Awake (Book 3)

Epilogue

Watch the world go by. Listen to words. Watch mouths. Eat food fed through a tube. Brace yourself for bath day and failed therapy and lost hope.

Three years and every minute, every hour, every day, was the same.

When I closed my eyes and settled in for another long day of nothing, it was easy to fantasize. Easy to daydream. And it was always the same dream. Three years ago I killed my father, and then before I could squeeze the last bits of the serum out of me, August crashed in and saved the day and saved me and we lived happily ever after. And the world was none the wiser.

That was not how it went.

Three years ago I killed my father, and then I squeezed all the last bits of the serum out of me, and Jessica and Blake were the ones to find me. Everything to do with my existence closed up and fizzled away, and August hadn't visited me once since my three years of this hospital being my permanent home, and the world was none the wiser.

The door to my cell opened. Jessica walked in, hair cut in a short bob, her entire being as radiant and beautiful as always. The door clicked softly shut behind her. One gaze toward the TV and she scowled, flicking it off. "They make you watch Soaps all day?" she said, with a hint of a chuckle in her voice. "Why don't they just kill you?"

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to smile; to give her some indication I was alive in this useless body, hearing her, reacting, but I could not.

She pulled up a chair and folded her hands and just stared at me, and all I could do was stare vacantly in the same direction as always. Jessica visited me the most. Sometimes Blake stopped by. He was enrolled in culinary school and doing inhumanly well and so he didn't have a lot of free time. He might have even been in Paris by now. I couldn't be sure. Time passed differently in a hospital.

I waited forever for August, heart breaking over and over when he never showed, but I didn't stop believing. And I would never stop waiting.

Jessica insisted I give up. She insisted I forget about him. Granted, she probably said these truths because she thought I could not understand her, but I could. And they were as useless as my arms and legs.

"Three years, El," she said this time. "Over three years. Three years and a couple weeks. I've tried to find him, but he's August; if he doesn't want to be found, he won't be found. And you need to let him go."

I didn't expect her to understand. She who experienced pure physicality in their relationship. And maybe this whole comatose-not-comatose thing had made me bitter. But I wouldn't expect her to understand the impossibility of two halves not ever being made whole. He had to come back. Eventually he had to come back.

That certain voice inside me was dying a little bit more each day, but it hadn't deserted me completely. And until then, there was only hope.

"I met somebody," she stated, reaching in her purse and pulling out her phone. She showed me a picture, and even though she thought I couldn't see it, I could. Her with another man, slightly taller, wearing rugged boots and jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt. A dog-tag hung around his neck. His right arm slung around her neck, hugging her close. He was missing the left one.

"Army veteran," she murmured, stroking the sides of her phone with loving caresses. "He's a few years older. Three, I think. Wasn't even in the army that long before his arm got blown all to hell." She chuckled darkly. "I guess I have a type, huh?"

I wished I could speak. I wished I could laugh.

Jessica sniffed, dropping her purse to the ground, folding her hands in a gesture of prayer. "Oh, Ellie," she said, tears carving paths down her cheeks. "You gotta get better, man. They want to pull the plug. They want to pull the plug on you. I keep telling them no, that you'll get better, that they just need to be patient. But they insist you're dead inside and this stupid tube is the only thing keeping you alive." She grabbed my immobile hand. "Just give me a sign. Please. You can't give up. You can't stop fighting. The world may never know, but I will. And Blake will. And August. Damn him for losing you, but he will know, too. You can't just give up, okay? You're a fighter. You're a fighter."