Forever Loved (The Forever Series) Read online

  He reviewed the segments of the agreement. I signed the bottom.

  “Let’s get you discharged,” he said, standing.

  I followed him numbly down the corridors, back through processing, and collected my backpack and the personal items they had confiscated when I arrived.

  “Do you need a ride somewhere?” he asked.

  “I’ll take the bus,” I said.

  “Good luck, Corabelle. I’m sorry this happened.”

  I turned away from him to trudge down the sidewalk. The day had moved to evening. I wasn’t sure what to do next. Once again, I had to start all over.

  When I got to my dorm room, I sat on the bed, feeling numb. What would I say to my parents about my move? And my coworkers. Would they clear out my desk? I wasn’t sure how big a secret it would be. I had no instructions.

  I could go home to my parents’ house, but it was so full of memories — the sun room, my bedroom window, the gate in the back fence that led to Gavin’s. No, I couldn’t go there.

  Finn’s framed picture sat on a small table and I picked it up. “Where do I go now?” I asked him.

  He couldn’t look at me, his eyes covered with a protective mask, the tube and the blue tape preventing him from talking, or crying, or making any sound.

  I slid to the floor, the picture in my lap. Why hadn’t I walked some other way? Why had she been so close to that wall? I’d never struck anyone in my life, not with anything other than a playful punch. She had no idea why I had done it. That I knew what it was like to forever second-guess yourself, to wonder if what you had done had harmed your child.

  No one ever told you what to do when your world caved in. I had no one close enough to call about this, just coworkers and a few study partners. I wasn’t sure if I could even tell them anything, based on that agreement.

  I had never been so utterly alone. When Finn died and Gavin left, I still had my parents and the sympathy of an entire town. Now I had nothing, no one. Not even a home or a school or a future that I could see. I lay flat on the rough carpeted floor, Finn’s picture on my chest, letting the heaviness of my grief and fear settle over me like a blanket.

  What would I do?

  Beneath my bed, light glinted off a plastic bag that held a few of my summer clothes. I reached for it, dumping the shorts and tank tops into a pile and crunching the crinkled bag in my fist.

  Did I dare?

  I propped the picture on my belly, admiring Finn’s cheeks, pink and fat beneath the gray mask. I could remember their pillowy softness. I had held him only once, watching his chest rise and fall with urgency until the movements slowed down, with long spaces in between, then stopped.

  I quit thinking of anything at all and tugged the bag over my head. An ugly image, I was sure, the girl with the dead baby on her belly and the grocery sack on her face. I twisted it under my chin to seal it off. I wouldn’t die. I would pass out and let go, and air could get in.

  Or not.

  It didn’t matter.

  The plastic settled over my skin, then gradually began to mold itself to my nose and cheeks, sucking in against my mouth. A tear trickled from my eye to my ear. I felt my lungs aching, the panic building in my chest. I began to writhe, my arms insisting on coming up to pull the bag away. I fought the urge, stuffed it down, raged against the survival instinct that tried to change my mind.

  Then my body went quiet and still, and I could relax into the dark. The light began to fade and I sensed my hand hitting the floor.

  But I didn’t go out. I heard crayons scraping across paper. In front of me was an image as wide as the wall, as tall as my imagination. I was coloring the blue sea, spreading color with broad swaths. Next to me, Gavin, boyish and short, his socks sagging, knelt and filled in the sand with a pale brown crayon, decorating the surface with starfish and clamshells.

  I laughed and stepped back. The ocean was vast and beautiful. Gavin turned to look at me, and we smiled. This was our future, our goal, our home.

  My belly heaved and suddenly I threw up into the bag. I yanked it away, panicked, disgusted, but in awe at my body, resisting me, making me do its will.

  Finn’s picture clattered to the floor, but didn’t break. I snatched a shirt from the bed and wiped my face, sucking in air. I would survive this. I would make it home.

  To the sea.

  5: Gavin

  I felt ridiculous sitting in class listening to Professor Blowhard yammer on about comets. Corabelle’s seat was too empty, like there was a hole in the room. Her friend Jenny watched me sympathetically from the end of the row, between flirty waves to the TA. They were so going to get busted for dating, or whatever it was they were doing.

  The only salvageable thing about being there was taking notes to help Corabelle. I concentrated on the page, scribbling them the old-fashioned way because typing while I tried to listen made me crazy. I would still swear he was taking the entire class lecture out of a children’s book about space.

  After an eternity, he shut down the projector and we were free. Jenny picked her way around knees and backpacks to stand by my seat. “How’s Cora?”

  “Much better. Talking, awake. I think she’s through the worst of it.”

  “I’m taking her shifts, so I haven’t had a minute free to go over there again. You going now?”

  “Probably not until late. Her parents are there.”

  She moved aside to let another student by. “I bet that’s going just grand.”

  “They haven’t had me arrested. I’d say that’s a win.” I stood up, slinging my backpack over my shoulder. “You’ve talked to her boss, right?”

  “Yeah, they’re supposedly sending her a care package. Probably leftover coffee and stale strudel.” Jenny fell into step beside me. “Why do you think she walked into the water? I mean, I knew she’d been upset, and this was big shit going down, but that’s huge. She’s no drama queen, and trust me, I know drama.”

  I’m sure she did. But I had no answer for her. Corabelle was different now, parts of her as unreachable as the shadows on the moon. We headed for the stairs. “I’m betting the hospital is going to try and drag it out of her,” I said.

  “You think they’ll say she’s crazy or something?”

  “She’s putting on a pretty good act of being normal.”

  Jenny rushed to keep up with me, her pink ponytail swinging. “Are we talking about the same person? Because the Corabelle I know couldn’t fool a kindergartner.”

  Our footsteps echoed in the stairwell, and I had to resist the urge to pause on the spot where Corabelle and I talked for the first time after discovering we were on the same campus. “She’ll rise to the occasion.”

  “Well, fooling the shrinks is all well and good, but both you and I know the real deal. She went into the ocean and wasn’t planning on coming back out.”

  I stopped on the bottom step and turned to face Jenny. “Look, we don’t know what Corabelle was thinking, and we don’t know she has a problem. She’s working it out now, and she’ll either fool the social worker or she won’t. I don’t think she’s in any danger, and I would rather us be supportive than speculate.”

  Jenny held her hands in the air. “Whoa, dish boy’s got a burr up his ass.”

  I whirled back around at that. This conversation was pointless.

  “Hey, Gavin, sorry.” She grabbed my arm. “You know I want what’s best for her. That was a tough scene out there.”

  I yanked the door open. “Why the hell did you meet me there anyway? Why not any other place?”

  Jenny halted. “That’s a very good question. It’s what she wanted.” She twirled a pink lock around her finger. “You think she planned it? That doesn’t seem like her.”

  I shook my head. “No. She’s sentimental. We had some moments on the beach, that’s all.”

  Jenny passed through the door. “I’m sure you’re right. But even if she does escape the sanity police, we should keep an eye on her.”

  “I plan to,” I said.
“Once she’s discharged, I’m not letting her out of my sight.”

  ~*´♥`*~

  I only managed to work a half-shift at the garage before Bud sent me home again. I was too distracted and sheared off a radiator hose on a routine maintenance job.

  I stopped by Corabelle’s apartment to look around before heading to the hospital and facing her parents. They had probably been there all day, and I hoped they’d be ready to leave, if not already gone, before I arrived.

  The butterflies I re-created from Finn’s crib mobile still hung in the trees outside her door, although a little more sparse than I had originally laid out. A few lay on the ground and I scooped them up.

  Her apartment was stuffy and airless. I left the door open to let the cool inside and sat on her sofa, remembering how tense I’d been that first time I came over, when she’d asked for me.

  Why had she texted me that night? There were so many things about her I didn’t know, places she’d been that I’d never go or understand.

  I caught a whiff of something foul and moved to the kitchen, pulling the trash bag from the bin. I spotted a plate I remembered from our apartment, a ceramic fish painted by a neighbor. I set the bag down and picked up the plate. Corabelle wouldn’t serve fish on it, saying it was cannibalistic somehow, but I could picture cookies stacked on it, and orderly rows of crackers and squares of cheese from when someone came over to study.

  I wondered what else she had, flipping open a few cabinets. I left every single thing behind, all my clothes, my toothbrush, everything I owned except my laptop and backpack, which had been in my car when I took off from the funeral. I had started over literally from scratch, but Corabelle had retained the detritus of our lives together.

  I couldn’t find anything interesting, so I picked up the trash bag again, jumping back when a wet drop hit my shoe. A green liquid oozed from several holes in the bottom of the sack. Cheap bags. I opened her pantry and searched for a box of them to double bag it so I didn’t leave a trail through her apartment. I found a neatly folded stack of them, and tugged the first one off the top, snapping it open.

  As the sack fitted over the other, I realized it, too, had holes. What was that all about? I examined them, realizing they were perfect punctures, done on purpose. I returned to the pantry and pulled another one from the stack. Also riddled with them. Every bag had been tampered with.

  Attached to the door was one of those stick-on closet organizers designed to hold plastic grocery bags to be reused. It was stuffed full of sacks. I pulled one out and held it up to the overhead light.

  Holes.

  I pulled out bag after bag, and they were all the same. Careful punctures at the bottom of each one.

  What was Corabelle doing? She didn’t have a cat to get tangled in one and suffocate. Obviously she didn’t have a child. And either way, it was an obsessive thing to do.

  I stuffed the sacks back in the little bin and folded the trash bags as best I could. I wiped up the floor with paper towels and held the bag sideways to keep the worst of it from dripping.

  As I walked around the building looking for the dumpster, I decided to put this from my mind for now. Corabelle could tell me about it later, when she was stronger, when we had some miles under our belt and could talk about hard stuff. Whatever was going on with her, and whatever quirks came out of it, probably led back to me. If I wanted us to be together again, I had to accept all the things about her. So I would.

  6: Corabelle

  My parents were going to drive me crazy. They’d sat around my bed all day, talking about the most inane things. Knitting. Football. Construction in my hometown.

  “You guys are in one of the most beautiful cities in California,” I said. “Go out and see the sights.”

  Mom shook her head. “While you are still recovering? Of course not.”

  Every time the door opened, my anxiety rose that the social worker would return and my parents would want to stick around for the interrogation. They had no clue that I’d been kicked out of New Mexico State, only that I had decided to finish out my degree at the school I had originally applied to. They also didn’t know I had forfeited my scholarships and was going into debt.

  But Miss Cat-Eye Glasses probably knew all of that.

  I poked at the new phone Dad had brought, wishing my old one would turn on so that I could at least get a contact list. Neither Jenny nor Gavin had called or texted me, both thinking mine was still defunct. I vowed to memorize their numbers from now on, so I’d never be out of contact again. I felt cut off from the world.

  “I’m surprised Gavin hasn’t tried to connive his way back to your room today,” Dad said. “I’m looking forward to kicking him out. I already talked to the staff and they said if he isn’t family, he can be asked to leave.”

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck start to hackle. “Dad, I’m over eighteen, and I want him here. You can’t turn him away on my behalf.”

  “Don’t you remember those days after he left?”

  Mom looked up from her knitting, her reading glasses low on her nose. “Arthur, let’s not go there.”

  Dad paced the room. “You were devastated. I wanted to find that boy and pulverize him.”

  I tugged at a loose string on the hospital gown. Dad had changed. He never would have said things like this before Finn.

  “And now look at you. He no more comes back and here you are in the hospital.” He whirled around. “I am convinced he was responsible for this.”

  “Now you know Gavin was the one who pulled her out,” Mom said.

  “So obviously he was there when she went in!”

  I set the phone down by my leg. “I’m right here, you know.”

  Dad came forward and sat by my feet. “Tinker Bell, you were doing so well before. I can’t help but think all the upset is what got you in this situation.”

  “What situation is that? I got a little wet, and I ended up sick. I’m better now, and I’ll be out of here soon. All this will be behind me.” Why wouldn’t he let this go?

  Something moved in the doorway, and I looked to see Gavin standing there, his face red with fury.

  “Do you have something you want to accuse me of…sir?”

  Dad twisted on the bed. “Oh, good.” He reached across me to push the nurse call button.

  “Don’t do that!” I shouted. “This is ridiculous!”

  “No, him being here is ridiculous,” Dad said. “Baby, why won’t you listen to reason on this?”

  Gavin moved through the room with coiled energy, like a panther. He took my hand. “How are you feeling?”

  I hung on, watching my father glare at Gavin’s back. “I’m getting around today.”

  He set my backpack on the floor. “I brought you the notes from class today and your books so you could catch up.”

  I looked around him at my dad in an “I told you so look,” but he was heading for the door. I didn’t like this. “Dad, where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer but kept moving. I turned to Mom. “What has gotten into him?”

  She set her knitting in her lap. “I can’t calm him down. It’s like he’s built up too many years of being Mr. Nice Guy, and it’s all going to blow.”

  “You have to stop him. I won’t let them kick Gavin out.”

  She shoved her yarn in a bag. “I’ll go see what he’s up to.”

  “Take him out to dinner or something. Get him away for a while.” I could feel the tension in my neck and back, and several of the aches blossomed into a burn. I’d ask for pain meds again, or maybe not. I really needed to be awake to study. But this was not to be borne.

  When the room had emptied, Gavin leaned over for a kiss. He aimed for a light peck, but I brought my arms up to his neck, keeping him there, wanting to feel something other than anger, panic, and exhaustion.

  He shifted closer to me, running his fingers across my cheek. As his lips crossed lightly over my mouth in a caress, I could feel everything downshift, settlin
g back into a steady rhythm.

  “I’ve missed holding you,” he whispered against my skin.

  “So hold me now,” I said.

  He leaned into me, pulling my head against his chest. He smelled of the garage, oil and machinery, a bit of sea air from the ride over. Masculine and good. After the antiseptic sterility of the hospital, he was bliss.

  “Should we time the nurse rounds so we know when there’s a gap?” He released me just enough that I could turn my face up to see his evil grin.

  “You are so bad,” I said. “They can’t exactly kick ME out.”

  “See, we’re all covered.” He leaned down to kiss me again, and this time, despite the lingering weakness in my muscles, the heat from the contact began to spread through me. He gripped my chin and slid his tongue in my mouth, and now my fingers were tight around his biceps. I yearned for him, dying to get out of this gray room and someplace where I could be with him, explore all the things about him that were not yet familiar, to know him like I once did.

  His arm wrapped around my back and pulled me close, crushing me against him. I let the walls and glaring industrial light fall away, closing my eyes to the rails and machines and clinical equipment. There was nothing but his body and his mouth, his hands and hard muscles, the nape of his neck beneath my fingers.

  “Good God, get him out of here NOW,” my father barked.

  Gavin didn’t even flinch, but withdrew slowly, on his own time frame, unwilling to be jolted away. He settled me carefully back against the pillow.

  My mom had her fists pressed against her mouth, clearly upset but not willing to speak up. My dad was red-faced, more worked up than I think I’d ever seen him. Beside him, a short man in a blue hospital security uniform looked sheepish and uncertain.

  “I understand you are unwanted here,” the guard said.

  “I want him here,” I said. “Dad, you’re going too far.”

  Gavin stood up to face them. “I understand you’re upset—”

  “DO YOU?” Dad’s voice boomed through the walls and Mom jumped.