The Color of Destiny (The Color of Heaven Series Book 2) (10 page)

I had my first beer at the age of thirteen in John’s basement. My mom showed homes and properties most evenings, which meant I had far too much freedom for a thirteen-year-old. I’m still not sure if she genuinely believed in me, and trusted me to behave like a mature, responsible adult, or if she simply preferred to stick her head in the sand and let me do as I pleased.

At fourteen, John and I began experimenting with marijuana, and he was expelled from school for bringing hashish brownies for the entire homeroom class on Valentine’s Day. I knew about them, of course, but at least I had the sense not to help him bake and frost them.

We remained friends, even when he was forced to attend a different school, and though he was a terrible influence on me and got me into all sorts of trouble and dangerous situations—like what happened to us that night—it was his friendship that taught me a lesson I desperately needed to learn.

Chapter Thirty-four

When I woke in the back seat of John’s car, we were still driving, but now we were surrounded by thick dark forest on either side.

“Where are we?” I asked, sitting up groggily and looking around.

“We’re almost there,” John replied. He raised a pint of whisky to his lips, tipped it up, and chugged it.

“Give me some of that,” I said, reaching out to take it as he passed it over the seat.

“
Whoohoo
!” he shouted, and cranked up the radio when ACDC came on. “We’re gonna get shit-faced tonight! How do we open the sunroof?” he asked Lisa while he searched the dash for a button.

She reached up and adjusted the controls. The tinted window above us slid open with a quiet hum, and through the heavy haze of my drunkenness, I could see the stars.

John stood up on his seat and stuck his head out. “What a night!
Yeah
!”

Lisa laughed again and cranked the music even louder until I could feel the rumble of the bass inside my chest.

I felt a little queasy as I watched John struggle to find his footing on the center console between the two front seats, then hoist himself up through the small opening. Was he going to climb onto the roof? I couldn’t seem to make sense of what he was doing. My vision was blurred and I could barely think.

“You’re nuts!” Lisa cried out with amusement. “
Oh, Jesus
!”

Considering the state I was in, it’s a wonder I saw what happened because everything spun out of control so quickly.

A racoon had waddled onto the road, and Lisa swerved to avoid him. I was tossed against the side window and John’s legs disappeared from view, as if he’d been sucked out by a tornado.

Then Lisa drove us straight into a tree.

Chapter Thirty-five

I don’t know how long I was out. It felt like only a few seconds, but when I came to, ACDC was no longer playing on the radio. It was some other band I cannot recall.

I sat forward as if waking from a dream and touched my hand to my forehead. Slowly, dizzily, I realized my face was covered in blood, which dripped from just above my left temple. I wiped the blood away from my eyes and blinked a few times to see past the blur of my confusion.

Lisa was hunched forward over the steering wheel. I tried to open the car door. My hands shook uncontrollably. Somehow I managed to flick the latch and push it open. Spilling out onto the forest floor, I fell to my hands and knees and vomited.

The next thing I remember is pressing Lisa’s shoulders back to push her away from the steering wheel. Her head fell limply against the seat and she turned toward me. I thought she was looking at me, but her eyes were dead, unseeing.

Horrorstruck, I sucked in a breath.
What should I do?
I needed help, but I had no cell phone. It was 1987.

John...

I laid the flat of my hand on the roof where the tinted glass window was still open. Where was he?

Staggering weakly up the embankment and onto the road, it was difficult to make anything out in the darkness. The headlights of the car continued to shine into the forest, but John had been thrown out of the vehicle many yards back.

“John!” I shouted, but only my voice echoed back to me in the clear, starlit night. Crickets chirped noisily while music from the car radio grew more distant as I trudged with heavy feet along the pavement. “John!”

Then I spotted something—a heap at the side of the road, just ahead.

I began to jog. My heart beat thunderously in my chest. “John!”

Terrified that he would be dead like Lisa, I dropped to my knees beside him. It was dark, but my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight’s bluish glow, and I was able to make out his face.

His eyes were wide open. A trail of blood from his ear formed a thick black puddle, like chocolate syrup, on the pavement. Those wide, terrorized eyes shifted to meet mine. His lips moved.

“Ub... ub... ub...”

He stared at me, desperate and afraid. I could barely breathe. I was now completely sober, all my senses buzzing with awareness.

“Don’t worry,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder and glancing down at his mangled body, his legs and torso twisted grotesquely.

“Ub... ub... ub...”

I will never forget the eerie sight of his lips moving, and the faint, husky sound of his voice in the night.

In that moment, twin headlight beams appeared from around the bend, and I rose to my feet. I waved my arms frantically over my head and moved quickly to the center of the road.

Chapter Thirty-six

It seemed to take forever for the cops and paramedics to arrive. When at last they put John on the stretcher, his eyes were still wide open, but he was able to answer their questions by blinking once for yes, twice for no. They took us together in the back of the ambulance. I was able to sit on the bench while John was strapped in with a neck brace.

“Ub... ub... ub...” It was all he could say, and he kept uttering that sound over and over. What did it mean? Was he asking for something? Trying to tell us something?

“Just try to relax,” the paramedic said as he checked John’s pulse. “You’re in good hands. We’re taking you to North York General Hospital.” He looked over at me. “What’s your name?”

“Ryan,” I said. “Ryan Hamilton.”

“Do you know his parents? They’ll probably want to talk to you.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I know his parents.”

His father would be disappointed he wouldn’t be able to smack John around for this. It’s how he usually dealt with such things.

o0o

None of us had been wearing seatbelts. Lisa was pronounced dead at the scene and John survived. Barely. He was paralyzed from the neck down and suffered substantial brain damage caused by a fractured skull and an epidural hematoma, which was a bleed in the brain. The bleed had caused blown pupils, explaining the strange eyes I saw.

He had a fractured C4 that severed his spinal cord. One level higher, he wouldn’t have survived more than a few minutes, for it would have paralyzed his diaphragm. His brain injury improved, which may not have been a good thing, because he was stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and grew very bitter. I tried to visit several times but he wouldn’t see any of us.

It wasn’t easy to lose my best friend, and I can’t possibly say that anything good came of it—not for John. It still pains me deeply to think of his misery.

o0o

Two years later, I graduated from high school at the top of my class, which shocked all my teachers and my disinterested mother, who had no idea I was performing so well. She had never asked. But after the accident, something clicked inside of me and I began to question my existence, and my good luck, for I had emerged from a fatal accident with only a few scratches.

Why had I survived? Why me?
Was there some greater purpose I was meant to discover or achieve?

Everything changed for me overnight. I finally realized how fragile and precious life was. I quit drinking and partying. I took an interest in school—science in particular—and eventually in human anatomy and the workings of that complex organ inside our heads. The more I learned, the more magic I saw in the world, for how could such a wonder of nature—the brain—ever come to exist? Everything I learned was based on science, yet my own survival that night—and further events that were about to occur in my life—never ceased to amaze me. Everyday still seems like a miracle to me, with no scientific explanation whatsoever, but at least I know one thing for sure: life is a gift that should not be squandered.

o0o

I was offered scholarships to a number of universities and chose Carleton, in Ottawa, which had a good neuroscience program. I chose not to live in residence because I wanted to live alone and focus on my studies. It paid off later when I was offered spots at three different medical schools across the country. I decided to accept the offer from Dalhousie, in Nova Scotia, because I wanted to broaden my horizons and see something of the world outside of Ontario. And something about living on the Atlantic coast struck a resonating chord in me.

I completed my family medicine residency in Halifax and chose to settle on the South Shore in the small picturesque seaside community of Chester. Imagine giant pine trees, hundreds of private rocky coves to explore, and a plethora of yachts and sailboats out on the Bay on Sunday afternoons.

As far as work was concerned, I wasn’t contributing anything extraordinary to neurological research, nor was I saving lives on the operating table. I chose to be a small town doctor who mostly wrote prescriptions for ear and sinus infections, helped educate patients about high cholesterol and heart disease, and covered the ER in the Bridgewater Hospital a few times a month. The most complicated procedure of an entire week might be the removal of a fishing hook from a lobsterman’s finger, or the plastering of a cast on a twelve-year-old’s arm after he was slammed too hard against the boards during a hockey tournament.

For the most part, it was pretty basic stuff, but then, on a regular Monday afternoon—during one of the hottest summers anyone could remember in half a century—she entered my office.

And my true purpose in the world became clear.

Chapter Thirty-seven

“Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

Abigail Smith—a curvy, knockout of a woman with golden hair and blue eyes—struggled to hold her daughter still on the examination table. Marissa was twenty-two months old and flailed about like a banshee, screaming her lungs out.

“She never cries like this,” Abigail said. “Something is definitely wrong, but she doesn’t have a fever. She keeps wincing and lifting her shoulders, like the pain is inside her head. I’m in a panic, Dr. Hamilton. You know about my husband, right? He died of a brain aneurysm not long after Marissa was born, before you came here. It was very sudden, but he complained about a headache just before. What if the same thing is happening to Marissa?”

I flicked on my otoscope to look inside Marissa’s left ear. “Just hold her still for a minute. That’s good. Everything looks clear here. I need to check the other one.” Abigail and I switched places while Marissa continued to scream. “And brain aneurysms are rare,” I said as I leaned forward to look inside. “This could be anything. A simple ear infection.
Ah.
I see the problem.”

“What is it?”

I straightened and turned off my otoscope. “There’s a small spider in the canal, trapped up against her ear drum.”

Marissa screamed again.

Abigail’s giant blue eyes blinked a few times, and her head drew back in surprise. “You’re kidding me. Oh God, can you get it out? It’s not going to crawl into her brain is it?”

I chuckled, mostly to help Abigail relax—though the flush in her cheeks was quite attractive and I was finding it difficult not to stare. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll have it out of there in a minute or two, but I’ll need you to lay her down on her side and hold her still. Can you do that?”

“Yes, but how did it get in there?” she shouted over her daughter’s shrill cries, while I went to fill a syringe with saline.

“Who knows,” I replied. “It could have happened anywhere. A spider landed on my arm just the other day while I was driving. Rappelled down from the roof on a strand of web. It’s nothing you did.”

“How big is it?” she asked with concern.

“It’s very small. Just a baby, like Marissa.” I approached the table and leaned over her, and was surprised when Marissa looked me directly in the eye, and stopped crying when I spoke. “I’m going to flush some water into your ear, kiddo. Then you’ll feel better, okay?”

She blinked up at me, glanced at the syringe, and nodded.

“Just lie still,” I said. I gently pushed the saline into her ear canal, and the spider swam out. I grabbed hold of him with a pair of tweezers and placed him in a stainless steel bowl. “There. All gone. You can sit up now, Marissa.”

Her forehead and cheekbones were blotchy from crying so hard, and she wiped her eyes with her small fist.

Abigail picked her up and held her. She turned away from me. “There, there, it’s all right now. You did great, sweetheart. You were very brave.”

“All gone,” Marissa said, looking at me over her mother’s shoulder. She reached out with her little hand, and I took hold of her fingers for a moment, smiling at her. Something inside me turned over like a stalled car engine coming to life.