35. Unruly Hearts
35
Unruly Hearts
USUALLY WHEN YOU flew into LaGuardia, you kissed your ass and hoped for the best. I hated flying into LGA—the turbulent air, how you’re going
right over the water
, how
you think you’re going to land in that water
when at the last minute the tarmac comes up and your plane juts down and—
I didn’t like flying.
At all. But I braved it. In fact, I didn’t quite mind it at all. Because I was going to see
Ben
.
After the funeral, I had thought to stay a few days longer, but as soon as my family heard about what had happened—from Alice, because she was about as good at keeping secrets as my dad was—they all told me to go. Catch a flight back with Rose, come home in the morning, go to his hospital—to
find him.
“Good things don’t wait, and neither should you,” Mom had said.
Perhaps this wasn’t my grand romance, but this was my story,
and whether I was the rule or the exception, I didn’t care. I just wanted to see him. I wanted to make sure he was okay.
Rose’s phone pinged with a few texts. Probably all from Alice. They had gone on a date last night to Bar None, and Rose hadn’t been able to shut up about my sister since. I loved it—and hated it. My chaotic best friend and my smart-ass younger sister? It was a recipe for trouble.
What were Ben and I? Were we anything?
I wondered. I didn’t know. I thought back on my last conversation with him, and I was filled with mortification all over again. His grandmother was Ann—he’d read all of my sex scenes! He’d seen me
naked
!
I wasn’t sure which was worse.
They were all pretty bad.
Though, did he remember any of that? Or when he woke up, was it like waking from a dream? Erin had told Rose that his injuries were minimal, and the doctors hadn’t known why he wasn’t waking up. Because he wasn’t there. His soul—spirit—whatever. I wasn’t sure what made us tick. The memories in our electrons? The wind in our lungs? The echo of our words? Whatever it was, he was awake now, and even though it felt like an eternity since I sat in his office and gave him a cactus, it had only been a week to everyone else.
“Oh, hey.” Rose elbowed me in the side. Passengers were beginning to file out of the plane and onto the jet bridge. “Erin texted me while we were on the flight. He’s taking visitors now!”
“Oh.”
I wanted to puke.
Leaving the airport was always a lot easier than coming, but LaGuardia made it hard no matter what. It was like whoever designed the place wanted everyone who came through it to suffer as much as they could. All of the open gates were on one side of the airport, but the line for the taxis was across the parking garage,
down an incline, through a construction zone, at the far end of what was probably once a bus stop. It took thirty minutes to get there, and calling a car would’ve taken just as long because the pickup area was right
next
to the taxis.
But we finally managed to nab one, and Rose told our driver to take us to New York Presbyterian in Lower Manhattan—and take the shortest route possible. Because of the layover in Charlotte, we didn’t actually manage to get back to the city until rush-hour traffic, so a drive that usually took thirty minutes took an hour and some change. That was one thing I didn’t miss about the city. At least in Mairmont, there weren’t enough people
for
an hour and a half’s worth of traffic.
By the time we pulled up at the hospital—and the right building—I just wanted to go home, but Rose was nothing if not stalwart.
“Don’t you
want
to see him?”
Of course I did. That wasn’t the question. It wasn’t if I wanted to see him but—this last week had been strange, and otherworldly, and who was to say that he wanted to see
me
?
Rose paid for the taxi and dumped her duffel on the sidewalk beside a fire hydrant, out of the way of most of the people. “I’ll be out here,” she said, waving me inside. “I don’t really like hospitals.”
“I don’t, either—you know, the whole
ghost
thing,” I hissed.
“And one’s waiting for you upstairs. Five thirty-eight. Don’t forget!”
As if I could. I’d been repeating the number over and over in my head for the entire taxi ride, but a small voice, one that I had been trying to ignore, trying to shove away, kept asking,
What if he doesn’t remember you?
What would I do then?
I didn’t know, but I didn’t think about it, either, as I got into the
elevator and hit the fifth floor button. A moment later, an older woman stepped in with me. She had on the loudest sweater I’d ever seen—every color of the rainbow vomited onto it and knit together. I’d seen a sweater like that only once before.
“What floor?” I asked.
“Oh, I think it’s finally time to head to the top.”
“Sure thing.” I pressed the highest number.
The older woman leaned toward me. She smelled like lilac perfume and dumplings. “Thank you, Florence.”
“You’re welc—” But when I glanced over, she was gone. A chill slithered down my spine. I could’ve sworn she was here, just a moment ago.
And that sweater—she looked like—
She looked like Ann.
The elevator doors dinged and opened to the fifth floor. I stepped out and glanced back one more time to make sure that the woman wasn’t there, but of course she wasn’t. She was dead. Five years dead.
I didn’t have time to think about Ann, because as the elevator doors closed, I heard a familiar voice say my name. And it wasn’t the voice I wanted to hear.
“Florence?”
I turned around, and standing there in the lobby, with blond hair and a trimmed beard, was Lee Marlow. He was holding a bouquet of yellow flowers in his hand with a card stuck in them that read
GET WELL SOON!
I felt myself go clammy all over. “Lee—h-hi.”
“What a surprise!” He seemed confused. “What’re you doing here?”
“Um—I’m here to see Ben.”
He frowned, as if trying to puzzle out exactly how I knew him. And I didn’t know where to start. Though I should’ve known
better, because it turned out, Lee didn’t much care. “ ’Course he’s popular with the ladies.”
Ben?
Right. I’m sure he told himself that because no one came to see him when he had his appendix out on our two-year anniversary.
“It’s nice to see you made some connections at all those publishing parties I took you to,” he added.
He really couldn’t think about a world beyond himself, could he? Charming and suave, of course he was, and the world he knew danced around him like planets around the sun.
I forced my lips to smile as my hands balled into fists. Just one punch. Just one—
No, Florence.
You’re better than that.
“I just asked the nurses,” he went on, and pointed down the hall. “He’s right down this way. We can walk together.”
I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to do this alone, either. My chest was beginning to feel tight. This wasn’t how I pictured seeing Ben again, with Lee Marlow to witness, but I began to care less and less about
how
we met again and just that we were
going
to. Because Ben was here, and the panic in my veins was slowly, with each step, transforming into excitement.
He was here. In this building.
Alive
.
Ben was alive. Ben was alive.
Ben was alive.
Hospitals didn’t look so different from publishing houses—at least not Falcon House. Glass walls separated patients from everyone else, sometimes frosted but never private. The cacophony of beeps coalesced into this jagged sort of rhythm that had no rhyme or reason, and my heart was louder than all of them, beating in my ears like a funeral march.
Lee never knew how to do anything in silence. He didn’t like
quiet. He had to be either talking, or listening, or
doing
something. So, as we went together down the hall, he talked. “It’s good to see you—are you going somewhere?” he added, once he noticed the suitcase I was rolling with me.
“I just came back from visiting home.”
“Home? No shit. You always hated home.”
“My dad died,” I replied, and his eyebrows jerked up.
“Oh. Florence, I’m s—”
“Is that his room?” I interrupted, looking straight ahead. Toward the end of the hall, to room 538. I could see the number on the plaque. And through the frosted glass, there was a shadow—a shape—sitting up in bed.
I knew that shape. I knew
him
.
“Oh, what a surprise. Laura’s still here,” Lee observed. I didn’t notice the woman sitting in the chair beside Ben’s bedside until he said something. Soft red hair and a heart-shaped face, snuggled in a blanket. The same red hair from the social media photo. The same soft face.
“Laura?” I echoed.
“She hasn’t left his side since the accident,” he went on, and I didn’t think he told me that in malice because—he couldn’t know why I was here. Or what I felt. “I keep telling her to go home but you know how it is.”
I came to a stop.
Fifteen feet away, in room 538, Ben laughed at something she said. It was loud and bright and—and
happy
. He was happy. I didn’t need to see him to know that.
“I think she still misses him,” he said. “Maybe he’ll give her a second chance now.”
A second chance. What Laura had begged of Ben, after she cheated, and Ben had wanted that. A second chance—but he didn’t
think he deserved it, because what guy drove his girlfriend to cheat? But it was her fault. She made the choice.
And he made his.
But . . . she had been at his bedside this whole time. Waiting for him to wake up. She loved him.
Really
loved him—and they had the kind of shared history that Ben and I couldn’t have in the seven days we knew each other.
I . . . knew very little about Ben. What was his favorite food? His favorite music? What was he afraid of—what did he do on the weekends? Did he own one of those squatty potties? Questions I hadn’t thought to ask in the last week.
Then again, I’d been grieving. I was
still
grieving. It was hard to make space with a sorrow that full.
“Why didn’t you come after me?” I asked Lee abruptly. “When I left?”
He gave me a strange look, and oh, I wished he could’ve said that he missed me. And I wished he could’ve apologized. And I could’ve told him that my stories were real, and that they were precious, and that I wanted to tell them someday. Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.
And this was not mine.
Lee Marlow said, of all the things he could’ve, “I don’t think we would’ve worked out, bunny. I don’t like dating rivals, though you got a while to go. I didn’t want to see you jealous—”
My hand was already in a tight fist.
It would’ve been a shame to waste it.
So I turned and I slammed it straight into his motherfucking nose.
He gave a howl of pain, backpedaling in surprise. His nose wasn’t broken. I didn’t know how to throw a punch that hard. But it
did
hurt my knuckles. He whirled back to me with wild, angry eyes. “The
hell,
Florence?!”
“I’m not your rival, Lee Marlow,” I told him, shaking my hand because it hurt. “You’re not even in my league. But you better watch me,” I added, and grabbed my suitcase handle again, “because I’ll be the writer you will never be.”
Then I left down the hallway, back toward the elevators.
And I didn’t look back.
Even as he shouted at me to stop, told me he’d call the cops, file a report—I didn’t care.
It felt good, and he deserved it.
And I was never going to think about Lee Marlow again.
Rose was still waiting for me outside, and the look on my face must’ve said it all. Her eyebrows knit together and she shook her head. “Oh, honey,” she whispered, and pulled me into a tight hug.
I told her I couldn’t do it. I didn’t tell her why, but it didn’t really matter anymore anyway. It wasn’t my move to make, and this wasn’t my part of the story to tell. I had helped him get his life back, and he had helped me through mine—and if that was it . . . then it was. He was happy, and so it was time that I was, too.
I went home with my best friend in the entire world, to our small apartment in New Jersey, and I finished writing a love story.