Wild Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

  In this memory, he’d been tiny and tucked into a bed in a small, dark room. But it wasn’t a scary room like the closet had been. The door was open a crack, and the light from the hallway was bright enough so that he—we—could see walls that were decorated with beautifully hand-drawn pictures of cars and airplanes and smiling teddy bears. There was a big bookshelf along one wall, and it was filled with books and handmade toys.

  What is this? He was surprised and I realized it was a memory that he’d forgotten. It had gotten lost in all of his anger, sorrow, and pain.

  In that memory, the door was pushed open, and a young woman came inside. She was trying to be stern, her finger up to her lips, but she smiled with genuine joy as she sat on the edge of the bed.

  “You saved your cookie for me,” she said, her cool fingers pushing our hair back from our face. It felt unbelievably good. We were glad she was finally home—that we knew she was safe.

  “It’s your favorite kind,” we told her earnestly, then asked, “How was work, Mommy?”

  She was tired, but she smiled again. She worked as a waitress at a restaurant and tried to get the breakfast and lunch shifts, but sometimes had to go in at night. “It went quickly, no big problems—thanks for asking.” She narrowed her eyes, but that smile still curled about her lips. “Did Daddy forget to give you a bath? I think he did. Do you know how I know, Mr. Milo? Because you are so, so stinky.”

  We giggled as she tickled us, but then she snuggled close to hug and kiss us despite any stinkiness, and we felt so, so safe and content.

  “How about we share that cookie tomorrow?” she asked us with another kiss. And then she started to sing. Her voice was pretty but nothing special, except it was, because it was hers. And the song she sang was a made-up melody about Milo climbing up a tree and finding a bird in a nest and a bug on a leaf, and we knew it was a song that she’d sung to us a thousand times before. And we relaxed and floated, safe and secure, as her face and her voice and the love in her eyes faded away as we finally fell asleep.

  And there on Garrett’s driveway, outside that doctor’s office where Calvin was clinging to life, Milo was trying not to cry as he kissed me. Thank you for that.

  You were loved, I told him as I kissed him back. But then you weren’t. But now you are again. Okay?

  He nodded and kissed me even more deeply.

  Also? I think it’s kinda hot to have a boyfriend who’s sensitive enough to cry when he feels emotion.

  He broke off our kiss to look down at me and smile. That’s something I’m going to need to work on.

  I smiled back at him, reaching up to trace the adorable dimples in his cheeks. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.

  The moon was out, and its reflection on the water was beautiful. It was a gorgeous, balmy, romantic night, and all should have been right with the world.

  Except for my best friend in a coma, and my other friend whose long-lost little sister was eight-freaking-months pregnant, and—

  Still thoughts, Milo said and kissed me again.

  ————

  A few minutes later, at around two in the morning, Milo and I went inside to check on Calvin. “You want us to sit with him?” I asked Dana. “Take a turn?”

  I could smell her tension mixing with both her fear and her hope.

  “Feel free to sit,” she said. “But I’m not going anywhere.” She motioned to the chairs that Garrett had pulled into the room.

  I realized that he was in there, too—curled up and asleep on pillows he’d tossed into the corner.

  And while that wasn’t the strangest thing I’d seen today—not by a long shot—the concept of Calvin’s arch nemesis, Garrett Hathaway, sitting vigil at Cal’s bedside was pretty darn weird.

  Milo sat down in the softest-looking of the chairs and pulled me onto his lap.

  “Feel free to tell me to shut up if you’d rather sit here quietly,” I said to Dana, “but I read somewhere that people in comas can hear when people talk to them.” I looked at Cal. “So, Calvin. Would you rather have a tattoo of a dog pooping on your back, or a tattoo that says Long Live Goat Cheese on your forehead?”

  Silence. Because, of course, Cal couldn’t answer. Dana’s back was to me as she held tightly to Cal’s hand, and she didn’t move.

  Garrett sat up in the corner. “What kind of dog? I mean, I think that would probably matter to Cal. Pit bull, yes. Terrier, probably no.”

  “Unless he wanted to make it as small as possible,” I said. “Then a terrier makes sense, or maybe a teacup Pomeranian in that four-legs-together crouch…?”

  Dana cleared her throat and finally turned to look at me.

  I went proactive with the apology. “Sorry.”

  “No,” she said. “These are definitely questions Cal would want answered. Like, he’d also want to know what font. You know. For the Long Live Goat Cheese.”

  I laughed—a short burst of surprise and gratefulness. “Comic Sans,” I told her. “Definitely.”

  “That’s a tough one,” Dana said. “Because Cal does love Comic Sans.”

  I laughed again, and this time it felt good. “Then let’s go for the forehead tattoo in Comic Sans. Unless Cal wakes up and says otherwise…? Nope. Cal obviously doesn’t object. Good. It’s definite. Next question.” I looked at Milo.

  “Would you…rather be a pirate afraid of water, or a cowboy afraid of horses?” he asked.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Dana scoffed. “Pirate.”

  “For sure Cal would want to be a pirate,” I agreed. “With a service horse that he rides on the deck of his pirate ship, to help him with his fear of water.”

  Dana laughed. “Nice.”

  “Garrett, your turn,” I said.

  He frowned, then said, “Would you rather have a Lamborghini or a Porsche?”

  Clearly, he didn’t get the rules of the game. “Good try, but no,” I said. I turned to Dana. “Dane?”

  “Would you rather go skydiving over an ocean filled with sea monsters or…go hiking in the woods near the chupacabra’s lair?”

  “Chupacabra!” I said. “Calvin, you really need to wake up, because Dana just said chupacabra!”

  He didn’t, of course. But we did have to explain to Garrett that a chupacabra was Spanish for “goat sucker,” a legendary bear-and-or-space-alien-and-or-lizard-like animal (depending on who claimed to see it—sometimes it was a mix of all three) that left livestock exsanguinated. And then we had to explain that exsanguinate, in this case, meant left in the middle of a mountain field without any blood—like not a drop, which, yes, was weird.

  And then we had to discuss whether Calvin’s new Long Live Goat Cheese tattoo on his forehead would make the chupacabra target him in particular, so we decided that, just to be safe, he’d better skydive into sea monsters instead.

  Would you rather be a vampire allergic to blood, or a werewolf allergic to dog hair?

  Would you rather have normal teeth and a horrible unibrow, or normal eyebrows and one huge buck tooth?

  Would you rather throw up while giving your high school graduation speech, or get caught picking your nose at your wedding?

  Would you rather eat fried monkey brains, or drink eel pee?

  All through the night, we went through a long list of questions, deciding all of them for Calvin as Dana held tightly to his unresponsive hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I went home before dawn, so I could pretend that I’d been in my bed all night. I showered while I had the chance, then went into the kitchen to endure the usual annoying breakfast ritual with my mom.

  The one where she tried to start a conversation as I tried to eat as quickly as humanly possible.

  “There was a fire out by the beach last night,” she told me as she scrolled through the local news.

  “I know,” I started to say, but swal
lowed it and instead said, “There was?”

  “It started in some faulty wiring,” Mom reported. “The place burned to the ground and three people were killed.”

  “Yikes,” I said, as inwardly I was glad that the fire had been deemed an accident.

  “I think I’ll call an electrician. Make sure our house is safe.”

  “I think we’re probably okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. Count on Mom to go into full screaming-terror mode.

  Except even that wasn’t as annoying as it usually was as I thought about Milo’s distant memory of his mother. I’d always thought that I had too many memories of my mom coming into my room and sitting on the edge of my bed. Now I knew that there was no such thing.

  In fact, I kissed Mom on the cheek on my way out the door, which surprised the crap out of her. “Will you be home for dinner?” she called after me.

  “I don’t think so,” I called back.

  “You know, you can invite that boy over,” Mom said, stopping me short halfway out the door. “The cute one with the long hair? What’s his name, Milo?”

  “Okay, yeah,” I called back, at first thinking no freaking way, but then thinking maybe Milo would actually like that. Dinner at my house. With my mom. “But not tonight.”

  “Whenever!” Mom called back. “I love you!”

  “Love you, too!”

  ————

  Nothing had changed with Calvin.

  The medical scanner gave us a continuous readout of his condition, and when Morgan checked in via phone, I read him everything on the screen, and he seemed confident that things were going as well as they possibly could.

  At this point, Dana was doing some heavy-duty movie marathoning, watching one movie after the other and describing the action to Cal—continuing with the assumption that he could hear us.

  Garrett ordered pizza both at noon and in the evening, and normally I would’ve objected to a double pizza day, but by dinnertime we were approaching that twenty-two-hour mark, and it didn’t matter what I ate. My appetite was gone.

  At around 9:15—just a few minutes before I was certain Cal was going to wake up at 9:18—Morgan poked his head into the room where Dana and Milo and I were sitting next to Calvin.

  “Just wanted to let you know that I’m back. And I’m right outside if you need me,” he said. “And just for the record, darlings, if Cal doesn’t wake up, that doesn’t mean—”

  “Yeah, we don’t need to hear that right now,” Dana cut him off.

  “Fair enough,” Morgan said and left, shutting the door tightly behind him.

  We were down to counting seconds now, and as the clock on the computer screen finally flipped from 9:17 to 9:18, I turned to look at Calvin.

  Who didn’t move.

  Nothing had changed in his vitals either. His heart was beating slowly and steadily, his blood pressure was the same.

  But he didn’t wake up. His eyes didn’t open; he didn’t laugh; he didn’t move—he just lay there. Still in a coma.

  Then 9:18 became 9:19 and 9:20 and then 9:21.

  And I realized in that moment just how desperately and completely I’d believed it—that Calvin was going to wake up, and everything was going to be okay. And the panic that I felt when he didn’t wake up nearly overwhelmed me.

  “Calvin,” I said sharply. “Come on!”

  Milo’s arms tightened around me.

  “It’s okay,” Dana said quietly. “Twenty-two hours isn’t just a single point on a time line. I mean, yeah, it can be, but maybe his prescience rounded it down. It’s twenty-two hours from now through the next fifty-something minutes, until it’s twenty-three hours, at ten eighteen, right? So let’s just give him some space.” She spoke directly to Calvin. “We’re right here, babe, whenever you’re ready to wake up.”

  For Cal, timing was everything. And of course, he chose that very moment to come back to us, by whispering, “Love it…when you…call me…babe.”

  “Get Morgan! Get Morgan!” Dana shouted, and I rocketed up and threw open the door.

  “Morgan!” I looked back to see that Cal had opened his eyes, and he was smiling weakly up at Dana, who’d started to cry.

  “Hey,” I heard Cal say. “Hey, hey, hey, it’s okay…”

  Morgan rushed in and gave Calvin a quick scan and made sure he had water to drink, but then he ushered us all out of the room to give Dana and Cal some privacy.

  As I went into the hall, I realized that Morgan had brought Dana’s sister, Lacey, back with him, and I was struck by the strange coldness in her eyes as she watched Dana kiss Cal right before the door closed.

  “How could she love a D-addict?” Lacey asked.

  “He’s not an addict anymore,” I told her, and she focused those icy eyes on me.

  “Once an addict always an addict,” she said. “But whatever. If he hurts her, I’ll kill him for her.”

  “Yeah, you really won’t have to kill anyone,” I said, but she’d already turned away, watching as Milo, Morgan, and Garrett all high-fived down at the end of the hall, in the lobby.

  “Who’s that?” she asked. “He’s cute.”

  “Who, Garrett?” I asked. “This is his dad’s—”

  Lacey cut me off impatiently. “No, stupid. I’ve met Garrett. He’s an idiot. Who’s the cute one, the one I haven’t met?”

  “That’s Milo,” I told her, and it was weird—the next words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. “He’s mine.”

  Lacey laughed at that, and all of the little hairs on the back of my neck went up, particularly when she said, “Yeah, that’s not how it works, bitch,” and then walked away.

  I was about to follow her into Dr. Hathaway’s office when Dana opened the door to the operating room. She was looking extremely happy—like she was having the best day ever. “Morgan said he brought Lacey? That’s amazing that she felt comfortable enough to come out here.”

  It was amazing, and I decided to chalk the name-calling up to jealousy combined with years of torture and abuse. This was definitely a happy ending—the return of Dana’s long-lost sister combined with Calvin being cured of his addiction.

  Plus, we’d saved Jilly’s life. We were on a roll.

  “Can you go sit with Cal for a sec,” Dana asked me, “while I say hi to Lace and make sure she has whatever she needs?”

  “Of course. She’s…” I pointed into Dr. H’s office.

  “Thanks,” Dana said. But then she caught my arm and said, “I don’t think I’ve said it yet, but…”

  She hesitated, so I shook my head. “You already thanked me,” I reassured her. “It’s okay.”

  “No,” she said. “I wanted to say that you kicked ass last night. Morgan and I, we both gave up, but you didn’t, Bubble Gum. You refused to quit. And you took command and, well, Cal’s alive because of you.” And then she said the words I never, ever thought I’d hear. “Good job.”

  She hugged me again, adding, “Don’t get used to that.”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant the hug or the Good job, but regardless, I was smiling as I went in to see Cal, who was sitting up in bed.

  “Hey,” he said. “Rumor has it you started my heart with your freakishly freak-show G-T ability.”

  “Someone’s been spending too much time with his new friend Garrett,” I said. “And as much as I’d like to, I’m not sure I can take total responsibility. Right before your heart started beating again, Dana was all Come back to me, babe!”

  “Huh,” Cal said, trying to hide his smile. “Funny how she didn’t tell me that part.” He held out his arms to me.

  I went in for a hug. It was one of those old, familiar hugs where I had to bend down for it. It was how we were going to have to hug from now on, since his walking days were over. That made my heart twinge, and I had to work it, hard, not to cry.

 
“It’s okay,” he said, patting my back. In a typical Cal move, he was trying to make me feel better. “My heart’s still healthy. So that’s good, right? The way Dana put it, if I had to choose only one, it was better to fix the thing that keeps me alive, right? Be a bummer to be able to walk around only to drop dead from a heart attack in a year. This way, I get to live to be old and cranky.”

  “Dana’s very smart,” I said, pulling back and sitting on the edge of his bed.

  “But not when it comes to her creepy little sister.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Lacey’s been through a lot.”

  “Be empathetic, be sympathetic,” Cal told me, “but promise me you won’t trust this girl. At least not right away.”

  “I trust her about as far as I can throw her,” I told him. And I knew he wasn’t talking about anything having to do with the way she’d just looked at Milo, but I certainly wasn’t going to trust her around my boyfriend, either.

  “Thank you,” he said. “So. About this Long Live Goat Cheese tattoo on my forehead. In Comic Sans, my favorite font…?”

  I laughed with delight. “You heard that?”

  “Every word,” he said. “Chupacabras, unibrows, nose-picking at weddings. It was impressive. But I remain the Would You Rather master. Behold! Would you rather take a weeklong bus journey with a dozen evil clowns and a bathroom that doesn’t work, or spend an hour in a bed with a dozen tarantulas?”

  “Evil clowns?”

  “On a strict vegan diet of cowboy beans,” he said. “The tarantulas, however, haven’t been fed in two weeks. Still, if I had to make a guess, I’d bet the evil clowns were angrier and therefore more dangerous.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Cal, you’re ridiculous.”

  “You love me so much,” he said with a smile.

  I smiled back at him. Because I so did.

  Acknowledgments