by Kim Mckade
He was awake. The door squeaked, and he turned his head to look at her.
She smiled weakly. “Hi,” she whispered.
He croaked in response. “Hi.”
She moved to the bed and looked down at him. His head was bandaged. She avoided looking at the lower half of his body.
“How are you?” she asked inanely, wishing the words back as soon as they came out.
“They cut off my leg,” he said dully.
“I know,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well. No point being sorry Got what I deserved, I guess.”
“You didn’t deserve this,” she said firmly.
He frowned and looked at the wall. “What do you want?”
“I want...” Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what exactly she was going to say. She could feel it; a bond had been forged between them. An unlikely bond, to be sure. And not one that she would have asked for. But life had put her here, in this place, and she was finally wise enough not to fight it.
“I want you to know that it doesn’t matter It’s only your leg.”
He kept his face averted, and she saw his jaw muscles clench.
“I know that it sounds stupid, Carl. And I’m not going to pretend this is a minor thing that you should immediately get over. It’s a terrible thing that’s happened, and it’s going to take you a long time to adjust. But you can adjust. I want you to know that what you have lost is a leg. Not your life. Not your identity. It’s your leg. You are the one who can make it more than that. Only you.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” He turned to her, his face flushed hotly, his breath harsh.
She smiled down at him, feeling for the first time a kind of tenderness toward him. “I know a little—more than you think I do. Because I’ve lost everything I based my life on. Everything I’d worked toward and dreamed about.”
He glared at her, derision in his eyes. For some reason, it made her smile. “You know, this could be the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“You have a serious head injury, don’t you?” He tried to roll over, but couldn’t because of his leg.
She had to admit, she felt a little dreamy, but not because of a head injury. No, for the first time in her life, she’d given herself permission to follow her heart.
“Yes, I took a bump on the head, and for the most part, that’s your fault. I’m partly to blame, of course. Getting into that pickup with you wasn’t my brightest hour. But mostly, it’s your fault. It’s your fault you were drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk, I was just blowing off steam. If Huckaby hadn’t made such a big deal out of a little joke—”
“Uh-uh,” Corinne said, shaking her head. “Don’t blame this on Jeremy, or on the fight you two had. This wasn’t the first time you got drunk. Don’t try to pawn the blame for this off on someone else. It’s your fault we ran off the road and hit that tree. And as hard as it’s going to be to face, it’s your fault you lost your leg.”
Carl turned his head and ignored her.
“You’ve blamed me and Sheriff Haskell and everyone else you could think of for everything that’s gone wrong in your life. And right now is a good time for it to stop.”
“Thanks for the sympathy,” Carl said sarcastically. “You can leave now. Be sure and sign the guest register on your way out.”
“Believe it or not, I do feel sympathy for you. You’ve got a hard battle ahead of you. I feel enough sympathy, in fact, to come in here and say what I really believe needs to be said, though I know you’ll hate me for it.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“You have a choice to make, Carl, right now. You can let this be the end for you. You can turn bitter, and hate yourself and everyone around you You can feel sorry for yourself from now on. You can let this little drinking problem of yours turn into a big one. Or—” She turned her palms up. “Or you can decide to turn this tragedy into something good. Let it open your eyes. Start taking responsibility for yourself. For your own happiness.”
She reached out and cupped Carl’s shoulder. Amazingly, he let her hand stay there. “Do you want to be happy, Carl?”
Carl looked at her and rolled his eyes. “What kind of idiot question is that?”
“Not as idiotic as it sounds. Happiness is a choice, Carl.”
“And I’m supposed to choose to be happy about this?” He gestured angrily to the lower part of his body.
“Of course not. But you can choose to let it ruin your life. Or you can choose to find what else is inside Carl Buchanan besides football.”
Instead of growing angrier as she’d expected, Carl faced the wall again. She saw the muscles of his throat convulse. “Yeah, well, there’s nothing,” he said huskily. “Nothing else. So you can save the pep talk.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t tell me to look on the bright side!” he said hotly, trying futilely to pull himself up. “Don’t you get it? I screwed up! I screwed it all up. I was supposed to play football. I was supposed to be a star! And I screwed it up Now...I don’t have anything. Now I’m nothing.” He collapsed against his pillow.
“That’s not true. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
Carl whipped his head around. “That’s what Mom and Dad tried to tell me. But we all know my life is over.”
Corinne leaned forward and made him look at her. “Listen to me. That isn’t true, Carl. You’re more than that—more than football.”
Corinne pulled back, frustrated, searching for some way to make him understand. “Look. I could tell you the sky was green every day for twenty years, and the sky would still be blue. Just like you being told all your life that a football player is all you are—all you’re good for—doesn’t make it true. It’s still a lie, no matter how many times you’ve heard it.”
Carl pulled away, breathing hard. He swiped at his cheek, and Corinne realized he was crying. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?” he asked her. “What do I do now?”
Corinne smiled and wiped away her own tears. “Now, you decide what you want. What you want from yourself. Not what your family wants, or what you want from everyone else.”
She looked at Carl, and hoped what she said made some kind of impression on him. But in her mind, she also talked to Toby, and her mother. And as she talked, Corinne felt at last a sense of the reality of her relationship with her mother. Not just her own perspective of that relationship, not just the way she’d always perceived the problems between them, but the whole picture.
It’s not my fault, Mom, she thought. It’s not my fault now, and it wasn’t my fault then.
She spoke to Carl, but in her mind, she spoke to her mother. And she spoke to herself.
“Now you take a good, honest look at yourself, and decide what you have to give. And you focus on that, instead of every wrong you think has been done to you. Instead of dwelling on everything that could have been, or should have been. You focus on what is, and make the most of that. There’s a lot in there, Carl. I know there is. You just have to be willing to look for it, and accept it.”
Corinne felt something small but significant inside her loosening, accepting the message she tried to convey to Carl. She felt a sense of letting go, and that letting go felt a little intimidating. But it also felt right.
I’m sorry, Mom. But I’m going to live my life now.
Carl cleared his throat and wiped under his eye again. “No matter what I do, it won’t be enough. He told me last night it would all be okay—that we’d deal with the future. But... He’s never going to forgive me for this.”
Corinne didn’t have to ask; she knew Carl was referring to his father. She squeezed his shoulder again. “I have a feeling that won’t be as big a problem as you might think.”
“You don’t know my dad ”
“Sure I do. And I happen to think people can change, if they really want to.” She leaned forward and met his gaze again. “
If they want to, Carl. That means you, too. I meant what I said. You have to start taking responsibility for yourself. You can’t go through your life blaming everyone else for your mistakes.”
“You’re right. I’ve got nobody to blame for this but me,” he said. He looked down at his lower body and shook his head.
Corinne surprised them both by leaning down and giving him a hug. “Give your dad a chance to accept this, Carl. And give yourself a chance.”
A nurse came in just then, and Corinne told Carl she needed to leave. “I’ll be back. Think about what I said, okay?”
She walked out the door, and saw Toby. He leaned against the wall outside Carl’s room, his hat in his hand.
He looked at her solemnly. “Do you think he’ll listen?” he asked quietly.
Corinne shrugged. “I hope so. Time will tell. I just hope it doesn’t take him ten years.” She bit her bottom lip, suddenly nervous.
He looked horrible—beaten and tired and heartsick. She’d done that to him. She closed her eyes for a second. “Listen, Toby. There are some things I really need to talk to you about—”
“No.” He pulled away from the wall.
“But I need to tell you—”
“I said no. I came to talk to Carl.”
The nurse emerged from Carl’s room and looked at Toby. “He’s very tired. He asked if you could come back later. He told me to tell you he wasn’t going anywhere.”
Toby nodded and pulled his hat on. “Yeah, I’ll be back.” With that, he turned and walked away.
“Toby, wait.” Corinne hurried to keep up with him. He ignored her, his long strides carrying him down the hall and out a side door.
With a muttered oath, Corinne followed him. The cold winter air cut through the sweats Becca had brought for her to wear home, and Corinne gasped with the shock.
“Would you—oh!—would you wait just a minute? I need to talk to you.”
“I told you, I’ve heard plenty of your excuses.” He moved quickly down the sidewalk and into the parking lot. Corinne hugged her arms against the cold and followed him. “I don’t need to hear another one of your reasons for putting me off.” He reached his Jeep and unlocked the door.
“I’m not going to give you an excuse, and—” she grabbed the door before he could shut it in her face “—and you’re going to listen!”
Toby glared at her, then shook his head. “You’re going to freeze to death.” He pulled off his jacket, and despite his anger, there was a tenderness in his touch as he took her hand and started pulling his jacket on her. “You need to get inside.”
“Not until you hear me out.”
“Hear you say what, Corinne? That I spent ten years of my life trying to please my dad? That I should have followed you back then? That I should have gone after what I wanted and if I had, we would be together now?”
She wrinkled her brow and shook her head. “No, that’s not what I was going to say—”
“I heard it, Corinne, loud and clear, when you were talking to Carl. I got the message.”
“I wasn’t trying to say—”
“Aw, hell. Are you going to stand out here and freeze? Get in.” He reached over and unlocked the passenger door.
Feeling as though she’d missed an important step somewhere along the way, Corinne walked around the Jeep and opened the door. She turned to see Toby had followed her. He gingerly guided her in and shut the door behind her.
“You think I was talking about you in there?” Corinne asked when he got in on the driver’s side.
“It fits, doesn’t it? And you’re right, in a way. The only reason I got into law enforcement was to make my dad happy. It was what he wanted, and I wanted to please him. But you know what?” He lifted his chin defensively. “I like what I do. In fact, I love it It suits me, right down to the ground. Maybe I can’t solve every problem in the county single-handedly. Maybe I couldn’t do anything to stop Mr. Davis from getting sicker. And it will probably always bother me that I can’t. But, Corinne, I like trying”
“I know,” she said quietly. She leaned her head back against the seat. “And you were ready to give it up for me.”
“Yeah, well...” He made a tossing-off gesture with his hand. “Some people never learn.”
Corinne bit her lip and looked down at her hands. “And some people finally do.”
When she raised her gaze, she saw Toby looking at her with that same dead look that had come into his eyes when she told him she wasn’t ready to marry him. She wanted to move across the seat and into his arms. She wanted to tell him, finally, a decade late, how she loved him.
But she hesitated, because at the very least he deserved an explantation. And because she was no longer sure of how she would be received.
She twisted her hands together and squeezed. Just say it, she told herself. “I was an accident,” she blurted.
Toby’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“My...my birth, my conception—whatever—was unplanned, to put it kindly. In fact, if everything I learned in my eavesdropping was correct, I was conceived on the first or second date, between two people who had no real affection for each other, and grew to hate each other. I’m sorry I never told you that.”
“Corinne, do you honestly think that matters to me?”
“It matters to me. It’s always mattered to me, because I’ve always felt that if I hadn’t been born, my mother’s life would have been drastically different. Better. I thought that because she made it plain that was what she believed. ‘Single mothers don’t have the money for this and that.’ I heard that one too many times to count. Or, ‘I had to grow up too fast...I missed my youth. When I should have been out partying and having fun, I was home changing diapers and heating formula.’ I heard that one a lot, too. And the topper—‘None of the good men want a ready-made family.’ Which told me pretty effectively that it wasn’t only her past I’d ruined, but her future, too.”
Corinne clenched her jaw. She didn’t want Toby to think she was feeling sorry for herself; she just wanted him to understand. “And so I tried to make it up to her. If I could just do something, anything, to make it up to her, to show her that it was all worth it—everything she’d sacrificed and missed out on—she would forgive me. She’d see, in the long run, that I wasn’t a mistake after all. If I could make enough money, have enough prestige, do enough good in the world...” She shrugged. “But I couldn’t make her happy. Nothing I ever did was enough. And I allowed those feelings to spill over into my relationship with you.”
Toby looked at the dashboard and rubbed the back of his neck. “Would having your own talk show make her happy?”
Corinne shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He just stared at the dashboard in silence. Was she too late? Had she killed his love for her, once and for all? She choked back her panic at his carefully blank look.
“When I left Aloma ten years ago, I didn’t say goodbye, and I didn’t look back, because I couldn’t, Toby I hope you can understand now why.”
Toby nodded slightly. “Yeah, I suppose I can.”
“Toby, I wasn’t thinking about you when I was talking to Carl. I was thinking about Mom. And about me. And about finally letting go of my need to please her. About learning how to please myself.
“I still need to prove that I wasn’t a mistake, Toby. I still need to know that I can make a difference in the world. Not for her. For me.”
“Sweetheart, you can’t think you were—”
“Please, Toby, let me finish. This has been a long time coming. The other night, when I was alone with Carl out there in the middle of nowhere...” The words poured out, and she wasn’t even sure what she was trying to say, just that she needed for him to know. “I was so afraid, Toby. I was so afraid. And I was about to panic. But I heard your voice, telling me you’d take care of me. Telling me you were there for me. And it helped me, Toby. It really did, knowing that, even though I was alone, I had someone out there who really cared about me, who b
elieved in me—”
She choked off abruptly, and attempted to swallow the lump that had built quickly in her throat. She had to get this out. “What you do, Toby—being sheriff—it’s a part of who you are. A big part. I finally realized, just today, that what I’ve been looking for, you already have. Here, in tiny little Aloma, you’ve made a difference. Don’t look at me like that,” she said with a small laugh and a sniff. “You have. And I really think I have, too. I think we might have helped Jeremy with a very difficult time. And maybe, just maybe, what I told Carl will make him think. The point is, Toby, from this little corner of the world, you’re affecting people. This is where you belong, Toby. I wouldn’t take that from you, not for anything. Just as I don’t want to leave it.”
Toby was silent, but she saw his throat working as he swallowed hard.
“I turned the Atlanta job down.”
He remained perfectly still. “You said it was your dream come true.”
“It was. But the person who wanted that is gone. My dream has changed.”
“And what is your dream now, Corinne?” Toby looked at her intensely.
“Ask me again, Toby,” she whispered. “Please.”
His gaze still glued to hers, he shook his head and spoke just as quietly as she. “Not this time. This time, you go first.”
She didn’t expect to cry, didn’t know she was going to until the tears ran and her throat closed. She barely managed to get the words out. “I love you, Toby. I always have.”
Still, he just stared at her, frozen.
“Say something, please.”
Toby shook his head slightly, as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. It’s just...I’ve waited so long to hear that. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”
Corinne, gave a short laugh and sniffed back her tears. “You’re not dreaming, but...” She took a shaking breath. “Would you propose again?”
Toby rested his arm on the back of the seat and looked at her solemnly. He wasn’t going to do it, she thought. She’d blown her last chance.
He swallowed, his gaze locked on hers. Finally, he said softly, “Will you marry me?”