Chapter 24
Grand Theft Gown
So yeah. The ladies at the wedding dress shop had been screaming after me, because I was kind of stealing their dress.
I wasn't being purposely illegal, I just needed to get out of here fast and I really wasn't thinking straight.
I hailed a cab. When I got in I realized that one, I didn't have any money on me, and two, this was the same cab driver as the time I had an accident.
The second part wasn't that important, I mean what a small work, bleh blah blih. It was all cute, but the real important thing was the first part.
I was going to have to do some acting. "OH MY GAAAWD! It's my wedding day! My wedding day, and my husband-to-be collapse at home! I have to get to the hospital! HIS CANCER MUST BE BACK!" And then it was like an entire ride of me screaming incoherent things about our dreams of owning two golden retrievers and saving the naked mole rat. And coral reefs.
When the cab driver parked in front of the hospital I just ran out. He could have easily followed after me to stop me, but he was probably just glad that I was getting far away from him.
Hospitals made no sense to me. The first person I spotted that was waiting in a little glass cubicle, I ran to her and ask her to direct me to Landon Armstrong or Sophia Armstrong or really, any of the armstrongs. I think the dress threw her off, because she asked for one of the security guards to take me to someone who would know where they were.
I caught a lucky break. Landon's sister was walking in the halls on our way to people with answers.
"Sophia?"
She frowned looking at me. Everybody was giving me weird looks. It was like they had never seen a wedding gown before. "Danika, right?" she said, walking up to me. I nodded. She added, "He's in no shape for a shot-gun wedding at the hospital church. I can give you an update without you needing to marry him to be a family member."
"Oh, ignore the dress. Just tell me how he's doing."
"Long story short, and in layman's term, he collapsed in your apartment building. Your neighbour, Miss Beauregard found him and called the ambulance. He didn't flat line, but his heart was beating extremely erratically, he wasn't getting any blood to his brain so we had to shock his heart. We're keeping him under observation." What was he even doing at my place? Did he get drunk again?
"Can I see him?"
"He's in intensive care, so no," she answered.
What? But I was being all spontaneous and dramatic and let's be real here, kind of romantic and I couldn't even go see him? "When can I see him?" I pressed.
"Next visiting time is in four hours, but my mom will want to check in on him and it's only one person at a time."
Before I could ask anything else, Sophia's pager started to beep frantically and she was running away from me.
That's how I ended up waiting for about nine hours in the visitor's room. I had left my phone back the wedding dress shop, so I had no one to call to ask for a change of clothes. The best entertainment I had was from very old used up magazines which made me overuse the Purell dispensers. Oh and ignoring the weird looks everyone was giving me.
No cops had shown up to arrest me for grand theft gown so that was about the only good news I had all day.
I didn't see Landon's mom waiting in the waiting room to see her son. Maybe she was intelligent enough to just go home and wait till the next visiting hours. I on the other hand didn't want to leave. What if he suddenly started to get worse? What if they needed my blood or for me to come an hold his hand and tell him not to walk towards the light and—
"You can come see him now." I looked up at Sophia. She seemed tired. I got on my feet automatically. "You have ten minutes to talk with him. You'll switch with my mom afterwards so she can see him for the last five minutes," she instructed me.
"If this was Grey's Anatomy I could have slept beside him for the last nine hours," I told her as we walked side by side.
"If this was Grey's Anatomy he'd be dead, and probably something dramatic like your long lost twin."
"Your sense of humour needs some working on," I informed her.
She snorted. "I'm ignoring what you just said because I know I'm hilarious." She stopped in front of a door.
Landon was lying there on the hospital bed with a bunch of wires and tubes hooked up all over him. There were two other patients in his room, but only one of them had a visitor.
And I didn't really know what to do or say. So, I walked towards him and stopped at the foot of his bed and I went with a soft, "hey."
"Christ," Landon said in a raspy voice. He looked awful. He barely lifted his head and it seemed to be taking him all of his strength. "You guys really moved thing fast. You're getting married today?"
And then I realized what this must looked like. I hadn't really thought about it, I had only thought about getting to Landon as fast as possible. Not about giving him an actual heart attack. "Oh. OH. Shit. Wow, okay yeah, I totally didn't think about how this looks. Why am I always wearing inappropriate dresses at the hospital? I'm sorry. I called off the wedding. I'm not getting married. I just wanted to feel like a pretty princess."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
"So, no wedding?"
"No wedding."
"What does it mean?" he asked me. Even if I could see he was weak and in pain, I could see it, the shimmer of hope in his eyes.
"It doesn't mean that I'm picking you."
"You're still picking him?"
I shook my head. "I'm no picking either of you. I'm picking me. You were right. I need to get my life together. But it didn't mean getting myself a boyfriend or a husband. It meant figuring out what kind of future I wanted."
"How grown up of you," he said, and then started to breathe a little faster and then slower again, like his body didn't know what it was doing.
What was I supposed to do? Should I hold his hand? Was I even allowed to touch him?
I felt a little uneasy. So I said, "I can't stay very long because apparently this isn't Grey's Anatomy, but I just want to see you and make sure you were okay."
"I wasn't okay, you know before. I was going to see you, to convince you not to marry him again. To explain why I was at Abbie's the other day."
"It's okay not to be okay. You and I, we convince ourselves everything is under control but it really isn't. We need to figure out lives out. You were right when you said I had to get my life in order, but you need to do that too. I'm finally trying to turn my life around. And if you ever want us to have a chance at something, you'll need to start doing something with yourself too," I told him.
He closed his eyes, taking this in. And then he said, "I have options, I know. But I never wanted to take any of them because starting something new meant giving up something old and I was too scared to do that. Moving on would mean that my circus years would be truly over and I wasn't ready for that. It's all I've been dreaming about for as long as I can remember. I never had any other plans than this, nothing that gave me as much joy and a sense of fulfillment as performing did. I always thought the heart thing might stop being an issue."
"But now you know they were right. Now you know it's real."
He opened his eyes again to look into mine. "Yeah, it's real. So, I need to accept it. And finally move on."
I smiled at him. "I'm proud of you."
He gave me a small smile back. "What does it mean for us?"
"It means that we can keep doing Pizza Fridays, and we can support each other and you could maybe try not to have a heart attack again."
It looks like he was maybe trying to laugh but it was too much effort. "That sounds good to me."
"To me too."
And then my ten minutes were now up so I went to kiss his forehead, because there were no tubes or wires on it, like his arms and hands and we smiled each other and I went to walk out of the room, and because I was wearing a ginormous dress and because I was Danika Wisher, I tripped on the edge of it, and flashed everybody once again.
Underwear, I should really start wearing those.