“No, I didn’t.”
“Are you hungry? Because I would love a pizza right now,” he said.
“Oh man. That sounds incredible.”
“Let’s go, then. Is Darshu’s still the best?” One strange thing about Greenwood was that the best pizza place in town was owned by a guy from India. “My treat,” he said, and grinned.
“It better be your treat, Mr. Billionaire.”
“Ugh, you know I hate that word!”
So we went for pizza. Apparently there’s no law against billionaires eating dripping melted cheese with the rest of us peasants. I got choked up a few times, thinking of my patient, but Nick would just listen and hold my hand. And then make me laugh a little bit. It was kind of bittersweet, though. I kept thinking that if it hadn’t been for the accident, my whole life could have been like this. Hanging out with Nick, going for pizza, laughing with him. Getting to spend every day with him. Of course, you can’t go back, and it was probably better that I found out when I did that I couldn’t count on him. How do you trust a guy who leaves town when you need him most? But still. Don’t you hate your might-have-beens?
After our early dinner, I expected Nick to drive me home, but he headed out of town.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something I found the other day.”
“So you’re just…what? Going to take me there, without asking? I have a ton of studying to do.”
“Just trust me, Julia, sheesh.” When he said that, I thought of about ten angry answers, but I didn’t say any of them. What was the point? So I looked out the window. We were driving through some pretty woods, still in fresh late-spring green. After a while, Nick pulled off the road. I didn’t see anything. It was just an empty stretch of road going through a forest.
He got out of the car. “Come on!”
“Why’d you stop here?”
“You haven’t been back here before?”
“Back where? I don’t know what you mean.” I looked around, thinking there must be a landmark or something.
Nick took my hand and led me over to a tree stump. “None of this looks familiar?”
“For god’s sake! No!”
“Julia, this is the tree we hit in the accident.”
“What?” My face, my whole body went cold. I tried to pull away from his hand, but he held me tight. “I don’t want to see this! Why would you bring me here?” I was crying. I tried to walk away again, but he caught my other hand and pulled me close to him.
“Just stop. Stop,” Nick said. He wasn’t yelling, just talking calmly. His hands were warm. “Look. Look at the stump.”
I looked. It had been cut off at about my waist level, and what was left had a deep, wide crack through the middle. The top, where the cut was, was dry and gray, and if I’d wanted to, I could have counted the rings. All around the bottom, where the stump met the ground, were thin new branches springing up, each one covered with green leaves.
“When you were telling me about your patient, I thought I should bring you here.”
“Why? What would possibly make you think, when I was already upset, that you should show me this and get me more upset?”
“Because, look.” He pointed to the new growth. “Look how tough this tree is. It was almost destroyed, but it won’t give up. Just like you. You lost a lot, but you didn’t give up. And look what you’re accomplishing now! That girl today could be just like this.”
I took a deep, shuddery breath. He was right, in a way. But he obviously didn’t know how much I’d lost, how much I’d been damaged by the accident. It wasn’t just the physical scars, you know? He was trying to help me, I could see that.
“And another thing. For me, this is hope. Hope that we can get back what we lost.” He took a breath, like he wanted to say more, but then he shook his head. He took a jackknife out of his pocket, bent down, and cut off one of the new branches growing from the old stump. He pressed it into my hands. It smelled green and summery, from where it had been cut.
He stood up, and stepped very close to me. I thought he would hug me, but he didn’t. Instead, he rubbed a place on my cheek, near my mouth, with his thumb. “Julia, did you know that while you were in the ICU, the doctors told me that you probably wouldn’t remember the accident? That you probably wouldn’t even remember anything that happened for hours before, or even that whole day?”
“No. Why would they tell you that? Instead of Mom.”
“I was there. Your mom must have gone home for a while, and I was the only one there.”
“I don’t remember you being there at all.”
“You were on painkillers and sedation. But I was there. From the time we were brought in on the ambulance, I never went home. Dad and Lucy brought me clothes and stuff.”
But I knew the rest of the story. Later he left. And not just to go home and sleep. He left for years.
“Do you, Julia?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you remember the day of the accident?”
I was quiet. What difference did it make now? A girl in a wheelchair must not have been good enough for him—he made that clear when he bailed. Why hash over all that other stuff?
I said, “I don’t want to talk about the accident any more. I went to a shrink for a while and talked it all over, and now I’m done. Maybe you should see a shrink if you need to talk about it.”
He had been looking at me so eagerly, but at that he closed his mouth and turned away.
“Can you take me home now, Nick?”
We got in the car, and drove through the twilit woods and farms, me still clutching the branch Nick had cut for me. It was a beautiful night, and the wind washing over us was softly scented with growing things, but we didn’t speak a word the whole way home.
~ ~
After walking on the beach with Nick, I felt almost like a completely different person from the one who went down to the edge of the lake and started swimming. That fast, my whole life had changed. Have you ever had that happen? Everything looked different. Colors were brighter, edges were crisper, and objects seemed to give off a glow. Someone was barbecuing their picnic dinner, and it smelled amazing, and that plus the scent of the pines combined to make me want to pull in lungful after lungful of delicious air. To top everything off, I was holding hands with Nick, and our connection felt electric. Like nothing I’d ever experienced.