The Promise of Paradise (22 page)

He tried to ask where
he was, and why the hell the lights above him were so bright, but
when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. He tried again. A mumble
this time. In fragmented pieces, the room took shape around him.
White everywhere. Shadows he couldn’t make out. Noises he didn’t
recognize: humming and beeping and mechanical burping. Something
wrapped tight around his arm. And a God-awful smell. Seconds later,
he placed it.

Oh, Jesus Christ.
I’m in the hospital.

He could make out
different voices, some female, some male. Pain radiated from his
temples to down around his ankles, and he closed his eyes again. Next
time he opened them, he saw Cal. Eddie’s mouth fell open. In the
doorway, dressed in the same plaid shirt and jeans he’d been
wearing the night of the accident, stood his kid brother.

“Screwed up, didn't
ya? Mom’s gonna kill you.”

Eddie squinted. “What
the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m not here,
idiot.” The seventeen year old crossed his arms and leaned against
the wall. “I’m inside your head. Inside your dreams. Where I’ve
been for the last three years.”

A doctor walked by
Cal—or
through
Cal, Eddie thought with a shudder—peeling
off his gloves as he left the room. No one else even blinked.

“You’re dead.”
Eddie turned his head away. “And I must be close, if I think I’m
talking to you.”

“Severe
lacerations…possible head trauma…hematoma…we need a CAT scan
and MRI…X-ray that leg…”

Eddie fought to hold on
to the words, to the sentences that swirled around him. But he
couldn’t even keep his eyes open. Something pricked his arm, and
warmth dripped into his veins. He stopped struggling. Even the lights
didn’t seem so bright anymore.

Better. Doesn’t
hurt so much.
He turned his face back to the doorway. “Still
here?”

Cal grinned. “You
gotta tell her,” he said. His expression grew serious. “You gotta
tell her how you feel.”

“Who?”

Cal rolled his eyes.
“Who do you think? I’m seventeen, not a moron.”

“Now you’re giving
me advice on women?” Eddie found that if he closed his eyes, he
could still talk to his brother. Funny. And yet not so funny, after
all. Maybe the people closest to you, the ones that wound the threads
of their lives through yours, belonged to you forever. Maybe you
could continue to have conversations with them. Even past death. Even
past hopelessness.

“It’s not
hopeless,” Cal said.

“Stop reading my
thoughts.”

“Tell her.”

“She just got
engaged. I saw him put the ring on her finger.”

“So?”

“So she’s gone.
She’s not anybody I ever knew, anyway. And she doesn’t belong in
Paradise.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Yeah? What do you
know?”
Go to hell,
Eddie thought, exhausted.

“Already there, bro.
Same place you’ll be if you spend your life wondering what would
have happened if you’d had the balls to talk to her instead of
running away.”

“I didn’t run
away.” Eddie didn’t want to think about it anymore. He didn’t
want to hear his dead brother’s voice. Didn’t want to remember
the anguish of saying goodbye at the grave. He felt himself melt into
the bed, as if his bones had turned to liquid. As if part of him was
already gone. Didn’t hurt so much. Besides, if going to sleep, if
giving in to the pain and the weakness clamping down on his body
meant seeing his brother again for real, then maybe dying wasn’t
the worst thing in the world.

Maybe everything really
did happen for a reason.

* * *

“I’ll give you a
ride to the hospital,” Lacey offered.

Ash shook her head and
waited for the room to stop spinning. She wasn’t religious, had
abandoned church the summer she left for college. But as she hung up
the phone, she found herself staring at her fingers, clutching the
edge of the bar so hard the tips had all turned white. Would prayer
work at a time like this? Did the big guy upstairs listen to people
who once vowed never to set foot inside a church again?

“No, it’s okay,”
she said after a minute. “I’ll drive myself. I’m okay.” And
she wondered if God could hear the lies she told out loud too.

Strange, Ash thought as
she pulled onto Main Street a few minutes later. She didn’t think
it had poured this hard all summer. Sure, maybe a quick shower here
and there, but nothing so violent. Nothing that made her think that
Paradise itself, its streets and its homes along with the people
inside them, might be swept off the map. Her fingers shook against
the steering wheel. Her stomach churned. She’d had to ask J.T. for
directions to the hospital, and even though she’d written them
down, she made two wrong turns and had to double back.

“
Eddie’s been in
an accident…”

Again and again she
heard the words of his father, the tears bubbling in his voice, the
control the man fought to keep.
My God. The Wests had already lost
one son.
How could they go through it all again?

She braked hard and
swerved to avoid a car abandoned in the middle of the road. Breath
hissed through her teeth, and she fought for calm.
Read the
directions. Focus on one thing at a time.
Okay, a turn at the
blinking yellow light by the highway. A treacherous drive along aptly
named River Street. A right turn by the Dairy Dome. Ash started
counting breaths, to remind herself to inhale. Another half-mile, and
the modest brick building that housed South County Medical Center
rose up from the fog. Finally.

She steered into the
visitors’ lot. Only one other vehicle occupied a spot, a brown
pick-up truck with a dent in one side. She ran for the ER doors,
which slid open as she approached. In the foyer stood an orderly. He
looked her way but didn’t speak. She headed for the desk. No one
there.

“Hello?” She rapped
on the glass divider. After a minute a receptionist appeared, with a
sweater pulled tight across her chest. For the first time, Ash
realized the room was freezing, with the AC up full blast. She
wrapped her arms around herself.

“Eddie West?” The
words turned her tongue thick in her mouth. She tried to ask
something else but couldn’t.

The woman glanced at a
chart. “You family?”

Ash shook her head.

“Can’t tell you
anything. Privacy laws.”

She backed away. Had
they taken him upstairs, to another room? To surgery? She looked
around the waiting area for his father. Not a soul.

“
He’s asking for
you…”

That meant he was okay,
right? He wouldn’t be talking, or coherent, if he were really that
hurt. Without seeing the walls around her, she moved through the
waiting room on unsteady legs. In the far corner, she sank onto a
blue plastic chair. Two magazines, their covers torn off, lay on a
table beside her, and a coffee pot burped in the corner. Otherwise,
the place was empty. No emergencies tonight, apparently, except for
Eddie. How lucky for everyone else.

Ash closed her eyes.
Mistake.

Eddie’s mouth on
hers, his hands roaming her body, sprang to life behind her lids like
it was a motion picture with a viewing audience of one. She stared at
the clock above the door instead. Five o’clock. Five-oh-five.
Barely the other side of afternoon. On any other day, they’d be
sitting on the porch roof talking baseball. They’d be making fun of
the neighbors, watching the street, telling stories. They’d be
living.

She thought back to
their Fourth of July party, counting the days. Two. Four. Five. Five
days ago, Eddie and Ash had danced around the porch roof. Later that
night, he’d kissed her. And by the next morning, she knew she loved
him, somewhere in the back of her mind where the thought was so new
it hadn’t even opened its eyes.

She tried to glance
through a magazine, but the words and pictures blurred. She looked
back at the clock and counted the erratic clicks of its old-fashioned
hands. The telephone rang. A nurse walked into the waiting room on
rubbery white feet, passing Ash without a glance as she pushed her
way through the swinging glass door into the area beyond. Into the
area, Ash assumed, where they looked patients over, treated their
wounds, decided the next and best course of action.

Triage,
she
thought after a minute. That was the word, the way they decided who
was examined first. The one who bled the most got the bandages. But
what about injuries that went below the skin? What if you couldn’t
see how badly you’d broken your heart until it was too late?

“Are you Ashton?”
It was a woman’s voice, quiet and shaky.

She looked up and saw
Eddie’s blue eyes. Her heart lurched. “Mrs. West?”

“Irene.” The
graying brunette sat in the chair beside Ash. She balanced on the
edge as if she might jump up again at any moment.

“How is he?”

“They’re not sure.
He was thrown…” Her last word broke on a sob. A man approached
them, and as Ash stood to shake the hand he offered, she saw an older
version of Eddie, with the same strong jaw and the same solid
stature.

“Malcolm West. Thanks
for coming.”

She nodded, not sure
what she was supposed to say.
I live upstairs from your son? I
think I might have fallen in love with him? I’ve lied to him about
everything important since the day we met?

“They’re doing some
more tests,” Eddie’s father said after a minute. He sank into the
seat beside his wife and took her hand. “They want to make sure
there wasn’t any damage to…ah…his brain.”

Irene burst into tears
and fell against her husband’s shoulder.

Ash looked away from
them, down at her lap. Black spots circled in front of her eyes, and
the room grew hot. Had they turned off the AC? She had to pinch the
skin on her arm to keep from passing out.

I shouldn’t be
here. It’s too private, too fragile, too awkward. I don’t even
know them. I barely know Eddie.
She shifted in the chair, meaning
to get up, go outside, find some fresh air, when something poked her
in the leg. She looked down and saw the bulge in her pocket. The
ring. Colin’s ring. Colin’s offer.

For a minute or two,
Ash sat perfectly still.
This is it, the moment I have to choose.
Life with someone she knew, or life with someone she’d only just
met. A life that was predictable, that followed rules she knew, or a
life with twists and turns she couldn’t begin to predict. She ran
her fingers across the lump in her pocket and felt the edges of the
ring, the smooth circle of the band.

Choosing Colin means
I get the marriage I always wanted. I get the comfortable life in
Boston. I get the partner my family approves of.

Choosing Eddie means
no guarantees. It means taking a chance, holding my breath, and
jumping into the deep end. It means starting all over again with
someone brand new.

She stole another
glance at Eddie’s parents. If she said no to Colin, there was no
promise Eddie would even know her face when he woke up. Ash stood.
“I’m…I’ll…would you excuse me?” She reached for her cell
phone. “I have to make a phone call.”

Irene sniffled and
looked at her hands, folded like a broken bird in her lap. Malcolm
nodded and tried to smile, but the expression slipped away before it
reached his eyes.

Five thirty, the clock
now read. Ash found a spot beneath the overhang outside where a weak
signal came in. She scrolled down the saved numbers. For a minute she
thought about calling Jen, but what good would that do? She couldn’t
ask her best friend to hop into her car and drive a hundred miles,
not on a night like tonight. And not to save Ash from something she
needed to figure out by herself.

She stopped halfway
down her list and stared at the digits she knew by heart.
It’s
the right choice. The only choice.
She dialed and waited for
Colin to answer.

“Cal?” Eddie
lurched up from unconsciousness. He looked at the door, the last
place he’d seen his kid brother. Nothing. No one. Not even a
flesh-and-blood doctor or nurse.

His head swam.
Everything hurt, tenfold. He rolled his head on the pillow. The bike.
The rain. And he'd forgotten the damn helmet. He ran one hand over
his thigh and touched gauze. After a minute, he realized his right
arm was bounded tightly to his chest. It ached like hell. His hair
felt matted against his forehead.
Did I break an arm? Hit face
first?
He had no recollection of the accident, no idea how hard
he’d hit or how far he’d been thrown.

The room remained
empty, and he wondered if they’d moved him up from the ER. He
glanced around. Looked like every other damn room in this place, and
he’d spent enough time in the hospital to know. The bed next to him
was unmade, the hall outside empty. He leaned up on one elbow and
caught a glimpse of a sign for the elevator. So he was upstairs.
Second floor. That meant his parents were probably wandering the
halls somewhere close by. He was surprised Mom wasn’t sitting
bedside, waiting for him to wake up.

Or maybe she'd figured
she couldn’t wait like that again. Not after last time.

Tears filled Eddie’s
eyes, pain he thought he’d gotten rid of long ago. He pressed the
first two fingers of his right hand against his breastbone, a gesture
from the months after the accident. A superstition. He’d once
thought that the hollowness there would go away, that one day when he
checked, it would have filled again with something like life. Each
day when he woke, for almost a year, he checked for some sign of
recovery. Each day his fingers fell away without finding one. After
awhile, he realized they never would. Like a bum ankle, or a scar
that stretched the length of your jaw line, some pain you carried
around with you forever.