Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
We stand side by side in front of Saylor’s bed, the steady beep of the heart monitor filling the room with a rhythm that seems too mechanical and impersonal for the gravity of the moment.
Gazing down at Saylor, it’s hard to reconcile the man in the hospital bed with the twenty-three-year-old I love.
Time has touched him in ways I hadn’t imagined.
He looks older now, closer to his thirty Earth-bound years, his face bearing the quiet marks of the years that have passed.
His skin is pale, a stark contrast to the sterile blue of the hospital gown, and his body has become thinner, yet nothing diminishes his handsome features, the same ones I know as well as mine by now.
There are tubes lined up with his nostrils, a lifeline of oxygen keeping him tethered to this world. I watch, almost holding my breath, as his eyelids flutter like butterflies resting momentarily before taking flight. It’s a small yet heart-wrenching sign of the life still fighting within.
He’s not dead.
It’s hard to swallow around the knot in my throat.
My eyes trace the familiar contours of his face, stopping at the birthmark on his cheek. Just as I remember it, it’s a detail that grounds him in reality.
This is my Saylor.
I watch the gentle rise and fall of his chest, a rhythm that’s both reassuring and painfully slow.
His hair, a brown, untamed mess, falls carelessly over his forehead, some strands daring to touch his closed lids.
It’s longer than I’ve ever seen it, a disarray oddly fitting for the turmoil of our situation.
The urge to reach out, to gently push those stray locks away from his face, is overwhelming.
This is so unfair.
He’s not dead, he’s still here with me, and yet…
I’m hit by a wave of longing and sorrow. The man before me is both the Saylor I love and a stranger. I push the thought away.
Not a stranger, he’s mine.
No matter what the future holds, he’s a part of me, a part I will cherish and fight for, always.
My hand finds Hunter’s, seeking an anchor in this storm of emotions. “He looks so… still,” I murmur, the words catching in my throat as I try to match the Saylor before me with the loud, silly one I’ve known in my heart.
Hunter’s voice is gentle yet laced with a pain that echoes my own.
“This is what he looks like when he’s… active.
” I turn to look up at Hunter, frowning at him.
“Mostly, he’s in a vegetative state, Sloan.
As we got him out of the water, he was slipping away, and I got him back, but his heart stopped another two times before the paramedics got him to the hospital.
We thought he would die. But he didn’t. He lived, but he just never woke up again.
” I watch Saylor’s motionless form. The rise and fall of his chest and the occasional twitching of his fingers are the only signs of the life raging silently within.
Hunter’s words wash over me. “I know it’s horrible, but sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to…
I don’t know.” Hunter’s voice is laced with sorrow and grief, and I grip his hand even harder, trying to give some support.
I understand. I get it.
Watching your best friend, your brother, like this after you had given everything to save him.
This is hard.
I’m choking on emotion and haven’t lived this reality for that long.
Hunter’s voice is a heavy shroud in the sterile room, his words laden with a grief that’s been festering for years.
“Right now, Saylor seems almost reachable. His eyes are moving behind closed lids, a twitch here and there, signs that scream he’s still alive and trapped in there.
This is the state where the doctors had hope at first. The state he could wake up from.
But then there’s the other state, the one that made us all lose our hope, and that’s happening way more often than this one.
” His voice breaks slightly, a testament to the pain of hope that flickers and dies repeatedly.
“Most of the time, he’s still, like he’s braindead.
That’s why our parents had to move away.
My mom, our mom, couldn’t handle the flares of hope every few days, only to be pushed into a hole again.
It would have killed her to stay here, come here every day, and watch this over and over again. So they left.”
My heart constricts painfully, a sickening feeling swirling in my gut. “They left you guys alone with it,” I whisper, tears threatening to spill over.
The enormity of what they’ve been through.
Hunter nods, a tear escaping down his cheek.
“True, but I get it. We all get it. We stopped coming here long ago, even if it fills me with guilt. We only come occasionally when the doctors call because his active spurts are so long or intense that they think his state could change. But it never happens. And if I’m honest, we only ever wait on a call where they’ll tell us he’s died.
” His admission is like a punch to the gut, brutally honest and heart-wrenchingly painful.
“Sloan, for us, Saylor died that day. Having hope… it’s been seven years.
” Hunter’s voice is barely a whisper, laden with a feeling of sorrow that seems to seep into the very walls of the room.
“I would give anything to have him back, but it’s not going to happen, and I had to let go of the hope, or it would have killed me. ”
I understand, I really do, but it’s all so fucking messed up. “But how? How can I feel him, see and sense him, if he’s like this? If he’s not dead?” I ask, my voice shaky.
That’s what I asked myself repeatedly on the way here. I have no idea how all of this is possible, and my thoughts and feelings are in such turmoil that I can’t even think straight long enough to make sense of it.
“I don’t know, Shortcake. I don’t understand it any more than you do. But maybe, in some way, he reaches out, and you’re just receptive enough to feel it.” Hunter’s words offer little comfort, and I turn to look at Saylor again.
“There has to be a way to get him back,” I say, more to myself than Hunter.
Hunter shakes his head, his eyes shadowed with years of disappointment.
“We tried. Our dad flew in every doctor who specializes in his condition. Medical experts, people who work with natural healing, experimental methods, we tried it all. Nothing made a difference. But I can tell you with full conviction, we have done everything there is to do, tried everything there is to try.”
Leaning my head against Hunter’s shoulder, I allow myself to feel the grief, the love, the confusion.
There has to be a way. Being like this? Nobody deserves this. I thought it was bad for a soul to be lost in the between—between life and death. But this is even worse because Saylor’s not lost. He’s trapped.
And he doesn’t even know it.
I step closer to Saylor, reaching out tentatively to touch his hand. There is no tingle, but it’s warm, startlingly so, and reality hits me with the force of a freight train.
I fell in love with his soul before I ever touched his skin.
My vision blurs with tears as I gently push the hair from his eyes, whispering, “Casper.”
The steady beep of the heart monitor slows, and the tension in Saylor’s body dissipates, letting him sink deeper into the pillow, his breathing becoming more shallow.
“That’s what I was talking about. That’s the vegetative state,” Hunter shares softly, his voice a distant echo.
A tingle tugs at my heart, and I turn to see Saylor standing beside me. My Saylor, my Casper, standing beside me, his eyes wide with shock as he stares at his own body. “Wha—” he starts, his voice laced with confusion and disbelief.
“You’re not dead, Casper,” I choke out, the words heavy with emotion.
“He’s here?” Hunter’s voice is thick, and I hear his sharp intake of breath.
“Yes.” I nod, wiping away another tear.
Saylor looks stricken, a mirror of my turmoil. So I reach out to the Saylor laying in the bed beside me and let my hand glide over his head, and his spirit reacts, a look of shock crossing his face. “I felt that. I can feel you. It’s just a whisper, but it’s there.”
I search his gaze, wanting to guess if what I’m about to do is too much, but I need to do it. I need to feel his skin under my lips. I lean in, my mouth barely brushing his birthmark on his cheek. “Do you feel this?”
Hunter mutters a curse under his breath, but I barely register it, my focus entirely on Saylor.
“Yes,” Saylor whispers, touching his cheek, tears glistening in his eyes.
I stand and turn to his spirit, mirroring my earlier action, kissing the air where his birthmark would be. “We’re gonna find a way, okay? Everything will be all right.”
The waves crash onto the shore rhythmically, but their consistency does nothing to calm the storm inside me.
We’re sitting on the beach in Lubec, at the familiar spot where Hunter and I used to hang out, Sloan beside me, Hunter to her left. I find myself in a whirlwind of thoughts, my mind racing yet painfully still.
Hunter talked me through it on the car ride back here, explaining everything that happened to me that I somehow missed. What they tried to help me, what they still do with physiotherapy with my unconscious body, light therapy. They do a lot.
It’s like I’m forgotten, yet not.
I don’t know how to feel. I’m not dead, just a fucking potato. Just like Sloan called me. But I’m not a sweet potato, more like an old, withered one.
Can you imagine? Being twenty-three one day and then, bam, you’re looking at your thirty-year-old self. Aged overnight and not in a good way. I’m pale, so damn pale—like a ghost.
Ha-ha.
And my hair, Jesus, it’s a disaster. Whoever is in charge of haircuts in that hospital should be fired. It’s like they just put a bowl on my head and go to town with dull scissors. Horrendous is an understatement.