PLEASE COME TO BOSTON
A racing blend of things rushed in and out of her cerebellum, in and out of her line of hearing.
"She's doing well, ma'am. Aside from the already healing bullet wound we medicated, on her lower stomach, it's nothing more than a few scratches. We did have to remove a deep fragment of glass from her right arm, but nothing harmful. A few weeks with a bandage…"
"The Bings have horrible marriages. They yell. They fight. And they use the pool boy as a pawn in their sexual games."
"Chandler, have you ever put on a black cocktail dress and asked me up to your hotel room?"
"No."
"Then you are neither of your parents."
"…And it looks like we've got another full day of snow ahead of us. Make sure you bundle up and stay plenty warm out on the streets…"
"…Don't let the sun…go down on me…I'm just another fragment of your life…to wander free…"
The mixing and washing of words and noises stopped, but it was only because Lily had forced herself to sleep again. There, in the darkness and quiet, there were only two things. One was her father, who sat in his chair, reading the morning paper and smiling from time to time. The other was Shane, who whispered words to her, words she couldn't understand but ones that sounded so sweet, so calm. Shane was smiling the same way, as if assuring her.
She wanted so badly to see Jeff, to make sure he was still in there, in the blank part of her alternate world, the one she had since created somehow. But he never showed his face, he never came in laughing or teasing her, he never came to hug her or kiss her or make sure she was alright. It was as if he couldn't, or maybe, didn't want to come.
Hours passed like days, days like centuries where she was; in a cold bed, in a cold room, with no one and nothing, alone in the dark with her thoughts and nightmares. Lily waited to see if someone would come and help her, come and rescue her, but all the people who came, the ones with the needles and questions and medicine did nothing but worry her more. It wasn't that she was in pain physically, the bullet she remembered from her stomach in the Vegas motel hardly hurt anymore. And the stinging she knew she recalled from glass and falling debris was gone.
There was only the ache in her heart.
And it wasn't long before someone finally came to attempt fixing that too.
Massachusetts General Hospital – Boston
January 29th, 2004
It was freezing.
Her toes were like ice cubes when she wiggled them for the first time that morning. She shifted her legs under the tightly bound blankets of that same confined bed and let her eyes open one at a time to the light of the room around her. The sun was out, but the windows were fogged with ice and snow. She gripped the pillow closer to her, hugging it like an old friend, or a long lost lover.
There was the same sound of the same door but she didn't move. She was too concentrated on the way the snow flurries fell on the pane of the window, at a twirling angle, each of them like tiny little winter dancers.
"Blue jean baby…pretty eyes…you married a music man."
Things were coming back to her, from her mind to reality again. She could finally see Jeff, but only when her eyes were open, only when she was watching the snow and thinking of a million different things that couldn't come back. They were too far lost in her mind.
"Ballerina, you must have seen her…dancing in the sand."
He was there on the beach, down on Harper's Shore. He was smiling at her, winking and casting out a fishing line like her dad used to. And Lily was dancing, spinning in the white rock sand, kicking it up like snow in winter. It was just another day of skipping school for them.
"Tiny Dancer, 1994 tour…" she mumbled against her hand on the pillow.
A moment later she felt a hand on her back, on her shoulder, rubbing softly, begging her silently to turn and take notice of the probable healer. And so she did, very carefully, as if barely moving at all when she glanced over her shoulder to the opposite side of the bed. It was the face of her past, the face of victory in one respect or another.
"How are you feeling?"
He mumbled the same way she did, his chin in the palm of his hand, resting on the edge of the bed as he continued to stroke her back lightly.
"Lily, are you in pain?"
She just looked at him defiantly.
"What hurts?"
There was a simple shake of her lip as she drew it in with a bite to control the wave of tears that was building on the high crest of her mind. She relaxed into Tommy's eyes, the ones that were healing enough in their own respect, and she began to drift, like a piece of wood lost on the bay. Like a piece of glass, lost in the bottom of the ocean.
With a heavy, teary breath she whispered, "My head hurts."
"Do you want me to get the doctor for some--?"
"No," she choked through chalky coughing.
Tom sighed tiredly, a wreck just from having to sit by with the mother he hadn't seen in eight years, and wait for his only sister to get well. But it wasn't happening the way he had hoped.
"Lily," he reached out and took her hand, brushing over her knuckles softly. "Doctor Camden says you can go home whenever you're ready. Mom and I want you to come back home with us, back to Chatham. You shouldn't be alone in D.C."
She was breathless as he spoke, wondering too many things to even speak. She wanted to know how many days it had been. She wanted to know what her mother had done when she had seen her 'believed-to-be-dead' son walking towards her again after almost a decade. She wanted to know where Shane and Jeff and the guys were. She wanted to know that things weren't as bad as they felt. But she had a feeling that 'bad' was only the surface.
"We'll take care of you. Just say the word and you can come home, okay?"
Her eyes shifted back and forth from the doorway to Tom then to the snowy window again, before she finally just whispered out, "Tell me what you're really saying."
"What?"
"He's dead," she snapped back at him. "I can't go to him. So, you're going to help me get over my dead husband."
Tom gulped and held her hand tighter, "Lily the doctors haven't said--"
"Oh right, like I'm going to believe a bunch of doctors. I am one. I know he's dead. I felt him die in my hands, Tommy. Don't lie to me--"
"I'm not lying, we don't--"
"Fine," she turned back over to face the window instead of him. "Don't then. I already know."
In silence they sat together in that room, while Debbie Hanson watched from the window of the door, too afraid to go near the situation. She had a son back after eight years, one she swore she'd buried. She had a daughter who was a survivor of a CIA battle and a potential widow like herself. She couldn't move the door beyond touching the handle.
From inside, Tom could do nothing more than reach out and touch his sister's arm and back gently, when he heard the desperate crying from her turned position. He knew it was probably only the start. The gates had only just opened again.
Nantucket Sound – Cape Cod
April 16th, 1994
"Lily, tighten the halyard around the winch!"
His shouting above the wind confused her and she turned back to give him a worried smile at the helm of the yacht. She lifted the rope in her hand and shrugged at him.
"This?"
He laughed wildly and nodded, "Yeah, tie that on the little silver thing over there, baby!"
She looked to where he pointed and then hurried and did as she was told, wrapping the rope around six or eight times. Lily grabbed hold of the rail to keep a firm balance as the boat rocked against the waves of the coming storm. She was still learning, more and more as Jeff took her out onto the water with his dad's sailboat each weekend. And it made him proud.
"I need you to make sure the mainsheet is tight too. The one right here," he pointed to the closer of the two sails where he was and she carefully inched her way across the wet deck, "Just pull as hard as you can."
She brushed her long hair out of her eyes and grasped the line that was flapping around in the wind, her fingers burning as she tugged on it, teeth clenching to make Jeff laugh even louder as he turned the boat over to port side, drifting in a tumble towards the bay.
"You got it?"
"Got it," she yelled back at him tiredly.
He spun the wheel in a flash, making the sails dance under her weakened hold.
"Okay be careful, make sure you hold tight so that the boom doesn't come loose and--"
It was too late when he shouted it, too late when he warned her. One second was all it took for Lily's tiny arms to loosen the hook just enough on the mainsail, so that the boom wiggled free as he'd tried to tell her, and then come swaying in to smack her on the side of her face, like he'd hoped it wouldn't.
"Lily!"
She tumbled backwards, fingers shocked from the ropes and body crushed down into the middle of the idly wandering yacht. Jeff jumped from behind the wheel, letting it gravitate back to a sailing lull, and ran into the middle of the saltwater sprayed deck.
"Lily," he fell at her side, lifting her dizzied, half conscious head. "Lily, baby. Look at me."
He could already see the reddened spot on her temple where the boom had thrashed her face.
"Jeff," she mumbled weakly and he smiled as he stroked her hair.
"You're alright, I got ya."
"It hurts."
He knew exactly what hurt, he could see the bump forming, but it wasn't his style to give into her so easily. Instead he teasingly whispered, "What hurts, your arm?"
She shook her head in his hand even as he leaned down and kissed her arm through his Boston PD sweatshirt.
"No…"
His free hand slid down her body further, "What then? Is it your stomach?" He lifted the sweater away and blew against her flat stomach with his tongue, licking her navel.
"No, no…" she nearly cried with giggling as she held her head. "Ouch."
"Oh I know," he whispered, moving down even further to press his lips to the back of her knee, one of her most ticklish spots. He raised it up against the sea spray and nibbled at the crook of her knee as she threw her hurting head back and moaned in laughter.
"Stop it. STOP! Oh my GOD, it's not there!"
He raised his head and gently dropped her leg, before coming up to her face again. He held her in his lap as she stared up at him weakly, with a faint trace of humor left on her mouth.
"It's my head that hurts."
"Oh," he sighed softly and cradled her head in his hands as he leaned down to nuzzle her wet cheek, "And what a pretty little head it is."
He kissed her chin, her jaw, the corner of her mouth, and then the tenderized place where his terrible teaching skills would leave a three week long bruise and minor concussion. It would be one that only his more practiced skills of love could heal.
Chatham, Cape Cod
Two weeks later – Valentine's Day, 2004
"Mom," Tom rushed through the front door of the house, shouting as he went, trying not to trip, "Mom, where you are?"
"In the kitchen," she called back.
He hurried through the living room and dining room after the sound of her voice and made it to the archway of the kitchen just as he nearly dropped the contents in his hand, the contents that made Debbie Hanson shout when she shut the fridge door. With one hand over her heart and a bottle of milk in the other, she gasped with a heavy breath.
"What are you doing with, that?"
"I got him for Lily. Think it'll help?"
She smiled and shook her head, adding milk to her morning coffee.
"I guess there's only one way to find out, sweetheart."
"Where is she? Upstairs?"
Debbie sipped at her mug and pointed through the kitchen window facing the windy beach. Tom glinted out and saw a single Adirondack chair sitting twenty feet out near the water, with no visible body, but a blanket waving off the sides. He smiled and darted through the sliding doors to the deck, then down into the sand as his mother watched from the window.
Between the cold wind and tackling sand on his boots, Tom could faintly hear an old radio playing beside Lily's chair, spitting out the bittersweet sadness of The Beatles' Yesterday. It slowed his movement, bringing a lasting sigh before he landed in the freezing sand at her feet. She looked like she was asleep, but opened her swollen eyes and slowly turned to look down at him, only half there in reality. He could see straight through her, in a way that scared him.
"Lil…?"
She took a deep breath and changed her position in the chair with legs curled up under the blanket, her old blue coffee mug resting on her knee and her box of tissues falling off to the sand.
There was only a tired, achy mumble, "What?"
"I've got something for you, a Valentine's Day present."
Her eyes fluttered closed for a second, attempting to regain strength enough to peer over her knees and see the object of question that Tom raised to her face. It was a puppy, soft and black with patches of white here and there, and a painted bulls-eye that made her shortly grin as she reached out to pet its tiny face.
"He's a border collie. I found him at the Humane Society this morning. They said he's only five months old, still a baby."
Her brow twisted as the dog's tongue came out to meet her stroking palm. Lily fooled with his floppy, curly ears and smiled a little wider as tears fell down peaceably for once.
"He likes you."
"You got him for me?"
"Yeah," Tom laughed as the dog reached to crawl into her lap on the chair, "I thought it might help cheer you up some, give you some extra company. I know you couldn't have dogs back at your apartment in D.C."
The puppy stretched its nose out to kiss and sniff at Lily's neck, where her perfume lingered from the day before. She wasn't even sure why she still wore it every day. She didn't have an office to go to anymore, or patients to see, or anyone to impress. It was more or less a subconscious necessity to who she had been for so long, and most likely a way to remember someone else who had been as fond as the puppy was of lingering at her neck.
With a soft laugh and sniffle of tears she asked, "What's his name?"
"Oh well, they were calling him Lucky because they found him in a box out on the highway."
"Aw, that's awful." She wanted to cry even deeper from the very thought of it, merely because she'd gotten so good at crying again after all these years. She'd cried every minute of every day for two weeks, and she showed no visible signs of stopping. She scrunched the puppy's face and nuzzled her nose with his, "You poor Lucky thing."
"I actually renamed him for you."
Her eyes turned down at Tom in the sand, almost fearfully.
"Go ahead," he gestured as he hugged his coat tighter against the cold, "Look at his tag."
She did, carefully turning it over in her hand as she felt her heart drop ten feet further into the pit of her stomach where it had resided for too long already. Lily gulped, not nervously, but angrily.
"What do you think?"
Her fiery eyes met her brother's as she gently shoved the dog off of her lap and back into his.
"What's wrong?"
"I can't believe you."
Lily's lip quivered as heavier tears fell. She grabbed her blanket and tissues and coffee, and then stormed off down the beach as Tom tried to chase after her.
"Lily, what's wrong with it? I thought it was a great name for him!"
She was gone, inside of the house and upstairs by the time he pushed his way through the back door and into the kitchen's warmth again. His mom was blocking his way any further with her arms crossed and a wary eye on him and the dog.
"Thomas."
"I don't know what I did wrong. It's just a name. I thought she would love it."
Debbie walked towards him, stroking the dogs' ears playfully as she reached for the tag settled on his neck and collar. She turned the silver engraving over into the light of the kitchen and sighed.
"Honey," she looked up at her son's face, patting it in that motherly way they had both missed for too many years. "I don't know if naming a puppy after your sister's nickname for Jeffery was such a good idea."
"Come on though," he teased, holding the dog up with a shake and tickle of his stomach, "Doesn't he just look like a Sparky?"
Debbie laughed, unable to help it, and nodded assuredly.
"We'll wait and see how she takes it. You know Lily, she loves dogs. She probably won't be able to help this face for very long."
They played with the puppy for a few minutes before Tom stood up and messed with his hair. "I should probably go get ready. I still have to drive all the way into Boston."
"Oh that's right," his mom rose with the puppy in her arms, brushing his shirt of sand. "You have a big Valentine's date tonight. Don't you think we should tell Lily about the--"
"No, don't. Not yet."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah," he yawned and kissed his mom's head, "Its better this way for now."
