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Amber
“Well, aren’t you dreamy?”
The man in front of me wasn’t someone that I knew, but I knew what he was. He was a doctor by the way he was dressed and the concerned look on his face. I’d been in an accident, and I was in and out of consciousness. What I did see though, was the handsomest man in front of me. It reminded me of one I watched on television on Friday nights. What was his name again?
The guy chuckled and said it was just as well, that my good tastes were intact.
“What is the diagnosis, doc?”
“Well, you are feeling no pain I take it?”
I agreed that I wasn’t and that made him frown a little less. I still wasn’t sure what I was doing here, but that was just as well. By the looks on everyone’s face, I wasn’t going to like the answer anyway. The way the doctor was looking, it was bad news.
“Not a bit.”
“Well, you have had quite a bit of damage. How about moving around, does everything seem to be in order?”
It was the way he asked that made me worried. I didn’t want to think about the latter, so I went to move and show him that I was fine. I could move my top just fine, but when it came to moving my legs and the like, I couldn’t, not even my toes. I felt tears in my eyes because I knew what that meant.
“I’m not going to be able to walk again, am I?”
Dr. Collins told me that I would, it was just going to take a little work to get there. There was talk of damage to my spinal cord, but he was a surgeon, not just a doctor, and he had already seen my scans. He sounded like he believed that he could help me. Naturally, that’s what I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to believe that I would never be able to walk again. I was only twenty-three and I was too young to think about that sort of life. I was active, ran every morning. Not walking wasn’t an option.
“Do you really think you can fix me?”
“Yes, I believe that I can.”
It was like a godsend, hearing that I wouldn’t be able to walk, experiencing no movement below the waist, and then being told that this handsome doctor was going to make it all better. That’s what I wanted to hear. It was still hard to imagine never walking again. Even if he said he could fix me, I’m pretty sure the scare of not being able to was going to stay with me for a while.
“I am not going to lie to you, Amber. We’re going to get to know each other well. You’re going to be here for a while. Who can we call? You didn’t have any numbers in your purse and your phone was smashed in the wreck. Do you have someone that can be here for you? This isn’t something that you’re going to want to go through alone.”
I sighed and turned away. Everything was ending on a good note, until he said that. I didn’t want to think about that. My support system was basically null and void. I’d never had much of one since I could remember and after aging out of foster care when I was eighteen, I’d had none at all to speak of, except a motley crew of friends.
Instead of answering with my sad answer, I just shook my head that I didn’t have any.
“No one?”
He was shocked, but I agreed with the sentiment.
“We are born alone, and we die alone.”
“That is true, but we are supposed to be surrounded by people we love in the meantime.”
I smiled, despite myself. I think I was going to like Dr. Collins; he was at least nice to look at. Very easy on the eyes. If we were going to be around each other a lot, I couldn’t think of a better view.
He left not too long after we spoke. He wrote a couple of things in his chart and that gave me time to check him out a little bit. I may have broken bits in me, but my eyes still worked, and other parts wanted to work as well.
The good doctor was fair-complected with bright blue eyes that were more the color of the sea, infused with green, than a pure blue of the sky. His eyes were stormy, and his smile was genuine. The doctor was tall, at least from my position and his fingers were thick, as were his biceps and forearms. I don’t know what it is about a man’s arms, but I like the powerful ones, and the doctor had it. Every part of him was massive, though he wasn’t intimidatingly so, just big enough to make me wonder.
Before I could get too many thoughts about it, I was given something to sleep, and it worked perfectly. I asked about the other driver right before I went out, the one that had jack-knifed my car. They were seen and already released. It made me feel better to know that no one else had gotten seriously hurt. It could have been worse, I told myself.
* * *
The night was clear,and I was listening to music. It was loud, the preferred volume that I liked when I was trying to think. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of a couple of months. I was leaving his house, moving out to stay with a friend and I was trying not to cry. I could feel my eyes welling up and I had to wipe them a couple of times to see, the lights of oncoming traffic about blinding me with the fluid there. I was trying my best to hold it together, but it was a stretch.
I stopped at a red light, pulled myself together, and was about to go when the light turned green. I started to ease out into the intersection and was slammed from the driver’s side. It was blackness and then the loud sound of the horn blowing. I didn’t know if it was my car or the other driver.
