Mia Darien - Good Things

Right away, she could feel that it was hot, and wet. She tried to lift her hand to touch it, but found that something was around her hand. In fact, she felt entirely trapped in place. Her brain was moving out of unconsciousness slowly, and couldn’t reconcile the facts. In fact, she was having trouble understanding what the facts were.

“Don’t move,” a man’s voice said from beside her.

She didn’t recognize the voice and that jolted her closer to being awake. Now she tried to open her eyes properly, and found that she couldn’t. There was something on them, almost gluing her eyelashes. Panic began to set in and she started moving.

“Don’t move,” the voice repeated. She felt a squeeze and realized that someone was holding her hand, but she knew that it wasn’t Tom.

“Who are you?” she asked, hearing her own voice and how small it sounded. There was a strange, tinny echo to it. “Why can’t I open my eyes? Where’s Tom?” She started to struggle again, but remained trapped and when she moved too much, it hurt.

“You were in a car accident,” the voice said. Jesse kept trying to open her eyes. It hurt her eyelids but felt like with each attempt, she was able to achieve more. The voice continued, “Tom, I’m assuming he was driving. He’s right beside you, but he’s unconscious. I’ve called the paramedics, sweetheart, you just stay still. I don’t know what injuries you have.” She felt the squeeze on her hand again. “Help is on the way.”

Why couldn’t she remember a car accident? She felt tears well up in her eyes, but it actually helped. It loosened whatever was sticking her eyelashes together so she was able to peel them open, and she instantly found the truth of the stranger’s statement. Before her was the shattered windshield. Turning her head slightly, she was able to see him.

Jesse didn’t know this man kneeling beside her open car door. She was sure that she had never seen him before in her life, but he on the ground with her feeble hand clasped in his. “Help is on the way, I promise,” he reassured her. His voice was kind and he looked at her like he was earnestly concerned, even though they were strangers. She felt tears choking her throat again, but they hurt and she swallowed them back down.

Weakly, she tried to turn her head the other way. She saw Tom. He was slumped back in his seat and she saw blood covering his face. The tears returned and she couldn’t stop them. “Tom?” she asked in that weak little voice again, choking back emotion. “Tom? Wake up, honey, please. Tom? Tom?”

“Wait till the ambulance gets here,” the stranger said again. “They’ll be able to help him.”

Jesse tried to remember what had happened, but everything was so hazy. The effort made her feel like she was going to be sick and she let her head fall back against the headrest as she tried to take a deep breath around the nausea.

She closed her eyes again. “What’s your name?” she whispered.

He once more squeezed her hand gently. “Anthony.”

Jesse forced her breath in and out, slow and steady. “I’m Jesse.” She bit down on her lip, swallowing hard against the pain. She wanted to crawl into the seat beside her and hold her husband until he woke, but she knew she couldn’t. Her seatbelt had her pinned and she didn’t feel like she had the strength to unfasten it. What else might be broken was a deep concern to her mind, and she didn’t want to move too much and make it worse.

Sirens echoed in the distance, but she couldn’t tell from which direction. She listened as they grew closer and louder, overwhelming her aching head. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she heard the sound of rolling tires coming to a stop, doors opening and shutting as she opened her eyes again to try to look out. Everything beyond that broken windshield was a blur, but she saw those dark figures drawing near.

“Tom,” she told them weakly. “Help Tom.”

“Excuse us,” a paramedic said as he came around to the passenger side.

“Help Tom,” she whispered.

“We are, ma’am,” he said. “We are. We’re also going to take care of you.” As he began working on her, she tried to look beyond him to find Anthony, but there was no sign of him.

Sniffing, she felt her throat tighten again. “Thank you,” she whispered to someone who was no longer there as she listened to the sounds of their rescue.

Comparatively, Jesse wasn’t as bad off. She was covered in bruises and lacerations, and had a sprained ankle from where it had been resting when the car hit that tree, but the driver’s side had taken more damage. Tom had taken the hit for her, like he always did—or always tried to. Jesse was up and about in just a few hours, limping around and feeling like she’d been beaten.

Her husband was another matter.

She sat by his bedside. He was still unconscious. No, he wasn’t just unconscious, he was in a coma. The doctors had used words like “intracranial pressure” and “bleeding.” All she knew was that it was bad, and they didn’t know what was going to happen. They were doing things like “monitoring the situation” and “preparing for contingencies.”

As he lay there, she wrapped one hand around his, the other gripping her Tree of Life pendant, and pressed her forehead against the bed beside him. The possibilities rolled out before her in stark terror as her mind tried to suggest she consider a life without him. Those thoughts were shut down as hard as they came, because she couldn’t do it.

Tom and Jesse had met in high school, had become inseparable almost instantly and had stayed that way ever since. Married just after they turned twenty, they were coming up on their tenth anniversary. They had been planning to...

They had been planning.

“Tom,” she whispered at the floor, unable to lift her head. She had known this man for over half of her life, and she couldn’t imagine the rest of it without him. The doctors might be planning for all contingencies, but she couldn’t. He would be okay, because he just had to be. She squeezed his hand, but knew he couldn’t recognize it for what it was.

She was still in that position, half-dazed with the surrealism of it all, when the door to this small Intensive Care Unit room opened. It might have been a visitor for the other patient, so she didn’t bother looking up. Even when the footsteps approached her, she didn’t look up. Jesse felt a heavy hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” the owner of the hand said. She recognized the voice of Tom’s boss down at the autobody shop where he had worked for the past five years. Marcus was a good man and had even become a friend. She murmured a “thank you” but couldn’t summon the power to do much more. The hand left her shoulder and she heard a chair scrape closer. “What do we know?”

“Not much,” she said. It was an effort to draw in a deep breath, but she managed to do so and relayed what had happened and what little she knew of what the doctors said. Marcus, not being a man of many words, just offered the appropriate grunts of sympathy or frustration.

“If there’s anything I can do,” he said, patting her shoulder with his bear paw of a hand one more time. After she mumbled another word of gratitude, he left.

This was roughly how it went for the next two days.

She moved occasionally, strongly encouraged by the nurses to take care of herself. It never equated to eating much, but they managed to keep her fairly hydrated with cups of ginger ale and ice water. Others visited—Tom’s coworkers and friends with the volunteer fire department, and her sister came by as well, a pair of friends stopping by later. There were choked up phone calls with Tom’s parents.

In Tom himself, there had been no change. He wasn’t any worse, and that was something, but he wasn’t any better either. There was no sign of his waking any time soon.