by C. C. Piper
Later, when I looked back on that drive, I wouldn’t remember any of it. The only thing I would remember would be the desperation I felt as I waited to be allowed to go to Alaina’s side.
She’s alive.
This mantra had kept me sane as the woman I loved remained unconscious in the Intensive Care Unit. She’d been here for two days already and showed no signs of positive change. Since her three immediate family members were the only ones with permission to go in, all I could do was peer at her through the glass of the ICU window. She laid there motionless as doctors, nurses and other medical personnel traipsed in and out twenty-four-seven.
The updates we received at first were harrowing. She’d been diagnosed with a concussion to her left parietal lobe, whiplash, broken ribs, a shattered left hand – which had been operated on and was full of pins – and severe contusions to her left leg, probably due to the vehicle who’d slammed into the driver’s side door.
Her neck was in a brace, her hand was in a cast, and much of her body was covered in bandages and gauze. She’d been hooked up to beeping machines and an IV pumping God-knew-what into her. Her parents and brother were beside themselves, alternately going in to hold on to her good right hand and coming back out to the waiting area and staring blankly into space. Sometimes they’d lose it and go off to the restrooms to cry.
They were looking to me to provide them with some comfort, but other than physically being there, I didn’t have any to give. Instead, I kept my own counsel and stood gazing at her through the window into her room, willing her with everything in me to wake up.
She laid on that hospital bed, her features bruised and still, her body bloody and broken, as she remained in what we hoped would only be a temporary coma. Her family and I were in a holding pattern, eager for some sign that she was healing as we prayed ceaselessly for her to make a full recovery.
At one point a police officer brought in pictures of what remained of her Mini Cooper. Because she’d been struck on three sides – from the back, from the left and from the right – her vehicle wasn’t salvageable. The four of us goggled at her mangled twist of steel and aluminum in horror. It seemed incredible that Alaina had survived that sort of carnage.
Yet so far, she had.
After two nail-biting days, a miracle occurred. She opened her eyes.
Neurosurgeons and other specialists swarmed. She was given test after test and scan after scan. At first, she wouldn’t speak, and when she did, she made little sense. She did groan with pain, though, and I was so thankful when they gave her something that appeared to ease her.
While she seemed to recognize her family members – and me when I waved to her from the window – she remained disoriented and bewildered. Bryant, Caroline, Andy and I stood by helplessly. None of us would say the words I knew we all must have been thinking.
Brain damage.
There had been swelling beneath her cranium over her parietal lobe, and until that swelling decreased, they wouldn’t know the extent of what could be wrong. We didn’t know what might happen. We didn’t know if she’d spend the remainder of her life having difficulty with her equilibrium or with her ability to communicate properly.
We just didn’t know.
The Williams family took turns going home and getting some rest and a shower. They told me I should go, too, but I couldn’t. Maybe it was ridiculous, but I felt like if I left the hospital something horrendous might happen with Alaina. So, to the fatigued befuddlement of her parents and brother, I remained.
I slept in the waiting room and ate at the cafeteria. Until she was out of the woods, I couldn’t bear to leave, so I didn’t, deciding to use their restrooms to wash up instead. My first hint that I was acting out of the ordinary came on day four. Andy had approached me with a peculiar expression on his exhausted face. He looked like hell. We all did. I’d asked him to bring me some fresh clothes rather than agreeing to go get them myself.
“Mace, what’s up with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mom and Dad and I have all switched out shifts here, but you keep refusing. I don’t get it. You’re behaving like… I don’t know… I mean, you’ve been helping her some lately, but it’s not like you two were ever that close.”
It took that for me to wake up. Though part of me was more than ready to clear any deception from the air, I didn’t want to cause a scene right there in the ICU. So, I went. I showered then fell headfirst into my bed. After eight dreamless hours, I woke, still tired but feeling more human. I hurried back the morning of her fifth day.
And when I arrived, she was sitting up. She had more color in her battered face and was speaking in strings of words that sounded a bit more normal. These were all remarkably good signs.
Her condition was upgraded from critical to serious but stable, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. She was moved into her own room, and I was so grateful because it meant I’d finally be able to touch her again, even if it would only be a hand on her shoulder.
The moment I marched through her door, she’d been saying something about her food. “These are the best, these…” she paused, “apples.” They were apples, so I smiled even though she hadn’t noticed me yet. “I love apples. And I love you, Daddy.”
Bryant beamed at her. “We all love you, too, sweetheart.”
“And I love Andy.” My best bro gave her a cautious hug which was really more of his hand wrapping around her right arm. “And you, Mom, though you piss me off. I need to move out. And I love almonds. Do you have any of those?”
Andy chuckled into the awkward moment. It sounded as if Alaina may not have much of a filter. “I’ll see what I can do, buttercup.”
At that precise moment, Alaina caught me standing in her doorway. Her bow-shaped lips lifted into an incandescent smile as she said, “And I love you, Mason, even though I don’t know if you love me. I know you love sex with me ‘cause I love that, too. And I want to be with you all the time. I really do.”
She went back to her food as if she hadn’t just dropped a thermonuclear bomb.
The three members of the Williams clan gaped at me for the length of maybe three seconds before my best friend in the world reared back and punched me right across the bridge of the nose.
Then, he dispatched two more blows in such quick succession that they knocked me onto the bleachy floor. I didn’t fight back, didn’t defend myself. I didn’t want to make this worse. Especially since it took both Bryant and a couple of other medical personnel to yank him off me.
“You sorry son of a bitch. I’ll fucking murder you,” he growled, and I knew he meant it. I’d never seen Andy so full of rage. In the background I heard a female voice gasping “no” over and over again. It was Alaina.
“Goddamn it, Andy, stop,” Bryant ordered his son as he seized him by the elbow. “Alaina’s not even fully cognizant of what’s she’s saying right now, for Christ’s sake.”
But I was done lying to these people that I cared about so much. Shuffling up to a standing position – while a stream of blood dripped down my face and splattered all over my clothes – I pressed a palm to my nostrils to try to stem the flow. “It’s true. Alaina and I have been involved in a relationship.”
“For how long?” Andy bellowed his question at me, his upper lip curling in menace.
“Three months.”
Security showed up then, “Sir, you’re out. You’re banned from this facility,” a man in uniform spoke to Andy, physically removing him from the room.
One of Alaina’s nurses snatched up some gauze and antiseptic liquid and bustled over to treat me. I wouldn’t let her, though. I couldn’t. Bryant stood at the foot of her bed glaring at me, while Caroline moved to her daughter’s good side, looking at me as if stunned. I knew what I had to do.
Blood was still gushing from my nose and each of my eye sockets were throbbing, but I ignored all that. I had something important to say. I looked at Alaina where she sat on her bed, her good hand thrown over her m
outh and her bruised features clenched with horror.
“I love you, B.C. More than anything,” I told her, wanting to reach out to her but not letting myself. Then, feeling shaken, I stumbled my way out into the corridor. The elevator happened to open at that precise moment, and considering it divine providence, I stepped in. Other people were milling around by the elevator bank, but they didn’t join me. So alone, I reached the lobby level and advanced out through the automatic doors.
17
Alaina
Hospital strength pain medication was trippy. It blurred the lines between truth and fiction, what bounced around my imagination, and what was reality. When I first woke up, I’d had difficulty telling the difference between real and not real. Then, when that issue resolved itself, I couldn’t seem to keep myself from babbling everything that scurried through my head.
It was like being on some weird version of truth serum.
And it wrecked everything. In actuality, I’d wrecked everything. Even though I hadn’t meant to.
My entire life had become a shambles. I was injured in a hospital with a shattered hand and fractured ribs that hurt every time I coughed or laughed. Laughing was the worst, though I’d had no reason to so much as smile since my brother had attempted to beat the man I loved into a bloody pulp and got evicted from Harborview altogether.
Mason, on the other hand, had not been evicted. Right after the debacle with Andy went down, he told me those three little words I’d been dying to hear. I’d needed to hear those words so much, and when he’d turned his bloody self away and vanished, I hadn’t panicked. He just needed to go home and clean up. He’d be right back.
Wouldn’t he?
At the time. I was more worried about my brother, honestly. But then, Mason hadn’t returned. Not that day or the next. Now, it’d been three days since all that had transpired, and I didn’t know why he hadn’t come back to me. I didn’t even know if he was all right.
So that sort of put an asterisk on the whole declaring his undying love thing.
Now my brother was furious with his lifelong best friend and couldn’t even visit me. My dad no longer looked me in the eye. And the man who’d become so vital to my existence had cut off all contact with me. To be fair, the concussion meant I wasn’t supposed to be staring at phone screens anyway, but still. Mason hadn’t sent any messages. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t even emailed. I knew this because I’d asked my mom to check.
And speaking of my mom. I was flabbergasted by how nice she’d been to me. I didn’t know if it was because I was physically hurt or what, but I couldn’t remember my mother treating me in such a loving way since before I’d gone off to kindergarten.
It felt authentic, too. Like we were a more traditional mother and daughter duo. She’d gone so far as to apologize to me, which was just as trippy as being high on pain meds. Her eyes had welled up, so I knew she meant what she said.
Bizarre, right?
If I’d known totaling my car would mend the rift that’d been between my mom and I for years, I would’ve done it as soon as I’d obtained my driver’s license.
Well, that might have been a bit extreme. But… Maybe.
I even felt comfortable enough to confide in her when she’d asked me about Mason. Our cover had been blown anyway. It was far too late to hide what was in plain sight.
I still had issues limiting my verbal diarrhea, so I probably told her too much. I knew I might regret that later. But I had to say, letting everything I’d been holding inside flap in the wind was surprisingly refreshing.
“Where is he?” I asked her. “Why is Mason being such an ass right now?”
Mom patted my arm. She didn’t even say it felt too bulky or anything. “I don’t know,” she said. “Your father called the firm this morning asking if they’d heard from him. They haven’t.” We went silent for a long minute, and the weight of everything that had happened felt so heavy I felt like it would crush me. “He wouldn’t leave the hospital early on, though.”
“Who? Mason?”
“Yes. Your father and I discussed it briefly, how odd it was that he wouldn’t go home even to change clothes and take a shower.”
“I don’t remember that.”
She offered me a sad smile. “It was when you were still out. Andy spoke to him about it a few days in, so Mason finally went. I should’ve known there was something unusual about that. He’d stand at your window and just stare at you. Nothing says love like being devoted beyond distraction.”
I grunted. If he loved me so much, why had he abandoned me?
“Has he contacted any of you or been by the estate?” I asked, grasping at straws.
“No,” Mom said, her eyes glum.
Another thought scampered through my brain and out of my mouth.
“Why have you always been so rough on me?” Remember what I said about no filter? Consider that an example. She waited a long time to answer me, long enough that I thought I might not receive an answer at all.
“I was a little jealous, I think.” Her gaze downcast.
“Jealous? There’s nothing about me that you could ever be jealous of.”
She shook her head. “You’re beautiful, Alaina. You always have been. Even at your more awkward stages. And so smart. Smarter than I ever was. You also have more creativity in your pinky than I have, period.” This came out ruefully.
“You’re the one who organizes all those social events, though,” I reminded her. “You always have your makeup on and your hair done.”
“That’s because I have no talent for making anything myself. And if I don’t put my face on, I look like the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.”
“Mom!” Expelling a sound that was half laugh and half cry. “I never thought I had a chance of looking even half as good as you do.”
She looked stricken. “See what I’ve done to you?” She laced her fingers with mine, falling quiet for a while. “You know, there’s a new woman who moved into the neighborhood a few months ago. She joined the Chamber of Commerce. She said something that I didn’t listen to at first, but now, I think she’s right.”
“What did she say?”
“That as women, we’re too hard on ourselves. That we try to live up to the expectations of society rather than working on being happy. Maybe from now on, we should both focus on doing whatever it takes to be happy.”
I squeezed her fingers. “I like that, Mom. I like that a lot.”
I did like it. But I couldn’t help but wonder why Mason had done what he had. Why had he made us go through this cloak-and-dagger relationship if he loved me like he said he did?
Why spout words of love to me after taking a thrashing from his best friend, only to disappear as if he didn’t love me after all?
Though I was worried about Mason, as the days passed, I felt more and more annoyed at him. How dare he do this to me after everything that had happened between us? What kind of man sent such mixed signals all the time? I want you but don’t tell anybody. I love you but now I’m going to walk out of your life. I mean, who does that?
And why?
It all made my head hurt, and this time, the car accident wasn’t to blame.
The damage caused to my neck and back by the whiplash had improved greatly. The deep cuts I’d received on my legs were healing. My concussion was healing. My ribs were healing. Even my pin-filled left hand was healing, though I didn’t know how much dexterity it might have going forward.
But my heart remained broken, and from all indications, Mason intended for it to stay that way.
18
Mason
I never used to think of myself as a coward.
As a kid, I’d actually been more of a daredevil. I did wheelies on my bike. Climbed giant trees. Did flips off rocky cliffs. Tried bungee jumping. Parachuted out of a plane. I’d broken one arm or the other a few different times. And I didn’t mind. I lived for that shit. The thrill of it thrummed through my blood and made me feel alive.
&n
bsp; So alive.
That trend continued in my decision-making processes. I’d chosen to go out of state to college just to try something different. I’d driven perilously fast around blind curves, slept with as many girls as possible, and drank until I blacked out. I was young and single and loving life hard.
And then, my parents had gotten on that twin-engine turboprop plane because I’d thought it’d be such a cool gift. Skydiving. I’d loved it and decided they would too. I still remembered having to talk them into it.
“Come on you guys, it’s so much fun!”
I’d totally believed those words. Right up to the moment I’d found out one of their engines had caught fire at thirteen thousand feet. The odds of the other engine failing had been astronomical, yet that was exactly what it did. No one had a chance. Everyone aboard died instantly, including the two people who had loved and nurtured me since birth.
My fault.
All my fault.
So when I eventually began to live my life again, I erred on the side of caution. I tried to do what I thought my parents would want – since that was the only thing I had left – and poured myself into law school and then my career.
When I fell for Sophia, it was partly because I thought my mom and dad would’ve liked her. But I focused more on work than I ever had on her. I dumped her as if I didn’t love her, even though I did. Then, she was hit head-on. I’d made the mistake, yet she was the one to pay for it.
And she paid for it with her life.
It was so unfair. So wrong.
And once again, all my fault.
Just like Alaina’s accident was my fault.
Rationally, I knew that if these three cases were ever to go to court, that I would get off scot-free. From a legal standpoint, there was no evidence or point of law that would condemn me. There was no proof, and if I’d paraded such circumstantial conjecture before a jury of my peers, they would almost certainly rule that I wasn’t to blame.