With his focus fixed on the angler, Jonas never had time to avoid the car that had just swept around the corner into the clearing. Jonas felt all sorts of new pains coursing throughout his body before he found himself staring up at a blue sky.
“Oh my God!” Jonas heard cries around him and the slamming of car doors. Suddenly there were three faces above him, looking down on him like imps about to guide him to Hell. He looked at the trio, a middle aged woman with mascara blackened tears staining her face, a young boy whose mouth was agape and the familiar sight of the angler.
“I tried to warn him,” Jonas heard the angler say.
“I…I just never saw him,” stuttered the woman through tears.
“No, no,” interjected the angler resting his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t get thinking that any of this was your fault, there was nothing you could have done.”
“God, I feel sick, I’m sorry…”
“It’s ok, it’s not your fault. He came stumbling out of the woods acting all crazy. He probably didn’t know where he was and didn’t have the faculty of mind to get out of the way even if he had seen you and had time. Which he didn’t.”
“Thanks. You’re kind,” sobbed the woman.
“Is he going to die, Mum?” chirped in the young boy.
“It’s the bloody dolphin that’s going to die,” screamed Jonas, looking up at the three faces who all appeared to recoil exactly in synch at his outburst. “Isn’t anyone going to help me?”
Jonas awoke to find a new face standing over him. This time it was friendly young face of a girl with tied back blonde hair who had her face almost up against his.
“Oh, hello there. How are you feeling, sir?” she said, feeling his forehead.
The softly spoken voice somehow soothed Jonas, and he felt the power of her words rushing around his veins. He looked the girl up and down with her sweet smile and nurse’s uniform fitting snugly against an ample chest. Jonas recalled the last close encounter with a woman, Elizabeth, and subsequently calmed himself. Jonas noticed that he actually felt calm for the first time since first setting eyes on Sam. The forest hadn’t brought him the peace he had been looking for, and any hopes of tranquillity had been quashed upon finding the dolphin.
Sam!
All the calmness inside him suddenly rushed away at the thought of his dolphin friend, and Jonas tried to sit up but was restrained by soft hands on his shoulders, gently persuading him to lie back down.
“You should lie down, Sir. You’ve suffered quite a beating by the looks of it and you’ve broken your left leg and sprained your left ankle. Would you like to tell me what happened?”
“But I have to go, I can’t stay here,” pleaded Jonas, not wanting to believe the severity of his situation.
“Sir, you can’t walk anywhere in your state. You need time to heal, and besides it’s getting dark outside.”
Jonas looked at the nurse. He wanted immediately to blurt everything out and bolt from the bed to find the nearest phone. But instead an all too familiar feeling of failure was beginning to take a grip of him. He had been that dolphin’s last hope. Jonas looked down at his leg which was set in a cast and raised above the bed.
Sam probably had no hope left at all by now.
Jonas sighed long and hard. “How long have I been…” Jonas looked around and took in the confined surroundings of a curtained off section of a hospital ward. “…here?” he asked.
“A few hours. You were out cold when you arrived earlier this evening,” replied the nurse.
“And how did I get here?”
“Ah, a lady, a Mrs Evans brought you into to ER,” the nurse explained as she tended with a cold cotton swab on Jonas’s forehead. “She said she’d found you out in the forest and that you had stepped in front of her car. She said it was all an accident, and another man on the scene seemed to think you were a little ‘whacked out’, I think is how he described you,” said the nurse.
“Is she here now?”
“No, I don’t think so. The police came and took a statement from her and she left with her son. She was quite shaken up herself, mind you.”
“The police!” said Jonas, “Are they here? Can I see them?”
“No, I need to contact them when, well, now that you’re awake. They’ll want to take a statement from you.”
“Have you phoned them?” questioned Jonas.
“No, not yet. I want to check your dressings first. You’re not going anywhere, they can wait. I’ll phone them in the morning so that you can get a good night’s rest. You look as if you could do with one if you don’t mind me saying so.” The nurse smiled kindly at Jonas.
“No, I need to see someone,” Jonas persisted. “Is there a phone I can use?”
“Are you OK, sir?” asked the nurse, a look of concern setting suddenly on her face. “You need to keep still. You’ve been unconscious for the last few hours and we need to get you checked out properly, especially with the apparent beating you’ve taken to the face and head.”
Jonas let his head sink back into the pillow. It was probably all too late anyway. If it was getting dark now, Sam wouldn’t have had that amount of time. Just like Jolene. During her final hours, Jonas had stepped out from her room to fetch her a last bunch of beautiful flowers from the shop in the hospital lobby. When he’d got back to the room there were all manner of doctors and nurses rushing around, panicked. One nurse held him back at the door as they had tried unsuccessfully to revive her. He couldn’t even make it in time for Jolene to see a familiar face before she went.
“I see. It’s just…” Jonas pondered.
“Yes?”
“I just didn’t have the time to come here, that’s all.”
“Well, we’re all busy people sir, but if that lady hadn’t brought you in when she did, you may have been a lot worse off by now. Were you going somewhere important? You’re wearing a suit. We had to cut the trousers away to get to the wounds on your legs.
“My suit? Oh, I had….” started Jonas, his chin falling to his chest. He took a deep breath and squeezed out the words. “I just buried Jolene. My wife. She died last week. I couldn’t save her either…” Jonas’s sentence drifted away as he fought back his emotions.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” said the nurse. She turned away from his face as though she didn’t want to have that conversation. Jonas watched her move down to check the dressings on his thigh.
“You’re probably used to death, in your profession I guess,” said Jonas, breaking an awkward silence.
“It’s something you never get used to, to be honest,” replied the nurse.” Besides, we like to think we save more than our fair share of people here you know,” replied the nurse with an ice-breaking smile, not meaning any malice in her words.
“Sorry, right.”
“According to Mrs Evans, how fast the car was going, I’d be surprised if all of these injuries were from it hitting you,” said the nurse observationally. A polite and quiet curiosity. “Did something else happen?”
Jonas took in a deep breath. This young nurse seemed genuinely concerned for him and her easy bedside manner made him relax from his anxiety. He could feel the day’s events split into words and all muddled around in his lungs. With each deep breath he sorted them and started to let it pour out.
“After Jolene was interred, I just couldn’t face the wake afterwards. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a party in the last 18 years without her and I really didn’t feel like starting today. So I ducked out and went for a walk in the woods. Then it all just gets a little crazy. You probably won’t even believe me.”
“You probably wouldn’t believe half of the things I’ve heard in ER, trust me,” smiled the nurse.
Jonas smiled, comforted. “I found a dolphin.”
“A dolphin?” enquired the nurse, a little startled, looking up from his dressing.
“A dolphin. Yes, just lying there on the path in the woods. I have no idea where it came from or where it was going. It
was just totally irrational you know.”
“Right,” said the nurse non-judgmentally.
“That’s how I hurt my knee, I just came around the corner and pretty much fell over its tail. It’s not the kind of thing you expect to see sitting on the path in the forest.”
The nurse shook her head and took a seat on the edge of the bed, examining Jonas’s face with her eyes as he related his tale.
“I sat with it for a while, trying to comfort it you know. I still had all of these emotions running around inside me from the funeral and I just didn’t want to see it go the same way as Jolene. I didn’t have a phone to call for help, I couldn’t find anyone in the immediate area, so I went looking for help. You want to hear something silly? I made a promise to Sam, I named it Sam by the way and that’s not the silly part, I made a promise that I would save it. But, here I am all battered and bruised from being kicked around by jealous boyfriends, angst-ridden anglers and bloody psycho-woman driver.”
The nurse placed her soft hand on his. “It’s not silly,” she said. “That was chivalrous and you should be proud of yourself. A dolphin, huh? Wow. Well, I imagine most people would have ran off pretending they had never seen it. But this dolphin, you comforted it in its hour of need, heck, you even tried to find it salvation. What more could you have done?”
“Saved Sam. That’s what I could have done. He’s gone by now. Died alone.”
“You must be feeling vulnerable,” replied the nurse, “but don’t beat yourself up about that, you did your best by the sounds of it.”
“Well, nurse. My very best seems to fall well short of everyone else’s idea of mediocre.”
The nurse nodded sympathetically. “I’ll let you get some rest now.”
Jonas waited until the nurses station was vacated before slipping past. Artificial light destroyed the darkness of night in the corridors of the hospital, but outside the overwhelming blackness momentarily stole Jonas’s vision. Standing just outside of the hospital’s main entrance, wearing only his suit jacket over his white gown, Jonas leant against the wall in an attempt to ease some pressure from his cast leg.
The drop in temperature from the day afforded a cooling effect to Jonas, a welcome feeling of liberation from the stuffy interior. Despite the medication, the exertion of his stealthy and slow escape seemed to double the accumulative pain that his body had amassed over the course of the day. Jonas grimaced and watched an ambulance pull away, lights flashing and siren wailing in panicked discourse. One last ditch attempt to save Sam had forced him from his bed, in the face of the wishes of the nurse, regardless of the plague of futility that had affected his inner voice. Stubbornly he had to do what they didn’t want him to. Now if only he could make it down those steps, if only he could make the bus shelter, the car park, the line of trees.
But the pain was now unbearable. How quickly the night had set in, Jonas mused, but then recalled the nurses words of how long he’d been unconscious. But even her mention of how late in the day it was had not really sunk in. A little darkness couldn’t stop Jonas from making one last effort to get back to Sam. But how the blackness of night adds miles to the horizon, bringing unfounded depths and impassable routes.
Jonas stumbled forwards, reaching for the hand rail of the entrance steps. But losing his footing and balance from his weakened legs, Jonas fell, clutching desperately at the railing to prevent himself from hitting the ground yet again. His legs sprawled awkwardly out behind him, Jonas rested his chin on the cold steel and felt a raw twisting sensation in his lower back. Summoning strength in his arms, he heaved himself up, shifting his body to end up sitting on a cold step, legs projecting in front of him. Jonas clutched his head, desperate for the nagging pains in his body and soul to be expelled.
At that moment three young people exited the hospital from behind him and they walked straight down the steps past him. Jonas looked up in disbelief at them as they looked to the sky and each other, anywhere so long as it wasn’t at him. So long as no-one had to go out of their way to help.
“That’s right, just walk on by,” shouted Jonas, watching the threesome fade away into the night. Jonas thought of Sam out there in that sea of blackness. Likewise out there lay Jolene, each as alone as the other. The one thing in common they had was that neither of them Jonas could save.
Jonas felt a new ire borne of frustration boiling inside him, the total despair at having one last kick in the teeth. One last mocking moment of failure. Gritting his teeth, releasing a primal scream, Jonas bent forward and with renewed strength ripped off his leg-cast and bounced sprightly to his feet. He wasted no time and bounded down the steps, running after the ignorant three, brandishing his hardened leg-mould in the air. Across the car park, meandering through a maze of parked vehicles Jonas chased them. But their youth and head-start had the better of Jonas who stopped and bent double, panting hard for air.
“That’s right, run! Run from any responsibility!” Jonas spat into the ground. Hearing a car’s engine fire somewhere in the distance, Jonas stood upright again. “Go on, run! I hope you wrap yourself around a lamp-post and I’ll let all of the air out of every single ambulance tire in this forsaken place and then see how you like being ignored when you’re sat there bleeding to death!”
Jonas swung the cast and it smashed hard into the wing mirror of the nearest car, sending splintered glass to the floor. As the shattered mirror hit the cold ground, Jonas felt the splintering of his own tension. Swinging away merrily, Jonas pounded at the windows of countless vehicles, putting cracks in windows and kicking dents into doors with careless regard. Jonas jumped onto the bonnet of a black BMW and beat hard at the persistently tough windscreen. Driving his foot through the epicentre of the spider-web of cracks in a final act of release, Jonas finally felt all remaining traces of anxiety and conflict drain from him. He slumped down and sat on the bonnet, feet resting on front bumper, head lowered against the carnage that lay around him.
Jonas lifted his head, and from his vantage point on the steps, he watched the three young people walk away towards the car park. His mind was back with him now, back in reality looking at the cast on his leg. Seeing his fragile form, he felt more hopeless than at any point during the day for his body’s lack of strength and ability to serve the thoughts in his mind.
“I thought I’d find you here,” he heard the familiar, comforting voice of the nurse behind him say.
“Jonas? Time for some medication.”
Jonas roused himself from a drowsy slumber, unsure if he wanted to wake up or not, or lose himself entirely again in the blackness. “You’re still on shift?” asked Jonas weakly, surprised to see her.
“Yes, I’ve been here all night. I get off soon. I just wanted to see how you were feeling this morning when you woke up. It sounded like quite a day you had yesterday.”
Jonas closed his eyes. “You must think I’m crazy.”
“No, look,” insisted the nurse. “Here, take these for the pain.”
Jonas opened his eyes properly and slowly took the medication offered to him. He swallowed the contents of the small vial with some water. He waited for them to take away his anguish, or at least his memories of the last 24 hours.
“Look, anyway, there’s someone here to see you,” said the nurse. “You’ve got a visitor waiting outside. Do you want me to send them in?”
“A visitor?” asked Jonas. “Who? No-one knows where I am. All my friends are probably nursing hangovers from the wake and never even realised that I’d even gone astray.”
“Well, someone did. I’ll go get her.”
“Elizabeth?” Jonas looked up surprised to see Elizabeth standing before him. As nice as it was to see the one face that had tried to help him yesterday, Jonas felt uneasy with her presence, remembering how she’d left him.
“Jonas? Oh my God, it’s you. Sorry, I was expecting your friend.”
Jonas looked up at her quizzically. Without invitation Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed and began to exp
lain. “I was just passing by this morning and thought I’d check in to see if anyone had been admitted that had been found injured in the forest. You know, the friend you’d told me about. But, I’m…I’m so sorry it’s you. That bastard, Mark. If I see him again…you want me to call the police on him? I don’t mind, we’re through.”
“I sort of guessed that from yesterday,” Jonas tried to chuckle but broke into a phlegm-ridden cough, finding it hard to raise any real frustration against her.
“There, there big guy. Not many people can take a beating like that and walk away you know,” Elizabeth comforted.
His anger placated, Jonas looked at Elizabeth, detailing the difference in her appearance from the woman whom he’d met yesterday. The track suit had gone, replaced now with a skirt and blouse, and she was furnished with subtle make-up and freshly styled hair.
“Sorry, I know. Hospitals make me edgy,” said Elizabeth. “Well, as you’re here I guess I should apologise for leaving you there like that in the woods yesterday. I should have helped you immediately instead of getting all wrapped up in arguing with him.”
“Don’t worry, Elizabeth” said Jonas meekly.
“But I do” said Elizabeth. “That was wrong of me, and call me Liz.”
Jonas nodded. “A lot of things went wrong yesterday, Liz. At least you tried to help in the first place. That’s something other people didn’t even bother to attempt to do,” said Jonas.
“But, I did come back to look for you, you know.”
Jonas threw her a surprised look.
“Yes,” continued Liz, “after we’d stormed off, I just needed to get away from Mark you understand. I lost him in the woods and I doubled back to the clearing to see if you were ok. But you were gone.”
“I couldn’t wait around,” said Jonas, a little angry that he was hearing this. Maybe his decision to push on had been the wrong one. Maybe if he’d have just stayed put, Elizabeth would have been able to help him.
“I know, your friend right?”