If Only One Could Be So Lucky - 1. Chapter 1

If Only One Could Be So Lucky

“… total to two hundred and eighty-nine dead and forty-six injured. The cause of the malfunction–”

“–news stories today. A landing gear malfunction caused a small international–”

“–hospitals overwhelmed with demand, so if you need to visit an emergency room officials are asking–”

“Fucking AM news stations, shut up!” I scream and smash my fist against the face of the car’s radio. I only look up from the display when I hear the long frantic honk of a horn from oncoming traffic. I suddenly grab the wheel with two hands, jerking the car back into my own lane.

“Fuck…” I swear again, sighing while my heart pounds in my chest. I quickly get mad again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, God damn it all to fucking hell, FUCK!” I just can’t deal with it anymore. It’s too much for any one person to handle.

I try to take deep breaths to calm myself but I can’t. Every time they hitch in my throat and I end up gasping and hyperventilating. My hands are getting cold and I loosen my death grip on the steering wheel, allowing more blood flow to my fingers. Then I realize it’s not just my hands. My feet, my legs, my arms, they’re all cold, shaking despite the fact that it’s twenty-two degrees in the car…

Fuck, I’m going into shock, I realize. The sudden drowsiness and weakness isn’t helping my already compromised driving skills. Why the hell would anyone at the hospital let me drive myself home? Oh yeah, they wouldn’t, that’s why I had snuck out right before the end of my unexpected double shift before anyone could confront me.

I suddenly remember to focus on the road and find I’ve been driving on auto-pilot, going to where it’s familiar, muscle memory guiding the turns, but I’m not approaching home. My car passes through the open cemetery gates and takes the left fork, then the right, and I shove the shifter into park in the middle of the little circle at the end of the path. My weight’s thrown forward in my seat as the transmission clunks and the car jerks to a stop. I shake my head. Whoops, guess I wasn’t fully stopped before throwing it into park.

I open the door and automatically start walking between the familiar graves, light headed and rubbing my arms quickly to try and warm up. I almost smile as I mentally say hello to Trudy Ellen Beaches, loving wife and mother, and Gerald Patrick Grimes, philanthropist extraordinaire, as I always do when passing them. There’s a frantic electronic dinging and I look back to see my car still running with the door open and the key in the ignition. I stare at it for a moment, uncomprehending. I keep going forward.

This part of the cemetery is the nicest. The grass is greener and thicker, who knows why. There are more trees and it’s on the highest ground, giving a beautiful view of the rest of the cemetery, the park nearby, and half the town. My grandma Elsa is buried just over there by the big oak tree. His grandma Ethel is buried on the other side of the tree. The funerals had been on the same day… so many years ago… but not that many I suppose…

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

My head jerks up and my vision swims for a moment. The end of day light is growing dull and flat, so it takes me an extra second to focus on him and be sure. It takes me a long time to process how and why we both came to be here. But we had planned to be here, on this anniversary, so I suppose it just made sense that we were.

“I… I wasn’t going to,” I finally answer. I look down at myself. My scrubs are covered in sweat stains and dried blood. There’s urine on my shoes. I’m afraid of what my face and hair must look like, unwashed for the last thirty-six hours.

“God, I must reek,” I say. “I wouldn’t come near me if I were you. I’m not sanitary.”

He moves a few steps away from our tree and gestures for me to sit down. “You okay? You’re extremely pale.”

I suddenly feel very dizzy and nearly collapse at the base of the tree. I sit and hang my head between my knees for a few moments, my back to the rough bark.

“You know not to ask me if I’m okay,” I say, my tone scolding but soft. “You know that only makes it so much harder. When I’m composed enough to talk, I will. When I need your support, I’ll come to you. I always do. I just need space at first.”

I had never been able to handle the rush of concern and physical support from others when I’m hurting, the emotions too overwhelming, making my own so much worse. Between my med school and his long absences due to his job, I had to deal with a lot of stress. We’d figured out a system to deal with the tough moments, and it had been working for the last three years.

“Sorry,” he says, crossing his arms. He looks like he’s about to sit on the little stone bench between Charlene and Eugene Harrison but then decides to stay standing. “It’s hard seeing you like this.”

“It’s hard being like this,” I say, almost snapping at him. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “How can they put this kind of responsibility on me? God, I’m only a first year resident! I hadn’t even been responsible for someone’s death yet before the crash…”

I wasn’t being morbid or self-deprecating by saying “yet.” Entering this profession we all knew that as a doctor you have to make life and death decisions, and since we’re only human, sometimes they’re the wrong ones. Eventually a wrong diagnosis or a bad choice for a prescription will be made, or a response to a patient crashing just won’t be quite fast enough and… you’re responsible for that person’s death. The first one is hard, and you have to be prepared to handle it, to learn and move on, because God knows there will be a second, and a third…

“I feel like I killed at least fifteen people today,” I say, clenching my fists around the pant legs of my filthy scrubs. “Emerge was so packed, so crazy, everyone covered in blood and crashing… When I chose to go to one patient first, another died in the bed beside her. When I went to treat this elderly lady I was rushing and missed an allergy. There were so many people that I smacked into a nurse and ruined a whole bunch of samples, and people died while waiting for their lab results. I was so overwhelmed, made so many mistakes…”

“You did your best and you did your job,” he says soothingly to me.

I miss his voice. When he’s away, watching wild animals or secluded tribespeople through the camera lens, hearing his voice when he calls is the only thing that keeps me sane. We don’t even have to have a real conversation; I just cling to that connection, that sound, the cadences and rhythms of his smooth baritone, and I’m soothed and lulled into safety and comfort just as strong as being in his arms.

“I know you tried your hardest and I can guarantee none of your co-workers said you let them down,” he continues. He’s right. Despite all the high stress levels, everyone had worked together well. I’d had a lot of supportive grips on my arm and expressions of, “You’re doing great, Dr. Kane,” from the older residents and even the chief of medicine. It was a good hospital and a great working environment and I hoped to get hired on full time when I completed my residency.

I sigh dejectedly anyway. “Still, so many people died. The stupid plane… When do they ever have mass injuries? When planes crash everyone is just supposed to be dead, gone, vaporized in ball of flame. That’s what’s comforting about flying. If you’re gonna go down, you know you’re not going to be mangled and suffer… But this one…”

“The landing strip was lined with fire trucks and ambulances as they tried to land,” he tells me. “Only one wheel of the landing gear went down, and the plane was supposed to just scrape along the tarmac, but a wing caught the ground too early and it spun and flipped…”

“Fuck,” I say for the millionth time, my stomach rolling and bile filling my throat.

“Some people survived.” It is supposed to be a comfort. It isn’t.

“Those bastards,” I spit, tears welling up in my eyes again.

He looks at me speculatively for a long time. His eyes search me like he’s reading a dense book. Finally he says, “Do you know…?”

A frozen grip seizes my heart. I bite my bottom lip and recount, “In the ER, there were police, ambulance attendants, and hospital staff, all trying to communicate with each other. And there were reporters, vying for information. It was chaos. When the passenger manifest was being discussed and which of the injured and dead had gone to which hospitals and what families needed to be contacted… I ended up with a list in my hands along with a stack of patient files and hospital procedures. I read it. The ninety-three names of the people put in body bags when they cleared out the wreckage.”

There’s silence as our eyes meet. He has beautiful, dark eyes, like espresso. God, I miss him so much.

An eternity later he opens his mouth to speak.

I say quickly, “You must have been waiting here a long time,” forcing a different subject, looking anywhere but at him. “My shift was supposed to be over this morning.”

I can hear his smile in his little amused exhale of breath. “You’re worth the wait. You’ve always been worth the wait.”

My forehead falls on my knees and I start to cry. Fuck, I can’t…

“I love you,” I say, the words warbling. “Did I say it enough? I’m afraid I didn’t say it enough. And what about all the other things I haven’t said that I should have? How many times did I think of how handsome you are, how wonderful, how lucky I am and didn’t say it? Why was I so stupid and silent? And what about the things I haven’t thought of yet to say?”

“That’s kind of the point,” he says softly. “We’re here to say all those things. I love you too. I know you know it, but it’s important to say it anyway. And I know you love me, I never doubted it. I was so excited to come home to see you, so happy for this day.”

“If it hadn’t been for our anniversary…” My breath is too shaky to continue.

“Then I wouldn’t have gotten a surprise for you.”

My gaze shoots up to study him. Surprise? I don’t understand. He reads the confusion on my face.

“Look in our spot.”

I glance up at the tree trunk that stretches up and branches out above me. I brace my hands on the ground and push myself to my feet, heart racing again. I keep one steadying hand on the trunk as I reach up to a hole in the trunk where decades ago some branch had been, then broken off and rotted.

The first time we had met, the day of the funerals, he had decided to climb the tree, despite the suit and dress shoes. He had reached into the hole to haul himself up… and scared the shit out of a sleeping raccoon. It had scratched and bitten him, and I had kept him company at the hospital while he got a couple stitches and a rabies shot. In the time between that first meeting and officially going out, that flirty, exciting, not-sure-what’s-going-to-happen-but-God-I-hope-it’s-good time, we had left little gifts and notes for each other in the tree hole, knowing the other would get it when we returned to visit the graves. I saw Grandma Elsa way more often than I had originally planned to those first few weeks.

My hand closes on a small velvet box. I squeeze my eyes shut and take a moment to compose myself before retracting my hand and turning to face him.

“No…” I whisper, the tears falling freely down my cheeks. The ache in my chest is horrible.

“I meant for there to be happy crying,” he says, the weight of my sorrow pulling him down, his dark brown eyes glistening in the fading traces of daylight.

I look down to my hand and open the lid on the box. Two solid white-gold bands are nestled inside. A wracking sob escapes from me and I clamp my hand over my mouth. My heart is breaking, a physical ache that burns like fire in my chest, slowly spreading and consuming me. I feel sick and dizzy and no matter how much I cry I can’t extinguish the burning pain. Soon it will envelope and destroy everything that is left of me. I wish it would hurry up kill me already. This life is just too cruel.

“It’s not fair,” I whine through a cascade of tears as he steps a little closer. “Three years ago… our first kiss… this day, this spot…” I pull one of the twin rings out of the box and slip it on my left ring finger. It fits perfectly, of course. I look up to his eyes, red and wet. “I would have said yes,” I whisper. “I love you. I would have said yes.”

He smiles weakly. “I know.”

“It’s not fair,” I repeat. “We were going to have our whole lives together… And it all just ends. This is all we get?”

“We should be thankful. Most people don’t even get this much. No one else on that plane got to say goodbye.”

My throat closes up and I can’t speak. I don’t want to say goodbye. I can’t, I won’t. If I don’t then he can’t go… but I know from his expression that that’s not true. There’s only a moment or two left.

“Any last…?” I choke out.

He shakes his head. “I know you’ll make all the right choices. You always do. You’re so strong, Ty, so incredibly brave and strong. You’re going to be a great doctor, you already are. You’re a wonderful man, a loving friend, a caring son and brother. I’m so lucky to have been able to love and be loved by someone like you.”

The words sound like vows or a eulogy. I should be saying the same things to him. I can’t. It hurts too much.

He’s close now, close enough to touch. I reach forward and hold out my hand, the second ring held delicately between my thumb and finger. He lifts his left hand and slowly reaches forward, slipping his finger through the band. The illusion is perfect for just a short moment, until my hand shakes from my crying and I drop the ring. As he lowers his hand it passes right through mine; I don’t feel a thing.

“Don’t!” I call out to him, but he’s disappeared, gone. Gone forever.

Something breaks inside me and I go completely numb. Still and silent, part of me is dead too.

~ ~ ~ ~

Dr. Holmes stopped just as she passed the on-call room. She really needed to get back to the ER, but she also knew that when tragedies like this plane crash happened, it was just as important to check on the doctors and make sure they were coping properly. She backed up a couple of steps and peered in on the two first year residents, dirty and dishevelled like everyone else. Dr. McFarlane was kneeling in front of Dr. Kane who was just sitting on the edge of the cot, motionless, staring blankly.

“Is Ty okay?” Dr. Holmes asked, walking into the room only lit with the late morning’s natural light.

Dr. McFarlane shook his head. “He’s gone. Catatonic. His eyes were moving a while ago, like he was dreaming or something, and I was giving him time to process the news. But it’s been too long now. I think he’s going to need help.”

Dr. McFarlane looked forlornly at Dr. Kane. They’d been friends since the first semester of med school. It killed him to see his friend and co-worker so horribly affected by this tragedy.

“It’s been two hours since the first victims of the crash started coming in. Why’s he shutting down now?” Dr. Holmes asked, a third year resident and not as personally familiar with Dr. Kane as the other doctor. “I saw him forty minutes ago and he was doing fine, just tired from being here all night.” She walked up to Dr. Kane and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. No response. No response to her pen-light in his eyes either.

Dr. McFarlane swallowed hard. “We just found out that the plane that crashed, it was the same one Victor was on.” He saw the lack of recognition in her expression and filled in, “Victor was Ty’s boyfriend. They lived together when Victor wasn’t travelling for work, crewing for a documentary TV show. He was coming back for their anniversary. He died in the crash.”

“Oh God…” Dr. Holmes’ face drained. “Poor Ty…”

After a moment Dr. McFarlane broke the silence. “That’s got to be the worst way for it to happen… Suddenly with no warning, not being able to say goodbye.”

Dr. Holmes shook her head. “It’s worse to watch someone suffer. You’ll see it here, if you haven’t already. People going through so much, so many surgeries, treatments, in and out, until they just… don’t want to hang on anymore. And their families go through so much pain, watching, waiting, saying goodbye too many times, feeling guilty…”

They sat with Dr. Kane for a moment longer. Then both their beepers went off. They exchanged identical knowing looks. As much as they wanted to, they couldn’t sit around to mourn or offer support. They had to try and save lives, and they were now one more doctor short.