Unbroken (39 page)

THIRTY ONE

IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG TO locate Sabrina, who is shakily making her way to my room. I watch as she stops in the doorway, taking a deep breath as she makes her way over to my bed.

I stumble backward at the sight of my battered, beaten body. My face is barely recognizable; the right side of my face is incredibly swollen, my lip is busted, my eye is blacked. My head is bandaged up, and my eyes are closed.

Sabrina sobs as she collapses into a seat next to my bed and grabs my hand. She pulls it up to her mouth and presses a kiss to my hand as tears spill over her eyes. She holds my hand against her cheek and closes her eyes.

I turn to stare at Mom, and she’s smiling sadly.

“She’s beautiful, baby boy. She’s a lucky girl,” she says.

I shake my head. Mom doesn’t even know the half of it. If she knew what this girl has done for me in all this time, she’d know it’s exactly the opposite.

“No, I’m a lucky man. The luckiest,” I respond quietly.

I can’t even lie. The sight of my own body in this vulnerable state is sobering.

But the sight of Sabrina, still in
that
dress I requested she wear for her birthday, my letter jacket thrown over her shoulders, and her Butterfly You Chucks on her feet…it breaks my heart. Her eyes are red and puffy from crying, and her hair is all over the place, which is so unlike her. She looks like a lost woman, like everything in her world has been ripped away from her.

“What am I doing here, Mom?”

My mother places a steadying hand on my shoulder and smiles at me. I get lost in her, trying to commit her appearance, her voice, her scent, her
anything
to memory. I don’t want to forget what I loved the most about her, and I certainly don’t want to forget this chance I’ve been afforded, this chance to see her again.

“That’s up to you. You have a choice. You can return home to your family, or you can come with me.”

Her words strike me, and I shake my head in blatant refusal.

This is not a choice I want to be saddled with. I don’t want to choose between life and death, going and staying. I don’t want to make a choice between the two women I love the most in the world. It doesn’t seem fair to have to make that choice when either way, someone loses out. And the sad part is, no matter when this had happened, the choice would have been equally as difficult to bear.

I don’t have time to reply, because Sabrina takes this opportunity as one to speak. As usual, I’m hanging on to every word she says from the moment she chooses to open her mouth.

“The…the doctors say you can hear me. I don’t know if that’s true, but whether it is or not, I can’t imagine
not
talking to you in a time like this. I can’t imagine leaving you alone when you need someone so badly.” She sniffles, running her thumb over the back of my hand. “I don’t know where you are, and I don’t know if you have a choice of whether to stay here or go…on, but…but I’m hoping I can convince you to choose the former rather than the latter.” She tilts her head upward and tears spill over her cheeks. “I know you’ve spent your life thinking love isn’t real. And you’ve spent your most recent years thinking that it’s impossible for anyone to love you. But that’s just not true, Brody. If you go out into that waiting room, you will see
tons
of people who love you, waiting to hear that you’ll be okay, waiting to hear that you’ve woken up. Literally, everyone is here, babe. The Quinns—all of them, my family, Colin and his family, your friends from that pizza place we go to all the time, your old buddies from the baseball team, Eddie and Alice Hastings, even your grandparents…they’re all here and they’re all hurt and they all love you and they’re all in limbo, waiting for you.” Sabrina sighs, and I feel my heartstrings pull at the sight of her pain. “And then you come in here…and you have me. I know it’s not much, but I have loved you from the moment I saw you, Brody Durham. And I’ve waited for you to come to your senses, to love me the way I love you. And it doesn’t seem fair that we should only get so little time to share that love with each other, after so much time spent waiting for each other. It doesn’t seem right that a love like ours should end here, when we both fought so many demons to even make it this far.”

She bends forward, resting her head against the mattress beside me. Her sobs intensify as she clutches my hand to her chest. I turn away, unable to watch her break any further. This is unbearable. I’ve spent so much time trying to shield her from pain like this. Her pain is my pain. Her heartbreak is mine. Her tears are mine. And when she comes undone, so do I.

She looks up, grabbing her iPod out of the pocket of my letter jacket and places it on the bedside table.

Taking my hand once more, she tries and fails to suppress her cries. Her words are shaky and emitted through whispers, but I hear them loud and clear. “I found out today that I’m pregnant, Brody. We’re pregnant.”

At her words, I fall to my knees.

Pregnant?

That’s a word I didn’t expect to hear for a long time…but today of all days? When I’m literally in limbo, unsure of whether I’m about to die or wake up to the girl I love…I have no strength left in me.

“This isn’t how I expected to tell you, babe. I—I wanted to do something special for when I gave you the news that you’re going to be a father. But I can’t hold it back. I need you to know that we’re here and we love you and we’re waiting for you. And I need you to know that I understand if you feel like you need to go. I understand if you need to move on, and leave the pain this world has caused you once and for all. But I…we…your baby and I…we really,
really
need you to stay.”

My mother is at my side, and her arms wrap around me as I start to cry. This isn’t what I want. I don’t want this. I don’t want to watch the love of my life break down. I sob into Mom’s arms, letting all the pieces within me fall. I am broken without her. I am broken when I see her this way. I put that pain in her expression and those tears in her eyes. And I need to be the one to take them away.

“It’s okay, baby boy,” Mom says soothingly, but I can’t believe her, not this time.

“It’s not okay! This is not okay! How could you leave us? How could you leave us with him? Did you have a choice, too? Because if you did, let me tell you, you fucking made the wrong one!” I cry even harder. “None of this is okay! It wasn’t okay six years ago when you left me—when you left all of us—and it’s not okay right now for you to tell me I have to choose. I don’t want to choose! This is not the choice I want to make! The choices I want are the ones between Baked Alaska and Cherry Garcia, or between lying in bed with my girl all day or showing her off to the world. I don’t want to choose between life and death. I don’t want to choose between you and them. I don’t want to choose between my mother and the mother of my child! I don’t want this! Take it away! All of it!”

My head is buried in my hands, and I’m pulling at my hair in agonized frustration as I let loose all the pain that has plagued me from the day my mother silently passed in her sleep. Every beating, every harsh word from my father’s mouth, every time my siblings and I were left out in the cold, walking to a safe place to sleep for the night, all of it comes rushing back, hitting me at full force. I feel every blow a thousand times, over and over and over again, but this time, I have my mother by my side to help me through it.

“Baby boy, look at me,” Mom whispers. I raise my head marginally and meet her gaze. “If I had a choice, I never would have left you. I fought every second of every day to stay with you, with all of you. I fought until my dying breath for just one more day, one more hour, one more minute with the people I loved. And if I had a choice, I never would have chosen to leave you, to put you in the position where you have to choose like this.”

I nod, knowing she means what she says. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have to choose.

I lift my head when I hear Sabrina move. She’s unwrapping the cords of her earbuds from around her iPod, and she’s turning to a song. I watch as she places one earbud, and then the other, into my ears.

She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.

“I need you, Brody. I need you to open those beautiful sometimes-gray, sometimes-blue, always heart-stopping eyes of yours,” she whispers. “Wake up. Don’t leave me here alone. Don’t go where I can’t follow.” She stifles a sob. “
Please
.”

She hits ‘play’ on her iPod, and the saddest song I’ve ever heard echoes throughout the whole room. My mother extends her hands for me, and she helps me to my feet. I lean against her for support, because I have no strength at all to stand. She guides me out of the room, away from Sabrina and our unborn child, and into the waiting room.

In the waiting room, I am assaulted with the overwhelming feeling of grief, sadness, and heartache. But there’s an emotion I feel even stronger than all others.

Love.

Nickayla and Colin are wrapped in each other. He whispers in her ear and presses kisses into her hair while she cries. Mama Quinn and Ana are speaking to a nurse, while Jude and Gabriel are consoling their daughters. My baseball buddies look out of place, but they are here nonetheless. Even Kyle has shown up, which says so much. We were friends for years before he hurt Nickayla, and the fact that he’s here now—considering the last time I saw him, I kicked his ass—is a huge step in the right direction. My grandparents, who I haven’t seen in years, embrace each other and stare at my siblings like they’ve just seen a ghost. Dalis has curled in on herself, and is wrapped up in Bianca’s embrace. Cason is in a corner alone, but I see him crumbling from head to toe. I recognize the symptoms, and I hate that I can’t be there to console him physically.

I feel her presence beside me, and realize Sabrina has emerged. She makes a beeline for Dalis, taking her hand. When my sister comes to her, Sabrina’s arm wraps around her shoulders. Together, they walk over to Cason, and they pull him out of his corner haven and wrap him in an embrace.

She guides them to my room, and I don’t see what happens once they’ve entered and closed the door, because I turn to face my mother, who is regarding me pensively.

“You’re going to go back, aren’t you?” she asks.

I don’t want to hurt her. But I don’t want to lie to her either.

The minute Sabrina said that she was pregnant, my mind was made up. But after this…after seeing all the people I care about or have cared about in the past, surrounding me with love and hope…I know for a fact that I can’t leave this world behind.

I wrap my arms around my mom and I hold her as close as I can for as long as I can.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I miss you so much. I miss you every second of every day,” I say, choking back my emotions. “But Dalis…Cason…my friends…my family…I can’t leave them. And Sabrina and our baby…” I catch my breath. “I don’t want them to miss me like I miss you. I don’t want them to visit me at some hole in the ground. I want to be there. I want to be there always. I’m so sorry.”

Placing her hands on either side of my face, she gives me a brilliant, beautiful smile.

“Oh, baby boy, don’t be sorry. It’s not your time. I always knew you would make this choice, Brody. And I’m glad you did. Go on. Go be with your family.”

I hug her tightly, knowing that within a few moments, all of this, all we’ve said and done and shared with each other will be gone. I will be back in the land of the living, and my mother will continue to go on. And I will still have this empty hole inside me that only she can fill. It’s painful, letting her go, knowing I have to lose her for the second time. It’s even more painful knowing that I have to let her go because this is the choice I’ve made.

“I love you so much, Mom.”

“I love you, too, Brody. Always.”

Hand in hand, she leads me back to my room, where Cason is standing by himself. He’s standing over my body, with the black velvet box in his hands, and he looks stiff as ever. He shakes his head roughly, then pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. I move to stand next to him, and when I look for Mom, she is gone, just like that.

I try to ignore the dull ache in my heart when I feel her absence for the second time.

I don’t know if my brother is going to speak. I don’t know if he has anything to say to me, and I honestly don’t expect him to. He’s the silent one, the one who keeps to himself. Having a conversation with him is like pulling teeth ninety nine percent of the time.