Away From Everywhere (2 page)

Hannah was unconscious by the time the emergency response team found the car. She was lying there peacefully, as if asleep in her own bed. When Owen first heard the paramedics coming, their voices sounded so distant and calm. Then he saw frantic zips of flashlights along the ground like helicopter spotlights, and noise rushed at him as fast and loud as warfare: the shouting of urgent instructions, the suck of mud at their feet. Even the snapping of twigs beneath their boots was deafening. Their urgency was more startling than their presence was calming.

The paramedics pried their bodies from the car and loaded them onto long yellow spine boards. As they turned to head back to the ambulance, Owen heard them sigh and curse the rugged terrain between the car and their ambulance down on the highway. They'd almost screamed it in his ear, yelling through the walls of rain,
We're gonna need a third set of hands on each board! Watch your backs!
They treated him and Hannah like cargo, lifting them over rocks, passing them around trees, ignoring Owen's questions.
Just relax, sir. Just take it easy until we get back to the ambulance and take a look at you both. We have no answers for anyone just yet.

It was slippery and dank. Tree branches and shrubs got in the way, scraping against the bright yellow spine boards. Rocks rolled under the paramedics' feet, threatening to snap their ankles. Lying there on the spine board, his eyes shut tight to avoid the rain beating down on his face, Owen had an eerie feeling that he should have died in the crash. Or maybe that he wished he had. He was thinking about those few moments before he hydroplaned. The wipers couldn't keep up with the rain, and a thick glaze of water, rippled by the wind, coated the windshield and hazed his vision. The glare of oncoming headlights trickled down his windshield like stars caught in a waterfall. He was watching Hannah, so peaceful in her sleep, when the car lifted from the highway and spun into the ditch. His eyes, not on the road, had been wandering across the curves of her body in the rearview mirror: the lines of her ribcage beneath her tight shirt.

As the paramedics loaded the stretchers into the ambulance, Hannah's left arm fell over the side of the spine board, limp because she was unconscious, and swung back and forth like a pendulum.

Owen grabbed a man's forearm, panicked.“We are heading to the hospital in Sheet Harbour, right? It's the closest, right?”

He wanted to be taken to a hospital anywhere but Dartmouth, maybe check in under bogus names. Say they never had their hospital cards or any other kind of ID on them. That they were just out for a drive.

“Dartmouth General, sir. Sheet Harbour is, at present, not equipped for this …for …
surgery
. Just take it easy now, and lie back down.” He was fiddling with an IV bag and didn't even look at Owen.

He didn't want to seem desperate, and didn't want to have to explain why. “Isn't Halifax closer than Dartmouth?”

The paramedic shook his head.

“Then can we make it the other one in Dartmouth instead. I have–”

He looked at Owen like he was delirious. “Just lie back, sir. My job is to take you to Dartmouth General Hospital, and it is in your best interest to let me do my job. Especially for your partner's sake.”He nodded towards her.

Owen looked at Hannah: his brother's wife, his sister-in-law. Now that title sounded so incestuous and wrong. His lover, the woman his brother had failed, the woman he loved: that was how he preferred to think of her.

He pictured his brother's face, how bereaved and betrayed it would look when he saw his wife and brother come into his hospital, strapped to stretchers from the same accident. He knew Alex was working all weekend, but in that moment all he had was hope. Even if he'd never seen the difference between hope and naïveté.

He looked again at Hannah and the two paramedics who were working on her. All their attention, the quick movements and taut faces, made it clear how helplessly injured she was.

“Sir, lift your head.”They placed a mask over his mouth. “Deep breaths now.”

There would be no point in lying. Owen knew that Alex was smart enough to connect the dots and draw the picture. Owen was not at a screenwriting conference and Hannah was not shoe-shopping in Montreal. Her car would be found not twenty minutes from Alex's cabin, on a stretch of road that led to nowhere
but
his cabin.

“Deep breaths, sir.”

He looked again at Hannah, at the paramedics who had done all they could for her. It was only a matter of time now. He looked up at the white ceiling, jostled back and forth by the bucking of the ambulance against the rough pavement.

The paramedic adjusted a knob. “Deep long breaths now, sir.”

The periphery of his vision blurred, engulfed by whiteness. He thought of the time he and Alex had run off on their parents at a zoo, each daring the other to stick a hand in the bear cage. They agreed to do it at the same time: the first one to take out his hand was the loser. He couldn't remember who won.

Everything went white.

When Owen regained consciousness in the hallway of the hospital, he was wearing a rigid neck brace. He couldn't look to his left or right: just straight up, at the square, dotted ceiling tiles framed by beige metal. He couldn't see if Alex was nearby and had caught on to him yet. He didn't know where Hannah was, or if she was still alive.

Everything seemed blurred. His eyes were overwhelmed, or the lights were too harsh. All he could see were glowing strips of yellow: long fluorescent light bulbs passing him by, one by one, as medics carted him down the hallway. Eleven, then they turned a corner. Seven more fluorescent strips, another turn. The sickly smell of hospital tingled in his nostrils, making the hair in his nose feel thick and wiry, and he could feel dried blood caked against his skin when he shifted his body. All of his adrenaline was long gone now: the broken bones were throbbing, the deepest lacerations felt filled with salt, flames, glass. When three more long fluorescent bulbs passed him by, he was lifted from the stretcher onto a bed, and the fluorescent bulbs were replaced by two large domed lights. They looked like headlights, like a car headed straight for him. Then his brother's long, unmistakable face was peering down at him. Alex's eyes were either questioning or denying what he saw.

Owen?

Everything in the room was gone now, except for that look of astonishment in his brother's eyes. It was wild and haunting: a frightened fox wanting to pounce or run. As both brothers struggled for words, a nurse appeared and pried Alex out of Owen's field of vision. She had his arm clutched in her hand, her pink nails digging into his freckled and sparsely haired skin.

“Dr. Collins!The woman in the next room, same crash, she needs your
immediate
attention! I don't know how she's still breathing!”The urgency in her voice wasn't enough, she had to shout, to yell the specifics. “It's bilateral hemopneumothorax. We're sure of it, she's suffocating, and I am guessing cardiac tamponade, and those are just the chest traumas …”

Alex blatantly ignored the nurse because it was his
brother
right there in front of him. But the nurse insisted, she tugged at his arm, sank her nails a little deeper. Creases now, where her nails met flesh. As he was promising Owen he would be right back,Owen grabbed him by the arm so urgently it made a slapping noise. He had to warn his brother, to at least lessen the shock. “Just, wait …one second.”

Alex and the nurse turned to him. Their attention, their eyes all over him like that, it made it harder for him to speak, to confess.

“Alex.” He waited for the courage to finish the sentence. The pause only made it harder to utter the next few words. There was only the vicious truth. “It's …Hannah …in there.” He tilted his head, slowly, towards the next room. Hesitant to be so curt. So definite and honest. He fell back into his bed breathless, his heart thudding off ribs.

Alex tore his arm free from Owen's grip. His one hand clapped from the sudden absence of Alex's arm. “Hannah is in
Montreal
, Owen!” His voice quivered in denial, as if all of a sudden so much made sense. As if he understood that curious way Owen stood next to his wife now: like a man fighting against every inch of himself not to reach out and touch her. Not to let eyes linger too long after words during a conversation.

“Alex …me and Hannah, we …we were at your cabin … all week.”

He looked at his hands, no longer able to look his brother in the face. Alex refused to believe Owen, so he had to trust his eyes. Owen watched him walk into the next room, dragging feet like blocks of cement, moving only because he had to. He pressed the palms of his hands to those green doors with all the hesitation of a man about to commit suicide, then thrust the doors quickly open.

Owen was stabilized and alone in his room. Through the dead silence he heard doctors asking for more suction, more blood. More light. The shouts and screams were getting louder and more urgent. And then a sustained beep tore through Owen's room. It sank into him like a bullet in slow motion. He heard Alex swearing, then wailing, then being constrained and comforted. Something got knocked over; it sounded like pennies falling, like metal on metal, for five long seconds.

Owen expected Alex moments later. He expected his brother to barrel into the room and grab him by his neck and snap it. To yell, to shout in a way that brought saliva out with the words. He braced himself for it, not to protect himself, just out of instinct. But Alex never set foot in his room.

Owen sat alone in cold silence for days, contemplating life, suicide, love: the intricacies of each, the flipsides. He thought of his place in the world now, without family, without Hannah, without love, and without hope.

A GHOST, ALIVE

ONE GLANCE OUT HIS WINDOW and he saw it was one of those grey days, maybe rain, the kind of day he could use as an excuse to be lazy, to stay in bed and avoid the world. Mummified in white sheets and propped up against a mahogany headboard, he sat up in bed, sipping bitter black coffee from an oversized white mug, a novel splayed over his knees. He'd paused to stare out the window. Grey clouds clung to a grey sky, like balls of lint on an endless blanket. The same crow was zipping left to right and right to left, etching temporary black lines across the window.

The book fell off his lap and lay front cover down on the beige carpet. He stared at it on the floor. He'd lost his page. He couldn't concentrate enough to read anyway. Every ten minutes he was back in that car.

Another sip of coffee.

He'd placed the filter so carelessly in the carafe that he could feel the grit of coffee grounds against his teeth, and the steam rising from the mug coaxed tears from his eyes. The cold of the day had crept in through his window and crawled into bed with him, so he fetched a black downfilled comforter from the hall closet in a futile attempt to stay warm. Everything about his life felt futile now. Memories of Hannah were constantly batting off his skull like wasps trapped in a jar: buzzing, stinging, and clawing their way to the surface to play out over and over again.

It was the morning of Hannah's memorial service, and he'd awoken to a memory of them at Alex's cabin: Hannah dropping a CD into a stereo as Owen lit a fire in the fireplace. She laughed when she caught him reading the instructions on the store-bought log.“I think you just light them, Einstein. I think the idea is you burn the log!”

He smiled at her sarcasm, as he always did. She never considered herself funny but laughed at herself habitually, and the sound of her laughing always walked right through him like a ghost.

She turned and flashed him a black and purple CD cover:
The Lioness
. “Owen, you'll
love
this album!” She always spoke so clearly, neglecting no syllables in her words. She pronounced album as AL BUM, as it if were two separate words.

She pressed play, wandered over to the light switch, and flicked it off. The room was lit only by the fire now, and the flickering flames had her shadow dancing along the wall. Reflected black onto the ceiling, the glass of wine in her hand looked like a ten-pound goblet. “Most people make music you
hear
, but SongsOhia playmusic you
feel
. Do you know what I mean?”

He insisted she drink it, even though he couldn't now, because wine evoked something in her; it awakened her to the world and made her hypersensitive to its emotional landscape. She
felt
everything when she drank red wine. She'd describe those sensations with enough passion and detail that he often made jot notes and incorporated her ramblings, and everything about her, into his writing:

Have a character likeHannah who uses her hands as much as her eyes to see the world.

Lying in bed she says, “Love is most epic between those who cannot share it.”

Have a character whose smile lingers, just a few seconds, after she laughs.