Heart Of Gold

The Way Home

When Jake woke, it was to the incessant beeping of his heart-rate monitor. Whatever pain medication was being pumped through his IV wasn't strong enough to let him ignore the beeping. There was a hazy stream of light poking in through the window of the room he shared with Will. It pooled at the foot of his bed, warming his toes.

Jake thought back over the last forty-eight hours, trying to create a chronology in his mind. 

He remembered the ambulance, the glaring fluorescent lights in the emergency room and the cold, antiseptic smell of the operating room before they put him under. He remembered waking up to a crushing feeling in his chest and the raw burn along the edges of his incisions. They went right down the middle of his chest from where the doctors had cut him open – a pneumothorax, they had called it: a collapsed lung. One of the broken ribs on his right side has pierced it. 

He looked over at Will in the bed beside him. His friend was unconscious, sedated from his injuries. The nurse had told Jake yesterday that there was swelling in Will's brain and they had to remove a piece of skull to let the pressure subside. They wouldn't wake him up until that was better. 

Thick white plaster encased Will's left leg from the ankle to mid-thigh and his face was covered in cuts and bruises. Jake knew he didn't look much better himself but at least he was alive.

The guilt that came with that realization crushed him. 

He had gotten a taste of it yesterday when he'd first woken from surgery but the morphine had numbed it. Now that the nurses were easing him off it, he felt the full brunt of what had happened. He was jealous, for a moment, of Will – unconscious, he didn't have to feel what Jake was feeling now. He balled his fists, digging his fingernails into his palm. 

The memory of seeing Gail lying in the mud, her limbs splayed and blackened with blood and dirt, haunted him. For a moment, Gail had shimmered like diamonds in the darkness before he realized it was the crystalline shards of glass embedded in her skin that were catching the moonlight. It made him sick to his stomach and Jake leaned over the bed, vomiting. The pain at his incisions shocked the image out of his mind as a nurse came running in.

"Easy does it there," she said. "Lie back now, there you go."

She adjusted the pillow behind him and glanced over at Will.

"He's still out, is he?"

Jake nodded.

"Well, probably for the best," she nodded sagely. "Was he the driver?"

"Yeah," Jake answered, "but it was my car."

"Well, no use dwelling on that," she said, patting his arm. "You two are alive, which is more than those other two girls can say."

She walked outside for a moment and came back with a plastic tray of food. There was juice, Jell-O, a thick, pasty-looking soup and some vegetables. None of it looked very appetizing.

"Eat," she ordered, sitting on the side of his bed. "I'm not leaving until you do."

Jake picked up the bowl of Jell-O, poking at it. It wiggled, translucent and bright green.

"That's not going to hop into your mouth on its own." The nurse raised an eyebrow and handed him a spoon.

Obligingly, Jake took a bite. The Jell-O felt surprisingly refreshing after throwing up and he took a second bite.

"Now, why don't you tell me what made you sick," the nurse said.

"Nothing," Jake deflected. "I'm fine."