Be Not Far from Me(46)

Meredith and Kavita are waiting in my room when I get there, Kavita smart enough not to bring flowers or balloons, Meredith emotional enough to bring both. Dad leaves us alone so that we can talk, headed back to the house to bring me some of my own clothes, which I’m finally allowed to wear. My friends settle into chairs by my side, both nervous.

“Hey,” they say at the same time, Kavita giving Meredith a soft punch on the arm.

“Guys, it’s fine,” I say.

“No, I mean—” Kavita says in a rush while Meredith just starts crying.

“Stop,” I tell them both, and they do.

“You didn’t know,” I say, before either can interrupt me. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Meredith nods like she wants to believe it, but Kavita’s frown tells me she’s not going to let herself off the hook quite so easily.

“We thought you went home, Ash, I swear,” she says.

“I did,” I tell her. “I took the long way.”

Meredith snorts—something I haven’t heard her do since fourth grade—and uses the edge of my bedsheet to wipe her face, which I doubt my nurses would like, but it’s so Meredith that I don’t care. She’s here; she’s in front of me; she’s my friend, and you take them with the good and the bad—something they’ve been doing for me for years, and I never thanked them for it.

And I will. I’ll say all the things I knew needed to be said when I thought I was dying. But I’ll do it when I’m healthy so they can’t make light of it and say it’s the drugs talking. I’ll do it when I can stand on my feet and look them in the eye so that they know how true it is. I’ll do it when I’m ready and they are too, when I’ve got a good handle on who this new Ashley is and she’s found the right words.

“So you cut your foot off?” Kavita says.

“Part of it,” I correct. “But, yeah. On the floor of a meth lab, with a rock. Then I disinfected with whiskey.”

“That’s so you,” Meredith says. “Some of that hit the news and people on Twitter were calling bullshit, and I was like, whatever, I wouldn’t be surprised if she chewed it off with her teeth. So I got in, like, five tweet wars over it.”

“Thank you,” I tell her, and I mean it.

Kavita rolls her eyes but lets it slide. “I took your pack home for you,” she says, efficient as always. “And I charged your phone.” She reaches into her back pocket, pulling it out.

“Thanks,” I say. I’ve got thirty-five texts, but I slide it under my pillow for later. “So . . .”

I trail off, unsure of how much they want to hear about the woods, about thinking I would die and deciding that I would and then changing my mind about it. I don’t know if Meredith can handle the idea of eating worms and raw fish, and she for sure can’t hear the part about the one that swam back up my throat, or about me clubbing a possum to death. Kavita might, and maybe I’ll tell her one day, but right now I’m so far from that, here in this clean room, with my friends.

“Omigod.” Meredith perks up suddenly. “You don’t know because you’ve been gone, but Kate Fullerton ran over Jake Smalls with her truck at a field party because he said she smelled like week-old period. But it was just his foot, and it was, like, real muddy so he didn’t get hurt too bad.”

“That’s a shame,” I say, to which Kavita adds, “Preach.”

Meredith keeps going, telling me all the things that went on in my absence, what people said and did, the world that kept going without me in it, stuff that normally I might tell her doesn’t matter, that I don’t care. But this is my life, and these are the people in it.

And yes, I do care.

Duke is the last person to show up.

Dad is filling out paperwork so that I can leave tomorrow, but the scratch of his pen falls silent when Duke walks in, and I open my eyes. Dad knows what happened, the story coming out of me while he untangled my hair, so I half expect him to rebreak Duke’s nose.

It’s still lopsided and a bit yellow right around the bridge, so instead Dad just gives him a once-over and asks me if I want to talk to him. I tell him I do, and Dad leaves, not quite letting the door shut entirely behind him.

“Hey,” Duke says, taking a chair next to the bed.

“Hey,” I say. He leans forward like he’s thinking about taking my hand, so I tuck it under the sheets.

“Ash,” he says, eyes down. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him, and he swallows hard like maybe there’s more words stuck in his throat but they’re having a hard time coming out. I know how that feels, know what it’s like to have all the feelings backed up in there and choking you. I felt like that when I found him in the woods with Natalie.

“I came looking for you,” he says after a second, voice small and quiet. “I went all up and down the hills. I did everything I could think of, Ash. But you weren’t there.”

“No,” I agree. “I was long gone and headed the other direction.”

It’s true in more ways than one, but I know he’s got to get it out, so I let Duke tell me about how he found my shoes and socks, the rock where I crushed my foot and the blood there. He tells me about search parties and sniffing dogs and news crews and reporters and people lining up in straight rows and combing the woods for me, Jason yelling himself hoarse. He needs to do it, needs to show me how hard he tried to make up for what went wrong.