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Except, he fell in love with me. And so it’s funny, how wrong I had it at first. He traded absolution, traded guiltless living, he traded a fresh start, to be with me. He wasn’t with me because he thought he had to be. Being near me put his life at risk, it risked his friends’ lives. But he did it until he was worried it would risk my life. And then he had to tell me. Had to let me go. That’s what he thought, Dove told me.
It’s a fucked-up story, this one. Hard to understand and even harder to accept.
There were two hit-and-runs that night. One mine, and one that of an elderly forest-dwelling woman. She died and stayed dead. Breck hid her body underneath snow, so the local paper didn’t report her death until a month and a half later.
I died and came back.
Another curve in the tracks: Breck telling Barrett, Dove, and Blue that the woman that he’d hidden was alive. Was me.
Breck thought this would make it easier for Bear to live with what had happened. He didn’t know that Bear and I had talked that night at the bar. That we’d connected. Bear had called me “snowflake,” given me his scarf. We smoked our cigarettes together, and I loved his handsome face, his pretty eyes. I remember just that one thing: smoking with him outside. In my memory, I even loved his sadness.
Sweet Barrett.
Mine.
I look at Barrett, and I want to hug him. Want to touch his hair and rub his scratchy cheeks. I want his lips on mine, his strong legs intertwined with my soft ones. I want him beside me at night so I can hold him, he can hold me.
It’s the little things. That’s all life is, when you really start to think about it. Little things that are your story. No one knows them—no one but you and yours—but they’re what make a life. The twinkle lights I strung up on the ceiling for him. Him smelling gardenia petals. The flying pig bird bath.
It’s the little things that make a life, and I’ve learned that they are all I need. Just Barrett in his Jeep. Just shower sex. Just my lover’s smile as I lie in his lap on our rock in the woods.
All things I don’t have, because I haven’t even seen his eyes in forty-six days.
* * *
“Hey there, sleeping Beary…”
I climb into bed with him, the way I always do, crossing my legs before I take his big, warm hand in both of mine.
“You know, I should tell you, hibernation season’s ending. I’ve seen Papa almost every day the last two weeks. Even Cinnamon is waddling out of her little nook some days, and you know females are the last ones to wake up. I want to let you know. As a Bear, you have a certain schedule that you need to follow.”
My throat tightens unexpectedly. I look down at his hand and trace the scars on it, trying to tickle with my fingertips. Some days, I’ll feel his fingers twitch a little, and my whole body goes hot, then cold—with hope he’ll wake up and fear that he won’t.
It’s just so tricky. So confusing. So unknown. His number on the Galsgow Coma Scale is an eight. A three means totally unresponsive, and a fifteen is the best score: what I’d score. Anything over an eight would mean he’s not technically in a coma anymore. If he would just say anything—even words that don’t make sense—he’d be a nine. But…Barrett doesn’t.
When the nurses or one of the therapists do something that hurts him, sometimes he’ll recoil. Last week, when they re-casted his broken ankle and moved it in a certain way, his eyes opened. He drew a deep breath, and I thought I would pass out from pure joy. Then his eyes shut and his vitals leveled out again.
If he can feel pain, he’s still here. That’s what I tell myself. If he can feel pain, he can feel pleasure. So I spend some time each day massaging joints the PT thinks are sore, rubbing his feet, stroking his hair. I kiss his cheeks and face, his hands, even his arm
s. I put my own scented lip gloss on his lips and kiss them softly.
If only life were like a fairy tale. I know I would have the magic kiss that woke him up.
Nic only lived four days after the gunshot. On that fourth day, he got a blood clot. Before he died, on the third day, when he was seeming more stable, he confessed to hitting me, to leaving me there in the snow rather than taking me with him in his car. It’s true, he didn’t have cell phone service, and after he left, he called as quickly as he could. But I find I don’t care about those details. In my mind, he left me there because he didn’t give a shit whether I lived or died. I doubt that I would feel this way had he not done what he did in the woods that day.
Had he not tried to kill me. Had he not tried to kill Bear. Had he not deceived my best friend, wasted years of her life and now broken her heart and strained our friendship. Things are getting better slowly, and I know time will heal the awkwardness between Jamie and I right now. Our friendship is too strong, too old, to be severed—even by my murder of her lover.
Barrett threw a martial arts star at his back, aiming for a certain spot between two vertebrae. But Bear’s left handed, and his left hand doesn’t work, so the star got buried in Nic’s shoulder. When Nic was on the ground, he somehow pulled it out and that’s how he got Barrett in the throat.
I have the star—it’s cleaned up, hiding in an old pot in my garage—and that thing is razor-sharp. So it’s not surprising that it did so much damage to poor Barrett.
How he went from almost bleeding out and suffering a broken ankle to being in this coma… That’s the part that no one really understands. He went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. That’s why they had to shock him. I’m told that happens sometimes when people get really low on blood.
Then they got him to the hospital, and they couldn’t tell whether he was stable enough to put him under general anesthesia, so they went ahead and cauterized his artery with him awake. Sometime around then, Barrett’s blood pressure shot up, then he passed back out. No one could find evidence of a stroke—they still can’t; images of his brain look perfect—but in retrospect, they think something must have happened around then.
At the time, however, he seemed okay, so they put him under. They operated on his ankle, adding screws to keep it stable, and then they fixed his trachea and closed the torn up tissue around it.
When I got to him in the ICU, he had a temporary trach—so, a tube punched into his trachea a little further down from where the damage was. He was covered with hot blankets, because losing blood makes the body temperature drop. His ankle was elevated, in a cast, and his beautiful face looked gray.
