“How can I help you?” a nurse squawked over the intercom.
“I need to speak with Mr. Avery in private. Please escort Miss Jacobs to her room.” He stepped back. “I’m sorry, Avery. You’re too upset.”
“You’re damn right I’m upset,” I said, shaking my head, looking up at Josh’s father. “Don’t do this, please,” I begged, tears streaming down his face. “He just needs a little more time. Just a little more time.”
Parsons and Smith came in, picking up my cane and me, and gently guiding me toward the door.
I turned around. “Please!”
His face was red and blotchy, his cheeks wet.
“It’s okay, Avery, shh,” Parsons said. “Let’s get you back to your room.”
“A light sedative, Parsons,” Dr. Rosenberg ordered, no inflection or emotion in his tone.
“No,” I wailed. “Please let me stay with him!”
Aunt Ellen met us outside my door, helping the nurses to tuck me into bed. I was limp with despair. It made no sense for Josh and me to have gone through the accident, for me to have the memories I couldn’t forget, for Josh’s brain activity to increase at the sound of my voice, if it was all just a dream. Love was something we couldn’t see, an intangible variable to the equation of life. Who were any of them to say what I felt wasn’t real? Separating us may have been sentencing him to death. Josh was the one person I couldn’t let go.
“It happened,” I bawled. “We love each other. We had a life together.”
Parsons leaned down, caressing my hair while Smith pricked my skin with a syringe, pushing the sedative into my veins. My mind fogged over, my body becoming too heavy to fight against them.
“Just rest, honey,” Aunt Ellen said.
Once again, my eyes closed, but I didn’t dream. I remembered only sinking into darkness, sadness pulling me further into the deep. I wondered if I would ever see my husband again.
I waited in a wheelchair for Aunt Ellen, watching the various cars and minivans load and unload patients and passengers.
The leaves on the trees were already beginning to turn, and the fall breeze blew through my light sweater.
Brakes whined as a yellow cab came to a stop, and the driver side door opened and closed. My breath caught when I saw the cabbie approach.
“Need a cab?” he asked.
My eyes glossed over. “No, thank you. I’m waiting on my aunt.”
“Is she on her way?”
“She’s just coming from the parking lot.”
“I have a card,” he said, digging a creased rectangle from his pocket. He placed it in my hand as if it were an inconvenience. “Call if you need a ride.”
I looked down and sucked in a tiny gasp. “Thanks, Mel.”
Mel hobbled back to his cab, waving once without looking back.
Once the dirty cab pulled away, Aunt Ellen swerved her rental toward the curb, parking next to me. She hopped out, rushing to help me into the passenger seat.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“That was Mel,” I said, holding his card to my chest.
She watched me for a moment, curious, and then shut my door and rushed around the front of the car to her side. “And we’re off,” she said, merging into traffic.
With every mile we traveled closer to my building, I felt emptier.
“I bet you’re excited to get home,” Aunt Ellen said.
“Not really.”
“No?”
“Not without Josh.”
Aunt Ellen pressed her lips together. “That was some dream you had.”
She exited the highway, taking a detour to the pharmacy before parking in front of my building.
“Here we are,” she chimed, twisting off the engine.
I pushed out of Aunt Ellen’s rental, stepping across the leaf-covered ground.
She rubbed her hands together. “Dear Lord, it’s cold for this time of year, isn’t it? It can’t just be that I’m a Floridian.”