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