Summer on Main Street

by Crista McHugh

  “So are you thinking about it?”

  “I don't know. I never really planned on staying in town.” She grabbed a pile of napkins, fresh from the dry cleaner. “I only sublet my apartment for the summer.” Edge to edge, fold once and then twice. Her fingers followed the rhythm that had become second nature that summer.

  Lacey chuckled. “Yeah. Funny how plans change, huh?”

  Ash finished folding and carried an armful of napkins to the closet. On her way back, she took a detour to the ladies’ room. She didn’t feel like making conversation, even with Lacey. How was she supposed to answer Marty’s question with Colin’s hanging over her? Sinking onto the toilet seat, she sighed and rubbed her legs. The ring, still in her pocket, dug into her thigh. She pulled it out. Look at it fifty different ways, think about all the things it meant she had to choose, it still was the most beautiful piece of jewelry she’d ever seen.

  “Marry me…make me the happiest guy in the world…”

  The door banged open, and a pair of feet appeared in the stall beside her. “Ash? J.T. said Marty called, wants us to close up early today.”

  “Why?” She glanced at her watch. Almost four. She wasn’t ready to go home. She wasn’t ready to see Eddie, to call Colin, to make any kind of decision. She wanted to wait until the wee hours, tomorrow’s dawn maybe. Not mid-afternoon of a gray, lifeless day. She flushed and headed for the sinks, avoiding her reflection in the mirror.

  “Guess the storm’s pretty bad,” Lacey said. “Shoot. I could have used the dinner shift. Lunch tips weren’t so good.”

  Ash lathered up and watched the soap swirl into the drain. I wish I could do that. I wish I could just vanish in a whirlpool until I sort out my life. Hide in a dark hole until things on the outside made sense again. She frowned. Except she’d come to Paradise with the intention of doing just that, and look where it had gotten her. Her shoulders hunched up. Maybe you couldn’t ever run away from your life. Maybe the big choices did follow you no matter where you went.

  Back in the bar, J.T. nodded over his toothpick when she asked about the weather.

  “Yep. Marty said the bridge to Forestburg’s under water. He’s stuck down in Salem overnight. Plus the news said there are a couple of accidents on the other side of town. He said to forget it, go on home.”

  Outside, lightning sliced the street into jagged white pieces, and the rain poured down, heavier than ever. Ash nodded. If she were calling the shots, she'd say the same thing. No use staying open. The way this weather looked, she couldn’t imagine anyone in Paradise leaving the comfort of their couches.

  The telephone rang.

  “Blues and Booze,” J.T. answered. “We’re getting ready to close…oh, yeah. Hang on a minute.” He held out the receiver. “For you.”

  Ash frowned. No one called her at work. “Who is it?”

  “Dunno. Some guy.”

  “That’s helpful.”

  J.T. shrugged and started counting his drawer

  “Ashton Kirk?” She didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Yes?”

  The man paused, giving way to a cough. But when he spoke again, she knew who it was. She knew before he told her his name. She knew from the way he formed his vowels. She knew from the way he dropped the end of his sentences, from the way he stopped every so often when the words became too hard to say. She knew because he spoke exactly the same way his son did.

  “Eddie’s been in an accident. He’s asking for you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A face. Blurred and dark. Eddie tried to sit up. “Whoa.” Hands on his shoulders pushed him back. “Take it easy.”

  He tried to ask where he was, and why the hell the lights above him were so bright, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. He tried again. A mumble this time. In fragmented pieces, the room took shape around him. White everywhere. Shadows he couldn’t make out. Noises he didn’t recognize: humming and beeping and mechanical burping. Something wrapped tight around his arm. And a God-awful smell. Seconds later, he placed it.

  Oh, Jesus Christ. I’m in the hospital.

  He could make out different voices, some female, some male. Pain radiated from his temples to down around his ankles, and he closed his eyes again. Next time he opened them, he saw Cal. Eddie’s mouth fell open. In the doorway, dressed in the same plaid shirt and jeans he’d been wearing the night of the accident, stood his kid brother.

  “Screwed up, didn't ya? Mom’s gonna kill you.”

  Eddie squinted. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m not here, idiot.” The seventeen year old crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “I’m inside your head. Inside your dreams. Where I’ve been for the last three years.”

  A doctor walked by Cal—or through Cal, Eddie thought with a shudder—peeling off his gloves as he left the room. No one else even blinked.

  “You’re dead.” Eddie turned his head away. “And I must be close, if I think I’m talking to you.”

  “Severe lacerations…possible head trauma…hematoma…we need a CAT scan and MRI…X-ray that leg…”

  Eddie fought to hold on to the words, to the sentences that swirled around him. But he couldn’t even keep his eyes open. Something pricked his arm, and warmth dripped into his veins. He stopped struggling. Even the lights didn’t seem so bright anymore.

  Better. Doesn’t hurt so much. He turned his face back to the doorway. “Still here?”

  Cal grinned. “You gotta tell her,” he said. His expression grew serious. “You gotta tell her how you feel.”

  “Who?”

  Cal rolled his eyes. “Who do you think? I’m seventeen, not a moron.”

  “Now you’re giving me advice on women?” Eddie found that if he closed his eyes, he could still talk to his brother. Funny. And yet not so funny, after all. Maybe the people closest to you, the ones that wound the threads of their lives through yours, belonged to you forever. Maybe you could continue to have conversations with them. Even past death. Even past hopelessness.

  “It’s not hopeless,” Cal said.

  “Stop reading my thoughts.”

  “Tell her.”

  “She just got engaged. I saw him put the ring on her finger.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s gone. She’s not anybody I ever knew, anyway. And she doesn’t belong in Paradise.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Yeah? What do you know?” Go to hell, Eddie thought, exhausted.

  “Already there, bro. Same place you’ll be if you spend your life wondering what would have happened if you’d had the balls to talk to her instead of running away.”

  “I didn’t run away.” Eddie didn’t want to think about it anymore. He didn’t want to hear his dead brother’s voice. Didn’t want to remember the anguish of saying goodbye at the grave. He felt himself melt into the bed, as if his bones had turned to liquid. As if part of him was already gone. Didn’t hurt so much. Besides, if going to sleep, if giving in to the pain and the weakness clamping down on his body meant seeing his brother again for real, then maybe dying wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  Maybe everything really did happen for a reason.

  ***

  “I’ll give you a ride to the hospital,” Lacey offered.

  Ash shook her head and waited for the room to stop spinning. She wasn’t religious, had abandoned church the summer she left for college. But as she hung up the phone, she found herself staring at her fingers, clutching the edge of the bar so hard the tips had all turned white. Would prayer work at a time like this? Did the big guy upstairs listen to people who once vowed never to set foot inside a church again?

  “No, it’s okay,” she said after a minute. “I’ll drive myself. I’m okay.” And she wondered if God could hear the lies she told out loud too.

  Strange, Ash thought as she pulled onto Main Street a few minutes later. She didn’t think it had poured this hard all summer. Sure, maybe a quick shower here and there, but
nothing so violent. Nothing that made her think that Paradise itself, its streets and its homes along with the people inside them, might be swept off the map. Her fingers shook against the steering wheel. Her stomach churned. She’d had to ask J.T. for directions to the hospital, and even though she’d written them down, she made two wrong turns and had to double back.

  “Eddie’s been in an accident…”

  Again and again she heard the words of his father, the tears bubbling in his voice, the control the man fought to keep. My God. The Wests had already lost one son. How could they go through it all again?

  She braked hard and swerved to avoid a car abandoned in the middle of the road. Breath hissed through her teeth, and she fought for calm. Read the directions. Focus on one thing at a time. Okay, a turn at the blinking yellow light by the highway. A treacherous drive along aptly named River Street. A right turn by the Dairy Dome. Ash started counting breaths, to remind herself to inhale. Another half-mile, and the modest brick building that housed South County Medical Center rose up from the fog. Finally.

  She steered into the visitors’ lot. Only one other vehicle occupied a spot, a brown pick-up truck with a dent in one side. She ran for the ER doors, which slid open as she approached. In the foyer stood an orderly. He looked her way but didn’t speak. She headed for the desk. No one there.

  “Hello?” She rapped on the glass divider. After a minute a receptionist appeared, with a sweater pulled tight across her chest. For the first time, Ash realized the room was freezing, with the AC up full blast. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Eddie West?” The words turned her tongue thick in her mouth. She tried to ask something else but couldn’t.

  The woman glanced at a chart. “You family?”

  Ash shook her head.

  “Can’t tell you anything. Privacy laws.”

  She backed away. Had they taken him upstairs, to another room? To surgery? She looked around the waiting area for his father. Not a soul.

  “He’s asking for you…”

  That meant he was okay, right? He wouldn’t be talking, or coherent, if he were really that hurt. Without seeing the walls around her, she moved through the waiting room on unsteady legs. In the far corner, she sank onto a blue plastic chair. Two magazines, their covers torn off, lay on a table beside her, and a coffee pot burped in the corner. Otherwise, the place was empty. No emergencies tonight, apparently, except for Eddie. How lucky for everyone else.

  Ash closed her eyes. Mistake.

  Eddie’s mouth on hers, his hands roaming her body, sprang to life behind her lids like it was a motion picture with a viewing audience of one. She stared at the clock above the door instead. Five o’clock. Five-oh-five. Barely the other side of afternoon. On any other day, they’d be sitting on the porch roof talking baseball. They’d be making fun of the neighbors, watching the street, telling stories. They’d be living.

  She thought back to their Fourth of July party, counting the days. Two. Four. Five. Five days ago, Eddie and Ash had danced around the porch roof. Later that night, he’d kissed her. And by the next morning, she knew she loved him, somewhere in the back of her mind where the thought was so new it hadn’t even opened its eyes.

  She tried to glance through a magazine, but the words and pictures blurred. She looked back at the clock and counted the erratic clicks of its old-fashioned hands. The telephone rang. A nurse walked into the waiting room on rubbery white feet, passing Ash without a glance as she pushed her way through the swinging glass door into the area beyond. Into the area, Ash assumed, where they looked patients over, treated their wounds, decided the next and best course of action.

  Triage, she thought after a minute. That was the word, the way they decided who was examined first. The one who bled the most got the bandages. But what about injuries that went below the skin? What if you couldn’t see how badly you’d broken your heart until it was too late?

  “Are you Ashton?” It was a woman’s voice, quiet and shaky.

  She looked up and saw Eddie’s blue eyes. Her heart lurched. “Mrs. West?”

  “Irene.” The graying brunette sat in the chair beside Ash. She balanced on the edge as if she might jump up again at any moment.

  “How is he?”

  “They’re not sure. He was thrown…” Her last word broke on a sob. A man approached them, and as Ash stood to shake the hand he offered, she saw an older version of Eddie, with the same strong jaw and the same solid stature.

  “Malcolm West. Thanks for coming.”

  She nodded, not sure what she was supposed to say. I live upstairs from your son? I think I might have fallen in love with him? I’ve lied to him about everything important since the day we met?

  “They’re doing some more tests,” Eddie’s father said after a minute. He sank into the seat beside his wife and took her hand. “They want to make sure there wasn’t any damage to…ah…his brain.”

  Irene burst into tears and fell against her husband’s shoulder.

  Ash looked away from them, down at her lap. Black spots circled in front of her eyes, and the room grew hot. Had they turned off the AC? She had to pinch the skin on her arm to keep from passing out.

  I shouldn’t be here. It’s too private, too fragile, too awkward. I don’t even know them. I barely know Eddie. She shifted in the chair, meaning to get up, go outside, find some fresh air, when something poked her in the leg. She looked down and saw the bulge in her pocket. The ring. Colin’s ring. Colin’s offer.

  For a minute or two, Ash sat perfectly still. This is it, the moment I have to choose. Life with someone she knew, or life with someone she’d only just met. A life that was predictable, that followed rules she knew, or a life with twists and turns she couldn’t begin to predict. She ran her fingers across the lump in her pocket and felt the edges of the ring, the smooth circle of the band.

  Choosing Colin means I get the marriage I always wanted. I get the comfortable life in Boston. I get the partner my family approves of.

  Choosing Eddie means no guarantees. It means taking a chance, holding my breath, and jumping into the deep end. It means starting all over again with someone brand new.

  She stole another glance at Eddie’s parents. If she said no to Colin, there was no promise Eddie would even know her face when he woke up. Ash stood. “I’m…I’ll…would you excuse me?” She reached for her cell phone. “I have to make a phone call.”

  Irene sniffled and looked at her hands, folded like a broken bird in her lap. Malcolm nodded and tried to smile, but the expression slipped away before it reached his eyes.

  Five thirty, the clock now read. Ash found a spot beneath the overhang outside where a weak signal came in. She scrolled down the saved numbers. For a minute she thought about calling Jen, but what good would that do? She couldn’t ask her best friend to hop into her car and drive a hundred miles, not on a night like tonight. And not to save Ash from something she needed to figure out by herself.

  She stopped halfway down her list and stared at the digits she knew by heart. It’s the right choice. The only choice. She dialed and waited for Colin to answer.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Cal?” Eddie lurched up from unconsciousness. He looked at the door, the last place he’d seen his kid brother. Nothing. No one. Not even a flesh-and-blood doctor or nurse.

  His head swam. Everything hurt, tenfold. He rolled his head on the pillow. The bike. The rain. And he'd forgotten the damn helmet. He ran one hand over his thigh and touched gauze. After a minute, he realized his right arm was bounded tightly to his chest. It ached like hell. His hair felt matted against his forehead. Did I break an arm? Hit face first? He had no recollection of the accident, no idea how hard he’d hit or how far he’d been thrown.

  The room remained empty, and he wondered if they’d moved him up from the ER. He glanced around. Looked like every other damn room in this place, and he’d spent enough time in the hospital to know. The bed next to him was unmade, the hall outside empty. He le
aned up on one elbow and caught a glimpse of a sign for the elevator. So he was upstairs. Second floor. That meant his parents were probably wandering the halls somewhere close by. He was surprised Mom wasn’t sitting bedside, waiting for him to wake up.

  Or maybe she'd figured she couldn’t wait like that again. Not after last time.

  Tears filled Eddie’s eyes, pain he thought he’d gotten rid of long ago. He pressed the first two fingers of his right hand against his breastbone, a gesture from the months after the accident. A superstition. He’d once thought that the hollowness there would go away, that one day when he checked, it would have filled again with something like life. Each day when he woke, for almost a year, he checked for some sign of recovery. Each day his fingers fell away without finding one. After awhile, he realized they never would. Like a bum ankle, or a scar that stretched the length of your jaw line, some pain you carried around with you forever.

  But tonight it wasn't there. Surprised, he closed his eyes and checked again. That awful emptiness, that bone-deep ache that had greeted him each morning for the last three years, had disappeared. Maybe the accident had shaken it loose. Maybe grief had run its course. Or maybe he’d finally met someone who cast light on him again.

  He reached for the call button. Cal was right. He had to let Ash know how he felt. She’s the reason I didn’t roll over and die. She had to be. Nothing else had changed in Paradise this summer, except for her coming here.

  Eddie only hoped it wasn’t too late to tell her that.

  ***

  “Thanks for meeting me here.”

  Colin ducked under the overhang. Rain dripped onto the back of his neck and soaked his shirt. “No problem.”

  Ash crossed her arms over her chest and shivered.

  “How’s your friend?”

  She shook her head, not trusting herself to guess.

  “Ash.” He took hold of her arms and pulled her close.

  She blinked away tears. Fitting herself against Colin’s chest, the way she had so many times before, felt right. It felt familiar. She knew his rough spots and his edges. She knew the way he slept with one leg outside the covers and the way he ordered his eggs in the morning. She knew the feeling of his arm around her when they stood for pictures. And as if the pages of her life had suddenly opened in front of her, Ash saw the next forty years with Colin. She saw a lavish wedding, a house in the suburbs, children, a dog, and vacations to Europe.