In Dark Woods (Signal Bend Series #4.5) (2 page)

The room was loud and bright. She could barely see him for all the machines and contraptions, the tubes and wires. But she got closer and there he was, nearly as pale as the white sheets, his beard badly shaved away, his hair stiff and clotted with blood. There were screws in his head where he was bolted into a metal frame, which was bolted into a bizarre, futuristic kind of bed. A tube was down his throat, breathing for him, taped to his face—which, she supposed, accounted for the shave. He looked like someone else without his beard, someone gaunt with sickness. He barely looked human. She couldn’t reconcile this broken husk with her Isaac. There was a mistake. There had to be a mistake.

She almost had herself believing it. Then she saw a little clear plastic bag, closed with a drawstring, sitting on a bedside table. His leather cuffs. His rings, including his wedding
band. Mjölnir, on its leather cord.

She fell into the chair at his bedside and wept.

~oOo~

On the second day, they all came in to pay their respects. “All” wasn’t much of a number: Len, Havoc, Badger, and Bart. They came in, one at a time. They went pale and shook their heads. They stood and took in the sight of their President, probably dying, and at the hands of one of their own. Then they kissed her cheek and asked what they could do. She told them each the same thing.

“Make Show go home. He has too much going on to be this tired. He needs to sleep.”

They nodded. They squeezed her shoulder. They left.

~oOo~

“Let me take over for awhile, Lilli. Gia misses you.”

Lilli didn’t even turn her head. Her eyes on Isaac, her hand on his motionless, cool hand, she said simply, “No.”

Out of the question. She would not leave his side. She could barely stand to leave his side to hurry to the bathroom, even with Show there.

And he hadn’t left, either. As far as she knew, he hadn’t left the building since the second day.

“It’s been a week, Lilli. They’re keeping him asleep. He won’t wake up while you’re gone. You can go, rest. Get a shower. Hold your girl.”

She shook her head.

“She’s okay?”

Show walked to her chair and squatted at her side. “She needs her mom, Lilli. She misses you. Shannon says she tries to sing herself to sleep.”

Her heart felt torn in two.
Gia needed her. And she needed the calm she felt with Gia in her arms. But she could not bring her daughter into this room, and she would not leave Isaac. She would not. Her eyes began to fill, but she shook the tears away. Enough of those. Enough.

“But she’s okay?”

Show sighed and put his meaty hand on her arm. “Yeah. Shannon’s got her. She’s okay.”

~oOo~

On the ninth day, he should have woken. They had been keeping him in an induced coma, keeping him perfectly still, unconscious through the worst of the medieval mechanisms he was bolted into to ensure that his body would remain completely immobile. When they were satisfied that his death was no longer imminent, when he was breathing again on his own, when he had healed enough that he was out of the cage of a bed he’d been in and their concern about infection had abated, when they were beginning to want to talk to her about a prognosis that extended beyond the next hour, the next day, then they weaned him off his coma cocktail.

“They.” Except for Tasha, who wasn’t officially one of his doctors, Lilli had been unable to distinguish among the several specialists who traipsed through their room daily. Still in battle mode, but with no battle she could fight, she could focus on nothing but the man lying in the bed at her side. All of her attention, all of her will, was on him.

They weaned him off the meds, but he didn’t wake. Except for a subtle increase in his heart rate, there was no change. He slept on. And Lilli sat at his side and let the world move on without them.

TWO

Bright. So bright. And loud.

The bright dimmed suddenly.

“Isaac? Isaac? Oh, God! Isaac! Hey, love. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

He didn’t understand.

~oOo~

“Can you talk to me,
love? Can you hear me? Isaac, please.”

Lilli. He blinked and saw her. He tried to reach out to her, but he wasn’t in his body. Where was his body? Where was he?

Lilli.

He felt her hand on his face, brushing something cool and wet from his
temple.

“It’s okay, love. I’m here. We’re here. We’re okay.”

~oOo~

The room was crowded with people he didn’t know. Standing over him, looking down at him, not a single familiar f
ace. He knew where he was now. He didn’t know why, but he recognized the sounds and smells. All he could see was the ceiling, the top of some apparatus, and the faces looming over him, but he recognized a hospital. He’d been in them often enough.

But he couldn’t see Lilli. He needed Lilli.

“Lilli.” Nothing but a raspy squeak came from a throat he now felt to be scraped raw.

But she heard him.

“I’m here. I’m here, love. I’m here.” She pushed aside the man who had been closest to him, and her smiling, tearful face hovered above him. She looked pale and thin—was she sick? Was it she who was the patient? No. No. It was him.

He reached out to touch her face, but his body was still missing. “Lilli?”

That time, he made her name. He tried again, and it was stronger, “Sport? What—”

“Shhh, love. It’s going to be okay.
”

~oOo~

“So that’s what we know at this point. Do you have any questions?”

The doctor looked down at him.
There was something profoundly disorienting about having a conversation—any conversation, let alone this conversation—from flat on your back, while everyone else looked down at you.

Isaac closed his eyes. “No.”

“I know it seems bleak. It’s good news that your arms feel numb. Feeling numb is different from actually being numb. There’s communication going on, and that’s promising. There’s a chance that you might get at least some real mobility and use back in your arms and hands, then. And Isaac, honestly. That you are conscious at all…in my private opinion, that’s God’s work.”

He laughed bitterly, but it came out a strangled whine. “God can fuck himself.”

“What’s next, Doctor?” Lilli was standing at his side. He could turn his head just enough to see her, and he knew that her hand was on his arm. He could feel the weight of that hand, but not the warm silk of her skin. As if his arm had been injected with Novocain. He could not touch her. He could not hold her. He might never hold her, never feel her, ever again.

He could move nothing but his head and neck
, and those were mostly constrained by a hard brace. He still didn’t know why, what had happened. He only knew that he was trapped on his back, locked into a dead body, doomed to spend the rest of his years shitting the bed.

He didn’t even have his hands so he could pull a trigger.

The doctor regarded Isaac quietly for a few more seconds. Then he turned to Lilli. “I’ve arranged for a rehabilitation therapist to stop by in the next day or two. She’ll talk to you both, get some information, and set some goals. Then she’ll make a therapy plan.”

He turned back to Isaac. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You still have a great deal of healing to do. You survived severe trauma, Isaac. There was extensive organ damage, nerve damage, skeletomuscular damage. Your first priority is simply basic healing. Then we’ll see where we are.”

“Yeah.”

If where ‘we’ were was on
‘our’ back in this fucking bed, then it didn’t fucking matter.

~oOo~

Lilli smiled down at him. “Hey. You’re awake.” She kissed his cheek, and he lifted his head as much as he could, trying to prolong the contact. “Show’s here. I’m going to step out and let you talk.”

“Don’t go.”

“Just right outside, love. Promise.” She brushed the backs of her fingers over his cheek; he turned into her touch. Then she backed away, and Show moved up.

“Hey, boss.”

“Lilli told me how I got here.” He still had no memory of it himself. The last thing he remembered was pulling Havoc and Len off of Shiv. “How fucked are we?”

“You sure you’re up for this already?”

“How. Fucked. Are we?”

A faint grin twitched on Show’s mouth, and he nodded.
“We gotta step back and see. Ceej and Vic—that’s done. Lilli saved you—don’t know how she told it, but she put a bullet in Ceej’s head. Crack shot.”

Saved him for what
? That was the question now.

Show went on, “The Scorps are gone. I think we’re okay.”

“How?” He had talked to Sam—it was one of the last things he’d done on two legs—and Sam had been implacable. He wanted the Horde patched over. Period. When Rick had come in, told them that a brawl was on in the Hall, Isaac had been telling Sam that a patch-over vote would happen over his dead body.

Ironic, that.

Show cleared his throat, and his eyes dropped from Isaac’s. If he could have felt his spine, Isaac would have felt a chill run its length; Show was not a man who looked away.

“We…we made a deal.”

Fuck. They did patch over. Fuck. Oh, Jesus fuck.

“What kind of deal?”

Now Show faced Isaac, his eyes a riot of emotion. “Bart’s patching over to the Scorpions LA charter.”

“What? Why?”

“He can work the intel from L.A., stay on top of the media at its source. Sam gets a top-shelf hacker on the west coast.” Show hesitated. “And somebody near at hand he can hurt if our shit gets in his way.”

“A hostage? No. No fucking way.” Bart couldn’t handle that heat. He was just a kid—well, he was thirty, but he might as well be just a kid. The shit they’d had to do in the fight with Ellis had fucked him up hard.
And the Scorpions were into much heavier shit. “No, Show. Get in the way of that. They’ll tear him apart.”

Show dropped his eyes again.
“It’s done, boss. It’s done. It was Bart’s call. Hell, he came to us with it. His call.”

“Christ. It’s wrong, Show. It’s fuckin’ wrong.”

And it was all on him. He had failed his club. He’d failed Bart. And there was nothing he could do about it. Trapped in a body that had abandoned him, he could not lead the Horde.

He could not
be
Horde.

Ride or die.

He couldn’t ride.

THREE

For the first time in nearly a month, Lilli went home. Fall had come on while she’d been sitting at Isaac’s bedside, and she sat in the passenger seat of Show’s truck and watched the brilliant colors of the woods go by. It seemed strange to her that the world had been going on its way, turning on its axis, moving around the sun, all this time.

Show knew her well and didn’t try to start a conversation. He drove, and she thought.

She felt like she’d left at least half of herself back in Isaac’s room, but he was stronger, a little—enough that they were planning to release him out of the ICU and into what she and Isaac had taken to calling “gen pop” in the next day or two. He was strong enough that he’d threatened to have her barred from his room if she didn’t go home for the night. He’d been relying heavily on her presence since he’d woken up almost two weeks ago, so she took it as a good sign, even as it hurt her feelings a little.

She’d refused to sleep away from him, but she had agreed to go home, spend some time with Gia somewhere other than a hospital waiting room, get a decent shower. She’d also pack a bag for him of things to keep his mind busy. He needed to keep his mind busy. When it wasn’t, it spiraled instantly into despair.

A man like Isaac, confined to a bed for the rest of his life? She could not imagine the horror he must be feeling. She could see some of it, in the dark mood that overtook him more every day, with every sensory evaluation he didn’t pass, every pinprick he didn’t feel. She could see it in his eyes in the moments after waking, when consciousness returned.

He’d told her he rode in his dreams.

Her heart broke fresh every day. Gia needed her; Isaac needed her. Gia screamed and clutched for her every time Shannon took her away, back to Signal Bend. And Isaac needed her near to keep the black deep from overtaking him, to give him focus away from the state of his body, of his future. His heart rate sped up, making the machines sing, every time she stepped out of the room. He didn’t say anything, didn’t reveal his anxiety intentionally, but the heart monitor spoke for him. That he would panic like that just to lose sight of her—that he was capable at all of panic like that—was almost more worrisome than the rest of it.

Until today. Today he’d sent her away. She was taking it as a good sign. She hoped that it was.

As reluctant as she was to leave him, even for a few hours, there was a part of her that was looking forward to being back in their house. Shannon and Show had been living in it for almost a month, taking care of Gia, and the animals, and giving their daughter as much of a normal life as possible. Everybody seemed to have stepped up to help them however they could. The whole town had closed ranks around Isaac and Lilli.

She was humbled, and she was anxious.
She’d been relying on people in ways that she never had before, and she didn’t see an end to it. She would not leave Isaac alone to drown in his despair. Gia would forget these weeks of parental neglect. Isaac would never forget these weeks. Neither would Lilli.

When she
came into the house, Shannon was walking Gia into the living room. Gia saw her and shouted “Mamma!” and did her unsteady little toddle run until Lilli could swoop her up.

“Hey,
cara
, can Mamma get a kiss?” Gia puckered up tight and squinched her eyes shut, and Lilli planted a kiss on those pursed little lips.

~oOo~

It was dark and after official visiting hours when Lilli got back to Isaac’s room. He was staring at a television rigged over his bed. He was still being kept flat on his back, though he’d been released from that horrible iron maiden of a contraption even before he’d come out of the coma. Now he was encased in some kind of plastic and vinyl gizmo. They’d removed the top part, mostly freeing his neck, a couple of days ago, but that was the part he could move, and she hadn’t understood why all the precautions around the rest of him, the body over which he had no control. But they didn’t want him to
be
moved, either. If there was a chance that the neural connections might reform, they had to be left undisturbed to do so.

The sight of him at first astonished her. She had not noticed how much he’d changed. He was so much smaller. She’d known he’d lost weight, but sitting with him all day
, every day, she had not seen it. He looked weak. Tears hit her hard, but she mastered them and pushed them away.

“Hey, love.”

“Hey.” She heard the black in his voice. She knew she should have stayed.

“I brought you some stuff from home. Books. Some DVDs. Some other stuff.”

He laughed harshly. The paralysis had taken a lot of his wind, making his voice softer and his laugh smaller. But he got the point across. “Books? I can’t read. Need hands to hold a book.”

She sat the packs on the floor by the bed and
shoved the television away, pushing the off button as she did. “Isaac. Look at me.”

He didn’t, but he was a captive audience, and she grabbed his chin. His beard
was coming back. For that, she was glad. She wondered how much more gaunt he’d look without it.

“Don’t go there. Stay with me. We’ll get through this.” He tried to pull away, but she held firm. “We will.”

“I can’t let you bind yourself to half a man. Less. Not a man at all.”

“That is self-pitying bullshit, and arrogant to boot. You don’t ‘let’ me do shit. Your body isn’t what I love, Isaac. Your body isn’t what makes you a man.”

He smiled just the tiniest bit, a sad little turn at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, it is. By definition.”

She huffed. “Wrong, asshole. Your body makes you
male
. Your brain and your heart—big and strong as ever—they make you a man.”

~oOo~

She sat next to him and read aloud one of his favorite books,
Altered Carbon
, until he fell asleep. Then she set it aside and folded out the rack disguised as a cot she’d been sleeping on for more than three weeks. She lay down and let her mind go to do what it would.

She’d been perfectly truthful—what had happened to his body changed nothing about the way she felt about him. Of course she mourned it. So much of his personality was conveyed in his physical presence, huge and imposing, virile and gorgeous. And they were, she knew, or had been, an unusually physical couple. Early in their relationship, they had been almost brutally physical, but in the past couple of years that had been less true. Neither of them had the same need for animal fierceness they’d had before Lawrence Ellis had entered and upended their lives.

His body was important. But he himself was
conveyed
, not
contained
in it. He was so much more than the limits of his flesh. She wanted him to see that, too.

But he was a man who could barely stand the constraint of riding in a car. How he would live the rest of his days, his years, motionless, she did not know.

~oOo~

Shortly after the eleven o’clock shift change, Darla, Isaac’s regular night nurse
, came in to do her first vitals check. Lilli liked Darla a lot. She was a short, stout woman, in her forties, maybe, with iron grey hair and a prodigious bosom packed tightly into plain green scrubs. None of the ICU nurses wore anything but surgical scrubs. She looked liked a prison warden. But when she smiled, and she was almost always smiling, she brightened up the room, and she had a sweet, melodic voice. Isaac slept deeply at night, augmented by meds, and he barely knew her. Lilli slept little and was getting to know her pretty well. She wiped the whiteboard and wrote her name and her usual flower, then went to check the machines.

Lilli sat up, and Darla smiled. “How’s he doing?” She kept her voice low, not to disturb Isaac’s rest.

“Glum.”

“Yeah, I imagine.
But I hear they’re moving him down to 3 tomorrow and getting him started with rehab. That’s great news.”

Lilli hadn’t heard that
the plan had been set. She wondered if Isaac had, if she’d missed that while she was at home. “Yeah? I didn’t know.”

“Uh-huh. They’re working on the bed for him already. Not easy to get a bed like he needs. Not a small guy.”

“No. Hey, Darla? Can I get some help with something?”

“Sure, honey. What can I do?”

~oOo~

When Isaac woke the next morning, Lilli had everything she needed. After she
’d helped him with his breathing therapy, and fed him breakfast and they’d taken the tray and what was left of the soft, easily digestible food away, she pushed the bed tray off to the side and washed the parts of him that she could—his arms and shoulders, his neck, his face. She washed his hands, taking her time, massaging each cool finger and his palms, loving the still-strong feel of him. His brow furrowed.

“What?”

“Nothin’.”

He didn’t like to be washed. He didn’t like to be fed. They weren’t sensual experiences for him. She felt a connection as she performed these acts, but he did not.
Except when she washed his face, he couldn’t fully feel her touch. All he felt was his weakness. She knew that, but she wouldn’t allow him to stew in his own juices, neither literally nor figuratively.

But Darla had helped her figure out something new. When she was done, she went to the bathroom and refilled the washtub with warm water. She carried it out and set it on the beside table. After she made sure she had everything she needed, she moved behind his bed to stand at its head. Unable to see her from their relative positions, Isaac asked, “What the fuck, Lilli?” His voice was querulous. He was in peak bad temper today.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she slid the flat part of a specially designed tub under his head and pulled his long hair back. He grunted at her touch.

“Relax, love. Just feel. Let yourself
feel
this.”

His hair had not been washed since he had been able to stand under their shower
at home and wash it himself. A month. It was thick with grease and still stiff with his blood. His braid had been pulled loose at some point early, maybe for surgery, and it was practically in dreads now.

Darla had clucked and suggested that it would be much easier to shave his head and start over. But Lilli knew that losing his hair on top of every other degradation would be a bridge too far. Before she’d come back to the hospital the evening before, she’d stopped at a beauty supply store and asked for the best detangling shampoo and conditioner available.

She shampooed and rinsed five times, lingering every time over his scalp, easing her fingers slowly, tenderly through his matted, filthy hair. At first, he’d been resistant; his jaw tensed as it always did when she washed his body. She’d ignored it, focusing on what
she
felt, touching him more intimately than she’d yet been able, feeling his thick locks heavy and wet in her fingers, feeling the warmth of his scalp, when the rest of his body was always so cool.

Then his reluctant grunts became quiet moans, and his brow smoothed out. He closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed. The constant beep of the heart monitor, a sound she had become accustomed to, slowed its tempo. She massaged his scalp, and she eased her fingers through his hair, and he, at last, allowed himself to feel this thing that was left to him.

After the first and second washes, each time, she’d had to pull the tub from under his head and take it to the bathroom to rinse it out; the water that had pooled as she rinsed was brown with old blood. During the rest of the washes, when his hair was mostly clean, she was able to focus on the snarls.

She loved
his hair, so much. More than any other part of his spectacular body, his hair was him. It was as long as hers, thick and dark, and she loved to wrap her hand around it when they fucked. He was vain about it, too, always wanting his braid smooth and even, very particular about what kind of band he’d wrap around it (no metal parts!), and she loved that—this little bit of primness in her massive, macho guy.

She would have worked the snarls out strand by strand before she would have let them shave him.

When she finally had every snarl released and his hair squeaky clean, she massaged conditioner into it. Then she rinsed it clear. She toweled it dry and pulled it all to one side of the pillow. She put everything away, and then she took their blow dryer out of her pack and dried and brushed his hair until it was soft and gleaming.

Then she braided it, being careful to make sure the sections were even and the braid smooth, and she wrapped the bottom in a black, metal-free elastic.

Only then did she notice that he was crying.

She leaned over him and took his face in her hands. “Oh, love. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “No, no.” He took the deepest breath he could and calmed. “I love you, Sport. I fuckin’ love you.”