by Naomi Niles
“I’m really glad you both came,” I said loudly, struggling to be heard over the sound of the rain in the gutters. “I don’t think I was ready to face this alone, and I would’ve been miserable without you here.”
Kilgore’s eyes glittered in the half-light. “I hope you’ll think about what we said. I think, especially after he quit teaching, there was a period of a few years where your dad thought he had wasted his life. But he told me, he said, ‘I’ve done one thing right, and that’s how I raised my daughter. Nothing will ever take that away from me.’”
My cab pulled up to the curb. I hugged him and asked if we could go out for lunch tomorrow. He said of course and promised to text Mike and let him know where and when.
When I reached the hospital, I found a second nasty surprise waiting for me: Darren was seated in the lobby, his hands clasped together in front of him as though in prayer. He leaped up when he saw me. He was wearing a tangerine-red racing uniform and looked strikingly out of place amid the drab surroundings.
“How long have you been sitting there?” I asked him in a tone of disgust. All the anger and revulsion I had been shoving down over the last week rose to the surface like filthy sewage water during a rainstorm.
“Only for a couple hours. I tried texting you, but you never responded.”
“I must have had my phone off.” It was a true statement, if not a particularly convincing one. “Weird how you only show up after my father dies.”
“What do you mean?” He looked positively alarmed at the venom in my voice.
“I mean I haven’t heard from you in several days. I could have used your strength and support but you were MIA, and you wouldn’t even return my phone calls. I’m sorry to say this, but right now I don’t even want to look at you.”
“What phone calls?” he asked, looking pale and agitated. “I never heard from you.”
“I have a hard time believing that. I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted on Sunday, but some of us had real problems to deal with. You’ll understand someday when you’ve grown up.”
Darren spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “Look, I’m sorry your dad just died—”
“Yeah, you’re real sorry.”
“But you don’t have to take it out on me. I came here wanting to help you.”
“It’s a bit late for that. I could have really used your help four or five days ago. Now I don’t even think I want it.”
Darren glanced around the lobby, painfully conscious that we were being watched by three or four men in scrubs. He said in a lower voice, “I know you’re in a lot of pain right now and maybe you’re not aware how you’re coming across. Maybe we should wait until your emotions have had time to settle—”
“Forget you,” I snarled, resisting a strong urge to spit in his voice. “Don’t ever lecture me about how I ‘come across.’ I get that from enough boys; I don’t need it from you.” Without waiting for him to respond, I stalked past him out of the lobby while he stood looking on in defeat.
Chapter Thirty-One
Darren
Ignoring the stares of the nurses, I turned and walked out of the lobby into the rainy night. Rain was slapping the gutters with a constant thumping, and the head lights of an ambulance shone brightly through the haze. A couple of paramedics were unloading a man on a stretcher.
I stood there for a moment waiting for the road to clear so I could cross to my car. The urge to run back inside and apologize to Penny was strong, but I wasn’t even sure what I would be apologizing for. I had spent most of the week waiting miserably for her to call or text me, and I would have come to the hospital if Nic hadn’t warned against it. “She needs a lot of space,” she had said. “You don’t want to come across as inescapable. If she starts to feel trapped, she’ll begin looking for a way out of the relationship.”
So I had waited, and that, too, had proven to be a mistake. She had just broken up with me, and there was no telling what I could have done to avoid it. Maybe she would rethink her position after she had had a few days to calm down. I wasn’t about to give up on her, not yet. But at this point, charging back into the hospital and trying to rescue the relationship wasn’t going to help.
By now, the paramedics had fully unloaded the stretcher and were pulling it over the concrete. I had begun crossing the street, but froze in my tracks when I saw who was on it.
It was Dickie.
A new sensation of panic gripped me as I watched him being dragged through the doors. Without a second’s hesitation, I turned and followed the stretcher through the lobby and into the ground-floor elevator.
I waited until the door had closed and the elevator was ascending to the twelfth floor before questioning them.
“What happened to this man?” I asked.
The taller of the two paramedics turned and looked at me in mild surprise, as though having only just noticed I was in the elevator. “Do you know him? He got into a nasty accident while racing illegally. His Mustang hit a wall and went up in flames; he was immediately knocked unconscious, and somebody only just managed to rescue him. Any later, and he would have died.”
“As it is,” said the second paramedic, a Hispanic man with wide, arching eyebrows, “we still don’t know if he’s going to make it. He has a pulse but has been unconscious since impact.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, a note of desperation in my voice. “Is he, like, in a coma?”
The first paramedic exchanged glances with the second, as though they were both surprised by the level of intensity in my voice. “We don’t know anything for sure yet,” said the first paramedic.
“His doctor should be able to tell you more in an hour or two,” added the second. “In fact, I shouldn’t have even told you this much. I could lose my job.”
I started to ask another question, but just then the elevator door slid open, and the two paramedics led the unconscious Dickie toward a small room at the end of the hall. I followed with a dazed feeling, wondering what sins I had committed to invite so many disasters on myself at once. Within the space of about an hour, I had lost my girlfriend and my best friend. And I still hadn’t made it out of the hospital.
I didn’t yet know what I had done to offend Penny, but Dickie’s accident was almost certainly my own fault. Cold waves of guilt burst over me as I recalled our conversation that morning. He hadn’t wanted to race, but I had insisted on it. If I hadn’t talked him into it, we could be sitting in a bar right now knocking back drinks and trying to solve the infinite mysteries of women. Instead, he appeared to be in a coma, and there was no knowing whether or not he would ever come out of it.
I went and sat down in the twelfth-floor waiting room, resisting the urge to light a cigarette. Weak and exhausted but unable to sleep, I paced the floor silently in the haze of the fluorescent lights.
After what felt like an hour, the door opened, and a woman in glasses, carrying a clipboard, entered the room with a grave expression.
“Are you Richard’s friend?” she asked.
I nodded, not liking the way she had phrased the question, as if I was his only friend. Though when I thought about it, I supposed I was. “How’s he doing?”
“The best I can say at this point is that he’s still breathing. He’s in critical condition, and we’ve taken the precaution of placing him in an induced coma, temporarily.”
“Isn’t he already in a coma? Why would you do that?”
“It’s a necessary step in the process of allowing his body time to heal itself. You’re welcome to come sit with him, though, of course, he’s going to be unresponsive. Does he have any relatives that you know of?”
I shook my head. Both his parents were dead, and they had no other children. Penny was the only other person he had been close to, and if he died, the two of us might be his only mourners.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Penny
“Maybe I shouldn’t have gone off on him like that. I don’t know. But after the week I’ve h
ad, you can’t really blame me for being stressed and upset with him. A good boyfriend calls you every now and again, especially when your dad is dying.”
I was lying in Nic’s bed staring up at the ceiling. I hadn’t wanted to talk about Dad or Darren, so we had played a board game and eaten some leftover fried rice before retiring to bed for the night.
But when I awoke next to her in the warm light of morning, all the troubles of the day before were still there waiting to be sorted. Soon, I would have to begin making arrangements for Dad’s funeral. And after the fight we had had the night before, I wouldn’t have blamed Darren for thinking we had broken up.
“I feel like this is at least partially my fault,” said Nic, who had been putting off doing her morning exercises for the past hour so that we could talk. “He told me he wanted to go visit you in the hospital, and I told him it would be better to wait because you were already dealing with so much. Maybe I should’ve asked you first, but you had mentioned feeling overwhelmed and wanting to put everyone at a distance.”
“I can see how it would be confusing because I both wanted you to be there and I wanted to be left alone,” I said fairly. “I suppose I would’ve been upset either way, but I’m over it now and I’m not in the panicky place I was in last week. I felt this sense of lingering terror in my tummy knowing that Dad was about to die. But once he finally passed on, the terror subsided, and I began to feel a sense of peace—like, ‘Okay, the worst is over. Now we can begin to deal.’”
“Isn’t that the worst, though?” said Nic. “Sometimes the waiting for a dreadful thing is worse than the thing itself. There’s a sense of release when it finally happens—even though, in this case, you can never get your dad back.”
“Yeah, but I think he was ready for a long time. That’s what his brothers kept telling me last night: that I was probably dreading his death more than he was because now he gets to be reunited with Mom.”
I reached for my phone on the nightstand and scrolled through my texts looking for new messages. There were none. “I guess I had better find Darren and apologize,” I said gloomily, staring at my phone as though it was somehow to blame. “He just needs to understand that sometimes I’m not an entirely rational person, and it’s something he’ll have to deal with.”
“Given the fact that you just lost your dad, I think he’ll understand,” said Nic. “There’s a certain measure of grace that comes with grieving.” She winced in pain as she rose from the bed.
“Nic, it’s already ten o’clock,” I pointed out, holding up my phone. “You’re not actually going to work out this morning. Give up the dream.”
“I suppose not,” she said with a sigh. “Do you want breakfast? I don’t think I’ve eaten since lunch yesterday.”
We ate a lavish breakfast of gluten-free waffles, raspberries, strawberries, granola, and scrambled eggs with cheese and toast. Nic was scrolling through the morning news on her laptop when she turned to me and said, “Did you hear about this?”
“No, what?”
She turned the computer around to face me. I set down my tea and took it from her. “Apparently there was an accident yesterday at the drag strip.”
My immediate instinct was to wonder whether Darren was okay, but of course he was; I had seen him last night. As I scanned the article, my hand flew to my mouth in surprise. Dickie had been horribly injured. He was currently in critical condition at Medical City.
“I hope he’s okay,” said Nic anxiously. “In my experience ‘critical condition’ is a polite way of saying he’ll probably die.”
“Oh, I hope not.” My stomach turned at the thought. I shoved my plate away, having lost all desire to eat. “Him and Darren are best friends. Think how devastated Darren would be if he died.”
“I’m sure death would be pretty devastating for Dickie, as well,” said Nic with a smirk. “Anyway, we ought to go visit him. I bet Darren is already up there keeping watch over his bed.”
“Maybe so. I’ll go and text him just to be sure. Maybe he’ll actually answer this time.”
While I texted Darren, Nic rose from the table and began gathering up the half-empty plates. “Do you think we’ll ever again have just a normal week,” she asked, “where no one dies, and there are no accidents, and we can just sit at our windows drinking tea?”
“I doubt it. I led such a calm and untroubled existence before I met Darren. I don’t think I even appreciated how good I had it.”
“You didn’t,” said Nic. “You were always complaining about how lonely you were. If you ever want peace to return to your life, I suppose you’ll have to break up with him.”
“Which I will probably never do,” I replied, and drained the last of my tea.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Darren
That night was the most miserable night in recent memory. I sat in a chair beside Dickie’s bed wishing he would wake up so that we could talk. A weight of guilt lay on me that I couldn’t shrug off no matter how hard I tried. The night seemed unnaturally dark, the lights overhead harsh and unyielding.
It was one of those nights that you just have to live through, knowing that the only relief for your misery is time. I wished time would move ahead two or three days when Dickie had woken up and Penny had calmed down. But for now, all I could do was wait. In the past when I was miserable I could usually go to sleep and know things would look better in the morning, but tonight even that was no help. I kept waking up every few minutes with a pain in my side, remembering anew how I had put Dickie into a coma and being pummeled by fresh waves of guilt.
I finally fell asleep at around four and woke at around eleven. Doctor Ware stood over his bed reading some inscrutable numbers on the monitor. She beamed when she saw me stirring.
“Did you sleep well?”
As though in answer, I tried to stand up and found that my foot was asleep. A painful feeling of pins and needles shot through me, and I fell back into the chair, wincing.
“We have patients who do that a lot,” she said. “Just give it a few minutes, and when the nerves decompress, the feeling will return to your feet.”
“Thanks.” I motioned to the sleeping Dickie. “How’s he doing?”
“Still unconscious, but that’s by design. Right now, this coma is the safest place for him. It’s going to be a few days until we can bring him out.”
“And then will he be okay? Will he be alert and able to talk?”
“That I couldn’t tell you,” she said with a shake of her head. “It’s going to be touch-and-go here for a while, but I’m holding out hope that we haven’t seen the last of him.”
She turned and left the room without elaborating, and I sat there watching him for a few moments in silence. His eyelids fluttered rapidly as though he was dreaming. I reached for his hand and held it in my own for a moment—something he would never have let me do under normal circumstances. It felt cold to the touch.
I was startled out of my thoughts by the sound of a knock on the door. It was a shock to see Penny peering through the window looking nervous and hopeful.
Confused, I motioned for her to come in.
She was wearing a low-necked sleeveless shirt the color of guacamole and a pair of knee-length shorts. I could tell she had been crying on her way over because her mascara was running.
“You mind if I come in?” she asked quietly.
“Please.”
Looking encouraged, she crept in and shut the door slowly as though fearful of waking Dickie. “Hey, I read about what happened. How’s he doing?”
“Lucky to be alive,” I said, “though we don’t know how long that will last. The only good news is that the doctors are the ones who put him in a coma, and they’ll decide when they want to take him out of it. After that, he should wake up, though it’s anyone’s guess whether he’ll be coherent enough to talk.”
“Oh, I hope so,” she moaned, staring sadly down at his prone form. “There have been enough medical emergencies this weekend.”<
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“I just feel so bad.” I had wanted to say this to someone all night; speaking the words felt like an exhalation. “I was on the strip getting ready for the race when I heard the news about your dad. I came running over here as soon as I heard. If I hadn’t encouraged Dickie to take my place, this would never have happened.”
“Yes, but you didn’t force Dickie into that car,” Penny pointed out. “You can’t blame yourself for his accident any more than I can blame myself for my dad’s death.”
“It’s not the same.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “Your dad had cancer.”
“And you don’t think I found ways to blame myself for that? You’re not the only one feeling guilty here.”
“But that’s totally irrational,” I told her, not for the first time. “You didn’t give your dad cancer.”
“No, but I still feel massive amounts of shame and guilt over it. You don’t think I’ve been blaming myself this entire week, wondering what I could have done to prevent him from dying? In the end, it was Nic who brought me out of it. She said it wasn’t productive and there was no use blaming myself for things I had no control over.”
“But it’s different,” I said, “because if I had made different choices yesterday, we wouldn’t be standing here talking over his unconscious body. Dickie was never the best racer, but I still thought he had a decent chance of beating Adam and winning that two hundred thousand, or I wouldn’t have pushed him to take my place. I let my greed get the better of me and look where it landed us.”
“Well, you both did,” said Penny. Setting her purse down in the chair where I had slept, she came over and stroked my arm. “I’m sure Dickie wanted some of that money, or he would never have agreed to be in the race. It was a silly mistake, but one that I don’t think either of you is likely to make again. I think now would be a good time for you to give up racing before it gets you imprisoned or killed.”