You let him drive away. You could’ve called the cops. He’s going to die. He’s going to die twice over, and you ruined his life.
Suddenly I become aware of Joyce’s escalated whimpers beside me, and I return to the sound of the doctor’s falsely calm voice. “. . . induced a coma,” he’s saying. “We’ll need to operate, and then we’ll have to let the swelling go down. It’s possible he’ll suffer from brain damage, but we can’t say how severe.”
“Possible,” Raymond repeats as he rubs Joyce’s shoulders. “Possible, Joyce, not absolute.”
She’s shaking her head, her eyes closed tight against her tears, her ears closed off from his words, and I can’t feel my legs.
Can’t feel my legs, or my heart, only the hollow in my stomach.
I’m backing away, but it’s like someone else is controlling my body with a remote. I don’t mean to leave them, but I do. I turn. I run.
I am running away.
I’m running through the horrible gray doors back into the horrible blue-gray waiting room, where everything’s different—the Other Joyce and Raymond sitting somberly in their chairs, far away from Beau, my own parents gone. I keep running.
I run out of the hospital, and then the hospital’s gone. The busy intersection of two highways gone. The Steak ’n Shake, the Christmas Tree Shop, the Check-into-Cash, gone. Everything gone but the trees and rolling blue-green hills, which crash like waves under my feet, threatening to pull me under.
But they can’t, I think.
As long as I keep moving, they can’t pull me under.
And I run. I run hard, feeling flecks of moisture—not-quite rain—dampen my skin.
Grandmother, where are you?
I’m afraid.
Help me.
Help me.
“Please.” The word tears out of me, wrenched sideways and tattered to shreds by my gasping lungs. “PLEASE!” I scream.
A bright white light explodes in front of me and, for a split second, I think, she’s coming for me. She’ll pull me out of this. I’ll leave it all behind.
In the next instant, my feet make sense of an abrupt change in the earth’s texture, from soft and malleable to stiff and flat. The sounds of hooting howls and singing crickets morph into a car laying on its horn, and the aroma of dewy night is now the stench of burning rubber. I’m in the middle of the road. There’s a car just yards away from me, barreling toward me too fast to stop.
For some reason, in that moment, the only thing that occurs to me to do is to cover my eyes. I throw my forearm up to block the screaming headlights when something collides with me, throws me sideways, and the car goes speeding past.
I spin back and see Beau, standing and staring at me as he gasps for breath. The rest of the world has already vanished again, leaving us alone in a clearing in the woods. For a while, we both just stand there, breathing hard.
Finally, reality overtakes me, makes me lose my balance. “They put him in a coma,” I say, my voice throttled. “He might have brain damage.”
Beau doesn’t budge, doesn’t blink. My knees give out. I’m falling to the ground, sobbing, and Beau catches me around the middle as a wail passes through me. He roughly brushes my hair out of my face over and over again, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t see anything. I can’t even force my eyes open.
“It’s my fault,” I sob, and Beau holds me tighter, pushing his forehead against mine, his hands pulling at the hair against my neck. “It’s my fault.”
“No,” he says. “No.” His mouth finds mine, hot and wet with tears, and with every kiss, it’s like my pain is flooding through me to him, and there’s an endless supply waiting to fill up the space.
I take a breath and open my eyes. “Why did it happen in both worlds?”
Beau shakes his head and pulls me close again.
“I can’t do this.” It hurts to say. It hurts to look at Beau, to want him and know I’ll never look at him again without remembering what happened to Matt. “I can’t do this.”
Beau stares into my eyes, deep lines creasing his brows.
“I need to find Grandmother,” I say. “I need your help.” I need you.
“We’ll find her.”
She can fix this.
She’ll tell me what to do.
I’ll save him.
Two weeks until I leave.
Six weeks until the end.
She can fix this.
The nightmare plagues me all night, only this time Matt’s there instead of Mom. And we aren’t laughing; we’re arguing, fighting, screaming at one another when the car jerks sideways, dives down into the creek. It starts to fill with blood, and I turn to find a deep gash down the center of his head. I press my hands to the wound, but the blood spills through my fingers and it burns my skin where it touches until my whole body is on fire, burning with the heat of his blood.
It’s my fault.