A/N: Based on a true story. This story is dedicated to every single person I've ever let down (especially you, you know who you are).

Sowing Season

"Was losing all my friends

Was losing them to drinking and to driving.

Was losing all my friends, but I got them back.

I am on the mend,

Least now I can say that I am trying.

I hope you will forget the things I still lack."

-x-

It was nearly two am when I finally listened to the message. We’d been at the hospital for roughly five hours, herded from waiting room to waiting room like dumb, nervous cattle by tired, wrinkly-eyed nurses who smiled too wide and danced around our questions. None of us were next of kin, and even though I’d seen and talked to Chris almost every single day for the past four years (even though I was there when he was hit, saw his body roll and held his hand until the ambulance came), we weren’t entitled to any information on his condition.

The social worker handling Chris’s case was named Amy. She couldn’t have been much older than me, but she carried herself with a sort of worn out professionalism that reminded me of my mother (Mom had taught first grade for over thirty years and had that same bone-tired essence about her, even on her best days). At first, she had sat with us for a while, waited while more and more of Chris’s friends accumulated in the hospital lobby and unenthusiastically explained that Chris had been sent to the OR. Then, when our anxious little group had overflowed the lobby, she heaved a laborious sigh and waved us around a corner with a tight smile.

And so she shuffled the lot of us down long, winding hallways and crammed us into cramped, airless elevators before leaving us in a brightly-lit room with heavy chairs, Formica tables, and a vending machine to wait and think and worry and remember.

Our group of twelve had taken all three tables in the waiting room and pushed them together, huddling close and speaking in hushed tones to prevent disturbing the other families around us.

“You were there,” they all said to me at one point. “What happened?”

“How fast was the car going?” Adam asked.

“Who’s fault was it?” Andy demanded to know.

But over the course of the past few hours I’d gone dumb as a post and just as still, and could only offer them the slightest of shrugs before zoning back into the blankness that had encompassed my brain ever since the accident. It was like coasting on ice, smooth and numb and frictionless.

Chris’s operation was slow-going (they wouldn’t tell us what they were fixing, or why it was taking so long), which gave me several long hours to envision the graphic memory of the crash with intense, terrifying detail. I tapped my sneaker impatiently against the egg-colored floor tiles and tried to force the thought from my head, smiling plastically at the people around me. With my initial panic slowly melting into a dull, aching worry in the pit of my gut and images of the car crash swinging in my head, I feared that I might actually make myself throw up with all the waiting and worrying and nothing to do.

During a lull in conversation with Chris’s other visitors, I slipped out of the waiting room and into the hallway (the only place any of us could get service) and flipped open my cell phone to check for missed calls and voice mails.

I had only one.

“Look, I’m going to be blunt,” Chris’s voice echoed through the tiny speaker on my cell phone, clear as a bell. It felt a little bit like listening to a ghost, with Chris in the operating room and his voice speaking to me from the past.

“It’s not that I don’t like you, I think you’re great. Really. You’re fun, and outgoing and a cool person to hang out with, but there’s something that I really need to say,” said the message, and despite the compliments he was paying me, I could feel my stomach sink with dread, my instincts screaming that whatever else he was about to say would hurt.

(I was right).

I stayed quiet and still for a long time after hanging up the phone.

“Hey, Emilee, Chris’s mom and dad are finally here and they—whoah,” Andy blinked at me, his floppy green hat peeking around the door. “You okay?”

The cell phone at my side gave a plastic creak as my fingers curled tighter around it. “Yes,” I said with false surety. “I’m fine.”

Andy passed me a skewed look, but seemed to accept my answer.

And so, inhaling sharply and swallowing a scream that threatened erupt from somewhere deep inside me, I followed Andy back into the waiting room to meet Chris’s parents with Chris’s voice still ringing criticisms in my ear, the phone clutched rigidly in my hand the only thing keeping me from shattering completely.

-x-

“You take forever,” Chris’s static-ridden voice cut through the bad reception on my cell phone. I could barely hear him over the hum of fluorescent lights and the steady murmur of other shoppers bustling about with carts and kids, but I could imagine the affectionately teasing tone he was taking with me.

I cradled the phone closer to my face, trying to redistribute the weight of three stout pie pumpkins in the crook of my left arm (they were tiny, dull orange in color, and all that the grocery store had in stock on the night before Halloween, but my friends and I were determined to carve pumpkins this year, and so we would have to make do with miniature jack-o-lanterns).

“Where are you?” I asked the phone.

“Already checked out,” Chris answered after a beat, sounding impatient. The teasing pitch to his voice had evaporated, and it made me feel a little anxious. I had a feeling he was unhappy with me, but I couldn’t be sure. “I’m waiting by the doors, so hurry and pay and I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to sound sure and taking small, quick steps towards the check out lanes. “I’ll see you in a bit--”

But he had already hung up.

I breathed a silent sigh through my nose and pocketed my cell phone, trying to quell the uneasy feeling growing at the back of my mind. I bet he’s mad at me, I worried. The pumpkins pressed into my chest felt cold, heavy, and dead, and for some reason I couldn’t convince myself to be excited about the plans we’d made to carve them. Instead, I my mind was filled with the terseness of Chris’s tone and the fear that I must have done something to upset him.

With an unnamed guilt settling into my chest like a virus, I watched the check-out girl ring up the pie pumpkins for two dollars and fifty four cents each and didn’t even care when she shorted me on my change.

-x-

That night, I had a terrible dream.

In the depths of a tumulus sleep, my brain had recreated the precious few seconds before the accident with perfect, terrible detail, leaving me on a wet street in the dark dampness of a long October night.

Chris was standing before me with a frown, the sleeves of his blue worker’s jacket shucked around his elbows and a plump orange pumpkin hoisted upon his left shoulder (he’d brought it from home, I remembered, to carve with us that night. He’d brought it with him into the store, and had it with him when he left). Slung around his arm was a white plastic grocery bag, which held a can of recently-purchased black spray paint. From where I stood, I could hear the bag crinkle against the can with each little breath of air.

“We have to hurry,” he said to me then in a voice too heavy to be his voice, and the words sank into my bones like a chill. “Or we won’t get back in time to carve all these.”

He sent a pointed glance towards the pumpkin on his shoulder.

“We don’t have to rush,” I returned, feeling the familiar sting of tears like pinpricks of heat behind my eyes. “We have time.”

He didn’t seem to hear me, moving to the edge of the sidewalk towards the red and white lights streaking through the darkness. His movements were fluid and easy even though he was drawing dangerously close to the curb, and my heart struck up a rapid, unsteady tempo at the sight.

“Come on, you’re chomping at the bit to get out of here,” Chris said. “You were the one who wanted to get home. If anything, you’re the one herding us out.”

“That’s not true,” I answered frantically, but it left an acidic taste in my mouth. “You know that’s not true… I--”

“Then hurry up.”

Then, without a second glance, he stepped off the curb and into the street. And when I woke up, I woke up sweating and sobbing and screaming to drown out the screech of tires and the sickening crunch of broken glass and broken bones. I woke up with my hands fisted so tightly in the sheets that my fingers ached, and I wondered if all of the clenching I had been doing was my attempt to twist the outcome of the past into something different (wondered if I’d only been trying to twist myself into something different).

And when I settled back down into the damp, rumpled sheets, I couldn’t shake the cold dread creeping back into my heart, same as it had been hours earlier as I sat with my knees on the dirty asphalt and my hands caked with blood.

If there’s a villain in this story, I think it’s me.

-x-

Standing at Chris’s bedside was a slow punishment worse than sitting ignorant and stupid in the waiting room.

The unsteady wheeze of the ventilator as it pumped air into his bruised and battered lungs brought up an ache of fear at the bottom of my stomach. The sound itself seemed to throw off the rhythm of my own heartbeat, until I felt nervous and out of breath just watching him struggle to expand his ribs in an inhale. His skin, tanned from long, active summers spent outdoors, was still marred with blackening scabs and the chipping remnants of spray paint. A fresh pink scar no thicker than my pinky stretched from sternum to navel (they had cracked his ribs to get to his lung, to repair his diaphragm, to remove his spleen).

He’d been asleep for two whole weeks.

“You take forever,” I said. And waited.

-x-

I first met Chris on the first day of my freshman year at college. . At this time, I truly believed that this was the beginning of everything, and I eagerly began planting the seeds of my life into the cold ground in hopes of fruit. In this way, Chris and I were similar, both waiting for something new to grow.

He was thinner then, with a boyish lankiness since lost in favor of thirty additional pounds of muscle, which have given his frame a more militant stockiness. He had a nice smile, friendly and open (this hasn’t changed).

Young, fresh-faced and completely naïve, we both came too early to our writing course, seating ourselves on opposite sides of the room and waiting patiently for the professor to arriveRatty notebooks and pens arrayed in a semi-organized manner along my borrowed desk, I stole a curious glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He caught my eye and sent me a crooked, boyish grin.

“Hey,” he said, gaze flicking up to catch on the Rolling Stones button pinned to the side of my cap. “Nice hat.”

I gave a pointed look to the Led Zepplin logo on his grey T-shirt. “Nice shirt,” I replied, returning the smile. “I’m Emilee.”

“Chris,” he said, gathering his supplies to move to the desk next to mine. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

Chris settled into the seat beside me, turning his chair to face me fully with eager conversation. We chatted about school and made small talk about our new living spaces on campus before diving into an avid discussion about our musical preferences. I was happy to find that we had very similar tastes, and on a long digression about the superiority of third wave ska to the first and second wave ska, he interrupted me with a laugh.

Chris’s smile grew wry as he held up a finger in an ‘ah-ha!’ sort of motion. “I have an idea,” he said, “let’s be friends.”

I laughed, too, and it felt good. “Good plan.” His smile was contagious, and for the first time since arriving at this strange new place, I felt comfortably at home.

-x-

Chris’s father had left the door slightly ajar, and over the whirr of machinery and the beeping of monitors I could hear the smooth tenor of his voice.

“Emilee’s here,” he said to the prone, silent figure on the bed. “She wants to see you. Do you think you’d be up for it?”

A tense silence followed, filled only with the wheeze of Chris’s ventilator and the clacking of plastic tubes (the tube in his throat inflating his lungs prevented him from speaking, and so he had to communicate himself through nods, head shakes, and gestures). I held my breath.

“Are you sure? She’s been here for weeks.” I could hear the frown in Miles’ voice, and without seeing Chris’s not affirm it, I had my answer. I felt my face go smooth as a river stone. The numbness was back, and I felt nothing.

Chris’s father sighed, a soft sound among the harsh, clinical noises of the machines keeping his son alive. “Alright,” he said gently, “Get some rest, then.”

I hastily moved away from the door at the sound of Mile’s footsteps, trying not to look too shamefaced for eavesdropping. Seconds later, his lanky frame slipped through the doorway, and he favored me with a small, friendly smile.

“He’s still konked out,” he kindly lied. “Your best bet is to come back tomorrow—I’m sure he’ll be ready for guests by then.”

I hollowly returned the smile, already shrugging back into my coat.

“That’s fine,” I said.

The lie sat like a chunk of ice in my stomach for the rest of the night and refused to melt even after the tears had stopped.

-x-

We didn’t even know he was missing.

Our group of six, bundled in heavy coats and woolen scarves to ward off the early chill of a particularly harsh Michigan winter, had trundled from the florescent warmth of the grocery store with white plastic grocery bags slung around our arms, heading for the bus stop on the far side of the street. We were bubbling with giddy energy, electrically charged from our adventures downtown (we had raided every thrift shop within a twenty block radius for Halloween costumes), and with the cold stinging my face and the weight of three pie pumpkins hanging from the crook of my elbow, I felt practically invincible.

The darkness of the night held an inky quality, with the lights of traffic making blurry, streaking patters on the damp asphalt. The light on the corner was taking forever to change during rush hour, and we waited at the crosswalk, shuffling impatiently at the curb and chattering amongst ourselves.

After a brief moment the light turned red and the signal beckoned us to cross, but before my sneaker left the curb an abrupt movement out of the corner of my eye brought me pause. The piercing shriek of tires scraping against the pavement pulled my head around faster than I thought possible, shooting my heart into my throat and lodging it there as I witnessed the precious few, anxious milliseconds before the collision.

A large black car, as dark and wet-looking as the road, screeched to a painfully abrupt stop. Something heavy burst against the hood with a terrible popping noise (like a gunshot, like a bomb, loud enough to reverberate through my very bones)—glittering fragments sprayed into the air like starbursts, and a large shadow rolled stiffly from the front of the car, illuminated by the SUV’s broken headlights. It lay as motionless as stone over the broken white line on the asphalt.

“What the fuck just happened?” Dave shouted with tension in his voice, already sprinting down the road towards the smoking car. “What the fuck was that?”

And truthfully, I didn’t know (never thought to do a head count). The thing lying in the road was thick and frighteningly still, and I couldn’t recognize the shape from the end of the street. I followed Dave’s loping gait, heart racing from shock and fear and the strange, sickening pulse in my stomach.

Realization came to me in fragments. I saw the brown tennis shoes, kicked off by the impact of the crash, lying discarded in the road (Chris had worn the same pair for over four years—they had holes in the heels and though I’d gone with him to the mall to buy a replacement pair he had yet to purchase new ones). I saw the remains of the shattered pumpkin (Chris had brought it from home, he had been carrying it on his shoulder, how could he have seen the car?). I saw, I saw, I saw.

We didn’t even know he’d left us, had started to cross without us. We didn’t even know he was missing.

“Oh my God.” I was choking on my heart, and though Dave’s legs were twice as long as mine I outstripped him easily. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

He wasn’t moving, curled up on his side and lying in a puddle of something thick and black. There was a gash along the side of his head oozing red, red blood onto the cement. His knuckles were scraped raw. His legs were twisted grotesquely. The bottom of my stomach dropped into oblivion. He wasn’t moving.

Not dead, I prayed, hesitating before stepping in front of the smoldering wreckage of the crumpled Chevy Suburban. Not dead.

Within seconds, a group of strangers had parked their cars and materialized around him—one woman shed her coat and placed it under his head (she claimed to be a nurse) and as soon as she touched him, his eyes flickered open. It was at this point that I remembered to breathe, drawing in a lungful of slippery air and trying not to choke on it.

Chris began to squirm with slow, jagged movements, and though his legs were bowed in an unnatural way, his mouth was slack and his eyes were glazed. It was terrifying to see such a lively boy so frighteningly vacant, his face as blank as a river stone, smooth and cold and lifeless.

“Does anybody know his name?” the nurse called impatiently, eyes settling on me expectantly as she placed a hand to Chris’s forehead.

At that moment, all of the rough, panicked parts of me froze over with something smooth and cold. It was an anxious, eerie stillness, like transitioning from a gravel road to a freshly paved one. The clattering in me stopped and I was gliding mindlessly, operating on instinct and adrenalin alone.

“Chris,” I said, coming to my knees beside him and placing my numb hands on his face, forcing him to look at me. “Stay with me, Chris.”

His dulled eyes wouldn’t focus on mine, but they stayed open. The black liquid pooled around him was thick and cold—I could feel it seeping through my jeans and clinging to my fingers. Up close, I recognized its acidic scent—it was the spray paint Chris had bought not five minutes ago. He was covered in it (and now, so was I).

Chris was squirming more violently now, and letting loose loud, bone-chilling moans. His arms were reaching up, shaking from strain. Instinctively, I grabbed his hand and squeezed, feeling the sticky mixture of paint and blood sliding over his calluses. I was so fixated on this strange, frightening feeling that it took me a moment to realize his trembling fingers were squeezing mine back (his grip was strong, almost painful, but I was so grateful that I wasn’t completely useless to him that I hardly noticed the way my bones ached under the weight of his).

“Chris, come on, Chris,” I kept saying as he writhed over my knees, his muscles spasming and cramping with pain. “Chris… Chris… Chris.” It became my mantra, my universe, for a moment because it kept his gaze on mine.

“Hold him still,” the nurse instructed me, handing me what looked like a folded handkerchief. “Here, for his head.”

I took it dumbly into my free hand and pressed it to the cut, swollen flesh pulsing blood into his right eye. He flinched hard, his face twisting into a grimace as he wriggled away from the compress.

“Geddoff,” he slurred blearily, freeing his fingers from where mine had clasped them in order to push me away.

My icy exterior splintered at that, letting real fear and hurt settle in before freezing over. I grit my teeth and forced the handkerchief to his head despite his struggling, feeling it grow damp and sticky.

“Get off!” Chris groaned, teeth clacking together with the force of his words.

It was with his broken, bloody hands pushing me away and the blessed wails of sirens finally piercing the air that I recognized the tears streaking hotly down my cold, cold face. I couldn’t feel them at all, didn’t have to blink them away. They just fell effortlessly like apples from a branch and froze on the ground like the rest of me, catching the flashing red lights reflecting against the dark and the car and the paint and the pavement.

Winter is coming, said the chill in my bones and the numbness of my heart.

No, I amended as the paramedics pulled Chris’s mangled body from my wet, red hands and strapped him to a stretcher.

Winter is here.

-x-

I was there the day he came out of his coma. I saw him open his crusted, watery eyes and look out through slit lids at the world he’d slept through for almost a month. I saw his mother cry and kiss the stitches on his forehead. I waited for my turn to speak.

“Hey there, sleepy,” I said quietly after the initial hullabaloo had died down, pulling as close to the bedside as I dared (the stiffly starched sheets just barely brushed my arm and the steady wheezing of his ventilator next to my ear was near deafening).

Chris said nothing, still to weak to move or speak. But his eyes were open for the first time in weeks and I could only assume he understood.

On impulse, I reached for his hand, closing my fingers lightly around the mottled scabs and paint-stained knuckles. His fingers were rough and stiff as a yew branch. I waited for a response, a twitch or a flinch in his face or hands to let me know if I’d crossed a line, but he gave me nothing but a blank stare.

"Chris," I said gently, watching his blurry blue eyes focus on mine for the briefest, most precious second.

I'm sorry, the words brimmed in me, threatening to overflow, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

But before I could speak the apologies dried in my throat like water in a desert as all at once his fingers twitched subtly against mine, squeezing my hand ever so slightly (so soft I almost couldn't feel it). The frozen place inside of me shifted the tiniest bit, stirring back to life after lying dormant for almost a month (it wasn't moving forward and it wasn't moving backward but at least we were no longer standing still.

He looked at me with a bruised face and swollen, silent eyes, but with the weight of his hand in mine and ice thawing inside my head, when my watery eyes looked back all I could see was spring.

The End