I’d had so many “if only”s in my past I’d let them suck the life out of my present. But “if only” didn’t just apply to a person’s past—it could also direct one’s future. If only I’d gotten into that top-notch college. If only I’d gotten that promotion. If only I’d gotten that girl to fall in love with me. If only I’d achieved, earned, or succeeded at such and such, my life would be perfect. But that was a falsehood. A lie wrapped up in the veneer of what appeared to be the truth. If only I’d saved the world ten times over, earned the fame, glory, money, and the girl . . . and got to eat prime rib every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner . . . my life wouldn’t be perfect. If only I could just keep kissing Josie for the rest of my life . . . my life wouldn’t be perfect. Because hers wouldn’t be.
I might have been, and still was to a certain extent, a selfish, single-minded son of a bitch, but even I couldn’t be okay with allowing my quest for a perfect life take away hers. Josie couldn’t spend the rest of her life kissing me. She had so much more to give and to experience and to see. She had more worlds to light on fire as she’d lit mine. She had more people to make laugh and smile and leave her impression on. She had a whole life to live, and just because my life had been so scaled down that kissing her for the next fifty years was all I wanted didn’t mean that was all she wanted. Or deserved.
My life had grown small. Microscopically small. Hers was still immense, spilling over into the realm of infinite almost. I wouldn’t allow her to shrink her world in order to stay in mine. I couldn’t. It would have been the cruelest, most despicable thing I’d ever done . . . and I’d done plenty of things that fell into those categories.
That didn’t mean I was resolved to keep pushing her away as quickly as I could—Rowen’s mini-sermon was still sitting heavily on my mind, and I couldn’t seem to shake it off quite yet—but it also didn’t mean I would let her spend her days and nights at my bedside. If there was a way to stay in each other’s lives while she still lived hers as fully as I knew she could and deserved, then I’d consider—consider—abandoning my pushing-away agenda. But I recognized that was more of a baseless hope than a founded reality.
Josie could tell my head was heavy with something, and by the time we rolled to a stop in front of the doctor’s building adjoined to the hospital, she’d already asked me three times what I was thinking. I didn’t tell her what was really on my mind, but I answered with a partial truth about thinking of the future. From the way she’d looked away from me after I answered her the same way for the third time, I knew she could tell I was hiding something. She was right of course, but I couldn’t very well tell her I was contemplating the best possible future for her and if that involved me in some fraction of a capacity.
The guy driving the medical van came around to open the large back doors. I didn’t know how much this little trip had cost—probably not nearly as much as the fifteen-hour ambulance ride—but I couldn’t keep racking up these kinds of bills. I felt the hospital bill from down in Casper coming, and from what I knew of the tests they’d run on me, paired with people’s complaints about the astronomical costs associated with hospitals stays and procedures, I knew I’d probably require a fifth of Jack before I could open that envelope. Too bad I’d given up drinking the hard stuff months ago. I’d probably never needed a drink more, so of course this was the point in my life I’d grown a conscience.
“Have a nice ride?” the driver, whose nametag identified him as Lou, asked. He lent Josie a hand to guide her out of the van.
I tried not to glare at his hand curling around hers. But it was a gesture I would have sold my soul to be able to do, and I couldn’t keep my glare contained. I think it became more of a scowl even.
“It was fucking fantastic,” I answered as he messed with some dials and buttons to lower the platform I was on. “But since I didn’t see any comment cards floating around back there—not that I could fill them out in my current state—here’s a few suggestions: Get an air freshener because it smells like nothing short of a hundred people have shit themselves in the back of this thing in the past month, screw down whatever the hell is rattling around in the front of the van before you become responsible for driving a physically disabled person mentally disabled to match, and please, this is the most important part . . .” My gaze lifted to the bumper stickers plastered around the interior of the van as the ramp lowered me closer to the ground. “Get rid of the slew of positive affirmations you have glued to every inch of bare wall inside there. ‘Believe you can, and you’re halfway there’? ‘Every day is a second chance’? ‘Don’t be afraid to fail, be afraid not to try’?” A sharp laugh slipped past my lips as I shook my head. “You do realize that with the business you’re in—transporting people so handicapped they can’t move themselves—concepts like every day being a second ch
ance and just giving it your best are not realistic or even viable solutions to our problems, right? Just thinking myself happy or inhaling love and exhaling hate won’t make me whole. So why don’t you rip down those damn things and save the rest of your transports from being reminded of how small their lives are and how they’ve lost most, if not all, control of them?”
I hadn’t meant to end my spiel shouting and red-faced. I hadn’t even meant to go off like that, but from the looks on Lou’s and Joze’s faces, I might as well have been spilling my internal organs on the pavement. Lou’s smile fell as he focused on lowering the platform the rest of the way to the ground, and Josie’s eyes shifted from narrowing to looking close to spilling over with tears. I regretted saying what I had. Thinking it was one thing, but spewing all of my anger and frustration when people were around—especially the person I cared about most—was not acceptable. Even if I did decide I needed to push her away.
“Sorry,” I said around a sigh. “Just ignore the bitter, raving madman in the wheelchair. The world pissed on him, so he’s trying to piss on it right back. I’ll try harder not to take it out on innocent bystanders.”
When I looked at Josie, she was clearly avoiding making eye contact with me. Lou seemed to be of the same mindset. Josie stepped up on the curb and waited while Lou moved my wheelchair from the platform and headed for the sidewalk.
“Just give me a ring when your appointment’s over, and I’ll pick you back up here,” he said in a formal voice to Josie.
She nodded, working up a small smile as she stood beside me once Lou had me on the sidewalk.
“Do you want me to show you again how this operates?” he asked her.
“Nah, I’m pretty sure I’ve got it,” she said. “If I need some help, I can play a pretty convincing damsel in distress.”
That got a chuckle out of Lou and a bristle out of me. I didn’t like the idea of someone besides me rushing in to save the day or the moment or whatever needed saving in Josie’s life. I didn’t like scanning the people moving in and out of the hospital and wondering which one or ones would rush in to help a girl like Joze.
“I’ll see you later then,” Lou said. He closed up the back of his van before crawling behind the wheel.
Behind me, I heard Josie exhale. It was a slight sound, and the emotion in it might have been imagined, but it almost sounded like she was standing at the base of a mountain and staring up at it after being told she had an hour to summit it. It was the kind of exhale a person gave when they were tasked with an impossible challenge.
“Hey, Joze?” I tried glancing at her over my shoulder, but the chair made it difficult. “I’m sorry about all that. I really am—”
“Shit,” she said under her breath.
“Yeah, I know I’ve been acting like a piece of shit,” I said. “That’s an understatement, but—”
“Not shit you.” Her voice was hinging on hysterical. “Shit I just left my purse in the van that’s currently driving away.” She flew around the side of my wheelchair, raising her arm to try to flag it down.
“Joze, wait!” I knew her purse would be okay for a couple hours, and the upside to leaving it in the back of Lou’s van was that when she was reunited with it, her purse would be the most enlightened and insightful purse in existence, brimming over with positive affirmations and shit.
Josie didn’t hear me though. She was one-track minded. She was about to step out into the road when something came into view from the corner of my eye: a big truck with big tires and big sounds. How Josie was oblivious to its size and sound was beyond me, but I guessed whatever was in her purse seemed more important.
“Josie, stop!” I shouted as she took a step into the road, the truck barreling closer.
Still she heard nothing, neither my voice nor the thunderous growl of a diesel engine powering closer. The road leading up to the hospital was rounded and at an incline, so while I could see the truck coming, the driver couldn’t see us yet. Even if he could have seen us, he wouldn’t have, because the driver was flailing one arm, looking frantically at the buildings instead of the road. Beside him, a young woman was breathing heavily and seemed to be holding her stomach.
Shit.
The driver didn’t see Josie. Josie didn’t see the truck. A catastrophe was moments away, and other than my raised voice, I had no way to stop it.