Why you shouldn’t drive out into the wilderness right before your wedding. By Hank Roberts.
Hank knows the dangers of the roads outside Uranium. He especially knows how dangerous they’re in winter, when every inch freezes and it’s even easier to lose control of the car – he witnessed it first hand, in eighth grade, when a car overtaking his school bus slipped and slammed into a crash barrier, effectively. His entire bus swerved rapidly to the right, nearly avoiding another crash with the wreck.
At school, all of them had to be checked out by one singular ambulance crew, and then the principal asked them to call their parents from the payphones outside. He called his house phone, but nobody picked up. He tried to call the car shop too, but the line was dead, only a faint buzzing. In the end, Corey’s mom, Bonnie, drove him home, and only when Hank told him, his dad learned about what happened.
So, Hank always takes extra care of his safety. And doesn’t like to drive when it’s cold and snowy, not at all. It’s dangerous, and his dad was always meticulous about changing tires, and Hank will absolutely refuse to drive until they are changed.
But Trishna asked so nicely. And she’s already stressed out enough about her college classes, and the wedding planning, and keeping the balance between what she wanted at her wedding, what Hank wanted and what her parents wanted, making sure her internship at the company in Calgary goes through, and her anxiety medication restock was late this month, that when she asks him to pick up firewood from her dad’s friend – “just south of Uranium,” she says, and shows him a very general area on an atlas of Canada – while she takes a nap, Hank just can’t say no.
And now, he wishes he said no.
Because his car is slammed on the side, surrounded by mounds and mounds of snow from every side, and his head is spinning violently, urging him to expel the contents of his stomach. His leg is forced into a horribly painful position, crooked and mangled like a bloody mess. He can feel something digging out of the fabric of his jeans, fuck, fuck, this is not good. The childishness of that thought makes him laugh, maybe in shock, maybe in pure denial, because there might be a bone sticking out somewhere out of his body, and his reaction is this is not good.
He desperately searches for his phone in his pockets, but it’s not there, obviously, it lays on the floor next to the passenger's seat, and he can only see it when he cranes his body to the right, which sends another wave of pure pain through his veins.
Fuck. Fuck. His phone is broken. Snapped in half, the screen weakly blinking at him with all the colors of the rainbow. Mocking him. What are you going to do now, Roberts? You’re helpless. More helpless than a newborn baby. He’s seen newborn calves get to their feet immediately, and he feels like a premature baby, not even being able to breath
He tries to open the door. It won't budge. Only makes a small, pitiful noise of air being released before completely bucking against his grip on the handle. He even pushes against it with his arm – it hurts like a bitch, like a twisted elbow or a particularly bad bruise – but the snow outside successfully blocks his struggles,
Hank might even have started crying at that moment. Because it’s all so fucked up, and he didn’t deserve it, and if he did, Trishna didn’t deserve for her so soon–to–be husband to die in such a way. He can’t even call her, tell her that he loves her and hopes she will find someone new to be happy with. That she will finish college, and she’ll go to Calgary, or even Vancouver, and be so fucking happy and successful, and have the best wedding without tiptoeing the budget line constantly.
He takes off his scarf – a dark red, thick and warm thing, given to him by his grandma from mom’s side – and ties it around the part in his pants with the bone sticking out. When someone finds him, in a week or so, they deserve to be spared the gnarly sight. He tries to not look at it too much, because he knows he will faint once he sees the actual extent of the injury.
His hand touches his bone on accident, and he throws up on the steering wheel violently before blacking out. Just for a moment, and then he can’t pick his head up from where it’s hanging limply, against his chest.
Hank remembers his mom. She had blonde, big hair that bounced when she walked, and she wore big hoop earrings. Her voice started blurring in his memories when she was four or so, and couldn’t imagine her face by the time he hit middle school. But now, it feels like she’s sitting right next to him, still as young as she was when the aneurysm in her brain ruptured. She’s helping him and Trishna plan their wedding, helping them choose the decorations and teasing him lightly about. Crying as she fixes his tie one last time, as he walks down the aisle, as Trishna walks down the aisle.
She’d look beautiful. In a white ballgown – Tammy had told him that she’s already chosen the one she wants, but didn’t tell him anything more and pretended to lock Hank’s mouth with a key and throwing it away – floating on the red church carpet, a veil over her face and henna tattoos over her hands and arms.
He can’t hear anything.
Slowly, Hank accepts his death. He lets himself go, gives himself the last absolution as he takes Trishna’s veil off her face, eyes sparkling as ever, dark–framed and behind thick glasses, smiling brightly. She’s beautiful, and he leans down with a big smile, lips pressing to each other.
Kiss feels like falling into nothingness.
Strange pulsing sensation wakes Hank up, and for a good moment, he thinks that it’s Heaven.
“Hank?”
Saint Peter? Whatever his name was? His head hurts, pounding in the back of it, like he slipped and fell on ice. His muscles feel frozen, and he even has stopped shivering by that point.
“Hank!” The sound is coming from somewhere, maybe above, side, down, is this even possible? “Jesus Christ, Hank, are you alive?”
He tries his very best to muster up any energy to move, but all of his muscles, including his fucking eyelashes refuse to do anything. There’s smashing of glass and shards fall against his side, punctuating against his jacket like markings of a god.
“Jesus fuck, Hank!” He manages to expel a low, mumbling noise, and the person exhales soundly. “Thank God. I thought you were dead. I did not want to find you dead. Praise Jesus, amen." There's no noise for a moment, and then again, “It’s me, Tammy. Can you talk?”
Hank makes a clicking sounds with his tongue, trying to move himself, or even mumble, but he can't. Desperately, he moves his eyes under his eyelids, hoping Tammy will get the memo.
“Okay, okay– I have a chocolate bar, do you think you can eat it? It’s a little frozen, but I can break it into smaller parts. I have warm tea too. You can just tap, or– I don’t know, hold up fingers, if you can’t talk.” Tammy is rambling, but the constant background noise of her voice is actually good. Something to focus on instead of his overarching misery and upcoming death.
“Tea.” He garbles out, like an experienced 50–year smoker, throat hurting from disuse, dehydration and coldness. His vocal chords feel like they’re stabbing him in the throat as he talks. Tammy goes silent for a moment, but then speaks up again.
“Alright, alright. One tea coming up.” He hears her shuffle around in her backpack, and suddenly there’s something warm stuffed into his hand. A click and his hand, the one holding the warm bottle is guided to his mouth. The warmth is like a long–lost friend, and he welcomes it with gratitude, chugging until Tammy leads it away.
He can finally open his eyes. His eyelids have seemingly frozen together, but hot air from the bottle unglued them. Tammy’s face in his car window – which is busted open – is almost entirely covered up with a thick, red hat pulled all the way until her eyes and a scarf propped up like a balaclava, but between them she’s staring at him with shiny blue eyes and a red splotchy blush all over her skin.
“'ime?”
Tammy looks down at something, and then back at him. “Eight in the afternoon. Dark out. I’ve already paged the main team, so they should be getting you out of there very soon.” Her eyes crinkle, and Hank presumes she’s smiling.
“Paged?”
“Yeah. There’s no reception here, so we all got pagers.”
Hank blinks a few times, both from confusion and trying to water his eyes. They feel like an ice desert. “All?”
“All. Yeah.” She looks at him with a perplexed expression for a moment before suddenly exploding in nervous rambling. “Oh, you don’t know! There’s a whole search party looking for you. Almost all of Uranium, if I were to say. After you kinda didn’t turn up for your wedding preparations, everyone took it seriously. Like, very seriously. News of the week. Like that time when cattle escaped from Mr. Boyer’s farm.”
That’s probably an understatement of the century, because the chance of someone going missing in Uranium is smaller than aliens actually landing on Earth, but Hank doesn’t have the energy for anything more than a word–long responses, much less full arguing.
“Trishna told me to not tell you anything more, to no overwhelm you–”
“Trishna’s–” He coughs up thick, dark green mucus from deep in his throat, sticking to the inside of his mouth. He tries to spit it onto his jacket, but it gets stuck before he can expel it. “here?”
Tammy nods vigorously. “Yup! She was actually the first one to look for you. She’s really worried, you know. You played a number on all of us.”
He nods, as best as he can, with the numbness of his neck and upper back. It sort of feels like he sat too long and now is feeling the consequences, even if he doesn’t know how many hours – days? – he's been gone for. Maybe it’s been just a few hours? Maybe a few days? God, he hopes it’s the first one, because that way, he still might have a chance of making it to his wedding. Or at least moving it to the next day, so the food doesn’t go to waste and the guests won’t leave.
“Try not to fall asleep on me here, alright? They’re pretty close.” Tammy’s voice is soothing, whistling right into his ear. And Hank tries, really tries to stay upright, stay awake, but his eyelids feel like lead, and the tea is settling in his stomach like a hot water bottle.
Hank wakes up, and there’s an uncomfortable pricking under his skin. Not enough to hurt, but enough for him to feel it, like very small needles are poking his entire body, both externally and internally.
The next thing he notices is that he’s finally warm. Almost entirely, wrapped up in something warm, the air is warm too, and there’s a hot water bottle laying on his chest, and a blanket is tugged up almost to his ears. He’s not wet anymore either, gloves and shoes goes.
And there’s Trishna against him.
Oh.
Trishna’s warm hand is wrapped around his - his hand is almost entirely consumed by a white bandage, only the bright red tips of his fingers peeking out, but oh, how he missed it. The steady weight of her against him, that little habit of hers. Her metaphorically holding them up, him physically holding them up. She’s leaning against him in that dingy plastic hospital chair, head on his stomach, rising up and down methodically as he’s breathing.
He has an oxygen mask on, pressing on his nose and jaw. Some device is beeping right next to him, multiple of them, actually. The IV in his arm doesn’t feel cold, so it must’ve been there for quite some time. He still can’t feel the tips of his fingers or toes, but he has control over his body, and even though it aches everywhere, he’s strangely happy about it.
And then, Trishna looks horrible. Even with how she’s curled up against his stomach, Hank can see it. Arguably even worse than Hank imagines he looks himself. She has naturally dark circles under her eyes, always had, but now they seem to be bloated and darkened to an astronomical extent. Like when you get out of a bath, and your fingers are puckered. Her hair is in a ponytail that’s falling apart, more strands sticking out than not, and Hank gets hit with the sudden urge to fix it. He’s used to helping her do it, because her fingers are more than a little uncoordinated when she can't see them, and he doesn’t mind.
So his hands, as stiff and weird–feeling they are, like he's threading them through water, automatically float towards the mess of a ponytail. He should’ve never left. She would have to wear bad ponytails until the end of time.
He pulls the band off gently, and it slides off easily. It’s one of the beige ones he got her when the last black one snapped and Trishna cried so hard he thought he might have to bring out her inhaler. The band stretches between his spread fingers – it feels so good and strange at the same time, to be able to do stuff with his fingers and not see them as a frozen, wet mass – even with how little he can move them. Hank gathers Trishna’s hair delicately and brings it into one strand.
And then, Trishna stirs. Right when Hank secures the ponytail.
She raises her head, blinking, and then freezes mid-yawn.
“Hank,” she says. Softly, as if she can’t believe it. Can’t believe he’s there, alive, breathing and looking at her, sitting in the dingy hospital bed in a paper–thin blue gown.
And then her resolve breaks. Sobs escape from between chapped lips. Even her cries sound weak, like they’re tired from being expelled all the time. Like her throat is torn up from crying – screaming, possibly? His name, searching for him, like Tammy said? – and he feels that she is more in need of reassurance now than him.
“I thought– I thought you were–” She doesn’t finish her sentence before another sob shakes her up. Hank moves wordlessly closer to her, as much as all the machinery around him allows him to do. His arms feel like they’re dunked in boiling hot water as he does.
He doesn't say anything. Just caresses the back of Trishna’s head, breathing in deep. Her head is resting on his stomach, and it raises each time he takes a breath. He can feel his heart thumping, the noise of blood flowing like drumming in his ears. When he swallows, the spit sliding down sounds like a gunshot.
“You said you’d never leave.” She sobs out between heaves, shaking her head where it lays. The shitty hospital gown makes a weird, sand–like sound.
Hank swallows again. “And I didn’t.” He lets his head float backwards. The ceiling is too crackless and clean, lights bright in his eyes, so he presumes he’s been flown out of Uranium. He’s not too surprised – the small hospital they have just outside the town, next to the highway, isn't equipped enough to treat stupid almost–grooms with deep hypothermia. Sudden pang of guilt flashes through his stomach, like an icepick. “I’m sorry I missed our wedding.”
Trishna’s head snaps towards him. “You could die.” The words sound weird in Trishna’s mouth. Almost as if she’s blaming herself for this, and Hank wants to yank the feeling out of her.
“It was stupid.” He says, and Trishna looks like she’s about to bash him on the head for being so stupidly considerate again.
“Almost dying?”
“Yeah.” Suddenly, tears spring to his eyes. And he tries to fight them, really, he does, but he’s too weak and too hooked up on electrolytes to actually keep them in. He wipes them with the top of his gown, and next to him, Trishna moves.
“Aw, you big baby.” Her warm hands land on his face – gently, because that’s what Trishna is, always so gentle – and her thumbs wipe the tears off. It only makes more of them flow, bigger and closer to each other.“We’ll talk when you’re not high on pain meds, okay?”
Hank nods. At least he thinks he nods.
“Good. Now sleep.” For a split second, he thinks of staying awake for the sake of it. For the sake of coming back alive from something like that, confirming that he’s still here, it’s not a delirious dream and he won’t wake up in unprecedented darkness. But then one of Trishna’s hands moves to his hair, and fuck, he really was going to marry the right woman. Who knows all of his weaknesses. Strength too, but weaknesses mostly.
Before he can curl up on his left, as he always does, something touches him. Like a brief touch of a feather, but it still is.
“I’ll be here. Always.” He says.
Trishna’s eyes glimmer with tears when she smiles.
“Thanks.”