Forgiven (Ruined) (18 page)

             
Oh.  Of what?

             
They're afraid for you.

             
Open your eyes.

             
That's not one of the voices.  That's just me.  Telling me that I've hit my head.  I'm not back on the night in Seattle, my father lying dead on the kitchen floor, my mother screaming, terrified and confused because I hid it from her, all those months, hid my father's escalating alcoholism and violence.  She had enough to worry about.  So when she finds us like that, when her only daughter is in the back of a police car and her only husband is in the back of an ambulance in a body bag, she doesn't understand.

             
I do.  Maybe for the first time.  Despite therapy.  Despite Kellan.  Despite my mother forgiving me and the forgiveness process I started.  Despite telling Bruce and no longer hiding, despite Emmy knowing and trying to come out of the shell, out from behind the wall I'd thrown up to protect the world from me.

             
To protect me from the world.

             
Despite everything, it's now, on the asphalt of Bee Street and a cross street I don't even know the name of, outside Kellan's new apartment, it's
now
that I understand I did nothing to deserve a death sentence.

             
I protected myself.  And after that, I threw away the gift of the life I had saved.  I've been crawling out of that shell, but I haven't fully understood the process.

             
I haven't fully understood what Kellan has been saying.

             
I thought I was ruined.  But I was hiding.  Giving up.  I was in the process of ruining.  The coming back to life?  That's what he was talking about.  Being a light in the world.  Giving instead of taking.  That's the trade.  The balance.  I took one light.

             
I make sure mine is a light that shines brightly in the world.

             
"I understand now," I say, looking at the legs.  Most people gathered around me are still standing.  It's like being four years old again.  I can't see up to their faces.

             
The sirens are close.  I'm on the street.  I'm injured.  My palms are bleeding and I'm pretty sure my right leg is broken.  But they can stop panicking about concussion. 

             
My head is clear for the first time in years.

             
"Willow."

             
This face I can see.  Because he bends down and looks into my eyes.  His hands are on my shoulders.  The voices all around caution not to touch me, to be careful, lots of instructions.

             
Fuck you, voices.  You didn't bend down and touch me.  You stood around and repeated the same things.

             
That's OK, though.  Gave me time to think.

             
To understand what I told Bruce is true.  The face I look up into, the green eyes that meet mine?  I'm in love with him.

             
"Kellan."

             
"Give her some room."

             
The legs don't move at all.  That makes me giggle.  The giggling makes Kellan look very worried.

             
"People, back off, give her some air."

             
I put a hand on his forearm.  "It's OK.  There's air here.  The legs.  They're beside the point."

             
Yeah, that didn't exactly reassure him, either. 

             
"The ambulance is here," he tells me, looking over his shoulder.  "Are you – what hap – I don't."  He stops. 

             
I could answer.  No, I'm not really alright.  I was hit by a car.  Of course you don't understand.  I don't either.

             
It doesn't matter.  The only important thing is: "Will you go with me?"

             
Kellan's hands tighten on my shoulders even as the EMTs rush from the ambulance, stretcher rattling, instructions shouted to the people with the legs surrounding me to
get back
, and with the voice of authority that makes them do so.

             
"Try to stop me," Kellan says.

             
Horror stories about emergency rooms abound, about waiting hours while everyone else goes first and gunshot wounds are attended to along with worried moms whose children coughed twice.  But the hospital where I'm taken takes me straight in and a very nice East Indian doctor tells me I appear to have broken my leg, so straight faced that I almost end up laughing.  Then the pain starts and I don't.  I also worry that laughing is a sign of concussion.  Why else would someone laugh at the idea of a broken leg?

             
Kellan says almost nothing.  He just holds my hand whenever someone isn't shoving him aside to take my blood pressure (elevated, there's a surprise, maybe it was being pushed into traffic and being hit by a car?), and heart rate and oxygen intake.  I don't even ask about the last of those.  I'm breathing, that's enough for me.  Especially given I got the feeling whoever shoved me would have been happy to prevent my continuing to breathe.

             
Kellan has to let go when they take me to X-ray, where they conclusively prove my right tibia is broken.  It's not a joint, no part of ankle or knee, and a clean break, which seems to make everyone happy.  Cast and crutches are called for, which means I'm going to be here more than long enough for the hospital to reach my parents and call them down here.

             
I'm a legal adult and with the person I most want to be here with, if here's a place I have to be (I'd rather have avoided it, thanks).  But the nature of things being the way they are, I'm on my parents' insurance and so the hospital calls them.  Which is fine in a way – hospital staff can deal with the number of panicked Mom Questions that first erupt and I don't have to.  By then, though, I've got some choice opiates in my system.  I could probably deal with my mom's questions.

             
What I don't want to deal with is the Willow + Kellan equation that Bruce is going to have instant questions about.  As in,
What were you doing on Bee Street?  Didn't I tell you to let him go?

             
Not that it's up to Bruce to tell me to let Kellan go.  Since Kellan hasn't let go of me any time he didn't have to, maybe someone should ask him how he feels about it.

             
I certainly haven't had time to.  As soon as the doctor gets done examining and the cast process is arranged for and the nurses have given me drugs with a needle that almost hurt more than my leg (there's a reason I don't have piercings, damn it) the police are there.

             
"You're Willow Blake?" 

             
They're both males, which at least means no one suspects this was a sexual assault.  Maybe I just watch too much TV; I always figured they sent female cops for female victims,.

             
And I try not to flash back to my last, to-date biggest, encounter with law enforcement.

             
"I'm Willow Blake," I acknowledge, because it's easier just to answer in very complete sentences.  Especially when the pain killer is making me feel as woozy as I did the night Reed had to rescue me from the jerks at the bonfire who were getting girls drunk and then doing what comes naturally to guys who intentionally get girls drunk.  I fish for my bag and realize I don't have it.  "Is my purse – " I start at Kellan, who just nods without handing it to me and the cops don't ask for ID anyway.

             
"We'd like to get the details from you about what happened."

             
I don't ask if they got details from everybody standing around me, who probably saw more than I did.  I glance at Kellan, wondering if they'll ask him to leave, something about keeping our stories straight.  They did when – in Seattle.  But then I wasn't a victim.  They didn't determine that until later.

             
"I was waiting for Kellan," I tell them, hoping I won't have to elaborate about why I was sitting on a wall outside his apartment building with no idea when he'd be back and without texting him I was there, waiting.  "We – we had an argument.  I was waiting for him to get home and I." I hesitate.  Almost stutter.  And then tell the truth.  "I lost my nerve about seeing him.  I was heading to a cross street, looking for an address to give to a taxi service."

             
"You didn't have your car with you?" one of the officers asks.  He's black, built like a fighter, very thick and muscled, with a clean-shaven head.  His partner is tall, blond, white, thin.  They're kind of like reverses of each other.

             
Easier to agree with them about not having my car with me.  I'd prefer not to get into the whole
I don't drive and here's why thing
.  At the same time I flash back to what I thought on the street.  That hiding didn't work.  My past from Seattle is writing me letters.  Kellan's past in the form of someone who hasn't forgiven him is sending him threats.

             
Which in an equation my math tutor couldn't figure out means I can learn to drive and get a license.  I'm legally Willow Blake now.  There may be a brief moment in DMV that someone will want to know about Kate Lambert.  Maybe not.

             
Doesn't matter.

             
Wow.  I'm going to get to learn to drive.  Soon as I get out of the cast.

             
"I didn't have a car with me.  It was busy on the street.  There were a lot of people on the sidewalk."  I frown at them. 

             
"There's a bus that stops on Bee Street, just short of your location," the tall skinny cop says.

             
That makes sense.  "Plus it was early evening.  People might have been leaving work," I add.  "Someone bumped into me.  I had just reached the corner of the cross street and started to turn to see who it was and someone shoved me hard in the back."  I gesture around mid-back.

             
That sparks a series of questions.  Was I bumped or pushed.

             
Pushed. 

             
Did I feel the hands shoving me.

             
Of course I did.  What do you mean?

             
Individual hands.  Could someone have lost their balance, maybe tripped or run into someone else and hit you?

             
I kind of gape at that question.  Carefully I explain.  I felt individual hands on my back, shoving.  I started to look back and was shoved again.  On purpose.  Then I fell.  Into traffic.  Directly in front of a car.

             
Kellan's hand tightens on mine.

             
The other questions are routine.  For them.  For me everything is surreal.  Probably that's the drugs. 

             
Maybe it's the situation.

             
The police ask if I saw anybody at all at any time on the street who I might have recognized.  I didn't.  They ask about whether I know anybody who might do something like this.

             
That's a little harder.  I could tell them about the
I know what you did
letter that's followed me from Seattle.  I should.  I know that.  I just don't want to be Kate Lambert again, not even for a few minutes.

             
Or do I tell them about the threats Kellan has received.  That I believe that's what our argument to the extent that we had one is about?  That I suspect someone I've never met and have no proof has done anything, except –

             
Eye for an eye.  At the time I had thought that causing a car accident would be tricky, because how could someone do it without being n the accident themselves and possibly hurt or even killed?

             
But what if eye for an eye meant experiencing not what the victims, Aimee and her babies, experienced?

             
But rather what the survivors went through?

             
"Miss Blake?"

             
I glance up at Kellan.  No one can touch me where I am now.  Even now it's not me I'm afraid for.  It's Kellan.  Not because I'm brave or feel invulnerable.  There's a very scraped up hand he's hanging onto that proves to me I'm not and a broken leg throbbing despite opiates in my system.

             
But Kellan was responsible for three deaths, the complete change of one man's life and the shattering of his best friend's life, however much Jake and his father may have forgiven.

             
Yes, I'm terrified of the idea of someone who wants to kill me.  The words don't even sound real in my mind.  Someone who wants to kill me.  But I'm more afraid of Kellan's reaction if someone severely injured me, left me broken and unfixable.  Left me that way and then told Kellan eye for an eye.  You did this. Your actions led to this.  You harmed someone I love.