All This Time

by Mikki Daughtry

  “I can’t either,” I whisper.

  * * *

  When my mom leaves later that afternoon, I grab my iPad from my bedside table, but I somehow can’t bring myself to scroll through Instagram, the images of all the different Marleys. I know in my gut that she doesn’t have one. I mean, she refused to write on the computer, opting to handwrite in a notebook instead. There’s no way she has an Instagram.

  So what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to find her?

  “Can I come in?”

  I look up to see Kimberly standing in the doorway, her arm sling-free, a small blue brace wrapped around her wrist. Her blue eyes lock into mine. The fire is gone, replaced with some sense of understanding. She’s looking at me like she’s reading me better than I can.

  “Sam told me,” she says. “About your other life.”

  Your other life. The words cut me like daggers. I try to contain it, to keep my shit together. But the tears come spilling out, no matter how hard I fight them.

  She hurries over, wrapping her arms around me. “It’s okay,” she says, holding me while I sob. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  She doesn’t force me to talk. She just sits with me, quietly letting me calm down enough to fall asleep. I find relief only in the darkness behind my eyelids. For a glimmering moment, nothing hurts. Nothing is upside down. Nothing is.

  When I wake up a few hours later, I feel a warm body next to me.

  I know it’s Kim. But I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend it’s Marley.

  “I know you’re awake,” Kim says, poking me in the side, her finger landing right on a protruding rib, a side effect of my liquid coma diet.

  I sigh. “That’s what they keep telling me.”

  There’s a knock on the door, and we quickly turn our heads to find Sam’s big frame filling the doorway.

  “Hey,” she says, not moving her arms from around me, and somehow I feel guilty. But unfortunately, a hospital bed is only so big, and if I move, I’ll topple off onto the tile floor.

  “Right,” Sam says, looking between the two of us and clearing his throat. “Okay. Good. I’m gonna…”

  His voice trails off and he turns on his heel, heading back down the hallway. We watch him go, his footsteps fading into the distance.

  I think of the tulips.

  “What’s up with him?” she asks, confused.

  “You… should go after him,” I say, studying her face.

  She looks over at me. “Why?”

  “I think you know why.” So much has felt off since I woke up, but this part of the dream world and the real world feels the same.

  I push myself up, running a hand over my face, the dynamic between the three of us feeling clearer since I woke up from whatever world I was in, since I spent an entire year forced to grapple with a life without her. And I don’t want to lose her again. Not like that. But I also can’t hold her back.

  Not anymore.

  If Sam is her Marley, he’s real and he’s here. He understands her when she’s angry and sad. He’s the person she can be completely herself with.

  “Do you think people should settle?” I ask her. “Even if it’s not what they want?”

  She lets out a long sigh and throws her legs over the bed, standing up to pace the room. I watch as she pulls her hair into a messy bun, ready to resume our fight. “I never said I was settling. I’m sorry about the night of the accident—”

  “I’m not,” I say, cutting her off.

  She stops and looks at me.

  “When I thought you were dead, all I had left were the last words you said to me. I replayed those words over and over.”

  “Kyle, listen. I—”

  “Let me finish. I need to say this, okay?”

  She nods and reaches behind her to find the chair, slowly sitting down.

  “That night, I wasn’t ready to hear you because… I was afraid you were right.” I glance up to see her eyes are wide with surprise. She was definitely not expecting this. But I’m not the same Kyle I was. “To turn around and not see you there… I thought that was the worst nightmare imaginable. But… to turn around and know that there was no you anymore, anywhere?” I let out a ragged breath, remembering that pain. That year I spent thinking she was dead. “Fuck, Kim. That blew up my whole world.”

  She doesn’t say anything, her hands tightly gripping the wooden arms of the chair.

  “But I still had your words. I finally listened to them. And I learned to stand on my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be,” I say, thinking of Marley. The internship. Journalism classes. “I learned who I am. Without you.”

  She’s stunned into silence. That never happens. I keep going, finally saying the words I needed to say but was never able to find.

  “We settled, Kim. You and me. And we weren’t happy.”

  She opens her mouth. Once. Twice. Struggling to find words. Finally they come. “Who are you, and what have you done with Kyle Lafferty?”

  “Oh, that guy?” I give her a small smile. “He was a selfish kid, so I left his ass in the dust. Then I grew up. Or—I’m growing up,” I say as she wipes tears from her cheeks. “Well, I’m trying to,” I admit.

  She stands and gives me a long, uncertain look, unsure of where we go from here.

  I reach out. “Come here.” She hurries into my arms, and I hold her close, her tears falling onto my shirt. “You’re my best friend, Kim. I want you to be so happy,” I tell her. “At Berkeley. Go find what you love. Find someone you love. Find that person you can’t live without. He’s out there.”

  The person I can’t live without. I think of Marley. How it felt to hold my entire world in my arms. How it feels to have it ripped away from me.

  “Yeah, right,” Kim says with a tearful laugh as she pulls away. She quickly grabs a tissue and blows her nose.

  “Hell, go on a date with Sam—”

  The words are barely out of my mouth before she slugs me with her sling-free arm.

  “You’re stupid,” she says, acting like I’ve just said the craziest thing.

  I grab on to the bed rail, smiling at her as I catch myself. I see it, though. In her eyes. That thought. That glimmer of a possibility.

  “Don’t settle again, okay?” I say after I right myself. “Ever. And I won’t either.”

  She nods, agreeing, and we shake on it. “Deal.”

  I take a deep, determined breath as her hand slides out of mine.

  For the first time since I woke up, I feel a little closer to peace. Because I will not settle.

  I won’t give up until I have Marley in my arms again.

  32

  I’m back in my house.

  My house, but not. The world I live in now is leaking in more and more every time I close my eyes. It’s weird, even scary how much my dreams are changing.

  “Kyle.”

  I follow the sound of the voice down a hallway, the walls crumbling around me as I fight to get to her, peeling paint giving way to the pale walls of the hospital, the standard-issue TV, the big window in the corner.

  I finally find her at the kitchen table. I can see her, but… barely.

  I squint, straining, the colors so dull.

  “Everything’s going to change now, isn’t it?” she asks, her voice the same as I remember it. Sadder now.

  I try with everything in me to get closer to her, to hold her again, but my feet won’t move. My legs strain, fighting to take even a single step in her direction. I look down to see my feet are enclosed in grass and mud, the cherry blossoms from the pond sprinkled around my ankles.

  The second I look back up at her, I jolt back into my hospital room, my sheets twisted tightly around my body, sweat beaded across my forehead, and the loss consumes me again.

  * * *

  Her voice still echoes around in my head as I grip the support bars in the physical therapy room a few hours later. I put a guarded amount of weight onto my leg, carefully taking one step and then another. My only break from
my tireless googling the past two days has been going down to see Henry every afternoon, the grueling leg exercises he puts me through an attempt at distracting myself from everything.

  But no matter how hard I try today to focus on my legs, on getting them stronger, I can’t escape the dream I had last night.

  Every day the world around me gets less hazy, but that means every day she feels farther and farther away, that dream I lived in for a year crumbling, cracking, showing its holes every time I go to sleep.

  “I wish I could do that for you,” a voice says.

  I come to a shaky stop and look up to see Sam. Even my good leg feels about as strong as a toothpick, yet somehow Sam looks worse.

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” I ask him. “You’d go through this for me if you could.”

  Sam rolls his eyes like that’s an idiotic question, but he nods. “Of course, dude. You’d do the same for me.”

  I swallow, wobbling, and Henry takes notice. He grabs on to my forearms, giving me some extra support.

  “Let’s take a quick break, okay?” he says as he helps me into my wheelchair, leaving the two of us alone for a bit.

  I’m trying not to live in my dreams, but I think of the day at the cemetery. There’s truth in that conversation, even if we never had it. So maybe we have to have it now.

  “I’ve been a shitty friend to you,” I say.

  Sam quickly shakes his head. “No—”

  “You said it yourself. Kim’s tried to break up with me seven times since the ninth grade,” I say, looking up at him. “You paid close attention. Why?”

  “Uh,” Sam says, frowning, his eyes narrowing as he looks back at me. “I don’t remember saying that.”

  Right. Off to a great start.

  “Well, either way, it’s true. You helped me see her perspective, and you helped her see mine,” I cover. “Every time, Sam, you helped me win her back.”

  I think about yesterday, how he left when he saw us together. “And now you’re trying to do it again. Why?”

  Sam looks away, shrugging.

  “Because you’re a good friend. Too good,” I say, flexing my skinny leg. “I’ve realized a lot of things. And even though I was asleep, a lot of what my brain was processing was real. There’s a reason Kimberly and I could never quite get it right.”

  Sam looks annoyed at me, but I press on.

  “This isn’t about Marley. Or me. It’s about you, Sam. Things haven’t been about you for a long time. If you love her like I think you do, tell her how you feel.”

  Sam swats at my water bottle as I go to drink it. “Come on, dude. This is fucked up. She’s going to Berkeley and she wants to have some space,” he says. “Besides, you’re right out of a coma and you two just broke up.”

  She told him we broke up. That has to count for something.

  I take another swig, carefully staying out of swatting distance this time. “She wanted space from me. She talked to you. She’s still here now. Don’t you want her to know?”

  “Whether or not you’re right doesn’t matter. You can’t control everything,” he says to me, his face serious. “You gotta let people be their own person, you know? Just like you gotta be yours. Whether you’re with Kim or Marley or nobody. You can’t make someone choose you.”

  A long moment passes, and eventually I launch the water bottle at him, my throwing arm still intact post-coma. “That was wise as hell,” I say to him as he catches the water bottle, smirking.

  “You know I’m the brains of this team, dude.” He laughs as he mimics tucking the water bottle under his arm and running, dodging playfully around my chair.

  The jokes, the no-bullshit talks. Things finally feel right between us. Like they did back in the dream world.

  “You want to get some pizza?” he asks, nodding toward the double doors out of here. “I hear the cafeteria makes a mean pepperoni.”

  I snort. “Is that even a question?”

  I’m already unlocking the wheels of my wheelchair, knowing full well the cafeteria’s pepperoni pizza is terrible, but I need a prison break right now.

  In two seconds, Sam grabs the handles and we bust through the doors into the hallway, flying out of the PT room before Henry can even realize I’m gone.

  33

  She’s here.

  I know it immediately even though I can’t see her. I chase her shadow down a hallway of my house, the paint peeling even more than last time, but she’s always just a little bit out of reach, her hair disappearing around corners, her hand slipping through my grasp.

  “I told you I wasn’t meant to be this happy,” her voice says from right next to me, but when I turn quickly to look at her, I jerk awake instead.

  I sit up, gasping for air, my eyes scanning the room automatically for some trace of her that everything and everyone tells me I won’t find.

  My head falls back against the pillow, and I rub my hands over my face, taking in a long, deep breath.

  When I inhale, there’s… her smell. Orange blossoms. Or… I roll my eyes. Honeysuckle.

  I lift my head toward the window and breathe in again, but no scent comes. It fades just as quickly as it came.

  Groaning, I roll over and pull my blanket up over my head.

  That’s when the scent of orange blossoms and honeysuckle overpowers me, like it’s stitched into the blanket. I breathe deeper and I know it’s not coming from the garden. It never was.

  It’s Marley’s smell.

  Somehow, she was here. She was actually here.

  I flick on the light, grab my crutches, and struggle to climb out of bed. Once I right myself, I limp over to the open window, gazing outside, the early-morning light casting a warm glow on all of the plants in the courtyard.

  Looking out, I see yellow Doris Day roses, the color jumping out at me. Smiling, I picture Marley, the yellow dress she wore that last night we had together.

  “You’re yellow,” I say, still able to feel the fabric underneath my fingers. “And Laura loved…” I notice the Stargazers, planted just across the path from the Doris Days, the pink and yellow next to each other.

  If Dr. Ronson were here, he’d say that this was tangible proof that I made that up too.

  But I get a chill.

  Because I realize what a complete idiot I’ve been. I hobble as quickly as I can over to my bed, grabbing my iPad and opening up Google. I type in “Marley + Laura + accident,” and results materialize before my eyes.

  * * *

  Sam finds me surrounded by sticky notes, all of them different Marleys, their geographic location in miles written next to their names.

  “What’s going on here?” he asks warily, picking up two of the sticky notes and reading them. “Marla and Laurie, accident, eighty-eight miles? Marley, Laura, accident, 1,911 miles? Dude, I thought—”

  I hold up another one, showing it to him. “Marley, Lara, seven miles.”

  He stares at me, blinking, not understanding what I’m saying.

  “This has to be her,” I say, telling him about her smell on my blanket this morning, the flowers, and the epiphany I had. I guide him through all my research, explaining to him how I’d spent the day googling combinations of the words “Marley,” “Laura,” and “car accident,” articles from all across the country suddenly at my fingertips.

  After that it was all about efficiency. GPSing the city the accident happened in, giving the first paragraph a scan for names, and then on to the next one.

  By the end, there was a sea of colored papers in front of me. And I’d narrowed it down to this.

  A single yellow Post-it. The key I’ve been looking for.

  “Seven miles away, dude. Plus, the story matches.” I swipe through to the article on my iPad, reading for him. “ ‘Lara, fourteen, was killed on impact by a speeding vehicle on Glendale Street yesterday afternoon.’ ” I look up at Sam and we both grimace, those horrific words feeling odd next to so much excitement.

  “Sam, that’s almost exactly
what happened to Marley’s sister. Seven miles away from here. It all adds up,” I say as I eagerly reach out for the Post-it. “I told you she was real. Now I just have to get over there.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a whole minute; then finally he shakes his head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” I ask him, shaking the Post-it note in front of him. “I found her.”

  “No, you haven’t,” he says, grabbing the Post-it from my hand. “Even if she were the ‘right’ Marley, she doesn’t know you. You were asleep. Forget it, man. I’m not helping you terrorize some poor girl.”

  I grab it back from him. “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to drive me over there.” I’m not going to be released for another few weeks at least because Dr. Benefield is still monitoring my brain activity, and this is definitely not something that can wait. I told Marley I would never leave her and now she’s going to think I have. I can’t put her through that. Not a single day more.

  “How do you even know where she lives?” he asks, incredulous.

  I hold out my iPad to him, showing him the GPS directions from here to the address I found with the help of the article. There was a quote from Lara’s dad, Greg Ellis, about the accident.

  While I couldn’t find anything online about a Marley Ellis, I found plenty about Greg. Including his address.

  We can be there in under twenty minutes.

  “Google is scary,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Sam,” I say, serious. “I need to see her. See if she remembers me.”

  “Remembers you? From where? All those nights she doused herself in jasmine perfume, snuck into your hospital room, and rubbed herself all over your blanket?”

  I throw down one of my crutches and snatch the iPad back from him. “Screw you, then. Don’t help.”

  He stalks to the door, and I know I have one last Hail Mary.

  And I’m an awful person for using it, but I’m desperate.

  “You owe me.”

  Sam spins around, confused. “What?”