Re-Arranged

Chapter Fourteen

Wes Whitley had not had an easy time once he stepped into the forties of his life. Recovery after the accident took time, but once he had contented to being a cripple for life, another problem arose. His memories of the time he had been unconscious was largely nonexistent and the drugs let him sleep through the discomforts, erasing dreams of any kind, at least from his conscious mind. Dreams and the effects they had on him.

He did not realize it at all until one day when his eyes opened to a darkened room with the curtains almost drawn to a close. From an uncovered corner of the closed window, something dazzled bright against the glass. If anyone had been there with Wes at the time, they could have reassured him it was just the sun and probably that reassurance would have worked.

But, alone, his brain recalled the headlights they had last encountered and how similar this dazzling ball of light was to them, in the same kind of night-like surrounding.

With that one trigger began months of screaming and crying and clawing and other aggressive reactions that remained fully intact in his awake mind and pulled his recovery into a regressive direction. Sarah could not help him through it either. From the moment that she saw him right after the accident, she had suffered a panic attack that did not bode well with her eight-month along womb.

Both the spouses could not depend on each other in the darkest of their times, and so had to rely on the support friends could give. Their three children had to be shipped away to their surviving grandparents on the father's side for better caretaking. They never saw their baby brother being born six weeks after the accident, their mother falling into postnatal depression or their father losing his will to live.

Kat and Frank, and Ted and Amelia took turns taking care of the distraught, broken family. Three years of therapy later, for both Sarah and Wes, it was as though waking up anew and meeting each other for the first time.

*

Funeral had been carried out, as per Wes' instructions, in a colourful, joyful manner which was not the traditional way of these ceremonies. The prayers and the final send-off were as what rituals dictated, however.

Three days past, the only people remaining in the Whitley residence were the ones who had been with him in the very last moments of his life. Every one of them stood beside the lake, letting the summer breeze pinch their exposed skins and sway their clothes and hair.

Winslow, the eldest of the Whitley children, sat on his haunches as he sprinkled the ashes into the grass along the bank of their backyard lake. He brushed his gloved hands together to rid of them of the clinging ash and stood up, the urn standing by his feet.

Everyone in the small party bowed their heads, said their prayers and turned to leave.

"That one is Wins... Winslow, right?" Darian whispered to Kelly, tucking her hand through his arm. When she nodded, he sighed in relief. Though Winslow was the only other son besides Sawyer, he had only been informed of the remaining three Whitley children's names over the course of these three days. Remembering them was harder than he thought, and with the two sisters, he kept mixing their faces, they looked a lot alike.

"Apparently, Uncle Wes had had some outlandish suggestions for names, some of which Aunt Sarah suspected rightly to be made up words even, so she put her foot down for the first two kids. For the third one, however, she had been sleeping heavily, utterly exhausted, when the time came to register the baby girl's name. Thus, we ended up with cousins named Winslow, Shawna and Wednesday," Kelly had explained when Darian had asked after the names once again despite the introductions. "Sawyer was named by Aunt Kat. And no, Wednesday was not born on her namesake day. Uncle Wes just felt like it."