Chapter Text
As it turns out a few hours can hurt and Ernie feels it in the sharp pulsating jolts at the base of his skull. But when he sees Lucy, drowning in a sea of sterile white linens and plastic tubes, the pulsating jolts and the pins and needles mutate from a raging wildfire to a snaking trail of smoke.
It's terrifying to see her, with her larger than life personality, reduced to this. The whooshes and the whirls. The lungs that rise and fall by the tube taped between her cracked lips. The mottled shade of blooming bruises peeking out along her collar. The beeping. The nurses that shuffle in and out, scribbling down her vitals and offering sympathetic smiles.
Ernie yearns to reach out. To reassure Lucy that he’s here even if she can’t see him – can’t hear him – but there's earthquakes rumbling through his veins and the floor is crumbling beneath him.
“L–L–” He tries. The sound croaks out like a miserable squeak. It makes little sense because he knows how to say her name. He’s said it without hesitation – over and over and over and over. But now that it matters, now that it could be the last, Ernie can’t get his tongue to move or his lungs to breathe.
God, he hates hospitals.
On his rounds one of the attending doctor's offers a smile, chalked full of sympathy, empathy, pity or all the above. He offers Ernie his shoulder, holding him afloat while the world around him burns. Together, shroud in suffocating black plumes and the mechanical clatterings, they count backwards from one hundred. It stretches on, each number the strike of a chisel to the boulder atop his chest, until all that’s left is glorious silence and, when Ernie opens his eyes, Lucy’s gone.
The ceiling above him is spackled and the curtains drawn. Even in the dark he can see the rich navy blue fabric against the sky blue wall. He remembers, like it was yesterday, Lucy's teasing voice as he agonised over fabrics and colour swatches for months.
This is home.
His home.
The how of it is fuzzy. There was Lucy, mangled beneath the crisp white duvet. There were the instruments and the tubes and the wires. There was the tightness in his chest that wouldn’t go away. There was the counting. There was the pinch and the needle and the grimace on Jesse’s lips as the words he spoke grew murky and indistinguishable from the sea of noise in the shell of Ernie’s ear.
“That’s a first,” he grumbles to himself as he crawls out from under the covers. His limbs are lead and when he steps, Ernie can’t help but drag his feet.
In the bathroom, under the warm yellow glow of the incandescent bulbs, the bags under his eyes and the stubble of his beard are undeniable. His clothes are creased and unchanged from his hospital visit. The filth of it, on an ordinary day, would disturb him, but the thought of someone undressing him dampens the sensation and replaces it with waves of relief.
Peeling away the layers of fabric, Ernie steps into the shower. The scent of industrial bleach and dried blood are caked on the inside of his nostrils. When he swallows the bitter bite of the frigid jetstream he can taste where it lingers. Even if he burns the clothes the smell will never dissipate, etched in the tightly woven helical strands of his DNA. Still, he scrubs until the comfortingly warm water makes him wince.
Time is an abstract concept under the torrent of water – water that never runs cold. When he emerges, despite the thick lingering fog, the tiles are icy cold to the touch. In the mirror, after he wipes at the condensation, Ernie flinches. It's chilling, he thinks, what a handful of days have done to his outward appearance.
In the adjoining room a bell chimes. The noise is one of those stock sounds that came with the device. For months, Ernie had fought with Lucy over how blasé and out of touch it was, to not set customised alerts. Lucy relentlessly advocated for having one for everything – something about visualisation. Now, white knuckling the counter, Ernie sort of wishes he would have agreed. Maybe, if he had agreed, the sound would feel less like an overhanging anvil and more like a table of contents narration.
Thankfully, what waits for him is innocuous. A monthly reminder to water the succulent sitting on the kitchen window sill. Succulents that, for being touted as thriving under neglect, are struggling.
“Hi Trudy,” he greets the plant with a dour note in his tone and a towel draped over his head. No response is forthcoming but Ernie carries on. “Things aren’t so great but I guess you know the feeling.” As he squeezes seven drops of water out of an eye dropper he sighs. “You’re gonna have to hang on. Lucy is–” throat constricting, he chokes out words that are nothing more than garbled sounds.
If there is one thing Ernie appreciates about the plants Lucy keeps bringing to his house to die it is that they always listen and never complain.
Down the hall, in an attached room, Ernie sits on the bench with his eye dropper and cotton towel. It’s clumsy, how his fingers settle on the ivory keys, the dropper nestled between his index and middle finger, but Ernie makes due, too worn to exert any additional effort. And, when the plangent yet subtle notes of Debussy’s Clair de Lune reverberate from the strings, a soothing sense of tranquillity wash over him. When Ernie reopens his eyes, hues of pink and orange have crept across the floor boards and, fingers sentries atop the keys, he notices his towel is dry.
Jesse shows up at half past nine with an omelette and fresh cut fruit in hand. It’s Heather’s handiwork, the way the kiwi is shaped like a flower and the strawberries are little hearts.
“You get some sleep?” The question is asked around a mouthful of potato chips Jesse dug out from the cupboard.
Craning his neck to read the time on the stovetop, Ernie counts off on his fingers. “Yeah.” In between bites he asks, “What’d they hit me with? I haven’t slept that soundly since I got clocked in the head by that surfboard in fourth grade.”
“That’s–” Brows pinched, lips downturned, Jesse fumbles the chip. It hits the ground and snaps in half. “What?”
“Nothing,” Ernie waves off the concern like a fly buzzing around his head. The upward tilt in the corner of his lips melts, replaced with the same sort of sombre feeling lingering in his chest like the cadence of a funeral march. Only no one's dead, he hopes. “How's–” he swallows around a bolus, “–how…”
“Still in a coma.” Jesse doesn't look up from the cover of Time Magazine’s 30 Under 30 edition tucked in the fruit bowl under the oranges. “Doc says they can't keep her under much longer. Guess being under’s only good for so long.” He scrubs the back of his head, bowed forward with the other elbow bent and digging into his knee, open palm supporting his lolling head.
A silence blankets them. It isn’t uncomfortable, but Ernie wants to fidget. He wants to do more than stab the creamy smooth eggs. “We should get back there. What if–”
“Ernie,” a hand settles over Ernie’s white knuckled grip on his fork, “Rushing over there isn’t going to change this. Luce, she…” The hardened edges of Jesse’s dad voice eases into the mellow trickle of a babbling brook. “She’s gonna need us. Not to pump her up or feed her bullshit, she's Texan. But you know to be steady and predictable for her, just like it's always been.” Wringing his hands he pauses and, in his silent deliberation, looks every part like a man trying to shoulder the burdens of the world and crumbling beneath the weight. “You cool with that?”
Cool is the antithesis of the endorphins racing through his veins and pooling in his heart until it is beating so fast Ernie is sure it will jump right out of his chest. “Course,” he lies through his teeth.
“Cool.” Jesse lies in return.
Stomaching a bite of the omelette, Ernie tames the violent recoil as the pillowy soft favourite tastes of turpentine. There’s nothing wrong with it, not when the first few bites were perfection and Heather is the Master Chef of omelettes. “Jesse if she isn't gonna be okay I…” fork tines scrape against the enamel of his front teeth causing the fine hair on the back of his neck to stand on end, “I don't know how I'm gonna be okay.”
“I get it. Lots of people would too. It's okay not to be okay.” Jesse slumps forward in this chair, shoulders folding in. Darkness lingers under his eyes and pale creases appear in his normally supple, flush skin. “But eventually you gotta move on.”