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I wanted to scream. I wanted to tap my snowmobile driver on the shoulder and find out if we’d be together again, and if not, tell him to take me back. But I just couldn’t do it. After everything I’d been through, physically and emotionally, I barely had the strength to hold on.
The ride back was hard, even painful… especially since I was effectively blind. My whole body ached. My stomach felt sick at being suddenly full, all that water being tossed and sloshed violently around.
Eventually the wind died and the engine stopped and the snowmobile skidded to a halt. I was grabbed immediately by fresh new hands. Laid out on a stretcher and carried somewhere warm and noisy and impossibly bright.
I only remembered bits and pieces of the next few hours. People talking excitedly, everywhere. An ambulance ride to a nearby hospital, where the siren was not only strange and foreign to me, but also high-pitched and annoying.
Once there, there was the flash of a hundred cameras. More people than even before. I was wheeled through clean, clinical hallways and placed in a large white room. I half-protested as an old woman with exceptionally large hands cut through the shredded fabric of my ski pants. She helped me remove my clothing and gave me fresh linens. The cute little ski outfit I’d put on happily almost a week ago had been replaced with a drab, hospital gown.
Only then did I realize vaguely there was an IV already in my arm.
I drifted. Maybe off to sleep, or maybe just semi-consciousness. Either way, time passed. Maybe there was something in my IV. Maybe, maybe, maybe…
Maybe you’ll never see them again.
I wanted to be warm. I wanted an electric blanket! I remember asking for one and being told it wasn’t a good idea, and that my temperature needed to be brought up more naturally.
Someone put a phone in my ear. My parents, yapping away. Screaming with happiness and elation that I was alive, and yet…
And yet they’re not even here.
It wasn’t all that surprising. Wherever they were, I was sure they were busy. I laughed, and it wasn’t a good laugh. A shiver ran through me as I finally hung up.
The nurse or whatever she was brought me another blanket, and I lay back for a moment just enjoying the feeling of not being cold. She told me not to talk. That I really needed to rest, speaking to me in perfect English although with a thick Italian accent.
I drifted off for a second time, and woke up feeling even more aware. The room was empty. It was silent too, except for some low voices. Except for…
SSSSSWISH!
“A-HA! She’s back!”
The curtain around me was yanked backward, and suddenly I was staring at Boone. He was grinning down at me from his own hospital gown, holding onto his own IV mounted on one of those wheeled push-stands.
Behind him, in a chair, was Jeremy. They both smiled.
“W—Where’s…”
“Shane?” Jeremy laughed. “In the bathroom, for the last half hour. I think he’s trying to pass a brick.”
Boone laughed too, and my body flooded with relief. They were here! My guys. My men. My lovers, my heroes, my saviors… my—
“Forget about him though,” said Boone. The hospital gown barely fit around his body, and the back of it was comically open. “There’s someone else here you need to see...”
He put two big fingers in his mouth and whistled, and I heard the door to the room click open. I couldn’t see past the curtain’s edge, but suddenly there was a bloodcurdling scream — one so familiar that I bolted upright.
I used the last of my energy to turn my head…
… just in time to see Faith running toward me, tears streaming down both her cheeks.
~ Epilogue ~
MORGAN
“No fair! You ordered in!”
Jeremy smirked in mock disappointment as he popped open one of the containers. Chinese was his favorite and we both knew it. Steam rose, hot and fragrant, from a compact brick of fried rice.
“I said I was getting dinner,” I called out from the bedroom. “Not that I was making it.”
