Dare to Breathe (21 page)

Carrie finally looks up at me and smiles, shaking her head. “No you idiot, I didn’t want to just be your friend. Didn’t you understand that all those times I was telling on you or shouting at you I actually liked you?”

I look at her in shock.
Carrie had feelings for me?

“Anyway, I was mad and I stopped being the friend she needed. I mean we stayed friends but it hurt too much to talk about you and well, I think I let her down.” She starts weeping. “When she was lost and getting more and more fucked up, I just walked away. My jealousy of her, for stealing you away, when you were never mine in the first place, just destroyed the friendship we had. I should have been there for her when she needed me but I wasn’t.”

“No,” I say, putting my arms around her and pulling her next to me. “You were a good friend to her. She always spoke highly of you. You were the one who made her laugh and do crazy things which kept her from getting too down!”

“No, the fact is, I did an even worse terrible thing after she died. Instead of looking at myself, I blamed you for it all and when you started dating Sam, I did it again,” she says.

I pull her away from me and lift her chin forcing her to look directly into my eyes. “I don’t blame you for her death. None of us can be blamed. I understand that now. Carrie, you can tell Sam you’re sorry yourself when you see her, okay?” I add with determination.

She looks at me with hope in her eyes and hugs me tightly. I choke on my own tears, praying silently that Carrie will get the chance to do just that.

We sit through the night huddled together, seeking support from each other without words. I feel frozen, every nerve ending dead. When the phone finally rings, we all stare at the phone in shock. Ben dives for it and answers it with a curt hello. I see him nodding and then the phone is thrust into my hand.

“Nathan, we found her,” Barry tells me in a rush.

“Oh thank God! Is she all right?” I fall down on my knees.

“She’s quite badly hurt. We’re on the way to State Memorial hospital now, and I’ll meet you there.”

I feel my friends pulling me up and I say something about the hospital. We all run to the car and Ben speeds off to the hospital in a daze. No one says a word until I pass the phone to Mandy and ask her to call the Marshes. I just can’t do it, not right now, not until I know she is okay. Mandy nods and I hear her urgently talking to Mrs. Marsh, tears streaming down her face.

We get to the hospital in record time and all pile out of the car and run toward the emergency entrance. I see a policeman sitting in the corner looking at the doors as they swing open. He sees us and comes striding up to us purposefully.

“Nathan?” he asks as he extends his hand to me. I grab it absently and look past him towards the nurses.

“Nathan, you need to come with me,” he says.

I finally stop trying to look beyond him and take Barry in for the first time. He is an older man with graying hair, a lined weathered face and a mustache.

“What happened? Where is she?” I finally choke out.

He gestures for me to sit down next to him in the plastic waiting seats and turns to face me. “We went to the trailer park you told us about. It took some time to figure out which one belonged to Dean. He had it in another name, Carver or something.”

“Carver was Sam’s mom’s maiden name,” I tell him recalling my conversation with the old lady.

“Yeah well, no one was there when we eventually found it but when I looked in through the window, I saw all his stuff, including a wall covered in images of a girl I could only assume must have been Sam, almost like a shrine. I figured he had to be coming back with his stuff all there so we stayed and waited.

Late last night, his van turned up and we waited in ambush as we watched him drag Samantha into the trailer. The second we saw him dragging her in, Nathan, we rushed in. When he heard our voices, he decided to fight back, screaming for us to leave him alone. We asked him to bring the girl out but he flatly refused. He must have had a gun in the trailer because he shot out at one of the officers. The shit hit the fan with guns going off everywhere. He was shot dead instantly.

I sit blankly and listen to his words wondering where the fuck Sam was in all this. She is all I want to know about. I can process what happened with Dean later.

“Where is she? Did she get caught in the crossfire?” I manage.

“Nathan, she was unconscious when we found her. We don’t know what he gave her and what he did to her but she was on the ground when all the shooting took place. She wasn’t shot. Right now she is with the doctors.”

I get up now, ignoring Barry and head over to the nurse’s station. “Excuse me, I am looking for Miss Marsh,” I tell her.

She looks up at me and gives me a curt nod then looks down at her computer and starts tapping into it. Five seconds later she looks up at me again. “I’m sorry, Mister…” She waits for me to say my name but I ignore her. “Um…she is still with the doctor right now. As soon as he comes out, I will let you know.”

“Is she okay?” I ask desperately.

“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t have any further information to share.”

I sit next to my friends. Barry hovers too and for a moment I wonder why until I realize he has an investigation to complete. I close my eyes and think of Sam. I know how beautiful and strong she is inside. I know despite the crappy cards she was handed as a child, she came out beautiful, funny and willing to give life a go. I know when she comes out of this fucking hospital, I am never letting her go again. I feel as if all I have done for the last two days is sit around and wait and I am sick of it.

Chapter Thirty-Five

After what feels like hours, I hear the elevator doors open and as usual, I look up hopefully. I see a sight that almost stops me breathing. It’s Sam. A nurse is pushing her out of the elevator in a wheelchair. She has on a white hospital gown which drowns her sweet, small body. Her beautiful face is bruised, she has dark rings under her swollen eyes and I can see bandages wrapped around her ribs through a small slit in the gown. Seeing her so broken almost kills me.

The nurse pushes her towards us and stop when she reaches us.

Sam looks up, her beautiful blue eyes tracking all of us one by one, only coming to a stop when they rest on me.

I stand up and approach her cautiously. She hesitates for a second and then stands up gingerly, throwing herself into my arms, crying.

“Be careful, I don’t want you to hurt yourself even more than you already are,” I tell her, feeling her broken body. “Shh you’re safe, I’m here now,” I whisper into her hair. I am afraid I could hurt her but I’m just not willing to let go. “I am so sorry I wasn’t there baby.”

She is shaking, so I take my jacket off and put it over her shoulders to help her warm up.

“He was going to keep me locked up,” she sobs into my shoulder. “I tried, I really did try to break free but he…he was just too strong. I felt so useless Nathan. He told me about my parents, and they were bad people too. I can’t believe they were all so fucked up!”

“No! Baby you were so strong, you held in there and waited for help. You never gave up,” I tell her, pulling her chin up to see my eyes. I kiss her lips. I need to taste her and make sure she is okay. “I know about your parents too, but babe you are so special, so much better than them and even as a child people could see it in you,” I add, thinking of the old lady talking about Sam and how she cared for her brothers.

Her wet eyes look up at me in pain. “I thought I was going to die and all I could think about is how much it would hurt you if I did. I thought you would spend the rest of your life blaming yourself. That would have been the worst thing ever but I knew you would never stop looking for me,” she says.

I don’t tell her how accurate her words are or how much she connects with me on a deeper level. This girl knows me so well and in some ways it scares me. “I would never have given up on you,” is all I say to her.

She gives me a smile and then suddenly she is engulfed by the rest of our friends.

“Oh, my God!” Carrie shrieks into her ear, pulling her away tenderly from me and into her own arms. “I am so glad to see you. If something happened to you and I couldn’t have said sorry for being such a bitch I would have been so upset with you!”

I hear Sam give a small laugh. “Easy now ladies, I am a little sore.” She grimaces at them. I watch from the sidelines as she finds comfort from the others.

Ben also hugs her, chastising her and saying she is never to disappear again,
as if she had a choice
. He mentions something about her favorite dinner and I guess he is promising her something to make her feel better. Mandy just stands to the side and sobs in relief. I go and put my arms around her silently, helping her to get herself together. Mandy has always been the soft hearted one in our little group and I love the way she cares so deeply for all of us.

Barry comes to talk to Sam. “Sorry guys. I need some time with Miss Marsh. I need to get her statement.”

Sam nods but looks around for me, clear panic in her eyes.

I go to her and gently touch her shoulders. “I’ll wait here for you. I promise.”

She closes her eyes, takes a deep, painful breath and then nods her head. I watch as she goes off limping, clutching her side, with the policeman into a private room.

I take another seat, along with the others who refuse to leave, and we all play the waiting game again.

We finally make it back to the motel and I give my phone to Sam so she can call her family. The second she speaks to them she starts crying inconsolably so I take the phone from her and speak to them myself, reassuring them she is okay and safe. I walk away from the others and tell them how the police found them and how they ended up shooting Dean. I tell them, in a broken voice, that Sam will probably need to come home and spend some time with them and they beg me to bring her straight home.

When I go back into the room, my heart breaks when I see Sam sitting on the bed, knees raised and arms wrapped around them, in a pair of sweatpants and T-shirt she borrowed from Mandy, her long black hair still wet from her shower and tied into a long braid down her back. I sit down beside her.

“Your parents are so happy you are okay but the truth is, they really need to see you right now.” I take a deep breath to continue, not really wanting to let her go, “and you need them too.”

Her sapphire eyes look up at me sadly and she just nods.

“I am going to drive you there in the morning and then I am going to go back to Rainbow Springs and wait for you there,” I tell her, trying not to start crying like a pussy.

I see in her eyes that she understands what I am doing. We both know we need to let each other go so we can learn to love in a healthy way, less co-dependent on each other.

“Just so you know, this is not goodbye,” I tell her.

She nods again and I pull her towards me, wrapping her tiny body in mine. I stroke her back as I feel her silent tears strip a hole right into my heart. We both fall asleep on the bed, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Leaving her again is the hardest thing I have ever done. I know she needs time to heal and I need time to allow her to do it herself but it still hurts like hell. We both cry when I finally hug her goodbye but then I let her go and walk back to my friends, who are waiting in the car, not turning around once.

I decide on impulse to join the others for the remainder of the road trip. There is no way I can go home alone right now.

We visit New York, Maine and New Orleans and through it all I smile and pretend I am okay when inside all I want to do is rush back to her and whisk her away. We finally head back to our hometown in Chicago to visit our families before we have to go back to college minus Ben who starts work at some fancy restaurant in town.

“I think we should visit her grave,” Mandy says to us one day, when we are all in her family’s living room.

No one speaks for a minute. We all know who Mandy is thinking about, but then Carrie sits down close to me, placing her hand in mine. “I agree. I think it would be good for us,” she says, looking straight at me. This is what she wanted to do when we visited at Christmas but somehow, we just couldn’t.

I consider their words and think about how it makes me feel. I never even went to the funeral when Kate died, it was all too raw and I know I really need the closure. “Okay,” I finally say.

The weather is wet and windy the day we decide to go. The rain pours down heavily as we drive over to the graveyard, forcing Ben to drive slowly through the wet roads. I think the heavens have opened up to mourn our friend with us, all over again. We get out of the car and I watch everyone pull on their rain jackets and set the umbrellas up. I do neither and walk numbly with the rain wetting my clothes and my hair. I follow the girls to her spot out in this cold wet place. I think about the vibrant girl I once knew and it makes me feel sad.

When we get to her headstone everyone stops and looks down at the words written on it. I struggle to see through the tears running down my face along with the raindrops, ‘
Beloved daughter, sister and friend…’