Beside You

It was a waiting game. Waiting for Maddie to wake up, waiting for any news from the doctors, waiting for something to change, waiting for more family members and friends to arrive, waiting until the next visiting hours began at the ICU, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Each family member (and best friend) made the time pass in a different way. Linda was going to wear through the floor in the kitchen very soon, Henry was pretending to work on the same table on the computer that he had been staring at since last week, Eric and Tanya spent time with Parker, Marc was trying everything to keep himself from thinking.

Abby split her time between her own home and her best friend’s home. Her first visit with Maddie in her ICU room had inspired the slightly older teen to purchase a notebook and turn it into a memory book. The girl used whatever time she didn’t spend trying and failing to distract herself, going insane with worry and forcing the food her mother brought her down her throat, to fill the notebook with each and every memory that she could, well, remember. The notebook wasn’t going to be enough and Abby was terrified that maybe she was jinxing Madison by remembering their time together, but she much rather focused on the fun and happy memories they had made than to keep the image of her lifeless, pale friend in front of her inner eye. And so Abby filled the notebook with memories, texts, drawings, a few pictures, some ticket stubs and whatever she else she could come up with. Maddie was going to love the book when she woke up, the two friends had been wanting to do something like that for a long time now.

Jared was doing something similar. He had holed up in his old room and was looking at pictures on his computer and in the albums from the living room. Since coming to Thunder Bay he really hadn’t said a whole lot, he didn’t feel like talking to anyone about what he felt right now. He was scared, insanely scared. Scared that Maddie wouldn’t wake up, scared that her injuries would leave her handicapped for the rest of her life, scared that she wouldn’t be the herself after the brain surgery, scared that his best girl friend and little sister just wasn’t going to be the same after this.

Most of the pictures were happy memories and there were quite a few that made him smile or even chuckle. Madison had somehow always been the center of attention, naturally, with all the boys, her brothers and cousins, around. Sweet, innocent, angelic looking Madison. The main reason why Jared was seeking solitude was because he didn’t want anyone to see him cry. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed to shed a few tears, especially on an occasion like this when everyone would understand, too. It was that it wasn’t just ‘a few’ tears he shed and he didn’t want the sympathy he was bound to get if someone saw. He needed to find a way to deal with this on his own, deal with his fear of change and loss, and there was no one who could tell him how to do that, but himself.

Maybe it was Jared that the parents worried about the most, who barely came out of his room to eat. But maybe it was Jordan.

It wasn’t that his brothers were intentionally avoiding him, especially Marc had a hard time letting go, every time he looked at Jordan he saw Madison’s broken face, her empty eyes after she told him about the phone call. At least no one was giving him a hard time constantly and blaming him (out loud) for what he had said to his sister. You could read on his face that he blamed himself more than anyone else did.

Like Jared, Jordan didn’t really talk to anyone and spent a lot of time in one room, but it wasn’t his own. Surrounded by her clutter, her clothes, her smell and everything else in her room he felt that he could hold on to what last grasp he had of his sister. Looking at the pictures that she had hung up, Abby and Madison with the horses, smiling wide after jumping into the lake, pulling funny faces for the camera, Maddie with their Mom, grandmother and Tanya on Christmas, Maddie and Matt with the carriage... Jordan realized how little he actually did know about his sister. There were so many things he had just never cared to find out about her, all the little things that meant you really knew someone. He felt like a stranger in her room, the only picture with him was a staged family shot from a few summers ago.

Jordan jumped when he heard the door open and close quietly. Today he’d sat down on the floor by the end of her bed, leaning against the frame. Eric silently leaned against the closed door. His younger brother looked rough, really rough. Rough like a man that had spent much time self-loathing. Not even when the Penguins had lost the Cup to Detroit had Jordan looked this rough.

“She probably hates me,” Jordan finally said, keeping his eyes on the spot on the floor he’d been looking at ever since Eric came in.

“She doesn’t,” Eric replied honestly.

Jordan let out a puff of air loudly. “She should. I’ve always been absolutely horrible to her, I’ve never done anything nice for her or been nice to her.”

“If she hated you, you couldn’t have hurt her like you did,” Eric said quietly. Jordan closed his eyes against the realization of how true his brother’s statement was. “I don’t know why, but she never hated you. Sometimes I wish she would have, but she didn’t. She was always wishing that maybe someday you’d be nice to her without being forced.”

The younger Staal ran his palm over his face with a deep breath. After everything he’d done, Eric still claimed that Madison loved Jordan. It was almost too much to take. She was well within her rights to hate him and never talk to him again.

“Do you think I can fix it? You know, when she wakes up?” Jordan avoided the word if like a plague, because he believed with all his might that Maddie would wake up. He had to or he’d go completely insane.

“I don’t know,” Eric answered honestly. There were a lot of words on the tip of his tongue, a lot of things he had wanted to say to Jordan for the longest time, but this was not the time to say them. Not when Jordan was already so down and beating himself up so much. There was no need for anyone making him feel even worse than he already did. “Do you want to?”

“Yes.” The word came from so deep within Jordan that Eric knew with that one word that maybe, if Madison allowed, after all this had passed the family would get to see what they had been hoping for for years: Jordan and Maddie reconciling. “Though I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want me to. Maybe she doesn’t hate me, but that doesn’t mean she wants to make up.”

“I think you’d be surprised,” Eric threw in.

“Probably. I probably don’t even really know her,” Jordan sighed gesturing to the pictures on the wall. “I don’t know what she likes or doesn’t like to eat, to do, to listen to, to... anything. I’ve just never bothered, she was always just there.”

“You can learn,” Eric shrugged. It cost him a lot of strength to be this understanding and giving to Jordan right now, but there would be no progress made at all if he wasn’t.

“Who’s that guy with the carriage?” Even though Jordan wasn’t the best big brother, seeing his baby sister with a guy in an embrace like that made the warning bells go off on his big brother radar.

“Matt, her boyfriend.”

“She has a boyfriend?! When did that happen?!” Jordan looked so shocked that Eric almost laughed.

“Couple weeks ago, not too long,” Eric smiled lightly. “She’s known the guy for a long time though, his parents own the stable where Lady and Theo stand.”

“Is he okay?” Finally Jordan looked up to exchange that look with his brother that only older brothers seemed to be able to exchange. And maybe Dads.

“He’s alright,” the oldest Staal nodded. “Maddie’s liked him for the longest time actually. Seemed to come down to it around New Year’s from what I know, he asked Dad permission to ask her on a date.” Jordan nodded approvingly, with the girls he went out with he never bothered to get the father’s permission.

“Was he at the hospital?” Jordan didn’t really remember who had all been in the waiting room when he arrived, Abby’s... speech overshadowing any other memory.

“No, I haven’t seen him around actually, I don’t know,” Eric shrugged and both brothers frowned about that realization. “But he was there when the accident happened.”

“Even if Maddie won’t hate me forever, Marc and Jared definitely will,” Jordan said dryly. Maddie was never able to hold a grudge, not really, but his brothers could and would, especially when it came to their baby girl. Not that Jordan could blame them, he would hate himself, too.

“Possible,” Eric replied truthfully. “You can’t redeem yourself within a few days, Jordan, it’s going to take time for everyone to accept this and eventually get over this. But you can work at it.”

“I hope so.”

“Are you gonna come downstairs? Mom’s making dinner.”

No one was really hungry or felt like eating, but still they did. They had to force themselves to keep their bodies in form and keep their nutrition up. The trainers would certainly understand a shed pound or two, everyone knew that something like this didn’t exactly make you want to scarf down a whole cow, but still they had to watch it.

“Yeah,” Jordan sighed and got off the floor.

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“Are you nervous?” 9 year old Madison looked up to her oldest brother curiously. Everyone laughed, except the in fact very nervous Eric, who was about to get drafted.

“A little bit,” Eric finally said. “What about you?”

“I’m not,” Maddie shrugged, surprising everyone. But instead of being the only serene member of the family, she felt something else. “I’m sad.”

Eric frowned, and he wasn’t the only one.

“Why are you sad, Maddie?” Linda asked softly, worried that the size of the event was scaring the little girl and that it was too much for her after all. Madison had fought tooth and nail to be allowed to come though.

“Because you’ll go somewhere even farer from home and then I can’t see you all the time,” Maddie answered sadly.

Eric swallowed and didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t going to say out loud that he had missed his little sister a lot, so much more than he thought he would, while he had been in Peterborough and if the predictions for the draft were right, then Maddie was also right. He’d be so much further from home than he had been in Peterborough.

“Can’t you just play at home again?” she asked with her big, brown puppy dog eyes, looking like she was about to cry.

“At home isn’t the NHL, Madison,” Jordan pointed out with a roll of his blue eyes. Eric gave him a dark look.

“You’ll come visit all the time,” the oldest brother tried, but that wasn’t enough for Maddie. Nothing was going to be enough. Linda took over in trying to console the upset little girl and later, when Eric was indeed drafted to a team that brought him so much further from home Madison was infected by the cheeriness of everyone around her and forgot about her sadness for a while. Later that night she remembered though.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes, little lady,” Jim Rutherford, the Carolina Hurricanes’ GM, smiled down at who he knew to be his highest draft pick’s little sister.

“How far is it to where your team is? Do you think I can ride there?”