the door, pushing all my weight into it so he wouldn’t be able to open it if he tried. Only he never did open it. Because when I looked out the door after about ten minutes, he was gone. He was gone, my card was gone, and I never saw him again.
CHAPTER 72
“What’s going on? I don’t un-understand? Why do you have this? How do you . . . ?” I scratched my head like I was trying to order my thoughts in a way that I was able to understand and process what was going on.
“You . . .” He pointed to the card in my hand. “You made that!” It was a statement, not a question. I looked down at the card in my hand, at the drawings on the front of it: butterflies and rainbows and a crudely drawn lion. I opened it again, looking at the signature lightning bolt, just to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I looked back at the bed, almost imagining that I would see my sleeping body back in it and this was all a dream. Because if this was not a dream, if this was actually real, then this was perhaps the most serendipitous thing that had ever happened in my life. Perhaps even in anyone’s life.
“I made this,” I said flatly, almost to myself. “I made this card years ago. On Christmas Eve. In hospital.” I was still trying to convince myself that this was real. If I said it out loud enough times, maybe I would actually start believing it, even though it seemed completely unbelievable.
“And you gave it to me.” Noah stepped forward and held up the card I’d given him last night, and then pointed back at my card. “The signatures are identical. You made that and you gave it to me all those years ago in the hospital on the worst night of my life . . . you gave that to me and I’ve been carrying it around with me in my wallet ever since.”
I shook my head. “Really?” I’d had no idea that the note I’d written all those years ago would have become imbued with such meaning, that it would have been kept like this.
Noah walked all the way up to me. “We met twenty years ago, in the hospital that night, and you gave me this card and you held my hand.”
Tears prickled in my eyes. “You were the boy covered in blood. And that’s why you hate Christmas,” I said.
“I was the boy covered in blood,” he repeated. I looked into Noah’s eyes. They were shining, his lower lids twitching, as if he was fighting back tears. “I was the boy covered in blood and you were the girl who made me feel just a little better in that moment. One of the worst, most terrifying moments in my life.”
“Like you did, in the ambulance,” I whispered.
“You know, I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve pulled this card out and read it when I’m having a bad day. If I lose someone at work, or I just don’t feel great, I read your card over and over again. I must have read it thousands of times. That card changed my life.”
And now a tear did escape my eyes. It trickled over my nose and dropped onto my chin. Noah wiped it away with his thumb, but instead of taking it away, he left it there. He stepped even closer to me, bringing his face almost all the way up to mine.
“Do you know how many times over the years I’ve thought about you? The girl in the hospital gown who gave me that card and held my hand. I wanted to find you so badly. I used to dream about finding you one day and telling you how much that card changed my life. When I was older, I went back to the hospital, but obviously they wouldn’t give out your information. I even thought of creating a Facebook page and posting the card on social media in the hope that you would come forward so I could tell you how much it had meant to me. And now I can.”
I nodded, feeling so overwhelmed with emotion.
“It wasn’t an accident at all in that elevator. It wasn’t an accident that you landed up on my doorstep at two in the morning.”