In the Time of Kings (30 page)

“Good to see you’re alive,” he says.

“I ... I’m not dead?”

“I’d say not. If you were trying to kill yourself, next time pick a taller bridge, eh?”

I feel utterly drained, disoriented. The sun is low on the horizon, but is it morning or evening? This is no seaside cliff or wooded glen, but open hills covered in grass. Up above a low rise is the road I’d bailed from when the lorry forced me off on my way back to Aberbeg. Not far away is a meandering stream and maybe twenty feet above it a narrow bridge. I remember it clearly, as if it just happened.

“What year is this?” I mumble. I can see a little better now, but not perfectly.

He laughs and I’m momentarily distracted by his lip barbell piercing. “That bad, are you? Must be pished. Or taken a pummeling. Still 2013, if that helps.”

Shock rolls through me.

No, it doesn’t. I don’t want to be here. I want to be with Mariota. I want to go back.

Digging my fingers into thick grass, I try to pull myself up, but the world spins around me. My muscles are like Jell-O. My shoulder blazes with pain. A groan escapes my throat. Warm dampness spreads along the waistband of my jeans.

The punk rocker or Goth or vampire ... whatever he is pushes me gently back down. “Stay where you are. I called an ambulance already. They’re on the way.” He lifts the bottom of my shirt, grimaces, then puts it back down. “Bleeding a wee bit there. Ugly gash on your head, too. Nothing serious, though. Probably just got scraped up when you took a tumble. I think you’ll be all right.”

“What day is it?” I ask.

“I should probably ask you that. Do you remember?”

I think hard. My head is foggy. What day, what day? Our flight home was supposed to leave in two days, on the 21
^st
of July. “The 19
^th
?”

“Close enough.” He straightens. “Ah, just down the road. Almost here.”

The wail of a siren rises above the rustle of a light wind until it comes to a stop on the road above. Doors slam. My rescuer hails them. Soon two EMTs are scurrying down the hill with a stretcher.

They ask me simple questions: what’s my name, where am I from, how did this happen, does anything hurt, what day is it? I’m not sure I answer everything correctly, because I’m too tired to think and they ask me some things more than once. I just want to go to sleep, hoping I’ll wake up back in 1333.

Because if this is real, if I’m stuck here now, I’ve not only lost Mariota forever, but I’ll soon lose Claire, too. Or already have. If that’s the case, I don’t even want to be alive. The next truck that comes along, I’ll be sure I plant myself squarely in front of it.

It seems like forever before they finish checking me over and begin to carry me uphill. Every stride jars me back to wakefulness. When we finally reach the road, the biker rushes to one of the EMTs and hands him something.

“This must be his.” He drops it into the man’s outstretched hand. “I stopped to take a piss over the bridge when I heard it ringing. Found it part way down the hill, then saw him. Looks like someone’s been trying like mad to reach him.”

The last thing I hear is the boom of the ambulance doors as they fling them shut and the piercing scream of the siren.

––––––––

A
pinpoint of white light blinds me. I jerk my head sideways and hear the crinkle of a stiff pillowcase. A quick look at my surroundings tells me I’m in a private hospital room.

“There now,” comes a voice crackled with age. “Remain calm. Everything’s going to be fine, just fine.”

An older man with ragged gray sideburns and Coke bottle glasses smiles patronizingly at me. Great, I’m being attended to by an octogenarian.

He clicks his pen light off and listens to my heartbeat with his stethoscope. “You must have skidded across the pavement when you fell off your bike.”

“I was run off the road by a moron.”

“Of course. Did you get a license number?”

“I was a little more concerned with not getting splattered under his wheels, actually.”

He moves the cold metal around on my chest, then jots a few notes on the clipboard beside my bed. “No internal injuries, thank goodness. We had to put a few stitches by your temple there. You have some abrasions along your ribs and hip, consistent with the accident you described. And a dislocated shoulder, which we’ve already set. It will be sore for a bit, but you should have full mobility within a week or so. ”

That’s the first time I notice the sling on my right arm. I hadn’t felt the pain before. Don’t feel it now, thanks to the drugs zipping through my bloodstream.

“We couldn’t find any identification on you. Is there someone we can call for you?”

I remember leaving my wallet behind when I left for the kirk. But I’d had my cell phone. “My phone. The guy who found me gave them my phone. Where is it? I need to call Parker.”

“Ah, I’ll see if it’s at the nurse’s station. Who’s Parker? A relative?”

“Brother-in-law. He’s here with my wife.”

“Wife?” His unibrow folds in confusion, then lifts. “Ah, why didn’t you say so? How do we contact her?”

A lot of good that would do. Yet he’d asked the question in all innocence.

“She lapsed into a coma while we were on our honeymoon here. They don’t think ...” The realization that this isn’t a dream wallops me with the force of a hurricane wind. If this is reality, then what had I just been through?

A memory. A memory of a life lived long ago.

“Sir?” he prompts.

Damn it. I can’t say it. But I have to face it. I have to. There’s no more escaping to the fourteenth century. “Is this Berwick Infirmary?”

“Aye, the only.”

I swallow, force the words out. “Coma. They don’t think she’s going to make it.”

“Ah.” He tilts his head back. “Yes, I know who you are now. Let me get your phone for you.”

A few minutes later he’s back with my phone.

“I can’t make out the numbers without my glasses,” I say. “Maybe you could —?”

“Ah, yes.” He steps toward the bed and retrieves a pair of glasses from the adjustable table next to it. “Here you are. They found these on the road. Luckily, they weren’t damaged too badly. Nurse Stephens managed to straighten the frames for you.”

I slip them on and stare at the display, scanning through the missed calls. Parker has called twenty times. What the heck? I’ve only been gone a few hours. Why didn’t he just text me?

Then I see the date. It’s the 21
^st
. The day Claire and I are supposed to be going back to Ohio. A sinking feeling tugs at my stomach.

Oh God. Is she ...?

A knot forms in my throat. I slam the phone against the bed and bite down. If the doctor doesn’t leave, I’m going to break down in front of him.

“It seems one of the nurses took a call not long ago for you,” the doctor says. “It was your brother-in-law. She told him what room you were in. He said he was on his way, but he wanted you to call him right back as soon as you could.”

“Sure.” I gulp in several breaths, turn my head toward the window. “Could you leave?”

“Yes, of course. If you need anything, the call button is on the left rail there. The nurses are only two doors down.”

I wait until the door clicks shut, then scroll to Parker’s name and hit ‘Send’.

“Hello?”

“Parker? It’s me, Ross.”

“Ross! Where in the hell have you been, man? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Run off the road by a truck. Guess I fell down a hill, hit my head. Dislocated my shoulder again, too. But I’m going to be okay.”
Physically
I’m going to be okay. Mentally I’m about to fracture into a million pieces.

“Ross, I need to tell you about Claire.”

I don’t want to hear it. Sooner or later though, I’ll have to.

“You won’t believe this.” He laughs. He actually
laughs
. Sick bastard. “She woke up yesterday. She’s a bit groggy, can’t remember some things. But they say she should make a full recovery in time. God, I can’t believe it, can you?”

The phone drops from my hand onto the pillow. I try to process it all, but can’t. How do you go from accepting the loss of your first love and moving on, to falling in love with another, to this?

“Ross? Ross, are you there?” His voice sounds muted coming from the tiny speaker. I retrieve the phone and press it to my ear again.

“Yeah, I’m here. Just in shock, that’s all.”

“Hey, I had to go back to the hotel and grab a change of clothes, but I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. I told the nurses to have a wheelchair ready for you. I’ll take you to see her when I get there. Okay?”

“Sure, okay.” But the enthusiasm in my words is lacking. I’m not sure what to feel just now. Joy? Loss? Relief? Maybe it’s the guilt that’s eating me up?

In my fists, I ball the sheets up so tight my hands begin to cramp. Tears slick my cheeks and roll onto the pillow.

I need more than fifteen minutes to sort this all out, to get my head on straight. But I don’t have more time. And I can’t just spit out everything that’s happened to me. They’d all think I was insane. Instead, I have to jump back into this life as if nothing ever happened.

I don’t know how I’m going to manage that.

––––––––

P
arker punches the door open and wheels me through. There on the hospital bed is Claire, just as I’d last left her: flat on her back, her tousled blonde hair spread around her puffy face, her eyes closed.

For a second I think she’s slipped back into the coma before I could see her again. Then Parker flips the switch by the door. The light blinks to life, humming for a moment as the bulb warms up. She doesn’t move, not even when Parker clears his throat.

He bends closer to me. “She’s tired. Still sleeps a lot. Come on, let’s say ‘hi’.”

When we reach her, I take her hand, careful to avoid the IV needles taped to the back of it, but that brings no response. Her skin is cool, her fingers limp, her whole body sunken down into the mattress like she hasn’t moved from it in days.

They had warned me she might have brain damage. Am I going to spend the rest of my life caring for someone who doesn’t even know who I am? Can I be that strong, that selfless? I want to shake her awake, hear her shout my name and feel her throw her arms around me.

Face toward the ceiling, Claire’s lashes flutter open, then quickly drift shut again.

“Claire? Claire? I’m here.” I clutch her hand more firmly. “I came back for you, Claire. I came back.”

She squeezes my hand back so lightly I almost don’t notice.

“About time, Ross Lyndon Sinclair.” She turns her head toward me. A faint smile pries apart lips that are thin and cracked. “Took you forever.”

I kiss her knuckles, try to swallow back my tears, but they come anyway. “Yeah, it seems that way.”

HERE & NOW

Berwick, Scotland — 2013

E
very day, Claire improves steadily. They had released me after twenty-four hours, but only after Parker insisted that he’d stay with me for a few days. My shoulder had been set, my gashes sewn up and my abrasions liberally swabbed with iodine. Claire was poked with more needles than a lab rat, as they ran test after test on her, took x-rays and did more MRIs, and woke her up every three hours to take her vital signs. By the fourth night of this, she was so irritated, she tells me, that she threw a half-filled water pitcher at the door when one of the nurses knocked. It makes me wonder if I’ll have to deal with personality changes and volatile mood swings, but fortunately she seems fine except for that one incident. It’s all for a good cause, though. They’re going to write her up in the medical journals as a modern day miracle.

A week plods by before they’ll even talk of letting her go home. I worry that we’ll eventually get swamped with a mountain of medical bills between the two of us. But since we’re in the land of social health care, I decide not to let it bother me. For now.

For now, I only want to remind myself how damn lucky I am. But that’s hard to do, because I still ache for Mariota. And I feel guilty about it, about having slept with her after resisting for so long, even though I shouldn’t. That was another life, I tell myself. I was someone else back then. There was no Claire. Only Mariota.

Yet I miss that life. The simplicity, the rawness of it. And I miss Mariota, terribly. She’s gone now, though. I have to go on. It should be that simple.

Yet it’s not.

Still, something else troubles me. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. Like there’s a piece missing.

––––––––

C
laire poses in front of the hospital bathroom mirror, pulling a brush through her hair in long strokes, a distant look on her face. She doesn’t even notice me coming through the outer door. I lean around the doorframe of the lavatory, gazing at her. Several seconds pass before she gives a startled reaction.

“Oh!” The brush falls from her hand to land in the sink with a clatter. Startled, she looks at me in the mirror. “My God, Ross. You scared me to death.”

“Did you forget I was coming to take you home?” I slide my arms around her waist and kiss her neck. “You looked far away just then. Where were you?”

Sighing heavily, she wriggles out of my hold, then marches to where her suitcase is on the bed. She’s wearing her favorite flowered sundress and a pair of strappy low-heeled sandals. Her hands flutter over her skirt, smoothing the wrinkles as she stares down at her painted toenails.

“Have you ever had a dream,” she says, “that seemed so real you believed it?”

“All the time.” I cross the room and sink into the vinyl chair in the corner.

“I mean like ... like you were actually
there
?”

“Did you have a dream last night?”

“Not last night, no. When I was unconscious.” Her dark eyes flick to me, then down again. “I always thought that being in a coma you’d just be thinking of nothing. Or you’d hear people around you and not be able to respond. But it wasn’t like either of those things.”

“What was it like?” I have to admit, I’m curious. So far I haven’t asked her about it because I figure she’ll tell me if there’s anything worth telling.