FOLLOW YOUR HEART

Chapter 34 - A Slight Accident

Camila stood in the reeds, looking into the lake and calling for Shawn.  Was that him calling back?  The rain was so loud she wasn't sure.  She looked down as something nudged her, and screamed.  It was Shawn, floating face down, unmoving.

"Oh my God, Shawn! Shawn!"

She grabbed him and used all her strength to drag him out, turning him onto his side and checking his airway.  Then she performed CPR, the way she had learned in the course she did with her Mom and Sofi last year for Sofi's school credits.  She seemed to be pushing on his chest forever and then he coughed and spluttered.  She turned him onto his side again and let him vomit up the lake water, coughing even more.  She fell back on her bottom in the mud, exhausted and in shock.  She had thought he was dead.  She had almost lost him.  He sat up weakly and saw her.

"Camila...". She knelt up and hugged him tight and he embraced her tightly.  They were too scared to let go and when she heard a ribbet noise and looked down to see a frog peering up them she knew it was time to move.

"Can you walk?" she asked and he nodded.  She helped him and they staggered back towards the house.  They were fairly close because they had been pushed right to the edge of the small lake and as they pushed through the heavy rain, they saw one of the golf carts careening across the grass, sliding from side to side on the flooded lawn.  It was Tally.

"Come on you two, get on," he called and she helped Shawn, whose head was still bleeding badly.  Her leg was stiff and sore but she felt she could have carried him if she needed to.

"Tally, we have to get him to the hospital!" she called over the rain.  "He got hit on the head and he almost drowned!"

"I'll get the car!"

He pulled up in the cart right out front of the coach house and ran and opened the door, then he helped her drag an almost-unconscious Shawn inside and opened the back door of his car.  She sat in there with Shawn, his bleeding head on her lap.  He looked up at her through unfocused eyes.

"Hey baby," she said quietly.  "You're going to be fine, don't go to sleep OK?"

"OK," he answered weakly.

"I don't care about what happened baby," she realised there were tears running down her face.  "I don't need to know the whole story, I don't care what Jana did or didn't do, I just want you to be OK, because I love you, I always have and I always will."

"I love you too," he croaked, his eyes fluttering.

"DON'T!  Don't go to sleep, stay with me OK?"

He reached up and touched her face with a trembling hand and then it fell and his eyes closed.

***

What was that noise?  It sounded like someone had left the fridge door ajar.  Beep beep beep. 

"Close the door," he said, his words sounding like they had come from a long distance, like underwater maybe. Underwater.  He spluttered, feeling his lungs filling with filthy lake water. 

"Come on now Shawn," came a calm and professional woman's voice.  "Sit up for me, it's OK, you probably just have a bit of that yucky water in your tum.  I'm holding a bucket, so let it all out."

He vomited repeatedly and then fell back onto the bed, wincing when his his head hit the pillow.  He reached back to touch the bandage on his head.  The boat.  The rain.  It all came back to him.

"Camila?"  He sat up suddenly and opened his eyes.

She sat sound asleep in the chair beside him, her dress stiff and muddy, her hair sticking out all over, scratches on her legs, her feet bare, a hospital blanket around her shoulders.  He had never seen anything so beautiful.