The club was all around me. I couldn’t disrespect Kace with my fear. With all of my ugly worries. So I stood, my knees thankfully holding me.
I followed the doctor in silence. Sterile smells invaded my senses as we walked past rooms. I didn’t want to get to Kace’s room. Be faced with him while fragile.
But I eventually reached his room, because there was no room for wants in times like these.
He looked worse than I’d imagined. Which had been pretty bad. One of his legs was in a cast, with scary looking metal prongs going through the plaster and presumably into his skin and bone. His body still looked big, crowding the small hospital bed, though the tube down his throat and the machines he was attached to looked bigger still. White bandages covered his head. Had they done brain surgery? Had someone cut into his skull?
“I know it’s overwhelming to see him like this,” the doctor conveyed softly. I hadn’t caught her name. I hadn’t wanted to know it. If there was still a chance that she was going to tell me that Kace was dead, I didn’t want to know her name.
“He has gotten through the worst of it,” she continued. “The next few days will be critical, but he’s young. He is healthy, and strong, which are all of the ingredients needed to get through this.” Her eyes found mine. “And he has a life to fight for, and obviously, a whole lot of love. I know I’m a doctor and supposed to speak purely on the science of things, but sometimes, love can be what brings people back from accidents this.”
She left on that, though her words hadn’t made me feel particularly warm or hopeful. Ranger had also many reasons to live. He was strong. He was loved. If there had been a way he could’ve fought his way back to us, he would’ve done it.
I stood in the doorway, just staring at Kace. I wanted to hover there, maybe forever. Because in this doorway, he was alive, none of the realities of what his life might be—what my life might be—could catch me in this doorway.
My boot moved. Then the other. He looked even was worse when I got to his bedside. The side of his face was swollen, covered with scratches and scrapes. From his face being scraped across the road, I guessed. My stomach lurched at the vision of his injuries. How something simple like a driver’s error, a distracted moment, could end so many things.
It wasn’t as quiet in here as I’d expected. I had imagined without Kace’s presence, without his smile, his easy words, his hard words, without any of his words really, that there would be nothing but a cruel silence filling the room. The same one that was there when I was cleaning my husband’s bloody body two years ago.
But there was the beep of the monitors he was strapped to. A low hum. Sounds of nurses, patients and doctors moving around in the hallways. My heart thumping between my ears.
My fingers moved to trail his. They were slightly scraped up too. The rings he usually wore were gone. I wondered what happened to them. Had the doctors taken them off? What about the necklace Lily made him that he wore every day, even in the shower?
I checked his neck. That was gone too.
I was thankful for his tattoos. For the permanence of them. His identity, his personality, stamped on his skin so he didn’t seem so anonymous laying in this bed. He was somebody. He was ours.
“I don’t think you can actually hear me right now,” I rasped, my voice a hoarse whisper. “I think maybe that’s something doctor’s say to people to try to make them feel better. To soften all the hard edges of this. Or maybe because the talking thing isn’t even for you. Maybe it’s for me. Being able to talk to you is a reminder you’re not gone.” My fingers interlaced with his. He was still warm.
“I know I’m meant to sit here and tell you I know you’re going to make it through. Know you’d never leave us. But that’s not how it works. You are not in control of this. Something else is. That makes it so much harder, doesn’t it? That neither of us are in control of what life will look like. I’ve gotta say, I can’t even think of a life that doesn’t have you in it.