Kansas Summer

"There's Something I Want You To Have"

“He’s coming around.”

“He’s coming around?”

“Colin!” I hear, blinking from the light.  I feel a body pressed against me.  My first thought is that it’s Jenna, but I know that she is too weak to leave her bed.  I smell the perfume and immediately recognize the person as Morgan.  She holds me in a bear hug while I am laying on my bed.  “Can you hear me?”

“Hear you?” I groan, sitting up, “Why would I not be able to hear you?”

Everyone in the room seems to breathe a sigh of relief.  Morgan wipes her forehead.  “You don’t feel bad, Colin?”

“No, I feel fine.  Why am I in this bed anyway?”  I swing my legs out from under the thin covers.  My socks touch the ice cold tile floor.  Conveniently, my shoes lie neatly under the bed.  I put them on.  “Why’s everyone here?” I ask, trying to remember the events from whenever it was that I had my memory.

“Honey, you’ve been passed out for a day now.  We wanted to be sure that everything was okay.  The way the doctors described your incident, we thought you’d be deaf for life.”  I am pleased that my stepmom showed up.  That meant a lot to me.

“It’s a miracle that you can hear at all, really,” Morgan adds.  “Alyse still isn’t awake, though.”

Alyse.  The name brings memories flooding back to me.  Immediately, my heart races.  “Alyse.  Is she alright?” I ask, nervously.

“As far as the doctors say, she should be fine.  She’s just got a few broken bones and ribs.  You did fall on her pretty hard.”  I grimace.  “But you saved her life,” Morgan reminds me.

I hold my head in my hands.  “What room is she in?” I ask.  No sooner does Morgan give me the number then I am out of the room and racing down hallways for Room 332.

When I burst in the door, I’m surprised to see a young man of about 25 sitting at Alyse’s bedside.  His face is tanned, but carries a slight reddish hue, and a slight beard and chinstrap cross the bottom of his face.  Short deep-brown hair lays haphazardly across his scalp. He wears a deep blue sweatshirt that gives him a gothic appearance.  I don’t recognize him, and he seems equally startled at my sudden entrance.

“Well, it’s nice to see that you are awake; I wanted to thank you in person for what you did for me.”

I am puzzled.  “What did I do for you?  I don’t believe I recognize you.  Have we met?”

The man shakes his head.  “We’ve never spoken to each other, but I am the one who hauled you two from the subway tracks.”

My face goes red.  “I’m sorry about that,” I mumble.  “Truthfully, it’s my fault that it happened.”

The man holds his hand up to stop me.  “No,” he says quietly, “I need to thank you.  If it wasn’t for you, I probably wouldn’t be alive.”

I glance up at him quickly, even more puzzled.  He continues.

“That night, two days ago, I got in a real bad fight.  Some gang picked on me because I was walking in the wrong neighborhood.  They knocked me to the ground and force-fed me alcohol.  It wasn’t a lot, but in my house, it was forbidden.  My mom divorced my father who drunk himself to a stupor every night because of it.  I knew that I couldn’t go home. 

“I happened to be in the same train station as you that night.  And like—your companion—I contemplated jumping in front of that train.  It wasn’t the first time; I was the one who got good grades in school and was constantly harassed by the popular kids.  They hurt me so much that I barely made it through college, even though I never saw them again after high school.  I hate living at home now that I don’t have a job.  My mom gets on me almost every day. And it’s gotten to the point where I believe that she would just be better off without me.