Page 7 of Raise Up, Heart
Rosanna clutches him to her, holding him in a tight hug of perfume and the warm scent of her skin that smells like home. It’s the smell of comfort from skinned knees when they were kids, which later became the confusion and pain of her rejection when he came out, and the joy of her acceptance after time soothed her shock, and the honest wounding of being two very different humans in the same family. It’s a scent mixed of pain and love, and he takes it in, finding it not at all stable, not at all four walls and a roof, but something more primal and familiar to him—the scent of the family that shaped of his body and soul.
“Come on,” Rosanna says, touching his cheek. “Let me take you home.”
Cole nods and climbs out of the hospital bed. As he pulls on his coat to go, he thrusts his hand into the pocket. Not there. It’s not there. The other pocket is empty, too. Rushing blood roars in his ears, and he grips the table to keep standing. The heart, his talisman, must have fallen out when he tumbled into the ditch, or…was it…did he… The person who called the ambulance? Did he take it? His hands were in Cole’s pockets. He sounded like Damon…but it isn’t, and it can’t be. Cole is losing his mind. Concussed. He’s concussed. But there’s no doubt about it. The rock is gone.
“Cole?” Rosanna asks, concern in her voice. “Should I call a doctor? Are you going to pass out?”
Cole isn’t going to pass out. No, he’s going to crack, completely crack, because heneedsthat rock. He needs it because it’s real and it’s what lets him be okay when he thinks of Damon. It works better than anything else ever has.
“I’ll call the—”
“No,” Cole says, raising a hand to his mouth, holding back the tears. “It’s just this room,” he says. “It was in this room.”
Rosanna is clearly confused, but when she looks around, a realization comes over her face. “Jesus Christ, you should have said something.” She grips Cole’s arm and says, “Let’s get you out of here.”
His house isn’t a comfort to him, though, and he starts to pack his bag. He has to get out of town, go somewhere else. He needs to head up the mountain. Just for a few days until his head is screwed on again.
Rosanna watches with her arms folded over her chest.
“Just be sure to tell Dad about what the doctor told you. No sleeping for six hours. And he needs to wake you in the night.”
Cole manages to shake himself free of his panic long enough to smile at her, tilt his head in some version of amusement and say, “Yes, warden. I can handle it.”
“Okay,” she says, but she sounds doubtful. “I’ll…just call him.”
Cole doesn’t argue. He doesn’t care. She can call his dad and talk to him for ten hours about this mess, and it won’t change that Cole is clearly out of his mind, and the only thing he wants more than a life that went entirely different one September day two years ago is just to get up to his father’s cabin, sleep with the windows open, and hike up to the waterfall for a while to clear his head.
“I’ll drive you,” she says. “You can’t be driving anyway.”
It isn’t what Cole wants to hear. If she goes, then she’ll stay and start a fight with their dad. Things will bedifficult, and it’ll become about so much more than what Cole needs right now.
“I’ll call Emily to come get me,” Cole says.
It’s the better side of the equation, even if it’ll take twice as long to get to his final destination. The idea of Rosanna and his dad together, the force of them, how they’ve always fought with their claws out ever since their parents’ divorce. Rosanna blamed Dad for their mother’s broken heart, unhealed even on her deathbed, and she’ll never let that go. He can’t handle all that history. He just wants to escape it for now.
His best friend Emily will just look at him with worried eyes and ask incredibly unhelpful questions, but she’ll end it all with a hug and she’ll tell him she loves him. It’ll make it just that much easier to keep on breathing, to keep on living. He does it for them, after all. For them and for Damon.
Damn him.
No! Cole thinks. He takes that last bit back. It still terrifies him to be angry with Damon, like that will somehow be the thing that drives all the memories away, that it’ll make Damon dead forever and truly. Cole sits down on the bed and rests his head in his hands.
Damon is dead.It’s neither here nor there what Cole thinks or says or believes. It changes nothing.
Sometimes Cole knows it’s ridiculous that he’s been grieving for Damon so much longer than he even knew him. But there’s comfort to be had in the memories of the times they shared. It’s the regrets over what he never got that hurt him the most.
“I called Emily,” Rosanna’s voice cuts into his thoughts.
Cole is grateful. He doesn’t have the energy now to explain why he needs to get to the cabin, or why he doesn’t want Rosanna there, too. He’s grateful that, for whatever reason, his sister has arranged for him to get what he needs without him having to fight for it.
“Thank you,” he says, and he sits. And he waits.
“Rosanna says thatyou might have been trying to kill yourself,” Emily says.
She’s gripping the wheel with both hands, one at the two and one at the ten, just the way their high school driving instructor taught them both. Her knuckles are white. But she’s looking at him instead of the road.
Cole waves a hand dismissively. “No. I wouldn’t do that.”
That’s mostly true.
