All the air in my lungs felt like it evaporated. I couldn’t speak. For the first time since we’d returned from West Virginia, I couldn’t ignore the pain on Miranda’s face. I couldn’t form the lie that I’d told countless times since the accident. I sat mute while Miranda stared at me, waiting.
“Good morning,” a woman said as she poked her head in the door. “Everything okay in here?”
“Ah, yes.” I smiled weakly. “The driver of the ambulance out front is a friend of mine and just visiting.” I pointed at Miranda, who did her best to smile. “Come on in and look around. If you have any questions, just let me know.” I looked back at Miranda when the customer disappeared among the rows of shelves. “We’ll talk about this later, I promise.”
Miranda made another attempt at a smile. “I’ll come by tomorrow after my shift. I’ll bring breakfast.”
*******
I couldn’t sleep that night. When I closed my eyes, I could see the misery on Miranda’s face, and the guilt that followed consumed me. I knew she was struggling. I sensed it whenever we were together. She’d tried many times to talk about that day, but I’d always changed the subject, never considering that she needed to purge her soul.
We weren’t the affectionate type of friends who hugged often or draped an arm around a shoulder unless one of us was really hurting. Marty told me that before I had awakened in the hospital that Miranda had nearly crawled up in the bed and held me as she cried her eyes out. The only affection I’d seen from her since was a fist bump after I came to and got my wits back. For that, I was grateful.
Had the contact been any longer than that fleeting touch of fists, I would’ve seen and felt what she had witnessed that day. I’d caught glimpses from the others when they hugged me or touched me. Through their eyes, for the briefest moments, I saw my lifeless body lying on the ice staring back at me.
Chapter 2
I didn’t open the shop at the usual time. Instead I put the plastic clock on the door indicating that I would open at noon. Miranda would see this and know to come around back to the house. I knew the conversation we were due to have would be emotional, and for me, showing emotion was a rarity. I had learned at a very young age to hide my feelings. As a grown woman, I was a master. I’d spent most of my life behind a mask of stoicism. There was only one person who had seen beyond it, and I watched as she walked up on my porch and let herself in as she always did.
“I have doughnuts and chocolate milk. We’ll work it off tonight, no worries.” Miranda walked past me where I was sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee and went into the kitchen. She returned a moment later with two glasses and a roll of paper towels.
“How was your shift?” I asked as I watched her pour the milk.
“Mercifully quiet.” Miranda wiped her hands on her pants. “We had a total of three calls and all before ten last night. I’m rested and ready to go to the gym tonight and work off the fluff this breakfast is sure to cause.” She dipped her hand into her shirt pocket and pulled out a handful of pictures. “I meant to give these to you yesterday.”
I took the prints and thumbed through them until I came to one of Miranda and me sitting side by side at a table. Miranda’s hair bright red and spiky stood out in contrast to my shoulder-length brown, her eyes bright and blue and mine dark. Her skin tone pale and mine olive. It was apparent we weren’t blood related, but we were sisters nevertheless.
“I’m gonna frame this one.” I took it out of the group and laid it on the coffee table.
She smiled. “I framed mine, too.”
I set my coffee aside and picked up my glass of milk. As I downed half of it, I was reminded of when we were kids. We shared a chocolate milk the first day we met. We were twelve, and my aunt had just moved us into the neighborhood. Aunt Judith was not particularly pleased with her new digs. Her two-bedroom condo wasn’t large enough for her and two kids she never expected to have. The house was bigger and afforded us another bedroom, but it wasn’t in an area she would’ve chosen if she had a choice. “I always thought I’d move up, not down,” she would complain.
She and my mom weren’t close, but after my mother’s death, she was the only option. Our father had long since gone, and no one knew where to find him. Judith was not comfortable with the role of mother and often spent her evenings in her bedroom with the door closed after dinner. Five years my senior, Colin, my brother, didn’t have to stay long. On his eighteenth birthday, he went into the military, leaving me alone with an aunt who was biding her time until she could kick me out of the nest and get on with her life.
Cecilia Donahue, Miranda’s mother, adopted me as her own, though not legally. I spent more time in the Donahue home than I did with Judith, especially after Colin left. Momma Donahue, as I called her then, simply became Mom over the years. She and Miranda were there for me through every achievement and disappointment, and had it not been for their love and acceptance, I was fairly certain I would’ve never made it to adulthood.
“Talk to me,” Miranda said without preamble.
I felt my mouth go dry. It took me a while to say, “It has affected me.”
“Bad dreams, or do you contemplate your mortality more?”
“Neither.” I tried to muster a smile, but the muscles in my face wouldn’t comply. I had always trusted Miranda with my innermost secrets, but this…made me question my own sanity. Miranda would respect my wish to keep it between us, I knew that. She’d give advice without judgment, but…
“Just tell me.”
I looked into her clear blue eyes and chewed my bottom lip. “The effect the incident had on me,” I began, sounding clinical to my own ears, “left me with an odd byproduct.”
Doughnuts and chocolate milk momentarily forgotten, Miranda sat literally on the edge of her seat waiting.
“I’ve done some research. It’s not really all that uncommon for people who have had near-death experiences. People come back with all sorts of oddities, then some have nothing at all. I think—”
“Quit with the foreplay and let me have it,” Miranda said impatiently.
I held up my hand and looked at it. “If I touch you, I can see…things.”
Miranda’s pale brows rose. “What things?”
“After we came home from West Virginia…I met a woman online.” Miranda rolled her eyes at this. I met most of the women I dated on the Net. “We met at a restaurant in Tallahassee, and everything was going great until I touched her hand while talking. And then I was in her car, felt the wheel beneath my hands and her frustration with the traffic that was making her run late.” I laughed. It sounded so strange in the retelling. I had trouble believing it myself. “It was like I was in her body as she walked into her house and changed for our date. Jeans or skirt, blue or gray? And then I heard a voice, and it felt familiar. Her husband was in the kitchen, and when she kissed him, I felt the brush of stubble against my lips. The lie was so easily delivered, ‘I’m going out with the girls, remember? Don’t wait up.’” I looked at Miranda, who sat quietly, stunned. “I’ll never forget what her face looked like when I stood, tossed a few bills on the table, and walked out of the restaurant without another word.”
Miranda cleared her throat. “Was this an isolated incident or have there been others?”
I nodded. “Deb, she hugged me when I got out of the hospital. I felt the ice against her stomach, felt the coldness of her hands while she held on to your boots. The shock, the confusion. It was so strong I had to pull away from her. I think maybe she thought I blamed her.”
Miranda exhaled loudly and leaned back in her chair. “This has been going on for two months, and you haven’t said a word.”
“I thought I was going crazy. I needed time to cope with it on my own before I could tell you about it.”
“I knew you were keeping something from me. I felt like there was a wall between us.” Miranda nodded as though everything was beginning to make sense. “The others have noticed it, too. You’ve never been really
affectionate, but lately, you’ve shied away from the group. Marty says she noticed how you deftly avoid being hugged. We all figured that maybe you were riding the razor’s edge of emotion, and affection would cause it to spill over.”
“Y’all have spent a lot of time talking about me.”
“Because we care,” Miranda said pointedly. “Don’t mistake that for going behind your back. We’ve just been trying to figure you out. You would do the same, you know it.”
I nodded. “I don’t want them to know, not even Marty.”
Miranda stared at me, her eyes narrowed from time to time. A few minutes passed before she spoke. “Do you think that’s fair? They don’t know what you say you can do. If you touch them, you’ll be invading their privacy. Your closest friends should at least have the option of whether they want their secrets exposed to you or not.”
It was my turn to stare. I dissected every sentence carefully in my mind, reading into what she said and the underlying meaning. “You don’t believe me. You think I’m using this as an excuse to avoid everyone while I deal with the supposed ‘razor’s edge of emotion.’”
Miranda shot me that narrow-eyed look she used when her defenses were up, then she smiled. “When you don’t want to have to deal with something, you shut it off. You pack it in a box and store it in the deep recesses of your mind.” She cocked her head to the side. “I’ve never known you to deliberately lie to me, though.”
“I’m not lying.”
Miranda stood and joined me on the couch. She thrust out her hand. “Touch me.”
I stared down at her it, studied the fine lines on her palm, buying time, because I knew what I’d see. More than wanting to prove myself to her, I felt I owed her. She’d been traumatized enough about that day that she’d sought out professional help. My best friend, my sister needed me to understand her as much as I needed her to understand me, so I took her hand.
Gut-wrenching horror seized my chest. Lonna was struggling. I could hear her grunting as she wrestled with a green piece of cloth. Numb from the cold, my bare hands barely felt the boots I was clinging to white-knuckled. I was shivering, not from the cold and wetness that penetrated my clothes, but at the prospect of loss so profound it made me physically ill.
Lonna wasn’t making headway. She didn’t have the upper body strength it would take to pull the water-logged body from the water. I prayed the ice would hold as I tugged my boot free of Deb’s grasp and began to crawl. When I reached the opening in the ice, I saw the dark hair plastered down on a blue face. The eyes wide open, mouth gaping. I felt my hands plunging into the icy water grasping for anything I could cling to. The lifeless body felt like ice itself and just as heavy as we pulled, pure adrenaline giving us strength we didn’t possess.
Through Miranda’s eyes, I looked down at myself, hardly recognizable. My mind blank. I released her hand with a gasp and quickly began retelling everything as I saw and felt it as though I were recounting a dream I was afraid I’d forget. Miranda blinked at the barrage of information. I saw the realization dawn on her face, her eyes widen. Her bottom lip began to tremble as I described in detail her feelings, her fear.
After I finished, we sat quietly as tears streamed down her cheeks. I wanted to cry. For the first time in my life, I wanted to release the emotion pounding inside my chest, but I couldn’t. Instead, I stared at the floor as the memory of what I’d seen flashed through my mind.
“Oh, my God.” Miranda sank back onto the couch and covered her face with her hands.
I let her cry, afraid to touch her. Afraid of what else I might see. “I want to…comfort you, but…”
“I know,” Miranda said through her tears.
I smiled ruefully. “I’ve been thinking about what this will mean for me from now on. Can you imagine what sex would be like? Full body contact, and I’m watching videos of that person’s life. I’ll never have an orgasm I didn’t personally cause again.”
“Oh,” Miranda said with a sniff. “That’s a real concentration breaker, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” My shoulders sagged. “I’m either going to have to become a hermit or live my life telling one lie after the other to hide what I’ve become.”
“Maybe you could wear gloves,” Miranda said, sounding more like herself.
“Welder’s gloves maybe, something thick like that.” I was actually considering it.
“Maybe you can learn to control it. You’ve always been really good at blocking things out. That might just work to your advantage.”
“I understand why you needed to see a shrink.” I glanced at her quickly and looked away. “If that had been you, I would’ve been pretty messed up.”
Miranda sighed long and loud. “Nothing has ever scared me that bad.” She reached out to touch me, then let her hand drop in her lap. “Are you telling me everything? You didn’t have an out-of-body experience while you were…down.”
“I did see some angels. They were wearing Krispy Kreme hats, and as they flapped their wings, hot doughnuts appeared.” I banged one of the doughnuts Miranda brought. “Unlike these, they weren’t made of stone.”
Miranda threw back her head and laughed. “You are such an asshole. I love ya.”
*******
The gym was full, and Miranda and I waited to use leg presses. We stood side by side careful not to brush against each other. “Wouldn’t you like to touch P.P. and see what all her secrets are? Probably one sexual escapade after another.” Miranda chuckled. “It’d be like interactive porn.” She lowered her voice. “You’d definitely have an orgasm that way.”
P.P. was the nickname we’d given Jade—Perfection Personified. She was across the room working with one of her clients wearing nothing but a pair of black spandex shorts and matching sports bra. I watched the muscles bunch and move under perfectly tanned skin, one part lust, the other envy. My arms had toned nicely, but the muscles there did not compare to what Jade was working with. Her stomach had that washboard look you only saw in commercials advertising diet aids or workout equipment.
“Thanks for putting up with my jokes,” Miranda said seriously. “We’ve spent the day grappling with the magnitude of this…thing, and I just needed a release. You know I’m not making light of what you’re dealing with.”
“Oh, that goes without saying. I’ve been dealing with this for two months, so it’s refreshing to sort of make fun of it.”
Miranda didn’t speak again until we had completed our first rep on the leg press. I lay stomach down on the one next to her and watched Jade demonstrate how to use the elliptical machine to a man who already looked weary.
“So what do you think? Should we take her up on her offer and let her write a plan for us?” Miranda asked between grunts.
“Couldn’t hurt, I guess. Might as well get what we’re paying for. But you’re gonna have to ask her for the both of us. My pride will not allow me to acquiesce.”
We finished our workout and loitered until Jade wrapped up with her client. Miranda wasted no time in her approach. I stood back and watched them talk until Miranda motioned for me to follow. Jade led us back to a tiny cramped office barely large enough to accommodate the desk and a chair that sat in front of it. I stood in the corner while Miranda took the seat.
“I have a questionnaire for you to fill out.” Jade fished around in her desk and produced two blue pieces of paper. “Sloan, you’re welcome to take my chair, and I’ll go find another one while you work on the questions.”
She left us alone without another word, and I took the seat careful not to lean back and leave my sweat all over her chair. I checked the boxes next to the areas of my body I wanted to work on, then another indicating how much time I was willing to invest. Miranda and I hesitated as we read over the ones concerning diet.
“Should we disclose how much junk food we really eat?” She might suggest a diet.” Miranda paled at the thought.
“Are we coming here to pacify Marty, or do we really want to get into shape?”
Miranda thought for a moment. “I really would love to lose this paunch in my stomach.” She grimaced. “That means diet.”
“We can still have pizza and doughnuts,” I said, trying to reassure us both. “Just not as often. We’ve never really been good at practicing moderation.”
Miranda agreed.
“Let’s listen to what she has to say.”
“So you’re saying be honest.” Miranda grimaced again and resumed her focus on the questionnaire.
Jade returned to her office about five minutes after we finished our paperwork. She set the extra chair next to Miranda and sat down. I watched as she picked up Miranda’s questionnaire and read it over, her expression impassive. Next, she scooped up mine and scrutinized it before laying it in her lap with Miranda’s.
“Let’s talk about diet first,” she said, looking at us. I heard Miranda whimper.
“Portion control, and of course, what you’re eating needs to change if you want to achieve the things you’ve listed.” She looked at Miranda with what I construed was compassion. “I think it’s fairly obvious you have a sweet tooth.”
“I have a mouth full of them,” Miranda confessed with a blush.
“I imagine being a paramedic is difficult when it comes to diet. You run calls in the middle of the night, then you’re hungry, so you grab a snack from whatever is open.” Jade tilted her head to the side. “Probably raid the vending machines in the hospital for sugary snacks, then go back to the station and sleep.”
“Bingo,” Miranda said with a nod.
“Would you consider packing healthy snacks to take to work with you? Something to munch on during those times?”
“We have no idea what a healthy snack is,” I said, drawing Jade’s attention. I shrugged. “Okay, fruit, but that’s not really filling.”
“I agree, but fruit is a good substitute for a candy bar. I have a list of snacks that will satisfy hunger, too, and don’t contain as much sugar.” She looked at Miranda again. “Will you try that?”
“Yes,” Miranda said with a nod.
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