Forever and Always Part 2

I couldn’t look at him, not yet. So I focused my gaze on the chair next to his bed, making my way over with a careful determination. Slumping into it, I ran my fingers through my hair—a habit I’d had for as long as I can remember—and took a deep breath. Then, I lifted my gaze to the love of my life.

            There were wires and tubes everywhere. Some led to his wrist (the one that wasn’t bound in a tight cast all the way to the shoulder) others led under his thin, sky-blue hospital gown that we both would have laughed about in any other situation. I could see that his left leg was bound in a cast, thicker than his right underneath the blanket covering him. My eyes followed the natural course; the curve of his lips, the hill his nose was, set perfectly in the center of his face—disrupted only by a thin breathing tube pressed tightly against his nostrils—and into his icy blue eyes, covered slightly by his dirty-blonde hair. I sucked in a breath. He’d been awake the whole time.

            He smiled gently at me, through all the wires and bandages, through all the pain he must have been in, he somehow gathered the strength to smile at me. Was it weird that that smile seemed to seep all the strength I had left right out of me? Tears welled up in my eyes and I heard the door gently close as the doctor and his nurse left, giving us some privacy. I choked back a sob and hid my face in my hands. I heard a sort of choked chuckle and a hand stroked down my hair.

            “Shh, sweetheart, it’s all going to be okay.” His voice was weak, but he still sounded like himself. In that moment, I could have sworn his voice was that of an angel. And it didn’t stop there. His voice continued, dragging me into a conversation so normal, so like one that we’d have had at home, over dinner, making jokes and laughing the entire time that I forgot for a couple seconds where we were. I forgot that he was hooked up to a heart monitor. I forgot that all the people threading in and out the door were nurses coming to check his vital signs. And I forgot what the doctor told me: that those beeps echoing in the back of my mind were numbered.

            We talked about the kids we were going to have and the house on the hillside, where we would stay forever because he had moved a bunch as a kid and didn’t want to put our children through that. He said that we’d always have to remember, whether rich, or poor, or better, to still love each other, forever and always.

He said he’d want to name our boy Elijah, and, he said, Elijah would have to be born first because our second child will be a girl, and he’ll need to protect her. I smiled. He tried to get me to think of a name for our “little angel” as he called her, but I had never been good with names. We both thought for a little while, until the silence became too much for us and we had to start another conversation. Before either of us said anything though, a willowy, red-headed woman popped into our room. When her eyes fell on the bed, she blushed almost as dark as her hair and whispered an apology. Her left hand reached for the door knob and the glimmer of a diamond on her ring finger caught my eye.

You know in cartoons when the character gets an idea and a light bulb shows up above their heads? It seemed like that happened for me, right there, in that moment. My idea seemed to shed a light, a ray of hope over the room and everything seemed just a little brighter. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it wouldn’t solve the real problem here. The one problem that nobody could really fix, unless they were a miracle worker. But who said love didn’t work miracles? I’d read enough fairy tales in my time to believe good can come from tragedy.

I slowly stood up, following after the woman, easily engaging her in conversation. I found her name was Ellie and her niece had apparently just had a baby. She was very bad with directions and had gotten lost, somehow switching the numbers she was given from room 132 to 231. As we walked farther away from my love lying on his bed, alone in some foreign room, I sped to explain my idea to her. Her eyes welled with tears and she nodded vigorously when I asked if she would mind helping.

We got all the nurses we could and explained to them my idea. Everyone was on board before we went to retrieve Ellie’s husband from his new family member. Even he agreed.