Doctor Williams was very cross. He might not be telling me this explicitly, but I could guess from to the tight line his mouth was pressed into, the little slits his eyes had narrowed into, the barely repressed tension in his little shoulders, and possibly the dirty glares he kept shooting my way as he fixed my hand up in the hospital's emergency room.
I pretended not to notice, adjusting the plain white blanket over my lap like everything was right in the world.
We were the only ones in the room this time. Christopher and Tasha had gone to finally get the girls and Granny, Mrs. Rodwell was still with her son, and the rest of the Williams were I knew not where. Probably back home-a place Charles would rather be at than bandaging my hand.
I had four broken bones, three displaced joints, and a particularly deep laceration across the top of my palm from a sharp edge of the rock I hadn't noticed. All in all, the pain that had started on the way back to town had not been my overactive imagination.
"Doctor," I tried after five minutes of his glowering over me, "I am pretty sure this isn't that bad. You don't need to be so angry."
He snorted explosively.
"You should just have sent someone else to tend to me if you were going to be so touchy about it," I pointed out, looking over his white head at a particularly disgusting painting on the wall. I couldn't even figure out what it was meant to be. Truthfully, from the angle I was looking from, it looked like something being strangled. Not even remotely soothing.
He huffed this time and gave an unnecessarily hard tug on my offending limb, making me wince.
I shut up.
Christopher had been pretty disapproving after I had broken Fred's nose and he had had some choice words to say about it too. Stupid, unnecessary, idiotic, irresponsible and rash were only a few of them. On reaching the hospital, Tasha had added considerably to the list.
"You think having your hand shattered like a bloody toy was worth it?" she had yelled. "What use was it to do this? What did you seek to accomplish?"
"I had told Fred he would be sorry for what he did to Meli," I explained easily, just as I had to Christopher. I held up my hand, industriously wrapped in one of Christopher's spare shirts from the boot of his car, and showed it to her. "I couldn't do anything else big short of murdering him, so I did what he had done to her. Hopefully," I shrugged, "he got the message."
I think my life would have been considerably at risk after this nonchalant attitude if Christopher hadn't pulled her back. I could understand where she was coming from. After breaking a leg and being a cripple for nigh on five years, it was quite natural for her to be apprehensive about any other of my limbs being even slightly misshapen. But I wasn't sorry. I would never be sorry. And I would never stop wishing I could have done more damage.
"There," Doctor Williams said briskly, pulling me away from my homicidal thoughts. "All done. You are free to go ahead and break some more of your body."
I looked at the white cast on my hand, my fingers feeling stiff and swollen inside its depths, and then at Charles. He looked so tired. There were deep bags under his eyes and a decided limpness to the corners of his lips that made me wonder how long he had been awake. Yet he hadn't sent someone else to look at me. He had come himself. Because, for some reason, he felt responsible for us. For the Rodwells and all else tied up, by default, to them and Angelica, his daughter.
I wondered if that's how he saw me now, if that's how he had seen Meli and all the other girls who came and went from his little apartment. I wondered if all his life he would keep trying to save other girls who resembled his daughter's memory, over and over and over again.
I placed my good hand over his as he made to get up. "Thank you, Charles," I said softly. He didn't start, almost as if he had expected this show of sympathy. He just looked down at where my fingers rested against his own and then up at me. I don't know if it was my imagination or not, but the light reflecting off his eyes was curiously too bright. "And I am sorry. I wish it didn't have to be this way."
He was silent for a moment, still watching me, possibly assessing. Then he nodded stiffly and blinked. His eyes were back to normal. "Try not to do more of it," was all he said.
Just as he got off his chair to get his bag and I scooted to the edge of the hospital bed I was getting way too accustomed to, the door to the room burst open.
"Zara!" Granny Tonks' voice sounded like the rumble of a decade old tractor. "Oh my god, Zara," and before I could even register what was happening, she had enveloped me in her scrawny arms and pressed my head against her smoke-impregnated shirt. She smelled like old woman and older pants. I feared my brain would be fried forever.
There had been no comfier smell.
I buried my head deeper into her bosom and almost burst into tears. "G-Granny," I said, my voice breaking.
"I was so worried, love, so very worried," she said again, running her hand down my head and over my back, like she wanted to make sure I was real. I couldn't plead innocent to doing the same to her. My grasping arms were tightening around her body like there was no tomorrow. After all that had happened, one wouldn't be amiss to assume that there wasn't.
"I am so sorry," I said, for I knew not what. "I didn't mean to frighten you."
She pressed her cheek over my head. "Everything is okay now. You are safe. We are all safe. All of us."
I could feel a small hand on my arm, the one that was around Granny's back. Slowly, reluctantly, I pulled my head out of her reassuring embrace and looked over her shoulder. She moved to the side to give me space, clearly unwilling, but kept an arm around my shoulders.
My gaze was so blurry that for a moment the room seemed drowned in water. The tears weren't falling yet, but they were certainly letting themselves be felt. I sniffed and blinked rapidly.
Hannah had withdrawn her hand as I untangled myself from around Granny. She took a step back, as if unsure. Her face was dripping. There was so much of that going on I feared the room might flood under the power of sheer womanly waterworks alone.
"Hannah?" I said softly. "Sweetie, come here." I held out a hand. And that was all it took. That was all it ever took with Hannah. Practically like an explosion, she gave one loud cry and ran into my arms, promptly bursting into fresh tears. No words were said, and none were offered. She submerged her face in my lap, her arms trying but falling just short of rounding the mountain of blankets bunched up in my lap, and my waist behind it.
I chuckled weakly, unable to help myself, as I rubbed her back and looked up. Doctor Williams had retreated to a corner of the room, probably trying to exit in as unremarkable a way as possible, clutching his bag to his side like a lifeline. His face looked slightly pale, and I wondered if, even after all these years, reunions like these reminded him of his forever incomplete family.
Why wasn't he leaving though, rather than watch something that was so clearly painful? What was stopping him?
I knew, of course. I knew even before I saw him glance uneasily at the door. I knew since the moment Granny had been the first one to come into the room, and Hannah after.
I knew what caused the frighteningly empty feeling, like the void off the edge of a cliff, in my chest.
Ella was standing only one step inside the room, her hand wrapped lightly around the doorknob, almost as if for support, her head cocked to the side like a kitten's, watching me. Christopher and Tasha stood behind her, his arm around my best friend's waist, her hand on Ella's shoulder.
There was nothing on her face. She had always been quite good at that. I don't know if it was me rubbing off on her, or Tasha's influence, or some kind of explosive combination involving us both, but Ella had always been a study in contrast. Sometimes she would almost act like a normal four-year old, throwing tantrums and breaking T.V.s, and others she would be like she was now, so frighteningly still and lost, like she knew not which step to put forward, knew not what next to do. The doctors had always said that she had an above average IQ, but sometimes intelligent people get lost too.
When she saw me looking at her, she blinked her eyes once, straightening her head inquisitively.
"Ella," I whispered. I had never been good at not crying. It just wasn't my league. The tears that had been threatening to fall over all this time finally broke the dam and flowed in thick warm streams down my cheeks. I pulled a hand away from Hannah's back and held it out, pleadingly. It didn't matter if the whole world came to comfort me and tell me they loved me and had missed me. It would have felt nice, but none of them mattered in the depths of my heart. None of them. Only Ella did. The child who had saved me from madness and insanity.
Again, she didn't run. She took tentative steps forward, her eyes still locked on mine, so young and yet so old. Her hand fell off the doorknob and I noticed it shook just a little bit. Tasha pulled back and pressed closer to Christopher. He rested his cheek against her head.
Hannah lifted herself off my lap, probably wondering at the deep silence that had descended all too suddenly. There was an embarrassingly wet mark where her head had been.
On reaching my side, Ella pressed her fingers lightly against mine, almost as if she expected me to evaporate any second. When I didn't, in a painfully slow motion, she let herself tighten the hold.
I didn't have any such reservations. I tightened my hold on her hand like a shackle, pulling her forward so fast she stumbled a little and would have fallen if I hadn't wrapped the arm of my bandaged hand around her. Hannah and Granny pulled back a little to accommodate her, and then, finally, my little princess was in my arms.
I pressed her closer, lifting her off the ground and into my lap, feeling her little heart beat wildly in her chest. She felt so small and tiny and I hugged her tighter, feeling this insane need to have her as close as humanly possible. I was sobbing.
It took a moment for her to relax, but finally, at long last, as I pressed my hand down her back over and over again, I felt her sag against me. A long drawn out breath left her body, pulling away all the anger and frustration, till I felt her go soft in my arms.
Then her shoulders started to shake, and I knew I was forgiven.
I walked down the corridor faster and faster, my bandaged hand trailing on the wall like a person's when lost in a labyrinth, hoping to leave an imprint of their movements behind to maybe get some semblance of direction. So, was I lost? Most possibly. Because, for all intents and purposes, I seemed to be moving in the general direction of the room I had told myself I would not go to.
Moving one leg in front of the other, I watched in fascination as my foot made contact with the ground again and again. It wasn't that it still shocked me that I could walk, more the reaction of others that led my subconscious to think this was indeed a miracle. And it was, in more ways than one. I could walk again, after five years of stumbling first one way and then the other.
I had always had a morbid assurance that I would walk again. I never knew where this assurance came from or where it planned to lead me, but I had known, deep down in that part of the heart where no feeling makes sense but somehow feels absolutely right, I had known. And now when this miracle had indeed come to pass, I couldn't bring myself to feel as shocked as one would expect.
I was thankful, though. Very, very thankful. I was one of those people who believes in a higher power pulling the strings of the world and, even though my higher power usually found it very amusing to turn a deaf ear to my pleas, something had given me my legs back again, before I had been driven off the edge of the cliff, as one might say. And I was so very thankful.
Almost as I was so very sure that I was thinking about my legs to stop thinking about where I was going and why I couldn't bring myself to stop.
The nurses and other patrons of the hospital-a myriad mixture of faces joyous, worried, heartbroken, nauseated, and interestingly, green-paid me no mind as I walked along the wall. They had other concerns, worries more important and life threatening than a girl unable to decide if she should go see the man she had saved or not.
The door to the room where he had been moved after Charles proclaimed him out of danger was right in front of me.
I took a deep breath. My hand shook slightly as I extended it forward and touched the doorknob. I felt a sudden wave in my chest, a wave of not belonging. I pushed the thought away. This was normal. This meant nothing.
Brow furrowed in concentration so that I might not run in the opposite direction, I turned the knob and pushed open the door. I had to fight the impulse to look around surreptitiously, like an intruder might to make sure no one notices him. The tremors in my hand were travelling up my arm and through the rest of my body, making my chest hurt.
The room was surgically white too, like the rest of this godforsaken hospital. Christopher had brought up the idea of moving Alexander to a better facility downtown, I knew, but had been shouted down by Mrs. Rodwell, who did not want to take any chances, no matter how small. Besides, everybody knew, though no one said it, that the subject of their concerns would probably have blown a nerve if the matter he had taken so many pains to keep hidden got splattered all over the news because his move was noticed.
There was another reason too, one that was kept below whispers even more than the one in which Mr. Rodwell throws a tantrum.
No one knew where Frank was.
After he had been kind enough to get squashed by the crumbling wall, the men, Christopher included, had been too involved in trying to make sure Alexander lived that it had taken them time to get to clearing the compound. When they had though, most of his other known lackeys had been accounted for...but not Frank.
Christopher had apparently almost crashed into a roadside vendor when that particular phone call had caught up with him. It was on the way to the apartment after dropping me at the hospital, Tasha had informed me. The man on the other end of the phone had rushed to reassure Christopher's vehement demands that all was being done to search for Frank, including cadaver dogs and what not, but yet no trace of him had been found.
"Christopher was so pissed he almost broke the car phone," Tasha had said.
Mrs. Rodwell still had no idea about what was going on around her...or so everyone thought. Whenever I looked at her, I had the disturbing feeling that she knew more than she let on.
I stepped into the room, my hand still on the doorknob, as if I needed to assure myself that the way out remained open.
His bed was right in front of me. I bit my lip.
He lay there, propped up slightly by the adjustable bed so that he didn't look as much of a dead body as he probably would have. The bruises on his face were a vivid black, blue and purple, straddling his nose and running across his cheekbones in mottled patches. The miraculously untouched skin of his neck, peeking through the open collar of his hospital gown, was a blinding white-a colour my metaphorical eye might even call the pallor of death, if it dared-,somehow making the bruises that much more prominent and ghastly. The cut on his forehead, where his brother's silver gun had hit, was stitched up in a series of neat little stitches, marching into his hairline.
I took a deep breath to steady my raising heartbeat, the fingers of my free hand curling into fists by my side, as if to bulwark my crumbling mental fortitude.
His hair lay in a tousled mess over his head. It was that which made me release a broken hiccup, which in turn alerted me to the fact that I was, in fact, crying silent tears. I was doing a lot of that lately.
The white hospital sheet lay tucked to his waist, his hands lying on top, tubes snaking out of the wrists and into the multitude of drips hanging over his head. There was a pair of tubes in his nose too, the bridge of which was bandaged back into shape. The beeps of the machine monitoring his heartbeat punctured the thick silence in the room like the echoing drops of water in a cave.
I let go of the door, causing it to shut silently, and entered the room. There was no one there, of course, and I knew why. I hadn't been fooled, not when Tasha had told me she had to take the kids back home, not when Christopher had decided he would better accompany her and stop at the compound along the way, not even when Granny had offered to accompany Mrs. Rodwell to the cafeteria to partake in a companionable and friendly meal of healthy salad and iced tea.
I was irritated with what they were trying to do, true, but in that moment when I saw his face, stiff and silent and almost foreign without the scowl he habitually wore, I was thankful there was no one there with me. I was not the kind of person who didn't allow themselves to break in front of others. But sometimes, in some moments that always catch you unawares and delivered a sound roundhouse kick to your kidney for good measure, were so inexplicably close to your being and intimate that you find it hard-nigh on impossible-to explain them to yourself, much less a group of tenaciously concerned friends.
This was such a moment for me, it seemed, and I heaved a sigh of guilty relief, even as I wiped the tears running down my face and stepped closer to the bed.
It was a tentative step that I took, uncertain, like I crept into a room where the dead slept.
He isn't dead, my mind yelled at me. He is not.
But he wouldn't wake.
The doctors had said the shock of the injury and what subsequently occurred had send his body into a coma after the initial adrenaline rush had passed. Dr. Williams was confident it would be short lived, citing Alexander's strong disposition and all-round arrogant personality as as cause for his certainty. There had been a long series of descriptive yada, yada, yada, following this revelation, as he strove to explain to Mrs. Rodwell in the minutest of details exactly what was wrong with her son, but I had blocked it out.
Coma. He had slipped into a coma. He won't wake up.
The infuriating idiot, I tried to think angrily. Always pulling a stunt.
It didn't work. All I felt was empty, wrung out and hung to dry in the sun till I was nothing but the lightest of husks pretending to be a human body.
There was a high stool besides his bed, looking to have been frequently occupied by the tell-tale butt mark on the cushion, and I had to wonder what it was that Mrs. Rodwell did as she sat with her son. Did she talk to him? Did she try to pull him back from wherever he was? Did she reminiscence with him, talk about his childhood and their family, hoping for something in her voice that might catch in his conscience and show him the light home?
Tentatively, so as not to cause even the slightest of movements in his vicinity, I sat down on the chair.
For a long moment, I just looked at him. For some reason, I felt light as air now, like I might blow away at any moment, or even as if I observed this scene from outside my body, like it was happening to someone else and not me.
I lifted my hand and placed it lightly on his wrist. His skin was cool.
"Mr Rodwell?" I said softly. My voice carried through the sepulchral silence of the room like a sigh. "Alexander?"
No response from him. Not a muscle twitched on his face.
Slowly, I picked up his limp hand and wound my fingers through the digits. His skin rasped against mine like dry paper. I felt a chill run up my spine. I scooted my chair closer.
"Alex, can you hear me?" I whispered, like I wanted to tell him a secret.
I had to smile a little at my own dumb question. Of course he couldn't hear me. He was like this expressly because he couldn't.
I leaned my head closer, pulling his hand up gently till it rested by my cheek. "A-Alex, please, listen to me," I said, voice breaking. "Listen, and w-wake up."
Silence.
My face was so close to his head by now that I had only an inch to lean closer and I could have kissed him. "Do you know, Alexander," I said, my voice breathy and cracked, his face swimming like ink in the mist that had descended before my eyes, "do you know what you are doing to everyone here? Do you know?" My fingers tightened infinitesimally around his. "Everything seems so weird, so out of it," I whipped my free hand through the air to emphasise my point, "when you aren't there to run the world.
"I mean," I continued with a huffy little laugh, wiping at the fat drop of tear that teetered precariously on the edge of my nose, "you are a controlling bastard, and if I had never known you, I could never have wanted you around. I am a bloody feminist, aren't I? And you are so freaking macho and strong with all those muscles and that confidence a-and that way you have when you look down at the rest of the world like they are all be-beneath y-ou... God," I exclaimed through my teeth, my eyes skittering over his marble face, "God, but you're an arse."
I was silent for a long moment again, my thumb rubbing an unconscious circle over the back of his hand.
Then I smiled and fresh tears pooled out of my eyes. "You are an arse, but we all love you!" I whispered vehemently, the words shooting out of my mouth like a projectile aimed at his nose, maybe in the hope that it might morph into a giant ball and slam into him, shocking him back into consciousness. "We all love you, and we are not going to let you do this to us! You arrogant, selfish prick," I said, sobs racking through my lungs and exploding out of my mouth in giant gasps. "You bloody bastard, please w-wake up! Wake up, wake up, wake up!" I shook his hand back and forth with each plea, as if to puncture the words with enough movement to make sure they reached him in one piece. My hands were wrapped around his so strongly by now that I had to wonder if I was hampering his blood flow.
He didn't respond.
"Wake up," I whispered, finally resting my head over our joined fingers in defeat. "Please wake up." My eyes closed involuntarily as I felt the knobs of out joints rub against my brow in so comforting a way that I pulled him whole arm closer still. I didn't want to rattle him, but I had to feel his corporeal presence close to me, to feel that he was still there-somewhere far away, but still there. "Come back to us. Come back to me," I cried, voice barely over a whisper, subconsciously feeling relief again over the fact that I was indeed alone. My tears were causing the fist made out of our hands to slip and slide across my face. I pressed my lips to his hand and looked up at him with wide eyes. "Come back to me."
I don't know what I had expected. The roof to blow open and a lightning strike to hit him in the chest, successfully bringing him back to life? Or maybe even him to take in a huge breath all of sudden, like in the movies, and open his eyes to gaze upon me with love and tenderness?
Or maybe even just to open his eyes?
He did nothing. Suddenly, his face looked more like a marble carving than ever.
I was still and silent for a long moment.
A hush fell over the room. Something on wheels rolled outside the closed door. Might have been a bed, might have been a wheelchair. Distinct chatter filtered through the walls and fell on my ears like heathen incantations, meaning nothing and everything all at once.
I dropped his hand and straightened, feeling my heart freeze.
I could feel my face growing harder, the tears stopping, the expression of supplication leaking off till nothing but a blank sheet remained.
Finally, a sharp spike of anger shot through my heart and exploded in my chest. I imagined that if a person had been looking at me at that moment, he would have seen my eyes veritably burn up with mile high flames.
"I saved your life," I said, my voice level, not breaking. "I saved your life and I will not let you do this to us. You will wake up, no matter what."
The silence was so deep I could hear my own heart beating wildly in my chest. The clock on the wall ticked rhythmically, and I watched this face through the incessant tick-tock, tick-tock, feeling it boring into my ears like the most insistent of ear bugs. My eyes twitched over his face like a ping-pong ball.
I stood up.
"Call us selfish, Alexander," I said conversationally, my voice back to normal, like I was talking to him, awake and well, over tea in a nice comfortable café, rather than comatose on a hospital bed. "Call me selfish, but I am not just going to let you do this. There isn't much I can do in terms to medical help...heck, I might kill you if I tried," I admitted, a laugh bubbling out of my mouth that sounded disturbingly too normal. "But you are waking up, now or fifty years later, whatever it is...and that's that." I adjusted the shoulder of my dress firmly, my lips tight. "That's that."
Silence again. It was starting to grate on my nerves, this silence, making me want to scream my lungs out to make sure this room was never silent again.
I sighed and, almost without any conscious thought of my own, placed my hand on his brow, sweeping away the tender wisps of hair stuck to his forehead. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned so close my face was an inch from his. His breath touched my cheek, a stray strand of air that was more absent that present.
I closed the distance between us, in a movement so normal, so unprepared and familiar that I shocked myself, and pressed a kiss to the corner of his lips. Something boiling hot bubbled up in my heart and spilled through my throat till I felt the tears prickle again. "That's that," I whispered in his ear. "I am not letting you go."
Somewhere in my mind, I could have sworn--by all the gods man has ever, and will ever, believe in--that the corner of my eye caught his lips twitch.
But I would never be sure, for I had already turned around and left.