Three months to save him.
“I’m doing the best I can,” Alice says, massaging her thin dark eyebrows. “We’ll try hypnotherapy again on Thursday. In the meantime, you two need to spend as much time together as possible. Every waking second you should be bouncing back and forth between the two worlds, maybe even looking for a third you haven’t accessed yet. Natalie, stay stressed.”
“No problem,” I say, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes.
“And keep recording your stories. As many as you can. The stories are the key.”
“Okay,” I say.
One story, one phrase keeps replaying in my mind. It grips my stomach mercilessly, fills me with fear.
It’s about the cost of love. To grow up is to love. To love is to die.
Who is going to die?
“We should stop at the hospital,” I say on our way back to Union.
Beau and I haven’t been speaking. There’s a heaviness between us. His eyes dart over to me, and my chest aches under his gaze, the sunlight slanting through the window across his hazel irises.
“Okay,” he says.
In the hospital parking lot, it occurs to me that Beau and I are here to see two different Matts. “How should we do this?” I ask.
“Meet back here in half an hour,” Beau says.
I stop walking and he does too, holding eye contact. I can’t find the words to say it, but I don’t want to go inside without him. The waiting room will be too cold, too bare, too scary. The world will feel too dark. The truth—that regardless of whether Matt recovers or not, Beau and I will likely never see each other again after I leave in two weeks—weighs me down. I reach out and touch his side.
He looks down to my hand then back up, slowly, and I’m sure we’re about to kiss again when I manage to drag my gaze from his and say, “Thirty minutes.”
He turns and walks off toward the hospital’s automatic sliding doors. Before he reaches them, both he and his truck are gone.
I talk to the man at the desk, and one of Matt’s nurses takes me back to his room, where his mom is sitting beside his bed. She stands up and gives me a hug. “He’ll be so happy to hear your voice,” she says.
I look down at Matt’s unconscious face. There are four inches of staples along his hairline, and his left eye and cheek are severely bruised. A lump of gauze is taped over his nose, from which thin plastic tubes extend and connect to machines. Joyce pulls back from me and wipes at her eyes. “His back was broken when he was thrown from the car,” she says. “They won’t know much more about the physical damage until he wakes up.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can get out. The floor seems to be swinging under my feet, all the balloons and flowers and teddy bears stacked along the far wall swaying right along with it. The entire world is a Viking ship ride, and the clear blue water on either side is made up of all the things I can’t get to.
“Will you stay with him while I go to the ladies’ room?” Joyce says. “I didn’t want to leave him alone, just in case . . .”
She trails off and I nod. “Sure.”
She leaves the room and I stay where I am, fixed to the rocking floor for seconds I don’t count, taking deep breaths and readying myself. Finally I go toward him, mechanically, and lower myself into the chair Joyce pulled up beside his bed.
“Hi, Matty,” I whisper, taking his hand in mine. My voice sounds wrong. As wrong as his face looks. As wrong as the quiet hum and beep of the machines and pouches he’s connected to. “It’s me.”
The silence that answers feels like a sky full of dark clouds waiting for the temperature to drop enough to let them break. When they do, tears fall instead of rain. I press my face into the back of Matt’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” I say.
His skin is cool against my cheek, like his heart’s too busy to be bothered with circulating blood all the way to his fingertips. The first time we held hands, that night at the football game in eighth grade, I remember being surprised how cold his skin was. I’d only held Tyler Murphy’s hand before and had unconsciously formed the belief that all boys’ hands were warm and damp with sweat.
Matt’s, though, did nothing against the cutting October wind as we huddled together on that hillside. Despite the cold, I remember thinking how I must’ve looked lit up from within for all our classmates to be watching us like they were. Eventually, being an extension of Matt started to feel like a cage, but that night it was an honor.