Second Chance

Second Chance by Susan Buffum (copyright by Susan Buffum, 2019)

“Have a seat,” said the red-haired girl with the incredible jade green eyes.

“Where the hell am I?” he asked as he watched her in her tattered amber gown sweep soot and ashes from a granite bench near a fire pit.

“Precisely,” she replied, dusting off her delicate white hands then looking at them, frowning. She sighed, shrugged and then wiped her grimy hands down the stained amber fabric covering her thighs. Glancing at her palms and fingertips again she seemed satisfied that her hands were clean enough and motioned for him to sit. “Please, sit. There’s a long line ahead of you. You might as well relax while you can.”

“Where am I and who are you?” he asked as he looked down at the bench that still had grains of soot and flakes of ash on it. He bent and began to blow the debris off, but almost as soon as it was gone more settled on the polish granite and he began to look peeved.

“Stop wasting your breath,” she said, and then she covered her mouth with the fingers of her left hand as she tried to suppress a giggle. “As if you have any left, really.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded, feeling suddenly surly with annoyance. He craned his neck, looking around but it was dark and he thought he might be out in the woods still but not at the party he had been attending. He shook his head, wondering if he’d had too much to drink, or if someone had slipped something into his beer. He felt a little off. Had he gone into the woods to take a piss behind a tree and gotten himself turned around and ended up at some after prom party? He hadn’t gone to the prom but a lot of other seniors had. He turned back around and looked at the girl again but he definitely did not recognize her. He was pretty sure that he’d have known her if he’d seen her before with that short, spiky red hair, although it looked good on her, kind of sassy, he thought, unable to keep his lips from curving in a smile as his gaze traveled down her petite but alluring form. The hem of her gown was torn and ragged, exposing her bare feet. “Where’d you lose your shoes?” he asked, admiring her slender ankles.

“Stand up, turn around and bend over because I think one of them might be lodged up your ass.” His eyes rose abruptly to meet hers. She had a stern expression on her face. Her face was fox-like, he noticed. “From kicking your ass,” she added.

“Did you kick my ass? A little bitch like you? I’m over a foot taller than you and probably outweigh you by seventy pounds.”

“Sixty two pounds, nine and three quarters ounces,” she spat out.

“Explain to me how a little squirt like you kicked my ass.” He crossed his arms and glared at her, tired of this nonsense already. “I need to get back to the party I’m at. Yours is kind of sparse as far as friends go. Where is everybody?”

“They’re already trough. I held you back.”

“Held me back. Yeah, well, a lot of my teachers wanted to hold me back but there was nothing they could do about it because I got good grades. And now I’m graduating in June. Fuck them.”

“No, you’re not graduating,” she said, shaking her head. “You blew it, buddy. No diploma for you.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

She began moving, circling around behind him. She’d circled him six times before he reached out and grabbed her delicate wrist, pulling her to a stop. “I mean you’re dead,” she said, raising her hands, making several odd gestures.

It was a moment before he realized that he had been gripping her wrist but now she was waving her hands around like a magician or conjurer. He looked at his hands. “How did you do that?” he asked.

“Your physical body has no substance here.”

“But I grabbed your wrist!”

“Your mind just hasn’t grasped the concept that you’re rather insubstantial now.” She began circling him again. “Do you want to know why I herded everyone else through the door and then swung it shut, but kept you here on this side?”

“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing here but this is really too weird for my taste. I have to get back to my own friends.”

“They’re busy. They haven’t even noticed that you’ve gone missing. Really, Drake, heroin? Did you really believe you were invincible? That it couldn’t kill you? Everybody dies. That’s the rule. No one escapes death. Not even you. Your four minutes are falling from the top of the hour glass called Drake Carter’s Life grain by grain into the bottom of the hour glass. When the last grain falls, I have no choice but to open the door and usher you through it, and then slam it shut behind you. That’s called sealing your fate. Ever hear of that?”

“I’ve heard the phrase,” he replied, feeling somewhat uneasy.  The girl was more than a little strange. “Do you mind telling me who you are? Are you the death fairy? Sort of like the tooth fairy from the dark side? Instead of leaving a dollar under the pillow you take a soul and what? Keep it in a jar on a shelf in your creepy little cottage?” He shook his head. “What’s your name?”

“Oh, I have a lot of names but most people just call me, Essie, short for Second Chance.” He chuffed an amused laugh mostly through his nose. “I’m your last and best hope. I’m your miracle, Drake. Do you believe in miracles?”

“”I’m eighteen years old. It’s a miracle I haven’t been killed while texting and driving. It’s a miracle I haven’t been shot by some psycho with an assault rifle intent on taking a whole gang with him when he blows his brains out in the school cafeteria, or the gym or the library—wherever he goes to hole up when he runs out of ammo or his gun jams. It’s a miracle someone hasn’t shot me in a fit of road rage because I braked to make a right hand turn and slowed them down! My life is full of goddam miracles.”

“It certainly wasn’t any miracle that you ended your own life shooting shit into your vein like you did.” Her tone and the look of disgust in her green eyes caused him to look away, to feel a frisson of apprehension about his situation because it was becoming more apparent to him by the moment that something was happening to him that was so far out of the norm it was making him feel off balance and frightened. “Drake!” she said sharply, causing him to look at her again. He watched as she slipped two fingers into the bodice of her gown, down between her breasts in that hollow where a female’s heat and scent resided. How many times had he nuzzled a girl’s neck and then her throat and then let his lips roam down to that enticing place framed by the V of a low cut sweater’s neckline? “This is what you need,” she said, withdrawing a pen-like object from that enticing space.

“What the hell is that? An Epi-pen?”

“It’s a naloxone auto-injector pen. It can reverse the respiratory depression that’s more or less suffocated you. You’re dead. It just happened. In four minutes your death will be irreversible. This won’t save you.” She shook the pen-like device in his face. “Three minutes and fifty-nine seconds to be precise.” She tucked the device back down between her breasts and then waved her arms as if she could direct the black clouds in the dark sky.

His eyebrows rose as an opening did appear in the clouds overhead, allowing a beam of pure white light to shine down on the ground at his feet. “That’s a cool trick,” he murmured.

“Just watch your life. It’s going to flash by fairly quickly,” she said.

“What?”

“Look!” She pointed down at the illuminated oval sphere between his feet.

He looked down and saw shadows moving inside the sphere. As he watched they gradually came more clearly into focus. He recognized his parents but they looked younger. His mother was holding a blue blanket wrapped bundle, smiling. His father was leaning over the bed, grinning ear to ear. His mother moved the blanket aside to reveal the baby’s face and Drake reacted to seeing his familiar infant visage. There had been dozens of pictures of him in every room of the house when he was growing up. He had finally convinced his mother to put the damn things away when he was eleven and wanted to have friends over. She had taken down the pictures and put them into albums that she kept in her bedroom. “I was kind of cute,” he said.

“You’re not so cute now with purple lips and a blue nose, ashen skin,” she said, making him grimace. “Keep watching.”

It did go fast. Eighteen years flew by in what seemed like only a heartbeat. “I really haven’t lived much,” he observed. He hadn’t even graduated from high school yet.

“No, you hadn’t lived much at all. You really only just reached legal adult status, although you were still three years away from being able to drink legally.” Her tone was wry. He had been drinking beer since he was fourteen. That had led to smoking pot at sixteen. And now he’d been trying heroin at his friend Jake’s insistence that it was amazing stuff. “You’d only had sex five times this year with a female. I’m not counting all the times you were alone.” He scowled at her and then looked away, somewhat horrified that she knew this much about his intimate business. “You’re not going to college. You’re never going to fall in love. You’re never going to walk on the beach again. You’re never going to have sex again. You will never get married. You will never be a father. You will not teach a son to ride a bike or play hockey. You will not pace the house waiting for your daughter to come home from a first date. You won’t kiss boo-boos and make them better. You won’t buy a new car, get a good job, buy a house, put in a pool, take another vacation, win the lottery, kiss your mother, hang out with your father, celebrate Christmas or your birthday.”

“All right!” he shouted, jumping up off the bench and walking away. “I hear you!” He walked into the deep shadows until he began to shiver. There was a sense of panic eating away at him from the inside now. “How do I fix this?” he asked. He turned and the panic flooded him—she was gone! He was alone in this place he now had some vague understanding must be limbo. He was in limbo—balanced between life and death. She had said that he was dead but there was a four minute window before he was dead dead. “Second Chance!” he shouted, striding back into the area where the bench stood. “Essie! Miss Chance! Hey! Miracle girl! Where are you?”

“Be quiet and sit down. It’s a busy night,” she said as she came out of the deepest shadows, guiding a girl with long brown hair by the hand. “Go through this door,” she told the girl. The girl hesitated a moment and then crossed the threshold. Second Chance swung the door shut.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Is she going to hell, too? What did she do? I mean, she looked younger than me!”

“She was thirteen years old. She just hung herself a few minutes ago. You didn’t see the mark on her neck?”

“Uh, no. Her hair was hanging down.”

“Bullied,” she said, sounding disgusted again. “Sometimes I hate my job with a burning passion!”

He dropped down onto the bench again, feeling drained. “Can I ask you something?”

“If you’d like.”

“Do you work for, uh, you know, the devil? Are you sort of the door person to the other side? You kick everyone through and slam the door behind them?”

“Sometimes.” She looked at him and something touched her inside. “Look, the thirteen year old? Different doorway. She’s heading upstairs. There’re some stops along the way. Everybody is sorted out in the end.”

“Don’t you mean judged?”

“No, they get sorted first and then they get judged. If judgement declares you go elsewhere it’s a direct path there, and that’s it. It’s final.”

“Why’d you stop me and keep me back?”

“I told you, some people get second chances. You happen to be the lucky winner of the second chance lottery tonight.”

“Okay, so how does this work?”

She raised her face, eyes traveling up to the dark clouds. “Three minute warning. You’ve been without oxygen for sixty seconds.”

“Fuck!” he cried. “I can’t hold my breath that long!”

“Don’t you dare use that kind of language here! I find it highly offensive and if you persist, I might renege on this chance and shove you through the other door and be done with you! Really! Show some respect not only for me but for yourself!”

“It’s how everybody talks these days,” he muttered.

“So that makes it all right?” She came up to him, grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back until he was looking up into her flashing green eyes. “I thought you had a brain. I thought you had a backbone and guts. I was wrong. You’re no different from any of the others I’ve shown through the door!”

“I am different!” he protested. “I’m sitting here and you’re giving me a second chance! You must have seen some redeeming quality in me! You must have seen something!” he cried.

“I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before. No big deal.” She abruptly let go of his hair and stepped back. He grabbed for her wrists but her wrists went right through his fists.
“Hey! No!” he cried, jumping up onto his feet. “How long has it been? How many minutes and seconds do I have left? Let me prove to you that I’m worth this chance! Please! Don’t offer me a chance and then yank it out from underneath me because I used one bad word! It’s everywhere in the world! I just said it because I’ve heard it so often it has no meaning to me! I’m sorry if it offended you. Really. I’m sorry.”

“It’s crude and vulgar.”

“Okay. Fine. I will never say it again. I promise!”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said.

“Okay then, I will try never to say that word again but I can’t promise you that it won’t slip out from time to time. I will try to control my urge to say it. Is that all right with you?” She nodded. “Can I ask you something?”

“The sand is still falling grain by grain...”

“Yeah, yeah! I know! I just want to ask you if you were ever alive. Were you? I mean, you look like you’re wearing a prom gown. Did you die in an accident on prom night?”

She turned her back to him but he could tell he’d hit a nerve in her. She wasn’t soulless after all. She had feelings. “I’m not at liberty to discuss this with you.”

“You must have been one feisty girl. I mean, the way you were talking to me, it was like you weren’t going to take crap from me no how, no way.”

“Drake, stop. This is about you. Not me.”

“But I want to know. How’d you get this job?”

“You’ve got two minutes and forty-five seconds,” she said.

“Tell me in fifteen seconds or less. I need to know what happened to you.”

“I have one minute and thirty seconds left,” she replied, “and then I will be shown through one or the other of the doors by you if you fail to...”

He stood stock still for a moment and then approached her. “Are you saying that you’re not dead yet? That somehow you got this job from the last person who had it? Am I supposed to take over from you when you’re officially dead?”

“I was at my cousin’s wedding. This is a bridesmaid’s gown. I was one of her bridesmaids. I was supposed to ride with the other bridesmaids in a limo but I wasn’t feeling well after the photo shoot in the park and they left without me. I’d been stung by a bee in the rose garden. This guy, a friend of Tom’s, the groom, he offered to drive me to the reception. I was having trouble breathing. He drove me to the emergency room and kind of just dumped me out the door and took off. He was scared. I’m not sure what’s happening because when I stopped breathing I was here and no longer there, just like you were no longer at the party. You were here. And it’s weird because I instinctively know who goes where and why. But I didn’t know when you came across. I just suddenly knew about second chances.”

He nodded and slipped his hand into his back pocket. “I hear you. And I have this on me, so maybe this was meant to be. You have that naloxone pen thingy and I have this.” He held out a similar looking item. “I have a peanut allergy,” he said. “I always carry an Epi-pen. That’s what I thought you had. But it turns out I have what you need and you have what I need, so maybe we should swap?”

She was looking at the injector he was holding out to her. A lot was going on in her head, evidently, but then she sort of gasped. “I have forty seconds left,” she said, her voice wavering. She quickly plucked the naloxone injector back out. “I carry this because my brother is a user and he’s overdosed before. He was one of the ushers and I was afraid he’d be shooting up at the reception and would screw up there and need this.”

“It’s a crazy world.”

“Drake, don’t ever use heroin again. If you’re addicted...”

“It was the first time and believe me, if I live, it will be the last.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, I promise. Here, you need this. Your time is almost up.”  He popped the cap off. “Hike your skirt up.” He crouched down before her, helping her get the long skirt of her gown up high enough to expose the front of her thigh so he could use the Epi-pen. She flinched slightly as he jammed it into her skin and the medication was injected into her.

“Hurry up! Get up! Lift up your shirt!” she said quickly. He stood up, tugging his shirt up. She fumbled as she unfastened his jeans and tugged them low on his hips. Her green eyes met his for a brief moment before she administered the naloxone in this abdomen.

“Chance! How old are you? Where do you live? What’s your real name?” he called through the sudden fog that rose up between them. “Chance!” Hey!”

She could be anybody from anywhere, he thought as he lay in the ER treatment room trying to remember her face. The world was a huge place.

“You’re a damned lucky young man,” the doctor said, from the doorway of the room he was in. “Another minute or so and your parents would have been grieving the loss of you. I’m admitting you for the night and we’ll see how you’re doing in the morning.”

“Who found me?” he asked. He couldn’t remember anything about that.

“When you went unresponsive one of your friends had the intelligence and foresight to call nine eleven. Fortunately for you there’d been a fire just down the road. Truck three was on its way back and another of your friends ran to the road to flag it down. They got to you pretty quickly or else, like I said, your parents would be devastated right now. They’re in the waiting room. You up to seeing them?”

“Bee sting,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?” he asked.

“I thought you said bee sting. It’s an odd thing to say. But then again, you had an Epi-pen in your hip pocket. Are you allergic to bee stings?” He looked down at the chart, his eyebrows bending together over the bridge of his nose. “Your mother told us that you have a peanut allergy.”

“Yeah, I’m deathly allergic to peanuts.”

 He hesitated and then said, “I could have sworn you said bee sting, but maybe you heard one of the nurses talking. We treated a girl earlier who had an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting.”

“Redhead?”

Again the doctor looked taken aback. “As a matter of fact...” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss other patients with you. It’s a privacy issue.”

“Yeah, I understand. Can you tell me if she was admitted or not?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

Drake spent the night, receiving further treatment. Mid-morning the floor doctor came in and told him that he would be going home soon, but he was referring him for drug counseling. “I’m never touching that stuff again,” he said.

“Nevertheless, you need to go to this counseling to avoid an arrest for possession of a narcotic and drug paraphernalia. It’s your first offense. You nearly died. This counseling avenue keeps you out of the criminal justice system. You get this one shot at having no record. You mess up again and you’re just a number in their system.”

“I hear you. I’ll go.”

“Good idea. You can get up and walk around. Just tie your gwn shut so you’re not mooning the nurses, although some of them wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t want them looking at my ass,” Drake said.

“Your mother’s coming with clean clothes. She’ll be here soon. The paperwork should be done by then and you’ll be free to go. Stay clean, son.”

“I will.” The doctor nodded and left the room.

Drake pushed aside the covers and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Hospital gowns were the worst thing ever invented, he thought. He fumbled with the various ties and snaps until he was fairly certain nothing was hanging out. The little slipper socks were hardly high fashion either but he had nothing else. Reaching up, he finger combed his tangled hair as he walked a bit unsteadily to the door and stopped, peering out into the corridor. There was no one around, except down by the nurse’s station.

Stepping out into the hallway he began a slow walk up one side of the corridor and then back down the other, casually glancing into each room. Most of them were occupied by older people, senior citizens. He made it to the far end, then crossed and entered the other corridor that ran parallel to the one his room was in.

In the third room from the elevator he caught a glimpse of red hair and he stopped. He wasn’t certain it was her. He had a vague idea of what she had looked like- fox like. This girl was chubby-cheeked and her skin was blotchy. She had oxygen tubing in her nose, was sitting up, staring out the window. Her hair was spikey. It seemed familiar. “Hi,” he said from the doorway. “Bee sting girl?”

She turned her head and looked at him. The first thing that struck him was the color of her eyes. Jade green. They were very vivid even from this distance. “Heroin overdose guy?” she asked a bit hesitantly.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

“If you want to. I’m all itchy hives and rash.”

“Yeah, you look like hell.” He came further into the room. “Of course I hardly look GQ worthy in this less than flattering attire.”

Her eyes traveled up to the top of his head then down to his sock-clad feet. She had to lean forward a bit to see his feet. Her eyes met his again on the way back up. “Charming. But we match.” She indicated her own gown. It was the same color, the same pattern as his. “How embarrassing to show up wearing the same gown.”

He quirked a smile. “My name’s Drake. Drake Carter.”

“Like the duck.”

“Yeah. Guess it’s a little better than Mallard.”

“Chance,” she said. “Chance Payton.”

“Chance, that’s an unusual name.”

“My father was scratching lottery tickets as my mother was trying to come up with a name for me. He won two thousand dollars on one of the tickets and said, ‘What’s the chance of that happening, me winning two thousand dollars on the day our baby girl was born?’ So Mom named me Chance and he agreed.”

“You from around here?’ he asked.

She shook her head. “No, I live in Waterbury. I was at a wedding photo shoot at Graystone Park here in town when I got stung by a bee. I was brought here.”

“You in high school or are you a college girl?”

She laughed. “Thanks, but no. I’m not in college. I’m a senior. I graduate this month.”

“Me, too. I’m from here.” He raised his hand, rubbing his nose, feeling suddenly way underdressed and awkward in her presence. He smiled nervously as he lowered his hand and she returned his smile. She seemed a lot calmer than he felt. “I had a weird experience,” he blurted out. Her smile faltered but her eyes met his and held them. “It’s all kind of vague now.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how to describe it.”

She continued to hold his gaze for a few moments longer and then she turned her head and looked out the window. “Me, too,” she said. “It’s strange but the moment you appeared in the doorway I felt like I knew you from someplace, like we’d just...I don’t know, been together. I thought it was a dream, but it was a really bizarre dream.” She frowned slightly and then she sighed. “You gave me an Epi-pen. How weird is that? I mean, how could that even be? I don’t even know you yet in my dream you pulled an Epi-pen out of your back pocket and administered it.”

He was silent, shaken by this confirmation that she had had a very similar dream or experience to his. “All right. Let me tell you this. I have a severe peanut allergy and I always have an Epi-pen on me. I carry it in my back pocket, usually. In my dream I gave a girl in an amber-colored gown an injection in her thigh.” She had gasped and her eyes had widened at this. Her hand rose from the covers and she shakily pointed at the narrow closet against the wall at the foot of the bed. “What?” he asked. “What’s the matter?’ He thought there might be a call button he needed to push for her on the wall although she had a call button on the bed controls. “Hey, are you all right?” Tears were trickling down her cheeks. “Chance?”

“Go look. Just go look inside,” she managed to say.

He slowly got up and went to the closet, glancing back at her as he touched the door handle. Her face was ashen pale beneath the blotchy hives still marring her complexion. He tugged open the door then slowly turned his head to look inside. “Holy shit,” he said, his voice sounding strangled because his throat had closed up, not from an allergic reaction but from strong emotion. Inside, hanging from a hook, was an amber gown. He reached in and touched the fabric but he already knew it would be satiny and soft. He’d touched this dress before, helping her hike it up to expose her thigh. “How can this be?” he murmured.

“Drake, what does this mean?” she asked, sounding almost scared.

He let go of the slinky material and slowly closed the door.  “We both more or less died last night. Somehow our spirits found one another’s. You were kind of bossy and in charge.”

“I’m a redhead, I can be that way sometimes.”

“You’d gotten there first, to this place we were at, and...”

“There was someone else there before me. I had to stay and she left through a door. I had to show people through the door but when you showed up...”

“You couldn’t open the door and let me go through.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I can’t remember much more about it.”

“You had a naloxone injector pen in the top of your dress. You jabbed me with it.” He laid his hand over his abdomen.

She was shaking her head. “I had one at the wedding but not in the top of my dress! It was in my bag. My...”

“Brother,” he said and her eyes met his again and held his gaze.

“Yes, my brother, Chase. He’s overdosed in the past. I carry one when I’m going to be someplace he is, just in case. He’s been to rehab a few times but he’s using again.” He could tell by the sound of her voice that she was upset about it. “Why would you inject that stuff into your body in the first place?” she asked, having looked away again.

“This friend of mine, he’d been after me to just try it. He said it was amazing stuff.”

“And you just believed him.”

“Yeah.” Her expression said it all. “I’m stupid, I know.”

“Not stupid. You must be smart enough to know better but you caved in to peer pressure just like Chase did.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m never touching it again.” She would not look at him. “You gave me a second chance, Chance. It was you. Of all the people you’d ushered through those doors in the, what, seconds you were put in charge by the previous doorkeeper, you chose me and stopped me. You must have seen or sensed something worth saving in me. Do you remember what that was?” he asked. “Why did you stop me and not just kick my ass through the f....”

“Hey!” she said sharply.

“Right, sorry.” He remembered now that she didn’t like that word. “I’m sorry. But why didn’t you kick me through that doorway to Hell?”

“Because you didn’t belong there!” She leaned back against the pillows, her hands gripping the bedcovers. “I can’t explain it!”

“Okay, then don’t try. You saw, heard or sensed something that made you believe I was worth intervening for. You had the naloxone pen. I had the Epi-pen. It worked out for both of us.” He ran a hand through his longish, tangled, dark hair. “Chance, I truly appreciate what you did.”

She was silent for a long time and then she asked, “If it was you in charge of the door, would you have given me a second chance?”

“In a heartbeat,” he replied as the nurse trundled in her stand to record Chance’s current vitals. “Should I leave?” he asked the nurse.

“No, although Jennifer is probably looking for you in your own room. You’re almost ready to be released.”

“Yeah, but. I was told I could take a walk. I just stopped in to visit Chance for a few.”

“I didn’t realize that you knew her,” the nurse said.

Drake’s eyes met Chance’s. “I do, but we haven’t known one another all that long. I recognized her as I was passing by so thought I’d say hello,” he replied.

“Chance will probably be going home this evening.” She finished typing her notes and headed for the door. “It’s nice that you two know one another. Take it easy, both of you!”

Drake watched the nurse leave and then he turned back to Chance who was smoothing the bedclothes. “Um...” he said, uncertain how to proceed. She looked up. “Uh, what do you think about maybe keeping in touch? I mean, I don’t know if you’re in a relationship or anything. I’m not. Nothing serious anyway.”

“I’m not seeing anyone right now.”

“So, you want to give me your cell number? I’ll call you?”

“All right.” She indicated a small pad of paper and a pen on the bedside table next to the tissue box. “Write your number down for me and I’ll give you mine.”

“I have a car. My Mom bought a new car last year. It’s a Honda Accord. Not new, but not in bad shape.”

“So basically you have a car and you drive.”

He laughed self consciously. “Yeah.”

“Good, because I can’t afford a car yet. I’ll probably be taking the bus to college in the fall.”

“Where are you going?”

“Community college here,” she answered. “My parents can’t afford anything else. I’m the baby of the family. They’re pretty much tapped out after putting my older brothers through college.”

“Do you have any sisters?” She shook her head. “So you’re the only girl in the family?”

“Yes.”

“That explains your no nonsense attitude then. You don’t take crap from guys.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good.” He wrote down his cellphone and home telephone numbers. “I’ll be working for my uncle’s landscaping business this summer. That’s what I’ll be studying at the same college you’re going to. Business and they have some horticulture and landscaping courses. My Uncle Henry is grooming me to take over his company.  He doesn’t have any kids so he’s adopted me and I’ve been working for him summers since I was twelve years old.” He handed the pen to her. “What are you going for?”

“Administrative Assistant.”

He nodded. “Cool. Maybe I’ll hire you to help me run the business one day.”

“Your uncle might have a say in that.”

“My uncle has cancer so he might not be around for many more years. He’s getting treatment but it’s spread. I’m going to take as many courses as I can for as long as I can before he has to stop working. He’s doing okay, has good and bad days. I’m hoping I can get my Associates degree before he bows out.” He shook his head. “Pretty heavy conversation here for just having met you.”

“It’s all right. Maybe our chance meeting was meant to be, Drake. You never know. Maybe you will need me to help you manage and run the business. Does your aunt work there?”

“He never married. He’s got some guys who’ve been with him for years but he’s been running the business himself.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, maybe I can talk to him and tell him you want to help out in the office. You think you could work part time and take courses, too? He can start teaching you stuff so when the time comes you’ll be familiar with things and I’ll be able to trust you to do stuff like pay the bills, cut the paychecks and send out the statements so I can be more hands on in the greenhouse and landscape design areas.”

Chance suddenly grinned. “That would be awesome, Drake. Even if he pays me minimum and I only work maybe 16 hours a week or so I’d be able to save that money toward a car.”

“I think he’s coming over tonight, that is if my stupid stunt hasn’t upset my parents too much and they’ve canceled Sunday night dinner. If they’ve canceled then I’ll call him during the week. After I talk to hm I’ll call you and let you know what he says.” She nodded. “Hey, before I go, I’ll call you anyway during the week. Do you maybe want to get together and do something next Saturday?”

“That would be nice. But I have to tell you, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs, and I don’t jump into bed with a guy until I feel comfortable enough for that. And I have never felt comfortable enough with anyone yet.”

He understood what she was telling him. “This has changed my life for the better. No more beer, not more drugs, I never smoked and don’t plan on taking it up. As for sex, well, let’s see how it goes. If and when you feel comfortable with me let me know and we’ll talk about it first. Sound good to you?”

“Sounds like a plan to me.” She looked at the numbers he’d written down then wrote her own cellphone number and home phone numbers on the pad, tore off the page and handed it to him. “Don’t lose that.”

“I won’t.” He had no pocket except for the pocket sewn into the center of the top of the gown but it had a hole in it for passing wires through. “I’ll just hold onto this for now.” He put the pad and pen back on the side table. “Well, I need to go before they send the dogs out in search of me.”

“Do you believe in fate?” she asked, reaching for his hand, catching it before he could turn away. Their eyes met, his hazel, hers an amazing shade of green. “I didn’t believe in it yesterday, but I am a firm believer today.”

“I am, too, a believer now.” His hand slid to hers and they laced their fingers together. “Thanks for seeing something in me worth saving.”

“Thanks for seeing something in me worth saving.”

He hesitated a long moment before bending quickly to kiss her swollen, blotchy cheek. “You look like a puffer fish,” he said.

“By next Saturday I should look like myself again.”

“Good. We’ll go someplace where there’re no bees.”

“Or peanuts.”

He shook his head. “You bring your Epi-pen and I’ll bring mine and we should be okay. You never know.”

“Will do.” She watched him walk to the door. He hesitated there and then turned back. “What?” she asked.

“This crazy thought just came into my head. Don’t take me wrong, but, if things work out for us, if this is fate, and we have a kid one day, what do you think we should name her?”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Really? That thought just came into your head?” He nodded. “Well, here’s another weird thing. I started thinking the same thing and you know what name came into my head just before you asked?”

“No, what name?”

“Destiny,” she replied.

He nodded. “That’s cool.” He raised his hand in which he held the paper with her numbers on it. “Talk to you soon. Hope you get to go home tonight.”

“Bye, Drake. Thanks for finding me.”

“I think I was meant to.”

He returned to his room, his heart feeling unusually light after such a life-changing experience. Chance. Fate. Destiny. How could it all have been merely a coincidence? He’d been essentially dead or nearly dead. So had she. They hadn’t known one another before last night, yet seeing her, talking to her this morning he felt as if he had known her longer than the less than four minutes he’d been with her in that twilight place between life and death.

It was possible that they had been discussing her while treating him and in his unconscious state he had conjured her up, worked her into a very bizarre near death dream, but that didn’t explain how he had known that she had red spikey hair like that and that she had been wearing an amber gown, unless he’d been semi-conscious when they’d brought him into the ER and he had caught a glimpse of Chance in another treatment room in passing but how would he have known about her brother being a user and that she carried naloxone like she did? That had nothing to do with anything, except he might have transferred the naloxone pen that an EMT had used on him to her but still, there had been the brother thing.

It was beyond his ability to comprehend and he decided he was not even going to try to understand what had happened to him last night. He would just accept it. That’s all he could do was accept it and move on with his life. But his life now included a girl named Chance, kind of ironic in and of itself. But Chance would always remind him that he’d been given a second chance at life, whether by her hand or by the hand of some higher being using her as an instrument to change his life.

Whatever had happened last night, he was pretty sure that Chance was going to be a part of his life for a long time to come, maybe to the end of his life here on earth.

 “Are you ready to go home?” his mother’s voice asked from the doorway. He looked up, looked at her pale, worried, haggard face, the shopping bag with clean clothes she had brought for him and then he did something that he had not done for a long, long time. He cried. “It’s all right, Drake,” she said, coming further into the room. “It’s going to be all right. Your father will certainly have something to say to you when he gets home tonight but we’ll get through this. You’ll go to those counseling and drug education sessions and we’ll put this behind us and move on.”

“Yeah, I’ll go, and we will.” He stood up, a piece of paper fluttering from his lap. “Oh,” he said.

“What’s that? A prescription?” she asked.

He laughed as he bent and picked it up. “This is a very important piece of paper. This is sort of a prescription. It’s a prescription for my future delivered to me by the hand of fate.” He walked up to her and took the bag from her hand. “I’ll get dressed and then, before we go, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Oh, good Lord, Drake! Have you been shamelessly flirting with the CNAs?”

“No! Nothing like that. I’ll explain it all to you later, or I’ll try.  This is a special girl and she’ll be going to the community college this fall.”  He shook his head. “I just want you to meet her and say hello.”

“Oh, all right!” she cried. “Go on, put your clothes on. I need to run to the grocery store before we go home and then I have laundry to do.”

He went into the bathroom to change, listening to her as she continued on with her list of things she needed to do before his father got home from work. He wasn’t too worried about his father reaming him out. They had a good relationship. He’d apologize, assure him it would never happen again, tell him he would do what he was supposed to do to avoid getting his name in the criminal justice system and then he’d tell him about this girl he’d met in the hospital. He hadn’t dated as much as his friends had through high school. His father had taken him aside several times, concerned about that. He’d told his father every time that he just hadn’t met the right girl yet, but that had changed. He’d finally met her.

Fate, he thought, was a pretty cool thing.