* * *
And then…the world fades to black.
* * *
Some time later.
* * *
“Sophia? Sophia?” Someone’s calling my name. But it sounds very far away like it’s at the other end of a long tunnel.
I give up. My eyelids are just too heavy. I can’t open them. Not yet.
* * *
Some more time later.
* * *
“Sophia? Sophia?” This time, the words are closer. They are no longer a tunnel away. My eyelids are a little less heavy. I manage to open them. Harsh light floods in, blinding me.
“Sophia? She’s opening her eyes! Sophia?”
The voice sounds familiar. The sound of it makes my heart seize up.
“Sophia, please wake up. Please.”
I try harder. Someone’s rooting for me. Someone very important.
When I finally open my eyes, I see Jax. The concerned look on his face morphs into relief. His eyes are filled with hope.
“J-a-x?” I manage to say. There’s something in my mouth. But someone removes it. My mouth is dry. My lips are chapped. I’ve never been this thirsty.
“It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
* * *
Some time later still.
* * *
I wake and sit up in a hospital bed. I don’t know how much time has passed or what day it is. All I know is that Jax is no longer wearing his casts, but is walking around on his own.
“I love you,” he says over and over again. “Do you know that? I love you. I should’ve told you a long time ago, but I was afraid. And I didn’t know how to say it.”
I stare at him. I don’t understand what he’s saying. Or why.
Tara’s also there. She looks guilty. Happy to see me, but guilty.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. And then I remember.
“You were in a car accident. A tractor trailer ran the red light. You’re lucky to be alive,” Tara says.
And then I remember. It’s not just me.
“And my baby…” I ask.
No one says anything. I don’t know if Jax knows. But by the look on his face, I suspect that he does.
“What happened to my baby?” I ask. No one wants to say it. It’s not good news.
“You lost the baby,” Tara finally says. “I’m so sorry.”
* * *
The world fades to black.
Chapter 35 - Jax
When I wait…
Tara is the one who calls and tells me about the accident. I drive to the hospital in a daze. From the tone of her voice, I can tell it is bad. Strangers don’t just call other strangers about accidents if things aren’t bad.
When I finally get there, I see a girl lying in a hospital bed. She is Sophia, but at the same time, she isn’t Sophia. Not my Sophia. Gone is the exuberant, feisty girl who became one of my closest friends over the last few months. Gone is her laughter and her smile. Instead, what remains is some sort of fragile shell of a person she once was.
And then Tara tells me about the pregnancy. About how she was going to keep the baby. My baby. A million thoughts swirl around in my head. Thoughts that I am ill-equipped to deal with. Thoughts that I have to simply put out of my head just to get through the days.
Sophia lies in an induced coma for three days. We don’t know if she is going to live or die. I stay the whole time. When I call O and tell her what happened, she comes to stay with me. She doesn’t have to. I asked her not to, but she insists. It’s like something is different about her, too.
“I love you. I love you,” I say to Sophia when she first opens her eyes. I didn’t say it when we were together and lived to regret it. So now that she is finally awake, I am not going to miss my chance.
“I love you,” I say to her again this morning. “I want you to know that I always have.”
She smiles at me. She knows about the baby but doesn’t say anything else about it. We try to focus on today. I try to make her laugh. I read funny stories to her from my phone. I show her funny videos of cats and dogs. Finally, she cracks a smile. A few hours later, she manages a laugh.
* * *
My sister had wanted to see her for the last two days. Ever since she woke up. But I didn’t want her to. Things between them got so bad and so complicated, I didn’t want Sophia to be uncomfortable in any way. But after Sophia finally laughs, I decide to bring it up.
“O is here. She has been here this whole time. For the three days that you were in a coma and the last two days that you were awake.”
“Really?” Sophia looks surprised.
“Yes. And she wants to see you.”
Sophia shakes her head.
“Please?” I ask again. But Sophia again shakes her head.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” I say to O, who’s waiting outside.
“No, I have to see her.”
“You can’t.”
I’m adamant, firm in my position. “If Sophia doesn’t want to see you, then that’s it. You can’t.”
I think she believes me. I think that she accepts Sophia’s decision. But I should know better. As soon as I start to walk over to the vending machine to get a cup of some terrible hospital coffee, O marches right into Sophia’s room.
“Sophia, I’m so sorry.” I hear O say. “I’m so sorry about everything. I was such a bitch to you. I don’t know what came over me. But I shouldn’t have acted that way.”
I come back to the room to pull O out.
“You can’t be here,” I say. “She doesn’t want to see you.”
“I know. I’m leaving. I just wanted you to know that. Okay? I feel terrible about all this.”
I’m about to drag O out, but Sophia stops me.
“It’s okay,” she whispers and sits up in her bed. “Go on.”
O apologizes in a way I’ve never seen her apologize before. I’ve never heard her be so sincere and honest. She talks about how awful she felt after her boyfriend dumped her and she wound up pregnant. She talks about how lost she’d felt and how coming back home was the only place she felt safe. And she talks about how much she hated Sophia for being there.
“I’m sorry, okay.” O sits down on the bed next to Sophia. “I was awful. I just wanted to apologize for being so awful and ask you to forgive me.”
Sophia takes a moment.
“Okay,” she finally nods and smiles. “Okay.”
Chapter 36 - Sophia
When I start to recover…
I have been back “home” with Jax and O for three weeks. He says that this house is my home, and slowly but surely, I’ve started to believe him. Did I really have another home? The trailer where I grew up and lived with my mother for all of those years wasn’t really a home anymore. Not really. She was gone, traveling around Europe with her new boyfriend. And now that she was basically an entirely different person, the place that we had shared no longer felt like home.
I continued to get better and better every day. The car accident had some residual effects, of course. Goose bumps run up my arms whenever I hear the screeching of tires or the honk of a horn. But otherwise, I was starting to feel like my old self.
“At least you never lost your memory,” O keeps saying. She’s right. I remember almost everything leading up to the accident and everything after I came out of that coma. What I remember most about her was how shitty she treated me when she first came to live here. But, the funny thing about life is that, just when you think you have something figured out, it changes on you.
“From the way O and I are getting along now, you’d think it was she who fell into a coma.” I remember joking with Jax. To say that O is now nice to me is the understatement of the century. She’s kind, sweet, accommodating. She’s starting to show now, and every day that goes by, every day that the baby grows bigger inside of her, the nicer she seems to get.
“I thought the hormones were supposed to make her worse,” Jax says, lying in bed with me one morning.
>
“Maybe only in the first trimester.” I shrug.
It has been three weeks since I left the hospital, and it has been longer than that since we talked about our own baby. The only real casualty of that fateful car crash. I don’t know how to bring it up, and I get the feeling that Jax doesn’t want to bring it up. Though I love this new O, who has somehow become one of my closest friends, seeing her belly swell does make me sad. I’m excited for her, but I am also devastated for my own child.
Everything about the accident is unfair, but it is out of my control. What I can control is how I react to it. How I allow it to affect my life. At least, that’s what I read on some new age self-help site. And when I first read those words, I thought they were the answers that I was seeking. I felt better. Calmer. But now, I realize that everything that has happened to me over the last year has been pretty unfair. It was just the accident that was particularly unfair and bad. But what is there to do? Nothing. I have no control over this. None of this.
It is in this mercurial state that I check my email on my phone. The sun is shining brightly outside, and Jax keeps wanting me to go horseback riding with him, but I can’t muster the energy to get out of bed. Now that Jax got me a phone with better cell reception and actual coverage to allow me to go online, I have very little energy to do anything but lie around in bed.
There’s an email from Danielle. My heart drops and, at first, I don’t dare open it. What the hell does she want? I don’t know what my main issue is with my mom, but something about the thought of her makes my whole body tense up. On one hand, I’m happy for her. At least, I want to be. I’m happy that she found someone to spend time with, someone who can afford to take her to Europe. I’m glad that she’s living her life to the fullest. After everything that she has been through with losing my sister and getting diagnosed herself and nearly dying in the process, she really deserves to be happy. So why can’t I be happy for her? Perhaps, I’m a selfish, self-centered girl who wants her to be unhappy for the rest of her life. No, that can’t be it. It’s more than that. At least, it’s not all that.
I finally get the courage to press ‘open’ and scan the email. I don’t read any of the words carefully enough. I don’t linger. I simply move on from line to line. My mom rambles on and on how much she loves Switzerland and Barcelona and Madrid – apparently, they’re in Spain now. She asks about how I’m feeling and mentions that she’s glad that I have such a wonderful boyfriend to take care of me. Again, she apologizes for not coming to see me in the hospital and mentions that she totally would’ve if Jax had said that things were turning for the worse.
“I was in a fuckin’ coma, Mom! How much worse could things get?” I talk at my phone. I want to toss it across the room, but it’s not the phone’s problem that I don’t want to get this email. I take a break, breathe in and out, before continuing.
“Great news: I’m getting married!” I read the line over and over. It’s at the end of the email. I read all the words around it and read it again, but it still doesn’t make sense.
“We want to get married in LA when he comes here on business next month. It’s not going to be a big wedding, just our closest family and friends. I’ll write you more about it later when we get the details figured out. How exciting!”
Getting married? Is my mom kidding? How the hell is she getting married?
I get up and pace around the room. I can’t breathe. My chest hurts. I crack my knuckles and wince from the pain. I didn’t do it right. Fuck. How is this happening? She doesn’t even know this person that she’s marrying. They’ve only known each other a few months. That’s not enough time at all.
“Can you believe it?” I ask Jax as soon as he comes into the room. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about it. I show him the email. It takes him forever to read it and respond.
And when he finally does, he simply asks, “So what? Isn’t this great news?”
I don’t even know who this person is standing before me and pretending to be Jax.
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t get it.” He shrugs. “Your mom’s getting married. She sounds happy. What’s wrong with that?”
Chapter 37 - Sophia
When it all gets to be too much…
The way he phrases it puts me off guard. I take a step back. There really shouldn’t be anything wrong with it. This would be fine for someone else’s mother, but not mine. She’s not the type. She worked in a diner almost her whole life. She lived in a trailer park. She doesn’t have any prospects. She has fought cancer her whole life. First with her daughter and then with herself. My mom simply does not do this.
“My mom isn’t the type,” I finally say. “My mom isn’t the type of woman who meets a European stranger late in life and has this torrid affair with him. And then marries him.”
“I can see that you’re very upset about this,” Jax says. “But let me put it this way. Aren’t you a lot like her?”
“How so?”
“Well, you grew up in the same trailer park. You had basically the same life minus cancer. And yet you found me. I’m also not a very typical option for someone like you.”
Now I’m not sure if he’s insulting her or me.
“I didn’t really mean it like that,” Jax quickly corrects himself. “All I’m trying to say is that you never know what kind of things will happen in life. And you can’t just go around trying to live in some sort of box that you put yourself in. Your mom has lived her life in a box for a long time. Maybe this is her way to just try to get out of it.”
I nod. Perhaps.
“Besides, it’s not like you two have any money.”
“So? What does that mean?”
“I mean, it’s one thing if you had money or some sort of trust fund or something. Then you’d worry about this guy’s intentions with her. But you don’t. So that’s one thing you don’t really have to worry about.”
I think about that for a moment. Jax is right. My mom and I do not offer this stranger very much in terms of finances. It is probably his family that is worried about some poor American who he is going to marry. Perhaps, things between them are simpler than I think.
“There you go.” Jax smiles at me. “I can tell that I’m starting to make sense to you.”
I smile, too. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she is in love.”
He wraps his arm around my shoulder. “But what if she doesn’t know him enough? I mean, this hasn’t been that much time. She only met him a few months ago.”
“Even if it’s not, even if this is a big mistake. So what? Isn’t that what life is about? Giving it all, even if it is a mistake?”
So what, huh? I think to myself. Maybe I need to adopt that attitude as well. So what?
My phone beeps again. Another email. But Jax takes it away from me and presses his lips onto mine.
“What are you doing?” I mumble.
“Nothing,” he mumbles back through the kisses. “I want to kiss you.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” I say. He presses his body to mine and intertwines his fingers with mine. A rush of excitement courses through my body as he pulls me on top of him. We fall onto a soft feather bed. Jax starts kissing my shoulder and neck. I close my eyes and enjoy the moment.
His tongue is soft and kind and strong when it needs to be, and it has sent me to the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair.
Beep. Beep.
The sounds break my concentration. I’m not usually the one who’s obsessed with my phone. Even out of the two of us, Jax is the one who checks his a lot more. But something is pushing me to look at it. Why? Another email from my mother? Perhaps. It’s not like I have a job that sends me emails. Still, I have to answer it.
“Oh, where are you going?” Jax tries to grab me and pull me back into bed. He’s only successful in pulling off my button down shirt. “Leave it alone. It’s just a phone. Who cares who it is?”
“Let me just look at it for a second, and I’ll
be right back.” I smile. I want to be back in bed with him. I want to kiss him and touch him and take off all his clothes.
I pick up the phone and look at the screen. The new email takes a moment to load. As soon as it loads, I drop the phone. I pray that Jax thinks it’s an accident even though it wasn’t. I dropped it because of his name.
Ryan.
Ryan?
Ryan!
How the hell did he find me? No, no, no.
“Oh, shit.” I get down on my knees. I reach for the phone, but Jax is quicker than I am in my fragile state. My mind is racing, but my body is standing still. I can’t make one decision or perform one action. I’m lost and afraid. My frozen hands shake uncontrollably.
“Let me see this,” Jax jokes. “What is so important for you to get out of bed and look at? It better be from your mom.”
He’s smiling and joking, but I can barely crack a smile. My mouth runs completely dry and my lips are chapped.
“Okay, so Danielle says…” His voice trails off. I can’t see what he’s looking at, but I know it’s bad.
“Sophia, who is Ryan?” He turns to me. His voice isn’t accusatory or distant. More like curious.
“Um, Ryan…” I say. I don’t know where to begin or how to explain. This is my secret. My shame. One that I never planned on sharing with Jax. “No one. Not really,” I say.
He stares at me. Then hands me the phone. Reluctantly, I take it.
“Hi, sweetie. I’m coming back to town. Would love to catch up. Love always, Ryan.”
I read the email silently. I don’t know what to do with myself. His words aren’t frightening or scary on the outside, but they cut me to my very core.
Obligation Page 13