractured C4 that severed his spinal cord. One level higher, he wouldn’t have survived more than a few minutes, for it would have paralyzed his diaphragm. His brain injury improved, which may not have been a good thing, because he was stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and grew very bitter. I tried to visit several times but he wouldn’t see any of us.

  It wasn’t easy to lose my best friend, and I can’t possibly say that anything good came of it – not for John. It still pains me deeply to think of his misery.

  Two years later, I graduated from high school at the top of my class, which shocked all my teachers and my disinterested mother, who had no idea I was performing so well. She had never asked. But after the accident, something clicked inside of me and I began to question my existence, and my good luck, for I had emerged from a fatal accident with only a few scratches.

  Why had I survived? Why me? Was there some greater purpose I was meant to discover or achieve?

  Everything changed for me overnight. I finally realized how fragile and precious life was. I quit drinking and partying. I took an interest in school – science in particular – and eventually in human anatomy and the workings of that complex organ inside our heads. The more I learned, the more magic I saw in the world, for how could such a wonder of nature – the brain – ever come to exist? Everything I learned was based on science, yet my own survival that night – and further events that were about to occur in my life – never ceased to amaze me. Everyday still seems like a miracle to me, with no scientific explanation whatsoever, but at least I know one thing for sure: life is a gift that should not be squandered.