The Scars I Bare (By The Bay #2)

Chapter One: Dean

Recovery Journal: Day One

I've been in this hospital bed about a week now.

Or at least, I think it's been a week. Hard to say with how much pain meds they've been giving me.

The shrink who keeps visiting, the one they send in to help me handle my transition or whatever, says this journaling thing will help me heal.

Heal.

Like that's even possible. Like the guy has a single clue about what I've been going through.

Does he know that every single letter I scribble down in this so-called recovery journal is a struggle?

It looks like damn chicken scratch. No, it was worse actually. Chicken scratch is what my mom used to call my handwriting.

Before all of this.

"Dean, I better not see that horrible chicken scratch again, or I'll bust your hide."

She'd probably give anything to go back in time to those simple moments when horrible penmanship was at the forefront of our problems.

I know I would.

I didn't just lose an arm or a hand, my five working fingers, in that accident.

It was part of me.

It was freedom and normalcy.

And it was mine.

But, now, it's all gone.

So, here I am, learning how to write again like a damn kindergartner, while nurses and doctors tell me everything is going to be fine.

"Just keep writing," the shrink says.

Well, fuck that.

Fuck this whole thing.

******

"Are you ready?"

The question startled me a bit as I stared out onto the water I'd once loved so much. It had been the place I'd go to when I was angry with my overbearing mother or pissed at my annoying little brother. The waves would calm my nerves and soothe my soul...

Or at least, they used to.

But now, when I looked out at that deep blue water, churning and moving about with uncertainty—knowing it'd been there with me that night, right alongside me, offering no hope, no sense of peace in those moments before the world went black—I felt nothing.

I swallowed deeply, looking up at my oldest friend, Jake. "Yeah, I'm ready."

With a solid pat on my back, he stepped up onto the makeshift podium, and I followed. The whole town, as well as the tourists who happened to be nearby, had turned up for today's ceremony.

It was a massive crowd before us.

With one last loving glance in his fiancée's direction, Jake took to the microphone and addressed the audience before him, "Good morning. Most of you know me, but for those of you who don't, my name is Jake Jameson, and I'm the resident doctor here on Ocracoke Island. But, on the day of the ferryboat explosion, I was just a passenger, like everyone else. Just trying to get from one side to the other.

"For some of us, this one-hour trip from one shore to the other is a part of life. For others, it's a fleeting experience, a day spent with family or friends during vacation, but nothing more. However, for the sixty-two passengers who boarded the last ferry on that fateful spring night three years ago, the memories of that day will live with us. Forever."