One Final Time

All day at work in his office, his headache grew in intensity. After the lunch hour, about 1:00, Les told his secretary, Susan, (a pretty blonde in her early forties) that he was heading home early from work.

As he drove the streets toward his house, his head pounded with an such increased pressure that he barely remembered that drive home. He didn't notice then Stella walking hurriedly down the sidewalk towards the nearest bus-stop, the same he had dropped her off a week before.

He pushed the door from his garage to his house open and slowly walked down the hall towards the kitchen, in search of a glass of water, perhaps, or something to ease the pain. The living room was dark and his eyes were blurry from the pain, so he did not notice Monica huddled over on the sofa. He moved into the kitchen without thinking and reached for a glass of water. Monica's cracking voice full of emotion startled him.

“She's pregnant,” was all Monica said. He turned slowly and tried unsuccessfully to bring his wife into view through the blurry-eyed perspective. Failing, he let her swim before her as he moved partially into the living room.

“Who?” he asked cautiously and hopefully.

“Our babysitter,” Monica said sarcastically, glaring up at him. He gulped soundlessly.

“Judy?” he wondered.

Monica sighed and stood up.

“No,” she said and walked over to him. “Stella, your little girlfriend.”

Les stumbled backwards as she approached him, trying not to fall over in the process. He felt his body start to shake as if in fever.

“How could you do this to me, to us?” Monica's voice shrieked to a thrill piercing the pain in his head. He grappled at the air, mouthing silently in anguish, as he felt his legs crumble beneath him. The last thing he saw was Monica's eyes in fear as he fell and her voice screaming, “Les!!” and then everything went dark.

Ruby was sitting up in her hospital bed. The psychiatrist had come and gone. It had been three days since the incident and the psychiatrist had decided that she was stable enough to be released. Her wrist was no longer bandaged and sported the familiar long sewn scar, reminiscent of high school. She wondered if she still had those arm bands her mother had made her wear back then. Her old room-mate, Nicole, had stopped by a little earlier and agreed to let Ruby crash at her place for awhile.

The door to the hospital room opened and Rob entered, cautiously. Slowly, he crossed the room and sat at the chair by the bed. He carried with him her guitar case and a duffel bag.

“I, uh, brought you some clothes and your guitar,” he said, breaking the silence. Ruby stared straight ahead and did not look at him.

“Thank you,” was all she would say.

“Won't you,” he began and then broke off. In a minute, he breathed in confidence and said, “Won't you come home?”

Ruby looked fully at him, trying to hide her lower lip trembling.

“Why?” she demanded to know.

“Can we work this out?” Rob offered.

“Why?” Ruby asked again, louder. “What am I to you, really? How do I know it won't happen again? God, I'm so stupid. What are we, just play-things to you?”

“No, no, not like that,” Rob pleaded. Ruby stared up at the ceiling then back at Rob. She surveyed all of him, saw a vision in her head of the first time they had met, in class, the moment she fell in love with him when their eyes had met, the first time they kissed, the feel of his naked body against hers, and then the flash of his face between the other girl's legs.

“Go!” she said at last.

“But--,” Rob protested.

She shook her head and said again, “Go.”

He stood and looked at her, his eyes pleading.

“Just go,” she said, her lip trembling, her voice starting to crack. She could feel the tears swelling in her eyes. “Go and don't come back.”

He looked longingly at her and then he turned and left the room. She let the tears flow freely, feeling loss of him, the heartbreak of letting go, and strangely a sense of empowerment. As the sobs subsided, she pulled herself from the bed. Opening the duffel bag, she pulled out the clothes and began dressing herself, preparing to leave.

Down in the emergency room, the doctors and nurses were busy with the intake of a thirty-eight year old unconscious man being wheeled on a gurney into the hospital. Unbeknownst to him, he was hooked up to IVS and life support. Flying behind him, his wife, soon to be separated, came carrying a baby, her eyes wide with worry.

She hurried over to a desk with a window and began filling out the necessary paperwork and answering the doctor's questions. In the room, Les had been taken into, a young blonde intern was busy drawing blood and running tests.

Monica paced, carrying Sam, in her arms in the waiting room, trying to calm her breathing. As the young blonde female intern came to get her, Monica thought how fitting it was that this would be his on-call doctor, that if he was awake he'd probably flirt with her. This doctor looked like a much younger version of herself, Monica thought.

“We've ran some tests and your husband tested positive for meningitis,” the blonde doctor was saying. “We would like to start him on some anti-biotics, we just need your signature.”

“Will that help?” Monica heard herself ask, as if from faraway. “Will he wake up?”

“We aren't sure,” the doctor said slowly and thoughtfully. Monica slumped into the chair further, holding Sammy closer and harder. The baby squealed a little and Monica released her grip a bit.

“We'll make him as comfortable as possible, give him a private room,” the doctor continued. “While we wait for more answers.”

“Um, okay,” was all Monica could say.

In another part of the hospital, Ruby sat filling out forms, preparing to leave the hospital and begin all over again. In the seat by her, perched her guitar case. The duffel bag was on the floor. She finished the paperwork and handed them to the secretary across the desk.

“We'll send your information to your insurance,” the secretary was saying.  She was an older, very rotund woman with short, bluish-grey hair. “We'll be in touch. You take care of yourself now, okay?”

The secretary's eyes scanned down to Ruby's left wrist and Ruby automatically pulled her sleeve down over her arm.

“Thanks,” she said and stood up, shouldering her guitar and duffel bag. She left the office and began slowly to make her way down the hall and out into the freedom of the big, bad world, to face it now all alone.

She stopped halfway down the hall and watched as several hospital staff wheeled a hospital bed in the adjacent hallway. Once they passed, she continued her journey, turning down in that same hallway but in the opposite direction, towards the front entrance of the hospital. To her surprise, a very shaken looking Monica, carrying a baby, was coming towards her.

“Monica?” Ruby asked, startled. “Why are you here?”

“It's Les,” Monica was saying, her voice full of emotion and trembling. “They say...meningitis, he's unconscious, in a coma. I don't know...”

In silence, Ruby felt the beating of her heart increase, almost could hear it beating louder. As if my heart couldn't break anymore, she thought.

“Where did they take him?” she asked.

“Room 203,” Monica answered. She hesitated and then continued, “You know he cheated on me?”

Ruby said nothing.

“Well, he did,” Monica continued. “I had just found out when he passed out in my living room. I was confronting him and then he...I thought it was my fault.”

She broke off and Ruby could see the tears falling down her face. Ruby gave her friend's wife a side hug in consolation.

Monica went on: “While I was waiting for him at home, after SHE left, I went into his office at home, I don't know why or what I was looking for, just something, some evidence of--”

She broke off and wiped her eyes with her free hand. Her purse swung by her side with the movement.

“Anyway,” she sighed and went on. She reached into her purse and pulled a photograph out of it. “I found this on his desk, right by his keyboard.”

She handed it to Ruby, who looked down at it. It was a picture of all of them from camp. She remembered that day as their day-off from counseling, when they'd all gone to town to do laundry, have a little fun. That evening of that same day she and Les had kissed. It was the whole bunch of them in a group shot, there before her was Geoff, Tara, Jess, herself, and Les. In this picture, Les had his arm around her shoulders and both of their faces beamed in a large smiles. A happier innocent time reflected back into her face, when their futures were still brightly laying before them and yet unknown.

“He always really cared for you,” Monica was saying. “I know that he didn't always show it, for whatever reason, but you really mattered to him.”

Ruby blinked back the tears from her eyes and looked up at Monica.

“What room?” she asked, her voice faltering.

“Room 203,” was Monica's automatic answer.

“Can I see him?”

“Let's see,” and the two women and one baby moved down the hallway.

Monica let Ruby enter Les's room by herself. Ruby stood dumbfounded in the room, staring at her long-time friend's still body on the bed, IV's of life all around him, a beeping and blinking machine matching his heartbeats beside him. She moved over to the chair by his side, setting her duffel bag down. Gently, she laid the guitar case on the edge of his bed. Still clutching the photograph Monica had given her, she looked for a very long time at Les.

Finally, she spoke.

“I can't believe you still have this photo,” she began, trying to sound cheerful. “I think I have one like it somewhere, I don't know where. It was so long ago, it seems now. Where did you find it?”

She waited, half wondering if he would answer. She breathed heavily.

“God, Trip, won't you just sit up now? Say this is all some stupid practical joke or something,” she bit her lip hard. Then held up her left wrist, “Kind of ironic that we both are here right now.”

She looked at the picture again in the same hand as the sewn up scarred wrist.

“You were always so good to me back then, always there for me,” she said, her voice faltering as tears began to fall. “I never really got it, you know, I don't know why I...we...never...oh, you know. We were just kids then, right? Just kids--”

She looked up tiredly at her friend.

“God dammit, Trip, just wake up. Wake up now. What the hell would I do in this world without you in it?

No answer came but the soft beeping of the monitor. Ruby laid the photograph on her lap and opened the guitar case, pulling the guitar from within. She set it cautiously on her lap on top of the photograph.

“I remember it was you that first taught me to play, you started it all,” she said almost laughing. She began to strum softly, then a song came fluttering back to her memory and she began to play.

From the depths of his unconsciousness, a memory fluttered through. A memory of a young girl on a camp stage, lit up by fire-light, singing a song from long ago, and that long ago self began to understand and inside of him now he began to feel it too.

Ruby sang and the hard years fall away, all the bitterness that had come between them dissipated with each line, her true feelings revealed themselves once again:

“I wanted to write you some words you’d remember
words so alert they’d leap from the paper
and crawl up your shoulder and lie by your ears
and be there to comfort you down through the years.

But it was cloudy that day and I was lazy
and so I stayed in bed just thinking about it.

I wanted to write you and tell you that maybe
love songs from lovers are unnecessary.
We are what we feel and writing it down.
seems foolish sometimes without vocal sound.
But I spent the day drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes
and looking in the mirror practicing my smile.

I wanted to write you one last, long love song
that said what I feel one final time.”

Ruby felt herself began to crumble inside. She gulped back her tears and went on.

“Not comparing your eyes and mouth to the stars
but telling you only how like yourself you are.
But by the time I thought of it, found a pen,
put the pen to ink, the ink to paper,
you were gone.”

She stopped singing, abruptly, unable to continue. She held the guitar in silence and looked at her unconscious friend, her childhood crush.

“And so, this song has no words,” she whispered softly. Slowly, she stood up and placed the guitar back in its case, closing the case. The photograph had fallen to the floor and she retrieved it and moved over to Les's side and looked for a long time into his face, his eyes closed from hers.

Setting the photograph on his pillow, she leaned over close to her face.

“Ollie right,” she whispered, smiling slightly. And, she kissed his lips. Then, she moved away, leaving the photograph beside him. She picked up her guitar case and her bag. Then, closing the door softly behind her, she left him.

In the hospital bed, now alone, Les's eyes opened.

Somewhere Only We Know

The End

One Final Time is lovingly dedicated to my Y-Camp friends & faithfully written for my "Trip"