The Gathering 01.37 –  How
Do We Deal? Pt 1 – Ordinary Day

            Another gray day in LA,
it was a beautiful cemetery green grassy knolls and rolling hills.  Rain was threatening, but it wasn’t about to
pepper them yet.  They all stood, far
behind the family and mourning friends that hadn’t been a part of their inner
circle.

            Alice
stood with her hand on the back of Dana‘s
wheelchair, and Dana looked on with a grim
expression on her face.  Alice‘s
hands were gripping the chair making her knuckles white with anger.  She hated that they were here.

            Dana
kept her hands on her legs her now virtually useless legs.  She could feel them, pressure and the rough
scratch of the pants she wore.  But she could
yet move them.  Her career was over.  Her mind tried to wrap its self around that,
what was she going to do, she’d never been anything but Dana Fairbanks the tennis
player.

            Sam
stood with Bette and Tina.  Bette‘s face
still held bruises from the accident, but Tina‘s
was blemish free.  Sam listened to the
priest wanting to jump and say something about this person they were putting
into the ground but she didn’t, she couldn’t her heart still ached from putting
C.J. in the ground.  Tina‘s
eyes kept darting left and right, and Bette held
her hand gently reassuring her all the time.

            Marina,
Kit, Lara and
Jayden stood further back.  Lara
also in a wheelchair and her private nurse, Jayden had a hand on her
shoulder.  Marina
had her hands folded in front of her, and Kit
had an arm hooked around her elbow.  Kit
had a wheelchair; her leg was in a cast, but she had said that she’d stand, so
she was using Marina
for her balance beam.  Then the priest
began as they let the coffin slowly descend into the ground.

            “Into the ground today
we lower…” 

*****

Flashback

            Jayden sat in the
waiting room, images of what had just happened shifted through her mind at a
helter skelter pace.  Snapshots of blood,
the splintering wall, the rubble and the shattered lives.  This hadn’t been some war torn country, this
had been in her own back yard and Jayden was at a loss at how to process it
all. 

            Jayden was still shook
from the shock of seeing her new friends bleeding and hurt.  She looked at Sam,
who was standing at the window a few feet away. 
Sam hadn’t spoken a word, she just
couldn’t see how she was going to live now.