“No,” he remembered saying. “No, she’s fine.”
But she couldn’t have been fine because they were bringing her to an emergency room, her lung had collapsed, and it looked bad.
“No,” he’d said even louder. “She’s fine.”
“I’m sorry, Mr Williams, but you need to come here as quickly as possible. Not to Bundaberg. We’re transferring her to St Andrews in Brisbane?—”
“Wh-Why?”
“They’re better equipped to perform the surgery your wife requires.”
He remembered his phone feeling like a live grenade. How it took everything he had not to pitch it into the nearest tree, as though that might stop what was happening. He remembered the cold sweat bursting all over his body as what the doctor said penetrated his thick skull. His mum died in a car crash when he was two; the same crash that put his dad in a wheelchair. Was that his destiny? To losehiswife to a car? But then, why wasn’t he there? Why wasn’t he involved?
“How?” he asked the faceless doctor. “How did this happen?”
The voice on the end of the line repeated the thing about the bus skidding, possibly to avoid an animal or a drunk driver, but that wasn’t what Willow had meant. He meant, why were there still cars? They killed people. Everyone knew that. Why were they still allowed? How were they allowed to happen?
Mercury started crying, from his voice or his energy he didn’t know, and then his memories went greasy. He’d called someone, Patrick or Derek, because he didn’t trust himself to drive. Patrick—or Derek—had taken the girls home, and he’d caught an Uber to the airport with nothing but his wallet and the clothes on his back. Cheryl Normal, Eden’s best friend since high school, hadbought him a plane ticket and sent it to him. She was coming, too, on a flight that left an hour after his.
No, he remembered thinking.Because that means it’s bad, and it can’t be bad—Eden’s fine. We’re gonna come back to Melbourne tonight, and then I’ll ban cars. No one’s ever gonna drive again.
The flight was hell, jolting turbulence the entire two hours.
If she’s dead, kill me, he’d told the summer storm rattling the plane like a loose tooth.If she’s not, fuck off. You don’t matter.
He landed to the news that Eden was in surgery. He caught a cab to the hospital, barely able to breathe. When he arrived, she was out of the operating room, but he still couldn’t see her.
“Standard,” a doctor had told him, but the kind looks on the faces of the hospital staff told him more. Eden was far from okay.
He walked the halls until he got asked to fuck off and sit down, so he’d headed for the gardens, his phone volume on the highest setting in case anyone called. His daughters’ faces became blurry in his brain. Would it be better for them if he were gone, rather than having to live with the man he’d become if Eden died? Because he couldn’t do what his dad did. He couldn’t keep going without her.
As he paced the grounds, he’d craved whiskey. Pills. He’d have taken heroin if sticking a needle in his arm wouldn’t have left him too fucked up to find out if Eden was okay. He’d neverwantedto judge parents who used, but in that moment, he understood—truly understood—how pain could rise up and over the right thing, until all you could do was try to make it stop. It took his fucking breath away.
Then he’d heard someone calling his name. Cheryl was striding toward him like an angel in the semi-darkness, a dart in one hand, a huge bottle of cold brew in the other. They stood, chain-smoking at the hospital entrance. Willow had never smoked in his life, but he kept asking for darts, and Cheryl keptgiving them. She never said, ‘Eden’ll be fine,’ but between her presence, the nicotine and coffee, he came back into himself. He stopped thinking about suicide and substance abuse. He called Patrick to check in on the girls, who were staying with him and his son, Alexander. Willow had told him not to say anything to his daughters about what had happened until he knew more. But there was nothing to know except the surgery was over, and he still couldn’t see Eden; that he would have to continue to wait.
The late afternoon bled into night. He and Cheryl got more cigarettes. Watched the drunk and inept come into the ER to manage their broken fingers and rashes. Willow was grinding out his hundredth dart, his lungs gritty and aching, when a good-looking doctor pulled up in front of him. “Mr Williams?”
“Yeah,” Willow had said, half-convinced the guy was a Sharks fan who recognised him. A nurse had already asked for an autograph, and Cheryl had threatened to kick her in the face.
But the doctor didn’t seem like a footy guy. And he was wearing an expression that was very familiar to the husband of Eden Jade, one eyebrow raised as if to say,‘You? You big, ugly ginger? You’re married to that crazy-hot blonde?’
And Willow could have kissed the cunt on the mouth, because he knew in that moment—because of that expression—that Eden was going to live. And he was right. He was taken to her bedside, where she lay, pale but stable and alive, and he wept like a fucking baby.
“Willow,” she’d mumbled. “I’m okay.”
And she was. Only it was an ‘okay’ that meant another two weeks in a Queensland hospital. An okay that left her on crutches, his daughters crying because they didn’t understand why Mama couldn’t play. And in the months it took for Eden to get back on her feet, he noticed he’d started grabbing the girls’ hands too hard whenever they crossed the street, that he wasfollowing Eden around the house like a needy dog, and getting close to a panic attack whenever they were in the same car.
And he couldn’t be a dick in bed anymore.
The doctor had given them the all-clear to start fucking three weeks after the accident, and they’d started slow. But once Eden was off crutches and pain medication, she’d grabbed his hand and put it to her throat the way she had so many times before… and he’d flipped out. Pulled back and totally lost his hard-on. Eden had understood, but a week later they’d been making out and she’d come right out and asked, “Can you be an asshole to me, Sloan Williams?”
He'd said, “Hell yeah, baby.” But that was a lie.
The second he’d tried, he saw her lying barely conscious in a hospital bed, and he couldn’t keep it up. It was like an off switch in his head. If it were a technical issue, he’d have gritted his teeth and gone to the doc for some dick pills, but he had no problem raising a mainsail when he saw Eden in the shower. It was only when he put himself in a headspace of using her, hurting her; doing any kind of spicy shit, that he stalled like an old car.
But how the hell was he supposed to tell her that? She felt guilty enough about the accident, the stress to their family, and the work she’d had to delay or outright cancel. He’d hoped his thing would work itself out, because sometimes that shit happened. But not this time. Still, what was he meant to do? Willow didn’t consider himself a closed book about many things, but the thought of telling Derek or Psycho he couldn’t satisfy his own wife was beyond fucking embarrassing.
And now, at the worst possible time, Eden had finally gotten mad and demanded more, and what had he done? Cracked the shits. Made her feel bad right before her big meeting.
