My stomach turns over and I feel like I might throw up. I lean forward and start retching.
Jay grabs a bedpan from the sink and rushes over to me while Mom holds back my hair. I don’t throw anything up, though.
Mom looks at me, concerned.
I stare blankly, picturing Reed at the side of Serena’s bed. Serena never even liked Reed, but now they share something so big, it’s bigger than anything. Reed can be her lightning mentor like a sponsor in AA. I almost laugh. It’s kind of like that. And my whole life, my wish to be struck by lightning might as well have been, “If I could just be an alcoholic, then everything would be okay.”
Mom touches the back of her hand to my forehead.
“I’m fine,” I say. I scooch down so I’m lying flat on my back.
“I can’t send him away now. And if Serena’s feeling up to it tomorrow or the next day, she can come to the meeting and meet some of the other survivors.”
I turn onto my side, my back to her.
“Serena needs us now,” Mom says, and I hear the curiosity in her voice. “I know that things between you haven’t been great, but can you put those feelings aside and remember that she used to be your best friend?”
Mom doesn’t understand. She thinks I’m still mad at Serena.
I nod, then whisper, “I want to take a nap.”
She touches my hair and then I hear her knees crack, one, then the other. I hear the door open and close. I can feel Jay still in the room.
“You can leave, too,” I say, my voice muffled by my pillow.
“I want to stay with you,” he says.
I try to hold it in, I try so badly, but I can’t anymore. The sobs come on like convulsions, a seizure. I can’t control them. I cry so hard and it feels so awful and so good. I know Jay is still standing there, probably not knowing what to do. I want him to come sit with me, but I’m also okay with him just being here, standing, being near me while he lets me release it all.
Finally, after what feels like forever, the crying subsides and I take a few shaky deep breaths. And then I breathe quietly through my mouth, my nose now too stuffy to let any air through.
“Should I come over there?” Jay asks quietly.
“Yeah.” I sit up slowly and reach for a tissue. Wipe my eyes and nose. He stares at my face as he stands next to me.
“Not so pretty, huh?” I ask. I’m sure that my eyes are puffy and my nose is probably bright red.
He shrugs.
I hit him in the arm.
“Ow,” he says.
He pushes the chair away with his foot and sits on my bed. Then he reaches over, slides his arm under my back, and pulls me into his chest. I close my eyes and press my face against his soft flannel shirt, still damp from the rain, and I feel his heart beat against my cheek. I breathe in his Jay smell—soap, shaving cream, and boy, plus a hint of hospital. He holds me tight, one hand spread across my upper back, one holding the back of my head.
“When they discharge you, I’m taking you to my house,” he whispers into my hair. “You don’t need to go back there until they’re gone.”
I nod into his shirt, feeling the tears sting again.
“I wanted to be moved into the garage by now,” I whimper. In a few short hours, my house will become theirs—Mom’s and the group’s. And now Serena’s too. But not mine.
“I know,” he says. And he doesn’t try to make it better by saying “It’ll be ready for the next meeting,” and he doesn’t try to fix it or come up with a plan, and man, I love him for that. I feel his lips on the top of my head, and the hand on my back moves in circles, and I am really, really thankful for him.
FORTY-ONE
Everyone has a side to them that’s kind of unexplained and feels misunderstood.
—Kirk Hammett (musician)
After Mom signs my discharge papers and I’m cleared to go, she seems torn.
“I just need to—give me just a few minutes to—” she says, her eyes darting back and forth between Jay and me. I know she feels like she should take me home and take care of me, but I also know she really wants to stay and “advocate” for Serena. That’s what she does.
Jay says he’ll take me back to his house and Mom doesn’t waste a second thanking him. She kisses me and then disappears.
Jay turns his back while I change out of the hospital gown and into my clothes, which are still a bit damp from the rain, even though Mom had spread them out on the window ledge by the heating vent to dry.
I’m so tired, but I need to see Serena before we leave. Jay leads me to her room. An aide is there, changing the sheets on the bed.
“You just missed her,” the aide says. “They moved her up to four.”
“That’s an observation floor,” Jay explains to me. “That’s where they’ll keep her overnight.”
That’s probably where Mom rushed off to. I nod and then wince at how the motion shoots pain to the bump on my head.
“If they just moved her,” Jay continues, “she probably won’t be able to see you right now. The old team of doctors and nurses has to brief the new team and it can get hectic. Let’s just get back to Wellfleet. Kyle had one of his friend’s drive my car and leave it here for me, so we can go now. We can come back tomorrow morning if she’s still here.”
I wonder whether Jay’s afraid that reporters will be waiting for him outside Serena’s door. I know I’m afraid Reed will be there. And seeing Serena like this would be—I don’t know—weird. I want to apologize. Things may be bad between us right now, but I want to be at her side. I’m just not sure if she feels the same way.
On our way to Jay’s car in the parking lot, he swivels his head around a lot, looking for reporters probably. But there’s no one there.
“I guess they got bored of you,” I say.
“I hope so.”
We get to his car, and he clicks the doors unlocked.
When I get in, I grunt because the hard seat alerts me to an ache on my butt. I must have fallen hard on it and didn’t feel it as much when I was lying down.
“You okay?” Jay asks.
“Mmmm,” I say, because if I speak, I’ll start to cry again. This fresh pain brings me right back to when I was recovering from falling down Reed’s stairs. The constant throbbing that was a reminder every second of every day of what had happened, of how stupid I’d been, how hard I’d fallen for someone who’d never really felt the same way. A tear trickles down my cheek. Jay reaches over and touches it, then holds his finger out to show me the drop.
He leans over, though he doesn’t have to lean far since he takes up most of the car anyway. He presses his lips against the spot on my cheek, rests his nose on my cheekbone. I sigh.
“You’ve cried more in the last couple of weeks than in the three years I’ve known you,” he says as he pulls away from me. “Did you know that emotional tears have more protein than basal and reflex tears?”
I shake my head no, but I’m smiling now. “I have no idea what you’re even talking about.”
He smiles, then starts the car.
I put my head against the window, which is cool against my skin. I close my eyes and listen to the hum of the engine, Jay’s breathing, the cars rushing by on Route 6.
When I open my eyes, we’re parked in front of Jay’s house, and I’m covered with a heavy, scratchy, wool blanket.
I sit up slowly and wipe my mouth.
“What time is it?” I ask.
“You’ve been asleep for an hour,” Jay says. “I thought about carrying you inside but I didn’t want to wake you up.”
I sit up straighter, stretch my legs, move my neck slowly from side to side. I still hurt, but sleep was good for me.
“Let’s go inside,” he says. “No one’s home.”
I’m starving. It only takes us a few minutes to polish off the leftover lasagna Jay pulled out of the refrigerator. We don’t heat it up or bother with plates; we just eat it right out of the pan. Jay searches through cupboards and the re
frigerator for something else.
“Soup?” he asks.
“Sure.”
He pours a can of chicken noodle into a pot and we wait for it to heat up.
“I can’t believe Serena could’ve died. I can’t think about that,” I say. “You were really incredible.”
He shrugs.
“You weren’t even on duty. You didn’t have anyone to tell you what to do, like in training. You’re really good at this. I’m glad it’s your thing.”
“Did I ever tell you that I was really into guns when I was eleven?” he asks suddenly.
I shake my head, trusting Jay that his conversational one-eighty has a purpose.
“I was into the actual guns themselves, not like violence and shooting people. I watched thousands of videos and I knew everything—how they’re made, all the parts, factories, what makes each gun different, all of the technical stuff that goes along with it. I imagined that one day, I’d design guns or something. Because it was what I liked, the thing that I thought about and wanted to spend all my free time on.”
I’m not sure why Jay is telling me this. I hate guns, as a rule, but as Jay talks about the way he viewed them, I realize he could just as easily have been talking about any kind of machine.
“And then the K.O. thing happened. And then a couple weeks after the K.O. thing, there was a mass shooting at a school in Providence. A twenty-year-old guy who’d gone there for middle school went in for some reunion thing and shot and killed nineteen people before he killed himself.”
“Jesus,” I say. “I remember when that happened.”
“Do you remember all the profiles and stuff about him in the news afterward?”
I shake my head.
“He was obsessed with guns. And he had Asperger’s.”
My stomach plunges. I can’t say anything.
“You can imagine how things here went after that,” he continues. “My mom didn’t tell me to or anything, but I decided to stop thinking about guns. Which was really hard. I mean, I was like an expert and I had to give it up.
“I kind of forced myself to become interested in cars. And then, more specifically in emergency vehicles and lights. I learned about the patterns of lights for each kind of emergency vehicle, how they were used. I learned about the police cars, ambulances, tow trucks, everything. And then I clicked on a video thinking it would be about a certain kind of fire truck lighting, but it turned out to be a video of EMTs rescuing three kids from a frozen lake. Everyone was smiling and cheering for them because they’d rescued those kids.
“And that’s when I realized I wanted to do that. I shifted to videos about emergency medicine, EMS training. I wanted to see smiles instead of the fear I saw whenever I walked into a room. Wherever I went, people saw that guy. The Providence shooter. And I needed to change that.”
“And it worked?” I ask.
“For the most part,” he says.
“It’s weird that I never knew how you got into being an EMT. I’m glad you found it,” I say.
Jay leans his back on the counter next to the stove, facing me.
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
I nod.
“Why did you do it? I mean, why now? I thought you said you were done with that. And I thought—I just thought you were done.”
I stare at the ceiling, searching for something.
“I guess ‘I don’t know’ isn’t good enough?” I say, my voice cracking on the last word.
He shakes his head no.
“Part of it is habit, I know that,” I say. “I hear thunder and I get this adrenaline rush. Probably like a drug addict who’s about to get their fix.”
“Right,” he says, but it sounds more like “Uh-huh, go on, because that’s kind of bullshit.”
I look at him and his eyes are sad. Hurt. And then I realize that he thinks I was chasing lightning trying to find my soul mate, even though he and I are just starting to become something else.
“Oh,” I say. “It wasn’t about the soul mate stuff. I—that’s not it at all. After everything with Reed, I think I realized it was never really about that. It’s always been about my mom. I’ve been thinking about this lately, trying to remember how it started—why I wanted to in the first place.”
Jay turns off the stove burner and ladles soup into two bowls. He brings them over to the counter and I breathe in the salty white swirls of steam that rise from mine.
“When I was little, my mom and I lived in this tiny apartment in Detroit and we didn’t have anyone else—no family or anything—but I loved it. It was like the two of us were best friends making our way through the world. And then, after she found the lightning-strike survivors group and started getting involved, there were always people around. At first, I kind of loved that, too—I’d never had grandparents or aunts and uncles or cousins. These people were like our giant extended family. And I was their little mascot. But one day I realized that the life we’d had—Mom and me making our way together—just us—was over. I would never be enough for her anymore.”
I blow on my soup to cool it off.
“Why?” Jay asks. “What happened?”
“I was in third grade. My mom was with Sue in the kitchen, and I wanted to show them this drawing I’d done in school. I don’t remember what it was, but I’d worked really hard on it and I was really excited to show Mom. They were having a pretty intense conversation about Sue’s husband and I knew that I wasn’t supposed to interrupt, so I stood outside the kitchen, waiting for an opening to come in. And then I heard my mom say something like ‘There’s no way he can understand what you’re going through. I know for me, it’s impossible to be close with anyone who hasn’t experienced what I have—being struck or knowing my soul mate. Basically, if it weren’t for all of you, I’d feel completely alone.’ They held hands across the table then, and since they weren’t talking anymore, I burst into the room to show them my picture. They ooh-ed and aah-ed over it as usual. But I remember it felt like Mom was just phoning it in, and it all felt different, like something had irreversibly changed, and I knew it had to do with what I’d overheard.”
I ate a few spoonfuls of soup and even though it was still a little too hot, it tasted so good. Like comfort and health. Jay stayed quiet, ready to listen.
“From then on, I knew that, deep down, she didn’t feel like I could relate to her since I hadn’t been struck by lightning. It’s why I wanted to get struck by lightning. Because I wanted to understand my mom. I mean, I knew she loved me, but it was obvious we couldn’t be our team of two if my not getting struck prevented her from being close to me. So, I guess that’s how it all started. But I lost track along the way and turned it into soul mate stuff, or whatever.”
Jay’s bowl is empty, but he still holds his spoon. He takes both of our bowls and puts them in the sink.
“I can see that logic,” he says. “I mean, from a little kid’s point of view. But she probably wasn’t talking about you—she meant like friends, boyfriends, whatever.”
I consider that. Maybe. Maybe I’d just been a kid and had done a bad job reading between the lines. Who knew? I shrug. Suddenly I’m so tired from talking and listening. I yawn.
“Do you want to lie down?” he asks.
“Yeah, I think I want to take a shower first, if that’s okay. And then, I’m sure I could fall asleep.”
And to prove it, I yawn again.
FORTY-TWO
Excuse me while I kiss the sky.
—Jimi Hendrix (musician)
Upstairs, Jay moves quickly ahead of me.
He grabs two towels from the hall closet, then goes into his room. Clothes spill out of open drawers in his dresser. He digs into one of the drawers, pulls out a folded gray T-shirt, and hands it, along with the towels, to me.
“Here’s a shirt if you want something clean to wear,” he says. “My pants won’t fit you, though.”
“Thanks.” I carry the towels and the shirt to the bathroom that Jay and Kyl
e share. There’s only men’s shampoo and soap—no conditioner—but I wash my hair anyway and scrub my body, wanting to wash away the rain, the parking lot, the hospital, the guilt, and everything with Mom.
After I dry off, I put on Jay’s T-shirt. It’s soft and hangs to the middle of my thighs. I drape my clothes over the shower-curtain rod. Everything is pretty dry but I don’t want to put any of it back on now that I feel so clean. I find a brush under the sink and run it through my hair, working through the tangles. I use my finger to rub toothpaste on my teeth.
When I go back into Jay’s room, he’s not there. I slide into his bed and pull the comforter up to my chin.
A minute later, Jay comes in. His hair is wet, and he’s wearing a clean white T-shirt and sweat pants, no socks.
“You showered, too?” I ask.
“Yeah, in my mom’s bathroom. I felt hospital-y.”
He starts moving around his room, picking stuff up from the floor, closing drawers.
“Aren’t you going to lie down with me?” I ask.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes,” I say.
He drops the stuff he’s holding on the dresser and then stretches out next to me, pulling the covers over himself, too.
I move close to him, put my arms around him, lay my head on his chest. His arms slide around my back and he pulls me in tighter. His breath is warm in my damp hair. I want to sleep like this, to take a long nap, but I also feel the familiar stirring in my nerve endings, which means I want him to touch me everywhere, not just on my back. And the fact that I’m not wearing underwear, and he doesn’t know that, makes me feel really sexy.
We have the whole house to ourselves. His mom and her boyfriend, Gabe, are out of town, and Kyle isn’t home. It feels very grown-up.
I tilt my face up and kiss underneath his chin, loving the sandpapery feeling on my lips. I kiss his jaw, light kisses up the right side, back down, up the left side. His breathing gets heavier, and I can feel his body heat up.
He sighs. Then he softly kisses my forehead, my cheek, my lips.
“Rach,” he says. “I don’t believe in soul mates.”
Soulstruck Page 20
