Page 49 of Silver Linings

twenty-nine

. . .

To my luck, the first flight out of JFK direct to Seattle was boarding by the time I made it to the airport.

I ran a mad dash through security and got to my gate right before they closed the doors.

Once I was seated and we were in the air, the adrenaline I was surviving on up until that point abruptly wore off, and I fell asleep immediately.

I was grateful for it, though, since it kept my mind from spinning to worst case scenarios. But now that I was back on the West Coast and in a cab straight to the hospital, all the what ifs were running rampant.

Mom said Laurel was in a bad accident. It was vague, but there was enough panic in her voice to scare me into action.

She could be in surgery right now. What if she was in a coma?

Fuck, she could be paralyzed. The thought of my wonderfully stubborn and headstrong sister lying prone in a hospital bed makes me physically ill, and the shaking of the car as it rolls over the highway isn’t helping the rising nausea churning inside my gut.

After what feels like an eternity, we roll up to the hospital, and the wheels have barely stopped turning before I throw myself out the door into the bustling emergency room.

The place is packed full of people. Nurses are flying around, charts in hand, family members pacing the waiting room, biting their nails down to the quick, all while announcements are being made over the speakers.

It’s an overwhelming, sensory overload nightmare cloaked as a health facility.

I scan the room but don’t see my parents anywhere before quickly walking to the front desk, sidestepping an anxious kid with the zoomies.

“I’m looking for Laurel Wells’ room, please,” I pant out of breath.

The woman at reception barely spares me an upward glance. “Relation?”

“I’m her brother.” She types something into her computer, nails clicking against the keyboard, ratcheting my anxiety up higher the longer she doesn’t tell me anything. “Is she—is she okay?”

“I can’t disclose that information.”

I am seconds away from running through the halls of this ER to search every room until I find my sister, to let her know I am here, that I’m sorry I hadn’t gotten here sooner.

Please let me be here on time this time . An image of my brother’s body floating face up in a lake flashes through my mind, reminding me of the day I didn’t make it in time.

“She’s in room 3410–” I’m already sprinting down the hallway in search of her room, barely pausing long enough to check the directional signs hanging on the wall telling me I need to go up.

I dart up two flights of stairs and tumble out onto the third floor hallway, hanging a right, passing room after room bringing me closer. My chest is heaving from the cardio and anxiety fueling my every movement this morning when I notice I’m one door away.

Room 3410 is just up ahead on my left. I pick up my pace, steeling myself for the worst before bursting through the door to find—what?

“What the hell are you doing here?” Laurel half-shouts around a heaping spoonful of chocolate pudding.

Laurel—who’s sitting up in a hospital bed with wires coming out of her arm, with bruising and swelling covering her face. She has a leg and an arm both in castings but otherwise, she’s fine. Not dead, paralyzed or in a coma.

The pressure on my chest eases infinitesimally as tears fill my eyes.

“Did I hit my head harder than I thought, and now I’m hallucinating my oaf of a big brother standing before me?”

“Laur…”

“Quick, if you’re really Hendrix and not a mirage, tell me what priceless family heirloom I broke when we were kids.” She’s painfully serious as she holds my stare with raised brows.

“You broke half of grandma’s vintage dining set when you were eight.” That set had been passed down through multiple generations before she toppled too hard into the cabinet and sent half the pieces falling—then tried to blame it on me and Maddox before eventually fessing up to Mom.

She tries to adjust herself in bed but winces as pain coasts along her body. I rush over to help her, fussing over the pillows to help them hold her up higher.

“Why are you here, Hen?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” I grab her hand.

“Not really. You live across the country.”

“Mom called me in the middle of the night, sobbing hysterically, saying you’d been in an accident and that it was bad.

I wasn’t really thinking after that. I just…

got here as fast as I could. All I–” my voice breaks around the words, “all I could see was Maddie. I needed to be sure you were okay.” Nothing more needs to be said.

She knows as well as I do the permanent scars that day left on us.

“I appreciate you for coming, but I’m okay. I’m just a little banged up.” She smiles at me, trying to ease the tension written all over my face.

“That’s clearly not true.” I nod at her broken and wrapped body.

Before she can reply, my mother pushes into the room carrying a tray of food. “I got you a plate of your favorite breakfa—oh!” Mom gasps when she sees me, nearly dropping the tray. Tears immediately well up in her eyes, a twin mirror to my own.

“Hi, Mom.” I stand and grab the food from her, setting it on the table next to my sister so I can wrap her up in a hug. She silently sobs against me, her shoulders shaking, and I squeeze her tighter.

“What are you doing here?” My whole body tenses at the sound of my dad’s voice coming in through the door.

“So many warm greetings this morning,” I mumble, turning to face my father. “Dad.” I give him a clipped nod.

“You’ve got some nerve showing up here like this after leaving the way you did.”

“I don’t think this is the best time to do this,” Mom says, trying to mitigate the rising conflict my dad seems hellbent on seeing through.

“Mom called me. I’m here. There’s nothing more to say.

” My voice is clipped as I try to keep my cool in front of the man whose judgment I can feel burning a hole in my temple.

It’s a complicated thing to dread someone’s presence while also still feeling like the kid who always begged for his approval.

I love my Dad, but that love often felt like trying to hug a cactus.

“The first call you’ve answered in months.

Isn’t that lucky?” The blow lands exactly how he intended it to, swift and to the gut.

And the worst part is, I can’t even refute it.

He’s right. I’ve been a horrible son, screening calls and never calling back.

At first, it was because I desperately needed the space, but then it was because I never thought to.

I got caught up in living life the way I wanted to, in a way that made me truly happy for the first time in my life.

I stay silent, trying my hardest to not give him the reaction I know he wants. He’s itching for a fight, never the first to back down, and I feel my hackles rise as I feel him staring at my back. But he just won’t let it go.

“I guess it’s fitting that you’re here, since you were the cause of the accident, after all.” My whole body goes ramrod straight.

What is he talking about?

“Dad. Don’t,” Laurel pleads.

But the thing about my dad is, he always has to have the upper hand. He’s always had it over me, and that’s part of what took me away from here.

“You don’t want him to know that the only reason you were even in the car was because you were going to follow in his footsteps and run off to New York?”

My eyes dart over to Laurel, and she’s looking pointedly down at her lap. “Laurel?”

“I had a red-eye. I was on my way to the airport,” she whispers, still refusing eye contact.

“Why?” My voice is gentle.

“Because you put it in her head that she could run away from this family too.”

I never take my eyes off my sister’s face as dad’s words land, and she flinches in her hospital bed. Something about watching my normally larger-than-life spitfire of a sister, sheltering away from my father’s harsh words, is all it takes for me to finally snap.

“Or maybe she needed to get away from you.”

“Excuse me?” His tone is filled with ice shards that cut through the room, sending an instant chill around the fluorescently lit space.

“I was just coming to visit you.” Laurel tries to dispel the tension, but I’ve already been sent down this path, and all the feelings I’ve been burying around my father for years have finally come to a head.

I rise out of my seat and face my dad. “You’ve never been a warm man, and I convinced myself that was okay because you were never cruel. But since Maddox died–”

“Don’t say his name.” Anger seeps from his tone, but underneath it, I also hear a chord of grief.

“–since Maddie died you’ve become…callous and cold.

Before I left, nothing I did was right and I was a constant failure to you.

You would berate me over every little thing.

Punishing me for the accident. As if I wasn’t punishing myself enough over it.

I know it’s my fault he’s gone, I know that!

I’m sor–” I choke on a cry, “I’m sorry. He would still be here if I had been stronger, and I’ll live with that for the rest of my life.

” I can hear my mom and sister softly crying behind me.

“So the answer is to just leave? I thought I raised you to be tougher stock than that,” Dad admonishes.