Cameron
My tires squeal as I pull into the parking lot of the Horizon Care Facility. Adrenaline fuels my muscles, and I sprint through the lot then squeeze through the sliding glass doors before they’re fully open. The sterile scent of the place turns my stomach and worry dampens my palms.
Pam, who works the front desk, looks up with wide eyes. “Can I help—Oh, Mr. Kyle.”
“Yeah, hey . . .”
“We didn’t expect you ’til Sunday.” Her easy smile doesn’t communicate anything close to urgency.
“I got your message.” I lean over to peer down the hallway. “Is she okay?”
“Message?” She looks around her desk as if the answer is lying around haphazardly on some scrap of paper.
“It said ‘urgent.’” I scour the area for any sign of disruption, my pulse pounding.
“I’m sorry. I don’t see anything here about an urgent message.”
“I received a message with this address.”
“Oh, well it wasn’t from us. Rosie’s just fine.”
I hear her words, but they don’t calm the fears. “I’d like to see her.”
“Yes, of course.” A soft smile curves her lips. “Rosie’s very popular today. I’ll take you back.”
Popular? I move around the circular desk to a door that leads to a long hallway: a hallway I’ve walked a million times, but today seems different somehow. Maybe it’s the leftover panic that still has my muscles twitching.
I follow Pam to the door with a nameplate on it that says “Rosie” in script. “So you didn’t leave a message with my secretary today?”
She shakes her head. “No, but I might have an idea who did.” She dips her forehead toward the square window in the door.
My mind whirls and my gut tightens. I step up to the closed door and peek in through the window.
The air around me stills along with my lungs. My daughter, smaller than the average eighteen-year-old, sits in her chair, head and legs locked into place by soft straps.
But she’s not alone.
Eve.
Emotion clogs my throat, and I force myself to swallow. She’s in a chair, leaning forward so that her long hair veils most of her face. She has one of Rosie’s hands between her own, and she’s talking.
My eyes track movement on the other side of the room. I look over to find Ryder, his eyes on mine through the window, and a pleased smile on his face.
Without the conscious decision to do so, I push open the door and move into the room.
Eve’s head swivels toward me. Her big blue eyes are red-rimmed and puffy, cheeks painted with tears. “I didn’t know.”
“Now you do.” It’s all I can say, the only thing I can get out before I brace for her reaction: her disappointment, anger, revulsion that because of me my daughter’s living out her life brain dead in a hospital. All because of me.
Eve turns sad eyes back to Rosie. “She’s beautiful, just like her mom.”
I nod, even though she can’t see me, not trusting my voice.
She holds Rosie’s curled-up hand, rubbing comforting circles on her knuckles, and the visual threatens to drop me. I look away and blink as my eyes focus on my son.
“Hey, Dad.” Ryder plops down on Rosie’s bed, hands behind his head. “So I take it you got my message, huh?”
I dip my chin toward Eve. “You do this?”
He shrugs one shoulder. “It was time. Rosie and I were sick of watching you fall apart, so we took matters into our own hands.” He looks at his twin sister. “Ain’t that right, Rose?”
“We? You haven’t been here in—”
“Guess my secret’s out too.” Ryder steps closer to whisper. “Just because I haven’t been coming with you doesn’t mean I haven’t been coming.”
Pride floods my chest with warmth. Here I thought he’d been abandoning his sister, but instead he’s been forging his own relationship with her. “How long?”
“Couple months. I stopped coming with you and I missed her. I decided to come visit, and I liked it better being alone with her. When I used to come with you, it was so depressing.”
“Sorry, son.” I rake a hand through my hair. “I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to say.” He says it in such a casual way I have to wonder how I didn’t see this before.
I turn my attention to my daughter. Eve moves away from her spot to give me room.
“Hey, baby girl.” I lean in and press a kiss to her forehead before taking the seat that Eve just vacated. “Busy day, huh?”
I watch for a reaction, a flicker of her eyelids, twitch of her lips, but get nothing. Her deep blue eyes stare blankly at me.
I notice a picture lying on her lap. “What’s this?” I pick it up. It’s of me, Eve, and Ryder from the night Ataxia played at The Blackout. “Your brother bring you this?”
“It’s a great picture,” Eve says in a soft way that gets my eyes.
I get lost for a moment at the tenderness I see in her expression.
“One of my favorites, although”—she reaches to a framed picture on the table next to her—“this one is the best.”
I take the frame from her, and an instant smile pulls at my lips upon viewing the image of Ryder and Rosie just weeks before she drowned. They’re eating popsicles in the backyard, both of them with bright purple lips and sticky sweet dripping off their chins. Messy blond hair and sun-kissed toddler cheeks.
“That was a good day.” My voice cracks with the memory.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shake my head. “I guess the same reason you lied about your age. I didn’t want you to hate me.”
She steps close, and I exhale hard with the soothing warmth of her hand on my shoulder. “I could never hate you. It was a mistake, Cameron.”
“A mistake that cost her . . .” I swallow the lump forming in my throat and pull Rosie’s hand to my lips to kiss each one of her knuckles. “I’m so sorry, baby girl.”
Still no response from Rosie, but the telltale sniff of silent tears from Eve shoots straight to my chest.
I turn my head. “Now you know. It’s because of me she’s locked inside a body she can’t control. She’ll never have a life outside of this facility, and if all plays out the way it seems like it’s going to, she’ll die in here—”
“Shhh.” Eve wipes her eyes and stands next to Rosie. “She can hear you.”
“We don’t know what she can hear.”
Her glistening eyes snap to mine. “I know she can hear you.”
“Eve, there’s no way to know that. She’s no longer responding.”
“She responds to me.” Her words seem to reverberate through the room.
“What?”
“It’s true, Dad.” Ryder sounds off from his place on the bed. “We’ve been here for hours, and a couple times she responded to us. It’s subtle, but it’s something.”
“You’ve been here for hours?” I look between Ryder and Eve.
“We’ve been in here with her since before the sun came up.”
I look between Eve and Rosie. “Can you show me?”
Eve nods and walks around to the front of Rosie’s chair. She bends at the waist and brings Rosie’s hand to her cheek. “Hey, Rosie. Do you remember me?”
Rosie’s eyes stay fixed on nothing across the room.
“You know your dad here thinks you won’t respond. I don’t know about you, but I really enjoy proving him wrong. What do you say? Can you help a sister out?”
Still nothing.
Unease churns in my gut. “Eve, it’s okay—”
“No, we’re not giving up.” She cups my daughter’s jaw with one hand. “Are we Rosie? Come on. Look at me. I’m right here.”
Rosie’s eyes shift toward Eve ever so slightly.
“Yeah, there it is!” Eve’s high-pitched voice is filled with pride. “Hey, pretty girl.”
“Holy shit. You did it.” I stand and place a kiss on my daughter’s forehead.
“I told you.” The triumph in Eve’s voice is contagious and sends shock waves of excitement through my body.
“I’m proud of you, baby.” I smooth Rosie’s short blond hair. “You’re so smart.”
“She’s amazing, Cameron.” Eve leans into my side.
The door bursts open, and D’lilah comes rushing inside. “Is she okay? What happened, is she—oh!” Her eyes take in everyone in the room. “What’s everyone doing here?”
I catch Ryder trying to hide a grin behind the back of his hand.
“Yeah, she’s fine.” I nod to my son. “Ry, you mind filling your mom in before you give her a heart attack?”
“Don’t mind if I do, Dad.” He steps forward and clears his throat. “Rosie’s fine. I left the urgent messages with you guys.”
D’lilah’s hand on her heart, she blows out several breaths. “Ryder, you scared me to death.”
“Drastic times. Here’s the thing. I’ve been watching you all dance around each other for months. Been watching Mom slowly kill herself for years. Figured it was time we had a family meeting.”
“But—”
Ryder holds his hand up to D’lilah. “Before you say anything, Mom, let me say that Eve is going to be part of our family eventually”—he fixes his eyes on mine—“as soon as Dad pulls his head out of his ass.”
Eve snort-giggles at my side.
“Eve, you love my dad. Dad, you love Eve.” He looks at his mom. “Mom, you’ve been sober now for a little while, and I know you love me. I don’t need a mom, but Rosie does. She needs all the love she can get, and I’ll be busy with college. It’s time you guys stop living in your mistakes and start looking forward.”
“How’d he get so smart?” Eve grins up at me.
I shake my head. “No fucking idea.”
D’lilah slides her gaze from Ryder to Rosie. Her eyes fill up with tears. “She’s grown since the last time I saw her.” She wraps her arms around her stomach.
Eve holds her hand out to D’lilah. “Come look at her from over here. She looks so much like you.”
’Li looks at Eve’s hand and slowly takes hold of it. I step away from the women as they crouch down in front of Rosie, then move to my son who’s sporting a very proud grin while watching his mom with his sister.
“You did good, son.”
“Yeah, I know.”
And just like the night of The Fourth of July, Eve becomes the easy that our family needed—the light that we’ve been missing for years—the glue that somehow holds us together.
I was living behind a translucent wall of apathy, not allowing anything or anyone that might drop me to my knees get close enough. Love has brought me the worst kind of pain imaginable, and I was so afraid of feeling that again, of losing something so beautiful I’d never be able to recover. But the risk is half the beauty of living. I’m risking my sanity by loving Eve, but the alternative is far more painful than the fear of losing her.
She shattered me, broke down the old me, and freed the possibility of a new outcome. Rewriting my future to create one I never even knew I wanted.
And as I watch my ex-wife fawn over our disabled daughter, as Eve and Ryder look on with smiles so big they could light the dark, I let go.
For the second time in my life . . .
I fall.
This time, by choice.