2. 2
He answered right away, and it was the strangest thing, just the warm sound of his voice saying, “Hi Julia” got me all choked up again.
“Nick, I need you,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it that way—it just came out.
“What’s wrong?” Instantly his voice was serious, take-charge. “Are you okay?”
“I had…. I had a really bad day at the hospital.”
“Oh. Where are you?”
“I’m at home.”
“Okay, sit tight, Jule. I’ll be right there.”
I washed my face and changed clothes. Less than ten minutes later, his car pulled up out front.
When I opened the door, the first thing he did was to fold me up in a big warm hug. I wasn’t expecting it, but I didn’t freeze up like the last time he’d hugged me here. It wasn’t a sexy hug, or anything like that. Just a long, comforting one. I didn’t know how to feel about it. I didn’t want to let him get too close. His scent, some clean-smelling cologne and that sunshine smell, was almost intoxicating, though. Just friends, I reminded myself.
I led him to the kitchen, which was where everybody sat to talk in this house.
He said, “Can I make you some tea? Do you still drink that woo-woo herbal stuff you used to like?” He rummaged in a cabinet for a second. “Yep, here it is.” He started to heat water and got two cups out.
“You still remember where everything is?” I said.
“Yeah. Your mom’s still as organized as ever.”
When we were seated at the table with the fragrant mugs in front of us, he said, “So what happened today?”
“I was working surgical,” I said, and I felt my voice tightening up. “They brought a girl in through the ER who’d been in a car accident. Just a 13-year-old girl, Nick. Her injuries weren’t exactly like mine, but pretty close, with a crushed pelvis and broken legs.”
Nick pressed his lips together before saying, “Were you in the OR where they were working on her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They operated for four hours. I was there the whole time. She’s in critical condition now, in the ICU. Just like I was. I was a basket case today. Once she was in recovery, I went to the ladies’ room and just cried and cried. Thank god my shift was over, because all I wanted was to come home.”
“So, you cried after?”
I nodded.
“But how about during? While she was on the table? How did you feel then?”
I took a sip of tea. “I don’t know. I just was focused on working. I was upset. But I still just did my job.”
He smiled, kind of a sad smile, but still a smile. “That’s great though, Jule. Nobody would blame you for falling apart in a situation like that. But you didn’t. You did the job.” He stroked my fingers with his thumb. I looked down. Somehow, he’d taken my hand while I was talking and I hadn’t registered the fact.
I left my hand in his, because, I told myself, it would be rude to pull it back right then.
Nick said, “Are you proud of yourself? Cause I’m really proud of you.”
“Well, yeah! Yeah, I kind of am.”
He looked at the time on his phone, and I said, “Oh, sorry. Do you have to be somewhere?”
“No, not at all. I was just thinking, it’s really early for dinner, but I bet you didn’t have lunch, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Are you hungry? Because I would love a pizza right now,” he said.
“Oh man. That sounds incredible.”
“Let’s go, then. Is Darshu’s still the best?” One strange thing about Greenwood was that the best pizza place in town was owned by a guy from India. “My treat,” he said, and grinned.
“It better be your treat, Mr. Billionaire.”
“Ugh, you know I hate that word!”
So we went for pizza. Apparently there’s no law against billionaires eating dripping melted cheese with the rest of us peasants. I got choked up a few times, thinking of my patient, but Nick would just listen and hold my hand. And then make me laugh a little bit. It was kind of bittersweet, though. I kept thinking that if it hadn’t been for the accident, my whole life could have been like this. Hanging out with Nick, going for pizza, laughing with him. Getting to spend every day with him. Of course, you can’t go back, and it was probably better that I found out when I did that I couldn’t count on him. How do you trust a guy who leaves town when you need him most? But still. Don’t you hate your might-have-beens?
After our early dinner, I expected Nick to drive me home, but he headed out of town.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something I found the other day.”
“So you’re just…what? Going to take me there, without asking? I have a ton of studying to do.”
“Just trust me, Julia, sheesh.” When he said that, I thought of about ten angry answers, but I didn’t say any of them. What was the point? So I looked out the window. We were driving through some pretty woods, still in fresh late-spring green. After a while, Nick pulled off the road. I didn’t see anything. It was just an empty stretch of road going through a forest.
He got out of the car. “Come on!”
“Why’d you stop here?”
“You haven’t been back here before?”
“Back where? I don’t know what you mean.” I looked around, thinking there must be a landmark or something.
Nick took my hand and led me over to a tree stump. “None of this looks familiar?”
“For god’s sake! No!”
“Julia, this is the tree we hit in the accident.”
“What?” My face, my whole body went cold. I tried to pull away from his hand, but he held me tight. “I don’t want to see this! Why would you bring me here?” I was crying. I tried to walk away again, but he caught my other hand and pulled me close to him.
“Just stop. Stop,” Nick said. He wasn’t yelling, just talking calmly. His hands were warm. “Look. Look at the stump.”
I looked. It had been cut off at about my waist level, and what was left had a deep, wide crack through the middle. The top, where the cut was, was dry and gray, and if I’d wanted to, I could have counted the rings. All around the bottom, where the stump met the ground, were thin new branches springing up, each one covered with green leaves.
“When you were telling me about your patient, I thought I should bring you here.”
“Why? What would possibly make you think, when I was already upset, that you should show me this and get me more upset?”
“Because, look.” He pointed to the new growth. “Look how tough this tree is. It was almost destroyed, but it won’t give up. Just like you. You lost a lot, but you didn’t give up. And look what you’re accomplishing now! That girl today could be just like this.”
I took a deep, shuddery breath. He was right, in a way. But he obviously didn’t know how much I’d lost, how much I’d been damaged by the accident. It wasn’t just the physical scars, you know? He was trying to help me, I could see that.
“And another thing. For me, this is hope. Hope that we can get back what we lost.” He took a breath, like he wanted to say more, but then he shook his head. He took a jackknife out of his pocket, bent down, and cut off one of the new branches growing from the old stump. He pressed it into my hands. It smelled green and summery, from where it had been cut.
He stood up, and stepped very close to me. I thought he would hug me, but he didn’t. Instead, he rubbed a place on my cheek, near my mouth, with his thumb. “Julia, did you know that while you were in the ICU, the doctors told me that you probably wouldn’t remember the accident? That you probably wouldn’t even remember anything that happened for hours before, or even that whole day?”
“No. Why would they tell you that? Instead of Mom.”
“I was there. Your mom must have gone home for a while, and I was the only one there.”
“I don’t remember you being there at all.”
“You were on painkillers and sedation. But I was there. From the time we were brought in on the ambulance, I never went home. Dad and Lucy brought me clothes and stuff.”
But I knew the rest of the story. Later he left. And not just to go home and sleep. He left for years.
“Do you, Julia?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you remember the day of the accident?”
I was quiet. What difference did it make now? A girl in a wheelchair must not have been good enough for him—he made that clear when he bailed. Why hash over all that other stuff?
I said, “I don’t want to talk about the accident any more. I went to a shrink for a while and talked it all over, and now I’m done. Maybe you should see a shrink if you need to talk about it.”
He had been looking at me so eagerly, but at that he closed his mouth and turned away.
“Can you take me home now, Nick?”
We got in the car, and drove through the twilit woods and farms, me still clutching the branch Nick had cut for me. It was a beautiful night, and the wind washing over us was softly scented with growing things, but we didn’t speak a word the whole way home.
~ ~
After walking on the beach with Nick, I felt almost like a completely different person from the one who went down to the edge of the lake and started swimming. That fast, my whole life had changed. Have you ever had that happen? Everything looked different. Colors were brighter, edges were crisper, and objects seemed to give off a glow. Someone was barbecuing their picnic dinner, and it smelled amazing, and that plus the scent of the pines combined to make me want to pull in lungful after lungful of delicious air. To top everything off, I was holding hands with Nick, and our connection felt electric. Like nothing I’d ever experienced.
We decided to head for home. We couldn’t figure out how to go back to our friends and hang out. When we walked away from the group, we were brother and sister, but we were coming back as so much more. To us, it was the most natural, beautiful thing in the world, almost like it had been fated all along. But we didn’t know how other people were going to react. So we figured we’d better just go—it was getting late in the afternoon anyway. We couldn’t leave without our stuff, though. I personally would have been happy to abandon my towel and bottle of suntan oil, and the paperback novel I was reading, but Nick still needed his car keys.
So, back we went. As if we’d agreed beforehand, we dropped hands when we got close to our friends. No use, though. Of course Suzanne had seen us kissing.
She had had a thing for Nick for a while, which I hated of course, but what could I say? I couldn’t tell her my brother was off limits. But she watched everything he did while we were at the lake, and that included what he did with me. While Nick and I had been off in our own little world, Suzanne had been watching and getting ready to pounce.
“So Juuuuulia!” she said, syrupy-sweet, as we walked up. “You sure do loooove your brother, don’t you? That was some kiss you gave him!”
“I don’t have a brother, Suzanne.”
“Who’s Nick then? You guys’ parents are married—sounds like he’s your brother to me!” Of course she was not saying any of this stuff in a normal tone of voice, and soon our friends were listening, plus some other people nearby.
“Give it a rest, Suzanne,” Nick said quietly.
“Oh, are you embarrassed ? Don’t you want me to talk about you kissing your sister right out in public? Do you want me to whisper about you FUCKING your sister?”
“Shut up , Suzanne,” he said.
“Make me, you filthy pervert. When you fuck your sister that’s incest , and it happens to be against the law!” If you saw a picture of Suzanne, you’d say she was a pretty girl. But a lot of the people who knew her didn’t think so. The poisonous expression on her face right then made her look about as pretty as a rattlesnake.
“Julia is no relation to me, not that it’s any of your business.” We had our stuff packed up by now, and turned to go. Our friends looked seriously uncomfortable, but they didn’t know what to do. Maybe some of them had seen us kissing, too.
“Run away, pervert! Go stick your tongue up your sister’s filthy twat, why don’t you?”
I could feel myself blushing at that. As we walked away, we could still hear her calling her venom after us. “Guess I should have asked your dad to adopt me, Nick. If I knew you were into INCEST!”
I walked stiffly beside Nick. I couldn’t even look at him. Was this what it was going to be like to be with him? People calling us perverts for the rest of our lives? We got back to the car and got in. It was hot as an oven inside, of course, so we rolled down the windows and Nick got us moving right away.
“So what do you think, Julia, was Suzanne maybe a little bothered about something back there?”
I laughed and said, “I don’t know, she’s just no fun anymore.” We both started laughing, much harder than our lame jokes deserved. It blew some of the tension away.
Nick said, still laughing, “What a bitch she is! You were right about her.”
Then I remembered what I’d said earlier and stopped laughing. “Yeah, but the bad part is, she’ll spread it all over town.”
“She will. Shit. I guess we do need to tell Dad and Lucy before they hear it from their friends.”
“Wow. This got serious pretty fast, huh?”
Nick held his hand out to me and I took it. We laced our fingers together. Being with him was worth it, no matter what people said about us. I leaned my head back against the seat, still looking at Nick while the wind blew my hair around.
“I’ve always been serious about you, Julia. I never wanted anything casual. Even though you were only fifteen that day in the restaurant, I knew I would wait until we were both old enough before I did anything.”
“So, do you think we’re old enough now?”
“God, I hope so!”
“Do you think Mom and Joe will think we’re old enough? I really don’t want the gossip to hurt my mom.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“It was really bad after my dad left. I don’t want her to have to go through that again.”
Nick was quiet for a while. Then he suddenly pulled the car off the road where a sign said, “Scenic Overlook.”
“Huh? What’s this?”
“Come on,” he said. “Just get out.” He ran over to the railing, pulling me by the hand after him. For a minute we looked out over the valley, seeing the patchwork of farmland and woods, and way at the far end, the outskirts of Greenwood.
He turned to me and said, “Okay. I know how we can keep Suzanne’s gossip from hurting us or our parents. And…we’d be doing this anyway in a few years, right?”
I was mystified until he went down on one knee in front of me and took my hand.
“Julia,” he said, and kissed my hand. “I love you so much. No matter what happens, I always will. Will you marry me?”