by T. J. Klune
Reality encroaches. Where am I?
The hospital. Seven days. The hospital. Otter. Mrs. Paquinn. Otter.
Otter.
I open my eyes and raise my head.
And he’s watching me with that gold and green. It’s so bright. It’s so bright, and he’s watching me like I’m the greatest thing he’s ever seen. He tries to smile but there’s a tube down his throat. But he tries. Oh, God, how he tries. He grimaces and brings his hand up and rubs it down over the tape on the sides of his mouth, the tube on his tongue. His eyes widen slightly and then come back to mine. There’s questions there, a knowledge that something has happened, but he doesn’t know what. He reaches out for me again and takes my left hand and rubs it urgently, like he’s trying to tell me something, something important. His thumb brushes over a piece of metal on my finger, and he freezes. He touches it again before lifting my hand up to hold it in front of his face. He focuses on the ring and squeezes his eyes shut. A single tear slips out and slides down his cheek.
And I realize I’m awake.
Oh, God. I’m awake.
And so is he.
He’s watching me again, like he can’t take his eyes off of me. There seems to be recognition there, certainly if he touched the ring, but I have to know. I have to be sure before I start screaming for help. I can feel it starting to bubble up my throat, and I know I only have a few seconds before I break, so I have to know.
I grip his hand tightly as I croak out, “Do you know me? Do you know who I am?”
He looks quizzical for a moment, and my heart starts to sink, and the words “brain damage” flash through my head like lightning, and I ache. My body aches, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because this is my man, and I will wear his ring because I will love him forever. I will—
He struggles to raise his hand from my grasp, and I let him go. He reaches up and cups my face, his eyes narrowed, almost like he’s angry. He rubs his finger clumsily across my nose and then pulls it away. One finger rises up and shakes as it points at me. You. The hand pulls up and points down at his chest.
“You and me?” I ask. “Yes, it’s you and me. You know that, right?”
He shakes his head, but it seems to be in frustration. He frowns around the tube in his throat and then points at me again and points back down at his chest. His finger stays there for a moment, drawing a shape. I watch, not understanding. I’m almost ready to start shouting for someone, anyone, and I know this is going to be the last moment that I can figure out what he is trying to say.
He knows this, somehow he can see this. His hand flashes out and grips mine and presses it against his chest, and I can feel it then, the heartbeat, the strong beat in his chest that vibrates up through my arm and becomes a roar in my ears. He lifts his hand up again and points at me and then drops his hand and presses mine against his chest.
And then it clicks. He knows me. He remembers me.
You are my heart.
“Otter,” I say. “Otter.” I lay my head down against his chest, and his heart beats in my ear, and he cranes his neck to watch me, and it’s gold and it’s green and it’s him, and as my chest begins to hitch and as I begin to shatter into a million tiny pieces, I have a moment where I thank God, where I tell him that I knew he’d understood that I couldn’t make it without Otter, where I tell him that I don’t know how much longer I could have lasted. Otter watches me, a look of wonder in his eyes as he touches my face, brushing the tears from my cheeks, reaching down to scrape the ring with his hand.
I need to tell people. I need to tell everyone. I raise my head. “You don’t move,” I growl at him. “You don’t do a damn thing. You stay right here, just as you are. I need to get help.”
Otter rolls his eyes. Whatever. I raise his hand to my lips and kiss his knuckles before I’m running out of the room. I collide with a nurse and start babbling at her, and her eyes go wide so I think she gets the gist of what I’m trying to say, and she sits me down in a seat and turns and shouts something at the nurse’s station down the hall, and more people come and go into Otter’s room, and there’s movement and excited chatter, and I close my eyes and lean my head against the wall, suddenly exhausted. Suddenly so very, very tired. I don’t know how long I’m there, but then I hear my name.
I open my eyes and find Alice and Jerry standing in front of me, a look of terror on their faces. I want to tell them no, no, that it’s okay, that everything will be okay. I don’t know why they’re scared, but then I realize I’ve broken, and I’m weeping openly in the hallway.
“Happy,” I manage to say. “This is happy.” I point at my face. “Happy tears. He’s awake. He knows. He knows.”
Alice falls to her knees and lays her head in my lap as her body shakes while Jerry stares down at me in shock and disbelief. I put my hands in her hair, and I pet her soothingly, my mind already back to Otter, wondering when they’ll let me back in, when they’ll take that damn tube out of his throat because I need to hear him speak, need to hear him say my name just once. I want to take him home to the Green Monstrosity now and shut our bedroom door and climb in bed in the Cave of Otter and Bear and never leave again.
We are provided updates over the next hour, but I’m not allowed to return to the room, much to my annoyance. I stand up and pace back and forth, trying to get a peek over the shoulders of everyone in the room. Apparently only tall people work at Mercy Hospital, because I can’t see a damn thing. They tell us they’re removing his breathing tube and that it can be uncomfortable, and that they need to run some tests, that they would like to get him down to radiology as soon as possible. I’m sick of tests. I’m sick of tubes and machines. He knows who I am. That’s the only test I need.
My family comes in during that time, one by one, their faces stuttering and crumbling when they hear the news. The Kid runs and jumps into my arms, and his hands are in my hair as he babbles in my ear, and I crush him into me, feeling alive for the first time in a week. I go through Creed and Anna. Anna’s parents. Dominic. Isaiah. I hug Jerry and Alice again. I turn, looking for Mrs. Paq—
Then it hits me, what I’ve forgotten. She’s not here because she can’t be. I’m celebrating while she lies alone in her room. That old anger starts to rise, but not at the people around me. At myself. I only thought of Otter. I didn’t think of her. I try to spin it any way I can, to justify my actions. It doesn’t work. Guilt overwhelms me.
But it’s again shoved to the side when a doctor walks out of the room, one I don’t know. I hate myself for it, but it can’t be stopped. We all watch him expectantly.
“Which one of you is Bear?” he asks.
Everyone looks at me.
“He’s asking for you,” the doctor says quietly. “It’s all he said. Your name. I told him he shouldn’t be speaking, not since he’s had the breathing tube down his throat for a week. You can see him for a few minutes, but then we need to get moving on some more tests. Try to keep conversation to a minimum. Talk to him, and if you need to ask questions, make them yes or no answers so he can respond without speaking. He’s going to be out of it for a while, probably sleeping more than he’ll be awake, at least at first. But… in my opinion, I think he’s going to be okay.”
I look apologetically up at his parents and start to protest (even though I’m having to restrain myself from bolting back into the room), but they’re having none of it. I’m practically shoved toward the door, and the room has emptied out and the last two remaining people part and there he is, still awake, the gold and green still there in his tired eyes. He hears my footsteps and looks up, and then I hear it, one word and one word only, but it means more to me than anything else. “Hey,” he says, his voice rough and low.
“Hey, yourself,” I say back, unsure of what to do next. It’s surreal, this moment.
A first step is as good as any. I go to his good side and grab his hand, and he follows my movements, never looking away, as if I’ll disappear should he blink. I lean down and kiss him s
weetly on the lips, and he sighs gently, and it’s like he’s content. It’s like he’s awake and he knows.
“Bear,” he says. Oh, my God.
“Otter,” I say, trying to grab onto the last of the strength I have. “The doctor said you shouldn’t speak. He said—”
Otter shakes his head and I fall silent. “Not in car?” he finally says, pointing at me.
“No, Otter. I wasn’t in the car with you.”
“Dreamt… you were. Was scared. Thought you hurt.” His eyes squeezed shut.
Ah, dammit. “I promise you, I’m okay. I promise. I’m okay now. But I swear to Christ, if you ever scare me like that again, being in the hospital is going to be the least of your worries. You think you’re going to ever drive again, you fucking asshole? You sure as shit better know you’re never leaving my sight ever again! Seven days! Don’t you dare! You hear me, Otter Thompson? Don’t you ever do that again!” By the time I’m finished speaking, I’m shouting at him, and there’s a faint smile on his face as he opens his eyes. I see a nurse start to enter the room, a worried look on her face, but Otter shakes his head at her and she subsides, watching me warily, like I’m going to break his other arm. Bitch, please. Like I’m going to go without a hand job after all I’ve been through. I glare at her until she backs off.
“Hear you,” he grunts.
“Stop talking!” I snap at him. “You’re supposed to be quiet!”
He watches me.
I don’t know what else to say. He touches my ring. Good a place as any to start. But he’s not off the hook yet. “I was just holding on to it,” I grumble at him. “Didn’t want it to get lost.”
Those knowing eyes. He waggles his free hand in front of me. “That’s your right hand, dipshit. Yours is supposed to go on your left, but it’s all swollen and gross and in a cast, and it’ll probably fall off anyways, knowing my luck.”
His eyes laugh for him. I sigh and pull out the chain around my neck, showing him the ring I’ve kept against the skin of my chest since the first day. He sighs and squeezes my hand, and I let the ring drop back against my chest.
“Don’t remember much,” he rasps.
This is expected. The doctor said he probably wouldn’t remember anything about the accident, or even the day of or longer. I tell him this quietly, but by the time I’m finished speaking, he’s already shaking his head. “What?” I ask. “What’s wrong.”
His grip tightens on my hand, his thumb pressing against the ring. “Can’t remember. Ask you?”
“Ask me what?”
He presses the ring, and it digs into my skin. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. “No,” I say hoarsely. “You were on your way. You didn’t ask me.”
He arches an eyebrow in question and grimaces at the pain it causes. “And?” he rasps. “What you say?”
And then he waits. And watches me.
And I… I am….
I’ve just been proposed to. Huh. I….
Holy hell.
Even though I knew it had been coming, even though I knew the moment I saw the rings and read the poem, and even though I’d already made my decision the moment my ring went on my finger and his went around my neck, it’s still a surreal feeling, one that I never thought would happen in my life. I’m twenty-one years old. I’ve been with Otter just under nine months. It’s too soon. It’s too fast. It’s not even legal. People won’t recognize it. Some people will hate it. I’m too young. We’ve just been through tragedy that’s not over yet. Rash decisions were made. Right. Right?
But his words. His words from that day that seems so very long ago.
Nothing’s too fast if it means forever, Bear.
O & B Forever.
I’ve loved him since I’ve known him. I will love him until the day I die. And I almost lost him. Fuck rash decisions. Fuck my age. Fuck it being too soon. Fuck whatever others will think. And fuck the legality of it, because we’ll know it’s real. We’ll know what it means.
And now he’s worried because I’ve been thinking too much. Again.
“Yeah, you big bastard,” I tell him as his eyes widen. “Yeah, I’ll marry the crap out of you. It’ll be messy and weird, and I’m totally not going to be your wife, but yes. You’re obviously going to need someone to take care of your crippled ass for the rest of your life, so yes. Of course, yes. I’ll fucking marry you, asshole. How could I say no?”
He closes his eyes again as his throat works, bobbing up and down. His eyes are wet when they find mine again. I don’t know how much longer I can stand, and he feels this, my weakness, because he is my strength. He moves over slightly, grimacing as he does so, his leg swinging precariously in the harness, and against my protests he pulls me down next to him. I try not to lay against him too much, because I know he’s got a couple of sprung ribs and is still covered in bruises, but he’s adamant, and as my head reaches his chest and his good arm wraps around me, so strong and alive, I listen to the beat of his heart as his hand runs through my hair. He sighs again, content and happy, and I hear him grumble, “Knew you’d say yes. Can’t resist my awesomeness.”
Thank you.
I WISH I could tell you that Mrs. Paquinn opened her eyes and smiled. I wish I could tell you that she said that she was tired of lying in the bed, and what was her nurse Jorge going to think of her if she got a bedsore? She’d never get coitus after that! And didn’t that doctor in the hallway look slightly like Bigfoot? Oh, did I think the doctors would let her drive her early ’80s Caddy that was the color of shit? They just couldn’t take away her driver’s license! Not when she used to race stock cars! Well, that might not exactly be true, but wouldn’t it be great if it was?
And that she loved us. Ah, God, she loved us all, and that we were the family she’d lost early on in her life but that the Lord saw fit to give back. How she thought of us like her sons and daughters, like her grandchildren and her greatest friends. That she knew each and every one of us would be okay, that as long as we held on to each other, that as long as we stuck together, it didn’t matter what was thrown at us. And I knew, I just knew she’d pull me and the Kid aside and tell us that our mother didn’t matter. That we’d got on all right, and that she was proud of what we’d become. That the next step in our lives was only the beginning, but that we should always remember where we came from.
I wish I could tell you that. I wish that more than anything in the world.
But I can’t.
Seven hours after Otter woke up for the first time in seven days, and as the sun set in the early winter dusk, Theresa Jean Paquinn died quietly in her sleep at the age of seventy-six. I was in the room with her, the Kid in my lap, the others strewn about in the hallway outside, waiting for the inevitable: Otter to wake up again and Mrs. Paquinn to pass. We watched for an hour, no words said, none that would have meant anything in the long run, anyways. We waited and waited until it finally happened. There was nothing revelatory about it, nothing to indicate that she was leaving, that she was saying good-bye. There was a breath in, no deeper than the one before it. Then she exhaled. And she was gone.
The Kid trembled in my arms as the machines began to flat line, and he turned and pressed his face into my shoulder, and I felt my shirt grow wet under his face. I rubbed his back as I watched her, so tiny and gone, and even when others came in to turn off the machines, when my family came in to say good-bye, we still sat there, waiting until we both knew the Kid would be strong enough to walk out on his own. He didn’t want to be carried. He didn’t want to lean on anyone. He wanted to walk out with his head held high, knowing he’d said good-bye in the only way he knew how to a woman who’d been his life.
Eventually, he slid from my lap. He walked over to Mrs. Paquinn and kissed her hand. He stood next to her for a moment and then walked out of the room, his head high, shoulders squared. Such a little guy.
I stood from the chair and made my way to her beside. I leaned down and kissed her forehead, brushing her hair back off her face. Her skin was already cool to the
touch. “Go on, old girl,” I told her. “Go find your Joseph, God love him. I’ll handle the rest down here, don’t you worry about that. I’ll be strong because you showed me how, and for that, I thank you. And hell, if anyone was capable of coming back as a ghost and haunting us, it’d be you. You stay out of my bedroom if you do, okay? There’s things I do in there that even you shouldn’t see.”
I kissed her one last time and left the room.
OTTER took her passing hard, but while he mourned her as the rest of us did, I think it was even harder for him, knowing what we’d been through while he was unconscious. I could tell the guilt was eating at him, that he hadn’t been there to shelter the Kid and me, even though the reason for his absence was not his fault. He seemed clingy, which was unusual for him, and he almost acted like the Kid, asking where I was going, what I was doing, when was I going to be back. He didn’t like me going places on my own, even though I rarely left the hospital. If I was gone longer than I said I’d be, you can sure as shit bet I’d get a phone call, demanding to know where I was.
There was plenty to do, however, in the days that followed. Otter had another surgery on his leg after the sutures became infected. There were a few moments where we were worried that he’d actually lose it, but they were able to clear out the infection with aggressive antibiotics, and the pins in his leg were unaffected. He woke up groggy and whining about how much pain he was in, and I knew then that he’d be okay. He stopped grumbling when I crawled back up into the bed with him and whispered in his ear that I was going to give him the sloppiest blowjob ever when he got out. He’d grinned at me in that drugged-up way he had and laughed quietly as he held me close.
I started to plan the funeral for Mrs. Paquinn, only to find that she’d left specific instructions as to how she wanted to be laid to rest. She wanted to be cremated, and her ashes spread along a familiar stretch of beach where so much of our lives had been decided. She didn’t want a big fuss made, she wrote in her will, but she did want everyone to tear up at least once, and then she wanted people to get drunk (“Even you, Bear” she wrote. “Lord knows it’ll probably only take half a beer before you’re crying, but at least we know that means you’re a cheap date. Otter, don’t let Bear out of your sight. I’m sure Creed will try to take advantage of that whole situation since he wants to have a bone session with your partner. But, if you do decide to join in the fun, make sure that you film it and send it to my new address: Mrs. Paquinn, care of God. Heaven, The Sky. I don’t know the zip code, but I don’t think that’ll matter. The post office should know what you mean”). She wanted to be celebrated, not mourned.
