What Glass Shoe did over her summer vacation: Fic
New The O.C. (yes, The O.C.) fic behind the cut.
Title: Lucid Interval
Part 1
Fandom: The O.C.
Rating: PG
Category: Mostly gen, but implied Ryan/Marissa and Ryan/Taylor towards the end
Word count: > 30,000
Summary: Two car accidents that changed the course of Ryan Atwood’s life and one that didn’t.
Timeline: This story begins during the last part of “The Graduates” and continues through the end of the series and beyond.
Spoilers: Everything, especially the last episode of the third season and the first three episodes of the fourth season.
Warnings: Angst, attempted suicide, canon character death
Author Notes or Why oh Why Did I Write This?: I got into The O.C. by accident this summer while I was taking my own advice and detoxing from and overdose of Supernatural. I watched a few episodes of Southland and became infatuated with the rookie cop played by Ben Mckenzie. He looked so familiar and I wondered where the heck I’d seen him before. A few clicks of a mouse, a mild heart attack (he played who on what show?), and four seasons worth of used DVDs later this is the result.
This story is basically complete, but it is loooong and I don't want to spam anybody to death, so I will post it in parts as I rewrite and polish.
Apologies: All mistakes are my own and I’m very sorry for them. I’m love writing but I’m not a writer, just a blue-collar girl trying to make it in this man’s world.
If you’re still reading, thank you. Please enjoy.
Part 1
Ryan remembers everything about the accident.
He remembers headlights on the narrow road, creeping up out of the darkness behind them. He remembers the sudden jolt and the way the tires skidded when Volchok rammed into the back of the Toyota Land Cruiser with his van. He remembers the surge of adrenaline that followed. He remembers how scared Marissa sounded when she screamed, how close to tears.
He remembers how she begged him to stop.
He remembers the yellow road sign rising up out of nowhere, too late to warn him if the sharp curve ahead. He remembers hitting the shoulder, the complete loss of control, the exact second that the Land Cruiser’s momentum carried it over the tipping point and it rolled…once…twice…three times, more, until Ryan lost count and he was sure it would never stop. He remembers when it finally did, the corpse of the vehicle settling around them with ominous, groaning sounds on a bed of concrete and broken glass.
He remembers lying there in the silence that followed. He remembers two words rising up from the blankness in his mind, the only thing that made sense at the time: We’re dead.
For a while after that his memory contains brief images, colorful snapshots like the ones in Summer’s scrapbooks, clips on a highlight reel:
The floor is the ceiling and the ceiling is the floor. He’s face down, smelling gasoline all around him. Marissa is lying next to him, face-up. The rest of her is a tangled mess of hair and limbs.
He’s crawling on his knees and elbows. There are splinters of glass digging into his palms and his forearms, cutting his skin, but he barely feels them.
He’s pulling Marissa out of the front seat, dragging her by her shoulders, by her clothes. Then she’s in his arms, limp as a rag doll and he doesn’t remember lifting her. She weighs nothing at all.
There’s a wash of heat on his back as the gasoline tank ignites and lights up the world. The road ahead of them is long and empty.
He’s holding Marissa.
She’s lying across his lap on the pavement. Her face is white. Her eyes wander like they can’t seem to find him. She’s begging him not to leave. He’s not even sure she knows he’s still there. “Stay,” she says. “Don’t leave,” she says, and he doesn’t.
He’s holding Marissa’s body.
All of the tension that was in her frame is gone. So is she. Ryan’s legs are numb. He’s bent over her, whispering in the cooling shell of her ear, telling her things he knows she’d want to hear, telling her he loves her, telling her he’ll never leave her, begging her not to leave him, even though she’s already gone.
It takes a long time for someone to find them.
Later, much later, he’s sitting on a gurney in the back of an ambulance. There’s an EMT shining a penlight in his eyes. The numbness that started in his legs has crept up his torso and into his arms, his neck, his head. He can see his fingers gripping the denim on his leg. He can feel his mouth open and close, answering the EMTs ask him questions, but it doesn’t feel real. Everything is washed-out, dreamlike.
The police arrive. They take Ryan’s driver’s license. They ask for Marissa’s name, the names of her parents, her address, her phone number. They ask him what happened. He tells them everything.
Everything.
He tells them about being run off the road, about Volchok and how he pawned Marissa’s pearls to pay him off, about the car they didn’t steal together, about dumping Volchok at the hospital after he beat the shit out of him and took back the after-party money on prom night. He relives it all in reverse, goes back to a time when Marissa was alive and well, to every point where he could have handled things differently but didn’t. He lives the last few weeks backwards, in monotone, and the police and the EMTs stand around, arms crossed, and they live it with him.
The cop who was taking his statement stopped writing a while ago. “Kid,” he says, trying to look him in the eye “Ryan, that’s fine. We have any more questions we know where to find you.” Ryan’s mouth hangs slightly open. He swallows. His throat is dry. That was the most he’s spoken at one time in his entire life.
The cop’s face is close to his. There’s a strong hand gripping his shoulder. “We’re going to find her parents now. Let these guys take care of you, alright?”
Ryan nods at the cop. The cop nods at the EMTs, and they put him in the back of the ambulance and shut the doors. A dozen or so yards away the thing that used to be Marissa is being loaded into a dark van. Thick yellow letters across the side of the van spell out “Coroner”.
At the hospital a male nurse in blue scrubs checks Ryan’s blood pressure and takes his temperature, then disinfects and dresses the cuts on his hands and arms. Ryan can smell the rubbing alcohol on the cotton swab but he can’t feel its sting against his broken skin. He wonders if he should be worried, but he can’t bring himself to care.
After the nurse leaves him, Ryan sits alone on a gurney, legs dangling in open space, curiously numb, like they belong to someone else. He stares at the off-white curtain that divides his cubicle from the next until his eyes grow tired of the pattern and can’t focus anymore. He listens to the sounds of the hospital: a phone ringing, the squeaking sound of tennis shoes on the slick floor, a small child screaming somewhere far away.
He loses track of time. Five minutes or an hour later a youngish Asian doctor in a white lab coat pulls back the curtain and enters his cubicle.
“Ryan Atwood?” the doctor reads from a piece of paper attached to a metal clipboard.
Ryan blinks absently. Then he recognizes his name. “Yeah.”
“I’m Doctor Woo.”
The doctor looks up from his clipboard. He frowns and asks, “Are you cold?”
Ryan shakes his head. His teeth are chattering.
The doctor tells him to lie down. He adjusts the gurney so that Ryan’s feet are higher than his head. He shines a light in Ryan’s eyes, probes his abdomen and asks him questions about pain and tenderness and a bunch of other symptoms that Ryan shakes his head at without really listening to.
After a while the doctor stops asking questions and regards him for a moment with an expression that Ryan can’t read. Then he takes a pen out of his lab coat and writes something on Ryan’s chart.
He sends Ryan up to radiology.
Ryan is a cooperative patient. The x-ray tech tells him to turn, to lift his chin, to hold very still while she presses a button behind a protective wall with a small, dark window in it, and Ryan obeys docilely. While his skull is being examined from the inside out, Ryan’s head is miles away.
“Ryan.”
The x-ray tech has stepped out of her booth.
“Ryan.”
He turns to her. She looks relieved. “We’re all finished,” she tells him gently, “I’ll have the nurse take you back downstairs.”
“Oh,” is all he says.
Ryan’s x-rays come back quickly and they come back clean.
“No apparent signs of trauma.” Doctor Woo tells him. “I want you to come back to the emergency room immediately if you feel any dizziness or nausea.”
Doctor Woo warns Ryan that he’ll most likely be sore for several days. He writes Ryan two prescriptions: one for muscle relaxers and another for a mild pain reliever. He warns Ryan that the muscle relaxers will make him drowsy. He shouldn’t drive.
“Is there someone coming for you?” the doctor asks.
Ryan is confused by the question.
“Is there someone picking you up?”
Ryan thinks back to his conversation with the police. He doesn’t remember giving them any information about the Cohens. He’s over eighteen. Technically Sandy and Kirsten aren’t his guardians anymore. He’s not sure that the police would be under any obligation to contact them.
“I haven’t called anyone.” He pats his pockets. His phone is gone. He left it sitting on the Land Cruiser’s dashboard.
“If you’d like I can have one of the nurses call-”
“No,” Ryan says quickly, “No, that’s okay.”
Doctor Woo gives him an appraising look. He lifts his right hand, holds his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart and says, “I’m this close to admitting you overnight for observation.”
Ryan is shaking his head before the doctor even finishes.
The way that Doctor Woo studies him is hauntingly familiar. Ryan realizes that it’s the same way that Sandy studies people. Ryan would bet that, like Sandy Cohen, this man is an excellent judge of character.
“Call your people,” the doctor tells him, “You can use the phone at the nurse’s station. Don’t leave without checking with the triage nurse.”
“Thank you.”
The ER’s waiting room is crowded and noisy, filled with a mishmash of young and old, rich and poor, all brought together by the common thread of having a human body which has suddenly and unexpectedly broken down.
Doctor Woo escorts Ryan to the admissions desk, past a trio of high school girls in short skirts and tight tops, two of whom are supporting the third between them. All three smell like beer. While he watches, an orderly pushes a wheelchair up behind the girl in the middle. She sits down, grimacing and being very careful with her right foot, which is nightmarishly red-black and swollen. Ryan can’t take his eyes off of it, not until the doctor sets the phone on the counter, puts the receiver in Ryan’s hand. He even presses nine for him.
Ryan stares dumbly at the keypad for a few seconds, then he dials the first phone number that comes to mind.
Ryan never had a cell phone before he came to live with the Cohens. He used to keep all of his friends’ numbers on scraps of paper in his pocket or in his head. When he came to live with the Cohens he only had time to memorize one number before they bought him a cell phone.
Sandy picks up on the first ring.
“Hello?”
Ryan’s throat closes up. This is the first familiar voice he’s heard since the accident.
“Hello?” Sandy repeats, a little more insistent.
Ryan manages to choke out a single word, “Sandy?”
“Oh, thank God.” Sandy’s words are heavy with relief. Ryan hears a quiet, “It’s him,” as if Sandy were moving the mouthpiece to speak to someone else, then he hears Sandy’s sentiments echoed by Kirsten.
Ryan gets a chill.
“Are you okay?” Sandy demands. “Where are you?”
“Uh, hospital.”
“Which one?”
Ryan glances around. “I don’t know.” He feels a little surge of panic in his chest when he realizes that he has no idea where he is.
Sandy takes a breath. “Okay, Ryan, is there a doctor or a nurse around? Someone I can speak to?”
Ryan nods, then realizes that Sandy can’t see him and he says, “Yeah, hold on…”
Ryan drops the receiver away from his ear, cups his handover the mouthpiece. Doctor Woo has disappeared. Ryan holds the receiver out to the triage nurse, “Can you, um…”
The nurse glances up from her computer screen with a put-upon sigh. She’s busy. He’s inconveniencing her, he can tell.
“Please,” he says.
Whatever she sees in his face, it gets under her professional skin. She takes the receiver.
Ryan tunes out their conversation. He’s never liked eavesdropping, even if the conversation is about him. When the nurse hands the phone back to him Sandy sounds reassured, in control, “Okay, Ryan. I want you to stay put. We’re coming to get you.”
Ryan can feel himself standing there in the hospital with the phone in his hand, but he can’t believe any of this is actually happening. This night seems so surreal, like a bad dream that he can’t wake up from.
“Ryan, are you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Are you alright?”
He doesn’t have an answer, not one that Sandy will want to hear.
“Okay,” Sandy says into the silence, “Okay. Sit tight. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Goodbye, Sandy.”
Sandy is still talking when Ryan sets the receiver gently back in the cradle.
Ryan turns away from the desk. His legs feel numb again. He doesn’t know how he’s staying on his feet, and suddenly he just can’t be anymore. Ryan finds the nearest chair and drops down into it. He rests his forearms on his thighs and loses himself in the noise and activity of the waiting room.
There’s pair of dark-haired toddlers running laps around a magazine-laden coffee table. A woman who could be their mother is slumped in one of the two-dozen or so identical maroon-cushioned chairs that line the chalk-white walls. Her face is pale and sweat-slick. There’s a sleeping baby in her arms. She’s trying not to wake the infant while she fills out a piece of paper attached to a clipboard.
He sees a bent-backed old man pushing an oxygen tank, making his slow way toward the opposite side of the room where there are two doors marked as restrooms and a metal drinking fountain attached to the wall between them. There are tattoos on the old man’s tanned forearms, so fuzzy and faded now that Ryan can’t tell if they were designs of women or weapons or animals when they were inked. There is a pack of Marlboro Reds sticking out of his breast pocket.
A few seats down from him he sees a woman with brown hair rocking a little girl in her arms. The little girl is crying and muttering “Hurts, Mommy. It hurts.” There’s an ice pack on her wrist. Ryan thinks they’ve been waiting for a while. The mother keeps repeating, “I know, Sweety, I know…”
Ryan realizes he’s staring and he drops his eyes. He looks at his hands, his scraped knuckles, the plastic hospital bracelet circling his wrist. He snaps it off and shoves it in his back pocket along with his prescriptions.
The nurse keeps glancing up at him like she’s making sure he hasn’t left, like she’s a waitress at a diner and he’s about to skip out on the check.
Above the nurse’s station there’s a round clock, ticking away. The small hand is on the ten. The big hand is on the three. It takes Ryan about a minute to interpret the time, and another minute for it to mean anything to him.
Ten-fifteen.
It’s been less than two hours since the accident.
Right now Marissa’s plane is sitting on the tarmac at LAX. Right now the other passengers are checking their boarding passes, finding their seats, cramming roller bags into overhead bins. Right now Marissa’s seat is empty, and it’s going to stay that way.
Two nurses rush by him. One is complaining to the other about traffic. Ryan hears, “…closed the road…car accident…”
It takes several minutes for it to sink in that the car accident they’re talking about is his.
“Ryan.”
He looks up.
He stands up.
Julie Cooper, framed by the sliding glass doors of the emergency entrance, is beautiful and terrifying. Her hair is uncombed, wild like she drove here with the windows rolled down. Her outfit is wrinkled. Her mascara is smudged around her bloodshot eyes.
The way she’s looking at him reminds him of the way Caleb Nichol used to look at him. It’s the same way his mom’s boyfriends used to look at him, and his brother’s friends, cops, prison guards, a lot of people. She’s looking at him like he’s a walking mistake, like he was put on this earth to make her life difficult, like she’d like nothing better than to tell him so, and right now Ryan is willing to take anything she wants to dish out.
Julie isn’t moving towards him, so he comes to her. His legs feel like he’s walking through waist-deep water, but it’s the least he can do.
She gasps in, a tiny sob. Her lips are trembling. When he gets close enough to hear, she says, “Why couldn’t it have been you?”
Ryan drops his eyes. He wonders the same thing.
Julie didn’t come alone, and while he’s standing there numbly with her words settling in his stomach like lead balloons Neil Roberts lays a hand on his shoulder. He eyes Ryan critically, looks in both of his eyes and at the bruise on his forehead. For a moment Ryan thinks that Doctor Roberts is going call the triage nurse over and say to her in his clinical, professional voice, “You made a mistake. This one’s dead too.”
The moment passes and Doctor Roberts is looking at Ryan’s prescriptions. Ryan doesn’t remember handing them over but he must have. Doctor Roberts couldn’t have fished them out of Ryan’s pocket without him noticing.
Doctor Roberts has his glasses on and he’s nodding.
“These are good. You want to be careful with the Soma. It can make you drowsy and dizzy. Did they do x-rays? CT scan? MRI?”
It takes Ryan a few seconds to understand that Doctor Roberts is asking him a question.
“Yeah, uh, X-rays.” It feels so wrong to be talking about himself.
Doctor Roberts is frowning at Ryan like he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. Ryan can think of several reasons why he might feel that way. “Are your parents coming for you?”
Ryan’s father is in prison. His mother is in New Mexico. She gave him a car as a graduation present but he crashed it.
Numbly, “Sandy and Kirsten are on their way.”
Doctor Roberts looks torn. He glances toward the door. Julie Cooper is outside under the fluorescent glow of the emergency room awning. So is Kaitlin, longhaired and slender, just like her sister. Julie’s back is toward the hospital. She’s clinging to Kaitlin like she’s lost at sea and her youngest daughter…her only daughter… is the only thing keeping her afloat.
Ryan wants to stop looking but he can’t.
Doctor Roberts is looking too. After a minute he says, “Son, I thinks it’s best if I take Julie home now. Are you going to be alright?”
“Yeah,” Ryan says. “You should go.”
“If you get nauseous or dizzy, come right back to the ER.”
Ryan nods like it’s the first time he’s heard that advice.
“You can call me too,” Doctor Roberts says, digging a card out of his pocket, “Even if you just have questions about your medications.”
“Thanks. Doctor Roberts?”
“Yes?”
He can’t seem to look Doctor Roberts in the eye. His eyes bounce between the Doctor’s forehead and his collar. This is hard.
“Is, um…is she here? Did they bring her here?”
He can’t even say her name.
Doctor Roberts gets a look on his face, some kind of emotion that’s masked because he’s used to handing out bad news.
“Yes, son. We came to claim Marissa.” He says the words without judgment. It is just a fact. It’s the answer to his question, and isn’t that what he wanted?
“Oh,” he says.
Doctor Roberts lays a hand on Ryan’s shoulder, just like he did when he first came in; only it feels so much heavier now.
“Take care of yourself, son.”
Then Doctor Roberts walks away.
Ryan wanders back toward his seat in the waiting room, which is still body-warm. He drops his elbows onto his knees, loses himself in the neutral pattern of the fabric under him and the scuffed texture of the floor. He doesn’t know how long he stays that way, probably just a few minutes, then the Cohens arrive. He hears them before he sees them, their rushed footsteps, Kirsten’s high heels on the linoleum, Seth’s squeaking tennis shoes. Then the chorus comes in:
“-my God, Ryan, when we heard-”
“-got here as soon as we could. Traffic was-”
“-alright man?”
Ryan can’t answer. He feels like he’s caught in a riptide, being pulled in every direction at once and he can’t tell which way is up.
Then Kirsten wraps her arms around him and the world feels solid and real again.
Ryan can only count a handful of times in the last three years that Kirsten has hugged him or kissed him on the cheek or patted his hand. Her physical affection for him has always felt reserved and mechanical. Ryan knows it’s partially his fault too. Before he came to live with the Cohens physical touch was, for the most part, unwanted and painful. Three years of living in Newport hasn’t been enough to tear down sixteen years worth of defenses. Besides, Kirsten has her own barriers. She’s not his mother. He’s just a kid living at her house. She’s never allowed herself to cross that line.
Kirsten blows right past her own boundaries and his and pulls him into a tight hug like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and Ryan…lets it happen. He shuts his eyes. His head dips forward onto Kirsten’s shoulder like his neck is made of wax and it’s melting in her warm presence.
“Oh thank God,” she whispers. “Thank God, thank God…”
He doesn’t deserve this. His face feels hot. He realizes that there are tears leaking from his eyes. He buries them in Kirsten’s shoulder. He hates himself for being weak. He hates himself for not being able to save Marissa. He hates himself for being alive when she isn’t.
“I couldn’t…” Ryan starts. His voice sounds wrong; flat and emotionless. He tries again, “It was too late.”
The Cohens are looking at him strangely. Maybe they don’t know that Marissa is dead.
After a long silence Kirsten says, “There wasn’t anything you could have done.”
But she doesn’t know that. There just isn’t anything else to say.
To be continued...
Part 2a
Thank you for reading. Feedback is welcome. If you see a mistake, please don't hesitate to speak up.
Title: Lucid Interval
Part 1
Fandom: The O.C.
Rating: PG
Category: Mostly gen, but implied Ryan/Marissa and Ryan/Taylor towards the end
Word count: > 30,000
Summary: Two car accidents that changed the course of Ryan Atwood’s life and one that didn’t.
Timeline: This story begins during the last part of “The Graduates” and continues through the end of the series and beyond.
Spoilers: Everything, especially the last episode of the third season and the first three episodes of the fourth season.
Warnings: Angst, attempted suicide, canon character death
Author Notes or Why oh Why Did I Write This?: I got into The O.C. by accident this summer while I was taking my own advice and detoxing from and overdose of Supernatural. I watched a few episodes of Southland and became infatuated with the rookie cop played by Ben Mckenzie. He looked so familiar and I wondered where the heck I’d seen him before. A few clicks of a mouse, a mild heart attack (he played who on what show?), and four seasons worth of used DVDs later this is the result.
This story is basically complete, but it is loooong and I don't want to spam anybody to death, so I will post it in parts as I rewrite and polish.
Apologies: All mistakes are my own and I’m very sorry for them. I’m love writing but I’m not a writer, just a blue-collar girl trying to make it in this man’s world.
If you’re still reading, thank you. Please enjoy.
Part 1
Ryan remembers everything about the accident.
He remembers headlights on the narrow road, creeping up out of the darkness behind them. He remembers the sudden jolt and the way the tires skidded when Volchok rammed into the back of the Toyota Land Cruiser with his van. He remembers the surge of adrenaline that followed. He remembers how scared Marissa sounded when she screamed, how close to tears.
He remembers how she begged him to stop.
He remembers the yellow road sign rising up out of nowhere, too late to warn him if the sharp curve ahead. He remembers hitting the shoulder, the complete loss of control, the exact second that the Land Cruiser’s momentum carried it over the tipping point and it rolled…once…twice…three times, more, until Ryan lost count and he was sure it would never stop. He remembers when it finally did, the corpse of the vehicle settling around them with ominous, groaning sounds on a bed of concrete and broken glass.
He remembers lying there in the silence that followed. He remembers two words rising up from the blankness in his mind, the only thing that made sense at the time: We’re dead.
For a while after that his memory contains brief images, colorful snapshots like the ones in Summer’s scrapbooks, clips on a highlight reel:
The floor is the ceiling and the ceiling is the floor. He’s face down, smelling gasoline all around him. Marissa is lying next to him, face-up. The rest of her is a tangled mess of hair and limbs.
He’s crawling on his knees and elbows. There are splinters of glass digging into his palms and his forearms, cutting his skin, but he barely feels them.
He’s pulling Marissa out of the front seat, dragging her by her shoulders, by her clothes. Then she’s in his arms, limp as a rag doll and he doesn’t remember lifting her. She weighs nothing at all.
There’s a wash of heat on his back as the gasoline tank ignites and lights up the world. The road ahead of them is long and empty.
He’s holding Marissa.
She’s lying across his lap on the pavement. Her face is white. Her eyes wander like they can’t seem to find him. She’s begging him not to leave. He’s not even sure she knows he’s still there. “Stay,” she says. “Don’t leave,” she says, and he doesn’t.
He’s holding Marissa’s body.
All of the tension that was in her frame is gone. So is she. Ryan’s legs are numb. He’s bent over her, whispering in the cooling shell of her ear, telling her things he knows she’d want to hear, telling her he loves her, telling her he’ll never leave her, begging her not to leave him, even though she’s already gone.
It takes a long time for someone to find them.
Later, much later, he’s sitting on a gurney in the back of an ambulance. There’s an EMT shining a penlight in his eyes. The numbness that started in his legs has crept up his torso and into his arms, his neck, his head. He can see his fingers gripping the denim on his leg. He can feel his mouth open and close, answering the EMTs ask him questions, but it doesn’t feel real. Everything is washed-out, dreamlike.
The police arrive. They take Ryan’s driver’s license. They ask for Marissa’s name, the names of her parents, her address, her phone number. They ask him what happened. He tells them everything.
Everything.
He tells them about being run off the road, about Volchok and how he pawned Marissa’s pearls to pay him off, about the car they didn’t steal together, about dumping Volchok at the hospital after he beat the shit out of him and took back the after-party money on prom night. He relives it all in reverse, goes back to a time when Marissa was alive and well, to every point where he could have handled things differently but didn’t. He lives the last few weeks backwards, in monotone, and the police and the EMTs stand around, arms crossed, and they live it with him.
The cop who was taking his statement stopped writing a while ago. “Kid,” he says, trying to look him in the eye “Ryan, that’s fine. We have any more questions we know where to find you.” Ryan’s mouth hangs slightly open. He swallows. His throat is dry. That was the most he’s spoken at one time in his entire life.
The cop’s face is close to his. There’s a strong hand gripping his shoulder. “We’re going to find her parents now. Let these guys take care of you, alright?”
Ryan nods at the cop. The cop nods at the EMTs, and they put him in the back of the ambulance and shut the doors. A dozen or so yards away the thing that used to be Marissa is being loaded into a dark van. Thick yellow letters across the side of the van spell out “Coroner”.
At the hospital a male nurse in blue scrubs checks Ryan’s blood pressure and takes his temperature, then disinfects and dresses the cuts on his hands and arms. Ryan can smell the rubbing alcohol on the cotton swab but he can’t feel its sting against his broken skin. He wonders if he should be worried, but he can’t bring himself to care.
After the nurse leaves him, Ryan sits alone on a gurney, legs dangling in open space, curiously numb, like they belong to someone else. He stares at the off-white curtain that divides his cubicle from the next until his eyes grow tired of the pattern and can’t focus anymore. He listens to the sounds of the hospital: a phone ringing, the squeaking sound of tennis shoes on the slick floor, a small child screaming somewhere far away.
He loses track of time. Five minutes or an hour later a youngish Asian doctor in a white lab coat pulls back the curtain and enters his cubicle.
“Ryan Atwood?” the doctor reads from a piece of paper attached to a metal clipboard.
Ryan blinks absently. Then he recognizes his name. “Yeah.”
“I’m Doctor Woo.”
The doctor looks up from his clipboard. He frowns and asks, “Are you cold?”
Ryan shakes his head. His teeth are chattering.
The doctor tells him to lie down. He adjusts the gurney so that Ryan’s feet are higher than his head. He shines a light in Ryan’s eyes, probes his abdomen and asks him questions about pain and tenderness and a bunch of other symptoms that Ryan shakes his head at without really listening to.
After a while the doctor stops asking questions and regards him for a moment with an expression that Ryan can’t read. Then he takes a pen out of his lab coat and writes something on Ryan’s chart.
He sends Ryan up to radiology.
Ryan is a cooperative patient. The x-ray tech tells him to turn, to lift his chin, to hold very still while she presses a button behind a protective wall with a small, dark window in it, and Ryan obeys docilely. While his skull is being examined from the inside out, Ryan’s head is miles away.
“Ryan.”
The x-ray tech has stepped out of her booth.
“Ryan.”
He turns to her. She looks relieved. “We’re all finished,” she tells him gently, “I’ll have the nurse take you back downstairs.”
“Oh,” is all he says.
Ryan’s x-rays come back quickly and they come back clean.
“No apparent signs of trauma.” Doctor Woo tells him. “I want you to come back to the emergency room immediately if you feel any dizziness or nausea.”
Doctor Woo warns Ryan that he’ll most likely be sore for several days. He writes Ryan two prescriptions: one for muscle relaxers and another for a mild pain reliever. He warns Ryan that the muscle relaxers will make him drowsy. He shouldn’t drive.
“Is there someone coming for you?” the doctor asks.
Ryan is confused by the question.
“Is there someone picking you up?”
Ryan thinks back to his conversation with the police. He doesn’t remember giving them any information about the Cohens. He’s over eighteen. Technically Sandy and Kirsten aren’t his guardians anymore. He’s not sure that the police would be under any obligation to contact them.
“I haven’t called anyone.” He pats his pockets. His phone is gone. He left it sitting on the Land Cruiser’s dashboard.
“If you’d like I can have one of the nurses call-”
“No,” Ryan says quickly, “No, that’s okay.”
Doctor Woo gives him an appraising look. He lifts his right hand, holds his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart and says, “I’m this close to admitting you overnight for observation.”
Ryan is shaking his head before the doctor even finishes.
The way that Doctor Woo studies him is hauntingly familiar. Ryan realizes that it’s the same way that Sandy studies people. Ryan would bet that, like Sandy Cohen, this man is an excellent judge of character.
“Call your people,” the doctor tells him, “You can use the phone at the nurse’s station. Don’t leave without checking with the triage nurse.”
“Thank you.”
The ER’s waiting room is crowded and noisy, filled with a mishmash of young and old, rich and poor, all brought together by the common thread of having a human body which has suddenly and unexpectedly broken down.
Doctor Woo escorts Ryan to the admissions desk, past a trio of high school girls in short skirts and tight tops, two of whom are supporting the third between them. All three smell like beer. While he watches, an orderly pushes a wheelchair up behind the girl in the middle. She sits down, grimacing and being very careful with her right foot, which is nightmarishly red-black and swollen. Ryan can’t take his eyes off of it, not until the doctor sets the phone on the counter, puts the receiver in Ryan’s hand. He even presses nine for him.
Ryan stares dumbly at the keypad for a few seconds, then he dials the first phone number that comes to mind.
Ryan never had a cell phone before he came to live with the Cohens. He used to keep all of his friends’ numbers on scraps of paper in his pocket or in his head. When he came to live with the Cohens he only had time to memorize one number before they bought him a cell phone.
Sandy picks up on the first ring.
“Hello?”
Ryan’s throat closes up. This is the first familiar voice he’s heard since the accident.
“Hello?” Sandy repeats, a little more insistent.
Ryan manages to choke out a single word, “Sandy?”
“Oh, thank God.” Sandy’s words are heavy with relief. Ryan hears a quiet, “It’s him,” as if Sandy were moving the mouthpiece to speak to someone else, then he hears Sandy’s sentiments echoed by Kirsten.
Ryan gets a chill.
“Are you okay?” Sandy demands. “Where are you?”
“Uh, hospital.”
“Which one?”
Ryan glances around. “I don’t know.” He feels a little surge of panic in his chest when he realizes that he has no idea where he is.
Sandy takes a breath. “Okay, Ryan, is there a doctor or a nurse around? Someone I can speak to?”
Ryan nods, then realizes that Sandy can’t see him and he says, “Yeah, hold on…”
Ryan drops the receiver away from his ear, cups his handover the mouthpiece. Doctor Woo has disappeared. Ryan holds the receiver out to the triage nurse, “Can you, um…”
The nurse glances up from her computer screen with a put-upon sigh. She’s busy. He’s inconveniencing her, he can tell.
“Please,” he says.
Whatever she sees in his face, it gets under her professional skin. She takes the receiver.
Ryan tunes out their conversation. He’s never liked eavesdropping, even if the conversation is about him. When the nurse hands the phone back to him Sandy sounds reassured, in control, “Okay, Ryan. I want you to stay put. We’re coming to get you.”
Ryan can feel himself standing there in the hospital with the phone in his hand, but he can’t believe any of this is actually happening. This night seems so surreal, like a bad dream that he can’t wake up from.
“Ryan, are you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Are you alright?”
He doesn’t have an answer, not one that Sandy will want to hear.
“Okay,” Sandy says into the silence, “Okay. Sit tight. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Goodbye, Sandy.”
Sandy is still talking when Ryan sets the receiver gently back in the cradle.
Ryan turns away from the desk. His legs feel numb again. He doesn’t know how he’s staying on his feet, and suddenly he just can’t be anymore. Ryan finds the nearest chair and drops down into it. He rests his forearms on his thighs and loses himself in the noise and activity of the waiting room.
There’s pair of dark-haired toddlers running laps around a magazine-laden coffee table. A woman who could be their mother is slumped in one of the two-dozen or so identical maroon-cushioned chairs that line the chalk-white walls. Her face is pale and sweat-slick. There’s a sleeping baby in her arms. She’s trying not to wake the infant while she fills out a piece of paper attached to a clipboard.
He sees a bent-backed old man pushing an oxygen tank, making his slow way toward the opposite side of the room where there are two doors marked as restrooms and a metal drinking fountain attached to the wall between them. There are tattoos on the old man’s tanned forearms, so fuzzy and faded now that Ryan can’t tell if they were designs of women or weapons or animals when they were inked. There is a pack of Marlboro Reds sticking out of his breast pocket.
A few seats down from him he sees a woman with brown hair rocking a little girl in her arms. The little girl is crying and muttering “Hurts, Mommy. It hurts.” There’s an ice pack on her wrist. Ryan thinks they’ve been waiting for a while. The mother keeps repeating, “I know, Sweety, I know…”
Ryan realizes he’s staring and he drops his eyes. He looks at his hands, his scraped knuckles, the plastic hospital bracelet circling his wrist. He snaps it off and shoves it in his back pocket along with his prescriptions.
The nurse keeps glancing up at him like she’s making sure he hasn’t left, like she’s a waitress at a diner and he’s about to skip out on the check.
Above the nurse’s station there’s a round clock, ticking away. The small hand is on the ten. The big hand is on the three. It takes Ryan about a minute to interpret the time, and another minute for it to mean anything to him.
Ten-fifteen.
It’s been less than two hours since the accident.
Right now Marissa’s plane is sitting on the tarmac at LAX. Right now the other passengers are checking their boarding passes, finding their seats, cramming roller bags into overhead bins. Right now Marissa’s seat is empty, and it’s going to stay that way.
Two nurses rush by him. One is complaining to the other about traffic. Ryan hears, “…closed the road…car accident…”
It takes several minutes for it to sink in that the car accident they’re talking about is his.
“Ryan.”
He looks up.
He stands up.
Julie Cooper, framed by the sliding glass doors of the emergency entrance, is beautiful and terrifying. Her hair is uncombed, wild like she drove here with the windows rolled down. Her outfit is wrinkled. Her mascara is smudged around her bloodshot eyes.
The way she’s looking at him reminds him of the way Caleb Nichol used to look at him. It’s the same way his mom’s boyfriends used to look at him, and his brother’s friends, cops, prison guards, a lot of people. She’s looking at him like he’s a walking mistake, like he was put on this earth to make her life difficult, like she’d like nothing better than to tell him so, and right now Ryan is willing to take anything she wants to dish out.
Julie isn’t moving towards him, so he comes to her. His legs feel like he’s walking through waist-deep water, but it’s the least he can do.
She gasps in, a tiny sob. Her lips are trembling. When he gets close enough to hear, she says, “Why couldn’t it have been you?”
Ryan drops his eyes. He wonders the same thing.
Julie didn’t come alone, and while he’s standing there numbly with her words settling in his stomach like lead balloons Neil Roberts lays a hand on his shoulder. He eyes Ryan critically, looks in both of his eyes and at the bruise on his forehead. For a moment Ryan thinks that Doctor Roberts is going call the triage nurse over and say to her in his clinical, professional voice, “You made a mistake. This one’s dead too.”
The moment passes and Doctor Roberts is looking at Ryan’s prescriptions. Ryan doesn’t remember handing them over but he must have. Doctor Roberts couldn’t have fished them out of Ryan’s pocket without him noticing.
Doctor Roberts has his glasses on and he’s nodding.
“These are good. You want to be careful with the Soma. It can make you drowsy and dizzy. Did they do x-rays? CT scan? MRI?”
It takes Ryan a few seconds to understand that Doctor Roberts is asking him a question.
“Yeah, uh, X-rays.” It feels so wrong to be talking about himself.
Doctor Roberts is frowning at Ryan like he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. Ryan can think of several reasons why he might feel that way. “Are your parents coming for you?”
Ryan’s father is in prison. His mother is in New Mexico. She gave him a car as a graduation present but he crashed it.
Numbly, “Sandy and Kirsten are on their way.”
Doctor Roberts looks torn. He glances toward the door. Julie Cooper is outside under the fluorescent glow of the emergency room awning. So is Kaitlin, longhaired and slender, just like her sister. Julie’s back is toward the hospital. She’s clinging to Kaitlin like she’s lost at sea and her youngest daughter…her only daughter… is the only thing keeping her afloat.
Ryan wants to stop looking but he can’t.
Doctor Roberts is looking too. After a minute he says, “Son, I thinks it’s best if I take Julie home now. Are you going to be alright?”
“Yeah,” Ryan says. “You should go.”
“If you get nauseous or dizzy, come right back to the ER.”
Ryan nods like it’s the first time he’s heard that advice.
“You can call me too,” Doctor Roberts says, digging a card out of his pocket, “Even if you just have questions about your medications.”
“Thanks. Doctor Roberts?”
“Yes?”
He can’t seem to look Doctor Roberts in the eye. His eyes bounce between the Doctor’s forehead and his collar. This is hard.
“Is, um…is she here? Did they bring her here?”
He can’t even say her name.
Doctor Roberts gets a look on his face, some kind of emotion that’s masked because he’s used to handing out bad news.
“Yes, son. We came to claim Marissa.” He says the words without judgment. It is just a fact. It’s the answer to his question, and isn’t that what he wanted?
“Oh,” he says.
Doctor Roberts lays a hand on Ryan’s shoulder, just like he did when he first came in; only it feels so much heavier now.
“Take care of yourself, son.”
Then Doctor Roberts walks away.
Ryan wanders back toward his seat in the waiting room, which is still body-warm. He drops his elbows onto his knees, loses himself in the neutral pattern of the fabric under him and the scuffed texture of the floor. He doesn’t know how long he stays that way, probably just a few minutes, then the Cohens arrive. He hears them before he sees them, their rushed footsteps, Kirsten’s high heels on the linoleum, Seth’s squeaking tennis shoes. Then the chorus comes in:
“-my God, Ryan, when we heard-”
“-got here as soon as we could. Traffic was-”
“-alright man?”
Ryan can’t answer. He feels like he’s caught in a riptide, being pulled in every direction at once and he can’t tell which way is up.
Then Kirsten wraps her arms around him and the world feels solid and real again.
Ryan can only count a handful of times in the last three years that Kirsten has hugged him or kissed him on the cheek or patted his hand. Her physical affection for him has always felt reserved and mechanical. Ryan knows it’s partially his fault too. Before he came to live with the Cohens physical touch was, for the most part, unwanted and painful. Three years of living in Newport hasn’t been enough to tear down sixteen years worth of defenses. Besides, Kirsten has her own barriers. She’s not his mother. He’s just a kid living at her house. She’s never allowed herself to cross that line.
Kirsten blows right past her own boundaries and his and pulls him into a tight hug like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and Ryan…lets it happen. He shuts his eyes. His head dips forward onto Kirsten’s shoulder like his neck is made of wax and it’s melting in her warm presence.
“Oh thank God,” she whispers. “Thank God, thank God…”
He doesn’t deserve this. His face feels hot. He realizes that there are tears leaking from his eyes. He buries them in Kirsten’s shoulder. He hates himself for being weak. He hates himself for not being able to save Marissa. He hates himself for being alive when she isn’t.
“I couldn’t…” Ryan starts. His voice sounds wrong; flat and emotionless. He tries again, “It was too late.”
The Cohens are looking at him strangely. Maybe they don’t know that Marissa is dead.
After a long silence Kirsten says, “There wasn’t anything you could have done.”
But she doesn’t know that. There just isn’t anything else to say.
To be continued...
Part 2a
Thank you for reading. Feedback is welcome. If you see a mistake, please don't hesitate to speak up.