Rebirth

It turned out that she had heard about me while visiting the kids in the children's wing, and out of curiosity had come by to see me. She was so moved by the fact that I had no visitors that she had taken to sitting with me. It was a bit heartbreaking to find out no one had come looking for my sorry ass, not even my sister, but it endeared me to Cindy all the more. She had a great heart.

Turns out there was a reason why my sister hadn't been summoned. No one knew who I was! The robbers had rifled through my coat after I went down and took my wallet. I reached the hospital with no ID, no DNR card (which explained why I was alive), and no one who could identify me! At best, they had figured out I was local, but beyond that? I was officially a John Doe!

What's more, until I was able to communicate, I still was a mystery patient! It wasn't until a week after I woke up that I was able to tell them my name.

When asked if I had any kin, though, I told them no. I had abandoned my sister, and I was not going to drag her and my current family back into my mess of a life.

Dimly, however, I didn't feel the same as before. I didn't feel like a guy who had shut himself away from the world, hating everyone and everything. It was like a distant bad dream. But if I was no longer that guy, then who was I?

Eventually, I found out more about my situation through Cindy and Dr. Gorowski. I had been shot three times: left leg, belly, right lung. I now had an artificial knee that was guaranteed to last me eighty years (Cindy teased that I should be able to get a deposit back on it.) The second bullet had torn my diaphragm and then ricocheted up into my stomach, the force of the entry also doing damage to part of my liver. The third round had struck to the right of my heart, puncturing a lung and doing damage to the brachial tube. To further complicate matters, I had managed to crack my skull pretty badly on the floor when I fell; there was no detectable brain damage, but the concussion made things tricky for them to work on me.

There was also the small matter of being undernourished. It seemed odd, but my lack of a proper diet and sleep offended him on some level. I wondered if he suspected my less than stable mental condition.

In total, I had undergone a total of ninety-three hours in surgery and been in a coma for six weeks. I died twice, once in the ER and once in surgery. And it would be a couple of more weeks before I could leave as I would require intensive physical therapy.

Not that I had anywhere to go to. I also had no insurance with no way to pay for any of the no-doubt expensive surgeries and therapists and drugs. It turned out that the thieves had cleaned out my bank account and my apartment, which meant I had no value or anything of money. Even if the cops caught the robbers (which the detective who came to see me said was doubtful) what little wealth I had was probably long gone. Using a touchpad, I was able to convey my concerns to Cindy, who only smiled and shrugged. "You can't do anything about it now. Just concentrate on getting better!"

Then she'd regale me with more of her stories from her other jobs. That's how she had passed the time while she sat with me, and she saw no reason to stop now. Cindy was a good storyteller, too. The stories themselves weren't all that interesting; it was the way she told them that captivated me.

The nurses did try to keep her out, but I finally put my foot down. Figuratively. I pointed out that she was the only person who had stayed by my side, and if she wanted to keep doing so, then she was welcome any time! Some mumbling was made about how she was supposed to be there for the kids, but since she was a volunteer AND she only visited me before and after her scheduled trips to see the children, there really wasn't a problem

Cindy helped me. A lot. She knew a great deal about how hospitals and how they worked, and she had connections with social workers. And, long story short, we grew closer. Very close. She was right by my side every therapy session. She spent what I gathered was most of her free time visiting me. It was always while she was wearing her clown costume, and now and then I started to wonder what she looked like without it.

Once I was able to start using my voice again, deeper and raspier than it once had been, I told her about my life. All of it. We had late night conversations about it. She drew it out from me so easily, too! I freely told her in things in confidence that I hadn't told anyone else, and I didn't hold anything back. I even told her how I had slept with Gwen one last time after our divorce, a foolish bit of stupidity that I could never bring myself to truly regret.

It was strange, but there was no heat behind my condemnation for Gwen and Joe. Perhaps it was simply that time had eased some of my suffering. Perhaps it was because I had died and come back as a different person! But I could talk about it with Cindy as though it had all happened to someone else, a close friend or brother. I was not removed from the agony of it all, but I had taken several steps back from it.

She wasn't shy about revealing her past to me, either. Cindy Cotton was a high-school dropout who had gotten into some bad things, had run away from home, and had a miscarriage when she was eighteen without ever knowing for sure who the father was. Then she cleaned up her act, got her GED, and had busted her sweet little ass to get by on her own.

Those were her words, not mine.

One of her first jobs was as a children's performer; that was how she had gotten into clowning. But she also waitressed and tended bar. And, she freely admitted, was a stripper and burlesque dancer. And a cam girl. She made fantastic money doing what she did (and no wonder, given her figure!), but still loved to do clowning on the side for charity.

"You don't care that I strip? Or that I put myself up on the 'net?" she asked me one day. "Some people get freaked out about it."

"Do you do it as a clown?"

That made her laugh, and I grinned with her. It was hurting less to smile, maybe because I was doing it more often. "No! While I could probably do it, it doesn't feel right, you know? I've got loads of other costumes." Cindy cocked her head to one side, purple curls bouncing. "But it doesn't bother you?"

"Nope." My answer was honest. "If you enjoy it, do it. Life... Life is too short, I've found."

"I do enjoy it. But lots of guys have problems with it. Or they make all kinds of stupid assumptions, let me tell you! My last boyfriend? Keith? He kept trying to convince me into meeting my coworkers so we could have a threesome." Cindy thought about this for a moment, giving careful consideration to my words. "Would you date a stripper? Or a cam girl? Someone who gets naked for other men? Who gives them lap dances? You wouldn't have a problem with that?"

I stopped myself from answering immediately, taking the time to think about it first before speaking. "I wouldn't have a problem with it. So long as she was upfront about it."

I chewed my lip as I took another second to mull it over. "I don't think I could watch her give lap dances, I'll admit. That might be hard. But if I trusted her and she was honest? If it was just that and, you know, not anything else... Yeah."

Where had my trust issues gone?! Maybe I was a different person!

"Why do you ask?"

"No reason, really," came her easy reply. "Just thinking about why I don't have a boyfriend right now."

The subject was dropped, and I didn't think any more about it. In retrospect, I was an idiot.

I remember asking her if she would get in trouble for spending so much time with a patient. There were ethical things about therapists and doctors and the like getting involved with someone under their care, weren't there? Cindy had shrugged it off, saying, "I'm not a licensed therapist. Just a licensed clown."

Eventually, the time came for me to be discharged. I had been in the hospital for months. I would still need a lot of therapy and counseling, but they could only keep me for too long. I had no idea where I was going to stay; my landlord had already illegally evicted me, but now that it was done I had no recourse. My car had been towed, and I had no money to get it out of the impound lot. I fretted about it all week leading up to it, but Cindy kept telling me that she had it covered and not to worry. When I asked her about the impending bill, she smiled again and said nothing.

When the big day came, I got the biggest shock of my life since Gwen and Joe. It was the first time I saw Cindy in normal clothes and without her clown face on. Her hair was still as brilliantly purple, though, and her smile was all the more beautiful without the greasepaint. She grinned wildly when they wheeled me down to the exit. She did a graceful pirouette, showing off her shapely legs before swooping low into a dramatic bow, giggling.

Her outfit was far more tight-fitting than her clown getup, a sweater dress that hugged her lush curves, and I could see why she was so successful as an exotic dancer. Nice calves and a healthy bust aside, I still found myself drawn to those eyes. They sparkled with mischief and amusement.

Later on, I found out that her eyes actually were that impossible color. Her hair might have been dyed, but she wasn't wearing any contacts to achieve that brilliant shade of green.

Seeing her eyes right then sealed the deal. I was in love. I just didn't trust myself to believe it yet.

"So, where are you taking me?" I asked her as she helped me into her car. "A halfway house of some kind?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that! Don't worry, you'll like it!" Cindy shot me a sidelong glance with a smirk. "What, don't you trust me?"

I twisted my lips wryly. I was in a good mood. My body still ached, and doing anything was exhausting, but I felt better than I had in years. I could only reason that the final blow to the head when I had fallen had knocked something loose? Maybe? There was still a dark core deep inside me somewhere, but it had become overshadowed by the light of a new day.

"I trust you. It's hard, but I trust you." I puffed out a sigh. "At least I don't have to worry about my luggage getting lost along the way!" I quipped.

We pulled into the driveway of an early twentieth-century house. "The upstairs neighbors are OK," Cindy told me as she helped me up the porch. I was still getting used to walking with a cane. "Judy is the assistant curator at the county historical society, and her husband James runs a small fix-it shop. Their kids come by now and then to visit. They're cool. They throw awesome barbecues! "

She guided me to the door on the right and fiddled with a set of keys. "It's your roommate you'll have to watch out for."

"Roommate?"

"Yeah," she snorted with annoyance. We stepped inside into a cozy living room filled with mismatched furniture. The place looked lived in but clean. It wasn't the hurried sort of cleaning that a person does when they're expecting company but rather a persistent state of being maintained. A faint scent of incense hung in the air.

"She can be a real bitch sometimes. And she's impulsive as hell. Once she knows what she wants, she goes for it. Like... Bang, Zoom, off she goes! Not a thought in her little head!"

"That bad?" I was slow to catch on.

"Oh, you wouldn't believe the things she can get up to sometimes! She's a real ditz!" Cindy closed the door behind me. "Like sometimes, she'll find this great guy that she's only known a couple of months and who's had a really bad run of luck, and she'll just bring him home with her! Without any warning! What a nut job, huh?"

I wasn't that slow. "Wait, you mean -"

She came up behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist gently. I could feel her leaning her head against my shoulders, her breasts pressed against my back. "Did you mean it the other day? When you said what I do doesn't bother you?"

"Yeah, it's... if it's what you enjoy doing -"

She stepped around in front of me, then. Cindy's face blossomed into a look of pure delight.

"Bang," she whispered happily, raising up on her tiptoes. "Zoom."

There are, I discovered, no kisses like clown kisses.

***

Five years passed, and things got better.

There was a stark contrast between Cindy and my ex-wife, one that I couldn't help but notice. Gwen had been quiet and to some degree passive. Dark and somber, she never truly left her goth phase behind. It revealed itself in her sense of fashion, the black clothing tightly fitted to her lithe little body. Looking back, she had been the sort of person to simply let things happen.

Cindy, however, was a firecracker! Still short with large, expressive eyes like Gwen's, but whereas Gwen had been petite and waifish thin, Cindy was curves and softness! Her clothing ran the gauntlet of colors and fashions, often clashing to her amusement. Gwen had let life happen. Cindy? Cindy took it by the balls and laughed in its face!

Of course, now and then she took me by the balls and laughed, too, but never cruelly. Mischievously, perhaps, but never cruelly.

That said, life was not perfect. Don't be fooled. Cindy and I still had our problems like any other couple. My depression did not instantly vanish; getting shot and cracking my head seemed to help, mind you! You could say that it reset my brain. I didn't even suffer from PTSD. Well, not badly anyway, a few nightmares now and then, and certain types of door chimes would cause an anxiety attack, but I could manage. As for Cindy, she was impulsive. That's not saying half of it! It was amazing sometimes how that spontaneity of hers made me grit my teeth one day and then fall in love all over with her again the next!

And I still had a mountain of medical debt over my head. Thanks to her connections, though, a good chunk of it evaporated. The county paid some, charities paid more, and after that it was just a matter of sending them a little at a time. It would probably never go away; the bill ran into several hundred thousand. There was a great chance that I would die still in debt.

Cindy refused to let me get down about it. "The sky is over your head constantly," she told me, "and there's always a chance that something is going to come crashing down on you someday when you're least expecting it or ready for it. But it hasn't! It's the same with debt. It's always going to be there for people like us. We can't let it stop us from living."

Cindy always had lots of similes and metaphors like that to keep me going.

She also had a lot of ways to keep us together. We never went to bed angry; sometimes we ended up staying up all night talking, but we always went to sleep together. If either of us said, 'fuck you' to the other, well... That's what happened, then and there! She said it was a house rule. And one night a week was ours. That was written in stone as far as she was concerned. At least one night a week, any night, was to be reserved for the two of us. No family or friends.

And she had a lot of friends! A LOT of friends. Friends who had gone through hard times of their own and understood. My new social world was filled with people who weren't living in the middle-class American dream! No one owned their house, few had their own cards, and all of them had problems.

Those friends were quick to become my friends, too, especially once they found out that I used to play tabletop RPGs! I was a couple of editions behind in D&D, but it didn't take long before I was playing again. Fighting off hordes of orcs with a bunch of strippers and bouncers at four in the morning was nothing if not surreal!

Thanks to those friends, I was able to find work. It didn't bring in the same amount of cash that Cindy did, but it helped pay our bills. I did part-time work at our neighbor's fix-it shop, worked at a local bookstore on the side, and became a fill-in bartender/waiter/driver for a couple of the area's nightclubs. I earned a reputation for being a reliable guy who could help out in a pinch.

True to my word, the cam girl thing didn't bother me. It was fun to watch from the sidelines, too! A little smugness couldn't help creep into my smile, either. The poor saps could pay for her time, but they could never have her like I could!

The dancing was a little harder to take the few times I saw her at the club, but I put it out of my mind. She did give lap dances, but nothing more than that. It was a pretty upscale place where 'those sorts of things' didn't happen, and her boss made it clear to all of his employees that if it did happen, they were out on their ass!

My lover was a fantastic dancer. Maybe she wasn't the best in the place, but she knew how to use her body! More impressive was the way she cadged drinks and extra tips off of the patrons, stringing them along and teasing them as though they might have a chance with her. We'd laugh all the way home while she counted her money, then we'd screw each other raw.

Hey, I said things got better for me. I never said that we were saints. I wasn't the naive young man who had been stupid enough to let his heart get stomped on, is all.

I did start going to therapy. Cindy often went with me. It was mostly group therapy run through the local university since I couldn't afford an actual shrink, and I supplemented that with attending various community support groups, but I finally had begun to work through my issues and my depression. There were a number of small revelations along the way, but the biggest one was in regards to my divorce and the life I'd led afterward.

The truth of the matter was that I let myself become a miserable, depressed bastard because I was punishing myself. Deep down, I hated that I had broken the heart of the woman I loved despite her infidelity. I hadn't believed that I was worthy of love or friendship. So I had damned myself and retreated from the world because I didn't deserve to be happy.

The human psyche is absolute shit sometimes.

One part of my ongoing rehabilitation was connecting with my sister again. I almost couldn't do it. Cindy had to dial the number for me. After a tentative "Hey, um, it's Jack", AnnaBelle laid into me furiously. I had sat quietly taking every screaming insult until Cindy impatiently took the phone from me.

"Hey, AnnaBelle? This is Cindy. Who? Oh, your brother's little fuck bunny. He's been screwing my tight little ass every night for a while now. I don't know if you know this, but your brother's cock is fucking amazing!"

I nearly choked.

"Look, long story short, your brother was shot and died a couple of times. No, no bullshit. I know he's been acting like an asshole, but you really shouldn't be yelling at him over the phone like this." Cindy shot me a triumphant grin. "What you SHOULD be doing is yelling at him in person! That way we can both tell him what a selfish jerk he's been. So when can you come up?"

It was a tearful reunion all around.

Long story short, after fourteen years of misery, I finally managed to start turning myself around. It only took dying, a great deal of counseling, a great deal more of hard work, five years, and a sexy, younger woman who occasionally wore shoes that honked with every step. At the ripe old age of 52, I was finally enjoying life. Maybe I wasn't rich and maybe I would die in debt, but for the first time since the divorce, I was at peace.

Life, however, had one last wrench to throw my way.

***

It was May, and I was relaxing on the small porch in the back of our house. It was "our" day. Cindy and I both had off, and we had decided to simply relax together. The air was still cool, but the grass was brilliant green and the sky was a gorgeous blue. It was the perfect temperature to sit there in the lawn chair and have a cup of tea. I'd brought the latest campaign book out for the game we were to start up next week, but I hadn't cracked it open yet. I dedicated the moment to simply enjoy being out of doors.