Walking on Thin Ice: Chapter 1

His head began to slip off the table; it was far too late for anyone to be up for any reason at all. Terry slapped his arm away and laughed as it slipped off pitifully and banged on the wood table. Michael looked up from the cherry wood and scowled at his old friend. John and Graham had already exited, quick to come and quick to leave. Eric dawdled in the corner, giving Mike a curious look of seemingly undivided attention lest he say something important.

"What‌" Mike asked, stretching and trying not to appear quite so tired.

Eric squirmed and looked away, muttering under his breath about "nothing" and "just daydreaming."

The other Terry, whom Mike affectionately called "Gil," was snoozing gently in the chair. Looking at his watch confirmed Mike's earlier assessment that no one in their right minds were awake at four thirty in the morning after staying up all night.

Terry poked the other one, and helped him up by luring him off his furniture with coffee and his car keys. Soon enough it was just Terry and Mike. They both yawned and grinned tiredly.

"I should be getting home, eh‌" Mike asked, pulling himself up to his feet, wondering what his empty apartment would bring him tonight. Burglars‌ Maybe his dog wouldn't be quite so ready to slobber on his face if it was four thirty.

Terry shrugged. "I don't know, mate, you look pretty tired. If that dog of yours doesn't need out till tomorrow morning, I'd say stay here."

Mike pulled himself up and barked a soft laugh. "Boxer always needs to be let out, the evil dog thing from hell..."

Terry mocked a scowl as his friend tugged a light jacket over his plain white shirt. "Alright Palin, but if you fall asleep at the wheel, I'm not coming to identify your body until noon the NEXT day."

With another chuckle and a wave, Mike exited the house and trudged to his car. His car reminded him of far too much when he looked at it from the outside. He remembered it breaking down on his honeymoon with Helen, he remembered leaning on it when she told him she was pregnant, and he remembered being clubbed upside the head and thrown against the hood while they mugged and killed his wife, only taking the money from his pocket.

He slipped inside and inhaled deeply. Three years and he still had graphic memories of what happened that night. It wasn't right to get rid of the car, but coming or leaving it he always was filled with a deep sense of loathing or depression.

Putting the damned thing into gear, he mumbled about maybe selling the hunk of junk and buying something else.

The radio was on, playing very soft music that sounded mournful. Perfect! He thought sarcastically, switching the station. Curiously enough, the song was on the second and third station, though classical symphonies were blaring on the fourth station he twirled the dial to. Leaving in on one of Beethoven's Concerto in Eb, he turned on to the small highway that lead to his house in the long run.

The strings began to sing a low mournful song while the French Horns and flutes joined in with weak triumphant calls, only to be continually crushed by a jealous trombone section. Mike's eyelids started to drop as street post after street post flew by. They dropped shut but he was still awake. Panic seized him as he felt his arms slump off the wheel and he began to realize he couldn't wake himself up. There was a loud bang and he was thrown against the steering wheel, head smashing against the windshield, and arm working its way into a tight spot between seat and center console.

Finally aware of the pain and trauma in his body, Mike's eyes fluttered open. There was Helen's face, blue and tormented, eyes open in a perpetual plea for help, sprawled across his vision. He let out a choked sob of pain and sadness before the wailing sirens filled his ears and he tried to free himself from the chrome prison.

"Shit," he mumbled, trying to undo his seat belt with bloody fingers. Finally the clasp fell apart and he kicked open the door forcably. He spilled out onto the grass and tried to hold everything together. The last thing he wanted to do was be found by paramedics vomiting his brains out. What assumptions would that bring?

The wailing sirens from the nearby hospital finally skidded next to his car's wreckage. A young man and woman leapt out of the back and examined the car for passengers before the woman turned and laid her flashlight on Michael, rocking back and forth with terror stark in his eyes.

She knelt next to him gently. Damn these estrogenical bitches! He wailed as she gave him a sympathetic eye and grasped his wrist firmly but gently.

"Could you tell me what happened, sir‌" She asked, in a loud clear voice that boasted that she knew what the hell she was doing and she knew it.

Mike groaned out a semi-answer and let his head drop down again for sleep.

The woman tilted his chin up and stared him in the face. "Did you fall asleep sir, or were you drinking?"

Mike shook his head free from her grasp and looked up pitifully. "I fell asleep."

The man who had miraculously appeared at his side with a stethoscope began to examine his wounds quickly by his side. "Broken ribs, Gemma."

"Broken wrist, Jeremy! This one here is a greenstick fracture of his radius as well, low to the wrist but it needs attention before he has a hematoma. Needs some stitches along his hairline as well, windshield got him pretty bad." Gemma retorted, having found all of the other injuries without searching the man sitting before her on the ground.

A car squealed to a stop just beside the ambulance and out jumped Terry Jones. He walked up to Mike and stood with wide eyes while Jeremy, the male paramedic tried to ask him what he was doing.

"Who are you?" Jeremy interrogated brashly, holding Terry's arms to stop him from moving any farther.

He strained against the pompous paramedic's arms for a moment. "Look, that's my friend!"

Gemma looked back at Mike who was glancing up repeatedly at Terry, trying to keep his eyes from closing again. "Do you know him?"

"'S Terry Jones...I know him." Mike slurred. Gemma jerked Jeremy's foot and watched with warning eyes as Terry slid to his knees before Mike and looked him in the eye.

There were loud noises everywhere, Mike couldn't concentrate on anything they were asking him, none of them. Slowly though, his eyes shut and he felt himself being lifted and placed on a gurney. He slept peacefully, endorphins keeping the shock of the pain from him until he arrived at the hospital.

"What a jackass! He didn't even take coffee‌ I repeat, what a jackass!" John's voice intruded into Mike's thoughts. He squinted against the light coming in through his eyes.

He swatted at the voice and found success as he managed to smack John a good one upside the head. "Shut up!"

When he did open his eyes, they were met with a rather bright sight. A white room full of white sheets, white everything. And the window was letting all the light in to reflect off the walls and possibly blind him. It was horror to think that his friends had come and sit in there for more than ten minutes just trying to wake him up while sitting in that awful light! All five of them had come though, including a very tired Terry Jones. He seemed to have trouble listening to conversations as they mumbled to another and Mike animatedly.

"We thought you were a goner, mate! That paramedic knew her stuff, so Terry says." Eric crooned, reaching out for Mike's hand, which was encased in a plaster cast.

Mike turned to Terry and tried to sit up. "What happened?"

Terry shook the sleep out of your eyes. "We got you into the ambulance, and you stopped breathing. She couldn't find a pulse, you weren't breathing, it was really horrible. So she had the defribulator goin', we had to stop so that other one could help, and then she had to give you CPR because when your heart got goin' again, you still wouldn't breathe. But we got you going again and just in time to get you a CAT scan. Apparently the crash had given one of your kidneys a sore bruising and it caused you to cease to be for about thirty seconds."

Mike's heart thudded in his chest, a dull sound that reminded him of his car, of Helen...of death. He shook his morbid thoughts from his brain and discovered that he was almost unable to raise his eyebrows in surprise due to so pretty big stitches scaling about three inches from the outer side of one of his eyebrow to the beginning of the second one. True, the stitches were way up in his hairline almost invisible, it still prevented him from doing any suggestive wagging to accompany his future comments. Stitches weren't there very long; he settled back into the white sheets of the bed and swallowed.

A male doctor slipped into the room, squeaking around all the other guys and trying not to crush the ones sitting in the chairs gathered around. He pulled up a stool and sat by Mike's bedside with a clipboard.
"Good evening, Mr. Palin. I trust we can have a looksee to make sure you're all right to leave tomorrow morning, right?" He asked, not ever looking at Michael directly, but looking at everything else.

Mike nodded and waved gently while the others filed out of the room with obvious intent of returning a little later. "Go right ahead."

He began to look more closely at his room. There were a few balloons, a few joke stuffed animals, and quite a few cards and letters from family, friends, some complete strangers. He jerked the card out of a nearby fruit basket filled with all sorts of home-made delights, and gaped at the words inside.

"Have a great life, Mr. Palin, glad I could help you out. And remember, friends don't let friends drive sleepy! Signed with all the love and affection a complete stranger can muster, Gemma Thompson"

The doctor peered over Mike cast and at the card. "Ah, I see Gemma has gotten back into her routine of checking up on all of her patients. Best paramedic we have in the whole hospital. She cares about people, you see. Real people, she checks on them and talks to them. In fact, that's how she met her fiancèe. Before he died you see."

The tag on the doctor's chest said "Dr. Jameison." Mike nodded to indicate that he had heard Jameison speaking, but he still was at a loss at why she'd visit him or leave him anything. Spending her paycheck on complete strangers? He replaced the card and went through the basket with interest.

Nothing you'd normally see was in there. There were quiches, breads, sweets of every kind! And they were all wrapped up like mummies in colored ceran wrap. He unwrapped a particularly good looking cookie and smelled the icing.

"She's quite the baker, has a stash all the time for her patients. Lemon meringue! Oh, she hasn't made those in ages! Mind?" Jameison reached for one in the basket.

Mike shook his head. "Go right ahead. Am I allowed to eat this now?" He held it up.

He looked both ways. "Don't tell no one I let you, but it won't kill you."

Mike smiled and sunk his teeth into the shortbread delight. In Helen's lifetime, they had rarely baked anything other than green bean casserole, so this was the best thing he'd tasted since childhood. "Wow!"

"Great, innit?" The doctor grinned, trying not to spill any crumbs on the chart he was filling out. He scratched off a few more things and then pulled himself to his feet, pushing the stool back into its hiding spot. "You're free to go tomorrow at nine o' clock, alright? At nine you have one of those friends of yours come and pick you up or it'll be my head!"

He smiled at the laid back doctor. "Of course."

Jameison swooped out of the room and clicked down the hallway, some mysterious sound reverberating from his dress shoes. When Terry and the rest of the guys didn't swoop back in he assumed they'd run off for the cafèteria. He wondered if he was allowed to stand up and go there himself. Bloody hospital gown is the only thing stopping me, he grumbled mentally.

There was a sound in the sterile hallway now that was of practical shoes squeaking on the floor. They entered the room adjoining Mike's, the one across from the small bathroom off to his left. There were mumbling voices and then the shoes left. Just as he was beginning to think that he was desperately seeking amusement in his barren hospital room, the shoes squeaked clear into his room, causing his head to jerk up and look upon the paramedic that had saved his life.

"Awake finally, I see." She smiled and walked in, pulling up a chair.

He nodded dumbly, looking at her in her bell bottom jeans and baggy t-shirt with "The Beatles" sprawled across the front. Her hair was impossibly long; longer than he remembered. Of course, it had been all wound up in a bun when he had seen her.

Gemma, sensing his awe for a moment, reached in and pulled out a piece of bread that had smelled Italian and broke it in half. She tossed most of the wrapped good back but kept a large chunk for herself to nibble on. "Pesto oregano, yum yum."

He smiled and looked into the basket for a moment before replacing it to the table beside the bed.

It was far more uncomfortable than she'd expected; this one wasn't a talker.

"I'm sorry if I seem untalkative," Michael said suddenly, finding his voice. "I'm just a little rattled I suppose."

She nodded, fully understanding. "I get you completely. Sometimes you just don't feel like you, right?"

"Yes!" He said enthusiastically.

Gemma nodded again, throwing the purple ceran wrap into the nearest trash bin. She looked very tired. "I felt that way when I arrived at this crash scene where the driver of the car was supposedly already dead. We arrived and it was my fiancèe. I felt like I had just had an out of body experience, and for weeks after I just kept floating around."

Mike remembered hearing that her fiancèe had died. "My wife died a few years ago. We were mugged out in London. When I woke up the first thing I saw was her body."

Gemma's face went dark. "Eyes open, wide and staring. Lifeless. You're desperate to prove your eyes wrong, but your heart isn't willing to let you do that. So you cry."

Her eyes stung momentarily, remembering those exact things happening when she had found Jonas' body.

Mike nodded, heart aching suddenly. "I wanted to die. Just, float away..."

"Hope it's all a dream, and float away." Gemma finished the thought for him.

He extended a hand to her that was uncasted and free to hold in hopes of comforting her, though his eyes were welling up too. She took it and smiled at him with "all the love and affection an almost complete stranger could muster."