by Lena North
“I’m the one who should say that.”
“Okay,” Bones muttered and turned to Nick. “Look, I don’t know what to say. You’ve just… I don’t… Fuck.” He cast another quick glance at Hawker as if the older man would object to the use of a word that was a staple in his vocabulary.
I started giggling, and Nick wheezed out, “Told you not to make me laugh.”
“This room is too crowded,” Jamie announced from the door.
“I’m leaving,” Bones said immediately with apparent relief in his voice, nodded at Nick and me, glanced at the three men from Norton again, and walked away.
“Me too,” Kit muttered. Before the door closed behind him, I heard him say, “Hey, wait up.”
I turned to Nick, but he’d closed his eyes and seemed to breathe heavier.
“Nick,” I squealed.
“Don’t worry,” Jamie said and started fiddling with the instruments next to the bed. “I told you he’d be dozing off every now and then.”
“Yeah,” I replied but my voice was small, and to my horror, my eyes suddenly stung.
As I cursed myself for becoming a silly, weeping fool, Jamie walked around the bed and put his arm gently around me. He’d been gone when I woke up on the couch in the staff break-room after our talk, and he’d seemed like his usual sweet and funny self toward me after that, although he was still impersonal and slightly terse with his cousin.
“Don’t mess with Snow,” Miller suddenly said.
What? Messing with me?
“Is this an official edict from Hawker?” Jamie asked, and his arm around me tightened.
“I don’t give a shit about Hawker. Her Da was my friend, and this is from me,” Miller stated.
“Hell yeah, it’s official,” Hawker muttered, but added sourly, “What do you mean, don’t give a shit about Hawker?”
“It means that right now, I don’t give a shit about you,” Miller said and looked calmly at his friend.
Yikes. Would they start a fight in Nick’s hospital room? Really?
Before their argument escalated, Olly walked into the room, followed by his father who stopped at the foot of Nick's bed and said, “This isn’t official either, Jamieson. This is Snow’s family telling you to back the fuck off before I crush you.”
The older man was scowling in a way that had Jamie removing his arm so quickly he slammed it into a chair, which toppled over and bounced into the wall.
I started smiling and moved toward the huge man.
“Uncle Sven,” I said and walked straight into the arms of my father’s older brother. “It’s good to see you.”
“Yeah,” he breathed into my hair, but he kept his eyes on Jamie.
“Y’all really need to stop peeing on the turf called Snow,” Nick murmured sleepily, although he was watching my uncle intently. “Here’s the deal,” he said calmly. “If I make it, no way in hell I’ll ever let him mess with her. I have a shot at happiness, and I’m holding on to that. I don’t make it? Don’t know a better man to help her with what comes then. If I’m not around anymore, I want him for her.”
There was a long, stunned silence in the room and I had a lump in my throat that didn’t go away no matter how many times I swallowed.
“Nicky…” Jamie whispered.
“It’s true, though I have to warn you, geek-boy… I’m not planning to die just yet.”
“Well, that sucks, doesn’t it?” Jamie muttered.
“Not for me,” Nick said but added a disgruntled, “Ouch,” when they both chuckled.
I watched them share their first happy moment in many years, and my arms held on tighter around Uncle Sven’s waist. He squeezed me back, and I wondered how much Olly had told him. Everything, most likely.
I opened my mouth to say something, but I had no clue what to say.
“Where are you going when you can leave the hospital?” Olly asked.
“You’re welcome to Marshes,” Dante said immediately.
He’d been watching us quietly, and I smiled at him. He’d come to the hospital every day, and Jiminella had been with him most of the times. We weren’t back to where we had been before our fight, but we were slowly mending the rift between us. I wondered if we ever would be the same again, though, or if I even wanted that.
“The Islands would be good,” Jamie said. “Uncle Nico would take good care of you.”
“Wilder said to tell that Double H is close to the hospital and they’d love to have you there,” Hawker muttered.
I tilted my head back and looked up at my uncle. Our eyes met, and I smiled into his blue eyes, so similar to my own. So similar to my father’s.
“You’re finally ready?” he rumbled.
I turned toward the room, and when my eyes met Nick’s, the look on his face softened.
“We’re going home,” I announced. “We’re going to Norton.”
***
We drove up to the house I’d been born in, and my belly started to hurt. I’d been back to Norton three times since my Mama packed two small suitcases and drove us down to Marshes. I hadn’t gone to my house during either of the visits.
An older woman stood on the front porch to the house next to where Uncle Sven parked the car. I recognized her immediately. It was Mrs. Pearson, and I had been scared shitless of her as a young girl. She seemed smaller, and less scary now, though.
I waved at her as I rounded the car to open the passenger door. Carson had picked us up in Prosper with his helicopter, and then Uncle Sven had waited at the helipad behind the hospital building in Norton, so the trip had been smoother than I expected. Nick had nevertheless dropped off as soon as we got into the car and I worried that I’d made the wrong decision when I said we’d go to Norton. Maybe staying with Wilder at Double H would have been better.
“I’m good,” he muttered and stretched a little.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“Stretch?”
“Move,” I grumbled.
I was about to help him out of the car, which likely would start off another argument where we’d both end up frustrated and annoyed, when the old lady called out an order for me to come and say hello.
Norton wasn’t the kind of place where you ignored your neighbors, and absolutely not this particular neighbor, so I sighed and muttered, “Shit. Be back.”
Then I pasted a broad smile on my face and walked over to reacquaint myself with Mrs. Pearson. She was only slightly less scary than I remembered and told me to call her Vera.
“Okay,” I agreed.
No way in hell I’d call the older woman Vera.
“Hello,” Nick said behind me.
“Your hair looks like sausages,” Mrs. Pearson muttered.
“I know,” Nick assured her cordially. “It would look like a huge ball if I didn’t have these though. Prefer sausages.”
“Huh,” she said and surveyed him. “You could shave it all off?” she suggested but didn’t seem too keen on the idea.
“That’s for later. Most men where I come from cut the dreads off when they become fathers.”
What?
I decided immediately that we weren’t having any children, ever. I loved Nick’s dreads.
“Huh,” Mrs. Pearson repeated. “Do you have a name?”
“Nick.”
“I’m Vera.”
She stared at him, and I suddenly remembered exactly why I had been so scared of her when I was younger, but Nick just met her gaze calmly.
“You’re a cool one,” she said after a while.
“Yup,” he agreed affably, and she chuckled.
Then she noticed the bandages sticking out under the sleeve of his loose shirt.
“Injured?”
“Shot, four times. We’re here to let me sleep it off.”
Her brows shot up and then she looked at me.
“Were you shot, Snow?”
It sounded a little like an accusation, and I st
epped closer to Nick.
“No?” I said uncertainly.
Nick started laughing, and so did Mrs. Pearson.
“You’d better get inside and lie down, boy. My late husband’s cousin and nephew are the doctors around here. They live there,” she said, pointed to a big house next to hers, and added, “Shouting distance.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pearson,” I interrupted what seemed to be an unexpected bonding between my seriously injured boyfriend and the cantankerous old lady living next door.
“Vera,” Nick murmured politely, but to my horror, he added, “I’ll need some sleep during my first days here, but you would perhaps like to come over for a visit once we’ve settled in? I don’t know much about Snow’s home here, but I expect that you do.”
“I will certainly do so,” she said, turned around abruptly, and walked away.
“Why did you have to invite her,” I hissed as we approached my uncle who was waiting by the front door. “She’s scary. And grumpy.”
“She’s lonely, Snow.”
That simple statement stopped me from complaining further.
“She isn’t scary, but she is enormously grumpy,” Uncle Sven rumbled. “You’re right, though. She’s also lonely. That was nice of you.”
“Thanks,” Nick said.
I felt like a heel but then I noticed how the lines on Nick’s face had deepened, and the pinched look in his eyes.
“Does it hurt?” I asked quietly.
“Yeah, a little,” he said. “I need to lie down for a while.”
His voice was terse, and he didn’t look happy, but it shook me into action.
“Right. Okay. Let’s find you a bed.”
“We’ve set you up in the main guest room,” my uncle said. “Time enough later to figure out what you want to do with the house.”
Pushing all my memories back, I led Nicky through the house, and into a big room with huge windows toward the garden. The sheets seemed new, and there were other details I didn’t remember.
“Aunt Bee fixed this?”
“Sure did, with some help from Mary. Miller and Olly went and got the bed, it’s new.”
“Tell them thank you?” I murmured, focused on getting Nick down on the bed without tearing his chest wide open.
“Yeah, from me too,” Nick sighed when he was horizontal, finally. “Snow, stop fretting. I’m good. Let me sleep for half an hour and then we’ll go buy groceries.”
“You’ll stay where you are until tomorrow, boy,” Uncle Sven stated. “The fridge is full of food, including a couple of meals that just need heating. Pizza place is number three on speed dial, and they deliver.”
“I’m not –”
Nick tried to protest, but he’d clearly not spent enough time with my uncle.
“I got instructions from that cousin of yours. They will be followed. You get me?”
“Yes, Sir,” Nick said immediately, which really was the only answer available to him.
“I’ll walk you out, Uncle Sven,” I said.
I wanted to thank him properly for the trouble they’d gone through.
“Grew up in this house. Know where the door is,” he rumbled and left.
Okay. Well, I guess he did.
“And he called Vera grumpy,” Nick said.
“How do you feel?”
“I’m good. A bit achy, mostly tired.”
“Okay. Rest for a while, I’ll go find out of they’ve made up another bed, or if I can find sheets.”
“Why would you do that?” he asked, although I could see that he knew and he continued before I could tell him. “You will sleep here with me.”
“I might turn around and –”
“Please.”
The look in his eyes undid me, and I gave in immediately. We spent the afternoon and evening on the bed in the guest room in my parents’ house. My house. I didn’t sleep much, but the night wasn’t as horrible as I’d feared and I wondered if my bad memories had grown to unreasonable proportions. It was just a house, and there had been happiness in that house too.
Chapter Nineteen
Oz’ child
Nick’s recovery was faster than I expected but way, way slower than what he wanted, and he was not in a jovial mood. The first days it took the combined efforts from me, Uncle Sven and Olly to keep him in bed, but then we got unexpected assistance.
My neighbor visited and when I opened the door to let her in, she gave me a glare of epic proportions. Then she instructed me to call her Vera, and informed me that she’d slap me if I insisted on addressing her as Mrs. Pearson. I murmured her name instantly, convinced that she’d follow through on her threat if I didn’t. She brought coffee as if we didn’t have a coffee-maker, dry biscuits, as if Aunt Bee hadn’t dropped off her famous sticky buns, and sat down in the huge chair next to the couch where Nick was resting after a fifteen-minute slow walk around the garden.
“Boy,” she barked. “This girl here has had enough people dying on her, she does not need you to join the crowd. Stop your whining and do what they tell you to do, which is what the doctors have ordered you to do.”
“I’m –”
His protest was met with the same glare I got, and it silenced him too.
“Did I in any way give you the impression that this was open for discussion?” she snapped.
“No ma’am,” he muttered.
“Fine. Now tell me about those Islands of yours. I’ve barely left Norton in my life, so I want to know.”
He obeyed, and over the next days, we talked about where he grew up. I learned a lot about him through his stories for Vera, and slowly we brought Norton and my own life into it. Vera had pictures from my childhood, and Nick enjoyed looking at them. I enjoyed looking at him looking at me as a child. His face softened, and I couldn’t find it in me to refuse to take the photos when Vera thrust them in my hand. It hurt to look at my family as we had been back then, but I grit my teeth, and as the days passed, it became easier. The hurt was still there, but it was a good pain in many ways. It felt oddly healing.
“You don’t seem to be big on huge families here?” Nick asked.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but he was right. I was an only child, and so were many others. Having more than two kids was unusual in Norton. Vera’s mouth suddenly formed a thin line, and I suddenly remembered that she just had one son. Maybe she’d wanted more?
“We are not very fertile in this village,” she said, and went on to confirm my suspicion. “My husband and I wanted more children, but it never happened.”
“I’m sorry,” Nick said, and the simple words made her face soften again.
“It is what it is, and I’m the best babysitter in the whole village,” she said. “There are several Johns’ in the right age, so I’m sure I’ll be busy.”
“Johns?” I asked, knowing that she talked about Hawker and Wilder, but not understanding what she meant.
“They breed like rabbits in that family.”
Since Hawker had two brothers and Wilder just one, I didn’t think the rabbits she referred to were very fertile either, but I didn’t say so.
“Gilmore Johns had three sisters,” she added. “One of them died when she was young, though, and the other two left years ago.”
“Left?” I asked.
Most people didn’t leave Norton, and if they did, they moved somewhere close by, like Miller's brother Carson had done. I’d thought I had been the only one to leave permanently. I wondered if Wilder knew that she had grand-aunts somewhere.
“There’s always a fight when it comes to the Johns family,” she chuckled. “They left, one after the other. One went abroad and the other hooked up with a slimy little man from the plains. They came back a few times, but I think they’re dead now.”
“Oh,” I said inanely.
“It will be good to add my genepool to the village then,” Nick suddenly said with a grin, and added to my horror, “We’re i
ncredibly prolific on the Islands,”
He wiggled his brows a few times, and I slapped his shoulder. I did not need him making any kind of innuendoes in front of my elderly neighbor.
“No need to tell me that,” Vera said primly. “You look very fertile.”
Oh. My. God. The conversation was not going the way I’d expected. Or wanted.
“Coffee!” I squealed and jumped up.
Their laughter followed me into the kitchen, and I heard them talking as I made another bucket of coffee. I was laughing too, though.
The older woman’s grumpiness seemed to fade away after that, and I came to like her dry humor. She told us that she had a miniature pig, and I laughed out loud when I found out that the female animal was called Miller. She brought another neighbor from across the street, and the two old biddies were hilarious together. We only talked about my parents in a roundabout and somewhat impersonal way, and it started to feel weird to leave them out of the memories. I wondered if I was finally ready to talk about what had happened.
“Is Vera coming today?” I asked when we’d been in Norton over a week.
I’d planned for us to take a slow walk down to Main Street for coffee, and thought she might like to join us. He had apparently made other plans.
“Not today, baby. Today we talk about your parents,” he said calmly.
Before I could protest, Olly walked in carrying a bag of my favorite breakfast croissants, followed by my aunt and uncle. It was nice that they came, but neither Olly nor I were morning persons, so their visit must have been planned in advance.
“Why don’t we sit down in the living room,” Aunt Bee said calmly, giving me no time to comment on their presence. “You’ll be more comfortable there,” she added and shuffled Nick in front of her.
Since he held my hand and wouldn’t let go, I found myself pulled down on the big couch.
“I don’t know what to say,” I mumbled into the silence that followed. “He died, she did too. What else is there to say?”
I knew my evasive comments wouldn’t be enough when Nick squeezed my hand.
“Why don’t I tell you a little about my brother,” Sven said, not putting it as a question and not waiting for me to agree, or even for Olly to finish pouring coffee.
