Chapter 24 - The Life That Mattered

With sweat beading along my brow, I forced myself to get out of bed the next morning. Never again would I take for granted the gift of mobility. Ten steps to the toilet shouldn’t humble anyone. Yet, it robbed years of self-esteem as my ribs protested when I twisted my torso to wipe my ass.

After the marathon of a simple shit and hand washing, my leg tried to reject all attempts to walk into the other room. Closing my eyes, I reminded myself that my leg was fine. Still, it hurt. The injury wasn’t real to me, but the pain was incredibly real.

Evie.

Franz.

Anya.

I had every reason to keep going, to push through. This wouldn’t last forever.

“Good morning.” Mom smiled from the kitchen. “Tea? Coffee?”

“Coffee.” I limped to the sofa. “Where’d they go? The hospital?”

Keeping a smile on her face, she handed me a mug of coffee. “Your family?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes. Evelyn didn’t want to wake you, but she wanted to go see her mom, and she thought it would cheer Madeline up to see the kids. So your dad went with her to help out. Also, she wanted to see Lila before they transferred her to Denver.” She sat next to me on the sofa, angling her body toward me as she sipped her tea. “You’re going to have to tell her.”

Grunting a laugh, I gazed at the steam from my coffee. “I tried, but we got interrupted, and then everything just … happened. It’s not exactly a quick thing to explain.”

“Ronin …” Emotion filled my mom’s eyes. She had been strong for everyone else, but I knew she saw the fear in my eyes. I knew it at the hospital. It was my fear too. “Your heart stopped.”

“I know,” I whispered.

“That’s …” She shook her head, blinking back the tears. “That’s not how it works. You feel. That’s it. You don’t live it. You don’t actually die. Why did your heart stop beating?” She cupped her hand to her mouth, choking back a sob as the tears fell down her cheeks.

I didn’t know why my heart stopped. I felt the cracked ribs. My ribs didn’t break. My leg wasn’t broken. My face wasn’t lacerated. The bruises were tender, but they weren’t visible. I just felt things. I would live to feel an eternity of deaths, not actually die. That was the deal. So why the fuck did my heart stop when Lila went into cardiac arrest the second time?

It wasn’t like before, when I was electrocuted. Again, no light beckoned me, and I wasn’t given a choice to live more days as Ronin Alexander.

A blip.

Same voice.

Two words: “Not yet.”

Okay, it wasn’t my time to die, yet. That didn’t answer the question—why did my heart stop?

“And Lila …” Mom left her name hanging in the air, wiping her tears.

My brow furrowed. “Yeah,” I whispered. I couldn’t get her out of my mind, out of my body.

“She’s still alive.”

I nodded once. “For now.”

“You think she’s going to die?”

“We’re all going to die.”

“Ronin, you know what I mean.”

Leaning forward, I set the mug on the coffee table. “She survived the surgery. They’re moving her to Denver because she’s stable. I’m sure she’s on blood thinners to keep her from throwing a clot. Still … things happen.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

Sitting back, I ran a hand through my wet hair and grunted a laugh. “What if Lila doesn’t die? Wow … that’s pretty messed up. Her living shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not supposed to be this way.”

“She was supposed to die?”

“Yes.” I clamped my mouth shut and rubbed my temples. “I mean … No. She wasn’t supposed to die. She wasn’t supposed to fall off the cliff. She wasn’t supposed to cross the barrier. She wasn’t supposed to go off on her own.”

“Why didn’t you wait for someone else to tend to her?”

I shook my head. My entire life at that moment felt like a perpetual headshake. Total disbelief. Massive confusion. “Because she wasn’t breathing.”

“But you knew you couldn’t save her at that point. You knew the rules.”

“Fuck the rules! It was Lila!” Tears burned my eyes as I gritted my teeth. “I couldn’t not try to save her. Graham was right there. I couldn’t look him in the eye and just … do nothing. My wife’s best friend. My friend. It was …” I rubbed my hand down my face. “Lila … It was Lila,” I whispered.

“What are you going to do?” Mom rested her hand on my leg.

I didn’t have a clue.

“Wait.”

“For her to die?”

Staring unblinkingly at my mom, I shrugged. “Or live.”

“When Madeline gets home safely and Lila’s transferred to Denver, you need to tell Evelyn everything.”

“What if I don’t know what everything is anymore?”

“Then tell her exactly that. Give her honesty every step of the way.”

“What if she doesn’t believe me?”

“Then you make her see it.”

If she didn’t understand, it left only one option—I was crazy. Who lived their life with a crazy person?

“Your dad doesn’t believe it like I do, but he knows you’re not crazy. There’s a middle, Ronin. If you can bring her to the middle, that’s good enough. She doesn’t have to believe it like we do to accept you. And she’s already halfway there. You know this. Every time you end up in the hospital and they can’t figure anything out, Evelyn loses it. She hasn’t been given a logical explanation, so at this point, I think she will latch on to anything you give her if you can show her it’s your truth.”

I cringed, leaning forward.

“What is it, Ronin?”

“Lila …” I blew out a long breath to release the tension that gripped my body. They were doing something to her at the hospital, maybe getting her out of bed. Whatever it was, she was feeling serious pain.

“How are you going to go back to work?” She stroked my hair.

“I don’t know yet.” I leaned back and closed my eyes. Sometimes giving all my energy to the worst area of pain actually lessened it, but it wasn’t easy when so many parts of my body vied for that top spot.

* * *

Corey took Madeline home the next day, a day after Lila was transferred to Denver. They anticipated she would be in the hospital two more weeks. I requested a few more days off work, hoping by some miracle I could do my job by then. It wrecked me to think that miracle had to be Lila dying.

With the help of little things, like celebrating Franz’s fourth birthday, the pain started to subside; that was good for both of us. However, I had a feeling that Graham was encouraging Lila to stay on her pain medications, which meant the reprieve was temporary.

Among all the other chaos, Sophie got the flu, so Evelyn had to go back to work. My parents agreed to stay as long as we needed them. My dad thought that meant until I returned to work, but I knew my mom figured it meant until the funeral … because she believed Lila’s fate had already been determined.

I didn’t know what to believe anymore.

“Ronin!” Evelyn glanced up from the half-constructed display toward the back of the store. No one else was in there at the moment. She brushed off her hands and quickly found her way into my arms. “What are you doing here? You’re out on your own. You must be feeling better.” Pulling back just enough to look up at me, she grinned.

I wasn’t feeling on top of the world—yet. However, I knew I’d pretend that was the case if it meant making my wife deliriously happy.

“I am.” Okay, I wasn’t feeling better, but I was out on my own, testing the waters to see just how functional I could pretend to be.

If Evelyn could go back to work, in spite of her dying mom, best friend in the hospital, daughter with stitches in her head, and me with my fucked-up issues, and pull her shit together enough to keep going, then I had to make the same effort.

“Lila messaged me. She’s feeling a little better today too.”

Of course, she was feeling better; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to drag my ass to the shop.

“They probably have her drugged up.”

Evelyn kissed the angle of my jaw. “No,” she murmured. “Per your suggestion, I talked to Graham about alternative treatments for pain.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Yes, you told me that. You also said he seemed pretty skeptical.”

On a shrug, she released me and turned back toward her display, arranging bars of soap into tidy little rows. “Well, he must have had a change of heart because he arranged for her to have acupuncture this morning, and she said it cut her pain in half.”

Her revelation and the optimism over Lila’s recovery made it easy for me to second-guess telling her the truth. Why mess with a good thing? Maybe Lila was an exception to the rule.

“That’s great.”

“It is.” She sighed, glancing over her shoulder at me. “I think I’m ready to finish our conversation.”

“Our conversation?” I knew what she meant, but if there was a one-percent chance I was wrong, I wasn’t going to shit all over her good mood by addressing something that maybe … just maybe no longer needed to be discussed.

“The voices in your head.”

I rubbed my eye. “That uh … makes me sound crazy, Evie. Do you think I’m crazy?”

She laughed. “Of course not. I just want to understand, and we got interrupted, so now I want you to finish telling me everything.”

Understand.

She wasn’t going to understand. I didn’t understand it. I thought I did, but then my heart stopped beating.

“I fear understand isn’t the best word. I’m not sure you’ll be able to truly understand.”

“Well, try me. Make me understand.” She clasped her hands behind her back, waiting for my magical explanation.

I cleared my throat. “O … kay. Just go with me for a second. As an example, if you saw a pig flying, you wouldn’t be able to dispute what you saw, nor would you be able to explain it. But it wouldn’t mean that the pig didn’t fly. Right?”

Evelyn laughed a little more, returning her attention to the display. “Yes. I suppose. Did you see a pig fly?”

“If I did, would you believe me?”

“Sure.”

“No!” I laced my fingers behind my head and paced back and forth. “You wouldn’t believe me. I can tell from your laughter you wouldn’t believe me.”

When she faced me again, her smile was gone. I didn’t mean to take away her smile. After days of tragedy and grief, she had earned the right to have a moment that wasn’t so damn depressing. “I’m not laughing at you.”

My chin dropped to my chest on a long sigh. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just so hard to tell you this because it’s not going to make sense. It’s going to be completely unbelievable and utterly confusing.” I glanced up at her again.

“Then don’t try to explain the voice. Just tell me what it means for your life now. Tell me if you know why your heart stopped beating, and I promise I will believe you.”

“I don’t know what it means anymore. I didn’t know what it meant for many years after the accident. Then I performed CPR on an actual person for the first time. I heard a ringing in my ears that intensified as I compressed the person’s chest. And I heard that voice telling me the same thing. Hinder not the soul’s intended path unto the light, lest shards of darkness shed upon thee.

“The person never regained a heartbeat. Once I stopped CPR, the ringing in my ears stopped. The next time I performed CPR, the same thing happened, only we did revive the woman. I heard the ringing, the voice, and I felt her injuries from the accident, her pain and suffering. She died less than twenty-four hours later. But that was the first time I ended up in the hospital too—feeling like I was dying, but having no signs of injuries or ailments. Come to find out, I miraculously recovered at the same time the woman died.”

My brain told me to keep going, but my heart told me to let her take over and decide where she was ready for me to go with the rest of this revelation.

Lines formed along her forehead. “That man you tried to save in the restaurant with Graham, you felt his pain after he was resuscitated? That’s why you were so sick?”

“Yes.”

She kept her gaze somewhere between our feet, maybe the smudge on the wood floor. “Then your pain just … stopped?”

I didn’t respond. She knew the answer.

“Because he died?” Blue eyes made their way to meet my gaze.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Evelyn nodded in tiny increments as her eyes narrowed a little more. “Lila didn’t die.”

“True.”

She cleared her throat and curled a few stray hairs behind her ear. “So what happens when they don’t die?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

I started to say it, but the words wouldn’t come out. They raked along my throat like razorblades, burning my eyes and suffocating my lungs. I didn’t know the real answer, just a few guesses mixed with my worst fears.

“Why?” she repeated with a hard edge to her demand.

“Because they all die.”