Forever: A Lobster Kind Of Love Read online

  Forever: A Lobster Kind of Love

  Jody Pardo and Jennifer Tocheny

  Warning, this novel is recommended for those who are 18+ as it contains adult content and material, including sex, and issues related to grief.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Jody Pardo & Jennifer Tocheny

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.

  The following works were used with the express written consent of their authors:

  Southern Roots by Julie Morgan

  Tempting His Heart by Dawn Sullivan

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

  The author acknowledges the real people or places and copyrighted or trademarked statuses and trademark owners of the following word marks mentioned in this work of fiction: Eastport, Maine, Perry, Maine. Calais, Maine, Dunkin Donuts, Dastardly Dicks, Rose Garden, Monopoly game, Lubec, Canada, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, Mystic, Connecticut, and New York City.

  ISBN-13: 978-1514186305

  ISBN-10: 1514186305

  Cover design: Justin Temporado

  Edited by Rebecca Cartee

  Formatted by: Ready, Set, Edit

  Photo images taken by Shelton Cole of SC Photo AZ

  Models: Craig Gierish and Jami Watts

  To our kids Logan and Ariel, everything we do is for you. Don’t ever believe you can’t do something. Live your dreams and build a life worth living.

  Ryan

  Thundering noise pierces the pitch-black sea and water swirls around me. The current is too strong and I cannot tread fast enough. The sea is taking me under. My ears begin to ring and I have to wonder, is this the siren’s call that sailors’ lore speaks of? It isn’t beckoning me, but it’s distracting me from the fact that I am sinking. I’ve always been a strong swimmer, but the sea is too strong. Too quickly, the blackness overcomes me.

  “Ryan. Ryan. Wake up. Come on say something.” I heard Dougie’s voice, my first mate, but my brain was cloudy and I had one helluva headache. Had someone spilled bleach on the deck? They better not have gotten any in the tanks or our bounty is ruined.

  “Ryan. Come on, Cap. Snap out of it. I see your eyeballs moving.”

  My throat was all scratchy and new sensations started to awaken me. Each breath burned my throat as I tried to force air out to speak. “Clean up that mess, Dougie.” I almost did not recognize the sound of my own voice.

  “Doc! Doc! He’s awake. He spoke. Doc!”

  Doc who? What is Dougie yelling about? We have been at sea for almost a month. Being so far out for so long gets to some guys, dammit if Dougie has gone mad…

  “Shut up, Dougie,” my throat was still harsh, “I’m trying to sleep.” I wished someone would turn that damn alarm clock off. A beeping sound continued to assault my ears. I pried open my heavy lids and the bright harsh light overhead hurt my eyes. This isn’t my bunk. Where the hell am I? I turned my head and saw machines. Oh fuck, this was a hospital. It wasn’t spicy food before bed and just a bad nightmare. I was really here.

  Dougie, my first mate, appeared at my bedside with an older man, who I assumed was the doctor he was calling. His fingers pulled at my lids and he shined yet another light, in my eyes. The overhead lights were bright enough, isn’t that enough light? “Ouch, Doc.”

  “Welcome back, Mr. Gannon,” the doctor said, still flashing his pen light back and forth in my eyes.

  “I didn’t know you were expecting me, Doc. Did I miss the party? I seem a little underdressed.” I desperately needed water.

  “He’s back!” Dougie yelled and hugged the doctor who looked shocked as Dougie undoubtedly squeezed the life out of him.

  “What happened? Why am I here?” I started to push myself higher on the bed so I could sit up a bit, but my body would not cooperate. I felt so…heavy.

  “Whoa, take it easy there, Mr. Gannon. I want to perform some tests on you now that you are awake.”

  “Okay, I guess. Go for it, Doc. Is someone going to tell me what happened?”

  “The storm from hell happened man. The boom with all the cages broke loose and took you overboard.” Dougie said solemnly. “We thought you were a goner.”

  “Well, apparently I have some fishing left to do. Hey Doc, when can I get out of here?”

  “Mr. Gannon, let’s do some tests first and we will go from there.” The doctor pulled out the little red hammer and this long handle with a wheel of little spikes on the end of it. He pulled back the covers from my legs and hit just under my knees one at a time. No response.

  “Ryan, I want you to close your eyes,” the doctor instructed. “Now I want you to tell me when you feel me touching you and follow my directions, okay?”

  “You got it, Doc.”

  “Can you feel this, Ryan?”

  I closed my eyes tight trying to focus on where he was touching me. Is he messing with me? Is that why my eyes are closed? “Not sure if it’s you or the AC draft tickling my right foot.”

  “Okay, what about now?” I focused again. I felt the lightest touch on my left calf, moving up to my knee, and drifting up my inner thigh, up…

  My eyes flew open as I grabbed the arm holding that spiky wheel; he was getting too close to the family jewels. “Whoa, Doc! Watch where you are going with those spikes.”

  The doctor had a surprised look on his face. “You can feel that, Ryan?”

  “Yeah, of course, I can feel that. I don’t want you pricking me in the nuts with that thing.”

  “What did you feel?” He asked with a furrowed brow.

  “You were tickling me, I guess, with that thing from mid-calf up until I stopped you.”

  “That’s great, Ryan. Okay, close your eyes again for me and tell me what you feel and when you start feeling it.”

  I closed my eyes once more and waited to feel the sensations. I focused intently until I felt him tickling me again, this time on my right leg just below my knee. “I feel that, Doc.” He continued his prickly ascent and this time he stopped mid-thigh. “I still feel all that.”

  “Well, that’s good news. Keep your eyes closed and wiggle your toes for me.” I wiggled and asked. “What is this all about Doc?”

  “Just keep wiggling, Ryan.” I kept wiggling, and I felt the tickling sensations again below my knee.

  “How long you want me to keep wiggling my toes, Doc?”

  “Keep wiggling and open your eyes, Ryan.” I opened my eyes and looked at the doctor standing at the end of the bed looking down at my…not wiggling toes. I don’t understand. I’m wiggling them. Why aren’t they moving?

  “Hey what’s going on? You guys do some Vulcan mind meld on me or something?”

  “Ryan, I think we need to talk a bit and fill you in on what you have missed in the last three weeks.”

  “Three weeks?” I felt confused. I’ve been here for three weeks?

  The next thirty minutes were spent listening to the doctor explaining all the tests they had run while I was apparently in a medically induced coma. All these technical medical terms sounded like the mumblings of Charlie Brown’s teacher and basically equated to one fact: I couldn’t walk.

  The doctor had high hopes for me
since I had a lot of feeling in my legs to about mid-calf and faint sensations in my feet. I could feel him tickling me, but my legs were not getting the message to move. They’d kept me asleep after the surgery performed on my spine, to fuse some vertebrae, so that the fusing could begin healing and prevent further nerve damage. Now what? What do I do now?

  “We want to run some more tests and do another CT scan now that you are awake. Are you in any pain, Ryan?”

  I thought about his question and moved what I could around and stretched. My body was sore as I moved, stiff from non-use. “Ouch, that hurt.”

  “Tell me what hurt,” the doctor said as he grabbed a fresh pair of gloves and got ready to examine me further.

  “On the left side of my back; it feels like something is pulling.”

  “That area might be a little sore. The skin is a little taut around the stitching site. The stitches are just about healed, and once you start moving around that should pass. I’m going to go order your tests and hopefully, if everything looks positive, we can discuss options.”

  Options. Like I’m picking out curtains or something.

  “Options, Doc? Are we having a baby?”

  “No, Ryan, you are not having a baby, but you will feel like one for a while. It is a whole new ball game, son, and time to start over like a baby. First baby step, we will try some soft food.”

  “Can you just puree a cheeseburger for me?”

  “Let’s start with some Jell-O and mashed potatoes and see how you handle that,” the doctor said, shaking his head.

  What can I say? I like cheeseburgers.

  As the doctor went back to work and the nurse left my dismal tray of hospital food by my bedside, the enormity of my condition hit me as I continued to will my legs to move. I couldn’t fish anymore. I couldn’t walk anymore. I had nothing left. The sirens of the sea should have taken me.

  Lydia

  I couldn’t believe I was going to do this, but the past six months had been total hell. I continued to think it was all a bad dream, wishing I would wake up and everything would go back to the way my life was before the accident. Six months had passed since it happened, yet, I still felt trapped in a dream-like state. I was tired of everyone looking at me and whispering, “Poor Lydia, so sad, I don’t know how she goes on.”

  The ironic thing? I wasn’t; I was just a shell of myself. I was thirty-one years old and a widow. I’d lost my husband, Mason, and my 2-year-old son, Braxton, two days after Christmas to a drunken truck driver. He ran a red light and killed both of them instantly. I still had nightmares of identifying them at the morgue. I popped Xanax like Tic-Tacs, and I only slept if I took an Ambien. I barely ate food and that’s only for survival. Everything had lost its taste.

  Why did I even keep going? Many times, I’d thought of just ending it all to be with my boys. Time after time, I’d held a handful of pills in my hand, and then I didn’t do it. What had stopped me? I clenched the necklace around my neck. It held the ashes of my Mason and Braxton, and I knew there was a reason I hadn’t gone through with it.

  Mason and Braxton continued to watch over me every minute of every day. I knew this because I felt them, heard them, and saw them in my dreams. I knew they wanted me to heal, but how? Give me a sign, guys.

  How would I heal when my heart and soul had turned black? How would I heal when I doped myself on anti-anxiety meds? How could I heal and smile, and laugh again when my love, my soulmate, and my baby were gone? Taken from me in an instant, in the mere blink of an eye?

  They were gone.

  Why did I struggle on a daily basis? I felt like I’d been left behind.

  I knew the day of the funeral that I couldn’t stay in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. In this town, everyone knew everyone’s business. There were literally over 300 people at the service. Where the hell had all these people come from? A line formed outside of the funeral home just to get in.

  Mason and Braxton were cremated. I couldn’t go through with seeing my husband and son lying in a casket and watch people look at them as they cried. Personally, I wondered why they hadn’t come to see us when my family was alive. Who were they anyway?

  Now my boys were ashes in a box. Everyone who came to give their condolences looked at me with those eyes.

  I felt like a sideshow freak. If I heard one more person say, “I am so sorry, if you need anything let us know,” I might just scream and yell, “Fuck you all. I need my boys! Can you give me that?!”

  I wondered why I’d even had the service. They were not buried. I don’t even recall planning it. I think Mason’s aunts arranged everything. As I sat there, everything was a blur. All I knew was that one day soon I would be leaving this town and everyone in it. I needed to get away, the sooner the better.

  Ryan

  They were transferring me today to some rehab center in New York City. There just weren’t places around here in Maine to handle these types of injuries. The doctors told me how I lucky I was, but what did that even mean?

  Fishing was my life. Always has been. I don’t know how to do anything else. If I can’t fish, the sea might as well have taken me.

  I kept trying to will my legs to move, but they just lay there. My head hurt as I concentrated and tried to make them move, or do anything at all. My thighs clenched with every attempt, but it wasn’t enough to make my legs move. A muscle twitch was all I received.

  It’s been a week since I “woke up” and when they were not pumping me full of fluids or medicines, I just lay there and tried to get my body to move.

  I felt so tired; everything wore me out. Even when I attempted to sit up in bed, pushing my body up tired me out. I might as well have died at sea. I would have sunk since I can’t even sit up in bed. I am one fucking defective buoy.

  This was a long-ass boring ride to New York City. I felt bad for my escorts. These poor ambulance guys, one had to drive, and the other had to sit here and stare at me the whole way. I didn’t know these guys from Adam, and I knew they were trying to be nice and all, but there was only so much that could be said about the weather.

  David, the paramedic, drove, obviously ecstatic that he had a day free of paperwork because this was a Basic Life Support transport, since I didn’t have any IV lines or airway issues to maintain. He kept going on and on about the best lobster roll he’d ever eaten. Apparently, they had stopped off at the Rose Garden for lunch. I wondered how Al was doing. I always stopped off at the Rose Garden and took Al, the owner, my first catch, docks be damned. I set aside two nice big ones and my crew and I drank for free all night. I hoped Dougie, my first mate, was taking care of him since I was lying around unable to do anything productive.

  Winston, my babysitter EMT in the back, had some reading material to keep him busy. I hoped my medical records entertained him. He’d been filling out some triplicate forms and reading my medical file since we’d left the hospital. That thing was about three inches thick. Good luck with that, buddy.

  “Anything interesting in there, man?” Winston looked up from the file and shrugged.

  “Nothing you don’t know. It’s all about you.”

  “What are you looking for? I see you flipping around in there.”

  “The hospital just gives me your file and your basic information. But we are not taking you home, so most of that information is pretty useless to us but needs to go with you to rehab.” He said as he chuckled. “So I am just digging out what I need to complete my report, your meds, previous medical history, and current condition…stuff like that. I guess they figure we got a nice long drive; I’ll have something to keep me busy.”

  “Seriously, dude? So they just gave me to you and didn’t say anything else?”

  “Well, they just said you were stable, conscious, and non-ambulatory and it’s a long ride. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to do it sitting in your wheelchair in one of those ambulettes. That would suck, especially if we hit traffic!”

  I figured he had a point. I get to lie down and I could sleep if I
wanted to. I didn’t want to sleep though, I wanted to fish. It’s almost July and all the clambakes and Independence Day cookouts meant big money. We made a killing on Memorial Day and the July 4th holiday was even bigger.

  “So what happened to you anyway?” Winston asked.

  I would tell him… “What does that novel say happened?”

  “Uh, let’s see…” he flipped through a couple sections, tabs, and stopped. I didn’t know there were pictures in there.

  “It says here you were in a boating accident. You got hit hard in a storm and were knocked overboard by a mast.”

  “That sounds about right. What else?” He flipped a few more pages and read aloud a bit.

  “You were unconscious when they fished you out the water. You had cracked vertebrae in your spine and they fused a couple together to stabilize you, but your mobility hasn’t returned. You were in a medically induced coma for three weeks. Wow, three weeks? That’s a long time.” He looked up and realized he’d said that aloud. “I’m sorry man. No filter.” He bowed his head and went back to reading.

  “Naw, it’s all right. What else does it say?”

  He looked unsure, glanced at me from under his glasses, and continued. “We are transferring you to Woodhaven Rehab in New York City for physical and occupational therapy.” My laughter must have startled him because he stopped reading.

  “Are you okay?” he asked with concern in his voice.

  “It’s just funny, occupational therapy. What are they going to do? Find me a secretary job in New York City?”

  Winston smiled, and I saw the thoughts cross his mind. “I guess that is a silly term. No, what it means is they will help you learn to do everyday things in a new way, given your um, new situation,” Winston added.