For This Life Only (3 page)

Eli sighed. “Sorry. I can't . . .” He hesitated. “Do you think there's a difference between doing the right thing that definitely hurts one person and doing the right thing that might hurt a lot of people?”

I felt the first dart of worry. “Eli, what are you—”

“I mean, in theory,” he added.

I groaned. “It's Saturday, Eli. Come on. Take a night off.”

Eli and my dad loved going round and round on heavy philosophical or religious issues. What is reality? How do we know what's real? How you do you define the greater good? I found it all mind-numbingly boring. Things weren't that complicated. Try not to be a crappy person. Go to church. Use your talents instead of burying them or whatever. If you do a good enough job, when you die, you go to heaven.

“I know what day it is,” Eli said sharply.

“All right, so sorry, Touchy,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender, which was usually enough to trigger a grouchy mumble or a reluctant smile.

But he didn't say anything.

With an impatient sigh, I turned in my seat to face him. “Look, E, no matter what's rolling around in that giant brain of yours, you have to know that you're on the
right side of things. You always are. You're the good one, remember?”

I tried not to sound bitter. I mean, that was the deal with being half of a whole. Most of the time, what you were was in comparison to someone else. If one of us was good, the other was bad, simply by being less good.

Add to that the lore surrounding the children of ministers—you were either an innocent, naive angel or you were hell spawn, sent to test your parents' patience and dedication—and our roles were pretty much set. And yeah, okay, I'd made it my mission to make sure that my reputation wasn't exactly unearned.

Eli made a frustrated noise and braked to slow down as we crossed the bridge over the creek that ran through Zach's parents' land. “But that's just it. I don't know if I am. Have you ever . . .” He shook his head. “I guess sometimes I wonder if the—”

Before he could finish his thought, the car gave a weird but distinct shimmy that made my stomach sink. Having put the car in the ditch once last year, I recognized the sensation instantly: the wheels had lost contact with the road.

Panic rose over me in a cold rush.

The moment slowed down to a crawl as we started to slide sideways. The antilock brakes kicked in with a horrible grinding noise, and Eli struggled with the wheel.

“Wait,” he said, panicked. “Wait!” I wasn't sure who he was talking to.

“Turn into it!” I reached, for him, for the wheel. Both, maybe.

But it was too late for either.

The back end of the car hit the guardrail with an enormously loud crash of metal on metal, and then the guardrail gave. I felt the lurch of regular gravity retracting, abandoning us to our fate.

The sound of my heartbeat filled my ears, muting the chattering of the radio and the shriek of tearing metal as the Jeep rolled, turning our world upside down.

A bright blue umbrella, neatly folded and in its carrying sleeve, flew up from the floor somewhere with a rain of dirt and old receipts. The smell of burning plastic and oil was chokingly thick.

My body lifted up and out of the seat, in that sickening defiance of physics that felt familiar from roller coasters, and then I was thrown forward and sideways, with no restraint.

When my elbow connected with the dashboard, I heard a distinct crack.
That's bad. That's bad!

And then I caught one last glimpse of Eli, his eyes wide and his face—our face—pale in the dashboard lights, as he spun away from me.

THE BEEPING—DISTINCT, RHYTHMIC, AND
from somewhere on my left—came first.

“Okay, Jacob, take it easy,” someone said, the voice low and soothing. “You're coming out from under the meds, and it's going to be a little disorienting. But you're in the hospital, and you're safe.”

I didn't recognize the voice, which scared me, and the beeping sound accelerated.

“The noise you're hearing is the heart monitor. Can you open your eyes?” he, the voice, asked, and I realized belatedly that it was dark around me.

With an effort that felt like swimming up through layers of mud, I tried to blink.

A sliver of bright light broke through on one side,
and I winced, tears running down the right side of my face. But the left side felt puffy and numb.

I blinked again, managing to keep my eyes . . . my eye open for a few seconds longer. Enough to see my mom, her face chalky white and pinched with worry, holding my hand. Sarah was perched on the plastic-looking recliner with her, watching warily, with Patsie, her worn stuffed dog, in her lap.

“Hi, baby,” Mom said, tears filling her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. She squeezed my right hand carefully, avoiding the IV needle stuck in the back of it.

My dad was at the foot of the bed, his reading glasses pushed up and lost or forgotten in his rumpled dark hair. He touched my foot, but hesitantly, as if it might break. “Welcome back, Jacob.” His voice was thick, almost foreign sounding, and he looked away almost immediately.

“What . . .” But making that small sound felt like swallowing razor blades with the sharp edges up, and my eyes watered more fiercely at the pain.

My mom clucked at me in distress. “You shouldn't try to talk.” She held a small plastic cup with a straw to my mouth, and I took a cautious sip, the water offering a passing moment of cold relief in my throat. “They just took the breathing tube out this morning. And you're still on oxygen.”

Breathing tube. “What . . . happened?” I could feel the
scrape of plastic in my nose and see the flaps of tape on my cheek, probably where the oxygen line was attached.

“Do you remember the accident?” my mom asked, squeezing my hand tighter.

At first, I couldn't remember anything but the darkness, a pitch-black nothingness from which I'd emerged. But then pieces came back slowly, then fell into place.

“Eli. The Jeep. He came to get me.” It was like remembering a dream from years ago. “The bridge.”

I struggled to sit up, only to find that the entire left side of my body wouldn't move.

“Easy,” the unknown voice said to my left, out of my range of sight. “We've spent a lot of time putting you back together.”

With effort and a growing weight of dread in my stomach, I turned my head carefully.

A man in scrubs and a white coat was on the left side of my bed, scrawling notes in a chart. But that wasn't the worst part.

My left arm was four times its normal size with bandages, and now that I was looking at it, I could feel the throbbing and sizzle of nerves that felt frayed. And my left leg, beneath the blankets, appeared to be equally swollen and lumpy with bandages.

He set the clipboard down on my bed and flipped a penlight on to shine in my eye, peeling back an eyelid
that wouldn't respond to my commands. “Your left eye is swollen shut, but as soon as the inflammation goes down, your sight should be fine. Dr. Sheffield, the neurologist, will be down a little later.”

“My arm,” I managed.

The doctor turned off the penlight and retrieved his clipboard. “Open fracture of the olecranon process. We've set it surgically.” He shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. “With rehab and time, you'll have eighty to ninety percent of normal motion back.”

That's not enough,
a panicked voice shouted in my head.

But I had to ask. “Baseball?”

“Sure, someday,” he said, already lost in whatever notes he was writing down.

My dad cleared his throat. “Jacob is left-handed. He is . . . he was a pitcher.”

The doctor hesitated, which told me everything I didn't want to know. “I think you should concentrate on healing for now.”

Nausea swirled over me like fog, and I dropped my head back on the pillows. No more pitching? No more baseball? Not ever?

The doctor frowned down at me, as if I'd insulted him. “You weren't wearing a seat belt. You're incredibly lucky to be alive, young man.” Then, as if he feared that wasn't enough to impress me, he pointed his pen at me. “You
died en route to the hospital. More than once. Took a few tries to keep your heart going. You're lucky someone found you when they did.”

I died?
The bed seemed to tilt under me like I was falling, though I knew I was lying down.

“It's a miracle,” my mom said, trying to smile through her tears. “God was watching over you.”

I tried to remember. Dying seemed like it should be one of those things that stuck with you. But between now and the accident—seeing Eli spin away from me—all I had was that inky, suffocating blackness. More than a blank space in my memory, it felt like a complete absence of everything.

What was that? Where was I when that was happening? Was I just gone?

That wasn't supposed to be the way it worked. Eli had given me crap about telling Sarah about the bright light and heaven, but wasn't that the way it was supposed to go? Or something close? Not just . . . nothing.

I could feel cold welling up in me, like my heart was suddenly pumping the icy water from the creek we'd crashed into.

But before I had time to fully process what any of that meant, the doctor's final words jostled for my attention.

You're lucky someone found you when they did.
Someone had to find me? But that didn't make any sense. Eli was
right there and wearing his seat belt, like a good, responsible citizen. He should have been able to call 911 and do CPR.

Suddenly, his absence from my room seemed enormous and ominous.

“Where's Eli?” I asked, trying to ignore the flicker of warning in the back of my brain and the tension coiling in my gut.

The atmosphere in the room immediately shifted. My mom sucked in a sharp breath and dropped her gaze to the floor, and my father turned away, scrubbing his hands over his face.

“I'll be back this afternoon,” the doctor said quietly to everyone and no one as he left the room.

“Is Eli okay?” I persisted, but neither of my parents would look at me. Even with my dad's back to me, though, I could see his shoulders shaking.

The tilting feeling returned, only this time it was more like the entire planet had dropped, trying to shake me off into space.

Sarah stared at me, pressing her mouth into the top of Patsie's head. I'd never seen her this quiet. Ever. Her eyes were wide above the matted fur, like she was holding back a flood of words.

Or trying not to cry.

My mom straightened in her chair, wiping under her
eyes with her free hand. “They told us it was quick,” she said, giving me a tremulous smile. “He wouldn't have known what was happening. Just a bump on the head, and then it would be like drifting off to sleep.”

“What?” I heard every word, but it was like they bounced off the surface of my brain, refusing to sink in for processing.

What she was saying was impossible. And yet, I could feel a growing emptiness in my middle, as if someone had rammed one of those telephone poles through my gut, cartoon-style.

Her fingers tightened on mine to the point of pain. “Honey, Elijah didn't make it.”

I WOKE UP BEFORE
my alarm would have gone off, if I'd bothered to set it.

Gray predawn light filled my room, sapping everything of color. Not that there was much to see. Small heaps of discarded clothes, a stack of books and papers from school, the metal crutches I theoretically no longer needed leaning against the wall. The row of baseball trophies across the top of my bookshelf gleamed in the faint light like enigmatic hieroglyphs from a secret society I was no longer a part of.

I squinted at the clock through the maze of dull orange prescription bottles on my bedside table. 6:45. My mom would be here any minute.

I'd spent the last two months in a half-conscious haze of exhaustion and pain medication, and the one day I
really needed to be asleep, to be so thoroughly out that even the most hard-hearted person would feel guilty waking me—that was the day my body decided to take the initiative and flip my eyes open without my permission.

I braced my weight on my right elbow and heaved myself onto my side, turning away from the door. With the awkward plastic cast on my left leg and the stubborn pain and stiffness in my shattered and twice-repaired elbow, movement was no longer the simple, thoughtless reflex it had once been.

Closing my eyes, I willed myself to go back to sleep. But a light tapping at my door signaled my mother's arrival. “Jace? Honey, are you awake?” she asked softly.

I ignored her. My silence wouldn't stop her, but I couldn't bring myself to respond, either.

The knob turned quietly.

“Jace . . . Jacob, it's time to get up for church.” She inched closer, her footsteps soft on the carpet, until she touched my shoulder gently.

“I can't.” The idea made the air feel too thick to breathe.

She withdrew her hand swiftly, belatedly realizing I was awake. “You can't stay in here forever, Jacob.”

Why not? It had worked well enough so far. Take my pills. Sleep. Wake up. Take more pills. Go back to sleep. Try not to think.

“The doctor cleared you for school tomorrow,” she said.

Dread pressed down on me at the reminder. “And I said I would go. That's enough,” I said without turning over.

“But the congregation, they've been worried, praying for you,” she said. “So many people have been asking after you. They want to see you.”

I didn't want to see them, though. And I didn't want them to see me.

If I went today, I'd feel the condemnation in every glance, every whisper, even in the sympathetic smiles.

I wasn't sure I could stand it.