Winter Oranges

  “Jason,” Dylan said, gently putting his hand on Jason’s shoulder. “It’s over.”

  “You killed him!” But just as he said it, Ben winked back into existence.

  “Ben!”

  But Jason’s relief was short-lived. Ben was clearly in trouble. He was screaming, his image flickering fitfully as he fought to project himself outside the globe through whatever pain consumed him. Jason turned the key on reflex. “Ben, are you okay?”

  Ben’s image flickered as he doubled over, falling to the ground, reaching his hand toward Jason. “Help me.”

  And then he was gone again.

  “No! Oh God, Ben.” Jason cradled the globe, feeling more helpless than ever, his mind racing.

  “Jason,” Dylan said again, reaching toward the globe. “Let me have it.”

  “Mr. Walker,” Sheriff Ross started to say, “if you’ll let us take you—”

  “Get away from me!”

  They each backed up a bit, stepping close to each other to confer, and Jason hunched over the globe, trying to think. Trying to come up with a plan. The words etched into the base of the globe seemed to taunt him. SHAKE GLOBE. The first two letters may have been scratched almost to the point of being illegible, but the simple instructions brought tears to Jason’s eyes. The last thing he wanted was to shake it now. He needed to get inside. He needed to save Ben. But the only way to do that was to fall asleep, and that wasn’t possible. Even if Dylan and the sheriff and the paramedics left him in peace, he didn’t have time. Whatever was happening to Ben was happening now, as the world fell apart on Jason’s rocky driveway. There was no time to waste. But what could he do?

  “Get him up,” Sheriff Ross said quietly to the paramedics. “I think we’ll need to sedate him.”

  Would that do it? If he let them drug him, would he fall asleep? But no, certainly Dylan would take the globe. Jason debated trying to bargain, telling the sheriff he’d go quietly if only she’d keep the globe safe, but there was no time. Even as he debated it, Ben winked back into sight for a mere second, his face contorted with pain, one hand gripping his chest, the other held toward Jason. Help me.

  “Sir,” one of the paramedics said, laying his hand on Jason’s arm. “Please. Just let us take you to the hospital.”

  He needed more time, and he didn’t have it. He pressed his fingers over the crack, trying to staunch the flow of water oozing like blood from a wound. He turned the key, as he begged and cried. “Ben! Can you hear me? Oh God, Ben—”

  He felt the paramedics’ hands under his arms. They lifted him to his feet, and as they did, the scratched instructions on the bottom seemed to shift. The strobing lights of the ambulance flashed from his left, and the lights from the sheriff’s car hit him from the right. The faint but eternal glow of the stars Ben loved so much bathed them from overhead. And between them all, the scratches over the S and H were suddenly clear.

  And they weren’t the result of any clumsy accident.

  He remembered Ben’s words.

  “Sarah was terrible at spelling.”

  “If she’d thought to leave directions, they would have been crystal clear.”

  He’d been right on both counts.

  Jason laughed. Or maybe he cried. As the paramedics pulled him inexorably toward the ambulance, as Dylan and Sheriff Ross both blathered meaningless platitudes, telling him it was for the best, everything would be okay if only he let them help, Jason took a gamble. He sent one fleeting prayer toward Ben’s stars that he wasn’t wrong. Then he broke free of the paramedics—

  And he smashed the globe to the ground with all his might.

  This time it shattered. Jason barely had time to recognize the fact before the shockwave hit, silent but brutal. It bowled over him like a Mack truck, throwing him back several feet and driving the wind from his lungs. His head slammed into the door of Dylan’s rental car, and he fell to the ground, his ears ringing. His impact against the car had triggered its alarm. It bleated incessantly. The ambulance lights continued their sickening strobe, flashing red and blue, red and blue. Jason glanced around and saw that he wasn’t the only who’d been affected. Everybody was on the ground.

  “What the fuck?” one of the paramedics said as he climbed shakily to his feet. “What the hell was that?”

  A new, acute pain had been added to Jason’s horror. Something both cold and hot tricked down the back of his neck. Reaching back, he found stickiness. His hand came away covered in blood. The world tottered again as he staggered to his feet.

  “Holy Jesus!” somebody shouted. “Terry, get over here!”

  It was one of the paramedics, screaming to his partner as he ran toward—

  Toward Ben.

  He was on his knees right where the globe had broken, one hand holding his chest. His eyes were locked on Jason, his lips moving. A single word Jason had long ago learned to lip-read—his own name. Jason. But just like before, there was no sound. Ben’s head jerked back, his spine wrenching, his fingers clawing futilely at his chest as the first medic reached him.

  “Convulsions! Get the gear,” the man yelled at his partner. “He’s not breathing!”

  Jason tried to run, but the world was spinning more than ever. His vision was blurry and his legs felt like rubber. He made it only two steps before he fell.

  Almost fell.

  Dylan caught him, his face ghostly white, his wide eyes glued on the paramedic, who had started compressions on Ben’s chest. Jason reached out and managed to catch the arm of the second paramedic as he ran past.

  “He has asthma.”

  “What kind of medicine does he take?”

  “None.” And then, seeing the paramedic’s disbelief, he blurted out the first explanation that came to him. “His parents didn’t believe in doctors.”

  The man nodded. “We’ll take care of him.” And then he was gone.

  Jason’s vision started to go black. He couldn’t focus on anything but the pain in his head. He was back in Ben’s cabin, his alarm blaring. “Don’t wake up yet,” he pleaded with himself. “I don’t want to wake up.”

  He sank to the ground. Realized halfway there he hadn’t been standing for a while. It was Dylan sinking to the ground, lowering Jason as gently as he could, his eyes dark with anguish and worry as he cradled Jason’s head in his hand.

  “You’re bleeding a lot.”

  “I don’t want to wake up.”

  “Try to stay conscious, okay? You need a paramedic too.”

  “After Ben,” Jason said. “Ben first.”

  “Okay,” Dylan said. He was crying. Even as consciousness faded, Jason was stunned to realize it.

  Dylan was crying.

  “Okay,” Dylan said. “I promise. Ben first.”

  The ambulance ride was a blur. The doctors whisked Ben away the minute they reached the hospital, and no matter how many times Jason asked about him, they refused to answer, telling him only that he needed to calm down. They sequestered him in his own room. Between the headache and the blood loss and the drugs they were giving him, Jason fell into a state of delirium. He tried to ask questions, but wasn’t ever sure if the words came out right or not.

  Dylan was there too, but he seemed unable to meet Jason’s eyes. The medical staff kept him busy, asking questions about what had happened. Jason suspected Dylan was glad for the distraction. It kept him from having to confront Jason directly. It kept him from having to explain why he’d almost killed Ben.

  And Ben . . .

  Where was Ben?

  Machines next to him began beeping. An alarm sounded. The general hubbub around him amped up along with it.

  “We’re going to have to sedate him,” somebody said.

  “No.” Whether he managed to say the word out loud or not, he didn’t know. Either way, they didn’t listen.

  Waking up inspired an almost sickening sense of déjà vu. The blood pressure cuff tightening around his arm, the dull ache in his head, the sunlight through the window, the nurse standin
g over him, surveying the bank of monitors to his left.

  “How’s Ben?” he asked.

  She wrinkled her brow. “Who?”

  “Benjamin Ward. He was brought in with me. Is he okay?”

  She frowned. “I don’t have any patients here by that name.”

  “Oh my God!” The monitors on his left began beeping in alarm. “Did he die? Are you telling me he didn’t survive?”

  “Calm down, now. Nobody’s dead. I’m quite sure I would have heard if we’d had a fatality last night.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “I’m not sure. You were awfully confused when they brought you in. The nurses said you weren’t making any sense. My guess is that you’re just a bit mixed up about what exactly happened. That’s all.” She patted his hand. “Don’t worry. The doctor will be by later this morning.”

  She left him as dread fill his chest. If Ben hadn’t died, but he wasn’t in the hospital, then . . .

  What?

  For months, he’d been sure of himself, but suddenly, everything was thrown into doubt. Was Dylan right? Had he imagined the whole thing? His hands began to shake. He sat up, setting off the alarm that indicated his pulse was spiking. He put his head in his hands, breathing deep, trying to steady himself and get everything back to normal before the nurse reappeared.

  Had Ben only existed in his imagination?

  “No,” he said to the room. “That can’t be it.”

  “What can’t be it?”

  He jumped, momentarily startled, but it was only Dylan coming through his door, a plastic bag in his hand and a magazine tucked under one arm. “They told me you were awake. About time, too. It’s after noon.” He held the bag up. “I brought you some clothes, since they cut yours off. Hope those weren’t your favorite pajamas or anything.”

  It felt like a lot to process at once. He couldn’t even remember what he’d been wearing when the horrible incident had happened on his front lawn. He stared down at his hospital gown, noting for the first time the cool draft that told him the back of it was open.

  “How’re you feeling?” Dylan asked.

  Jason swallowed hard, trying to pull himself together. Trying to decide what to ask first. “Ben,” Jason said at last. His voice still sounded like gravel. “Is he . . .”

  “Nobody’s told you?”

  The pulse monitor next to Jason beeped alarmingly as his heart burst into gear. “No.”

  “Calm down,” Dylan said, putting his hand on Jason’s shoulder. “He’s fine. Or they think he will be eventually, at any rate.”

  “But he’s alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . .” Jason hesitated. “He’s real?”

  Dylan blinked at him in surprise. “Were you beginning to doubt?”

  “Not until I woke up and he wasn’t here. I asked the nurse, and she didn’t know who I was talking about.”

  Dylan smiled. Jason suspected he was tempted to laugh but was doing his best to remain somber. “Yes, he’s real. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it.”

  “But the nurse—”

  “She probably didn’t know his name. They have him listed as a John Doe. I told them his first name was Ben, but apparently listing him as ‘Ben Doe’ would fuck up their precious filing system. So until you can tell them his last name—”

  “It’s Ward. Benjamin Robert Ward.” Jason fell back against his pillow and put his hand over his eyes as relief flooded through him. “What happened? He wasn’t breathing?”

  “Sure wasn’t. His heart wasn’t beating, either. They said it was like his body forgot how to function. Then they hit him with the paddles, and he coughed up a lungful of water like he’d nearly drowned. He had them stumped, that’s for sure. But . . .” He shrugged. “He’s chugging along fine now.”

  “And they think he’ll be okay?”

  “They say he’s badly dehydrated, but shows no signs of malnourishment other than a severe vitamin D deficiency, all of which is easily remedied. And there’s the asthma, of course, but they can treat that now. He should be good as new in no time.”

  “I should go see him,” Jason said, throwing the blankets aside and attempting to swing his legs to the floor, but the room spun, and Dylan pushed him gently back onto the bed and replaced the covers.

  “Don’t rush yourself. He’s sleeping.”

  He was a bit relieved to not have to stand. Just the attempt had made his head throb. He didn’t want to lie back down though, so he used the remote for the hospital bed to raise himself to a semi-upright position. When he was done, Dylan tossed the magazine onto the bed. Jason picked it up. It was StarWatch. On the cover was a picture snapped in the middle of the chaos in Jason’s driveway, Jason and Dylan seemingly arm in arm, one paramedic bent over a body on the ground, all of it bathed in the surreal red and blue of the ambulance’s light. The headline read, “Man Trapped in Magical Snow Globe Set Free! JayWalk’s Secret Lover Revealed at Last!”

  “Oh. My. God.”

  “The print version hit newsstands this morning, but the story was all over the web last night. You’d be surprised how much they got right. The funny thing is, now that they’ve printed the truth, they’ve become the laughingstock of the media. Everybody’s too busy making fun of StarWatch to ask what really happened.”

  Jason eyed the cover. It didn’t even matter that they’d violated his privacy this time. All that mattered was that Ben was okay. But staring at the magazine, he began to wonder how in the world they were ever going to explain Ben’s sudden appearance in the world.

  As if he were reading Jason’s mind, Dylan spoke. “The official story, as told by Sheriff Ross and myself, is that Ben was raised in a secluded mountain cult that doesn’t believe in modern medicine. He escaped and made it to your property, but then he didn’t know what to do, so he hid in your guesthouse, and you found him and took him in.” He smiled and held out his hands. “Brilliant, right? It explains his weird clothes and everything.”

  Jason had a hard time not laughing. “People are buying that crap?”

  “Well, they’ve been offered two possible explanations. Either Ben escaped from some doctor-hating cult and decided to camp out in your guesthouse, or he burst forth from a magic snow globe like Athena from Zeus’s split skull. So yeah, they seem to feel the cult’s a reasonable explanation. Plus, who doesn’t love a good cult story? That stuff sells.”

  “When you put it that way, it almost makes sense.”

  “It’s all thanks to you, really. You telling the paramedic Ben’s family didn’t believe in doctors was what gave us the idea.”

  Jason barely remembered the lie rolling off his tongue. So much of what had happened in his driveway was a blur, obscured by fear and the pain in his head. He carefully explored the tender spot on the back of his skull. “What about the paramedics? And the deputy? If the press talks to them—”

  But Dylan was already shaking his head. “They’ve been told in no uncertain terms by Sheriff Ross, your lawyer, and the hospital’s lawyers that they can’t say a goddamn word to the media. Not that it matters. Nobody saw anything anyway. They were all too busy picking themselves up off the ground.”

  “Thank goodness.” Jason shook his head, stunned that Dylan had gone to such lengths to cover for him and Ben, despite his earlier hostility. Then again, he’d assumed back then that Ben was a figment of Jason’s overwrought mind. Now, he had proof.

  And again, it was as if Dylan were reading his mind, because he suddenly moved closer. “Jason, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t. I should have believed you.”

  Jason forced himself to smile. “Why would you have? I know I sounded crazy.”

  Dylan shrugged uncomfortably. “I should have had more faith in you.” He met Jason’s eyes hesitantly. “I was only trying to help. I swear to you, I thought I was doing the right thing, but when I think about how much damage I might have done—”

  ??
?But you didn’t. It all worked out.”

  Dylan perched uneasily on the edge of Jason’s bed. “That doesn’t excuse it. I might have killed him, and I never would have known you were telling the truth. I would have gone to my grave thinking I’d helped, and you never would have forgiven me.”

  “Maybe.” Or maybe eventually Jason would have started to believe Dylan was right. Maybe he would have begun to doubt his own sanity. The thought troubled him, but it didn’t matter. “You didn’t kill him. And thanks to you, he’s free. That might never have happened without you.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  Jason leaned back against his pillows, considering. He understood Dylan’s guilt, and he knew that if things had worked out differently, he would have been furious. And yet now, knowing Ben was sleeping peacefully next door, knowing they’d been granted the possibility of a real future together, he didn’t have room in his heart for anything but gratitude. He reached out and took Dylan’s hand.

  “You’re forgiven. And more than that, I’m thankful. Whether it worked out the way you intended it to or not, I know your heart was in the right place.” Besides, based on the expression on Dylan’s face, he was going to punish himself enough for both of them anyway.

  Dylan moved closer, staring down at where he still held Jason’s hand. “I should congratulate you on your performance after Thanksgiving.” Dylan almost smiled. “Your little breakdown. I feel bad I was the only one who got to see it. You would have won an Oscar.”

  Jason laughed, even though it made his head hurt. “I feel bad about that, but you didn’t want the truth. I had to come up with a lie you’d like.”

  “Serves me right, I suppose.” Dylan sighed and stood up. “I should leave so you can go see Ben. He woke up once, but they had to sedate him. He had an anxiety attack, and it triggered his asthma. Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, he’ll be awake soon and it’ll probably go smoother if you’re there.” He flipped his thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve checked into a hotel around the corner. Figured I’d stay until you’re discharged, at the very least, so call me if you need anything.”