You'll Just Know

Chapter 3

The sky finally broke wide open and nature crashed and banged for three days straight, dousing Devon in a record rainfall. It sounded spectacular, but I missed it all. For three days, I sat in a bed in a bare white room, unable to explain to my parents why the heck I had been in a tree three stories high. I was seventeen years old, they lectured, far too old to be climbing trees. Blah, blah, blah. They were right. What could I say?

Anyway, not much mattered to me those three days except getting out. I was a convict awaiting parole. I had vivid, awful dreams of the fall, and dreams just as vivid about the beautiful Wendy Cameron. In my dreams, she smiled at me and held my hand and we were old, close friends. I would wake up, feeling like I was so much closer to her... like our interaction in my dream had somehow made us friends in real life, too. Dreams are funny things.

When all the smoke had cleared and they had cleaned me up a bit, it turned out that I did indeed have a fractured left arm, but that I was otherwise just bruised and scraped. No real permanent damage. I remember one doctor shaking his head and smiling at me whimsically. "Teenage boys are made of rubber." he said to me.

I just smiled back at him politely, wondering if I'd just been insulted.

The true highlight of those odd three days happened on my second night at the hospital. My sister was staying with me. As older sisters go, Sandra was fairly cool. We had a lot of differences, but despite this, we also shared a lot of trust. She stuck up for me when Mom and Dad refused to see things my way, and she treated me more like an adult than anyone else.

On this particular night, it was way past visiting hours, but the nurses still hadn't come to throw her out. Mom and Dad had gone home after sitting with me for most of the day, and the storm outside my darkened window was still going full force. The only light in my room was a small, dim lamp sitting in the corner. Sandra lounged back in a chair beside my bed, listening to the rain splash against the window pane. The rest of the hospital around us was dark and quiet.

Neither of us said so, but I knew we were both thinking of the time a few years before when she had been the one in the hospital bed after her car accident and I was the one sitting bedside. We never mentioned this though. I remembered that it had been raining that night, too.

Sandra sipped her Diet Pepsi and ran a hand through her tired tangle of blonde hair. "What's on your mind, Tarzan?" (She had been calling me Tarzan since the tree incident.)

"What do you mean?" I asked, playing dumb. She knew me too well.

Sandra chuckled to herself. "Oh, please. You've been staring out into space for the past two days now. I know that you didn't get hit on the head that hard. Did the fall shake you up or something?"

I shrugged. "A little, yeah."

"After my car accident, the thing that kept going through my head were those last few seconds before the crash, you know? I slowed them down, picked them apart. I kept thinking what would have happened if I'd done this or that a little bit differently."

I thought about this, and the way the fall to the ground was so clear and sharp in my memory. Slow-motion. "Yeah. You're right."

She took another sip of her Pepsi and leaned back to look out the window beside her. "But that's not all that's on your mind, is it?"

I shrugged again. She was watching the lightning in the dark sky outside. "What makes you say that?"

Sandra still didn't look at me, just took another sip. "Because during the last couple of days, when you thought no one was looking, I caught you smiling to yourself. Thought maybe you'd gone crazy at first."