“Grace told me about that.” She quivered in his embrace.
“I thought I’d lost my one chance at a happy life. Being back in a hospital setting brought back painful memories and I felt like I was reliving them all over again as an adult.”
“Something like this happened to you before?” Rachel asked softly, her voice full of sympathy.
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“I told you my mom died. But I never told you how. I also never told you about my own experience in the hospital as a four-year-old not understanding what had happened. My family was involved in a very serious car accident right before Thanksgiving. My mom was holding a cookie sheet with my toy magnets on it in her lap. I’d just made a picture with them for her, and she was going to make one for me, but I fell asleep.
She was holding it on her lap when the accident happened.”
“I never knew you were in a car accident. Is that how your mom died, internal injuries?”
Eli nodded. “The official term is ‘unsecured objects within vehicle,’ but the collision forced the cookie sheet into her abdomen, doing catastrophic internal damage.”
Rachel looked straight into his eyes. “Eli, you know what happened wasn’t your fault?”
In theory, yes, he knew that, but it hadn’t eased him at all the day he found out years later when he finally had gotten the nerve to ask his father about it. His memories were sketchy of the time after the accident, but he remembered clearly the time leading up to it.
“Yes, I do. But it didn’t make it any easier to bear. Ace told us about the lamp and the picture frames. It was like reliving that nightmare all over again.”
Eli told her his story as he was transported back in time to those painful memories. He took long pauses here and there, and she rubbed his back comfortingly with her good arm. Her warmth seeped into him and eased the telling, buffering the pain of the memories as he shared them with her.
Her Gentle Giant, Part 1: No Regrets
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Chapter Twenty-six
Eli wanted to go see his grandma and grandpa. His grandpa said they were going to eat turkey and jellied cranberry sauce until they both popped then they would take a nap. He wanted to see Aunt Becky and tell her about his Legos and give her the picture of the helicopter with the monkey piloting it that he’d drawn especially for her. He wanted to play with her long, long blonde hair and coil it until it looked like a long snake and loop it around his arm.
He wanted to climb Grandma’s tree in the backyard with his other boy cousins and hang upside down from his favorite branch. He hated sitting in his car seat for hours, but it was totally worth it when his grandpa would grab him from the car and hoist him up over his shoulder and give him a piggyback ride.
His grandpa was big and strong like his daddy and super tall like a big mountain, and when he laughed, it made Eli feel like the air shook around him. His grandmother would take him from Grandpa, and he’d loop his arms around her neck and wrap his legs around her waist as she held him and hugged him hard, and then she would say what a big boy he was getting to be and how he’d be tall someday like his daddy and his grandpa. She always made him feel special and important, and he hoped she was right about getting tall because right now he just felt short.
Mom had buckled him in his car seat after he’d gone to the potty and gave him his favorite big animal picture book and a cookie sheet with bunches of magnetic figures stuck all over it. That was his special toy she saved for long car trips. His daddy loaded the luggage in the car while she buckled his baby sister into the car seat next to him and tucked a fuzzy blanket around her and adjusted the neck on her fuzzy sleeper.
He looked over at his baby sister, and she grinned sleepily at him and blew a bubble with her spit. He loved when she did that because it was so
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gross and awesome. He loved gross stuff. His mother playfully called him the King of Gross and said she always wondered what she’d find in his pockets on laundry day. She’d gotten on him the day before about the earthworms, but he thought it had been totally cool when she showed him the bits and pieces they’d become in the load of laundry she’d just done. She didn’t think it was so funny, but he thought she hid a smile behind her hand when he told her he loved gross stuff. She’d shaken her head and sent him outside.
After sis was loaded and he had all the magnets off and piled in his lap, his dad started the car and they were on their way to Grandma and Grandpa’s. He made a picture with the magnets and handed it to his mom so she could look at it. He settled down to look at his big animal book, and she said she would make a picture for him with the magnets.