Final Cut (3 page)

Bill closed his eyes and prayed for it all to be done and over with. He just wanted to go home. He just wanted to be safe and forget this had ever happened to him. But he realized with an overwhelming sense of blind panic that this was not to be as he cursed himself for not wearing his seatbelt. He had never worn them because he hated the idea of being totally strapped in and he hated the feeling of being trapped when he was driving. He was a large man and a seat belt had always been uncomfortable for him. But he was now seeing the error of his ways as his body crashed to and fro inside the rolling cabin.

He was getting bloodied and bruised and he was sure that he had some broken bones. There was no doubt about any of that. He was hurt. He could feel the air being sucked out of him as he tried to cram it back in only to be denied due to extreme pain inside of his chest.

There was a blinding pain in the back of his head and the crunch of glass before he blacked out.

All Bill knew now was darkness.

“RISE AND SHINE”

3 Months Later

Bill awoke from the coma at almost three months to the day of the accident. He had almost no memory of how he had come to be in the hospital. But over the next several days he was able to piece it together in his mind slowly and methodically with the help of a counselor on staff at the hospital. The coma had been like the deepest sleep he could have ever remembered having and he felt as if he was not fully awake for almost a week afterwards. Things that happened seemed to be half dream and half real and everything felt muddled and confused.

His body had almost forgotten how to work and he found that he was only able to walk after three days of trying and then only if he had a walker and an orderly on each side to make sure he made it alright. It was by far the hardest thing that he had ever imagined having to go through and he would not have wished it on his worst enemy.

It was a good week before he had begun to get his head on straight. His friends and family visited him almost every day and he was actually starting to remember some of the things that they spoke about. The first few days that they had come to see him after he woke up was very foggy and hazy indeed. He found that he could hear the voices around him and that they were speaking directly to him, but the words were all jumbled together and just were not making much sense. He knew that he was asking them things on the days that followed that he had already asked them and they had already told him.

His best friend Buzz and his wife Joan came to see Bill several times. He had known Buzz since they’d played football together in high school. Buzz had actually gotten out of the town for a bit and went to college. But his family and everyone he knew were still in Crestwood Falls so he came back. It seemed that anyone who ever left the area
eventually came back to it. The place was like some wicked catch 22 where everyone who grew up there swore they would leave and most never did because by the time they were adults they were all too stuck in their small town ways and most were in love with their high school sweethearts ready to settle down and get married at the ridiculously tender age of eighteen.

Bill’s mother came to visit him every day and spent most of the day with him. He and his mother had always been exceptionally close, but he hated to see her spend all of her day with him. His stepfather Frank even came and stayed the whole day as well. Frank was a good man. It had taken Bill several years to fully trust him, but after the experiences with his own father that was to be understood. But his mother had lucked out and found a good man to spend the remainder of her life with. He and Bill had become pretty good friends. Frank was a veteran police officer who had been elected Chief of police in Crestwood Falls three years ago. He loved his community and he loved his work of keeping riff raff off the streets.

Everything was going well, until the third day that Bill found out what had happened to Nancy. Jake had been killed in the accident and Nancy thought that Bill would never wake up again. She somehow felt she was being punished by God’s wrath and that she had brought the pain and heartache on everyone involved and she took her own life.

Frank had told Bill this with a stern, but comforting voice. He had put it off as long as he could and Bill thanked him for sparing his feelings. It was perhaps the most devastating blow he had ever received and he did not know quite how to deal with it initially. He had never loved anyone as deeply as he had loved Nancy.

The blow that Nancy was gone felt like a shotgun blast ripping right through the center of him and he felt physically nauseous, as if he was about to spew all of the contents of his stomach all over the floor. Somehow he held it together but he could not stifle back the sobs. He knew that his family had probably pieced together the reason why Jake had tried to kill him and that he was deeply in love with Nancy. She was the perfect Angel he had always dreamed of being a part of his world and now she was gone. He had closed his eyes it seemed and his whole world disappeared when he opened them back up. What in the hell was happening to the world around him? How was he supposed to get by now?

Bill spent the next two days in a stupor where he did not want to see anyone and he damned sure didn’t want to talk to anybody. He barely wanted to do any of the physical therapy that had been laid out for him by his doctor. Even the sweet and attractive rehab nurse, Teri had not been able to shake him out of the funk he was in.

Teri was actually Buzz’s sister who had just returned home from college where she had studied nursing and had landed a job in the rehab center at the hospital. She was put in charge of his primary rehabilitation needs. He had not seen Teri since she was eighteen, except a few times in passing when she was home for summer vacation working at her dad’s Pharmacy. He always kind of got the feeling that she had a little crush on him, but she had always seemed so much younger than he and Buzz (four years) but now she suddenly didn’t seem so young. She was all grown up and giving him orders. The girl was a tough cookie who knew when he was throwing in the towel and letting the pain and fatigue get the better of him. She found a way to tap into the last bit of anger and fight he had in him and forced him to keep going.

And she looked damn sexy in that nurse’s outfit. This only proved the point that no matter what crazy trauma or pain a man is in the sensual allure of a woman is always enough to bring him out of it.

Teri had matured into a voluptuous and sexy girl with a sassy personality. She still retained enough of the tomboy in her that he remembered from when she was a kid, but she had blossomed considerably. She was average height with curvy hips, large breasts, fiery red long hair that hung down past her shoulders, and a smile that could make the most evil dictator on Earth cry “uncle”.

So yea, rehab wasn’t all bad. But Bill was starting to chomp at the bits to get the hell out of the hospital.

It was about the eighth day since Bill had awoken from the coma when his doctor came in to check on him. Bill was in fine fettle and was starting to wonder when he would be able to get out of the hospital and go home. He knew he had a long way to go with some of the rehab, but he was comfortable that he could go home and then come in for his daily sessions. He really just wanted to get his life back.

The doctor was a man who was only about eight years older than himself, which did not make him feel any better. He understood that one started to feel old when his doctor eventually became younger than he was. That was probably the best way to look at the aging process, or at least that was what he had read in a book once. He could not for the life of him think of who it was that had written that book, but he would love to shake the man's hand right then and maybe have a few beers with him because that man could teach him about life.

“Hey, there Bill. How are we today?” The doctor asked.

“Fine doc. I wish I could walk a bit better, but I guess we can’t all be Olympians, right?” Bill joked. He was surprising himself with the jovial attitude that he was displaying at the moment. It was possible that he just wanted to get out of the hospital so badly that he was just deluding himself into thinking it was going to happen and this sent tingles of excitement and happiness moving up and down his spine.

“Right you are, but Teri tells me you’ve been making great strides,” the doctor said as he closed the door behind him. He sat his clipboard down on the table and pulled up his stool so that he could take a better look at Bill.

“Well, she is an amazing nurse,” Bill said.

“That she is,” Doctor Bates said. He stood up and grabbed the otoscope from the side rack and turned on the light. Then he placed a plastic tip on it and proceeded to look in Bill’s eyes, his ears, and up each nostril.

“Ok, the basics look pretty good. Any pain or headaches to complain of? I know you had some of that earlier, which is to be expected.”

“No, actually the past week and a half I’d say has been pretty good. The pain in my body is getting less and less each day and the pain in my head is gone.”

“Fantastic. I’m just going to run a few cranial and cerebral tests on you here. You might be feeling a little silly with some of these, but don’t worry I won’t tell anyone,” The doctor joked.

He first asked Bill to follow his finger from all different directions with his eyes only and keeping his head still. That was fine. Then he flashed the light in and out of his eyes quickly several times. It was mildly annoying, but no pain or signs of seizures. Bill took that as a great sign.

“Ok, now I’m going to have you close one ear with your finger while I whisper some things in your other ear. Then just tell me what I whispered.”

“Ok, but no funny business doc,” Bill joked.

The doctor smiled good-naturedly, although Bill suspected he was annoyed with him by now. The man had a lot of patients to see and rounds to make. He didn’t need some wise guy making jokes.

The doctor moved his head close to Bill’s ear. It felt weirdly intimate and Bill was becoming a bit uncomfortable. He could even smell the doctors’ aftershave. He waited for the doctor to whisper something and when it didn’t happen he thought that maybe he was deaf and there was something else going on.

“Orange,” the doctor whispered. Bill breathed a sigh of relief when he heard him utter the fruit.

Bill repeated the word back to him. The next word was Red and the last word was bacon. He was starting to enjoy this childish game for some reason, but it was also making him hungry. He was glad that no one else was in the room watching this. He felt stupid enough, but he supposed that was all part of the healing process.

“Ok, very good there. I’m just going to listen to your breathing and your pulse,” Bates said. He grabbed the stethoscope and began placing it on random spots on Bill’s chest. “Just breathe normally for me,” Bates whispered.

Bill concentrated on breathing as normal as he could which he wasn’t having a problem with until the doctor said for him to breathe normally. Was he breathing weird before? Bill shook his head. It was impossible trying to figure out doctors sometimes.

“Ok, now just breathe deeply for me… and out…” the doctor said as he placed the stethoscope on several points on his back.

“How’s it sound?” Bill asked as the doctor placed the stethoscope back around his neck.

“Tip top shape,” Bates replied. “I’m just going to test your reflexes next.”

Oh, that sounded like a blast.

The doctor took the little tomahawk looking hammer he had and tapped on Bill’s left knee and then his right. Bill watched and did not see a damn thing happening, but the doctor smiled and moaned slightly as if he saw what he was looking for. Whatever it was he had done it right, apparently.

Then Doctor Bates asked him to place his arms at ninety degree angles at his sides while he checked more reflexes. The doctor tapped on Bill’s triceps and then his elbows. Again Bill did not notice anything happening.

“Alright then,” the doctor said. “Just want to check one more thing.”

Bill tried not to roll his eyes, but he was getting bored and he really just wanted to know when he could get the hell out of the damn hospital and go home. He had a life to get back to. Albeit his life was decidedly changed now that his darling Nancy was dead.

As he thought about this he kept picturing that it was all his fault for some reason. He knew that Jake was totally at fault, but he should have kept her safe. He should have kept her close to him and made her leave that bastard. But she was her own woman and Bill had never been the kind of man to tell a woman what to do or control her. She already had a man like that in her life and she didn’t need another one.

The doctor was behind him now and tapping at various points on his back with his fingers. It felt kind of weird but when the doctor asked him if he felt any pain or strange sensations Bill told him no.

“Ok, very good. Now I’m going to check your kidneys by lightly tapping on them. This might feel uncomfortable because you will feel the thud on your back, but it should not result in any sharp pain or anything like that. Let me know if that does happen, ok?”

“Sure thing,” Bill said.

The doctor performed two heavy thumps on both sides. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it did feel kind of funky. Bill told him that it felt fine, but secretly it was the kind of thing that might piss you off if someone else did this to you or bumped into you that hard at a bar or something. If you were drunk and they were drunk then it was guaranteed fight time. That was how you had to roll sometimes.

“Ok, then. As far as I can tell the exam shows that you are very healthy and that there is no reason you can’t go home today,” Doctor Bates said as he notated a few things on his clipboard.

“That’s great, Doc. Wow, it feels like I’ve been cooped up in here forever. It’s nice to know that I can sleep in my own bed tonight.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll bet that will be nice for a change. Of course you will be expected to come back to your physical therapy every day without exception. I know you are doing better and feeling better, but you will backslide if you do not keep up with your work.”