Healing the Scars
Chapter 2
"I don't know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every other part of my body is broken"
"I don't know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every other part of my body is broken"
Two Months Later. . .
Luke fought against the thick black fog surrounding his mind like a heavy blanket to open his eyes. A white ceiling greeted the tired orbs. He immediately recognized the room. He had seen it too many times already. The kidney transplant he got when he was younger, and the many checkups had left him quite famliar with hospital ceilings.
I'm in a hospital...what I'm doing here?
He franticly scanned the room as his mind tried to work the missing pieces together. There was something missing. Something wasn't right. He could feel it. There were two nurses standing just a few feet away. They started to walk closer to his bed. But no one else. Scott was nowhere around.
Where is he?
He willed his racing heart to slow down as he looked down at his hands were resting on either side. Just like the rest of his body, they felt as heavy as lead. An IV was attached to his right arm and that's when he noticed a long bandage across his left.
What happened?
"Mr. Snyder?" One of the nurses had taken a step forward and now stood next to his bed. "I'm Alice, and this is Sally." She gestured a hand towards an older woman standing near her. "We're going to take good care of you."
Luke looked up with a confused look on his bruised face. "What happened to me?" He asked in a near inaudible whisper.
"You and your husband were in a house fire," Alice said, her voice soft.
A glimpse of a fire flashed through his mind.
"Where is my husband?" Luke asked with trembling voice as he gazed at the two women. A part of him already knew the answer. His mind had done the math. It was right there in Alice's sad brown eyes.
"He didn't make it, did he?"
"I'm so sorry."
Luke lowered his eyes and swallowed hard as he tried to hold back the tears threatening to fall. Luke saw how Alice glanced over to the other woman. She seemed to ask permission to say something. But a frowning Sally shook her head while administering a slight warning to the younger woman.
"We're going to leave you alone for a moment. But if you need anything, just push the button by your bed here; and one of us will come running. OK?"
Luke nodded. But his mind had already shut out her words. They were only a low buzzing in his ears. He felt it when Alice gave his arm a light squeeze as if to comfort him. But the touch felt cold and so unfamiliar; not like the touch he had wanted to feel. The relief washed over him as he heard footsteps and a door being carefully closed, indicating that they were leaving the room.
Luke leaned his head back against the fluffy pillow and gazed up toward the white ceiling, letting his thoughts drift. He closed his eyes, and took his body and mind back to that horrifying night.
It could have been a second or an hour, when he his eyes snapped opened again in reaction to pure horror. Luke was breathing heavily, almost as if he had ran a mile uphill. He felt like someone had dropped a bucket of cold water over him. But the memory was still clearly floating in his mind. For a moment as he looked down at his bandage arm, he wished it had only been a nightmare. But it wasn't. It was indeed reality from which there was no escape.
I killed my husband
Luke buried his head deep into the pillow. His nails dug into his fingers as he struggled to hold back the scream filling his lungs waiting to escape. Finally those tears that had been trying to break free were released.
Luke later found out that he had been in a drug-induced coma for almost two months after his entire left arm sustained a third-degree burn in the fire. Doctors often put patients with severe burns in this state; where the body feels no pain and the person isn't aware of the situation. Instead, they enjoy a restful sleep while where undergoing multiple surgeries.
Apparently, he had already had four or five of those skin ripping and skin grafting procedures as they called it. It was done to help the arm heal by removing skin. It also worked to reduce scarring by making it less visible. But no matter how many times they worked on him, Luke knew that the scar would never completely disappear.
Six months later...
Most people would have considered this to be a beautiful summer day. Perhaps the best so far of the season. The sun was shining brightly
and the sky was clear as far as the eye could see.
But for Luke, the only word to describe today would be Hell.
Most people would have enjoyed the warmth of the sun as it danced over their skin, tanning them. They would have relished in the light breeze weeping like a soft touch as it moved through the trees.
But not Luke. His footsteps were slow as they inched toward his destination. He slowly dropped to his knees. He reached out his hand to touched the grave where his husband now rested peacefully.
The tears would start dropping any minute. But Luke didn't care. Despite everything that had happened - all the treatments, the pain and the loss - a part of him still thought this was all just a bad dream. And at any minute, he would wake up to find himself in his husband's warm and safe embrace.
But Scott's grave site proof that all of this was real. His husband was never coming back.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered as he reached out and let his right index finger traced the engraved outline of his husband's name.
I killed you.
Luke knew that if Scott were there, he would have told him that it was an accident. That's what other people had tried to tell him. But none of them had even come close to experiencing a situation like his. So how the h'ell could they possibly know?
Luke wasn't sure how long he sat there just starring at the grave, when he suddenly felt a presence nearby. He looked up to find a tall man with dark hair resting back on his own knees a few feet away. He too was letting his finger follow the letters engraved into the grave marker.
Suddenly the man looked up, and for a moment, their eyes met. Realizing that he had been caught starring at the man, Luke lowered his gaze. He quickly stood up, brushing the dirt off his jeans.
As he started walking away, Luke could feel the man's gaze. A small part of him couldn't help to look behind his shoulder. To his surprise, he saw the man walking toward him.
"Wait!" the man yelled as he run to catch up with Luke. He caught his shoulder and sprung him around. "You didn't have to leave. " He panted a bit.
"I didn't want to bother you." Luke blushed as he realized how stupid that sounded. It was a grave yard. Everyone was allowed there, He hadn't even bothered the man. He had just been caught starring - not a crime in itself. Well, not really.
"Yo-you didn't," the man replied examining Luke more closely. Luke looked up to find himself starting into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. "I'm sorry. But you look very familiar. Have we meet before?" He tilted his head and gazed back at Luke.
"I don't think so." Luke shook his head. "I would have recognized those blue eyes." He mumbled as another wave of blush spread across his cheeks.
The man took a step closer. "You look so familiar." He whispered as he drank in all of Luke's facial features and let his eyes travel down Luke's neck; and across his shoulders and further down.
As he came across Luke arms, he suddenly stopped as a small gasp escaped his lips. "Oh no."
Pure instinct drove Luke to hide his arm behind his back.
"You're Luke Snyder."
Stunned by what was coming out from the man's mouth, he could only nod at first and then confirm the man's suspicions.
"Yeah, that's me."
Looking past the man's blue eyes, Luke finally saw it. "You're the firefighter who saved me. Noah, right?"
The man nodded. "Yeah, that's me." He smiled a little as he shook his head in disbelief. "I can't believe I'm actually meeting you, and in the grave yard of all places.
Luke just stood there, not sure what he should do or say to the man, who saved his life. "They told me..." he began, gathering strength, "that you didn't know that my husband was inside, too."
"That's right." Noah's blue eyes suddenly looked appeared incredibly sad. "We had been told that you were the only one in the house when the report first and that your husband was away on a business trip." Noah looked down at the ground as he spoke, afraid to see the hurt in the blonde's eyes. "I don't know if it's any comfort. But he didn't suffer. . . unlike you."
"Unlike me?" Luke whispered more to himself than to Noah.
"Yes," Noah replied quietly.
Growing uncomfortable, Luke hastily said good-bye and turned to leave. But once again Noah grabbed his shoulder.
He reached inside his pocket and pulled out a business card.
"If you ever need someone to talk to...someone who knows what you've been through, call me." He pressed the card into Luke's hand and then turned and left.
Luke stared as the man disappeared behind some nearby oak trees. After taking one last glimpse at Scott's grave, Luke started heading back home.
Luke grew angry as he caught another man staring at him.
When Luke used to walked down a street, he knew people sometimes turned their heads. He had his own theory as to why. Those moments made him feel a bit proud of his appearance. But that was before the fire. Now, whenever he stopped or slowed down, he would catch people staring at his arm. Some appeared morbidly fascinated while others seemed a bit disgusted.
Luke's recent bus ride illustrated this point. No one seemed to bother with him except for this one guy, who wouldn't stop staring. Luke slowly moved his hands behind his back as he angrily starred back. But the guy's eyes were glued to where his arm had been only a moment ago. He kept his eyes trained on the man as he slowly started walking toward him. It wasn't until then that the insensitive jerk seemed to notice he had been caught. He lowered his gaze. He quickly looked away. Luke glared angrily at the man as the bus pulled up to Luke's stop and he got off. .
He turned around to see the bus driving off down the road. The mystery man remained a mystery, but hardly forgotten.
Luke shook his head, trying to forget the man's insulting stare. But it had become common place in his life along with a lot of other things, like the hospital visits, the questions and the loneliness. All the same, these moments when he caught people staring at him, somehow seemed to upset him nonetheless.
He started walking through the neighborhood park, when suddenly a little girl perhaps 8 or 9 coming walking toward him. They passed each other, and then little girl ran back to him.
"Excuse me," she said as she drew closer. "I was just wondering what happened to you arm." She pointed toward his arm once again hidden behind Luke's back.
"Hhm. . .I was in an accident," Luke replied in a somewhat kind, soft voice. But another part of him was boiling mad because this wasn't the way to act toward strangers.
Calm down, she's just a little girl... You can't tell a young girl that it's none of her business.
"Did it hurt?" she asked, tilting her head, her big green eyes staring at him.
Luke nodded. "Yeah. It hurt a lot."
"I'm sorry," the girl replied as her eyes quickly changed from being filled with curiosity to sadness.
"It's OK," he shrugged. Out of the corner of his eye, Luke noticed someone apparently the child's mother approaching them.
"You can't go and ask a stranger something like that, Nina," the woman said as she grabbed the little girl's hand. "I'm very sorry," she mumbled before dragging away Nina.
Luke watched them walk away before he started heading home.
The end to just another day. . .
He thought as he threw his keys on the kitchen table. He slowly undressed and walked into the bedroom. As he put his wristwatch on the nightstand, he spotted the business card given to him at the cemetery.
Noah Mayer, huh? The man who saved my life.
The firefighter's home address along with a cell phone number and email address was printed on the card. A weird feeling crept through Luke as he stared at it. It was as if something was telling him to call Mayer.
Luke snatched up the card and threw it away before climbing into his lonely bed.
I DON'T NEED TO TALK TO ANYONE ! No one can help me because no one understands. How could they? I'm responsible for killing another person because I forgot to turn off the oven. And how many times did Scott nag about me changing the batteries to the smoke alarm?
He stared up at the ceiling as if it somehow held an answer for how to deal with this hellish, living pain.
Despite Luke's best efforts to ignore the card - rolling over and pulling up the covers - it seemed to call to him from the floor near the trash basket. Unable to ignore it any further, Luke threw off the covers. He bent down to pick up the card and placed it back on the With a sight he threw the cover away and picked the card up and placed it back on the nightstand.
I really hate the summer
He thought as the nightmares once again claimed him.