All It Takes (20 page)

“STAR!” I yell, my voice booming down the hallway. And for long, terrible seconds, there’s nothing, and I can feel my body start to shake again.

“Ash?” I whirl around at the sound, afraid for a second that I’ve imagined it. But then it’s back, louder this time. “Ash!”

Holy shit. It’s her. It’s Star.

I turn down the hallway to my left, limping as I try to keep as much weight off my right side as possible, booking it toward the source of the sound.

“Star!”

“Ash!”

I skid to a stop and turn to my right. There she is. Holy shit. I feel hot and cold all at once, and my throat feels like someone’s got their hands around it, and they’re wringing the life out of me. But fuck, it doesn’t matter. It’s her.

“Jesus,” I say, the word barely making it out past the stranglehold on my throat. I don’t know how I did it, but suddenly I’m right in front of her. She’s got tears streaming down her face, and I reach out with my busted hand and touch them, wipe them away, just to be sure that she’s real. She lets out a sob and reaches for me. One of her hands is bandaged up like a mummy, and she’s all black and blue, but she’s here. She’s here and we’re okay.

“Oh god,” I fall forward and gather her up in my arms. The IV pole catches on something and goes tumbling to the floor. I feel it jerk the line attached to my arm, and it hurts like a bitch, but I don’t care. I’ve got her in my arms. I can’t stop shaking.

She’s crying, but I realize that I am, too. Big, nasty sobs that I press into her hair as I try to breathe through the ache in my chest. I feel like I’m dying. I press my lips against her ear, and try to take in enough air to force words out, but I’m shaking so bad. We both are.

“Ash . . . ” she says, and her voice is a fucking whimper and I can’t . . . I just . . .

“Jesus Christ,” I say against her hair, pulling her closer even though I don’t have to. She’s pressed as close as physically possible. Any closer and we’d be inside each other’s skin. My face is wet, and I can’t get the tears to stop, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fucking matter. She’s alive. I pull back just enough to press our foreheads together. “I love you,” I say, and I press my mouth to hers. “You hear me, Star?” I ask as soon as I break the kiss, because she needs to hear it. I need her to hear me, to understand. “I love you so fucking much. Don’t leave me, okay? Whatever you want. Just don’t leave.”

My eyes are squeezed shut, but I can feel her nod against the side of my face, the wetness of her tears against my skin. Her body is wracked with sobs, and I pull her closer, wrapping both of my arms around her back, even though every inch of me hurts. I want to wrap myself around her and her around me, and just get lost in her existence. I hear my mother come up behind me. I recognize the sound of her voice, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. All I can hear is Star as she cries, as her breathing slowly calms down enough for her to speak.

All I hear is Star.

“I love you, too, Ash,” she whispers, and I squeeze her close and just breathe her in. “I love you, too.”

Chapter 20

Star

“N
ow are you sure that you both don’t want to stay with us,” Ash’s mother asks for the hundredth time since she first suggested it. “We have plenty of room.”

“That’s okay, Mrs. Winthrope,” I say, and try to suppress a grin as Ash rolls his eyes and leans against my shoulder. “We’ll be fine at the house.”

“It’s just that you’re both still healing, dear,” she says. “And I don’t like the thought— Roger! Roger, turn here! I don’t like the thought of the two of you being on your own at a time like this.” She’s turned around in her seat now, looking over her shoulder at us, her eyes soft as she catches a glimpse of Ash’s arm around my shoulders, her son cuddled close to me. I wonder if she’d look so happy if she knew the things Ash has been muttering to me the entire ride over, low enough so she can’t hear them.

He doesn’t mean them, though. I can see how happy he is to have his parents around again. So I’m not going to blow his cover. “Really, Mrs. Winthrope,” I say. “We’ll be just fine.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” she says. “And really, dear, call me Nadine.”

“Okay,” I say, and smile at her, even though I have absolutely no intention of doing any such thing. Just because Ash and I are together doesn’t mean I’m ready to get all chummy with his mother. Not when I wasn’t even that close to my own.

Maybe Brick was right. Maybe I do built up walls around me. But sometimes people manage to get inside them with me. Like Ash did. I smile and lean over and press my lips against his cheek. “Your mom is going to make me crazy,” I whisper in his ear as Mrs. Winthrope argues with her husband over which is the best route to get to my mother’s house. Well, she argues. He just kind of nods and phases her out.

“Join the fucking club,” Ash murmurs back, a little too loudly, and I poke at him with my good hand, trying to shut him up before his mother catches us. Or before she catches onto the fact that he’s faking sleep. One or the other.

“You keep quiet,” I say. “We’ll be alone soon enough.”

I can feel his smile against my skin.

“I like the sound of that.”

All told, we were in the hospital for just over two weeks, but it had only taken hours after we’d been reunited for us to find out what had happened.

It was Preston. Lacey’s boyfriend. It was his car that hit us. An accident, they said. Both cars were totaled, my mother’s old station wagon completely destroyed. And even though his buddy who’d been in the car with him had messed his back up real bad, my injuries and Ash’s had been far worse. The doctor had come in while Ash’s mother was explaining what happened, and he’d confirmed what I’d known to be true. The pinkie finger on my left hand was gone. Amputated. Too destroyed to even try saving. On top of that I had some bruised ribs and a black eye to end all black eyes. Ash had made out only slightly better. Broken wrist, deep puncture in his thigh and another in his lung that they’d managed to get to before it got too bad. That wasn’t even counting the innumerable bumps and bruises between the two of us.

All things considered, though, I figure we made out okay.

And Preston? That bastard had walked away without a scratch.

“Gonna beat that guy’s ass into the ground if I ever see him again,” Ash had muttered into my skin, snuggling closer to me on the hospital bed. Despite what the doctors and his parents had said, he’d refused to be budged, and for the past two weeks, we’ve barely been out of each other’s sight.

To be honest, I’m kind of starting to get used to it.

It’s . . .
nice.

“Now,” his mother says, turning around in her seat to look at me as the car pulls into the driveway. “Are you sure that you and Ashley will be all right here? It’s perfectly all right if you want to stay with us.” She turns around in her seat again, and orders her husband to move the car up farther in the driveway. “No, farther! There. Was that so difficult?”

“She says that now,” Ash mutters against my shoulder. “But the second she catches us doing more than holding hands, her brain will explode.”

“Shut up,” I murmur in his ear, but I’m smiling as I do it.
“Ashley.”
I get a poke in my side in response, but it’s in one of my—very few—uninjured spots, so it doesn’t bother me all that much. I turn back to face his mother. “Honestly, Mrs. Winthrope—
Nadine,”
I correct myself before she can do it for me. “We’ll be fine here. We’ll just clear a couple extra paths and—”
and take it easy,
I’m about to say, but as I turn and look out the car window, the words catch in my throat. There, on the front porch, is Autumn. And Roth. And as I watch, Maisie and York and about half a dozen other people I’ve seen around town but have never actually met begin filing out the front door to stand with them.
What on earth?

My heart is slamming in my chest as I shake Ash into sitting up, and I can feel the second he sees it by the way his body jerks against mine. Slowly, I turn back to look at Ash’s mother, and I’m blinking through tears to see that she’s smiling at me.

“We wanted it to be a surprise,” she says. And that’s when I really start crying.

They cleaned it. Autumn and Roth and York and Maisie. Ash’s parents. Them and a handful of people they’d recruited, they’d cleaned out the whole house.

Ash and I walk through the house in a daze, leaning on each other for support. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. There’s still work to be done, walls to be painted, boxes of things they deemed
important
to go through. But those are stacked up neatly in the corners of the rooms, and the color of the walls was never my problem. My mother’s hoard was. And it’s gone.

I’m crying again, and I’ve shed so many tears lately that my face actually aches from it. But Ash is gripping my hand like a lifeline, and every time I turn to him, he’s smiling at me.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. “I’m thinking maybe I’m still in the hospital, and they’ve got me on the really,
really
good drugs.”

I laugh and sniffle, reaching up with my injured hand to wipe away what I can from my wet face. “Then how do you explain the fact that I can see it, too?” I ask. He smiles and leans over to press a kiss to my temple.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m pretty sure it’s real. And if not, then it just means I’m sharing the good drugs. Win-win.”

My laugh comes out like a sob, and I feel a gentle hand land on my elbow. I turn and see Autumn and Roth, and I drop Ash’s hand briefly so that I can reach out and wrap my arms around them both. “I can’t believe you did this,” I whisper.

They squeeze me back, Roth a little bit uncomfortably, and I’m struck by a sudden urge to reach up and ruffle his hair. He’s so bad at being a real boy. Instead, I just lean into them both, and Autumn nuzzles into my shoulder.

“What else were we supposed to do?” she asks, and when she pulls back I can see that she’s been crying, too. “Just leave it while you guys were in the hospital? There was work to be done.”

I pull out of her embrace, but reach down with my good hand and squeeze her hand in my own. “Thank you,” I say, but I have to force the words out through the boulder in my throat. She squeezes my hand back, but then she doesn’t let it go. I look up at her through aching, tear-damp eyes, and she tugs on my hand. “Come on,” she says, pulling me gently forward. “There’s something I want to show you, something we found.”

I let her pull me through the house, down hallways I haven’t seen the floor of since I was a little kid, past pictures on the walls that I barely recognize. Finally, we stop at a door. It’s the door to my childhood bedroom. Even after months of working on the house with Ash, we’d never even gotten close to making it this far. Keeping my hand in hers, Autumn reaches out and opens the door.

And the bottom drops out of my world.

The walls. They’re murals. Image upon image, layered together to form a single story told in pictures. Horses and pigs with wings, unicorns and princes and even a princess with her very own sword, wielding it against a fearsome fire-breathing dragon. I want to look everywhere, all at once, but instead I’m frozen, standing sagged against the door jam, my heart in my throat.

It has been so long, so long that I had forgotten.

My father had painted these.

He’d painted them for me.

And now they’re mine again. I sag back against Ash, who’d followed after us, and I’m caught between laughing and crying. I never thought I’d find any of his art ever again. Now I have a whole room of it, a thousand images to choose from.

“Thank you,” I whisper, turning and burying my face in Ash’s shoulder because I don’t know what else to do. His hand comes to rest on my back, rubbing up and down and I see Maisie come up behind him, tears in her own eyes.

“There’s one more thing,” she says, and for the first time I notice the shoe box she’s holding. She looks down at it, strokes her fingers over the top of it. “We found it when we were cleaning.”

She holds it out to me, and I pull away from Ash just enough so that I can reach out and take it. It’s lighter than I expect, but still my arm sags, exhausted. “What is it?” I ask, holding it out to Ash so that he can help me remove the lid. But I don’t need them to answer. As soon as the lid’s off, I can tell what it is.

It’s letters. Dozens of them.

I turn to Autumn, confused, and she gives me a sad little smile. “They’re from your mother,” she says. “They’re for you.”

All of a sudden, I can’t take it anymore, and the gentle stream of tears that has been escaping my eyes turns into a torrent, and I collapse against Ash.

These people, right here. They’ve given me everything. Their time, their care.

Their love.

They’ve even given me the impossible.

They’ve given me my parents back.

Ash

“A
re you sure you want to do this?” I ask as Star settles down next to me on the bench. It’s not even dark out yet, but the campfire York built before he and the others left for the evening is already crackling away in front of us.

“Definitely,” she says, and shifts around so that she can drop the box Autumn had handed her from underneath her good arm into her lap, without using her injured hand. Not gonna lie, I’m so so glad that we both survived the crash, and that we managed to do so without any life-altering injuries, but I’m fucking gutted that she lost her finger. And no matter what a brave face she puts on, I know she is, too. The pinkie-swearing was kind of our thing. But I’d rather have Star with me than just about anything else, even our stupid little ritual.

I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since I woke up. The crash. Maybe if I’d done something different, we wouldn’t have been hit at all. Maybe if I had just taken her dancing, or not taken her out at all, or not looked at her or not gotten distracted, or a million other things, then we’d both be okay. Star caught me thinking about it once. It must have shown on my face, the guilt, because she asked me what was wrong. And after a token of resistance, I told her. I don’t know what I expected, I guess that she’d be pissed off at me or something, having realized I’ve messed her up permanently.

But all she did was roll her eyes at me.

“You’re an idiot,” she’d said, leaning over to give me a kiss to ease the sting of her words. “If you’d done anything different, yeah, we might have been okay. But at the same time, we might have died. So don’t be stupid and think about
what-ifs
okay? You’re here with me now, and we’re okay. That’s what matters.”

Then she’d stolen my Jell-O and winked at me. So that was that.

“But seriously,” I say, nodding down toward the box, reaching over to help her tug the lid off when she starts to struggle a bit. “These were from your mom. Are you sure you don’t want to keep them?”

She looks up at me, and there are tears in her eyes, but she nods. “I’m sure,” she says. “I can’t turn into her. I can’t keep everything. If you keep everything, you end up losing what’s most important.” And it’s true. Her mom kept everything, but lost Star. I feel my own eyes start to prick at the thought of what that woman must have gone through, and reach over to wrap my arm around her shoulders. “Okay,” I say. “If you’re sure.”

“I am,” she says. “Besides, this way, I get to say goodbye to her on my own terms. Not anybody else’s.”

I lean over and press a kiss to her mouth, holding her tight until I feel her start to relax, then I pull away. Her eyes are shining with tears, but she nods and reaches down into the box and pulls out the first letter.

“Dear Daughter,”
she reads.

One by one, she reads the letters her mother had written for her. And one by one, after she’s done and has read aloud the last line
Love Mommy,
I watch as she places the letters into the campfire, and says goodbye. After the first letter, I can tell she is starting to get choked up, so I reach over and wrap my arm around her shoulders, and hold her as tightly as our injuries will allow. After the second letter, tears are flowing freely down her face. She doesn’t even try to stop them. After the fifth, my own face is wet and my throat feels like it’s strangling me from the inside out. After that, I stop counting. I don’t know how long we sit there, but by the time she’s read the last letter, the one her mother had written just days before she died, the sun is staring to dip behind the horizon, and the light is beginning to fade, making the fire cast little dancing shadows around the yard.

I press a kiss to her temple as she finishes reading the last letter, her voice so choked up that the sounds she’s making are barely even words anymore. Then, instead of leaning forward and placing it into the fire as she had with the others, she takes a deep, shaking breath and carefully refolds the last letter, placing it back in the box. She sets it down gently on the ground next to her. Then she turns and wraps both of her arms around my middle, and burrows her face into my aching chest.

“It’s okay,” I murmur into her hair. “It’ll be okay.”

“I want to keep that one,” she whispers, and I can feel the moisture from her tears seeping through my shirt. I bring my good hand up and slide it down her back gently, nodding.