Jenny looked at the flames. “Not my girls.”
“No,” Jack replied softly. “They’re innocents in this, just like their mother.”
“Think so?”
He made her look at him again. “Of course. Remember what you saw at the falls. What you took away from that experience.”
“My girls were happy and knew they were loved. I wish I could say the same.”
“Jen.”
She shook her head. “Why was creating something for myself outside of being a wife and a mother such a crime? We were supposed to be so woke, but it was a pretense. It was fine in the abstract, but when it came down to brass tacks, it was not-in-my-backyard, or in this case, not my wife. Charlie cheated on me because I chose to expand my sphere.”
“You did nothing wrong, Jenny. You bettered yourself. As a woman and as a role model for your girls. It’s not your fault your late husband was threatened by your success and independence. That he wasn’t man enough to find pride in your growth.”
She took Jack’s hand at that. “Thank you. I appreciate it, really. I need time to process, so I can shake the black cloud following me around.” Jenny craned her neck for the grandfather clock in the foyer. “What time is it?”
Jack looked at his watch. “Almost ten. Why?”
“Tess is coming over,” she said, getting up from the couch. “I promised I’d show her how to make my Nonna’s Christmas cookies.”
“Nonna?”
“My mother was Italian. Nonna means grandmother. The cookies are a family tradition. They call for sugar, eggs, flour, vanilla, a little lemon juice, and ricotta cheese.”
Jenny rolled her eyes at the look on Jackson’s face. “Yes, I said cheese. They’re really good, and if you’re good, I’ll let you have some.”
“I’m not saying they’re not good, but after the pumpkin pie kitchen fiasco, maybe I’d better stick around. After all, I’m better in the kitchen than you.”
His smile lightened her immediately. “Well, you might be good in the kitchen, but I’m good in another very important room.”
“Oh, really?” He pulled her into his arms. “I’m pretty good in that very important room as well. I’d even go as far as to say expert.”
Jenny wound her arms around his neck, loving the tickle of his breath as his lips hovered close. “You’ll have to show me some of your moves, sir expert.”
“Well, my name isn’t Wilde for nothing, you know.”
A loud screech followed by a scream had the two of them bolting for the front porch. A tan sedan screamed down the pavement, and in the middle of the road was a prone and bloodied woman.
With purple hair.
“Oh my GOD! It’s Tess!”
The two of them rushed for the street, pushing past the gathering crowd of rubberneckers. Tess’s body was bent, and a pool of blood formed under her head.
“Is she…is…she…” Jenny’s voice cracked.
“Jenny! Snap out of it! Call 911!”
Daisy had rushed from the salon, fear all over her face. “I saw it happen. Oh God!”
Jack dropped to Tess’s side to feel for a pulse.
Hands shaking, Jenny dialed for first responders.
“911. What is your emergency?”
“There’s been a hit and run. We need an ambulance and the police immediately.”
“Are there injured parties, ma’am?”
“One. Bad.”
Jack’s head jerked around. “I found a pulse!”
“Ma’am, what is your location?”
“Main Street, Whisper Falls. In front of the Willow Inn.”
“Dispatching EMTs and the state police.”
Jenny hung up as sirens blared in the distance, getting louder and closer.
“Jenny.”
Looking down, she cried out, rushing to Tess’s side. Her friend’s eyes were open, but her voice was weak and pained. “Call Sam.”
Tears dripped from the end of her nose, and all she could do was nod. Tess lost consciousness again, and Jen lost it as the crowd craned for a better look.
“Get lost, you GHOULS! This isn’t a freak show!”
The state police arrived at that moment, dispersing the crowd to make room for the ambulance at the scene.
“Anyone see what happened?” one officer asked.
Daisy nodded, wiping her eyes. “It was a tan sedan. A Honda Civic. With New Jersey plates.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes. I looked out the salon window, waving to Tess as she crossed the street. The car came careening down Main Street like the devil was on its tail. Poor Tess. Bastard didn’t even stop when he hit her. She flew ten feet in the air, crashing down so hard.”
“Which way did the sedan head after they hit your friend?”
Daisy pointed straight ahead. “Toward the highway.”
The telltale whoop of the ambulance made the cops move anyone lingering, including the townies. Jenny stood with Jack, listening to the EMTs as they talked to the police and assessed Tess’s injuries.
“Did she regain consciousness at all?” an EMT asked.
“Yes, very briefly,” Jenny answered.
“What’s her name?”
“Tess,” Jack replied. “Tess Everett.”
“Which hospital are you taking her to?” Jenny asked, as they slid Tess onto a backboard.
“Are you family?”
Jack replied first. “No, but we’re in contact with them.”
“Silverton Memorial.” The EMTs didn’t waste anymore time. Sirens blared as the ambulance rushed down Main Street and the twenty-minute drive to the hospital.
Jenny glared at the lingering gawkers and then turned for the inn.
“Where are you going?”
“Call Sam. I’ll get my car keys so we can meet him at the hospital.”
“Jenny.”
“…and someone needs to call Tess’s family. Have Daisy do it.”
“Jen, Tess has no family.”
She stopped, gripping the inn’s gate. “Yes, she does. She has us. So we’re going to meet the ambulance at the hospital.”
Jack rushed across to the gate as well. “They’re not going to tell us anything, love.”
Jenny’s jaw tightened and she lifted her chin. “They will if we tell them Sam is her fiancé.”
“We can’t do that.”
She glared at him now. “No? Do you want Tess to be alone through this? She needs to know there are people there praying for her, and if you don’t want to go with me, I’ll go alone.”
Jack gathered her to her arms. She struggled, hitting his arms and chest until she let it all out in his embrace. The onslaught had hit.
Chapter Thirteen
Jenny frowned into the cold, bitter coffee in her cup. “When are they going to tell us anything?”
“They wouldn’t be telling us a thing if you hadn’t been quick enough to tell them Tess and I were engaged.” Sam raked a hand through his hair. “Truth is, it is the truth. Yesterday, I asked Tess to marry me when we got to the Mistletoe Arbor.”
“Oh, Sam.” Jenny squeezed his hand. “This is a level-two trauma center. She couldn’t be in better care.”
The three of them looked up as a doctor came in to the waiting room carrying a clipboard. “Mr. Gibson?”
Sam stood. “I’m Sam Gibson.” Both Jenny and Jack stood with him.
“Mr. Gibson, I’m Doctor Wells.”
“Is Tess going to be okay?”
The doctor’s face was unreadable. “Your fiancée suffered a broken femur, as well as a broken pelvis, but more seriously, her CT scan showed she has an epidural hematoma. In layman’s terms, she has a brain bleed from trauma to her skull.”
Jenny’s knees went weak and she sank into the hard plastic chair.
“What does that mean? Is it like a concussion?”
“No. It means there’s bleeding between the tough outer membrane covering the brain and the skull. She’s going to need surgery t
o remove the hematoma and relieve pressure on the brain.”
Sam’s face blanched. “You want to do surgery on her brain?”
“Mr. Gibson, I know this is scary, and the accident has already been a shock, but Ms. Everett came in unconscious, and time was of the essence. We’ve taken her up for surgery. She’s in good hands.”
“How long is the surgery?”
The doctor didn’t blink. “About five hours. You need to understand, this procedure is particularly invasive, and comes with tremendous risk. We will update you with her prognosis after surgery. It’s too early to tell.”
Listening to the doctor’s words, Jenny sat numb again. In the past twenty-four hours she’d lost her old best friend, and was in serious jeopardy of losing her new best friend. As bad as that felt, it was nowhere near what Sam was going through. Feelings she understood all too well.
Everything came back in a flash. The blur of EMTs. Being unable to move or speak. Screaming inside for her kids. The sirens and the blur of flashing lights and EMTs. The antiseptic smell of the emergency room, and then nothingness.
Her chest squeezed, and she knew she had to get out before she had a full-blown panic attack. Sam didn’t need to see her flashback fallout, so she swallowed back on everything and dug her keys out of her purse.
“Where are you going?” Jack asked, getting to his feet. Jenny knew he saw the anxiety in her face.
“We’re going to need food. We’re here for the duration, and if the hospital coffee is any indication of the food in the cafeteria, the answer is a hard no.”
Jenny didn’t wait for Jack’s reply or the elevator, she rushed down the stairwell and out into the parking lot. The cold air hit her, and she gulped in a ragged breath. Snow flurries coated her car’s windshield with a thin layer of unbroken white. Seeing that was her breaking point, and she burst into tears.
“Jen!”
Wiping her face, she clicked the car’s key fob and unlocked the door. She was sliding into the driver’s seat when Jack caught up to her like lightning.
“What are you doing? You can’t drive like this.”
“Oh yeah? Watch me.”
“Jenny! For God’s sake! We’ve already had one tragedy today. I don’t need you racing off because you hate the universe right now.”
“What’s the point of loving, Jack? Of friendship? Of feeling? Of anything? Maybe Amelia has it right. Just think about yourself and screw everyone else if it doesn’t fit your agenda.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Some asshole mows down Tess in the middle of the street. My husband can’t deal with his own failings, so he pulls a dick move and kills his family. Why? And just when I start to believe life ain’t so bad, the fates throw in a monkey wrench. Jenny Mitchell is happy! Let’s fuck with her for shits and giggles!” She threw her hands up.
“This isn’t just about Tess, is it?”
Jenny exhaled. “It’s my black cloud. If I hadn’t moved to Whisper Falls, Tess wouldn’t have befriended me. I wouldn’t have, in turn, invited Amelia, who then spent her visit looking down her nose at everyone, and I wouldn’t have invited Tess to make cookies to try and make up for it.”
“Do you really think the universe singles you out like that?”
She toyed with the key fob in her hand. “No, but it feels that way sometimes.” Jack had snowflakes in his hair, sort of like the glitter at the Holly Maze, and for some stupid reason it made her feel better.
“What’s really going on?”
“You mean besides my PTSD in the waiting room?”
“Jen.”
She chewed on her lip. “It’s all of the above, Jack. Plus, my weird dreams are back. Last night was the worst one yet.”
“I thought they went away after I showed you the hidden falls.”
“Me, too.” She exhaled again. “I think I need someone to help me make sense of them.”
“I’m here. I’ll help.”
“My dreams are connected to everything, Jack. I don’t know how or why, but I feel it in my bones. Maybe there’s something the universe is trying to show me or tell me, and I’m too dense to figure it out. I think I need to see your friend Talan.”
“Are you saying you want Talan to interpret your dreams, or that you want to do a spiritual vision quest through a sweat?”
“Yes.”
He laughed quietly. “You’re timing is terrible. The Winter Solstice is a big deal for Talan’s tribe, and since that’s tomorrow, he might not want to hold a sweat during their celebrations.”
“Why don’t we let him decide when he meets me? In the meantime, you can give him my particulars.”
“What about Tess?”
“She comes first.”
“Jenny, a sweat isn’t something to be entered into lightly. It’s pretty extreme, both physically and mentally.”
“I need to do this, or Christmas will just be another day, and New Year’s won’t be the rebirth I’d hoped for. Will you help me?”
Jack nodded. “I’ll call Talan as soon as we know more about Tess, but right now Sam needs us. We’ve left him alone in that waiting room long enough, so that means we’re eating hospital food, crappy or not.”
“That was an excuse not to fall apart in front of Sam.” She shrugged. “I told you I was damaged.”
He slid his arm around her shoulders. “You’re not damaged. Just a little bent.”
“In all the wrong places.” She slipped her arm around his waist, scootching in closer.
“Just promise no more bolting like that, okay?”
Inhaling, she puffed out a cold, wet breath. “I’ll try my best.”
***
The three of them paced intermittently as they waited. Sam Googled everything he could about Tess’s condition, so much so, Jack had to take his phone away to stop him from making himself nuts.
“Can I get you anything?” Jenny asked.
Sam sat on the couch with a slump. “Yeah, news on Tess.”
“I meant food or something.”
“I’ve already eaten every kind of junk food in the vending machine.”
“There’s the cafeteria,” she tried again.
“I’m building the new wing, remember? I know firsthand that food is terrible.” Sam crumpled a candy wrapper and shot it at Jack. “Why’d you stop Jenny from going out for eats? I’ve had so much sugar I’ll be lucky if they don’t admit me for diabetic shock.” He exhaled, running a hand over his face. “If I’m lucky they’ll give me the bed next to Tess.”
The second hand on the waiting room clock sped by, but the minutes crawled and the hours practically stagnated.
“What’s taking so long?” Sam got up to resume walking a hole into the floor. “The doctor said five hours, but it’s rounding on seven!”
“Sam, there’s a lot of prep that goes on beforehand,” Jen replied. “Surgeons don’t update the family the minute they tie off the last stitch. There are surgical notes to be recorded and filed. Post-operative instruction to be given to the nursing staff. A patient’s family is at the bottom of their to-do list.”
“Yeah, well.” He slumped into one of the sad couch cushions again.
Jack threw a cheese puff at him.
“Hey!”
“You threw a candy wrapper at me.”
“The candy wrapper wasn’t coated in orange chemical cheese.”
“Will you two cut it out?” Jenny crossed her arms. “Find something positive and concentrate on that.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Wow, Jen. What great advice.” She threw a soggy paper straw at him, but he ducked. “Physician, heal thyself first.”
“Shut up, Jack.”
Sam cracked a smile at that. “Well, at least the couches in this waiting room are better than those hard plastic jobs in the E.R.”
“See?”
Before Jack could reply, the waiting doors opened, and Doctor Wells walked in looking for Sam.
“Doc—” Sam shot to his feet. “How
is Tess? How did it go?” The doctor waved Sam back to his seat, but Sam didn’t budge. “I don’t need to sit, Doc. Just give it to me straight.”
“The surgery went as expected. We were able to remove the hematoma and relieve the pressure on Tess’s brain. She’s in recovery, and she’s still unconscious. She could remain so for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. We’ll know more at that point, or if she regains consciousness before then.”
“Can I see her?”
The doctor shook his head. “The best thing you can do is go home and get some rest. She’s going to be in the ICU until we know more. We’ll call you if anything changes.”
The doctor left, and Sam sat on the lumpy couch. “I don’t know what to do.” He scrubbed his face with his hand. “I don’t want to go home, and I don’t want to go back to Tess’s place.”
“Of course not.” Jenny spared a glance for Jack. “You shouldn’t be alone tonight. You should come home with me and Jack. It’ll only take a minute to change the sheets in the soon-to-be-renamed Amelia suite, and give the bath a quick wipe down.”
“You should name it after Tess.”
Jenny smiled. “Now that sounds like a plan.”
“Let’s get out of here.” Jack clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “The doc’s got your cell phone number. We can stop at your place so you can grab what you need to stay over, and then Doordash dinner from the Brasserie.”
“You guys don’t mind?”
Jenny hugged him. “Family doesn’t have to be blood, Sam. You, Tess and Jack are my family now. In fact, once we know Tess is going to be okay, the two of you can move into the inn until further notice. That way we can take shifts helping her recover. Trust me. I know the drill after a catastrophic accident.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jenny hung up the phone. “Jack!” she called up the stairs.
“I’m on a ladder in bedroom four!”
She rushed upstairs and into the work in progress, a little out of breath. “That was Sam. He called from the car. They finally let him see Tess. The nurses told him her vitals are holding steady.”
“That’s great! I’m not used to being on pins and needles for two days solid. Did he say if she regained consciousness?” He climbed down the ladder to give her a hug.
A Little Mistletoe and Magic: Ho Ho Howls Romance Holiday Edition Page 11