Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance (9 page)

In the back of my mind I know I will only have a few hours to myself before dear old mom arrives so, somehow, I’m off the deck, but I don’t remember leaving. I’m barefoot, stumbling through scrub to the wooden staircase leading down to the sea. It’s a long way down, hundreds of stairs. I start the descent, and my pulse remains steady and slow. My old heart would have been pounding by this time, reminding me, reminding me.
 

Eventually I reach the beach, sand cool underfoot, and the ocean azure and endless. Surf crashes. Gulls caw. Wind soughs through my hair, touches my cheekbones, ruffles my hair. I scuff through the sand to the water’s edge, and the lap of Pacific against my toes is cutting and cold. There’s no one, not in either direction. No boats, no neighbors. Just me, and the sea, and my thoughts.
 

The temptation to crack a bottle of Lagavulin is strong. My mouth waters. I want that drowning feeling. I don’t have to think, or feel. I don’t have to decide. All I’d have to do is drink, and drink, and drink.

Wake up, and repeat.
 

Shit, the need to escape the chaotic welter in my mind is so strong I’m tempted to wade out into the frigid sea and swim until my arms and legs and lungs give out.
 

Great-Grandpa didn’t get this chance.

Grandpa didn’t.

Dad didn’t.
 

Why did I?

Why do I get to live?

Why couldn’t Dad have gotten a transplant? Why couldn’t I have grown up with a father?
 

I have no one. No one expects anything of me. No one is waiting for me. No one cares whether I come or go.

No one cares.

I made sure of that.
 

Jesus fuck—I can’t handle that line of thought for long. I head back up the stairs, amazed at how easy it is, jogging up those steps, feeling my heart beat harder and harder without hurting, without worrying, without getting dizzy or faint.
 

I wonder whose heart is in my chest?

*
 
*
 
*

I sit on the deck with a bottle of Lagavulin tucked between my legs. I’m weak. I’m so fucking weak. I shouldn’t be drinking. At all. That was, like, number one on the list of injunctions from the doctors. Yet here I am, on the deck, pounding it back like a fool.
 

I hear a door open, but it’s too late to hide the evidence, so I kick my feet up on the railing, cap the bottle, and sip from the glass as Mom comes out onto the deck.

She’s dressed in her “casual” clothes, which means she’s only wearing like ten or fifteen grand worth of designer clothes rather than twenty or more. She’s got her hair—naturally blonde like mine—piled on top of her head, and a pair of Chanel sunglasses wedged into her thick locks. Diamonds on her wrist, fingers, neck, and ears. She’s wearing heels, even out here. Just a casual day at the beach.

She takes one look at me, and goes into full freakout mode. “Lachlan Thomas Michael Montgomery! You’re
drinking
?!” She snatches the bottle and, before I can stop her, upends it over the railing. “That has
got
to stop. You know this is the one thing you’re not supposed to be doing. The doctors were all very clear on that fact, Lachlan. Your liver has been through enough, and now it has to work even harder to break down the Cyclosporine and all the other medications.” She pauses to take a breath. “Speaking of which, have you taken your meds today?”
 

“Jesus, Mom. It’s a couple drinks. What’s the big deal?” I attempt to stand up and immediately regret it, because it belies my claim.

She’s got tears in her eyes. “Because it could kill you. You’re
alive
, Lachlan.” She grabs my face, looks me in the eyes and whispers, her voice broken. “I lost you. You died. I was there—I watched you—I watched…I watched you die. But then we got the call to say that an organ donor had been identified, a perfect match for you. Because of that, you’re alive. Don’t waste it, Lachlan.
Please
…don’t waste it.”

“I don’t know how not to, Mom.” I feel the words tumble out, unbidden. “It’s all I know how to do.”
 

“Well, it’s time to learn.” She turns away, placing the sunglasses over her eyes, hiding her own emotions. We’re a lot alike, in that way. “You’re the only man in our entire family to survive the defect. You owe it to
them
, if nothing else. You owe it to Thomas—to your dad. To Grandpa Michael. You owe it to
me
.”
 

“To
you
? To YOU?” I’m shouting. “You took away my choice! I signed a DNR. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to be brought back. Or to be kept alive.”
 

“I wanted you to have a chance.” Again, her voice is a whisper, now barely audible. Her voice is smaller and quieter than it’s ever been, I think.

“It was
my
choice, Mom.”
 

“I couldn’t lose you, Lachlan! I only had thirteen years with your father. I deserved more. I thought I’d only have maybe thirty years with you. And then I
did
lose you. They barely brought you back, and then there was no guarantee we’d ever get a match.
 

“Do you have any idea what it was like for me, Lachlan? Sitting in that room for two months, watching you lie there, unconscious, kept alive by a machine, knowing I’d have to be the one to tell them to pull the plug? I knew you didn’t want to be kept alive like that. And I’d—I’d made a deal with myself. We’d wait for three months, maybe four, and if there wasn’t a donor in that time, I’d—I’d have to let you go. And I would have. But…can you even fathom what it was like? Knowing—thinking I’d have to watch you die a
second
time?”
 

She’s standing closer than I think she’s ever gotten to me. Inches away, so I can smell her perfume and see the makeup under her eyelids and on her eyelashes, and see the lipstick on her lips. “Don’t—don’t waste this, Lock. Please…please don’t. I know you’re mad at me. I get it. I deserve it, maybe. That’s fine. But don’t…don’t waste this.”
 

She leaves me then, going back into the house, shutting the door quietly behind her.
 

And I stay out on the deck, watching the sun go down, sobering up, and repeating her words over and over and over.
 

Don
’
t waste this.

Going nowhere with no one but me

Ardmore, Oklahoma

I slide the tip of the thermometer under the little girl’s tongue. “Okay, now just hold still for a few seconds for me. All right, good job, Eva. Now I need to look in your ears, okay?”

I go through the motions. Temp, ears, reflexes, nose, the works. Routine checkup. The next patient is the same. And the one after that. Then a young guy arrives with a sprained wrist and a concussion—he got tossed off a mule and landed the wrong way. All the usual stuff you’d expect to see as a physician’s assistant in a small rural town. The whole day goes that way. A summer cold. Some stitches in a forehead. Prescription refill. An annual physical.
 

As the PA, I take ninety percent of the patients. Dr. Amos Beardsley is going on eighty-five, and he really only sees the patients who’ve been with the practice for several generations, so I get the rest, the walk-ins, the checkups, the refills, the sutures and fractures and concussions and “is this rash normal” sort of questions.
 

It’s work.
 

It keeps me busy, and that’s all I need.
 

By the time the last walk-in has been seen, everyone else has cleaned up and shut down. Just as I prepare to close up for the day, a teenage girl arrives, too embarrassed and scared to ask her parents for contraceptives.
 

Finally, I grab my purse and head out to my vehicle. I’m tired, ready for bed. It’s seven o’clock, and I was at the office before seven this morning, and I didn’t have time for lunch. I’m still in my lab coat; still have my stethoscope draped over my neck.
 

I climb up into the cab of the truck and slam the door closed. I lower both windows to let the heat of the Oklahoma summer billow out. I’m already sweating, and I’ve only been in the truck for two seconds. It’s only going to get worse, too, because this old wreck doesn’t have AC.
 

I could afford a new truck, of course—I make decent money. But this was Ollie’s truck. He fixed it up himself, back in high school. When I first moved down here, after the accident, I visited Marcus, Ollie’s younger brother. We didn’t click, Marcus and I. He was country, and I’m…not. We just don’t see the world the same way, and I think the grief of losing Ollie was too much for both of us.
 

But Marcus was sympathetic to my grief, and realized my need to have something to connect me to Ollie. So he gave me this truck. I paid to have it looked over, anything broken got fixed. I spent more on it than it’s worth, probably, and it still breaks down all the time. The AC went at the beginning of the summer, and I just haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed. It’s not a big deal, though, since I work six days a week, sunup to sundown, and thus I’m rarely in it during the real heat of the day.
 

I’ll drive this old heap until it quits on me, because I can smell Ollie in it. See him in it. I’ve got his picture wedged into a gap in the dashboard, a candid photo I took in Africa. He’s blood-spattered, in the middle of stripping off his gloves. He’s exhausted; you can see it in the bags under his eyes. But he’s happy. I’d just told him I loved him, out of the blue. He’d needed to hear it, and I knew it, so I shouted it out across the tent: “Hey, Pep! I love you!” And he’d looked up, grinned, and I’d snapped the shot. I got him grinning, a moment of happiness amid all the hell.

I turn the engine over and it coughs, rattles, and then catches with a rumble. The radio is on—it’s always on—and the cab is filled with country music, Ollie’s favorite. It’s a traditional station, the same station where he’d had it tuned. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Randy Travis, Alan Jackson, maybe some older Tim McGraw and that crowd. Nothing new. It’s the soundtrack of this town of Ardmore—slides on steel strings and songs about love lost and taillights in the dust.
 

I hate it.
 

But the old radio has never been changed. Not once, not ever, and I’ll never change it.
 

We used to sit in that old Nissan pickup at the MSF compound, and Ollie would pull out his trusty iPod, filled to max capacity with every country song he could think of, tuck the left ear bud in my ear, the right in his, and we’d listen to country music and catch a breath or two between incoming two-tons full of bloody refugees.
 

I’ll always hate country music.
 

But I listen to it anyway.
 

Home is a good twenty minutes away on the outskirts of town.
Outskirts
may be pushing it. It’s a tiny one-room shotgun shack at the end of a long dirt road, sitting on a half-acre pocket in the midst of hundreds of acres of grass and hay in every direction. No neighbors but the Jensens half a mile down, who own all those acres, and the dozen or so horses grazing on them. It’s a lonely little place, dead silent at night except for the hooting of the occasional owl, and the crickets, and the humming of the light fixed to the power line pole at the edge of my property. It’s not much, but it’s mine.
 

I’ve got a couch, a TV, a few overflowing bookshelves, a bed, and a dresser; that’s all that’d fit anyway. It’s all I need, all I’ll ever want.
 

I toss my lab coat and purse on the couch, strip out of my scrubs, toss them in the hamper. Throw my sports bra and panties after them, step in the shower and rinse off the day. I towel off, brush my hair and slip on an old T-shirt of Ollie’s. It used to smell like him, but the smell has faded now even though I don’t wash it much; I’m trying to preserve the last shreds of his scent on it.

Pep, my cat and only friend, waits until I’m sitting on the couch with a book before saying hello. He’s a little black and white tom, so of course I named him Pep. I adopted him as my first official act after moving down here, because you can leave a cat in a house alone all day, and I needed
something
.
 

And god, does Pep come through for me. He’s a snuggly little fella; I like to sit cross-legged on the couch, and he likes to curl up like a comma in the space between my legs. Purrs like a little engine for as long as I stroke his back and the little strip of fur between his ears. He sleeps on the pillow next to mine at night, and takes my warm spot after I get up in the morning.
 

I read until my eyes blur, until my head spins. And then I climb into bed, set Pep on his pillow, and go to sleep.

Then, I wake up in the morning, and do it all over again.
 

Same as I’ve done every day since I came down here.
 

I had to go somewhere, and Ollie’s hometown seemed as good a place as any, especially since his parents didn’t live here anymore. They were up in northern California somewhere, and I couldn’t stand to be near them. Ollie sounded like his father and looked like his mother, and both of them tore my heart to shreds.
 

Being in Ardmore was another way of holding on to him, of being alone with him. Another way of keeping him as close as I could. Feeling him. Seeing him. He’d gotten milkshakes at the diner, bought his first pair of Tony Lomas at the outfitter a few blocks down. Took his first girlfriend to the movies at the theater across from the town square. He’s all over this town, and that’s equal parts comforting and cutting.
 

I don’t cry myself to sleep at night.

I stopped doing that months ago.

I don’t whisper his name when I’m lonely, because I’m lonely all the time.
 

I don’t get the shakes anymore, because I don’t do anything more dangerous or traumatic than stitching up the occasional boo-boo. I quit MSF, of course. I couldn’t go back, not after losing Ollie. I couldn’t face any of them. I couldn’t face Africa again, not without him.