by Roxie Noir
“Okay,” I say.
She gives me a hard look.
“No one would blame you if you turned back,” she says, her voice sinking almost to a whisper. “He’s got a long hard road ahead, and if you want out, now is the time.”
I stare at her. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I might leave Jackson.
“I don’t want out,” I say.
She nods once, curtly.
“Good,” she says. “He likes you.”
Then she opens the door to his room, and I take a deep breath.
“I found a stray,” Mrs. Cody says, and I walk through the door.
He’s fucked up.
Jackson’s got casts on both legs, bandages around his torso, a neck brace, a black eye, and a split lip. There are tubes and wires sticking out of him everywhere, both forearms and the backs of both hands.
But he’s alive.
I just start laughing. I’m giddy with relief and joy and happiness, and his eyes slide toward me.
“Izzat Mae?” he asks. He sounds like his voice box has been through a wood chipper.
“It’s me,” I say.
At the side of his bed I grab his fingers and hold them in mine, because that seems like the only part that’s safe to touch. I want to throw my arms around him, I want to kiss him. I want to hold him tight, but that’s all a spectacularly bad idea right now.
His fingers curl into mine.
“Hey,” he whispers.
27
Jackson
I’m ninety-five percent confident this isn’t another morphine dream, that Mae’s really here. I can’t see great, but I can hear her laughing and it sounds like she’s trying not to cry.
She takes my fingers, which is pretty much the only part of me that isn’t busted. I squeeze her hand.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she says, her voice not much more than a whisper. “How are you?”
I lick my lips. I can’t move my head, I broke a shitload of bones, and I’m high as fuck right now.
“I’m fine,” I say. “You know I won?”
“Of course I know you won,” she says. “I got a great shot of you winning.”
There was something I was going to say to her. I close my eyes and try really, really hard to remember, but my memories are scattered and fragmented.
“Lula-Mae,” I start.
Landing in the sand wrong. Crash coming on. Trying to get up and nearly blacking out from the pain. Waking up in the sand, gasping for air, feeling like I was breathing through a straw, my whole body hurting more than I thought possible.
A stretcher, an ambulance, a bed. People kept telling me things but I have no idea what.
I know I had surgery, because I remember being awake and on the table and then feeling like I was falling backward into darkness and not even being afraid, just wondering what was under there.
Then I was here, and my parents were here, and I couldn’t really move but I was pretty sure I was alive, though every so often I’d think I was talking to someone and their face would start to twist and morph. Always into sea creatures, for some reason, but they’d keep talking and after a few minutes I’d wake up.
“There’s no brain damage?” Mae says.
I squeeze her hand.
“What?” I say.
She looks down at me.
“There you are,” she says.
“I’m on drugs,” I say, and she just laughs.
“You fell asleep for a few minutes in the middle of your sentence,” she says.
“That isn’t brain damage, that’s just morphine,” my dad says. “They’ll taper him off it in four or five days and he’ll be a little more lucid.”
I remember what it was that was so important.
“Mae,” I say.
“Yes?” she asks, her thumb rubbing over my knuckles.
“I didn’t break my dick,” I tell her. “I think.”
She turns so bright red that her face is nearly purple, and the room goes dead quiet.
Then someone moves, off to my right, and my mom stands up. I’d already forgotten that my parents were there.
“We’re going to go get some coffee,” my mom says.
“You want anything, Mae?” my dad asks, getting up slowly. Her puts his fists on his lower back and stretches.
“No, thank you,” Mae says, still beet-red. “It was very nice to meet you!”
“We’ll be back in a few,” my mom says, and then they leave.
Mae leans over and kisses me. She’s very, very gentle, and with the morphine I feel a little dizzy.
“You scared the hell out of me,” she whispers.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She squeezes my fingers again, and I realize she’s crying. I try to raise my arm so I can wipe her tears away, but pain shoots through me and I drop it.
Mae wipes her face with the back of her hand, and with her this close, I can finally see her face. Her eyes are puffy and red, deep circles under them. Like she’s been crying hard for hours.
“It’s okay,” I say, and rub my fingers against hers. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m not even the one who’s hurt.”
“It’s better when you’re here,” I say.
She kisses me again, her hair a curtain between me and the world.
I want to say I never wanted to make you cry, but I think I drift off to sleep again, because when I wake up, she’s curled in an armchair on the other side of my bed, my other hand in hers. I squeeze it and she bends over to kiss it very, very lightly.
“My parents were here when I told you about my dick,” I say.
“They were,” Mae says. “That was about ten minutes after I met them for the first time. Good job.”
“Help me make sure it works?” I ask, my voice sounding fuzzy even to my own ears.
Half the dreams I keep having are sex dreams, sort of. In one of them Mae’s naked and walking down a hotel hallway, away from me, and I keep walking after her but she never gets to the end and I never get closer. In another one she’s on the other side of a window, looking at me, and she keeps taking off her clothes, but there’s always another layer underneath.
She laughs.
“Not a chance,” she says. “For starters, I think you’re too high to give meaningful consent.”
“I definitely consent,” I say.
My bed’s got rails on it, and she’s leaning over one.
“You’ve also got hairline fractures in four vertebrae and you’re peeing through a catheter,” she says.
“Sounds gross,” I say.
“It is,” Mae says.
My vision’s getting a little blurry around the edges, and I think I’m starting to drift off again. Mae leans her head against the rail over my bed. I just watch her for a long moment, until everything starts to wobble.
I remember what I wanted to tell her.
“I love you,” I say.
Mae’s head turns into an octopus.
When I wake up this time, the sun has moved and Mae is gone, but my parents are back in the room.
“She left?” I ask. I move my fingers, just in case she’s there and I can’t see her.
“She was fast asleep in that chair so we made her go rest,” my dad says, lowering the copy of Guns & Ammo he’s reading. “Blame us.”
“By the way, as far as the hospital is concerned, she’s your sister,” my mom says.
Well, I’m not doing sex stuff for a while, so I can probably act brotherly. More or less.
“I like her,” my mom says. “She’s nice, and she takes good pictures of you.”
We watch some daytime TV. I drift in and out. Nurses feed me nutritional shakes through a straw and come in and mess with all my tubes and machines and IV drips.
At one point, I think, I’m glad I’m so high, because this is pretty embarrassing, and also I think I might be in a lot of pain.
Later, I wake up and Mae is sitting
there, my parents on either side of her. She’s got her laptop on her lap, and she’s pointing at something.
“I think this one’s a better angle,” my mom says. “Wow, there are just so many of these.”
“Picking ten out of a thousand is always the hard part,” Mae says. “Well, one of them.”
“Did you go to school for this?” my mom asks.
“I got my BFA at UT Austin,” Mae says.
“Are you from Texas?” my mom says.
“I grew up about an hour from Odessa,” Mae says.
I have the feeling that my mom is about to start grilling Mae about everything she’s done in her entire life, and even though I can’t do much, I can save her from that for another ten minutes.
“You don’t have to interview her,” I say.
“We were just looking at her photos of you,” my mom says. “They’re very good.”
“Thanks,” Mae says.
I hear her laptop shut and she comes over and stands by the bed again, taking my hand.
“Visiting hours are over in a couple minutes,” she says. “I’ll be back tomorrow, okay?”
I think we’re still in Vegas. I think she has to leave, and I think maybe she was supposed to leave today.
“Tomorrow?” I say.
“It’s the thing that happens after tonight,” she says.
Mae leans over and kisses me softly.
“Wait,” I say, before she straightens up, so her face is a couple inches in front of mine.
“What?” she whispers.
My dad clears his throat. Right. They’re there.
“Tell you tomorrow,” I say.
28
Mae
I’ve moved from the Wynn to a Motel 6 near the hospital, the cheapest thing I could find, and I head back there when visiting hours are over. Even though I told Jackson’s parents I’d go take a nap, I actually had to move my stuff to here, and I need a little while to just lie in the bed and stare at the ceiling.
As bad as Jackson is, it’s pretty much a miracle that he’s alive. Somehow, when Crash ran over him, he only kicked in his ribs, puncturing his lung, and broke every bone in his right leg. If Crash had stepped on Jackson, he’d probably be dead.
He’s in a bad, bad way, but he’s alive.
I still haven’t heard back from Erica, my editor at Sports Weekly. She’s probably got bigger things to worry about, though maybe not. I called Bruce this afternoon and gave him the vague updates, and he didn’t say anything about it either.
I hope it worked. I hope I’m not blacklisted from all photography forever, but right now, I don’t even care. I know I will when I wake up tomorrow, but right now, I can only feel two things.
One is glad that Jackson’s alive, and that he’s going to be some version of okay.
The other is tired.
I brush my teeth and fall into the bed, where I sleep for almost twelve hours.
Jackson’s still out of it. He manages not to tell me anything else about his dick in front of his parents, but he doesn’t always make a lot of sense.
I split my day between holding his hand in the ICU and editing photos downstairs in the hospital cafeteria. They’re due to Erica before I leave Vegas, and I just want to get this finished with.
“You missed the nurse,” Jackson says the next time I head upstairs to see him. “She says I’m great.”
“She said everything was going as well as could be hoped for,” his mom says.
“Spoilsport,” Jackson says, but he’s smiling.
I stay there until he falls asleep again, and then his mom nods her head outside and I follow her.
“What did she really say?” I whisper.
She rubs her eyes.
“They’re taking the chest tube from the punctured lung out tomorrow,” she says. “But they need to monitor that for a few more days at least, along with the bruising to his organs, and he can’t really move his neck at all right now. He’s gotta have another surgery on his leg. He’ll be here for another week, maybe two.”
Shit.
“Okay,” I say.
She puts a hand on mine.
“I want you to go back to New York,” she says. Her voice is low, but firm, and my eyes widen.
I thought we were getting along.
“You need to go back,” she says. “I know you have a life, and a job, and you have to pay your bills, and you’re not doing any of that staying here and watching him sleep.”
“I can’t just leave,” I say, keeping my voice low.
“That’s why I’m telling you to leave,” she says, her voice gentler. “Because I know you don’t want to, but you need to. Go live your life, and come visit in six weeks when he’s not high out of his damn mind. You can’t do anything here besides make your own life harder.”
It makes sense, and I know she’s right. I still hate it, though.
“What happens after the two weeks?” I ask.
She sighs.
“He comes and lives with us until he recovers,” she says, crossing her arms and looking into his hospital room. “And, if my prayers get answered, he doesn’t go right back to riding. He’s at least out for this season.”
I want to ask what then, but I don’t think she knows, either. We still don’t know how long he’ll be in a wheelchair, or whether he’ll need crutches or a cane forever, and figuring those things out is more important than are we gonna move somewhere and live together.
I swallow and push my hand through my hair.
“I’ll go back,” I say. “You have to promise to keep me updated.”
“Absolutely,” she says. Then she smiles. “I like you better than Cassie, anyway. She was kind of dumb.”
I send the photos in and all I hear from Erica is Thanks, these look good. Which is at least nicer than it has to be. Bruce calls and tells me that he talked to her, and she’s pissed, but loves the pictures. He doesn’t exactly say it, but I think he talked her down. I think I owe Bruce pretty big.
I read all the rodeo news and blogs and websites. Jackson’s fall is huge news, and the World Championship organizers are giving press-friendly updates, but I’m nowhere to be found.
It seems like some of Jackson’s luck might have rubbed off on me.
My plane leaves at an ungodly hour in the morning, so my last night in Vegas I’m curled up next to Jackson in an arm chair, his hand in mine. They’re slowly scaling back the morphine, so he’s stopped nodding off mid-sentence, though he’s not one hundred percent lucid yet.
His black eye and split lip look better, though they’re not gone. He can move his arms okay, and the tube that was sticking out of his chest is gone.
I’ve got a couple minutes before visiting hours end, and there’s some game show on TV.
“Sorry I ruined Vegas,” he says. His voice is still low and slurry, but at least he’s mostly making sense now.
“We still managed to have some fun,” I say. The rail on this side of his bed is lowered, so I’m sitting in the chair resting my head on the pillow next to his.
“Then I’m sorry we didn’t have more,” he says.
I put the fingers of my other hand on his shoulder, lightly. I can feel the muscle there through his ugly hospital gown, and he looks over at me.
His eyes haven’t changed. The way he looks at me is just as wicked as ever.
“I’m gonna visit Wyoming next month,” I say. “Think you can be in good enough shape for some fun then?”
“Well, now I’m inspired,” he says, and grins.
Then he gasps, and I sit bolt upright.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, but Jackson’s just making a face.
“My dick still works,” he says, grimacing.
I realize he’s got an erection with a catheter in.
“Think about a kitten!” I say.
Jackson takes a deep breath, and then another. After a few moments, his face relaxes.
“Maybe it’s not all bad that you’re leaving,” he says, his
eyes still closed.
I just start laughing.
“I don’t think anyone believes I’m your sister, by the way,” I say.
“You’re just a very touchy, devoted sister who doesn’t look like the rest of her family at all,” he says. “Who also does a lot of inappropriate kissing.”
“Don’t think about that too much, though,” I tease, running a hand through his hair.
“Kittens,” he says. “Thinking about kittens.”
We go silent for a moment.
“I’ll miss you,” I say.
“Not as much as I’ll miss you,” he says. Then he turns his head toward me as much as he can, which is a fraction of an inch.
“Lula-Mae, am I awake?” he asks.
“I think so,” I say. “Unless I’m a sea cucumber. Then you’re probably having a morphine dream.”
“I love you,” he says. “I tried to tell you a couple times but I think I was asleep.”
Suddenly my eyes are full of tears and I feel like something’s wrapped itself around my throat. I swallow hard, trying to force the lump away.
“That wasn’t supposed to make you cry,” he whispers.
“It’s not you, it’s everything,” I say, and even my whisper-voice is shaking. “I hate seeing you like this and I hate leaving you here like this and I was trying really hard to act okay.”
“I’m gonna be fine,” he says.
But what if you’re not? I think, but I don’t say it out loud.
A nurse steps into the room and gives us a quick glance.
“Visiting hours are over,” she says, and then leaves again, and I bury my face in my hands.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
He puts his hand over one of mine and pulls it to his mouth as I’m sniffling, doing my best not to start sobbing in front of someone who has way more reason than me to cry right now.
Then he kisses my hand and I fucking lose it. I put my head down on my arm and just sob. I feel like somehow, I’ve failed him completely, because he’s still here and still in terrible condition and I’m just going home like nothing’s wrong.