Tattooed Hearts (7 page)

He walked down the
hall to the room, dazed in an almost dreamlike state. For the
first time in a long time, the antiseptic smell sickened
his stomach. It smelled clean–overly clean to the point of nothing, but there
was so much nothing that the nothing was something. Dead germs, he concluded,
hospitals carried the scent of faintly dead
germs,
like a hotel room for souls in purgatory.

He entered the room,
sounds and beeps of the
machines greeted him.
Trained eyes immediately checked his father’s vital signs and heart rhythm.
Luc’s heart was beating alarmingly slow. Forrest clung onto hop
e. His gaze moved to his mother, her usual rosy complexion
now pale and sunken. Charles stood on the other side of the bed, tall and
powerfully built like his son. He nodded at Forrest, his face grim.

“A tourist was on a
scooter, drunk as a bat.” His mothe
r spoke softly
into the silence. “Your father sw-werved to avoid him....and...w-went head-on
into a tree.” Her voice cracked on the words.

He didn’t have to ask,
no seatbelt. They’ve had many arguments over the use of the safety device.
Wrapping his arms
around his mother, Forrest looked
down at his father on the hospital bed and his breath caught. Fifty-nine years
young, his father was the poster child for health. Having worked on the farm
for so long, he was naturally big and sturdy, but at this moment,
he looked frail, sickly and gray. Tubes and IV inserted in
his pale skin, the only thing connecting him to earth.

Forrest glanced around
the room
.
E
verything
was expectedly
sterile, and yet a faint smell of death hung in the air.

“Intracerebral
hemorrhage
we were told,” Charles’ said in a low
muffled tone. “Luc had a stroke as he was transported here.”

He nodded at Jason’s
father. Forrest was all too familiar with the medical term. Intracerebral
hemorrhage was caused by an artery in the brain bursting and
creating localized bleeding in the surrounding tissues.
This bleeding killed brain cells and could lead to coma and death. His eyes
went to the slow blip of his father’s heart on the monitor. The mortality rate
for this type of injury was over forty percen
t.

Heart hammering
painfully in his chest, Forrest’s breathing went from quick to next to nothing.
He dropped his gaze to the linoleum tiles. Even though the floor was scrubbed
spotlessly, he could see all the tears that were ever shed on it.

“Forrest.” Hi
s father’s voice split on his name.

He quickly moved
closer. “I’m here, Dad.”

He watched his father
fight to open his eyes, when he finally succeeded, he smiled.
A weak smile.
Hope slipped.

“I waited for you.”

Forrest grasped his
father’s hand in his. “Don
’t talk. Relax, we
’re
here.” A doctor until the very end, his voice sounded
deceptively calm, no hint of the panic and fear eating him up.

“We?”

He nodded. “Mom and
Charles are here as well.”

Charles peeled himself
away from the wall and came to stand next
to Forrest.
His mother followed. His father’s gaze slowly floated from each of them, a
smile on his face.

“Thank you.” His
father said to his wife and Charles.
“Thank
you for giving me my son
.” He focused on Forrest.
“
I
love you.” He smiled once more, too
k one last jagged
breath and slipped away into an endless sleep.

Forrest stood
absolutely still, silent and frozen, as if his brain short-circuited and needed
to be rebooted. Around him, everything was in fast-forward while he was
motionless in the middle
of it all. The monitor
continued with the loud buzzing sound.

Code blue! Code blue!
The hospital code used to indicate a
patient requiring immediate resuscitation echoed in the speaker. Soon the door
swung open, fast, high-pitched voices spitting out medic
al terms: Push epi, pupils blown, intubation. The words flew around him;
he recognized each one of the terms. He’d spent countless hours with his nose
buried in medical books. But suddenly he understood why people called it
medical jargon because none of t
he words made any
sense. Until the doctor spoke, “Time of death, three-fifteen p.m.”

Forrest’s soul
shriveled.

He stepped back. An
arm filled with life and strength dropped on his shoulder. “I’m okay,” he told
Charles, but his voice trembled.

“Let’s go to
the waiting room.”

He nodded. Standing
next to his father’s best friend, he clutched his mother’s hand and the three
of them walked out to the waiting room where the rest of the wolf pack sat,
waiting.

* * * *

Ten long years and
nothing had changed. Forrest was everywhere. He occupied every space in
Claire’s mind and heart. That explained why she was on the ferry this cold
winter evening, crossing the Atlantic Ocean back to Martha’s Vineyard. A wild
wind whipped
a mass of ebony hair,
prodding
her
face
. With a hot cup of cocoa wrapped in
black fingerless gloves, she lifted her
chin,
eyes closed, and relished the fierce, frigid air rushing
around her.

“Oh,
my gosh
, you’re Claire Peters! Can we take a
picture?”

Her
day had started at three a.m. in her Los Angeles apartment,
quickly eating a mix of fruit and yogurt and drinking a cup of coffee before
heading to her first television appearance of the day. After she completed the
taping, stuck in a bumper-to-bumper limo
ride to a
meeting, she had leaned over and changed her destination.

Six hours later, after
a flight from L.A. to Boston, this ferry ride, and an anxious heart, she was
exhausted. But she didn’t get where she was alone, and for that she would never
complai
n when people recognized her.

“Absolutely,” she said
with a smile to the two excited girls. They looked to be of college age. “Are
you from the island?” She didn’t recognize them. Not that she knew
everyone
,
she
wasn’t there enough anymore for the closenes
s.

“No,” the brunette
answered. “We’re here for the weekend. We go to Northeastern University.”

Forrest’s
alma mater.
Her heart fluttered like a butterfly learning to fly.

“We don’t want to
bother you,” the other girl with a ponytail said, cell phone ready
for the picture. “By the way, I love your middle name.
What does it mean?”

“Yasō,” she said the
middle name she rarely used. “It means wildflower.” She squeezed between the
two girls and smiled for the selfie.

After a couple rounds
of thank you and names
were exchanged, the two girls
stayed true to their words and retreated back to their chairs. Claire leaned on
the rail and exhaled, her breath forming clouds.

Few passengers stood
nearby, their voices simmering with excitement, completely oblivious to the
Massachusetts bitter winter. The same college girls now
giddily discussed the possibility of hooking up with a Kennedy or any other
local, now that the only Montgomery was married. She didn’t have the heart to
tell them this time of year the island was lik
e
Stephen King’s
The Shining
with a population of barely
fifteen-thousand people scattered over six towns.

Claire on the other
hand was reminded of why she’d stayed away the last four months. In the cold
months, once all the tourists were gone, the island
became
dismal and desolate. And, oh yes, she had thrown herself at Forrest but he
hadn’t taken the bait. Instead he reminded her why Martha’s Vineyard was no
longer her home. She was temporary. So she’d stayed away.

Until
now.

Four months ago,
caught up in
the magic of Jason and Minka’s wedding,
she gave in to her deepest desires and kissed Forrest. The audacious move got
her nowhere. He walked away, but not fast enough. With just a kiss, he had
crushed down all the walls and freed her heart. The fist-sized
powerhouse had expanded and contracted with life.

Treacherous,
unreliable heart.

That’s why she was on
this ferry.
Time to let Forrest go
or surrender to her heart.
Either way, she craved closure and a much-needed break.
Her choice.
Probably not the smart
est career move to walk away in the middle of a promotional
tour, but she needed the break. After years of touring, filming a movie, and
designing countless wedding gowns, she was burned out. Her creativity had dried
up and she couldn’t write a song to sav
e her life.
More importantly, her career felt like a chore of late. The happiness it once
provided had dissipated.

Two weeks she told
James, her manager of the last ten years. Two weeks without anything to do. Two
weeks to be Claire Yasō Peters. Two weeks to figure out no matter how hard she
tried to remove all traces of Forrest out of her mind’s eye, he stubbornly kep
t hanging to her heart. When the captain announced they had
docked safely, a sudden panic washed over her.

What if Forrest wasn’t
home alone?

She kept tabs on him,
sort of. Here and there he’d posted a picture of Lake Tashmoo on his Twitter or
Facebook ac
count. Once upon a time, she’d commented,
not anymore. Now she received her updates through their mutual friends. Well
the girls anyway. From them, she discovered until recently he was still seeing
Kerry, the redhead who had him for lunch four months ago.

Jealousy poked its
ugly head and Claire reminded herself she no longer had any rights to him. She
stroked the infinity tattoo inside her left wrist. Now or never, she reminded
herself and made her way down the stairs to her black Audi sedan.

The car glided
quietly along the streets. After a short time, she turned
onto State Road. At six o’clock in the evening the streets were dark,
mystifying, and empty, a sharp contrast to the summer months. By spring, they
would start arriving–the tourists, the homeowners
who
migrated to Florida, Canada, or somewhere in the West during the winter. Come
summer, the population would hit its typical one-hundred fifty thousand plus
and bustle
with visitors, shoppers, scientists,
residents, and passengers.
But until then, only
the locals
were here, the fishermen, the teachers, the students, the policemen, her
friends. And let’s not forget the Vineyard’s most eligible doctor.

The car slid onto
Herring Creek Road, location of the farm owned and operated by Forrest’s
parents. There
were no street lights, no traffic
lights, yet, in the dark she remembered every turn, every Yield or Stop sign.

Her heart picked up
speed as she erased the distance between her and Forrest. Logic told her she
could wait until the morning to see him, she’d
be
calmer.

And do what tonight?

No one knew she had
returned to the island, not even her BFF Keely. There was the Montgomery
compound her mother managed, but that would mean she’d have to catch a boat to
Chappy. For that, she’d have to contact Jason. She
didn’t
want to do that. Not tonight.

From Herring Creek
Road, she made a left on Tisbury Lane and continued to drive about a mile. She
cruised along the winding road through acres of what she knew comprised of
picturesque, open pastures and arrived on Mead
ow
Lane. Her fingers gripped the steering
wheel,
she blew out a deep breath, and made a
right onto the well-trodden path that led to Forrest’s waterfront home on Lake
Tashmoo.