by Vivian Lux
"I got you. Here, we can make our coats into a blanket, unzip, that way both our body heat gets trapped, it'll keep us warmer."
But I was starting to shiver in earnest now. The last vestiges of the heat had been sapped away by the swirling snow. I wanted like hell to open the door but I knew that letting in the cold was a bad idea. I closed my eyes again, trying to will away the feeling of being trapped by reminding myself that Jonah loved me. His arms were around me right now. I was as safe as I could be and any minute now someone would come.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Jonah
"Ruby? Ruby? Wake up."
Her teeth chattering had woken me from my own frozen sleep. I leaned forward and could no longer make out the shapes of the dark trees ahead of us.
The snow had covered the windshield so thickly I could no longer see anything at all.
While we slept we were slowly getting buried.
My mouth felt like a sock had been stuffed in it and a headache was starting behind my eyes, traces of the whiskey still leaving my system. We'd been in here too long, why had no one come to pull us out? "Ruby, baby, I know it's hard but you have got to wake up, okay?"
She mumbled awake, setting her teeth to chattering at once. "Jesus," she shivered.
"I know."
"How long have we been here?"
"It's still night. I think. I don't know."
"It looks dark."
"I think that's because there's so much snow on the windshield."
I tried to keep my voice light, like 'oh look at that' but Ruby immediately caught the danger in my words. "We're getting buried and no one has found us yet? They won't be able to see us, Jonah, how can they find us...?"
"Okay." The fear was clearing my head, but it still felt like my brain was moving slowly, thoughts stuck in the thick sludge of cold. That was bad, I knew it. "Okay, baby?" I wished I could kiss the cold out of her cheeks. But it was only getting colder. I took a deep breath. "I need you to climb out, okay? We gotta start moving here."
"Jonah..."
"Ruby, we're going to be fine." I was decidedly not fine, but I didn't want her to know just how cloudy my brain was. "We just need to get out of here now and go back to the farmhouse with the blown down tree. We're not too far from it, right? Just have to stay on the road and we'll be there in no time."
She took a deep breath and then shoved her whole weight against the door again. I heard the scraping grind of the metal against the ground, the chuck of a rock glancing off. "Can you squeeze out now?"
"I can try." I could hear the panic in her voice and reached out to squeeze her hand. "I'm sorry," she said with a shuddering breath, pulling herself together. "I have claustrophobia really bad and I think it just occurred to me we're trapped here."
"We're not trapped, not at all, look, your door is open, right? You're just going to squeeze out there and then pull from the other end. I'm going to need you to help get my big ass out of here, okay?"
Asking for her help always did it. That's why I loved this girl. You told her you needed her and she was rock solid there for you. "Okay," she said, taking a wavering breath.
I heard the sound of fabric scraping and then the noise of her foot as she tried to find a place to stand. In the dark I reached out, putting a reassuring hand on her back. "If you need a push, I'm right here."
"Can you... not touch me?"
"Of course." Stupid me, she had just gotten done telling me she had claustrophobia. "You're doing great, Ruby."
"I'm almost out. Yes..." There was a scraping sound. "Ow!" she hissed.
"You okay?"
"Cut my leg. I'm okay."
But she sounded like she was in pain and for a second my rage was enough to surge me forward. "Can you step back baby? I'm coming out now."
I threw everything I had into squeezing through that door, ripping a hole right across the thigh of my designer jeans. I shook my head. Well I looked like a local now.
I blinked but the dark remained total. Out here, the wind was whipping around, stealing the last vestiges of warmth we'd held on to in the car. "Here," I said, shoving my hands blindly out. "Take my gloves."
"You need them, don't you?"
"I have pockets. Let's hurry."
I found Ethel's tire tracks almost by accident, and grabbed Ruby's arm. "Stay close, right here, with me okay? And I want you to keep talking."
"Talk about what?"
"Whatever you need to tell me.
I concentrated on staying in the track until suddenly the ground was solid under my boots and I knew we had hit the road. From the way we'd climbed, it suddenly made sense why no one had found us driving by. We would have been invisible. I heard a far off noise of an engine and froze, but no headlights pierced the darkness. The snow was falling steadily now, but no longer looked like a tornado of white. The worst was over.
"So Kayleigh is a little drama queen," Ruby was saying, babbling. "And she goes whining to her mother who's a kindergarten teacher too, saying that Brandon had shown her his butt when the poor kid's pants just fell down..."
I chuckled. "That's great baby." The tips of my fingers throbbed and I shoved them into my pockets, cursing myself for wearing a leather jacket instead of something warmer. Then I remembered that if I had my hands in my pockets I couldn't hold on to Ruby, so I reached out and grabbed her. "Here, we're just going to walk now, okay? Just a walk?"
Stumbling, blinded by the snow and wind, we walked, holding each other and I tried not to dwell on morbid thoughts like, "I'm really glad I told her I loved her before we died." "What if I made the wrong call? We should have stayed with the car?" "Are we going to die because I wanted to play for an audience again? Am I really the way that Gabe has always claimed I was?
My thoughts swirled like the snow. Ruby's babble had died away and I could hear her teeth chattering violently now. "Come closer," I told her, slinging my arm over her and pulling her close. The tip of my pinky was really starting to hurt now. "I see, I think I see a stop sign, right? That's the intersection, we're not too far baby."
Ruby mumbled something like she was trying to talk but her teeth were chattering too much. Blank fear took over my body. "Okay baby, I'm going to carry you now, ready?" She made no response, so I slung her into a fireman's carry and started to run, my heart pounding out of my chest. I was running blind past the stop sign, when I saw a fuzzy light, snow dancing viciously around it.
"Look baby. Look it's the house. We did it. You did it. Just hold on, not long now. Help!" I shouted. "Someone help!
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ruby
The farmhouse with the blown down tree was owned by a man named Don Raw. Turns out he'd known my father and was very surprised to find Joe Riley's daughter half frozen on his doorstep at three in the morning. He'd woken up to check on his animals and ended up saving us instead.
Now I sat at the edge of a hospital bed with a blanket over my shoulders, sipping microwaved hot chocolate and listening to the mysterious beeping sounds that pinged all around me, but my whole body was on edge. "Excuse me?" I called to a nurse who was hurrying past. "I'm looking for information on the man I came in here with?"
She immediately came over and checked my pulse. "You two really went through something tonight," she said as she counted the beats.
I pressed my lips together. "He saved my life," I agreed.
She glanced up my eyes. "You really love him, don't you?"
I nodded, suddenly unable to speak. The weight of what we'd just gone through - how Jonah had risked his own life to save mine, how he'd pushed himself to the limit to carry me to safety - made my breath catch in my throat. "I really do," I said.
She nodded and then gave a conspiratorial grin. "Come on. There's no reason why you can't finish warming up in his room."
I slipped off the bed and followed after her. Strange feelings of numbness were still present in my limbs, like little localized shots of Novacaine, but the doctor had said that would su
bside. I'd escaped the worse of the hypothermia by staying close to Jonah's body heat.
The way I figured it, staying close to Jonah was a good strategy overall. I was already smiling when I pushed the door open to see him, but my smile fell immediately when I saw him sitting there with heavy bandages on both of his hands.
He lifted his head and smiled softly when I came in. "Boy am I glad to see you," he said. "How are you doing?"
"I'm totally fine," I said, perching at the edge of his bed. But my heart was sinking rapidly. "You're not though," I said, gesturing to his hands. "Frostbite?"
"Well they didn't turn black and fall off." He shifted in the bed and grinned at me. "Finn told me I had the lamest version of frostbite ever. Just some blisters.
"On your fingertips?"
He nodded and kept the smile on his face but I could see a shadow of pain cross it, and instantly knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it too.
His fingertips. That he used to play guitar.
Waves of guilt crashed up against waves of love until I felt like I was being sucked down into a whirlpool. "If you hadn't been there - ." I started to say and then stopped.
The car had gone off into a steep embankment alongside the road. In the blinding white and pitch dark, it was like it was invisible. If I had been alone, and stayed there, the snow would have covered the car until it was one more indistinct lump in the snow. Maybe no one would have even come until the day time, at which point who knows what would have happened. "It was crazy to leave the car and go blundering through the storm," I said. "But doing the crazy thing probably saved both our lives."
He nodded tightly. "I have another crazy thing I'm thinking of doing."
I gingerly took his bandaged hand and rested it in my lap, stroking his arm up and down. "You're going to join Gabe on his TV show?" I teased.
His mouth twisted up in that natural smile I was seeing more and more often. "I mean he is leaving this week to go start shooting. Now is my chance."
I must have looked furious because he burst out laughing. "No, are you kidding me? First off, Gabe would kick my ass for trying to steal his spotlight. Second, I don't even want his spotlight. He literally just got his arm out of a splint, and now he'd going to go try and bust himself up again. I don't get it."
"I think you do. He feels alive when he's risking something. You feel alive when the spotlight is on you."
He shook his head firmly. "I feel alive when I'm with you."
I leaned into him. "Especially when we almost die?"
He chuckled and scratched his fingers along the back of my hair, making me want to purr. "I think I can forego almost dying for a while and just be with you."
I sighed happily as his words hung there in the air. With each heartbeat, the meaning of what he'd just said got clearer and clearer. Holding my breath, I turned to face him to see that he was watching expectantly. "Ah, there it is," he said with a grin. "I was wondering if you'd heard me."
"You're staying?" I breathed.
"I want to be with you," he said, pulling me closer. "And you're here. So I'm here too." He looked down and brushed my face with his bandaged hand. "Simple as that."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Jonah
Nearly freezing your fucking hands off really puts a damper on your guitar playing prowess. For the first two days after the accident, my fingers throbbed and ached so badly that I could barely sleep. The only thing that got me through the pain was Ruby distracting me as best she could.
She was really good at distracting me.
But after the initial pain wore off, the bandages were just annoying. I couldn't get them wet. It was a pain in the ass to go to the bathroom. And the white cloth covering my hands seemed to make them even more enticing for Ginger's kamikaze attacks.
But the one positive thing about not being able to use my hands was that it gave me a lot of time to think. And some of the thoughts I was thinking about my plan were not all that proud.
On the fifth day after the accident, Gabe stopped by with some gadget he'd seen on TV that was supposed to help people grip stuff. "Look, it's like you have a bionic arm," he crowed, looking quite pleased with himself.
I grinned. "This is actually kind of cool," I said. "Wish I could play the guitar with it, but..."
"That'll come back, dude," he said, and his voice was choked with more emotion than I'd heard from my brother in a long while.
I swallowed. "Hey man, I need to tell you something. It was supposed to be a big surprise and shit, but I got a rather massive sign from above that that was the wrong way to go about it," I said, lifting my bandaged hands.
Gabe furrowed his brow. His arm was in a soft cast now and the two of us with our bandages looked more similar than we every had before. "So what do you want to tell me?" he asked,
"Well, more show you." I gestured for him to follow me to my room where I got down on my knees and clumsily pulled the box out from under my bed.
"That's the box," he said immediately. "The one Ruby brought over and you wouldn't tell me what it was."
"I always knew you're smarter than you looked," I teased.
He leaned over and peered inside. "Tapes?"
"Yeah. Pop one in to the player there. I'd do it myself but..." I waved my hands.
His curiosity was killing him, I could tell. He grabbed a tape at random and slid it into the tape deck, then pressed play.
We both sat back on our heels as the sound of Gid's guitar filled the room. "Is that - ?"
"Yeah."
He listened, his eyes strangely bright as Gid's voice rang out. I hummed along without thinking.
"Where'd these come from?" Gabe said, pressing stop and reaching into the box to find another one.
"Gideon gave them to Ruby for safekeeping," I told him. "They were very close, actually."
Gabe blinked. "I don't think I knew that."
I nodded. "There were a lot of things I didn't know about Gid. I thought he was like...mine, you know? I treated him like some kind of human crutch to prop me up, but now that he's gone I realized I never really got around to finding out who he really is. Was." I swallowed. "Like I'll never know why he gave this box to Ruby instead of a family member, or geez, why he even thought he had to give it away at all. Why didn't he want to make a record, hell he had four nephews with insane industry connections. We could have done something with this."
Gabe was listening, tracing the outline of the box. "Sometimes people do things that don't make sense," he said, and I got the feeling he was repeating something that had been said to him a million times before.
"I re-recorded them," I blurted.
He turned to glare at me. "What?"
I nodded, shame filling my chest. "I thought I knew what Gid should have done, so I went ahead and did it."
His face clouded. "Jonah, what the fuck?"
"I know. I arranged a show and everything. That's where Ruby and I were headed last Saturday night. But right before we were set to go, I started feeling really hesitant, and you know me, I never hesitate about anything." He nodded so fast it was a wonder he didn't get whiplash. "So that's when I started to wonder if I was making a mistake thinking I should make money off this, even if I was calling it a tribute record. Because it wasn't really about Gid, was it?"
Gabe blinked slowly. "Geez dude," he finally said. "I'm honestly kind of impressed."
"Fuck you," I said with a grin.
"Maybe Ruby is good for you."
"She is," I agreed.
He looked at the box again. "I think you're right about not selling these songs. But I don't think that means you can't play them."
I was confused. "What do you mean?"
The corner of his mouth tugged up. "You're getting there, Jonah. We're gonna make a non-asshole out of you yet. I know you look at music like it's your job, but there are other reasons for playing than just making money, you know. You can make it about Gid instead." He stood up and patted my shoulder. "I have
faith in you."
I looked at my brother. "I think that's the first time you've ever said something like that to me."
He shrugged. "Yeah, well, don't make me feel like a jackass for saying it, okay?"
Chapter Forty
Ruby
Christmas was in two days. The kids had been dismissed early from school today, which gave me plenty of time to get ready - making sure I dressed very warmly out of some residual fear - and head down to the Crown Tavern.
Closed for Private Event read the handwritten sign on the door and I grinned at Jonah's barely legible chicken scratch. I needed to have a word with his kindergarten teacher about that.
Inside, the bar was decorated with a few bundles of evergreen boughs tied off with bows made out of Christmas camouflage. I hadn't even known that existed, but it made perfect sense for this town.
There was also a small circle of beat up folding chairs. I looked around for a second and then had to remind myself that Gabe had left four days ago, heading out to start shooting season two of King of Pain. But I did see Mr. King and Mrs. King, Beau, Finn, and Claire, Sadie and Willa. Dee had come and was waving at me to come sit by her, and there, in the corner like a wispy shadow, was Isobel Tanner. That was it. It really was a very private event.
After a moment, Jonah walked out with a guitar held in his hands. He didn't wait for applause, just sat down at the mic and set the guitar across his lap.
I waggled my fingers at him. He grinned and waggled his back, showing me that they worked just fine. "Thanks for coming," he said into the mic. "I wanted to think of tonight as a kind of memorial service." I hid my smile behind my hand. "Since I missed the first one, and all," he said pointedly to me. "Let's call this my way of making up for that."
He strummed. And then slowly, stiffly, he started to play.
I'd seen Jonah naked by now. This was a different kind of naked. Stripped. Open. Honest.
