Reaction

by Jessica Roberts

  Why did it have to turn out that the town bum—a mouthy, ill-mannered, lousy drunk—was now her only legal guardian? Could her mom have had worse taste in men?

  The bright side: at least Bill kept to himself—most of the time.

  Whatever.

  Thank goodness she had Creed. If it weren’t for him, she’d have to drive home with Bill. And there would have been nothing worse than a depressing drunk after a depressing funeral.

  “Thanks for coming, Creed,” Heather said when his mom walked away. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “You don’t have to think about that. I’ll always be here.” And their arms latched together.

  Yes, he would be. Because she couldn’t imagine life without him.

  “Some day this is all going to be different,” he vowed. “You’ll see. We’ll make it different, you and me. I promise.”

  A bump in the road brought me back to the moment.

  I recalled the picture from the funeral; the one Creed’s mom snapped. It was the same picture Doc showed me in the hospital right after I’d woken from my coma. He used it to jog my memory regarding Mom’s death. Crazy how the past and the present can scroll together in such a way that time becomes nearly non-existent. I wondered how Creed would feel if I told him what day I was thinking about.

  I browsed to the side to see in the driver’s seat a very different Creed than the one from my memories; a tall, scruffy-cheeked, grown-up Creed, loudly singing completely off-key to a song on the radio.

  My smile was automatic.

  As I reflected on our past, the unspoken promise was that we’d grow old together, be safe and secure in each other’s lives and hearts, and have a stress-free, joy-filled life. He would finally be able to take care of me in ways he wanted to back then.

  Yet even back then there were dreams inside of me that he didn’t know about. Dreams that I might not have fully understood either. Where I had seen our solid past, he’d seen our solid future.

  I wondered if that had changed.

  “So, how have your pilot-prep flights been going?” I asked Creed, realizing how far my thoughts had wandered—long, relaxing road trips did that to me.

  He turned off the radio and answered, “Two more months and I’ll have my commercial license. The position I told you about for the private airlines is panning out well. It looks like I’ll probably get it.”

  “That’s great, Creed. I’m sure it’s not common for a pilot to have a job lined up before they have their license. It says a lot about your skills.”

  “It’s fortunate, that’s for sure. I’ll be hubbed right in St. Louis, too. And I don’t plan on moving. I like it where I am. ”

  “Yeah, why would you move? It’s a nice place, and a great location. And Peter’s a good roommate.”

  Creed would be successful in anything he put his mind to. I felt pride for the man in my best friend.

  Filling the silence in soothing ways was the fresh, early afternoon air whirling through the cracked front window and the loud humming engine traveling across the sunlit highway. There was nothing better than zooming down a lonely countryside with no time constraints and a best friend on hand.

  Soon Creed stole my musings with a warm palm to my thigh, causing my head to angle upward. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?

  What was he trying to say? Did I understand? Either way, what I did or didn’t understand about Creed was lost in the trust and unconditional love I felt for him.

  “Heath, you know what my plans have always been and what I’ve wanted for us. You’ve known since I made Justin Harwood dare me to kiss you in the fifth grade. I’ve never met anyone like you, and I doubt I ever will.”

  “I thought you were dating someone? I saw a girl come over and I thought—”

  “Julie? She’s my trainee at pilot school, not my date. Never my date.”

  “Oh. I just assumed—”

  “We don’t have to talk about it or anything,” he cut me off. “I only want you to know, no matter what, I’ll always be the one that’s here for you.”

  As always, Creed was my superior. He’d already figured out what I was only learning: love is selfless.

  The cemetery was peaceful, just as I’d remembered it, if not larger; but that was ever indicative of childhood memories. After paying tribute to the most generous and loving person in Grandma V—who gave me more than a job and a car and a family member, she gave me a second chance at life, for which I would own her as my real Grandma and love and honor her forever—Creed and I meandered across the lawn and sat cross-legged in front of my mom’s headstone. We’d stopped at the store to buy flowers, and now Grandma V and Mom’s grey stone tablets stretched from the grass in a colorful bouquet of pink and white.

  This was the second time Creed began rubbing my legs. The first lasted only a minute, but this was longer, and more deep-tissue. He rubbed the joints around my knee mainly, kneading and stroking as if loosening the stiffness.

  “I’m assuming you rubbed my legs a lot when I was in the hospital,” I remarked, smiling.

  His hands stilled on my knee. “Oh my gosh, Heather, I didn’t even realize—”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “It’s not. I’m giving you a full body massage in the middle of a cemetery.”

  Though the idea funny, I didn’t laugh. “Did you rub my legs when I was in my coma?”

  “Every day,” he said, patting my thigh and then resting his hand on the grass. “Sometimes for hours. I guess it’s pretty common for coma patient’s feet to stiffen into a point because of the way they fall when lying down. I didn’t want you to be taller than me when you woke up, so I didn’t take any chances.”

  That’s when I laughed. I wondered how often he came to visit me when I was in the hospital, and what parts of his life I’d missed out on. “Walk me through your average day when I was in my coma,” I requested.

  “Okay.” He cleared his throat in a business-like manner. “Wake up at eight. Have breakfast. Visit you at the hospital. Go to the aviation center at eleven. Leave at five or six to go see you again. Eat dinner at the hospital. Be with you till about nine. Go home and go to sleep.”

  “You came to see me that much?”

  “I never missed a day.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious, Heath.”

  “Holidays? Christmas?”

  “I never missed a day.”

  “I can’t believe it. When would you do homework?”

  “In your hospital room. We had some great conversations about airplanes and flying.”

  “Your not serious.”

  “Why not? You were a great study partner. The best.”

  “Creed? Really? And you ate dinner at the hospital all the time?”

  “Alex makes a mean meatloaf sandwich, and Becky’s shortbread chocolate chip cookies are my favorite. I actually miss them.”

  “You know the names of the cafeteria workers?”

  “They all know you too. After a while, you get to know all the workers and the regulars, and get to talking to them. I know way too much about that hospital. Gossip travels fast. The best was when one of the cooks, his name was Jeremy or Joshua or some ‘J’ name like that, he got caught making out in the cold storage with one of the nurses from ER. It was big time news because he was the son of one of the hospital board directors and he was really young, like eighteen or nineteen. And she was a lot older. I heard they both got busted big time.”

  Creed shared a few more stories, just as soap opera-ish and just as entertaining. Him in the middle of all the hospital drama was too funny; my mouth hurt from smiling and laughing. I wasn’t feeling as fully amused as my laughter showed, though; I was too floored by Creed’s devotion to me. I was a flat, mute, corpse of a person for almost a thousand days, and he never gave up on me once.

  “It’s good to see you laughing,” he said when the stories were over. “It used to be so hard for you to come here, to deal
with anything about your mom.”

  “I lied about her to Nick,” was what came out. I wasn’t sure why I admitted that. Maybe because my brain was still making sense of Creed’s unfathomable sacrifices for me. “I don’t know why I would lie to anyone about her dying.”

  “I do,” Creed replied. “Remember that poem your mom had you memorize. The one that goes, ‘Love is stronger than death, even though it can’t stop death from happening’?”

  “But no matter how hard death tries,” I joined in, only half tuned into the words, “it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away our memories either. In the end, love is stronger than death.” It was the same poem I recited years ago in Creative Writing class, the time Nick bailed me out of my disastrous presentation.

  Creed went on, “When she was sick, she used to recite that poem to you, and then she would tell you never to think of her as gone. She said she would always be with you. And even though you couldn’t see her, she would still be there. After she passed, you didn’t like talking about her as if she were dead. In your mind, she was alive, only in another place.”

  “I still believe that. But I don’t see why, after a while, I couldn’t admit that she’d died.”

  “I think it was your way of holding on. If you talked about her death, to you it was like saying she was gone forever. And maybe you felt that if you admitted to it, she really would be.”

  I shook my head, understanding to a point, but still not fully grasping how I felt back then. “It was hard for me, wasn’t it?”

  He put his hand over my thigh again. “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but a few nights after the funeral, I came to your house. You were in your room with the door closed, and I stayed in the hall and listened from the other side of the door. I’d never heard anyone cry the way I heard you cry that night. It tore me apart. I lost it, right there in your hallway, I fell on my butt and balled like a baby.”

  The wave of emotion finally crashed, and with it came my surging feelings. I reached out and, with tears in my eyes, took hold of him. “I love you, Creed,” my voice quivered against his shoulder. “For always being there and for everything you’ve done for me.”

  “I know.” Creed pulled me into his lap and held me, and we sat in the cemetery and clung to each other for as long as we needed to.

  *******

  I discovered three other facts on my visit back home. One, my now yellow-grassed, shabby looking, childhood house was for sale. Two, the old library where I’d worked had been torn down and a new one, along with a modern-looking municipal building and a sports complex were being built. And three, there was no way Grandma V could have paid for the last year of my coma. She’d died too soon.

  *******

  School was school. I was keeping up on my studies and doing fine in all my classes. But homework didn’t use enough of my free time, and my grudging thoughts were getting to me. One of my pet peeves was holding grudges. I didn’t like the heaviness of them. But I didn’t see any way around it with her. I’d never felt toward someone the way I felt toward Paige. Sure, people got under my skin on occasion, but rarely. Yet this was a whole different story. This one girl was in the way of everything I wanted, and the grating part was that it wasn’t even her fault. I couldn’t even blame her. There was no one to blame!

  Antiques were my saving grace; they kept my thoughts busy. My collection of chandelier crystals was increasing, and I wanted a lucrative way to salvage them. That’s how I came up with the jewelry idea. Garage and estate sales were excellent places to find old, vintage jewelry, and I now had a large collection of broaches and odd pendants. And who knew a necklace made of old broach pieces, rustic beads, and chandelier crystals could be so stunning?

  My creativity and handiwork skills poured into these creations each night, and a measure of pleasure and satisfaction came with it.

  Sore hands and imaginative thoughts carried me to sleep each night. Usually those thoughts were passive and even, like gliding through the air on a bed of wandering, white clouds. The past few days, however, the clouds were black, and the wind was fierce, and the thunder rolled, and I was being tossed to and fro by wicked, violent storms.

  “That’s normal,” Professor commented. “College can be stressful.”

  “College, yes. Relationships, no. This is the time in my life where I’m supposed to be having fun, dating, acting irresponsibly, doing stupid things that I know I shouldn’t do, but doing them anyway because that’s what college kids do.”

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  “I’m stopping me. Why can’t I either lie to myself and pretend I don’t like him, or just go for it, forget about her and try to win him back? How else am I supposed to learn if I don’t make stupid decisions and learn from them?”

  Professor chuckled. “So true. The best way to cope with bad decisions is to learn from them. But the best way to cope with life, is to not make them in the first place. It’s a lot less painful that way. But to each his own.” He bent his head down and looked at me as if over the rim of invisible glasses.

  “See, there you go again. What are you, my conscience?”

  He smiled sportingly, that same encouraging smile he used to give back in English class.

  “Then why do I feel this way? Why is it that when we look at each other, it’s like no force on earth can keep us apart. Have you ever felt that? It’s so confusing.”

  “It’s called attraction, Heather. Not all that confusing, just very real and very powerful.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Okay, how about this? Did you know that, on average, twenty percent of engagements are called off every year?”

  “Really? That many? Weird, when you say it like that, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. It’s like, so what, it was only an engagement. Nothing was set in stone or anything…Oh crap, is that where that saying comes from?”

  Professor snickered.

  “Anyway, like you said, engagements are called off every day. But when I’m sitting here in the situation, it feels so much worse. I wish I didn’t feel like we still have something. Then I could just walk away and let them live their happy life together.”

  Professor lifted an eyebrow.

  “No really, I would, I promise.” Smiles from both sides. “But I can tell he still cares about me.”

  “Of course he cares about you.”

  “At first, I was beginning to wonder. Until we played basketball that day—the way he looked at me, and the way he smiled and teased, just like he used to.

  “You know what, though? In the end, none of that really matters. He’s still engaged to her. And I don’t see him breaking it off. He’s just not that type of person.”

  “People change,” Professor piped in.

  “You don’t understand. It would take so much more than that. There’s too much history there.”

  “What history?”

  A long, discouraged sigh. “He has this issue with making promises and keeping his word. See, he blames himself for his brother’s death. It’s ludicrous, but he thinks the accident happened because he decided not to take the scholarship offered him and came home early from his recruiting trip. I told him how illogical it was to think like that, but I guess the scars go deeper than my words ever could.

  “And then there’s his relationship with his father: broken because he changed his mind about baseball. No, he won’t go back on his word. He’s going to marry her, trust me.

  “And then there’s also the small little point she brought up. After I lied to him about my family life, he doesn’t trust me. I’m sure he understands what might have made me do it, but I kept up the charade too long. I lost his trust.”

  The bell rang, time to leave the counseling office or be late to class.

  “But get this, out of all the reasons to be discouraged, do you know what bothers me the most?”

  Professor nodded in interest, ever the good listener.

  “It’s
the fact that all our conversations have been so shallow. If I could just talk to him, really talk, ask him to forgive me about the lies, tell him why, explain to him how I felt back then, how I feel now, that all those feelings are still so current to me, maybe I could find a tiny ounce of peace in all of this. I just want to talk, without teasing each other or grappling or speaking hollow words.”

  “Sounds like you need to talk to him.”

  Chapter 7

  Receiving the same advice from two of my favorite people must’ve done the job.

  “I think you should tell him how you really feel,” said Liz, squeezing the excess beans out of her burrito. “Plain and straight.”

  “I don’t know,” I said back, scooping up her beans with my burrito. “That might be asking for some serious rejection.”

  “You don’t reject someone your in love with.”

  “He’s not in love with me, Liz.” Feeling the stares, we turned to the booth next to ours. We both had major issues with the volume of our voices.

  Hers lowered a bit, and with a fake smile she told them, “Sorry.” Then she turned to me. “I think he is in love with you.”

  “How can you think that?”

  “It’s the way he looks at you,” she said even softer, not for the next booth over but for dramatic effect. “Like he wants to steal you away from the rest of the world and keep you all to himself.” Her eyebrows danced up and down.

  “Stop, why do you say that?”

  “He watches you when your not paying attention.”

  “How would you know?”

  “At the banquet for instance, whenever you were talking to someone he would stare at you from across the table.”

  “Stop it, Liz.”

  “Okay,” she shrugged, taking another bite. “I’m just saying.”

  “All the wrong things,” I finished her sentence, suddenly sharking into my burrito.