Page 77 of Jam and Jingle Bells
He shook his head. “I’m not on the run unless you count running from my own past. My demons. My skeletons.” He put his hand in his hair and tugged on it. “This started right after my mom died when I was sixteen.”
“You said she died of cancer?” I asked and he shook his head.
“I lied, again. Sorry,” he said. “That’s the story I tell everyone. The real story is too much for most people.”
“What is the real story?” I asked gently, holding his hand.
“She drove into an oncoming lane of traffic and went headfirst into a semi.”
I reared back in shock. “I’m sorry, Ellis. Did she fall asleep?”
He held out his hands, palms up. “We don’t know. People saw her driving erratically and it was late at night. They assumed she’d been drinking and gave her wide berth. Some think she may have committed suicide.”
“Did they do an autopsy?” I asked. “Maybe she had a medical event.”
He tipped his head to the side. “They would have, but there was literally nothing left to autopsy. The car crumpled to the size of a motorcycle and burst into flames.” He shook his head and swallowed. “In hindsight, Romano-Ward Syndrome is inherited and my dad didn’t have it.”
“Which means your mom probably did?”
He nodded and grasped my hand tightly. “It’s likely. Some people never have symptoms, others, like me, suffer greatly. It’s possible the first time she experienced syncope was while she was driving that night. She could have been going in and out of consciousness and that’s what people were witnessing. We will never know.”
“How awful for you, no wonder you got the pacemaker. Were you tested right after her death then?” I asked and then paused. “No, you thought she’d died by accident.”
He swallowed again and his pulse jumped in his neck. “Right, I still didn’t know there was anything wrong with me. My hair started turning white because I stopped making melanin.”
“People say stress can’t change your hair color, but they’re wrong. It’s not the stress doing it. It’s the lack of proper nutrition and vitamins doing it. Our hair is an indicator of our overall health.” He chuckled and I put my hand over my mouth. “Sorry,” I said around my fingers, “dorky hair girl alert.”
He pulled my hand down to my lap and held it tightly. “You’re not a dorky hair girl, but you are right. I stopped eating and sleeping and all I did was study or work on the farm. We had a huge bison farm in Wyoming and my mom did a lot of the work with my dad. Suddenly, he was without his partner in lifeandon the farm.”
I lowered my head to my hand. “No wonder you didn’t want the bison burgers.”
He shrugged and closed his eyes for a breath. “I was trying hard to keep cool. When you forced that burger on me, I was like,okay, I’m doing this, or she’s going to think I’m crazy, and I don’t want her to think that.Yet, here we are.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think you’re crazy. Don’t think that. I promised I wouldn’t judge you and I’m still not. Nothing you’ve told me so far has changed my opinion of you, Ellis. You were a sixteen-year-old kid who suddenly had a lot thrust at him, emotionally and physically. When did you learn you had the heart condition?”
“When I passed out the first time,” he answered honestly. “I was almost twenty.”
I did the math quickly in my head. “You said you worked for a couple of years after high school on your dad’s farm and then moved to California.”
“Nothing escapes you, does it?” he joked, but his eyes weren’t laughing.
“Not much,” I agreed. “Was farm work too strenuous so you picked up yoga, or?”
He shook his head once, barely. It was almost like a full-body twitch. “No, I’d been doing yoga already. I started after my mom died.”
“Which is why you and Holly are spirit animals,” I said slowly, the light dawning. “You know of what you speak and do.”
He nodded, this time visibly and heavily. “Right before my diagnosis, I was training to be an instructor on my off time from the farm. Dad was getting close to retiring. He wanted to travel, see the country, and maybe find a woman to share life with again. He couldn’t do that on the farm.”
“And you didn’t want to take over the family farm?”
“Not really,” he answered honestly. “It was never my thing. I did the work, but I didn’t enjoy it and had no interest in learning about it. I lived on a farm and wasn’t even in Future Farmers of America as a kid in school.” He laughed, but it was forced, so I stayed quiet. “That summer it was hot,” he whispered, “like sweltering high temps and humidity that we hadn’t seen in years. Dad had the farm up for sale and we were starting our summer harvest. It was going to be our last since he had a buyer for the place.”
“I thought you had bison. What did you harvest?”
“Oh, we still had fields of hay and corn to feed the animals, and that all had to get picked and cut. It was late June, the first cutting of hay, and I was driving the tractor and hay baler. We were doing round bales, which is automated, so my dad was moving them as I dropped them. It was so hot, Addie, and it was like a hotbox inside the cab. I was sweating and I stopped the tractor, opening the door to yell for my dad to take a break,” he explained, his voice barely audible. “I knew something was wrong and thought I might be sick or something. I was going to jump down out of the tractor, but they say I passed out first.”
I squeezed his hand and held it to my chest, waiting for the blow to come, as I knew it would. A farm story like this never ended well. “But something bad happened while you were passed out, right?” I asked and he nodded, his eyes closing and a tear running from his right one. I wiped it away gently. “Just breathe, Ellis. I don’t want that device jumping your heart this soon after all the ones last week.” I rubbed the center of his chest. “I can fill in the blanks myself. You don’t need to say more.”
