Why Lie? (Love Riddles #2) (9 page)

The woman speaks into her radio. “We need a stretcher.”

And as if summoned, two men are there. They carry a flat thin board and help the first police officer lie her on it. The female officer stands next to me, her hand on my shoulder silently offering me support.

One of the paramedics triages her, the other putting a brace around her neck. Together, they lift the board she’s on and we follow them down to where the ambulance is parked behind the police SUV.

I lumber into it after them. The younger of the two drives, the older man treating Sydney. He asks me questions about her history and allergies. I know nothing.

Dragging a hand over my face, I stare at her unmoving body. Everything I know about her, her name, her age, her job, her address, and a host of other things is useless now.

“Can I call her grandmother?” I ask, reaching into my pocket for my cell.

He nods. “The signal is iffy up here. We’re taking her to Memorial if you get through.”

As it rings, I reach over to hold her hand. It’s clammy and coated with mud. I get through. Mr. Fairlane takes the phone from Gigi and I tell him where we’re going. Faintly in the background I hear the beep of locks on a car. They’re on their way. The paramedic asks his questions again and I relay them to her grandfather.

Once all of their questions are answered, I disconnect. That done, my attention goes tunnel, fully focused on the woman in front of me.

Her chest rises and falls but there is no other indication that she’s okay. Her condition, her injuries, are given to the emergency room of the hospital we approach.

There are words I don’t recognize mixed in with ones I do: broken, blood pressure, contusions, unresponsive, and pulse.

Over and over again, I remind myself that she is breathing, that we both are. Somehow, fate smiled on us today since we are both alive.

She’s hurt, though, to what extent I can’t tell. The paramedic does not appear to be frantic. Not that I have any experience riding in an ambulance prior to now.

I’m comparing his behavior to medical dramas I don’t watch on TV.

“Will she be okay?” I ask, suddenly anxious.

Our arrival at the hospital interrupts his opportunity to respond. Still holding onto her hand, I stay beside her as they move her.

I’m stopped at a set of double doors and told to wait.

“But, will she be okay?” I ask again, not wanting to let her go.

“We’ll have a better understanding of her condition soon, sir,” is the response I receive.

That’s no help.

Leaning over her, I brush my lips across her forehead. Then, she’s gone.

All I can do now is wait. The air conditioning is going, my soaked clothes absorbing the chill and incasing me. I strip down to my boxers in a family bathroom and wring the excess water from what I wore. Then I dry them the best I can using the hand dryer.

Instead of freezing, I’m now excessively cold. To stay warm, and keep myself from busting through those double doors, I pace.

When my phone buzzes with an incoming call from Jake, I get up to take it outside. There’s an overhang I stand beneath to avoid the rain. It’s significantly warmer out here, which is a relief.

Because I borrowed his truck, Jake and Kacey are the only ones apart from Sydney’s grandparents and my dad that know I came up here.

“Hey,” I answer.

“What happened? Did you find Sydney?” Jake asks, skipping any sort of greeting.

“I’m at the hospital with her. Her car got caught in a mudslide.”

He whistles low. “She okay?”

“She was unconscious when we got here and I haven’t gotten an update yet. Best case is she’s just banged up. It was bad, the mudslide took her driver side door right off the car.”

“Shit. That’s crazy.”

“It was. I think seeing that took ten years off my life,” I admit.

“I’ll bet. Are you okay?”

Am I?

Hell, that’s not an easy question to answer. Physically, sure, I’m all in one piece. Mentally, a replay of what happened earlier is stuck on repeat in my head.

If those cops weren’t there, if that branch hadn’t held her car against that tree for as long as it had. If so many things had or hadn’t happened, she could be gone.

My first memory of Sydney Fairlane was at Lola’s. It was summer and my parents’ had brought me there after a swim meet for a celebratory slice of pie with some ice cream. They weren’t the only ones who had that idea so the diner was packed with kids and their parents.

I must have been fourteen, and puberty had not been kind. I was gangly, had braces, and acne. She had to have been nine, or ten since she was a year older then Reilly.

She was helping Gigi and delivered my apple pie and vanilla ice cream. She told me I was missing out. That the Boston Crème pie with chocolate chip ice cream was the best.

Jake was my best friend so I was already used to dealing with pesky girls. I argued there was a reason apple pie was an American pastime. It was because it was the best.

She had looked me up and down with a smirk on her face and replied, “That’s all right if you want to be boring.”

Before I could argue apple pie wasn’t boring, Gigi took offence and did it for me. For some reason, for years I held on to that. How dare some ten-year-old girl imply I was boring. Every time I saw her after, that memory dug at me. There were times I behaved stupidly just to fight those words, to prove I wasn’t boring.

I broke into a neighbor’s garage and stole beer to supply a party I didn’t even want to go to. There were other things, risks I took, partly out of feeling helpless during times my mom was sicker than usual and to convince myself I wasn’t boring.

The night I charmed Sydney into letting me into her bed, I realized what an idiot I’d been to hold onto that for so long.

An idiot who took that realization and instead of learning from it, went on to make the biggest mistake of my life. A mistake that has me pacing this emergency room.

Every five minutes, I harass the woman at the check in desk. She remains tight-lipped. “Heath.”

I turn at the sound of my name to see Gigi and Mr. Fairlane hurry into the emergency room. Mr. Fairlane pauses only to shake the rain from his umbrella while Gigi comes straight to me.

“How is she? Have you heard anything?” she asks.

I shake my head and look over my shoulder at Vern, the front desk worker. “She might tell you more because you’re related.”

Gigi gives my hands a squeeze and moves past me to interrogate Vern. Mr. Fairlane waits with me while she does.

He doesn’t miss what my mud-coated appearance implies. “What happened up there?”

I shake my head. “I’ll tell you once we know Sydney is all right.”

His eyes follow mine and together we watch Vern pick up the phone on her desk while Gigi not so patiently waits.

I’ve lost count with how many pins and screws are now holding me together. On the left side of my body, there seem to be more bones that are broken than are not.

Surprisingly, my pinkie toe made it out unscathed. How that happened is anyone’s guess.

When Heath, still wrapping my brain around that, rescued me, I had apparently gone into shock. I suppose seeing my life flash before my eyes, ten separate times in a row in such a short period, will do that to a person.

Thing is, because of that, I was not only as broken as you would expect a person who had been in ten car accidents in a row to be, my organs were also freaking the hell out.

I may not enjoy paying for it, but at least I have health insurance. Otherwise, I’d have to sell all the organs they saved to pay for everything they did.

Moving sucks and these delusional doctors are under the impression that it’s a good thing for my recovery. I’m nowhere near healed and I already have physical therapy.

Considering the fact that I’m still mourning the loss of Lady, which is just cruel, what makes matters even worse is that my jaw is broken, so I can’t even comfort myself with food.

Also, having a mouth wired shut makes it impossible to yell at people. A scream has been building deep inside of me ever since I regained consciousness. As soon as I can open my freaking mouth again, I’m going to yell until it is out. Until then, I’m broken and trapped in more ways than I can mentally handle.

I am quietly shouting inside. I also want to kick every single person who tells me how lucky I am.

Yes, I get that it is a freaking miracle I am alive but, if I were lucky, maybe I wouldn’t have multiple casts. If I were lucky maybe Heath fucking Mackey wouldn’t be sitting in the armchair next to my bed right now.

The one and only pro so far to having my jaw wired shut is a reasonable excuse not to speak to him, that and milkshakes. There’s a gap, wide enough for me to fit a straw, smash bits of a banana or mashed potatoes through. Gigi has become a world expert on protein powders and every other powdered down nutrient.

Now, I’m right-handedly sipping on a mango smoothie and simultaneously ignoring Heath. The first few times he camped out in my room, I pretended to be asleep. That gets old after a while, especially when he wouldn’t take the hint and leave.

There’s a knock at my door before it’s pushed open and Officer Brendan Lowell, or Trip as he asked us to call him, walks in carrying a book. “How are you feeling today?”

My lips tip up, at least, I hope they do. Smiling doesn’t feel right anymore. From the other side of my bed, Heath grumbles something under his breath.

Setting my smoothie onto the table that crosses over my bed, I give Trip a thumbs up. It’s possibly a more positive response than what I actually feel.

He moves to sit in the chair on the other side of my bed, opposite of Heath.

“I brought you that book I told you about yesterday.”

Yes, yesterday.

Trip, all six foot three inches of him, has been a frequent visitor, much to Heath’s annoyance. Heath’s reaction is part of the reason I like Trip as much as I do, that and he helped save my life. He was the one who pulled me from the mudslide. Not that I was conscious at the time.

I didn’t find that part out until he came to visit me. Another thing I learned about him was he used to live in Ferncliff, even went to high school there.

I’m not sure how we never met, especially since Gigi remembered him, but Gigi remembers everything. He went to the police academy after college and has lived on the other side of the canyon my grandparents’ cabin was on ever since.

The cabin suffered no damage from the mudslide, avoiding its path altogether. Officer Lowell and his partner, Officer Maxwell, were the ones who came by the cabin that day to evacuate me. Since the cabin is no worse for wear and I’m lying in a hospital bed, I think he feels guilty.

Which makes no sense. There’s no way anyone could have predicted what path the mudslide was going to take and that my Lady would get stuck in the way. He has nothing to feel guilty over.

It’s sweet that he comes to see me. A couple of times he’s even gone to my physical therapy with me. Heath has gone every other time.

In fact, Heath has been here every single day since I was admitted. Part of me wants to ask Heath if he still has a job. That would take speaking to him so I’ve let my curiosity go unfulfilled.

Trip hands me the book. It’s
Big Magic
by Elizabeth Gilbert. One time when he visited me, he saw me watching
Eat, Pray, Love
and recommended this book.

“Thank you,” I murmur, setting it next to my smoothie, but outside of any danger of condensation.

“How was your PT today?” he asks.

I glare in response, making him laugh.

“You’re going to chew me out for asking that once you’re able to, aren’t you?”

Yes, I was. This morning in my physical therapy, I got to do hip thrusts. My left leg was in a sling so that the weight of my cast wasn’t an issue and so that I didn’t reinjure myself.

My therapists were having a hell of a time coming up with exercises that wouldn’t mess with my other injuries. It’s not every day they have a patient with all my issues.

This morning, the only other patient getting PT while I was, recently had a knee replacement. His surgery was way more recent than mine and he was already walking. Show off. I have an order in which my bones have to heal before I can do anything.

Out of all my injuries, the breaks—plural—to my pelvic bone and my foot were the worst.

Still, a lady a couple days ago got a hip replacement and she was walking too. Because my break was unstable, meaning there was more than one break, my healing is messier. That and the fact that I can’t bare weight on my left leg are the main things holding me back mobility wise.

My skull, nose, jaw, rib, and arm breaks shockingly haven’t been that wretched in the grand scheme of things. Since everything hurts, it’s hard to pick out a spot that hurts more than another.

My jaw is an annoyance but possibly a blessing because it’s seriously hampered any desire I’ve had to chew anyone out. My ankle and leg suck because I hate feeling trapped in this bed.

“They’re releasing me tomorrow,” I murmur through my shut teeth.