Spirits of Spring (The Haunting Ruby Series Book 4) (45 page)

Rachel’s bottom lip began to quiver. “I know that, Ruby.
I’m not being stupid. I know what terrible pain those people
must have felt. It’s the only way I could think of to accurately
describe how devastated I was to see my brother being shot.
I’m just not good with words.
Forgive me for not being a
walking stegosaurus like you.” And then, she burst into tears.

Suddenly, I felt like the stupid one. And I totally had no
desire to point out the fact that she inadvertently referred to
me as
a dinosaur instead of a reference book.
I now
understood exactly what she meant by the Holocaust reference.
And I agreed with her wholeheartedly. When Zach got shot, it
felt like my entire world and everything in it had exploded in
front of my face. The stone statue turned to dust and I cried
like a baby right along with her. It may have stopped raining
outside, but there was still a terrible downpour raging that
night.

30. Not Eggs-actly What I Was
Expecting

When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t where I expected to
be. I expected to still be at the lake, drenched, bleeding, and in
serious pain. Or at the very least, in the hospital dry, stitched
up, and in serious pain.
Instead, I found myself on a farm.
Grandpa Mason’s farm.

“It’s about time you showed up, Squirt. I’ve been
expecting you for a while now.”

What was going on here? Had I traveled back in time to
the night he died? Was I being given a second chance to fix my
mistakes?
Or was
this
just a dream, a terrible,
taunting
nightmare where I would wake up and he would still be dead
and Dad would still hate me for it? I’d had several of those
dreams recently but none of them came close to feeling this
real
. Did this mean that I was…
dead
?

I was too shocked—too confused—for words. When I
hesitated a bit too long, he spoke again.

 

“Don’t just stand there with your teeth in your mouth—
come give your old grandpa a hug.”

This time, I didn’t waste a second. I threw myself into
his outstretched arms and squeezed him harder than I ever had
before. Dream or no dream—dead or alive, I wasn’t going to
pass up this kind of opportunity.

He was exactly like I remembered him—tall and thin
with hair of pure silver. He still smelled the same, too.
He was
always a variety of perfectly blended scents—Old Spice, vanilla
pipe tobacco, and the peppermints he always chewed on right
after he was done smoking. I missed that smell terribly. One
night shortly after he died, I tried to recreate that scent myself.
I snuck off into the woods with a tiny pouch of tobacco I’d
procured from his unfinished tin and tried to smoke some from
the wooden pipe I’d whittled for him in Cub Scouts. I ended up
setting the entire pipe on fire and cursed as I tossed it into the
snow. Dad smelled the smoke on my jacket and assumed I’d
been smoking cigarettes. I was too hurt to admit the truth.
I
took my punishment—no television for two weeks—without
arguing and went to my room to cry. It was bad enough that
he
was gone but now everything
about
him was gone, too.

“There, there, Squirt,” he said as he patted me on the
back. “There’s no time to cry now—the chickens need to be
fed.”

How did he do it? How did he know that I was crying
the very instant the first tears rolled out of my eyes?
Even
when he couldn’t see my face, somehow, he
always
knew.
When I was little and trying to be brave after skinning my
knees or bumping my head, I would ask him how he did it.
Every time he would say that it was because he had special
grandpa powers that I wouldn’t have until I was his age and
had little squirts of my own to tend to.
Every time, I would
smile at the thought that I would have special powers someday,
too. I still didn’t know how he did it but that memory made me
forget my tears once again.

I released my grip on him and nodded my head. “We
can’t keep the chickens waiting!” I exclaimed as I grabbed a
bucket and handed him one as well. I was too afraid to ask him
what was going on for fear that my time with him would come
to an end the moment I did. It didn’t matter anyway—dead or
dreaming—all I wanted was to spend time with him.

I dipped into the feed bag, filled my bucket, and then
began to dish out their evening
meal.
I missed those
chickens—Grandma sold them all to a farm near Graysburg
after Grandpa died. When I was about six years old, I tried to
give every one of them its own name.
After exhausting the
names of every cartoon character I could think of, I came up
short by about a hundred names. Grandpa came up with the
perfect solution.

“Pick the name that you love the most then use that
name for every hen.”

 

I thought for a minute then asked, “Grandpa, what’s
your first name?”

 

“Ralph.”

 

“I made up my mind then. I’m going to name the
chickens Ralph.”

 

He’d laughed until he nearly choked. “Okay, Ralph it is.
First we feed Ralph and then we collect the eggs.”

Once I was old enough to understand that all of the
chickens were female, I saw why he’d laughed at my choice and
laughed about it myself. But silly or not, the name stuck and
from that day forward, every bird was christened with that
same name.

I walked up and down the barn saying, “Time for
dinner, Ralph,” to every hen I fed. Grandpa chuckled but
followed suit.
Once they were all fed, he flipped his bucket
upside down and sat on it. I placed mine beside his and took a
seat as well.

“Well, Squirt, tell me why you think you’re here.”

In order to do that, I first needed to find out where
“here” was. The likelihood of this being a dream was pretty
slim.
Time travel was impossible outside of science fiction.
That left only one alternative. I was dead.
“I died saving Ruby’s life,” I said quietly.

“Did you?” he asked as he pulled out his pipe and began
packing it with tobacco.

That’s when it hit me—taking that bullet for her didn’t
necessarily mean that she survived.
Easily, Jeremy could have
picked her off with his next round. In fact, my death could have
made her an easier target than she already was. I imagined her
kneeling by my body sobbing and unaware that he was taking
aim again. I’d saved her life so many times before without
incident. This time, I screwed up. Bad.

“Is she dead? Is she here?” I asked, afraid to hear the
answer. “Have you seen her?”

 

“Take it easy there, Squirt! Ruby’s alive. She’s at the
hospital waiting to see whether or not you are, too.”

She was alive! I didn’t completely screw things up after
all. “So they didn’t tell her yet? No one told her that I’m dead?”
She was
not
going to take the news well.

“That’s because you
aren’t
dead. Yet. You have to make
that
decision yourself.”

Deciding whether I lived or died wasn’t as easy of a
choice as it may seem. Aside from my love for Ruby, life wasn’t
all that great lately. I’d even begun to distance myself from her,
too. I’d been blaming it on depression but maybe there was
another reason for it. Maybe deep down, I’d known this
moment was coming and I’d been doing it to prepare her for
life without me. Maybe there really wasn’t a choice to make
after all—maybe I’d already made it a long time ago.

“Break’s over, Grandpa,” I said as I stood up and
offered him a hand to do the same. “Time to collect Ralph’s
eggs.”

31. Destiny Delayed

Five and a half hours, five thousand tears, and five
hundred tissues
later, Dad entered the emergency room
waiting area looking as exhausted as I felt.
Immediately, the
five of us mobbed him for news of Zach’s condition.

“He’s stable but still in critical condition in ICU. Garret,
Diane—come with me.” As Rachel and I began to protest in
unison, he added, “I’ll be back for the two of you in a few
minutes.”

We flopped back into our chairs angrily. Though I felt
definite relief at hearing that he had survived the surgery and
was at least stable, his use of the word “critical” was unsettling.
The fact that he wouldn’t allow Rachel and me to see Zach,
didn’t help either.
There was something wrong—something
besides the obvious, that is. I tried to get comfortable in my
chair but it wasn’t happening and I soon gave up trying.

Pacing the floor back and forth, I tried to shake off the
anxiety that was coursing through my veins like some sort of
nervous poison.
I checked the clock religiously with every lap
around the waiting room. What could be taking him so long?
He said that he would be back for us in a few minutes—a few
meant less than five, didn’t it? Didn’t it?

A few—definitely less than five—laps later, a middle
aged couple entered the waiting room with an elderly lady in a
wheelchair so I forced myself to sit back down. They’d brought
her in for a large burn on her right hand but that seemed to be
the least of her problems. As a matter of fact, she didn’t seem
to realize that she was burnt at all.

Instead, she sat there staring in my direction and loudly
repeating, “Ralph, come get your dinner!”

Frustration led to irritation which quickly led to rage. I
couldn’t take it anymore so I screamed, “Shut up already!
Ralph doesn’t
want
dinner tonight!”
Everyone but the lady in
the wheelchair ceased all communication and glared at me.

“Ruby! Apologize for your behavior this very instant!”
Shelly commanded with more fury than I had ever seen from
her before. Before I could say anything, the old lady’s caretaker
spoke.

“I know my mother isn’t easy to deal with—God knows
I lose patience with her sometimes
myself.
But she
has
Alzheimer’s and the only thing she seems to remember is
cooking dinner for my father who died thirty years ago when I
was about your age. That’s how she burned her hand tonight.
We turned our backs for two minutes and she stuck her hand
into the flame on our gas stove.
Someday you will need the
kind of patience it takes to deal with something like this. You
best start learning it now, young lady.”

Once the rush of anger subsided, I felt like a complete
shitass.
Yes, sometimes I thought mean things but I typically
didn’t blurt them out like I just did. Not to mention the fact that
I lost it on Rachel earlier, too.
But there was something so
unsettling about the fact that while my world was crumbling,
life still refused to come to a halt around me.
I fired off an
apology as the lady was being wheeled into triage then checked
the clock again. Seven minutes had passed.

Before
the
little hand
on
the clock could finish
its
rounds
again, Dad emerged from
behind the double doors
alone. I bolted from my chair, eager to go see Zach.

“Where’s Zach? Is he going to be okay?”

“I need to talk to both of you first,” Dad said as he led
Rachel and me down the winding hospital corridors. “I’ve seen
plenty of gunshot victims in my day but nothing remotely like
what I found when I opened Zach up. It defies explanation.”

I didn’t
care
about explanations—I cared about Zach!
Yet again, I was being asked to go about my life as though I
hadn’t been shook to my very core by watching Zach take a
bullet for me.

Shook. That word gave me the perfect analogy for what
was happening in my life right now. I felt like I was trapped
inside a snow globe.
While I ran scurrying for cover as my
whole
world turned upside down, the outside
world was
admiring
the sparkly
snow as
it landed, oblivious
to the
upheaval inside.

Dad opened the door to a small office and told us to
have a seat. More sitting. I didn’t
want
to sit. I wanted to see
Zach, to hold his hand and wait for him to wake up.
When he
opened his eyes, I wanted to be the first person he saw.
I
wanted to thank him for taking that bullet for me.
Then I
wanted to smack him—gently of course—for the very same
reason.

“Tell me
exactly
how it happened starting with the
moment the trigger was pulled and ending with your arrival at
the ER. Don’t leave anything out—I want every small detail you
can remember.”

Rachel went first. She described the sound of the gun
going off—without use of the Holocaust reference this time—
then proceeded to describe how she incapacitated Jeremy.

“So while I knew that he wasn’t paying attention to the
fact that I was even there at all, I snuck up behind him and
karate chopped him across the back of the neck!” she exclaimed
as she demonstrated her signature move. “He dropped the gun
and I wrestled him to the ground. When I rolled over onto a
rock, I grabbed it and smashed him over the head with it!
I
took his gun and hit him with that, too. Then we got Zach into
the SUV and came here.”

Rachel seemed disappointed when Dad shook his head
and said, “That doesn’t shed any light on this mystery. Ruby,
what did you see?”

Way more than Rachel did, that’s for sure. Way more
than I ever wanted to see. Since she and my dad were the only
ones who would hear my account of what happened, I told
them everything.

“So Clay and Zach both got to me around the same time.
Before the bullet got to Zach, it went straight through Clay. It
was sort of weird. I don’t know exactly how to describe it.
Clay’s a ghost but the bullet kind of stuck inside him for a
second and then he disappeared. I guess you know the rest of
what happened after that.”