Cold-Blooded Beautiful

by Christine Zolendz

“Just a few entries from my journal. They’re mostly about her. I figured if she knew I couldn’t live without her, she’d fight harder to wake up.”

  Jen’s lips moved to speak, then stopped.

  “Don’t. Jen. Don’t tell me she’s not going to wake up from this, okay? Because if she’s doesn’t, you can bury us together. I go where she goes.”

  “Oh, Kade…”

  “Sod off,” I snapped. My fingers clenched together tightly and just as I was about to start a tirade, the neurosurgeon strolled in. Ignoring us both, he walked past and pushed his glasses up the long thin bridge of his nose. From out of his pocket, he pulled a thin medical flashlight, yanked open Samantha’s eyelids and shined the light right on them. Those emerald green irises just about blinded me, but what made my heart stop was watching her pupils shrink and react to the light.

  Jen’s voice whispered into my ear, “He’s checking her pupillary reflex to see if her pupils constrict. Before, when you went out for coffee, they checked her gag reflex, she gagged and coughed.”

  The surgeon wrote a bunch of unidentifiable scratches and crap on her chart, clickety-clicked his pen and left. Jen slumped down in a seat and hung her head in her hands. Fuck everybody. I was going to read to her my words, everything she’d ever made me feel until she woke the fuck up.

  And I did, everyday for seven straight days. I read to her as her bruises slowly faded, her hair became shiny with oil and she lost so much weight that her cheeks looked sunken in. I read to her for hours at a time. For days, until my throat turned dry and my voice rotted into a hoarse raspy shadow of what it once was. I wasn’t ever going to stop. Ever.

  Tuesday

  My thoughts, my feeling, my fucking heart is tied to the posts of my bed.

  Captured and imprisoned.

  By her.

  I’ve never wanted to be held against my will until now.

  She tears me down and rips me raw.

  Flings the flesh of my chest open and gently lays her lips to my heart.

  It beats for her.

  It bleeds for her.

  She made it feel again.

  Made it all mean something again.

  She found me under all the rubble.

  Beneath the waste and the debris that was piled atop of me.

  And she grabbed my hand and helped me stand up again.

  Helped me live again.

  Wednesday

  I sat on the stiff grass; sharp spikes of icy green and I dug my fingertips into the frozen earth. I’m in the yard, my house, my tomb stands high above me. Her soft voice drifts through an open window, she is singing in the shower. I could almost hear the beads of water falling against her skin. Almost taste the salt as she washes it away to lather with apple and cinnamon. My hands tighten their hold of the earth not to rush in their with her. But the soil just crumbled through my fingers and broke along the cold ground. Suddenly, I’m up, running. Over the frost, crunching my boots in the snow. Through the door and straight into the bathroom. The door is never locked, because she knows. She knows I’d always need her and she would never lock herself away from me. Then I’m standing, fully clothed in the steam, drops of water soaking my shirt, my pants, and my boots. Mud and snow twirling and spinning over the drain and she laughs. Her beautiful, perfect laugh. Her hands cup my face, warm and wet. Her lips meet mine and I’m hers. She’s mine. Up against the cold stone tiles, sopping wet pants around my ankles, she’s mine.

  On day four, I saw a small wiggle of her toe. I continued to read to her. My notes. My thoughts. My feelings. Everything.

  Saturday

  Doctor Headshrinker, he bloody hates the name I’ve chosen for him, keeps repeating that I need to spend more time on my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and not my obsession with Samantha. Why the fuck would I want to do that? He mentioned to me this journal was supposed to be an ongoing way to communicate with Thomas, the dead kid who left me to die in a classroom.

  Really, I have nothing more to say to him.

  Fuck you, I won.

  I lived, you little bloody bitch.

  And know I can feel the sun shine on my face. I can feel the warmth on my skin, because my sun, she sleeps besides me. Every night. Fuck you Thomas. And fuck you Mr. Psychotherapist. I don’t need pills; all I need is Sam.

  On day five, I watched as she made a full fist with her right hand, and then her left. I read more. I read faster. The doctor’s said it might be all we could hope for, that she may never do anything more. No. Fuck them. I will deal with whatever she gives me. If she stays like this, she’ll come home like this, and I will read to her every day. If she opens her eyes and has to learn to eat and walk again, then I’ll be right by her side teaching and helping her. I will not give up on her.

  “I’ll read you one from this week, love.”

  Will I speak her eulogy before a crowd? Will the words stick to my tongue and tangle in tears? Will her apparition crawl into bed with me each night? Haunting me with scents and fluttery caresses. Meet me in my bed around midnight okay? Just run right in, full-speed, and send me into complete shock, or make my heart burst. Just take me with you, if you decide to leave.

  I thought you just left me. I didn’t trust you at all. I had no faith in what we were starting and us. I doubted everything. If you wake up with no memory, I’ll help you to remember. We’ll start again. I’ll take you to everyplace we’ve been and make you feel everything we created. If you can’t walk, I swear love, I will carry you wherever you want to go, everyday for the rest of our lives. Whatever you wake up with, we’ll be fine. Just wake up. Just open those green doors for me and fight. It’s not my job to change or fix you…my job is to love you with no expectations of you ever being anything more than what you are. If you change at all, I will love what you become, whatever it may be.

  Just don’t leave me, Sam.

  Chapter 22

  I did die.

  Flatlined with all the bells and whistles just before the neurosurgeon was to drain the pressure on my brain. They had to take the paddles to me. I must seriously hold the record for most resuscitated for such an ordinarily healthy person. I’ve had a damn defibrillator used on me at least a half a dozen times just that last year. I’ll have to check Guinness about that.

  Clinically, I was dead for nine seconds, which wasn’t too horrible. Anything longer than that, and I would have been really pissed off.

  Yes, I know the questions that you may have. No, there was no tunnel with light or long lost dead relatives to welcome me to the other side. Nothing of the sort. Just the gnawing need to tell the idiotic trauma team what the hell to do correctly so I could walk the hell out of this hospital and start celebrating the rest of my life. Most of it was nothingness. Heavy sleep. One minute, I felt Kade’s arms surrounding me, and then a powerful feeling of nothing.

  Consciousness came in bits and pieces. Sounds, low and soft at first, like I was far under the water, then clear and distinctive. Light and movement came slowly, along with the feel of the cold sheets under my palms and the itchy needle of the IV in my hand. All these medical thoughts muddled like fog in my brain, thousands of questions I knew I wanted to ask, yet the only thing to come from my mouth was a thin stream of drool, and the thoughts of still needing to sleep because I was so utterly exhausted. I listened to what my body needed and I slept. I heard Kade’s voice at a constant rate, but I could not get to it. I just slept and listened to him. Slept and listened. Slept and listened. His voice was my music.

  Okay, now hold onto something for a moment, because I’m just about to pull the pin on an awesome grenade. On day seven of listening to Kade Grayson’s heart-wrenching words, I gave him a present.

  I opened my eyes.

  His reaction was brilliant, and I couldn’t have chosen a better moment if I wanted to. You see, he’d been sitting in the chair facing my bed, watching my face and trying to read from his journal at the same time. He only stopped for a second to adjust his position, and when he did, I saw him f
or the first time. His laptop slid off his leg and onto to the ground. I heard the metallic slap of it on the floor, its clink and clank. His sad grey eyes widened with an incredulous dazed stare. Slowly, his hands clamped onto the hospital bed rails and his broad stiff body moved closer and closer to mine. I tried my best to follow him with my eyes, but I was still so tired.

  “Sam?” he croaked, tears filling those stormy grey eyes.

  “ICU?” I croaked. It sort of sounded more like iiiisluuuuue.

  His face exploded in tears and laughter, “Oh, God, baby. Oh, God. Oh, God, Sam, I thought I lost you.” He swiped at his tears and pressed the nurses call button like a lunatic, then jumped up over me and brushed wet teary kisses all over my face. “Don’t you ever leave me again. Oh, God, Sam, I love you so bloody much.”

  Doctors and nurses swarmed in, shoving Kade away, but of course, he wouldn’t budge. He hovered over them, listening to everything that was said, nodding his smiling crying face, and calling Jen on his cell. The doctors yelled at him to move and to shut down his phone, and in perfect Kade style, he told everyone to sod the fuck off. When I knew he was okay, I eyed the doctor who was repeatedly asking me the year and the name of the president.

  “What’s the damage?” I asked, softly. “I remember the wound on my leg. I can feel the bandage on my head and it’s throbbing.” However, they couldn’t understand me, because my words were slurred, slow, and unintelligible.

  The doctors and nurses poked and prodded me, asked me questions and did the normal routines of assessment. I answered as best I could, but my mind fogged up quickly when I began thinking of what I’ve seen happen to my own patients when the neural pathways in the brain were damaged, and wondered what severity of damage I was to endure. They were simple thoughts, rudimentary. I had suffered a brain injury. How would this affect my behavior and personality? My thinking and ability to solve problems? Will this change who I was forever? Then my thoughts shifted gears, my training and schooling came through, and relief flooded in. The brain communicates and deciphers our physical and mental performance. I was having straight concerned thoughts, about lost information and function. I was aware of things around me and hoped that the doctors agreed. This couldn’t be as severe as I feared, right?

  Right?

  I drifted back to sleep while a crowd of doctors and nurses dressed in whites and greens spoke over me. People walked in with carts, someone spilled a tray of noisy metal objects and my nose was assaulted with the familiar smells of a hospital. The scents that most people cringed at when it hit their senses considering what most people’s prior experiences were with hospitals. I tried to stay awake to speak with everyone, and to answer and ask all the questions my brain could process. The one nagging at me the most, left me wondering what had happened, wondering where David was, if he was really dead. My last conscious thought was: I hoped he was in Hell.

  As I drifted off, my hands clutched the cool blankets with the same vehemence I clutched the idea that I would be a surgeon again, and that whatever injuries were sustained would fall to waste and leave me whole.

  Life doesn’t quite work the way you want it to, though, does it?

  Although my waking up was awe inspiring and hopeful…my recovery sucked. Each morning, I would wake to a classical piece of music that to me sounded like the equivalent of scratching my nails down a chalkboard. My eyes would snap open fiercely and my teeth would automatically grind. Nails down the chalkboard, slow and screechy. Long screeching brittle freaking nails. The noise always made the front of my teeth tingle, and I’d get the sensation of peeling my gums away from my teeth. And even though my hatred and disdain for it was well known, the music was continuously put on to wake me. Every. Single. Day.

  Kade fucking Grayson. He did it purposely.

  The second after hearing the calamity, I’d struggle to sit upright, reach out and slam shut the culprit that played the atrocity. Some mornings, it was a CD player. Other mornings, it was his phone or an iPod, but every time, it would be hidden in a different place, causing me to have to get up and search for the offensive noisemaker to get it to silence. Somewhere in the hospital room, Kade’s face would appear in mine with an uncharacteristically cheerful smile. “Good morning, Doc,” he’d whisper. Each morning was the same. The first words I’d try to say slurred like warm ooze from my lips and dripped down my chin. Then I’d cry.

  Kade just smiled. “Come on, Beautiful. Try it again. Goooood. Moorrr-nnninnng,” he said.

  I really wanted to smack him.

  “Fuuuuuuckkk. Youuuuuu.”

  “Brilliant. Your speech is getting much better. How about a stroll around the hospital today? Maybe a shower?” He asked.

  God, he was infuriating.

  “Sam, love, you need to get up and walk. You need to talk.”

  “Hurrtsss,” I slurred.

  “I know, baby, trust me, I know this pain. But, I’m right here beside you and I’ll help you with every step. I won’t let you fall, Sam, and I sure as hell won’t let you lie there and waste away either.”

  He helped me shower, which was humiliating beyond anything I could ever know. My body was a colorful array of bruises and wounds, which made Kade’s lips tighten, and fists clench. Yet, he washed me gently with my favorite flavored soaps and dried me with soft towels he’d brought from home. Something seemed to have changed in Kade after I woke up, something I could only match to the word beautiful. It was as if he’d found some sort of inner peace, because it shined in him, rolled off him in calm cool waves. He’d speak in arousing whispers as he helped me dress, and plant soft kisses against my neck as he brushed my hair. He dragged my IV behind him as he helped me walk and do my physical therapy, always somehow touching me, always watching me – with those intense serious eyes. I noticed too, when he thought I wasn’t watching, how he’d care for the other patients around me. Little things, insignificant things, which Kade would have never had the patience for before, I found him smiling through now. A glass of ice chips for Mrs. Williams in the room across the hallway, fill the water only a quarter of the way up and a red straw she’d say, and instead of throwing the water in her face, he’d wink and get her exactly what she wished. A newspaper for Mr. Rilles in the next room, wrapped tightly with a small piece of chocolate inside.

  For weeks after I woke, he’d challenge me. To walk. To talk. To eat. To run. To think. To fight. He brought puzzles in for me to do and brain teasers for me to solve. He loaded up his iPad with over one hundred different apps that summoned me to use cognitive thoughts, reasoning, and problem solving. I knew what he was doing. I knew he was trying to prove to me that I would be fine, and I was so grateful for everything he pushed at me. I was also more in love with him than I could have ever thought imaginable.

  He was there at night when I awoke screaming from the harsh nightmares of David’s hands on me, teaching me how to overcome terror. To talk through it, write it all down, release it instead of letting it take hold of me. Teaching me to face the fears and become bigger and more important than they were. Kade Grayson taught me to live again. What man do you know would do this? I’ve seen, God, I have seen in my line of work, men watch over their wives for a week and then slowly start living their lives again, planning time without the person who is stuck in a hospital bed. He never once became impatient with me when I refused to move, or when I was too tired or just not able. The last sound I heard each night was the sound of Kade’s voice as he read through his stories and poetry to me. And, he was there every morning when I woke. With that fucking horrible music. Then he’d push me to move, walk through the pain, and survive it. Who better a teacher, right?

  “Let’s go, Doc, focus. Time to get dressed. Personally, I fancy the open-back gown look on you, but I bloody hate to share my view of your perfect arse with the rest of the patients. Especially that old wanker, Mr. Timmins,” his voice shifted through my thoughts.

  Kade had laid out my clothes on the bed while I had my attention on the scenery o
ut the window. Tall evergreens masked in a thick morning fog. Such a different view than that of my office downstairs. I slowly slid my slippered feet along the cool floor. My movements measured and precise, and well thought out. The least amount of movement for the least amount of pain. I intentionally opted out of accepting pain medications. My body was so strung out from what David had injected me with, so I wanted everything out of my system. I wanted personally to diagnose my cognitive reasoning, if I was able. And I sure as shit wasn’t able to do so with an ongoing stream of happy pills being shoved down my throat. I just wanted the fog to lift from my thoughts, my memories. I wasn’t used to living in the darkness of my own mind. I was a creature of the sun and its warm bright rays.

  A sound rustling noise brushed past my shoulder. Kade’s soft touch, tucking the loose strands of my hair behind my ear. “Hey, love. Pants first, then slippers,” his low voice whispered.

  Glancing down, I found myself dressed only in a shirt, cute white lacy underwear and my freaking zombie slippers. “I knew that.”

  “Uh huh,” he smiled, and then softly slid the tips of his fingers over the sheer lace of my underwear. “Nice, panties,” he breathed into my ear.

  “Stop, Kade. I look and feel like I lived through a horror movie, so don’t talk all sexy to me,” I snapped, stepping out of my slippers. Zombie eyeballs jiggled past my toes.

  The stupid ass, smirked. “Love, your eyes are wide open and you’re talking back to me. You, Samantha are the strongest, kickass, most breathtaking woman I have ever bloody seen.” Kade shifted his body in front of mine, muscles tight, heat radiating off his skin. His eyes, so grey, so full of hope, made me just melt into him and I slipped my feet back inside my slippers.

  “Love, you still haven’t put your pants on. Pants before slippers.”

  “I knew that,” I lied in frustration. “You just made me lose focus.”

  “Uh huh,” he chuckled. “It’s okay, Sam. You know there’s going to bloody be confusion and disorientation after your TBI. Loss of attention and agitation, I’m here to remind you of stuff, help you find some consistency. Hey, love? Guess what today is?”