Dedicated to the above for her lovely comment on the previous chapter (:

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Seven

          “What the hell is your problem?” someone shouts. “How did you not see her? She wasn’t even in the middle of the road! She was on the side!”

            Somebody yells back to the voice but I’m too far gone to hear it. I just want to pull up my comforter and sleep, blaming the TV and the loud volume for keeping me awake this long. I just want to sleep.

            “Are you…are you drunk?” The voice pauses. “Are you kidding me? I’m calling the police and an ambulance!”

            I feel a hand weave its way through my hair, tilting my head off my unusually hard pillow. I turn away from it, trying to fight waking up but they won’t let me.

            “Hey, hey, don’t sleep now, you need to stay awake, alright? We’re going to get you some help.”

            I recognize the voice and let my eyes flutter open. My heart skips a beat at the sound but all I can see are bright lights and blurred colours. I close my eyes.

            “Mom, did you call them?” he shouts. Somebody responds but I can’t make out their words. “You’re going to be okay, I promise you’re going to be okay. Just stay with me.”

            “Cade?” I croak out. My fingers search the air for his, and I end up grasping nothing.

            “Y-yes?” he sounds unsure but his hand finds mine and then I smile. “You need to stay with me, do you understand?” I keep smiling, waiting for sleep to wash over my but he shakes me a bit, pushing me further out of the fog. “Stay with me.”

            He sounds so worried; so unlike himself. He’s never been one to worry; he was always so carefree, always knowing everything would work itself out and that no matter what happened, things would be okay.

            A blaring noise breaks his murmuring voice and soon he’s lifting me up, up, up until his words blend in with all the others. Everyone is talking to me at once – voices I don’t recognize, sounds that scare me.

            “Cade?” I call out, my voice raspy. All I want is him. I want him here with me, I want him to help me. Pain throbs in the back of my skull and I wince. “Cade!”

            “Is there a Cade here?” a man’s voice shouts.

            For a moment, nobody responds, but then a quiet voice stutters that it’s him. There’s movement and I ignore the worry about what’s going on when I feel Cade’s fingers touching mine. Everything’s okay.

            “You need to stay awake, alright?” the man’s voice repeats.

             I’m moving now, feeling like I’m flying.

            “You need to open your eyes, wake up,” he continues in a harsher tone.

            “Hey,” Cade says, squeezing my hand. “Listen to them. They’re trying to help you.”

            I ignore them, the smile reappearing on my lips. It wavers a few times from the pain but every time I think about his fingers intertwined with mine, it sends butterflies in my stomach.

            “We’re losing her!”

            Everything is foggy and sleep starts consuming me. I try to roll over but my body won’t move; I’m stuck. I hold Cade’s hand as tightly as I can, not ever wanting to let go.

            The fog takes me quickly.

ღ

            “Bam, come here.” Cade smiles at me from across the plain white room. Everything is simple; everything is white.

            Slowly, I walk across the floor, feeling the coolness on my bare feet. Something swirls around my legs and I look down. I’m wearing a dress, the same plain colour as everything else in the room.

            When I reach him, Cade holds out his hand, but I hesitate to take it. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, brushing a strand of hair out of my face. He drops his palm and it lands in mine, his fingers hugging my hand tightly.

            “Where are we going?” I wonder out loud.

            Cade turns away without saying anything. He turns towards a brown door that wasn’t in the room before. He grabs the door knob with his free hand, opens it and a bright light shines into the room. It blinds me.

            “Come on,” Cade continues, pulling me forward. I stay where I am, unsure of what’s going on.

            “I can’t see,” I tell him. He doesn’t hear me, instead he keeps walking, trying to tug me along. Somehow he’s getting farther and farther away into the glare of the light but I’m still gripping his hand, trying to stay attached. “Cade, wait.”

            “Come on, Bama,” he whispers from somewhere in the light.

            His hand starts to slip from mine and I shut my eyes tightly, trying to move forward after him into the light. I can’t move.

            “Cade!” I call.

            He lets go of my hand and the door slams shut, but somehow I’m still blinded.

            Something is beeping, each small, repetitive sound a crashing wave through my skull. There are sounds of movement, but I still don’t open my eyes. I want to sleep; I want to never open them again, but the fog is gone and I know that I won’t be able to go back under.

            “Come on now, time to wake up.”

            I ignore the voice and keep my eyes closed.

            “Honey, we know you’re up. You just need to open your eyes and tell us your name.” I recognize my mother’s voice and reach for her, but my hand is already gripping someone’s fingers.

            “Bam,” I croak out.

            “How old are you?”

            “Seventeen.”

            “Good,” someone says. “Can you open your eyes now?”

            I turn to the right, away from the voice and try to calm my nerves. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know where I am and everything aches. Slowly, I peek open my eyes and instantly everything is too bright.

            I squeeze them shut

            “Come on, Bam,” someone whispers.

            At the sound of the voice, the one that’s been haunting my dreams every night since the last time I saw him, I let my eyes fly open and ignore how much it burns. After several moments everything is clearer, and the person I’m staring at is not Cade.

            I wrench my hand from a boy’s fingers and glare at him, disgusted. He quickly pulls it back and flexes it a few times, as if he’s lost feeling.

            “Do you mind leaving for a minute?” a man, who I presume is a doctor from the white lab coat, asks.

            The boy nods and gets up without a word. When he’s out of the room, I wipe my hand on the hospital bed.

            I turn back to the other side of the room where my mother is sitting. Her blue eyes are wide, worried. Despite not knowing where Dad is or not knowing what’s going on, only one thought runs through my mind.

            “Where’s Cade?” I sound almost breathless, and the sound of my own voice makes my head ache.

            Mom opens her mouth slightly but no words come out. She closes it, meets my eyes for a moment, and turns away.

            “Where is he?” I continue. I sound desperate, but I don’t care. I heard him a moment ago, and before when…I can’t remember what happened. My brain hurts as I try to think about how I ended up here and what happened before, but I can only remember a few select things.

            How can I forget months of my life?

            “Honey…” Mom trails off and my hands clench into fists at my sides.

            “Alabama,” the doctor says, his wrinkled face scrunching up as he looks at my monitor. “You need to calm down. Take a few deeps breaths for me and we’ll explain what happened as we assess you.”

            I ignore the doctor’s orders and grab my mom’s wrist, pulling her closer to me. Tears are rolling down my cheeks and I can’t tell whether they’re from the pain or the desperation. “Where’s Cade, Mom? Where is he? I heard him. He was just here.”

            “Bama,” Mom whispers. She meets my eyes and I see that she’s crying too. I don’t remember the last time I saw her cry, but it must have been a while ago because the sight is shocking to me. “Cade is dead.”

            Everything is shaking. The building, the walls, the room, the bed, my hands, my body. I can’t stop the shaking. Everything is crashing down around me.

            I let out a cry so loud that it makes my head feel as if it’s exploding. The doctor is rushing towards my monitor, where my IV cord rests but I barely notice him. It comes back to me quicker than I want it to, and I realize I don’t want to remember.

            “We’re going to put her out, Mrs. Reed. I don’t want her to do any more damage to her brain,” the doctor says.

            “Bam, it hurts,” he says, staring up at the ceiling with his vacant eyes. “It hurts so bad.”

            “I’m going to go call nine-one-one, okay?” I rise to my feet but Cade grabs my arm and pulls me back down. His hand is shaking over mine. “I’ll only be gone for a moment.”

            “She doesn’t remember that he passed?”

            “She’s been depressed ever since it happened. It must be the concussion. Is this bad? Does this mean she’s not going to remember anything?” Mom’s crying now, sobbing but I can’t see her. I can’t see anything.

            “No, don’t leave,” Cade whispers. He sounds like he’s crying, but there aren’t any tears. His whole body is trembling so bad. I need to call an ambulance, I need to call his parents. “I don’t want you to leave. I want you to be here with me when I…”

            “You’re not going to die, Cade,” I say louder than intended. I’m crying without warning and I try to stand up again, but Cade won’t let me go. Even for someone confined to his bed, his will is still strong. “I need to call somebody, Cade. I need to call your parents!”

            “I don’t think it’s permanent. I’d like to keep her here for a few days until she’s not only stable enough with her concussion, but also emotionally. I don’t want to send her home when this issue of not remembering her boyfriend’s death is not resolved.”

            “No, Bam, stay, please.” He’s crying now, real tears this time. He closes his blind eyes, grimaces at the pain. “It hurts…It hurts so bad.”

            “What happened?”

            “Cade, don’t do this. Stay, Cade. Don’t go.”

            “I don’t really have a choice, Bam.”

            “She’s sleeping…”

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            The next two days go by in a drug-induced haze. From the pain of my moderate concussion and the scratches on my elbows and legs, the doctors have doped me up on pain medication. It started out heavy, due to the fact that I had a complete psychotic breakdown in the emergency room, but once I came to again and remembered everything clearly because I was sober, the doctors decided that I only couldn’t remember from all the drugs and that they needed to lower my dose.

            After showering with awkward supervision and changing into a fresh set of clothes and out of my gross hospital gown, my parents walk on either side of me on the way out of the hospital.

            “Bed rest for the next few days,” Mom says with a sigh. Though she’s glad that I get to come home, she knows that staying in my room all day sleeping and staring at my ceiling are nothing foreign to me. “And then after that I don’t want you leaving the house without me. We need to monitor you until your follow-up with the doctor.”

            “Glad to go home, kiddo?” Dad asks, pulling me into him with his arm around my shoulders. I shrug, not wanting to say anything. Besides, the little cottage we’re staying in isn’t our home. “We invited Evan to come over for dinner, since he’s been in and out of the waiting room since you were in the hospital, but he said no.”

            Dad seems kind of upset that somebody declined his offer, but I’m still confused as to who Evan is.

            “Is that the man you were talking to that time on our walk?”

            Dad looks down at me, first confused, next worried, and then he laughs. “Oh, I thought you were forgetting. I guess you never really got to meet him. Evan is the boy who called you the ambulance. He was there when you…” he trails off, not wanting to say I got hit by a car. “You were squeezing his hand so hard while you were unconscious that you almost broke it.”

             We walk through the automatic sliding doors and into the night. The air is fresh compared to the suffocating hospital smell I’ve been breathing in for the last few days. In the car I stare out the window, watching the city lights pass me by on the way back to Mermaid Bay. The drive takes an hour to get there, and as soon as we get in I start to head for the stairs, but Mom grabs my arm.

            “Honey, the doctor wants us to keep an eye on you tonight,” she says, stopping me. “Do you mind sleeping on the pull-out couch tonight? The stairs are a bit much to do in the dark for me.”

            I narrow my eyes at her, agitated in my tired state. “I’ve been sleeping in a hospital for two days. I’d like the closest thing I can get to my real bed, back home.”

            My words get to her and she drops my arm, not knowing what to say. I turn back to my staircase, take a step towards it, but a voice behind me stops me for the second time.

            “I think you need to sleep on the couch, Bama.”

            It may be easy for me to hurt someone who hovers over me constantly, annoying me to no end to get what I want, but I can’t say anything to my dad. He always has the final say.

            “I didn’t even get hit directly,” I mumble, trudging off towards the stairs.

            “Bam,” Dad says in a warning voice.

            “I’m just getting my stuff.”

            After I’ve changed into warm pajamas, put my hair up and ripped the musty quilts from my bed, I grab them and drag them down the stairs, my vision swirling slightly with each step. I’m not supposed to be moving this much, especially after just getting out of the hospital, but I refuse to let my mom mother me to the point where I’m suffocated, so I decide to do things myself.

            I plop down on the couch, shut my eyes without lying down, and ignore the feeling of my mother standing in the doorway, watching me.