FIVE
Lenny
I woke up with my mouth tasting like yesterday's news, on my couch, Docs still on, one arm still stabbed into the sleeve of my jacket that I had half-dragged over myself like a blanket.
There was a slight jackhammer sensation in my temples, and a general dryness to my mouth, skin, and eyes. But it was nothing like the raging hangovers other people would have having drunk half as much alcohol as I had last night. You couldn't drink like I occasionally drank if you were laid up for a whole day after, nursing a migraine, mainlining Gatorade, and trying to soak up the booze with grease and carbs.
Me, I needed a shower, a tooth-brushing, a cup of coffee, and a glass of water, and I was fresh as a daisy.
But none of those little remedies could take the memories out of my brain, and I suddenly found myself a little jealous of blackout drunks who weren't plagued with their bad decisions the next day.
Because, what the hell had I been thinking?
Okay, well, I knew it the second that the tequila hit my tongue that I would likely do something I would at least roll my eyes over the next day.
I hadn't planned on trying to freaking kiss Edison.
That was other-level stupid.
Just normally.
But especially so when I had to get up and face him this morning for training.
I had a feeling it wasn't going to be something that stayed as a tequila-soaked memory. Edison's words had stuck with me too.
He didn't say if about kissing me.
He said when.
He planned on revisiting the events of the night before, but in the stone-cold sober light of day.
Christ, maybe even today.
Ugh.
Like I needed that thought in my head.
Today of all days.
That was the only reason I had agreed to be stupid and take Meryl up on the offer of booze. I knew today was going to be hard. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were always hard. The worst, actually.
Usually, I tried to train extra hard before I went, tried to get the excess energy out, tried to exhaust my body in the hopes that it would be cathartic emotionally.
It really didn't work at all, but I kept hoping.
Hell, if nothing else, when I went into work arched over like an old lady with whole-body arthritis, the guys there tended to overlook the fact that my eyes looked red and swollen.
The tequila was just a way to forget for a little while, to get rid of some of the stress that I carried with me every second of every day.
If I made some stupid choices while escaping, well, I guess that was a fair trade.
At least I didn't sleep with him.
First time I get laid in about a year, yeah, I wanted to be able to enjoy that with a clear head.
If I were being honest with myself, I would admit that Edison was totally the man I would love to break my dry spell.
The why could be looked at shallowly or with depth.
He was hot. Case closed.
But also, there was just something there. There was a connection. There was the odd feeling like maybe, just maybe, he got me.
No one ever got me.
Hell, people barely even tolerated me.
I didn't even blame them for that.
I was a bitter shot to take with no salt or sugar.
I certainly never thought any less of you if you didn't want to be around me for any longer than was absolutely necessary. And very few people would even want to put up with me.
Meryl did for who-knew-what reason.
Maybe just because I was the only woman willing to work there, and he liked seeing tits and ass around. Maybe it was more. I didn't know.
I couldn't, however, figure out what the deal was with Edison.
He could have literally any woman.
Why would he bother with little ole damaged me?
It was a question that was not answered a few hours later, after having spent another hour with him, this time being the one inflicting pain that he took with an admirable hiss when I had cussed him savagely.
He said nothing at all about the night before. In fact, it was like nothing at all happened.
For reasons I was choosing not to analyze, I was somehow offended by that.
I tried to shrug it off as I went home for a quick shower and change.
I didn't eat.
I couldn't eat.
I almost never did on these days.
The visiting days.
My stomach rolled too much to even entertain the idea. Before or after.
The drive was one I could do in my sleep, having done it every single day for three months, then three days a week for the next three months. It was a drive I was maybe terrified never to do again, no matter how much it made my gut hurt, how much it made my heart crush to dust in my chest.
The drive would be easier to accept than the reason I would no longer have to make it anymore.
I parked in the lot, taking my ticket, pocketing it in a way that was all-too-familiar. Taking a deep breath, I pulled the sour and salt scent of the Navesink River into my chest, hoping it could steady me as I let myself in through the revolving doors big enough to fit a small bridal party in each little section.
I never used to hate hospitals.
How could I, when I spent so much of my youth in them?
I was forever falling out of trees, breaking things, bloodying things, knocking into things hard enough to need X-rays and overnight observation.
I knew the exact sensation of the scratchy paper they pull over the exam tables and the faded, squishy, yet firm leather beneath it. I knew the coldness of the X-ray and CAT scan tables as well as the mechanical clicking noises they made while they peered inside you. I knew the antiseptic smell I almost found comforting, and had my mother not convinced, evidenced by how frequently she went over to the hand sanitizer dispensers that were attached to the walls, and scrub on some of the cold liquid that she would later complain dried out her skin.
I never had anything even resembling a phobia about the place that used to give me grape Advil and bubblegum-flavored Amoxicillin, and let me pick crazy colored casts.
They were actually memories I liked.
Which was rare.
But that all changed that night.
That horrible, life-changing, soul-crushing night.
Me, dead inside, cold-as-ice me, had sobbed until I had lost my voice, until all the skin on my cheeks became raw and red and painful.
That night when words that once meant nothing to me started to mean everything.
Words like coma.
And brain waves.
And cerebral swelling.
Words that said she became a doll in a bed with machines poking out of her wrists, her nose, her crotch.
Machines that were doing everything her body had forgotten how to do on its own while she slept.
Slept.
That was the term I preferred.
I wasn't a fanciful person by nature, but my brain rebelled when I tried to refer to her as in a coma. There was something wholly unreachable about that, something seemingly permanent.
"Hey Lenny," MaryBeth greeted me from the nurse's station where she was standing in cheery yellow scrubs that were meant to try to lighten the mood, but I too-often found their false cheer insulting rather than comforting.
Don't try to tell me that there is anything cheerful about this place where everyone behind a door was in limbo, alive, but not living.
"Hey MB," I greeted her because it wasn't her fault I had to be there. And she was someone taking care of the only person in the world my shriveled little heart loved. "Kick him to the curb yet?" I asked, forcing myself to be social when all I wanted to do was throw myself behind the all-too-familiar door and have a good cry again.
Her boyfriend was six years into his fear of commitment. Which was, somehow, a bullshit line she was still buying into.
Oh, he's been hurt before.
Yeah, well, haven't we all.
Nut-up and put a rock on her finger.
I might have even said something very similar to that one particularly bad day for me when I caught him alone beside the nurse's station waiting for her.
MaryBeth's head shake was all the answer I needed.
"You're a far better woman than me, MB," I told her, and knew it was probably the truth as I moved down the hall toward her door.
Well, it wasn't just hers.
But seeing as the other person she shared it with was as equally indisposed, I figured she didn't mind my mild - and major - breakdowns.
They were getting more frequent.
After I got over the shock, I had settled into a very unfamiliar optimism. For four and a half months.
But now, closing in on six, yeah, there wasn't a speck of optimism left. Just angry, bitter, soul-deep hurt.
I moved between the beds, still going through the ridiculous ritual of pulling the privacy curtain as if it made a difference.
And there she was.
Swallowed up by the big, slightly bent upward hospital bed, the rails up though there was really no need for that precaution seeing as she hadn't moved so much as an inch in all the time she had been inside that bed with the too-heavily-bleached blankets that had not a bit of softness, and hardly enough warmth.
It was always so cold here.
And my morbid brain wondered if it was some attempt at preservation.
"Hey babygirl," I greeted her, a hitch already in my voice as I took a deep breath. "You just had a bath, I see," I told her, moving past the bed toward the window side, grabbing the chair that was always there, and pulling it closer to the side of her bed.
They didn't get bathed often.
I guess it must have been a huge hassle.
I had dry shampoo in my purse for when the spans went too long and her perfect, glossy wheat-blonde hair would start darkening with grease at the roots.
But today her hair was bright and shimmering, still damp in places. I couldn't claim she smelled like she had had a bath seeing as the shit they used in the hospital had little to no scent. But she looked better.
Well, as good as she could in a bed with tubes keeping her alive.
Letha.
The only person who mattered.
Twenty-four years old.
She hadn't even gotten to celebrate her last birthday.
It sounded like she wouldn't get to celebrate the next one either.
Meanwhile, my sorry ass just got to keep having them.
That is your survivor's guilt speaking.
One of the nurse's had told me that, making me launch into a lung-burningly loud rant about how we weren't in a fucking plane crash together. That her traumatic event had nothing to do with my feelings that the world would be a better place if I were in the bed, and she was still off living her life. That was just common sense.
She was a far better person than I ever was, than I ever would be.
Yet here we were.
No amount of ranting and raging would change the situation.
My little sister was in a bed with machines bleeping out the fact that she was alive, but just barely, not really.
I hadn't seen her eyes in six months. That cornflower blue that made everyone who crossed her path stop and admire, that were always so easy to read, that never had a hint of the guards that mine did.
And her smile.
Christ, I missed that. More than words could say. All white teeth and crinkles beside her eyes because when she did it, she did it big.
Letha never did anything by halves.
It was a smile that got me through my less than stellar childhood.
It was a smile that I saw through my phone when I was still up in Jersey, and she had been away at school in Georgia.
It was a smile I got to see at the coffeeshop every single Sunday when she finally moved back to the area just a year ago, a smile that somehow made the humdrum drudgery that was my life completely tolerable.
It was so bright that it was blinding.
And since it had been gone, my world had been so much darker.
Pitch, in fact.
And so fucking cold.
I had always been me, guarded, distant, jaded, cynical, a bit of a bitch. But, I think, things had taken a turn when I got the call that night, when she was no longer around to balance me, to remind me of the good that there still was in the world.
I knew if she could, she would tell me to knock it off, to ovary-up, to stop being such a Negative Nelly.
It might not always be rainbows and sunshine, but the rain is lovely too, Lele.
I wasn't so convinced.
I'd been in a constant storm for half a year; I had yet to find any beauty in it.
Maybe that is because you're not looking for it.
That was exactly what she would tell me if she could.
Maybe she was right.
She usually was.
But what the fuck was the point of finding any beauty when she was laid up in a bed, not able to share it with me?
I reached out, sliding my hand under hers and curling it around. It was cold, but her hands always were.
Cold hands mean a warm heart.
Fuck if that wasn't true in her case.
I sat there for a long moment, nothing but stillness inside and out.
It was silly.
Juvenile, really.
But I was still waiting to see if her finger would twitch.
That was all I would need.
To stop the upcoming process.
To get not to make that decision I was dreading.
To take my sister off life support.