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“The ambulance will be here in a half hour to escort you home if that’s still want you want.” I heard the edge in his voice—he wasn’t quite, but almost, as pissed as Josie that all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. “As your doctor, it is my duty to strongly advise you not to leave until we’ve had some time to more accurately diagnose you and give you a chance to recover—”
“But this isn’t a jail, and you can’t hold me against my will, now can you?” I said, trying not to laugh at the word recover. Last I’d heard, “recover” meant someone would get better.
“No, it isn’t a jail. Though in your case, I
wish it were.”
Josie’s mouth dropped as she gaped at the doctor as if he were as batshit crazy as I was.
“Well, thanks for everything, doc. I feel like a new man,” I said dryly. I didn’t miss Rowen leaning into Jesse and hissing something into his ear that I couldn’t quite make out, though I picked up enough to decipher she thought I should be declared insane or have my ass kicked.
“I’m going to send you off with discharge orders, some prescriptions, and a couple of referrals for doctors in your area who specialize in back injuries. I know you seem to hate taking it, but I strongly suggest you take my advice of making an appointment to go to see one of them immediately.”
Josie approached the doc and took the handful of paperwork from him. She clutched it against her chest as if she were afraid someone would rip it away from her. “You can’t just let him check out, Doctor Payton,” she whispered in a tone that suggested she was begging. “Can’t you talk to him again? Try to make him stay?”
I’d only heard Josie come close to begging a few times in my life—she was too prideful a person to beg—and hearing her do it because of me made me feel about as low as I’d ever felt, and I’d been in so many low places so many times I was a contender for the record.
“I can’t force him to stay. I’m a doctor—I help the people I can who want to be helped.” The doctor’s gaze drifted to where I was laid out, immobile and stubborn. He was a good man. I could tell that from the few words we’d shared, but he knew no amount of talk or debate would get me to see his point of view. “Even if I could force him to stay, it doesn’t take a psychiatric evaluation to see that he doesn’t want to be helped. Good luck to you, Miss Gibson.” The good doc exited the room, moving on to whom I guessed was the next patient on his list, one who actually wanted his help.
Josie stood frozen for a minute, clutching the paperwork close to her. Every breath she took seemed to get longer and louder until it sounded as though she was gasping for air. “I need to get some fresh air.” She rushed for the door like she couldn’t get outside quickly enough.
“I’ll go with you.” Rowen followed her, but not before firing a potent glare at me.
I pretended I hadn’t noticed.
About two seconds after the girls had gone, Jesse’s boot-steps echoed through the room. He got so close to me he bumped into the bedrails. “What are you doing, Black?” His voice hinted at exhaustion. “I thought you kicked your self-destruction habit months ago.”
A sigh escaped past my lips before I knew it was coming. Oh well. If I could sigh in front of anyone without them judging me or reading some deeper meaning into it, it was Jess. “You can never kick a habit like that,” I said, staring at the place Josie had just been standing. “You can only wrestle it into submission. After this though, I’m afraid it’s wrestled me into submission.”
Jesse’s hand wound around the bedrail. “Then fight back.”
Another sigh—this one a bit more final sounding. “You need both a literal and theoretical backbone to fight back. And I’ve got neither.”
YOU WANT TO know what the longest, most uncomfortable ambulance ride in the world feels like? After what I’d just gone through, I could have explained it in precise detail, recapping every last awkward moment.
After she’d argued against me discharging myself from the hospital, I would have guessed Josie would want nothing to do with my escape plan, but she hopped up beside me after the paramedics had loaded and locked my stretcher into place in the ambulance. She gave the two paramedics a seriously impressive look when they suggested she ride with Jesse and Rowen, who were heading back in their truck. I knew they’d been planning on heading back to Seattle after the rodeo, but after their friend had gone and broken his back, they probably felt obligated to come get me settled in. Or maybe the obligation rested more with supporting Josie while, as Rowen had made a point of noting, I was behaving like a selfish, defeated asshole.
I was thankful they were coming back for a few days, for Joze’s sake. She’d need someone to lean on as she navigated this new chapter in life, and that person couldn’t and shouldn’t have been me. I wanted to make my removal from her life slow and gradual . . . but that was only for my benefit. The best thing for her would have been a sharp and sudden break because even though it would hurt like hell, that wound would eventually leave no trace of a scar. If I drew it out, I’d only cause a deeper scar to form. I’d already left Josie with enough of those.
When we’d crossed the Montana state line, the driver asked for more specific directions about where we were heading. After I gave him some, I got another earful and a half from Josie, and thanks to the confined space and volume she employed, so did the paramedics. One of them rolled earplugs into his ears at about the five-minute mark of her outburst.
I’d given them directions to Joze’s and my old farmhouse instead of directions to her family’s ranch, and you’d have thought I’d signed the execution order for a litter of puppies. She reminded me that the only bathroom that worked (well) in the farmhouse we were remodeling was the one on the second floor, and since we didn’t have an elevator, I’d have no way to get up there without the aid of fairy dust. I’d been too choked up to reply because she obviously hadn’t wrapped her mind around how a quadriplegic’s “call of nature” routine was drastically different from hers.
After that, she went on to argue that the floors were in such bad shape that I could tumble right through them in my wheelchair, not to mention there wasn’t a ramp to get me inside in the first place. I tried to remind her that her parents’ place didn’t have a ramp either, but she wouldn’t let me get a word in. She went on and on about the farmhouse being too far away from everyone and how I couldn’t be all alone when she had to go do something, and she warned me if I didn’t stop acting like a lunatic, she would start the paperwork to have me declared incompetent so she could take the wheel at the helm of my healthcare needs.
That was more than enough of a threat to get me to shut up and not say a word of protest when she gave the driver different directions. I knew she didn’t understand it, but I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want a stream of people filtering through the Gibsons’ kitchen, dropping off casseroles and sympathy cards while taking a quick peek at the immobile freak show. I didn’t want people’s sympathy or their morbid curiosity or their compassion. I wanted to be left alone, and the farmhouse was the perfect place to do just that. I wasn’t sure how I’d take care of myself or what direction my life would take, but I did know I’d have plenty of time to think about that during my isolation.
By the time the ambulance crunched up the Gibsons’ driveway, I’d had way too much time to ponder my future and contrast it to what I thought I’d have. So I was feeling particularly pissed at the world when the ambulance doors swung open and the paramedics unloaded me.
Josie jumped out behind me, looking almost worse than I knew I did, and she shot a wave toward the house. I didn’t look, mainly because I felt like me showing up at their front door in a stretcher while their daughter followed with red-rimmed eyes was like fulfilling every last premonition and hang-up Mr. Gibson had had when Josie and I had gotten together. He’d seen me for the piece of shit I was and been willing to overlook it when he saw how much I cared for his daughter and she for me. But months later, there I was—a piece of shit being carried into their house on a stretcher, sentencing their twenty-two-year-old daughter to a life as a caretaker.
It wasn’t just Mr. and Mrs. Gibson waiting on the front porch though. Jesse and Rowen were there too, looking not quite but almost as tired as I knew Josie and I did.
“Nice trip?” Rowen asked Josie when she crawled up the porch stairs.
“Don’t ask,” she replied, sounding exhausted.
As the paramedics carried me up the stairs, everyone went into action, though no one seemed quite sure where to go or what to do. Mr. Gibson and Jess opened the screen door. Mrs. Gibson reached out for my stretcher as though she wanted to help the paramedics carry me in. Joze and Rowen swept through the door at the same time, managing to bottleneck in the doorway before Josie wiggled free and led the way into the kitchen.
