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Maddie’s had a lot of nightmares in her life.
When she was little, she'd dream about spiders crawling into her bed, and she'd run screaming to her parents who would turn all of the lights on and shake out her bedsheets and tuck her back in with a kiss. Then it was the hospital. Daniel standing in the corner of her bedroom, staring at her silently. The sound of baby Evan crying. Herself in the hospital, bald and frail, and Evan getting stuck with an endless parade of giant needles on her behalf. A tiny casket lying next to Daniel’s. Waking up one day to find that Evan never even existed, that she imagined him and Mom and Dad thought she was crazy and she knew that he was real but everyone around her insisted she was making him up like an imaginary friend.
Over time, they went back to silly things like showing up to school in her Halloween costume on a normal day, or accidentally turning in her diary instead of her math homework. Not spiders anymore. Evan loved bugs and he would run around outside until he found something with spindly legs to cup gently in his little hands like one might carry a kitten, and he’d always show them off to Maddie with a big grin, and he would giggle when their little legs wiggled because it tickled, and he would borrow books from the library that proved the ones he picked up were perfectly safe, so Maddie couldn’t be too afraid of spiders anymore. She still had nightmares about getting sick, but she also had nightmares about embarrassing herself, or falling from something really high, or her teeth falling out.
For the past few years, her most frequent nightmare has gone something like this:
Evan sends her a postcard. She sends one back, or she calls him, and they talk, and her heart is almost whole again. She tells him that she loves him. She tells him that she misses him. She blinks, and the doorbell is ringing, and Doug opens it before she can. Evan knows, because he loves her so much, too much, and he has those sweet little curls in his hair, and he begs her to leave, and Doug. Doug. Doug would never let her leave. And he hates Evan for suggesting it, for trying to take her away from him, and his hands wrap around Evan’s throat, and Evan is little again, with scrapes on his knees and tears in his eyes, short enough to tuck his head under Maddie’s chin when they hug, and Doug squeezes until the light leaves those big blue eyes and Maddie’s soul is dead, and Maddie stands there and does nothing. She watches. She just stands there and doesn’t do a goddamn thing while Doug kills her completely.
But that still isn’t the one she fears the most. In her worst nightmares, she’s ready to leave. She has a stash of money, she knows where she’s going, and she knows that she can make it. And then Doug flips the switch in his heart that turns him into the man she fell in love with. He treats her like he loves her, and they have fun together again, and he just keeps treating her like he loves her for the rest of their lives, and she stays, and she’s loved, and she spends every single second of it waiting for that goddamned switch to flip again.
So Maddie doesn’t want to fall asleep.
Evan—Buck, because he grew up while she was stuck in place—is holding her hand. He hasn't let go in… Maddie isn't sure how long. She is sure that she survived. She is sure that Chimney’s alive. She is sure that Doug isn’t. Beyond that, she isn’t sure of much.
Buck’s leg is bouncing.
“You can get up if you need to,” Maddie says. Speaking makes her throat sore, but the silence is worse.
He’s shaking his head before she even finishes. “No, I’m, uh… No, I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you’ve sat in one place for this long in your entire life.”
“...I do kinda have to go to the bathroom.”
Maddie could make fun of him. Tell him you don’t need to raise your hand and ask, or something like that, but she knows why he won’t just get up and leave the room. He’d have to put a wall between them. He’d have to let go of her hand.
“Hey.” Maddie squeezes his hand. Her own hands are still dry from the cold—her knuckles feel like they might split. “I’m okay. I won’t disappear while you’re peeing, I promise.”
“Mads…”
“Maybe while you’re up you could run to the gift shop and get me some candy?”
Buck definitely sees right through her, but she has him anyway. “...Chocolate, or something fruity?”
“Not chocolate,” she answers immediately. “Gummy bears, maybe? Or sour straws. Whatever they’ve got.”
He frowns. Sits there for a little longer, before he sighs and finally stands, hugging her hand to his chest for a few seconds before letting her go.
“Anything else?”
“Maybe a drink?”
“Alright.” He leans down and presses a kiss to the top of her head. He strokes her hair. Maddie waves him off, and he rolls his eyes, and things almost feel normal as he walks out the door.
Buck always did thrive when he had a job to do.
Sometimes Maddie would have to make up little jobs for him to keep him occupied while she worked on her homework back in school. He would be in charge of sorting all of her books alphabetically, or handing her Post-Its when she needed them, and he always treated his silly little jobs so seriously. She remembers, when he handed her the Post-Its, how her hands were so much bigger than his.
Maddie examines her hands, now that they’re both free. They’re dry, the skin pale in some spots and red in others, but they aren't shaking like she feared they might. She’s doing better than she thought she might. She’s alive, and Buck found Chimney, and he kept him alive long enough for help to arrive.
Every so often, when she’s feeling sentimental, Maddie wishes that she had people to brag to about her brother. Most of her friends now are first responders, too, people who know a dozen other firefighters and aren’t impressed to hear how her little brother saves lives every day. Most of her friends now are also people who know Buck, which means they might tell him if she gets mushy, and she can't have that. Still, she itches with the need to tell someone, my baby brother is a firefighter, and he helps people every day, and he’s so much stronger than he ever thought he’d be. Maybe the urge just comes from the fact that she spent so long thinking that he was gonna be the only thing she left behind in this world, that he would be the one good thing she accomplished before Doug took her life.
But Doug didn’t take her life. She took his.
Of course she used to think about Doug dying. A car accident, maybe, or a sudden aneurysm, something quick and relatively painless that could set her free without any guilt, though of course once the thought had passed she’d feel guilty anyway. She had wanted him dead, a little bit, but not… Not like this. She had mostly just wanted him out of her life, gone like a childhood pet to a big farm. She didn’t want to have to live with him or think about him anymore. She had never wanted to feel his blood on her hands, because she had never wanted to feel anyone’s blood on her hands. And Maddie is proud of herself, proud that she fought and that she did what she had to to survive, and she doesn’t regret a thing. But now she has this weight where there shouldn’t be anything at all.
Doug had been acting more erratically than she’d ever seen. He was always organized, disciplined, he had to be to get through med school and make it as a surgeon, but he clearly hadn’t planned for her abduction at all. Did he have some kind of mental break? Was he fully aware of what he was doing? Was he cognizant of the consequences of his actions? Part of her knows that he was. Another part of her knows that it doesn’t even really matter. But there’s a man who was murdered behind a gas station for the crime of trying to save her life, and Maddie doesn’t even know his name, so she can’t help but wonder, could I have done things differently?
Of course she could have. She could have done so many things differently. She could have broken up with Doug before things got serious. She could have had cold feet and run back home before the wedding. She could have gotten herself a passport and fled the country. She could have seen Evan, visited for a couple of days, and kept on moving. She could have never let Howie get so close. She could have been opening a package when Doug stormed into the apartment, she could have jabbed him in the throat with a letter opener, she could have yanked the steering wheel from him and crashed the car, she could have, she could have, she could have been better and none of this would have happened.
“Your PostMates is here,” Buck announces, carrying a plastic bag clearly on the verge of breaking in each hand.
Maddie blinks hard. She doesn’t think that she was tearing up. She probably doesn’t look like she’s been… thinking things.
Buck sets one bag on the tray table and begins unloading various cans and bottles. “So, we got the classic Arizona Iced Tea, uh, this Vitamin Water, if you feel like being healthy, and a cherry Coke for if you’re feeling frisky, and… I also grabbed you a ginger ale in case you were feeling sick.”
He’s still holding a bag that’s nearly full to bursting. Maddie can see a mess of colorful packaging through the thin white plastic.
“...They had a lot of candy.”
Maddie quirks an eyebrow at him. Buck grins back and upends the whole bag in her lap.
He got her Skittles, both the regular and Tropical varieties. A hefty bag of gummy bears and a pack of rainbow sour belts. Twizzlers, Jolly Ranchers, Sour Patch Kids, some local brand of taffy, and…
“Oh, yeah. I saw that near the checkout and I just thought, you know.” Buck shrugs.
Maddie picks up a small red tube. Goat Milk Hand Cream. The scent is called Sugarberry.
…It never even occurred to her in all of those nightmares, Maddie realizes, to be afraid that maybe Evan wouldn’t try to help her. Or that he wouldn’t believe her. Even in her most far-fetched dreams, the ones where she wound up in inpatient psychiatric care because she’d actually just hallucinated it all, or the ones where she had actually somehow been abusing Doug the whole time, no matter how much she hated herself, no matter how low Doug had brought her, her mind never could concoct a version of her baby brother who wasn’t completely in her corner.
Maddie is suddenly deeply, fiercely glad that it’s only him here. It would be nice if she could see that Chimney is okay for herself, and maybe the next time she sees a nurse she’ll ask if they can transfer her home to Los Angeles, but this is how it needs to be, right now. Just her and Evan.
She wishes that he were still small enough to climb into bed with her to hide from the monsters. She’s thankful that they’re both big enough to fight them off instead.
“I think I’m gonna take a nap,” she says, “Don’t eat my gummy bears.”
“But I can have the rest?”
“You can have the Twizzlers,” she concedes. “Or some of the Jolly Ranchers. But the rest is all mine.”
Buck smiles as he gathers their bounty of sugar and loads it back up into the plastic bag. She hadn’t actually meant that she would go to sleep right away, had been planning on sipping at the Arizona Iced Tea before knocking out, but the sight of his smile is so comforting that she closes her eyes and wills it to stay with her, stuck behind her eyelids forever to keep her company in the dark.
“I’ve got you,” Buck says, and she feels a kiss on her forehead. He takes the tube of lotion from her hands, and Maddie figures that he’ll go back to holding her hand, now, just like he had before.
Then there are two big, warm hands rubbing lotion into her own, and a sweet, gentle fragrance drifting into her nose. Buck rubs more gently than she would have herself, sure to take care with her nearly-split knuckles and paying extra attention to the bit of skin between her thumb and index finger.
When he’s done with the lotion, she feels him smooth out her bedsheets, tucking the blanket around her more securely.
“I’ll be right here when you wake up,” he whispers, as if it even needed to be said. “Sweet dreams.”
I’ll be okay if they’re not, Maddie thinks, and then she dreams of nothing at all.