AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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 arms. 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.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate him for what he did to her. It doesn’t mean I don’t secretly, shamefully wish sometimes that Bear had killed him and not me.
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. It’s not good, but it’s not rare, either.
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.
A few times those first two days, his eyelids fluttered. Both times, I leaned in close to him and whispered to him, kissed his cheek, and told him how much I loved him. They still had him on painkillers, and after the fourth day, everyone had realized something was wrong. Maybe his old brain injury had flared up somehow. Maybe something with the painkillers. So they cut back on those. They took him for imaging of his brain, and Cleo, Kellan, Dove, and I all sat together, terrified. (Michael had to go back overseas). But everything looked fine.
And still does.
The trach is gone, and he can breathe. As of last week, every single medicine they had him on, the anti-seizure meds, a sedative, a sleeping pill… All, gone. And still, he sleeps.
I’ve heard the nurses talking about moving him out of this hospital. Somewhere designed for longer-term care.
Cleo and Kellan are still here, and they come every day, and we watch movies, eat dinner, talk— so Barrett knows he isn’t by himself. No one is more empathetic than Cleo. She knows exactly what I’m going through. In the mornings, Cle and I go for a run together. It was her idea, or rather her insistence. She tells me it will keep my brain chemistry balanced so I don’t get super depressed. As if…
Midday, while I’m here, they watch out for the bears and do their Cleo-Kellan things. They ride our bikes sometimes, which I know Barrett wouldn’t mind. And in the afternoon, when I leave home to run errands, they go sit with him. I come back at dinner, and we’re all there, and then “we” leave. I think it’s funny they don’t know I spend the night most nights. I guess because I leave the hospital at 5:30 every morning, drive back home, and shower, they wake up and see my car and think I stayed the night in my own house. I know when Cle finds out, she’ll be on me about how I should stay at home in my own bed, but I’ll call her a hypocrite.
Today, I watch Fifty Shades of Gray and giggle with Bear’s nurses as they come in and out. When it ends, I pull the covers down and climb in bed with him. I can’t always do this, but one of my favorite nurses is on, and she doesn’t care. There are some tubes and wires, but I know how to rearrange them so there’s room for me. Right after Shayna checks on Bear and leaves, I duck under the covers and rub my finger over his pig tat. Dove told me that he got it two weeks after New Year’s: a pig flying through a snowflake storm. It’s done in gorgeous color, just over his left pec. The tattoo means a lot to me, because without it, I’m not sure how I’d have known for sure that Barrett really wanted me. Not out of guilt, or out of loneliness, but out of love.
I try not to think about what Dove and Michael told me, about how Barrett only had some bear spray and the throwing star because he’d moved all of the knives and guns out of his house. And why he did that.
I like to imagine when he wakes up, all of that will be forgotten. He will say my name first thing, and we will hug. I’ll get under the covers with him and we’ll snuggle. I can give him water, wash his hair…
I’ll shave his beard and kiss his lips all night. And I won’t care that we’re still here. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but this man beside me. His warm skin, his old familiar scars and tattoos. I know everything about him now, every mark and curve of muscle. I will see him sleeping in my dreams for all my life and think how beautiful he is, and want to wake him up and see his eyes.
How much have I fantasized about that moment? Seeing his eyes open, focus on me. God, I want it more than life itself. Barrett wakes up, and we can talk. We can move forward. We can heal together. I know things like walking will be hard because he’ll be weak, so I can take him to my house since it’s a one-story. I’ll do what his physical therapist here does to help his muscles stay active. He’ll regain his strength, and I’ll cook all the best foods for him. They’ll take out the tiny yellow tube that’s threaded through his nose into his stomach, because he’ll eat my food. He won’t need that. In my fantasy, he won’t need anything but me.
