Reckless Hearts (19 page)

Later, sitting at
a wobbly aluminum table under the dim fluorescent lights of the empty hospital cafeteria, Elena poked at a slimy bowl of cubed honeydew with her spoon. She knew she should eat, but she couldn't bring herself to do so. She didn't feel like she deserved to eat. She didn't deserve nourishment. She didn't deserve anything good in her life after what she'd done—accidentally, she reminded herself—to Jake.

The honeydew was disgusting. She couldn't eat it.

She tried the cottage cheese she'd bought, lifted one halfhearted spoonful to her mouth and moved the watery pebbles around with her tongue. This, at least,
she could swallow, but it tasted like sand soaked in sour milk.

Her stomach ached. Her throat felt raw and scratchy. She'd cried herself out and now she just felt like a zombie.

But she had to eat something. She had to stay alive, if for no other reason than to punish Nathaniel and hold vigil over Jake's barely breathing body.

When Elena saw Nathaniel saunter into the cafeteria, wearing his sunglasses like a jackass, she felt the old Rios rage rise up in her. She almost jumped out of her seat to run across the room and claw his eyes out. She couldn't go to war with him. Not here. Not now. The chubby guy at the cash register would see her. She'd be ushered out by security and then everything would be that much worse.

Shaking with repressed anger, she slouched down in her seat and tried to make herself small.

But of course he saw her. The only other person in the room, besides the beleaguered guy working the cash register, was a nervous middle-aged man with a beard who, while pretending to read, had been tapping an incoherent rhythm with his thumb on his tabletop since Elena had arrived.

Nathaniel lifted his sunglasses onto his forehead and pointed at Elena in that way arrogant bros do when
they want to look both casual and macho at the same time. He headed right toward her and sat in a splayed-leg stance in the chair across from her.

“What do you want?” Elena hissed, emphatically setting her spoon on the table.

He leaned on his forearms, his hands clasped in front of him, and smirked and stared at her and said not a word.

“If you don't want anything, leave me alone,” Elena said.

He just went on smirking.

Elena stared back at him. If this was a staring contest, she refused to lose.

Finally he said, “I guess we're not friends anymore, then.”

“Fuck. Off.”

“I'll take that as a no. That's fine. I got what I wanted out of you.”

Letting her eyes pour acid at him, she refused to dignify that with an answer.

He leaned in closer across the table and studied her like he was looking for a weakness. “You understand, though, that we're not done with each other yet, right?”

“I'm not going to fuck you again,” she spit back at him.

Chuckling, he said, “You weren't that good, anyway. I'm talking about the ‘accident.'”

“Accident. Yeah. Good one.” She came close to slapping him, just barely restraining herself.

“See, that's what I mean. We've got unfinished business to discuss.”

He disgusted her. She leaned back in her chair to get away from him.

He didn't seem bothered by her revulsion. Adjusting himself in his seat, he pushed forward. “Like I said. We both know it was an accident and that's all anybody else needs to know, too. I need you to promise me that you won't go spreading insidious rumors that this might have been anything else.”

“Oh?” she said. “You think you've still got some hold on me? You think you can just snap and I'll do what you say? You don't know me too well, do you?”

Instead of answering, Nathaniel reached down and unlatched the clasp on the black leather messenger bag he'd set on the floor by his feet. He pulled out a large Ziploc bag and placed it on the table. It contained the jar in which Elena had captured the bees.

“I'll tell you what I know,” he whispered. “I know that this jar was on the floor of Jake's car. I've got a time stamped photo to prove it.”

Elena flinched.

“What? You think I wouldn't have ridden down here to watch? I came back to Dream Point last night. I've spent all day making sure everything went according to
the plan. It wasn't hard to sneak up and grab the jar during all the chaos with the paramedics.”

He paused and threw Elena a smug smile.

Then, holding the jar up again, he said, “You see that dust clinging to the edges? That's pollen. I'm sure it would be a snap to forensically link it to the dead bees that were also in the car, and that, as you know, were responsible for putting Jake in the hospital. Here's something I'm not sure about, though. Did you wear gloves while you were chasing those bees around your backyard?”

Elena flinched. She gazed at the honeydew. She gazed at the cottage cheese. She thought about throwing them into Nathaniel's face, but she knew that doing so wouldn't accomplish anything. She shuddered a little, and trying not to blink, looked defiantly back up at Nathaniel.

“I didn't think so. See, you're the one who loses if the truth comes out. You did this to him, and you alone.”

“Did I?” she asked. “Did I really do it all alone? I'm not so sure about that.”

“No? Who'd you conspire with?”

“You!”

He waved his finger critically. “That couldn't be true. I just met you today. You must mean Harlow.” He smirked again. “Who doesn't exist.”

He had her. She knew it and she knew he knew it, too. The only thing worse than what was happening now would have been for her to break down in tears in front of him. She was glad she'd cried herself out earlier.

“Why did you do this?” she asked him.

Realizing he'd won, Nathaniel allowed himself to slouch back in his chair. “Why not?” he said.

“You've destroyed his life. He's lying there like a vegetable now. The doctor said he might never wake up.”

“
I
destroyed his life? I don't think so. That was all you.”

“Can you at least stop smirking? I mean, do you have any soul at all?”

He screwed his face up into a softer smile and tipped his head at a sensitive angle. For a moment, Elena saw a trace of the person she'd thought he was when he'd been pretending to be Harlow. Somehow that made everything worse.

“Was any of it true? Anything at all? That story about your friend who died? Or are you just a horrible, evil person who has nothing inside him but hatred and ugliness?”

He patted her hand paternalistically and she recoiled, feeling a spike shoot through her nerves.

When he stood up, the smirk was back. “Thanks for the conversation,” he said, packing the jar back into his
bag and throwing it over his shoulder. “I think it was exceedingly productive.”

With that, he sauntered out like he'd sauntered in, leaving Elena to sit there with her melon and cottage cheese, more alone than she'd ever been in her life.

Nine days later,
the only change in Jake's condition was that the swelling had receded. Breathing shallowly, his eyes lightly shut, he looked like himself now, but sadder, lonelier.

Dr. Lawrence, whom Elena still found unnecessarily cold, though she had to admit now that he was excellent at his job, had told her that the internal inflammations had begun to lessen as well. He'd upped the chances of Jake's survival, but warned Elena that he might never wake up from his coma because it was hard to tell how much damage the decreased blood flow to his brain may have caused. So, good and bad news. All they could do now was wait.

Elena held vigil by the side of Jake's bed like she had every day after school since the “accident,” giving his mom a break to check in at the café and take care of the life stuff that didn't stop for tragedy. One of the nurses had told her that sometimes music helped stimulate the brain, so today she'd booted up the compilation of songs Jake had given her for Christmas. She'd been listening to them nonstop on her headphones anyway and it seemed right, if poignantly futile, to listen to them together with him, even if he couldn't hear them.

One after the other, Jake's tunes filled the room like ghosts of some present that should have been. “Wake Me When You're Home.” “Silly.” “Then She Smiled.” “I'm Here.” “Nothing Doing,” with its moody calypso beat. “Saltwater Taffy,” the first song he'd ever played for her, sitting in the grass in his backyard on Greenvale Street.

She held his hand, laid her head on his chest, and gazed at his immobile face, letting the music billow around her.

“Misunderstood.” “Roll On By.” “That's the Way Love Used to Be.”

She'd always loved his music, but now it seemed richer, subtler, more beautiful than it ever had before. To think that Sarah in the Keys had really been Elena. That all this was written for her. And that now . . . now it was too late to tell him how much it meant to her.

“Driftwood,” the newest one, the one he'd written
while she was stupidly letting herself be drawn in by Harlow, especially broke her heart. She could imagine him sitting alone in that strange impersonal mansion on the shore, staring out at the waves and believing with all his soul that he'd lost her forever.

“Don't let the sea wash me away,” he sang.

She kissed his breastbone.

“I won't,” she whispered. “I promise. I'll hold you tight. I'll swim you back to shore.”

She kissed him again and let the song wash over her.

“Just stay with me,” she said. “I need you. I can't survive here without you.”

She squeezed his hand and she felt a brief, weak pressure on the soft spot behind her thumb. He hadn't opened his eyes. He hadn't moved in any other way, but still, she wondered, was that him squeezing back? She willed it to be true.

Squeezing again, she sat up and waited for a response.

“Jake?” she said. “Jaybird?”

Nothing.

Then, just as she was about to give up and reconcile herself to the possibility that she'd imagined him communicating with her through his hand out of a desperate desire to have him here, awake with her, he squeezed again. This time she knew it had really happened. She saw it. She'd watched it, his index finger, flexing ever so slightly, but meaningfully, with intent.

As she waited for another sign from him, the slow, mournful picking of his guitar floated from the speaker she'd set up next to the flowers on the bedside table.

“I'm right here,” she said.

His Adam's apple slid up and down on his neck like he was trying to swallow. Then his eyes opened a sliver and Elena felt her whole body rushing with warm water.

She scooted the chair over so that she could be nearer to his face.

As his eyes opened wider, she leaned over and smiled down at him.

He seemed not to recognize her at first. His eyes weren't quite focused. They gazed up, taking nothing in, as though his mind hadn't woken up yet. He manipulated his lips, kneading them against each other, trying to form words that wouldn't come.

It took all of his effort, but he finally managed to push out a hoarse sound. “Elena.”

“Yes, Jake, I'm right here.”

The corners of his lips turned almost imperceptibly upward and, breathing deeply for the first time in over a week, he let his eyes shut again.

“Where am I?” he said.

“You're at the hospital. You've been asleep.”

He nodded without opening his eyes again.

For a long minute he remained still, breathing deeply, and Elena worried that he was sinking back into
his coma, but finally, he said, “What happened?”

Elena's heart seized up inside her. She'd known she would have to answer this question if Jake ever woke up, but she hadn't thought she'd be confronted with it so soon. Straightening his hair with the flat of her hand, she asked him if he remembered anything.

“There was a buzzing.” He breathed deeply. Talking exhausted him. “Like a bee.”

Elena wanted to tell him the truth, she really did. Just not right now. Not as the first thing he heard. He'd hate her. And he'd be right to hate her. “You were stung,” she said.

“How? I don't . . .” He huffed and paused to catch his breath. “I'm careful around bees. I'm . . . allergic.”

Thankfully, he kept his eyes shut throughout this conversation. The thought that some tension in her face might betray her and tip him off to her guilt was too much for Elena to bear.

“I know,” she said, soothing him, running her hand repeatedly through his hair. Nathaniel's threat burned at the front of her brain. “It . . . it must have slipped in through the window—or when you opened the door to get in. I don't know. A horrible accident. That's all I can think it was.”

He opened his eyes again and gazed into hers. She could see the thankfulness and trust pouring out of him toward her and the tension in her chest twisted ever
tighter until she felt the shame rise to her cheeks and she had to turn away.

Jake's music, which had been playing all this time, abruptly came to an end and the room suddenly filled with silence. This, somehow, more than anything else, pointed out to her how deeply she'd betrayed him. What kind of person had she turned into that she'd baldly lie like this to the boy she loved? She didn't deserve him. Not at all. But knowing this just made her need him that much more.

The tears began to stream down her cheeks.

Jake tried to raise his hand to wipe them away, but he could only mange to lift his hand six inches off the bed before it fell limply back to his side.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

She climbed into the bed and wrapped her leg across his torso, pressing herself into him, clinging to his chest. She was sobbing now. Her whole body shook.

“Elena,” he said. “What's wrong?”

She kissed him on the collarbone above the loose neckline of his hospital gown.

“Nothing's wrong,” she said. “I love you is all.”