“They won’t…hurt him, will they?” I asked.
Dana laughed. “What do you care? He was going to kill you—or worse.”
“I just don’t want to be like them—like the people who make Destiny,” I said, and even though she rolled her eyes, I knew she agreed.
“Whatever,” she said and went back inside, where Garrett was sitting with Cal.
Milo put his arm around me.
You’re not like them. You couldn’t be
. Aloud, he said, “Morgan will make sure they don’t hurt him.”
“Right! Because I’m the miracle worker!” Morgan rolled his eyes—he and Dana were more alike than either of them would admit—and climbed into the SUV. Jilly was already slouched in the front seat. “I’ll be back before your twenty-two hours are up,” Morgan said. And with that, they drove away.
I shook my head. Jilly had said practically nothing to me. Not even
thank you.
Give her time
, Milo told me.
She’s still getting used to the idea of not being dead. Life can be scary when you’re finally free—when you move from the darkness into the light. You have to learn how to be human, sometimes for the very first time.
I knew that he was talking about himself as well as Jilly. And I also knew that he was wrong.
You didn’t have to learn those things
, I told him.
You just had to remember.
But Milo shook his head. He had almost no walls up anymore, and I could see the way he saw himself. He believed that he’d been shaped into something severely broken by his stepfather’s abuse. And I didn’t doubt that he’d been damaged. It was hard to imagine any child surviving what he had without paying some awful cost in self-esteem or self-worth.
But everything that he was—my kind, generous, thoughtful, gentle, sweet Milo—had been part of him from the start.
He laughed at that.
Gentle and sweet. I’m not sure John Doe would agree
.
I didn’t try to argue. Boys can be weird when you use words like
sweet
to describe them, even though it was one of the things that most women looked for in a guy. I just mentally took his hand and led him, in his mind, back to a long-ago memory that I’d first glimpsed when he’d torn down those mega-walls.
In this memory, he’d been tiny and tucked into a bed in a small, dark room. But it wasn’t a scary room like the closet had been. The door was open a crack, and the light from the hallway was bright enough so that he—we—could see walls that were decorated with beautifully hand-drawn pictures of cars and airplanes and smiling teddy bears. There was a big bookshelf along one wall, and it was filled with books and handmade toys.
What is this?
He was surprised and I realized it was a memory that he’d forgotten. It had gotten lost in all of his anger, sorrow, and pain.
In that memory, the door was pushed open, and a young woman came inside. She was trying to be stern, her finger up to her lips, but she smiled with genuine joy as she sat on the edge of the bed.
“You saved your cookie for me,” she said, her cool fingers pushing our hair back from our face. It felt unbelievably good. We were glad she was finally home—that we knew she was safe.
“It’s your favorite kind,” we told her earnestly, then asked, “How was work, Mommy?”
She was tired, but she smiled again. She worked as a waitress at a restaurant and tried to get the breakfast and lunch shifts, but sometimes had to go in at night. “It went quickly, no big problems—thanks for asking.” She narrowed her eyes, but that smile still curled about her lips. “Did Daddy forget to give you a bath? I think he did. Do you know how I know, Mr. Milo? Because you are so,
so
stinky.”
We giggled as she tickled us, but then she snuggled close to hug and kiss us despite any stinkiness, and we felt so,
so
safe and content.
“How about we share that cookie tomorrow?” she asked us with another kiss. And then she started to sing. Her voice was pretty but nothing special, except it was, because it was
hers
. And the song she sang was a made-up melody about Milo climbing up a tree and finding a bird in a nest and a bug on a leaf, and we knew it was a song that she’d sung to us a thousand times before. And we relaxed and floated, safe and secure, as her face and her voice and the love in her eyes faded away as we finally fell asleep.
And there on Garrett’s driveway, outside that doctor’s office where Calvin was clinging to life, Milo was trying not to cry as he kissed me.
Thank you for that.
You were loved
, I told him as I kissed him back.
But then you weren’t. But now you are again. Okay?
He nodded and kissed me even more deeply.
Also? I think it’s kinda hot to have a boyfriend who’s sensitive enough to cry when he feels emotion
.
He broke off our kiss to look down at me and smile.
That’s something I’m going to need to work on.
I smiled back at him, reaching up to trace the adorable dimples in his cheeks.
Take your time. I’m not going anywhere
.
The moon was out, and its reflection on the water was beautiful. It was a gorgeous, balmy, romantic night, and all should have been right with the world.
Except for my best friend in a coma, and my
other
friend whose long-lost little sister was eight-freaking-months pregnant, and—
Still thoughts
, Milo said and kissed me again.
————
A few minutes later, at around two in the morning, Milo and I went inside to check on Calvin. “You want us to sit with him?” I asked Dana. “Take a turn?”
I could smell her tension mixing with both her fear and her hope.
“Feel free to sit,” she said. “But I’m not going anywhere.” She motioned to the chairs that Garrett had pulled into the room.
I realized that he was in there, too—curled up and asleep on pillows he’d tossed into the corner.
And while that wasn’t the strangest thing I’d seen today—not by a long shot—the concept of Calvin’s arch nemesis, Garrett Hathaway, sitting vigil at Cal’s bedside was pretty darn weird.
Milo sat down in the softest-looking of the chairs and pulled me onto his lap.
“Feel free to tell me to shut up if you’d rather sit here quietly,” I said to Dana, “but I read somewhere that people in comas can hear when people talk to them.” I looked at Cal. “So, Calvin. Would you rather have a tattoo of a dog pooping on your back, or a tattoo that says
Long Live Goat Cheese
on your forehead?”
Silence. Because, of course, Cal couldn’t answer. Dana’s back was to me as she held tightly to Cal’s hand, and she didn’t move.
Garrett sat up in the corner. “What kind of dog? I mean, I think that would probably matter to Cal. Pit bull, yes. Terrier, probably no.”
“Unless he wanted to make it as small as possible,” I said. “Then a terrier makes sense, or maybe a teacup Pomeranian in that four-legs-together crouch…?”
Dana cleared her throat and finally turned to look at me.
I went proactive with the apology. “Sorry.”
“No,” she said. “These are definitely questions Cal would want answered. Like, he’d also want to know what font. You know. For the
Long Live Goat Cheese
.”
I laughed—a short burst of surprise and gratefulness. “Comic Sans,” I told her. “Definitely.”
“That’s a tough one,” Dana said. “Because Cal does love Comic Sans.”
I laughed again, and this time it felt good. “Then let’s go for the forehead tattoo in Comic Sans. Unless Cal wakes up and says otherwise…? Nope. Cal obviously doesn’t object. Good. It’s definite. Next question.” I looked at Milo.
“Would you…rather be a pirate afraid of water, or a cowboy afraid of horses?” he asked.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Dana scoffed. “Pirate.”
“For sure Cal would want to be a pirate,” I agreed. “With a service horse that he rides on the deck of his pirate ship, to help him with his fear of water.”
Dana laughed. “Nice.”
“Garrett, your turn,” I said.
He frowned, then said, “Would you rather have a Lamborghini or a Porsche?”
Clearly, he didn’t get the rules of the game. “Good try, but no,” I said. I turned to Dana. “Dane?”
“Would you rather go skydiving over an ocean filled with sea monsters or…go hiking in the woods near the chupacabra’s lair?”
“Chupacabra!” I said. “Calvin, you really need to wake up, because Dana just said
chupacabra
!”
He didn’t, of course. But we did have to explain to Garrett that a chupacabra was Spanish for “goat sucker,” a legendary bear-and-or-space-alien-and-or-lizard-like animal (depending on who claimed to see it—sometimes it was a mix of all three) that left livestock exsanguinated. And then we had to explain that exsanguinate, in this case, meant left in the middle of a mountain field without any blood—like not a drop, which, yes, was weird.
And
then
we had to discuss whether Calvin’s new
Long Live Goat Cheese
tattoo on his forehead would make the chupacabra target him in particular, so we decided that, just to be safe, he’d better skydive into sea monsters instead.
Would you rather be a vampire allergic to blood, or a werewolf allergic to dog hair?
Would you rather have normal teeth and a horrible unibrow, or normal eyebrows and one huge buck tooth?
Would you rather throw up while giving your high school graduation speech, or get caught picking your nose at your wedding?
Would you rather eat fried monkey brains, or drink eel pee?
All through the night, we went through a long list of questions, deciding all of them for Calvin as Dana held tightly to his unresponsive hand.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
I went home before dawn, so I could pretend that I’d been in my bed all night. I showered while I had the chance, then went into the kitchen to endure the usual annoying breakfast ritual with my mom.
The one where she tried to start a conversation as I tried to eat as quickly as humanly possible.
“There was a fire out by the beach last night,” she told me as she scrolled through the local news.
“I know,” I started to say, but swallowed it and instead said, “There was?”
“It started in some faulty wiring,” Mom reported. “The place burned to the ground and three people were killed.”
“Yikes,” I said, as inwardly I was glad that the fire had been deemed an accident.
“I think I’ll call an electrician. Make sure our house is safe.”
“I think we’re probably okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. Count on Mom to go into full screaming-terror mode.
Except even
that
wasn’t as annoying as it usually was as I thought about Milo’s distant memory of his mother. I’d always thought that I had too many memories of my mom coming into my room and sitting on the edge of my bed. Now I knew that there was no such thing.
In fact, I kissed Mom on the cheek on my way out the door, which surprised the crap out of her. “Will you be home for dinner?” she called after me.
“I don’t think so,” I called back.
“You know, you can invite that boy over,” Mom said, stopping me short halfway out the door. “The cute one with the long hair? What’s his name, Milo?”
“Okay, yeah,” I called back, at first thinking
no freaking way
, but then thinking maybe Milo would actually like that. Dinner at my house. With my mom. “But not tonight.”
“Whenever!” Mom called back. “I love you!”
“Love you, too!”
————
Nothing had changed with Calvin.
The medical scanner gave us a continuous readout of his condition, and when Morgan checked in via phone, I read him everything on the screen, and he seemed confident that things were going as well as they possibly could.
At this point, Dana was doing some heavy-duty movie marathoning, watching one movie after the other and describing the action to Cal—continuing with the assumption that he could hear us.
Garrett ordered pizza both at noon and in the evening, and normally I would’ve objected to a double pizza day, but by dinnertime we were approaching that twenty-two-hour mark, and it didn’t matter what I ate. My appetite was gone.
At around 9:15—just a few minutes before I was certain Cal was going to wake up at 9:18—Morgan poked his head into the room where Dana and Milo and I were sitting next to Calvin.
“Just wanted to let you know that I’m back. And I’m right outside if you need me,” he said. “And just for the record, darlings, if Cal
doesn’t
wake up, that doesn’t mean—”
“Yeah, we don’t need to hear that right now,” Dana cut him off.
“Fair enough,” Morgan said and left, shutting the door tightly behind him.
We were down to counting seconds now, and as the clock on the computer screen finally flipped from 9:17 to 9:18, I turned to look at Calvin.
Who didn’t move.
Nothing had changed in his vitals either. His heart was beating slowly and steadily, his blood pressure was the same.
But he didn’t wake up. His eyes didn’t open; he didn’t laugh; he didn’t move—he just lay there. Still in a coma.
Then 9:18 became 9:19 and 9:20 and then 9:21.
And I realized in that moment just how desperately and completely I’d believed it—that Calvin
was
going to wake up, and everything was going to be okay. And the panic that I felt when he
didn’t
wake up nearly overwhelmed me.
“Calvin,” I said sharply. “Come on!”
Milo’s arms tightened around me.
“It’s okay,” Dana said quietly. “Twenty-two hours isn’t just a single point on a time line. I mean, yeah, it
can
be, but maybe his prescience rounded it down. It’s twenty-two hours from now through the next fifty-something minutes, until it’s twenty-three hours, at ten eighteen, right? So let’s just give him some space.” She spoke directly to Calvin. “We’re right here, babe, whenever you’re ready to wake up.”
For Cal, timing was everything. And of course, he chose that very moment to come back to us, by whispering, “Love it…when you…call me…
babe
.”