His Everlasting Love: 50 Loving States, Virginia (7 page)

“You’re welcome.”

“So you work with a lot of gimps?”

She wished he’d stop referring to himself in that manner. But she knew a few amputees who’d done this, and also knew it was useless to argue with them about it. Like trying to get a rapper to dump the N-word. Once an amputee appropriated a slur like “gimp,” there was often no convincing him to be politically correct.

Still, she tried to guide him by example. “No, I don’t really work with amputees anymore. But I did for a time. For a while I was on track to become a physiatrist, which is kind of like a cross between a physical therapist and a really hands-on doctor who specializes in musculoskeletal problems.”

“I know what a physiatrist is,” he said, his voice taking on a certain edge. “Had plenty of experience with them.”

Yes, of course he did. Willa rushed on, “Anyway, I quit the program and now I’m just focusing on general physical therapy.”

“Don’t know why you quit med school. Seems like you got a real talent for this kind of job. I bet you would have made a real fine doctor.”

He meant it as a compliment. She knew he meant it as a compliment. But she found herself fighting off her stutter, as she said, “It’s better if we don’t talk while we do these stretches.”

“Oh, okay.”

She could tell she was making an already awkward situation even more so, but she couldn’t help it. The sense of déjà vu was nearly overwhelming as she remembered the first time they had this conversation…

“SO YOUR SISTER RAN OFF. How’s that brother of yours doing? What was his name again? Trevor?”

She’d agreed to meet Sawyer on the hospital roof the night after explaining to him that he was a ghost. Sawyer’s spirit couldn’t go beyond the hospital doors, and this was the only place they could meet where there wouldn’t be regular folks around to see what would appear to be the young American Physiatry Fellow talking to herself.

The conversation actually hadn’t been going too bad before then. She could sort of see why Sawyer had been so popular back home. When he wasn’t being an asshole, he was actually sort of charming. Made good jokes and seemed to be listening with interest when she told him all about med school and how she’d come to be on fellowship in Germany.

However, his question about her brother brought a sad cloud into the conversation.

“Trevor…he died. Thel came home late and forgot to lock the door one night and he wandered out into the road while we were sleeping and got hit by a drunk driver. The crash ended up killing them both. That’s actually most of the reason Thel ran off. And a lot of the reason I decided to go to med school down in Alabama. I guess we’re all dealing with his passing in our own way. I just wish Thel would get back in contact. Let me know she’s alive. Marian says she’s fine, but…”

She trailed off, too sad about the loss of both her brother and her Irish twin to finish.

“Wow, I’m sorry,” he said, letting out a breath. He shook his head. “Hell of a time not to be corporeal. If I was, I’d be giving you a hug right now.”

She threw him a rueful smile. “If you were, I might accept it.”

“So that’s what brought you to Germany, because you wanted to work with amputees?”

“Yes, I think I might have a special gift for it. Being able to see ghosts and what not makes me think I’ll be good with missing limbs. I guess it’s my way of using my creepy talents for good, without, you know, going crazy like my mama.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I don’t know. My father thought she was crazy until that first judge ruled in her favor. Now none of us Grants are so sure.”

“No,” Willa said, shaking her head. “She’s definitely crazy, and not in the euphemistic way either. Remember that time at the mall?”

It was a vague reference, and probably a lot of boys would have pretended to have forgotten. But to his credit, Sawyer said, “That time your sister tried to flirt a meal out of my friends and me? And I made them tell her no?”

Willa could still remember the stomach-curdling humiliation, even if Thel refused to let it show as she walked back to their table empty-handed. “Yeah, that time.”

“I’m sorry about that, Willa. Sorry for a lot of things I did back then.”

She let that apology hang for a few seconds before saying, “Now.”

“Yeah, now,” he admitted. “I wish it hadn’t taken me falling into a coma and meeting up with you again in this fucked up place to realize what an asshole I’d been, but sadly, that’s what it took.”

“At least you’re honest about it,” she said, shrugging off the bitter resentment she’d been carrying around like it was an old coat that no longer fit.

Because it didn’t. She had no idea how Sawyer would be when he woke up and found himself missing part of his leg, but now…now she was starting to get what all those girls back in Greenlee had seen in him.

He hadn’t run away from this conversation like most guys would have, pretending they hadn’t been so bad or making excuses. Instead, he’d turned his handsome face to her and apologized so honestly, it struck her as noble.

“You think I’m honest,” he said with a wry chuff. “I guess that’s one thing I got going for me.”

“You’ve got a lot of things going for you. I wish you could see that.” She slid her eyes over to gauge his reaction to her words.

But he just gave his head a little shake. “What were you going to say about that time at the mall?”

Well, he was honest about
some
things, she guessed. With a mental sigh, she let him change the subject back to a safer topic. At least safer for him.

“The reason my sister decided to flirt with you all that day was because we were truly hungry,” she told him plainly. “The problem with my mom is she doesn’t just see ghosts. She also talks to them and sometimes she gets visits from what she calls “future ghosts”—kind of like ghosts who aren’t quite ghosts yet. Sometimes they just tell her things, sometimes they want help with something they want to correct. That’s what she’s referring to when she says, ‘The spirits told me this or that.’ She says she and Trevor’s dad divorced because we he was unfaithful, but I think the fact that she has literally thousands of spirit friends didn’t help matters either. It certainly didn’t help when it came to providing for the three of us.”

Willa shook her head with real bitterness remembering every single time Thel, Trevor, and she had to go without because her mother had gotten a request she refused to deny from one of her spirits.

“Anyway, about five months after the settlement check came, Marian went out and spent every single dime of it, plus an advance on her next three paychecks, to buy a first edition copy of
The Wizard of Oz
which she then immediately donated to the Smithsonian. Because some curator spirit she’d just met told her he’d always regretted not being able to acquire it for their collection. ”

The memory rolled Willa’s stomach with disgust. “She was always doing stuff like that. And the money she got from the settlement only made it worse. She eats like a bird, so it didn’t matter for her. But Thel and I had to feed Trevor, and you remember how big he was. So we went to the mall after giving him the last can of soup we had in the pantry. Usually Serena could flirt a meal out of one of the clerks. But that night, there wasn’t anybody but older managers working. And there were some lines even Thel wouldn’t cross—at least back then. And there wasn’t any other high schoolers hanging out—I guess because it was a Wednesday. Then you walked into the food court with your friends.”

The Sawyer she was talking to didn’t technically have a body, but she could have sworn she saw his stomach sink as he said, “Fuck, I’m sorry, Willa. If I’d known…”

He trailed off then, because they both knew the answer to the rest of it. Sawyer truly was an asshole back then. He probably would have not only still not bought them a meal, but he would have rubbed their faces in the fact that their mother had squandered all that settlement money on a book.

“No wonder you didn’t want to acknowledge me when you saw me here,” he said, quiet as the night.

She stayed silent, because that was exactly why. They listened to the night air for a while after that, the cool breeze making Willa want to put on a jacket even though it was the middle of summer. German weather wasn’t anything like the weather in Greenlee, Virginia where the nights were so sticky and humid, you didn’t even think of breaking out a sweater until September came around. Standing next to Sawyer didn’t help either. It was like standing next to an old-fashioned ice box for way to long. Cold by association.

“Maybe my coma is karma,” he said into all that quiet. “Retribution for what all I did to you. Maybe that’s why I’m stuck as a ghost now.”

Even a week ago, she would have liked to think the same. But she shook her head. “No, karma doesn’t work like that. And even if it did, you would’ve woken up as soon as you realized the error of your ways.”

She thought of what had happened after her brother died, then. His ghost looking down at his body…confused, only to become even more scared, when a portal suddenly opened up behind him. An oval in thin air with a tableau of two Asian-American women in a doctor’s office, one dressed in a hospital gown. They were holding hands and smiling as a doctor did some kind of procedure under the gown while they watched what was happening on a monitor.

An invitro fertilization procedure, Willa would figure out by her first year of med school. But back then she could only stare at the scene in confused panic, having never before seen a ghost get his portal.

“Thel!” Trevor yelled out to the older sister who’d always served as his fiercest protector as the portal started to suck him in.

But Thel couldn’t see ghosts like her and Marian. Not hearing him, she fell to her knees beside their brother’s large, fallen body screaming, “No! No!”

“It’s okay, my dearest boy,” Marian called out to Trevor with tears in her eyes. “This is where your story with us ends. Go on to your next book. Turn the first page.”

Willa would never forget the look of understanding that suddenly bloomed over Trevor’s scared face. Or the sight of him relaxing into the sucking wind. And then he was gone, the portal snapping shut around him as soon as he was inside.

Leaving nothing but the cicadas, the drunk driver’s last wheezing breaths, and the sound of Thel sobbing.

“No, this isn’t about karma,” Willa whispered to Sawyer. “This is about you.”

He wrinkled his brow. “What do you mean?”

“There’s a few types of spirits roaming around in our world. Most of them have been traumatized in one way or other and can’t let go.” She thought of her own father, and the white teenager from the next town over, still wandering around on the road outside their house after killing Trevor. “But you’re not dead yet. You’re what my mama calls undecided. You haven’t decided which side of the spectrum you want to be on.”

“Undecided,” he repeated. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Of course I don’t want to be in a coma. Of course I’d rather be living.”

She peeked over at him. “Would you?”

He opened his mouth. Then closed it, refusing to confirm or deny what she’d just suspected out loud.

And the easy mood between them became real awkward after that.

SIX YEARS LATER, Willa rushed Sawyer through his stretches.

“Turn over, please,” she said, hating to short-shrift him on the stretching, but suddenly needing to get out of there.

However, Sawyer just laid there, stiff as a board.

“Turn over please,” she repeated.

He hesitated some more, but finally lifted up. She watch his muscles ripple underneath his thin t-shirt as he turned over…to reveal a tent inside of his sweat shorts.

One so huge, it made her whole body heat. But not with embarrassment. With memory. A memory so powerful, she didn’t realize she was staring until he said, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she somehow managed to wheeze out, her mouth now dry as a desert. “It happens.”

Which was true enough. However, when it’d happened before with patients, she’d quickly and efficiently brought the session to an end.

Those other times, her body definitely hadn’t warmed at the thought of pulling down those briefs and taking him in her hand. And her dry mouth definitely hadn’t begun to water as she imagined putting her lips around his full length and finally tasting him there. The sweat, the need, the desire, she could practically feel it rolling off of him.

“Why do I feel like we’re both thinking the same thing?” he asked her.

His hoarse voice snapped her out of the fantasy. And when her gaze flew up to meet his, she found his swamp mud eyes dark with lust.

The sexual tension that had faded into the background during the workout was back with a vengeance now. Pulsing with electricity. Drawing her closer. Making her want to climb up on the table, and…

She shook her head. “We’ve gone over our allotted time. I should go.”

“No, stay,” he said. “We don’t have to…do anything. But I want to talk to you some more. I like talking to you. I feel comfortable with you for some reason.”

Yes, “for some reason” he’d never know or be able to understand.

“I’ve really got to go,” she said again.

“I thought you were done with work for the day. Why do you have leave out of here so fast?”

His question only compelled her to move faster. She packed up her things in record time and headed straight for the door, calling over her shoulder. “I’ve got another appointment.”

Which was true. The center closed at six, which meant she had to get all the way back over to Richmond and pick Trevor up. Thank God for the new car. She never would have made it on time using the bus system like she used to, which was why she usually picked him up before coming back to Greenlee.

“Wait,” he called after her. “Willa, wait, goddammit!”

She stopped and against her better judgment, turned around.

He was sitting up on the table now, which meant the tent wasn’t so much on display. But it was still obvious between his legs, and she forced her eyes up to his muscular torso. Tight with tension, it matched his face, which was now a dark storm cloud of emotions.