Sift

by L. D. Davis

  It was supper time. She and her family might have been getting ready to eat, but I had an open invitation that I had used a few times since coming out of my cave. I let myself in, sighing loudly as I dragged my leg into the house behind me.

  “Damn thing feels like it’s about to fall the hell off,” I said, and then for the first time, looked at the room’s occupants. “Oh.”

  Perry was there, and Janet and their two kids. Cort and Kenzie, of course. Baby Thomas was there, too, held in Connor’s arms.

  I could feel everyone staring at me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Connor’s. He had stopped his weekly visits to the house, coincidentally just around the time that I had stopped hiding in my room. I had not caught more than a glimpse of him since he had come to see me on my second day home.

  “What in the whole hell did you do to your head?” McKenzie cried out.

  I finally peeled my eyes away from those brown eyes and looked at the rest of the faces in the room.

  Cort pulled out a chair for me, and I gratefully sat down and took some pressure off my leg.

  “I got tired of that stupid patch on my head,” I said. “So, I asked Daisy to take me to get it cut. You don’t like it? Daisy got the same cut.”

  She gasped and then put a hand on her hip as she glared disapprovingly. “Daddy must be on the floor from a stroke.”

  “He’ll be alright. He has other things on his mind now.”

  “Well, I like it,” Janet said. “I mean, on you. I won’t be shavin’ my head.”

  “You best not be shavin’ your head,” Perry said to her and turned back to me. “You look weird, but then again you don’t look much weirder than you always did.”

  “Thanks, brother,” I cooed. “I love you, too.”

  “Can I touch it?” Cort asked, staring a little too closely.

  “Courtney Malcom, you better not touch her head,” Kenzie snapped.

  I rolled my eyes. “I ain’t got lice, Kenzie. Besides, you don’t have to like it. I didn’t do it for you or anyone else. I did it for me. I feel good about it, and I don’t have a lot of reasons for feelin’ good these days. So, you and Daddy can roll around on the floor together with your exploded brains.”

  “Hmph,” she said and went back to the stove.

  “I like it,” a voice said, quieting every other voice in the room.

  My eyes shifted to Connor. I felt my heart swell when I saw his lips quirked up to one side.

  “I liked your full head of hair, but…I like this style, too. It looks good, Darla.”

  Considering how much he had loved my hair before, to hear him say that meant a great deal to me, but I didn’t get all stupid about it.

  “Thank you, Connor,” I responded quietly, and then I got to my feet. “Well, I’m gonna head back.”

  “You just got here,” McKenzie said, startled. “Stay here and rest for a bit. Somebody can drive you back after supper.”

  I felt like I shouldn’t be there. They had clearly all decided to get together for dinner, and no one had invited me. I just showed up. Open invitation or not, I felt like I was intruding. I again had that feeling of being displaced and homeless with nowhere to go.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, opening the back door.

  Kenzie looked from me to Connor and back to me as if she knew why I was leaving. Yeah, that was the biggest reason. Maybe I hadn’t been invited because no one wanted to deal with the awkwardness that was bound to be between Connor and me. No one wanted to eat in that tension. I got it.

  “Darla, please,” Kenzie said, hurrying over to me.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, forcing myself to smile. I kissed her cheek and then hobbled back out the door.

  I had only made it a few yards when I heard the back door open and close again. There were footsteps behind me. I stopped and turned around, preparing to tell my sister to go back inside, but I was shocked to see Connor walking toward me.

  He stopped only about a foot away from me. His eyes moved over my newly shaved head and over my face. I wished I had schooled my features to hide my pain, but it was too late. He saw it.

  “In about thirty seconds, I am going to pick you up and carry you. You have a choice. Either I carry you back inside for dinner, or I carry you to my truck and drive you home.”

  Indignant, I took an awkward step back and put a hand on my hip. “I don’t need you to—”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  I sputtered. “You ain’t gonna—”

  “Fifteen seconds,” he warned. “Choose or I choose for you.”

  I took another step back and pointed. “Connor Chandler, don’t you dare pi—”

  I squealed as he lifted me into his arms, careful not to jostle my leg.

  “Choose,” he said quietly, gazing at my face.

  I growled even as I put my arms around his neck so I wouldn’t flop all over the place. “To my dad’s,” I said through gritted teeth.

  He was silent as he carried me around the house and to the front where his truck was parked. Very carefully, as if he were handling glass, he put me inside the cab and closed the door. Once he climbed inside, he reached across me for my seatbelt and buckled me in. He still smelled good. Comforting. Like home.

  The drive was only about two minutes, but halfway there, he said, “I really do like your hair. Gutsy move.”

  “It was either that or get a tattoo over my scar.”

  “Your dad would have really died, for real.”

  As we pulled into the driveway, I should have said something like, “Thanks for bringing me home,” or “I appreciate the ride,” but I didn’t. Instead, I blurted out, “You didn’t come. When I was in the hospital. You didn’t come.”

  The truck rolled to a stop. Connor looked over at me for too many heartbeats. I expected him to say something, anything, but he didn’t. He sighed and got out of the truck. He didn’t say anything when he lifted me into his arms again either, or during the walk to the front porch, where he carefully put me on my feet.

  He sighed again, and said, “I was there.”

  Puzzled, I replied dumbly. “What?”

  “I was there. At the hospital.” He began to back away. “You just didn’t see me.”

  With that, he turned and walked back to his truck. A moment later, he sped out of the driveway, leaving me baffled on the porch and a cloud of dust in his wake.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  I called Cherry that night. If anyone would give it to me straight, my best friend would.

  “Connor said that he was at the hospital,” I said when she answered. “He said that he was there, and I just didn’t see him. What is he talking about, Cherry?”

  She seemed surprised. “No one’s told you yet?”

  I threw my hand up. “Told me what?”

  “Oh, damn,” she murmured. “You got any top-secret-sweet-stash on you? You’re going to need it.”

  I went into my closet and retrieved my top-secret-sweet-stash and sat down in my chair. I stuffed a truffle in my mouth, and said, “Okay. Tell me.”

  “Connor was at the hospital,” she said without preamble. “He came with his parents. A matter of fact, they all arrived even before your family got there. As soon as Kenzie told him, Connor, Kirk, and Nerissa came. I was in the ER waiting room with Cade when they walked in. Darla, dios. Cade was a mess. He was so distraught when I first got to the hospital that they almost admitted him so that they could give him something to calm him down, but I was able to eventually get him to calm down and sit. He saw it all happen, you know? He felt like he should have been able to stop it somehow.”

  My gut clenched whenever I thought about what it must have been like for Cade that day. I had spoken to him a couple of times since I’d stopped moping in my chair, and I could still hear that guilt in his voice, no matter how hard he tried to mask it.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” I mumbled more to myself, but Cherry heard me.

  “I know it wasn’t,” Cherry said
gently. “He told me what happened between you two. He told me a lot, Darla. By the way, I have several bones to pick with you, because he told me things that you never told me. He probably wouldn’t have told me anything if he hadn’t been so upset, but it was like he needed to get it off his chest.”

  “Pick your bones later. Tell me the rest.”

  I ate another truffle as Cherry went on.

  “Anyway, like I said, Connor and his parents got there pretty quick. I didn’t know a lot myself at the time, thanks to HIPAA, but I told them everything I knew. Connor was wrecked. He was just as messed up as Cade had been. He was pacing back and forth, pulling on his hair and crying. It was horrible. Kirk and Nerissa tried to soothe him, but they were upset, too. Especially Nerissa. You really made an impression on his parents after just one meeting.”

  I couldn’t imagine Connor, the composed Connor that I knew being hysterical like that. A knot formed in my throat just thinking about what that must have looked like.

  “Maybe they were just upset because Connor was upset,” I managed to say. “Maybe that was hard for them to see him like that. What happened next?”

  Cherry sighed. “A big fat cluster fuck. That’s what happened next. Caden figured out who Connor was pretty quickly. What other man besides your dad would cry for you like that? He knew that Connor had to be the other guy. Caden attacked him—or he tried to. I saw him coming and tried to stop him. Security saw it going down, and they intervened, but by then Connor figured out who Caden was, too. Dios, Darla, it was a mess. The guys had to wait in separate rooms. The situation didn’t improve any when your family finally arrived. Everyone was on edge. The police told them how the accident had happened. They didn’t implicate Caden in the crash, but they did mention that he had been behind you and that you guys had been fighting. Then your dad tried to attack Caden. All the women were crying. The men were ready to explode. Everything settled down a little bit after a couple more hours, but Caden insisted that Connor leave, and Connor said he wasn’t leaving unless someone dragged him out.”

  Cherry went on to tell me that for eight days it was much of the same. Connor, his parents, Caden, Cherry, and my family waited for me to wake up. Everyone but Caden and Cherry got hotel rooms nearby, but my mom slept at the hospital every night. She ate there and showered there, too. She never left. Everyone else at least left to sleep a few hours and grab something to eat.

  “They fought every day,” Cherry said. “Caden and Connor. Every damn day. Even Perry and Connor got into it on that first night, because Perry didn’t know that his friend had been boning his sister. Anyway, you started showing some signs of life at the end of the eighth day. And by the ninth day, the doctors were convinced it was only a matter of time before you woke up, but they didn’t know if you would have any brain damage. Any more than you normally have anyway.”

  “Ha. Ha,” I said dryly. “Carry on.”

  “Caden and Connor started arguing again that night. Your dad had enough of it. I think we all had enough of it, but your dad is a bigger badass than Caden and Connor put together. They both backed down when he got between them. He told them that things were bad enough without them fighting. He didn’t want you to wake up to such mayhem. He was worried that even knowing that Connor and Cade had been in the same building would put an untold amount of stress on you and possibly complicate your recovery.”

  “If I would have woken up to that crap, I probably would have begged to go back into a coma,” I admitted with a groan and ate another truffle.

  “And I would have probably obliged you by punching you in your busted head for causing such drama to begin with.”

  “Okay, finish the story,” I said impatiently.

  “Your dad wanted Caden to leave. Almost everyone blamed him for what happened. I didn’t, but most did. But Connor told them he would leave instead.”

  My mouth opened. “What? Why?”

  “He admitted that you and him hadn’t parted on good terms and that he wasn’t sure how you would react to him being there. There was no telling what kind of state you would have been in, whether or not your memory would’ve been intack or if there would have been other cognitive issues. For all we knew, you would wake up and not have any memory of the past few months, which was a pretty big possibility. Connor didn’t want to upset you or scare you or impede your healing in any way. He asked everyone, even asked Cade, to not tell you he’d been there, at least not yet. He wanted to see how you were when you fully woke up first.

  “He thought it was the right thing to do, the best thing to do for you,” Cherry said. “He didn’t really want to leave. He did it in your best interest, and I have to say that I agreed with him. Everyone—even if reluctantly—agreed with him. Almost everyone also agreed that Caden should go, too, but believe it or not, Connor was the one that said that he should stay.”

  My face screwed up in confusion. “Why? Why would he do that for a guy he apparently loathed?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I was about to tell you that part next,” Cherry said, and then paused for effect. “Connor looked Cade in the eyes and said, ‘If you left, you wouldn’t have to face what you’ve done. You wouldn’t have to look at her bruised and broken body and remember that it is your fault. You stay, and you face what you’ve done, and I hope to hell it haunts you until you die.’”

  My mouth dropped open again, and the truffle I had just put in it fell out onto my shirt.

  “He said that? He really said that? Connor said that?”

  “Yes,” Cherry said the word so that it dragged out like a hiss. “He said it and Cade just stood there and took it! Then Connor turned his back on him and said he wanted to see you one last time while you were asleep. He and his parents left soon after that. I mean they left the hospital, not the city. Me and your brother kept them updated daily. They finally went back home after six days. Connor came back the day before you were released, though.”

  “Why?” I asked as I limped across the hall into the bathroom to wash my hands and to wipe the chocolate off my shirt.

  “It had become apparent that you couldn’t get into the apartment without someone carrying you up and down the stairs, and it was just too small, and you were likely to fall and hurt yourself. No one wanted you to go to Cade’s except for Cade. Connor was the one that stepped in and got the hotel room. He paid for your entire stay there.”

  If there had been a chair—other than the porcelain throne beside me—to drop into, I would have. My hands stilled under the running water.

  “But…but that had to be…thousands of dollars. We were there for almost a month.”

  Cherry snorted. “Yeah, thousands is about right. If he hadn’t sweet-talked the manager into getting some kind of discount, it would have been astronomical.”

  “Why didn’t Connor come see me after I was discharged from the hospital?” I questioned as I walked back to my room. “Why didn’t he come after I woke up and he knew my memory was okay?”

  “I am not exactly sure. I offered to take him up to surprise you a couple times, but he declined. You’ll have to ask him.”

  I stood by the window in my bedroom with my brow pinched. “But he didn’t call me or anything. No email, no text message, nothing. Why? Didn’t he know that I would think that he didn’t care?”

  Cherry sighed. “Look, Darla, I don’t know. Like I said, you will have to ask him yourself. I told you all I know, but if I had to take a guess…”

  “Yes, take a guess. If you had to take a guess, why would you guess that he didn’t do any of that?”

  “Maybe he thought that you and Cade were back together. Maybe he didn’t want to come in and shake things up. In the end, does it really matter? You know now that he cared. Look, I gotta go. I’m not a loser with a broken leg, so I actually have a life to tend to.”

  I rolled my eyes but smiled. “Cuban whore.”

  “Trashy gringa. I love you, bye.”

  “Bye.”

  I slipped my phone into
my back pocket and continued to stare out the window, thinking. I was rather overwhelmed with all the information Cherry had just given me. It was incredible that everyone had kept it secret for so long, that no one had slipped up in conversation. Knowing that Connor had been there and what he’d done made my chest feel tight with emotion. Swallowing around that lump in my throat was difficult.

  He was there. He was there, he was there, he was there!

  I almost didn’t care that he didn’t come to see me after I got out of the hospital because I was so tremendously humbled by his quiet kindness and generosity.

  And I had thought he disliked me, that he hadn’t cared.

  I turned away from the window and went into my closet again. After a couple minutes of digging around, I found the items I was looking for. The bedazzled pink card Connor had made for me and the keychain of the Earth. I hadn’t looked at them since I had packed them away back in Philly.

  I ran my fingers over the jewels of the card, touched the magic ticket within, and even brought it to my nose. Tiny traces of Connor’s scent lingered on the paper. After several minutes of admiring it, I placed it carefully on my dresser. Then I found my keys and put the keyring on.

  He was there. He was there!

  I put the keys down on the dresser beside the card and left my room, feeling lighter than I’d felt in months.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  A week later I was able to drive myself to Louie’s in Daisy’s car. Driving wasn’t the most comfortable thing, but since I was only driving around town and was able to go out by myself, I just dealt with the discomfort.

  I had a whole stack of mail sent down from Philly to go through, and most of it was from UPenn. I didn’t think they were sending me knock-knock jokes or giving me any money, so I supposed that they wanted me to give them money.