Jane Austen Girl (27 page)

They sat, silent for a string of heartbeats. Grier could hear her own pulse pounding in her ears, and wondered if he could hear it as well.

A sudden sense of urgency swept over her, a feeling so strong and overpowering that she stood suddenly, the chair sliding out behind her and making a harsh scraping noise on the floor. She pulled her hand from his and stuck it behind her back, as if it had just been burned. “I should go check on Mama,” she said.

She had reached the door when he called out, “Grier?”

But she didn’t turn around. She walked faster and faster, propelled by something she couldn’t even name until by the time she reached the end of the hall, she was running.

Friends come and go in life.

But brothers will always be brothers.

Grandma Randall to
Bobby Jack and Darryl Lee

after
breaking up a swinging match
in her backyard

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Darryl Lee stomped into Bobby Jack’s room and took the chair next to his bed, looking about as mad as he had the day somebody stole the hubcaps off his truck.

“I let you out of my sight for less than twenty-four hours, and you turn into Clark Kent?”

“I’m fine,” Bobby Jack said. “Sit down.”

“What were you trying to do? Kill yourself?” Darryl Lee pulled the chair up close to the bed, then leaned back and glared at him.

“Actually, I was just trying to save some lives.”

“You scared the heck out of me, brother.”

“I’m fine,” Bobby Jack said.

“Well, you might have been—”

“I wasn’t.”

“Coulda been.”

“Wasn’t. Where were you anyway? Nobody could find you.”

Darryl Lee glanced out the window, then back at Bobby Jack with a look he didn’t recognize on him. “Trying to work things out with Dreama.”

“Did you?”

Darryl Lee shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“What happened with you two? You had a good thing once.”

“We got lazy, I guess. Maybe I got lazy. Taking things for granted, you know.”

“You still love each other?”

“I still love her.”

Bobby Jack heard the note of vulnerability in his brother’s voice and felt a pang of actual pain for him. He wasn’t used to seeing Darryl Lee in a state of anything remotely resembling second chair.

“I guess what I know now,” Darryl Lee said, “is that you can’t look away and think things will still be there when you decide to look back.”

“What can I do?”

Darryl Lee shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Make your own happiness. And then don’t look away.”

“If you’re talking about—”

“Grier. Pissed me off at first, but clearly you’ve got it bad for each other.” He stopped there, looking as if he wanted to say more but wasn’t sure he should. And then, “Something real bad almost happened to Grier before she left here after high school.”

Bobby Jack’s heart jumped in his chest and he could see, just from the look on his brother’s face, he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest of this.

Darryl Lee glanced out the window, his voice lower when he said, “You remember Sherry Apperson?”

“She was in your class, wasn’t she?” Bobby Jack said.

“She and Grier were good friends in school. Several years ago when she came home to visit family, we ran into each other out at the Beer Boot. She started talking about why Grier had left town and how she didn’t blame her. She said one night when her mama was loaded, she had a boyfriend over. I guess her mama must have passed out in the living room, and the creep tried to rape Grier. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time that kind of thing had happened.”

Bobby Jack felt the blood drain from his face, and a slow rage start to build inside him. He suddenly understood exactly how difficult what he’d just suggested Grier do would be for her. “Hell,” he said. “I’m such an idiot.”

Darryl Lee looked at him. “What’d you do?”

“I told her she ought to forgive her mother.”

Darryl Lee considered this for a few moments. “That’s probably the very best thing she could do for herself.”

“And the hardest.”

“That’s usually the stuff that gets us where we need to go.” Darryl Lee said, and then, “So are you gonna tell her how you feel about her?”

“I’m not sure it would do any good.”

“As much as it galls me to say it, I saw the way she looked at you. She never looked at me like that.”

“You were both kids then,” Bobby Jack said.

“Love is love. Since when did it ever make any difference how old you are?”

Bobby Jack knew his brother and what it cost him to throw out this seal of approval. The strongest kind of love for Darryl Lee welled up in him.

They might not always agree on everything, but when it came to the real stuff in life, the things that mattered, he guessed they actually did.

“The moment will come, as surely as we breathe, when opportunity will disappear. Then, and only then, will we realize what we have lost.”

Grier McAllister – Blog at Jane Austen Girl

CHAPTER FIFTY

Grier stepped off the elevator and took the hallway to her mother’s room, her steps quickening until she was all but running past the nurse’s desk.

“Room 316!” she heard a nurse say. “Code Blue!”

Panic flared in Grier’s chest and spread through her in a wave of disbelief. She started to run outright then, a nurse right behind her with a cart carrying a large machine.

Grier came to a jarring stop at the room’s door. Two other nurses were already there, giving her mother CPR.

She lay flat on the bed, her face as white as the sheet beneath her.

The nurses worked with capable, well-rehearsed movements, their voices steady and calm.

The nurse who had been behind her pushed by with the cart, murmuring a brisk, “Excuse me.” And then glancing over her shoulder, said, “I’m sorry. You can’t be in here. You’ll have to wait outside.”

“But what’s happening?”

“Please,” the nurse said firmly, but not unkindly. “Wait outside.”

“I would rather take her pain a thousand times over than to watch her try to bear it.”

Bobby Jack to Darryl Lee after Priscilla left and Andy cried, broken-hearted,

for
her at bedtime

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Bobby Jack spotted her as soon as the elevator doors opened.

Darryl Lee had brought him a pair of jeans and a shirt. After changing out of that ridiculous hospital gown, he’d slipped down the hall and into the open elevator before one of the nurses could spot him.

He walked as fast as his aching left leg would let him.

She sat huddled against the wall, her knees to her chest, her head hidden beneath her arms. He sank down beside her and put his arm around her, without giving himself time to consider that she might push him away.

“What is it?” he asked. “What happened?”

Grier looked up at him then, her face streaked with multiple tracks of tears. “They’ve been in there over twenty minutes. When I got here, they were. . .her heart must have stopped.”

She began to cry then, deep, wracking sobs that came from a place of hurt so far down inside her that he could hardly bear to hear them.

“Grier.” He folded her into the crook of his arm, holding her as tightly as he dared. She collapsed into him, as if she needed to absorb his strength, needed it to go on breathing.

He kissed the top of her head and held her while she cried. He had no idea what to say, if there was anything he could say, to lessen the pain.

People walked by. Stared at them. Shrunk away from the sound of Grier’s grief.

He just pulled her closer. Held her tighter. Wanting to take it into himself. Feel the pain for her so that she didn’t have to.

He wasn’t sure how long they sat there. It seemed like forever because he couldn’t stand knowing the agony she was in. And no time at all because having her here against him was something he never wanted to end.

“I wanted to tell her I—” Her voice broke then, sobs swallowing the words.

“Shh. It’s okay,” Bobby Jack said, rubbing her hair and sensing the recriminations she wanted to throw at herself. At the same time, he could feel her acceptance that it might be too late, that she might have waited too long.

Another nurse came running down the hall, opened the door and stepped in, her voice carrying into the hall. “She has a DNR. We were just now able to get it from the nursing home. There was a digital file of it on backup.”

A man’s voice, low and resigned, said, “Stop.”

Bobby Jack felt Grier stiffen. She jumped to her feet, ran to the door and pushed it open. “No. Don’t stop. She’s my mother! Keep going!”

Bobby Jack stepped in behind her, saw the look of sympathy on the doctor’s face. “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “But those were her wishes.”

Grier sank onto the side of the bed, dropping her head onto her mother’s chest, sobs now pouring from her. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m so sorry. Please. Come back. Just come back.”

The doctor laid a hand on Grier’s shoulder and said, “She’s gone, dear.”

Bobby Jack looked at the doctor and the two nurses standing by the bed with downcast eyes. “Could she have a few minutes, please?”

“Of course.” The doctor turned and left the room. The nurses followed quietly behind him.

“Do you want me to stay?” Bobby Jack asked, his voice breaking on the last word.

“No,” Grier said, her voice barely audible.

“I’ll be right outside,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And as he turned and walked from the room, he thought her pain would surely break his heart in half.

“When I grow up, Mama, I want to be as pretty and good as you.”

Grier, age four, on a picnic at the lake

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Grier pressed her face into the pillow beside her mother’s still head, trying to muffle the grief rolling from her like a tsunami from the ocean floor. But it wouldn’t be silenced, and the tears wouldn’t stop. She cried like she had never cried before in her life, a child stricken by the realization that her mother was gone and was never coming back.

She laced her fingers with hers, squeezing tight as if she could infuse her with her own life force, will her back into this world, into this room, into her life.

The words rose up and refused to remain within her, silent. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m so sorry.” She said the words over and over again, until they were nothing more than a weak whisper, slipping past her lips.

Ironic that she had come to this room to give her mother forgiveness, and now, it felt as if she were the one seeking it. Only now it was too late for any words that might heal either of them.

Grier sat up on her elbows, pushed her hair back from her face and ran a hand across her tear-stained cheeks. The lines in her mother’s face had all but disappeared. She looked so much more like the younger woman that Grier remembered. She looked at peace.

“I know you never meant for anything bad to happen to me, Mama.” She smoothed the back of her fingers across her mother’s face, let them linger against the softness of her cheek. “Will you forgive me?”

But there was no answer in the silent room. She had waited too long, too late. She would have to live with that the rest of her life.

“Sometimes, all you can do for a person

is be there. Just don’t let them

convince you that they don’t

need you. They do. And they will.”

Bobby Jack’s Grandma Randall

after
the death of his father

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Bobby Jack stood outside until he could no longer hear Grier crying.

He opened the door and walked quietly across the room, putting his hand on her shoulder, and then rubbing her back, compassion a weight on his chest. “Grier, honey. Why don’t we go now?”

She looked up at him then, her eyes and face a picture of heartbreak. “You don’t have to be here with me,” she said.

“I want to be here with you.”

He could see her resistance and then watched it ebb away beneath a need to hold onto someone, to anything, to keep from drowning in the current of emotion she was trying to navigate.

He held her hand tighter, pulled her to her feet and then encircled her waist with his arms, melding her into him with an all-consuming desire to absorb it all, take the pain from her and carry it as his own.

She pressed her face to his shirt. He felt her breathe in and anchored her more securely within the circle of his arms. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

“I’m not sure I want to be,” she said, the words broken and full of self-blame.

“I want you to be,” he said. “I want you to be.”

AFTER WRANGLING A
couple of doctors into hastening his release, Bobby Jack called Darryl Lee and asked him to drop his truck off at the hospital.

All the while, he kept Grier with him, mostly tucked inside the curve of his arm because he feared what might happen if he let her go.

He felt her fragility and how easy it would be for her to break right now. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

By the time he had completed the paperwork to check himself out and Grier had answered the hospital’s questions about funeral preparations, Darryl Lee already had the truck waiting in the parking lot.

He stood by the open door, his face compassionate and concerned. “Grier,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

She looked at him, her eyes brimming again with tears. “Thank you, Darryl Lee.”

“If there’s anything I can do. . . anything at all.”

She shook her head and said, “I appreciate that.”

“Bobby Jack, are you sure you should be driving?” Darryl Lee asked.

“I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.”

Under any other circumstances, Bobby Jack knew his brother would have argued. But he let him go, walked back to his own truck and waved a solemn wave.