Waiting for Patrick

by Brynn Stein

  “Then why wouldn’t Patrick have attached himself to Ben at the time of death? He had promised to go back to him.”

  “I don’t know.” Elliot did not whine that statement. He didn’t. He never whined. “He was shot in the head. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “But he was thinking clearly enough to attach himself to an object hidden in a tree house hundreds of miles away?” Sheri arched her eyebrows as she dropped her chin into her hands.

  “It’s a theory. Okay? I don’t know.” Elliot threw up his hands in defeat. Both hands, then winced when the IV pulled at his left and he immediately dropped them to the bed.

  “One that does not fit all the facts, Elle.” She wiggled her head around in her hands in a gesture that Elliot assumed to be a negation, but it just looked like she was one of those bobbleheaded things people put in the back windows of their cars.

  “Well, give me one that does.” He slumped his shoulders.

  “Nothing about any of this suggests any viable theories, if you ask me. Including the belief in ghosts. And yes, I’ve talked to Ben, so I have to believe he’s there, but I still don’t think I believe in ghosts.” She suddenly sank all the way back into her chair. Apparently the argument was over and she thought she had won.

  Elliot glared at her. “You don’t believe in ghosts even though you’ve held conversations with one.” It wasn’t a question.

  “It’s about as logical as you believing Patrick attached his spirit to a book.”

  Elliot took a deep breath and carefully pushed himself up in the bed a little, feeling his incision protest almost before he did it. “I don’t have any other ideas to explain the memories.”

  “Overactive imagination,” Sheri suggested.

  “Still on the table I guess,” Elliot had to admit. “And I haven’t completely ruled out a psychotic break.”

  Sheri patted Elliot’s hand. “Whatever’s going on, Elle, no one thinks you’re crazy. Okay?” Then she had to tease a little. “Now, maybe if we hadn’t been able to experience Ben for ourselves….”

  He reached over with his other hand and smacked at her. And got another tug from the IV for his trouble.

  Chapter 15

  ELLIOT WAS still in the hospital several days later. They weren’t letting him go home yet because they couldn’t get decent, consistent readings. Every time they thought he was healthy enough to go home, he’d have another episode. Not a full-blown heart attack, but an abnormal heartbeat severe enough piss off the ICD and to warrant more tests, different medication, or at least another day’s observation. At least he wasn’t completely bedridden anymore. They helped him walk up and down the hall several times a day, which always completely exhausted him, but they said he had to do it.

  Today they had him sitting up in his room. The black-and-gray institutional recliner had two separate controls: the normal lever for the footrest, but a smaller button above that to recline the head. It had taken him way longer than it should have to find that damnable button the first day; he’d sat stick upright for ten minutes cursing the lack of cooperation from the head part when he tried to push it back.

  Apparently, by Elliot’s seventh day of incarceration, Daniel decided that instead of waiting for Elliot to come back to SC, Daniel would come to PA.

  “You scared us all pretty badly,” he told Elliot after the initial small talk.

  “Yes, Sheri has made that abundantly clear,” Elliot deadpanned and shifted in his seat. Thank God that didn’t hurt quite as bad anymore. “This is why you all didn’t want me here by myself, yadda, yadda.”

  Daniel smiled but had to admit, “Well, it is, man. What would have happened if that carpenter hadn’t gotten there when he did? A couple more minutes unattended and you would have been gone.”

  “I knew he was coming that morning. So I knew he’d be along any time. I only wanted to get a head start so I could find the journal before I had to talk to him about reconstruction of the tree house or before they actually began.”

  “You should have waited for him anyway,” Daniel admonished, smoothing the closest side of the blanket back over Elliot’s legs since it slipped a little when Elliot had moved. “He’s working for you. You could tell him you wanted to go get the journal first before he started. Or you could have had him climb up and get it for you instead of climbing up there yourself.”

  “Oh yeah. That would have worked. I can see that conversation now. ‘Well, you see, a ghost gave me this dream, telling me where he kept an old journal detailing the relationship between him and another ghost I’ve been talking to.’ The guy would have still called 911, but I would have ended up on the psych ward in a straitjacket instead of in the cardiac ward with the world’s ugliest zipper on my chest.”

  Daniel had to chuckle. “Okay, maybe not go into detail about how you knew it was there. But you still should have waited.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Elliot dismissed the conversation. “So how’s Ben? And do not give me Sheri’s usual answer and tell me he’s still dead.”

  Daniel smirked. “Well, he is.” He dodged a smack on his arm. “He’s also pissed off. From what I could get from him, if you die here, you can’t be with him there. I’m not really sure what the hell he has planned. You two going to haunt the place together for eternity or something? Damned if I know. All I’m sure of is I’m not going out there again in anything less than full riot gear and maybe with the SWAT team. He’s gotten a lot better about being able to move stuff. I was afraid he was going to throw the sofa at me.”

  “He hasn’t gotten that much better. I don’t think he can actually throw the sofa.”

  “Why not? Especially when he’s mad. You know, like when a mother lifts a car off her infant or something. All that adrenalin.”

  “He’s pure spirit. He doesn’t get adrenalin surges.” Elliot sat back up. Then reclined again. Okay, now that he had found that little button, and his chest no longer hurt like a son of a bitch every time he moved, he was playing with the thing. It was like when he sat in a swivel chair. He’d never been able to be in one of those without twirling around several times.

  “You go out there when he’s royally pissed off and then tell me he doesn’t have adrenaline surges.” Daniel reached forward and batted Elliot’s hand away from the button. “He was strung out on something.”

  Elliot smiled but couldn’t think of anything else to say on that topic. He asked Daniel how his work was going, and Daniel was off like a shot talking about a commission he had from a family who wanted him to combine a bunch of people from different states and make it look as though they were all in the same place. They talked the afternoon away about every topic they could think of. It kept returning to Ben and Patrick, but veered back off too. After Daniel left, Elliot read the journal for a little while before dropping off to sleep. It was as full a day as Elliot could wish for while stuck in the hospital.

  AS SOON as Elliot fell asleep, he was in the middle of a dinner scene at Ben’s house when the boys were fifteen. Elliot woke up long enough to close the journal and lay it on the bedside table. His circadian rhythm was shot to hell, and he was wide-awake at three in the morning with no one to talk to. He wished he could just call Ben, but there were many problems with that plan. There wasn’t a landline at the plantation—or a cell phone, for that matter, since Elliot had taken his with him. Even if Ben could answer it and listen to Elliot speak, it wasn’t like he could talk back.

  Maybe we could text. He made a mental note to get an extra phone and get someone to take it out to the house. Just so that they could try. But then, the more that he thought about it, the more he wanted to go home and not have to figure out a way to talk to Ben remotely. The pull to be here in Pennsylvania seemed to be gone, and he missed Ben. He decided he would go home as soon as they let him out of the hospital.

  In the meantime he was trying to figure out a way to take Patrick with him. If Patrick truly was connected to the journal, maybe it was only a matter of taking the book w
ith him. Then Ben and Patrick would be reunited.

  And Ben would leave.

  That would rip Elliot in half, but he loved Ben enough to let him go. For the first time in his life, he loved someone enough to value their happiness over his own. It was a cliché, but it was how he felt.

  THE NEXT morning, Elliot woke up gasping for breath. There was a horrible pain in his chest, and he could barely move. He was trying to reach for the call button but it seemed a million miles away. He needn’t have worried, though. The nurses came practically running into his room, followed closely by a doctor, and there was a flurry of activity. They finally moved him to a gurney and rushed him down the hallway. He could hear them talking, could tell that they were talking to him, trying to explain everything to him, but he couldn’t understand them, and he had no idea what was going on.

  I’M CRYING. My dad is dead. He came into the house after work and dropped on the floor. There was nothing anyone could do. I’m almost twenty years old and I’m crying like a baby. Ben is right beside me. Holding me, comforting me. No one seems to think it’s odd that he’s holding me this close, but I wouldn’t care if they did. I need him. He’s the only way I’ll get through this.

  ELLIOT WOKE up in the ICU again.

  “You have to stop doing this to us, Ellie.” Sheri was beside his bed. By virtue of having medical proxy, Sheri was allowed family privileges when it came to visitation. “You had another heart attack. At least you were already here this time. They took you for emergency surgery to reseat the ICD. It wasn’t being effective in shocking your heart back to normal rhythm. But they finally got you stabilized, and it seems to be working okay now.”

  “Isn’t this getting bad awfully fast?” Elliot had researched congestive heart failure and knew that it wasn’t that unusual, once the patient had the first heart attack, for them to go downhill fairly quickly, but he had thought he had more time than this.

  Sheri shook her head and wiped a stray tear from her eye. “I don’t know, Ellie. You just need to get better.” She had such a pleading look that he didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s not like I’m doing anything to cause it, Cher.” He covered her hand, trying to give reassurance he did not feel.

  “I know. I just need to get you back home with us. You’re not going to argue and try to stay in PA are you?” She leaned forward and gripped his hand as if she would use it to drag him home if he planned to stay.

  Elliot shook his head. “No. I’ve already decided to take the journal back home. That should take Patrick back too, and then he and Ben can be together.”

  “You still think Patrick is tied to the journal?”

  “Best theory I have so far, yeah.” Shoulders slumped, head sunk into the pillow as far as it would go, Elliot knew he probably looked as dejected as he felt, but he couldn’t do anything about it right now. He simply didn’t have the energy.

  “Have you had any more dreams lately?”

  “Yeah, pretty much every night. Then just now I was dreaming about when his father died.” He tried to put expression in his lackluster voice, but it wouldn’t cooperate.

  “You were getting Patrick’s dreams just now?” Sheri seemed puzzled.

  “Yeah, why?” He did manage to lift his head a little at her tone.

  “Ellie, I took the journal back to the hotel yesterday when they rushed you for tests. They said they’d bring you back to ICU and were transferring all your things to a room here. I knew how important it was to you, so I took it with me for safekeeping.”

  “But you brought it back, right?” He started to tense a little, head lifting off the pillow. That theory couldn’t go down the drain too. He didn’t have any more, and he was too weary to try to think of any. “You have it now. That’s why I could dream the memories about—”

  She shook her head. “No, Elle. It’s still at the hotel.”

  “Then….” Elliot was utterly confused. “How am I still getting his memories?”

  Sheri scooted closer and took his hand. “Because they were never from a ghost, Elle. They’re only—”

  “Do not tell me they’re my imagination. I wouldn’t know the ins and outs of life in the eighteen hundreds. Why would I know that?” He quickly raised his head and then wished he hadn’t as a stab of pain ran through him. Whether from the new incision or the leftover pain from the ICD shocking the crap out of his innards, he didn’t know or care. He searched around for the all-you-need morphine button and pressed it like his life depended on it.

  “Ellie.” Her concern was real, but Elliot was just a little pissed and wasn’t addressing it with her anymore.

  “No, dammit.” His voice was rising in both pitch and volume.

  “Okay. Ellie, calm down. Let’s not talk about this now.” Elliot hadn’t noticed the beeping of the machine get a little faster until just that moment. “Please calm down.”

  A middle-aged nurse appeared at the door. She didn’t look overly concerned, but she was checking on the change in readings. “Everything okay, Mr. Graham?”

  He looked over at the machine, then at Sheri, and finally at the nurse. “Is my condition really that bad that a little elevation in heart rate warrants this much concern?”

  “Better safe than sorry,” the burly nurse said calmly, but Sheri still looked like she was scared to death.

  “So… what? I’m never going to be able to get a little passionate in an argument without people appearing at my door?”

  The nurse smiled. “Well, I’d imagine once you get out of the hospital, things like that will stop happening… people appearing at your door anyway.”

  Elliot shook his head but grinned. “Have you met my friends?”

  The nurse chuckled, then patted the doorjamb before leaving. “Call me if you need me.”

  “Doesn’t look like I really need to. You just show up.”

  She smiled and left him alone with Sheri, who suddenly was very interested in talking about the weather.

  ELLIOT STAYED in ICU another day, and Sheri ‘forgot’ to bring the journal, promising to get it to him as soon as he was out of ICU.

  Elliot wanted something, anything, to take his mind off the situation. His health was deteriorating much faster than he’d thought it would, and he didn’t want to let himself dwell on that. But he needn’t have worried. With the pain he was in, he kept hitting the morphine about as often as the machine would let him, so he slept most of the time.

  The next morning he was transferred back to the regular ward. It felt like they hadn’t even gotten him settled in the room before Daniel waltzed through the door.

  “So,” Daniel said as he sat down. “I hear the journal theory is a bust.”

  Elliot chuckled. “Sheri couldn’t wait to tell you, could she?”

  “Well, she mentioned it when she asked me to bring you this.” He produced the journal from an inside pocket of his jacket.

  Elliot took it and shook his head. “I’m fresh out of theories. I don’t know why I’m getting Patrick’s memories, or how he’s reaching me in so many different places, with or without the journal.”

  “Well,” Daniel offered, plopping down in the chair, “maybe it’s not a place or a thing he’s attached to. Maybe he’s attached to you, personally.”

  Elliot wrinkled his brow. “Why would that be?”

  “How the hell would I know?” Daniel grinned. “Maybe you’re a descendant? And he’s able to reach you because your spirits are… similar… because you’re related… and… I don’t know.”

  Elliot smiled at Daniel’s fluster. “It’s a better idea than I’ve got right now.”

  “Only because you have no idea right now.” Daniel chuckled.

  “Well, true.” Elliot smirked and wiggled the tiniest bit in his bed, wary of angering his incision. “It’s worth some research, though. Did you happen to bring my laptop too? I had asked Sheri to bring next time she came up.”

  Daniel shook his head. “No. She didn’t give me that. I guess she’ll
bring it up.”

  Elliot fished around for his phone, and Daniel picked it up from the bedside table. After a curious look toward Elliot, asking if that was what he was looking for, Daniel handed it to him.

  Elliot texted Sheri to remind her to bring the laptop. “I’ll get on one of the ancestry sites and see if I can find a connection. I can use the personal hot spot on my phone to connect, like I do at home. But if I tried to do all that research on that tiny little screen, I’d just end up throwing the phone across the room.”

  Daniel seemed to think of something. “Check with the nurses and make sure it’s okay for you to have all these electronics and to be online and everything. The last thing we need is for you to be screwing up your pacemaker.”

  “It seems to be screwing up all on its own.” Elliot absently touched his chest.

  “All the more reason to ask about the electronics.” Daniel paused, then added, “Besides, it’s a long shot.” Daniel wiggled down in the chair. “I’ve never heard of ghosts working that way.”

  “Neither have I, but I have no other leads at all, so it gives me something to do.” He tossed his phone beside him on the bed, having completed his text and sent it. “And I already cleared it with the nurses before this last surgery, but I’ll ask again.”

  “Well, as long as it’ll keep you out of trouble.”

  Elliot winked conspiratorially.

  SHERI BROUGHT the laptop later, but Elliot was too wiped out from his brief sit in the chair to even open it.

  “Thanks for bringing it, Cher,” he mumbled before falling asleep.