Swelter

by Nina G. Jones

  He turned the hand on his abdomen up and threaded his blood-soaked fingers into mine. “Never,” he mouthed.

  “No . . . no,” I sobbed.

  Hands gripped my shoulders and pulled me away as I wrestled them.

  “Ma'am. Ma'am. The ambulance is here,” a voice from behind said firmly.

  I watched helplessly as the men worked on Bobby. The life slipped from my body, as if I had died but was somehow still breathing.

  “Ma'am. Ma'am . . .” a distant voice echoed. I looked up at the stranger in a daze.

  “I think you're bleeding.”

  I looked down at my hands and the shirt of Bobby's that I was wearing. Of course I was covered in blood. Idiot.

  “No,” he insisted, pointing to the ground. A few droplets of dark blood were on the asphalt just underneath me. Another fell. Another. I used my hands, covered in Bobby's blood to slowly pull up the hem of the shirt. I had no room for shame in front of these people. They had just witnessed the rape of my soul.

  My white underwear had a red spot. And then things went blurry. My knees burned, and I realized I was on all fours. Everything sounded distant, but through the deafening incoherent mumbling, I watched as Bobby was loaded onto the back of the ambulance.

  I reached out for him as people circled me, trying to help. But they weren't helping, they were letting those people take the best part of me away. They were letting those people rip me in two. I couldn't leave him. I couldn't let them take him from me.

  A wave of nausea hit me like a baseball bat to the stomach and I retched so hard it hurt. I hoped it would kill me. I didn't want to live on a planet again were Bobby Lightly didn't exist.

  Hands reached for me, and I fought them. Scratching. Clawing. A sharp prick in my arm contrasted with the haziness of the scene around me. And then everything became warm until there was nothing.

  It only took a few seconds after I woke up for me to start shouting for Bobby.

  A nurse ran over to me. Told me it was the middle of the night and I was disturbing the other patients.

  “Bobby—Robert—Lightly. Is he okay?” I pleaded frantically.

  “I don't know who that is ma'am,” she answered stoically.

  “Please . . . call the police or the—someone must know in this hospital,” I cried.

  I glanced out the window behind me at the ink black night. I didn't know how long I had been sedated.

  “Your sister is on her way. Please calm down.”

  “I don't want to fucking calm down!” I shouted. “Bobby Lightly. Bobby Lightly. Bobby Lightly!” I chanted his name over and over. As if I could summon him. Other nurses hurried over and held me down. “Let go!” I shouted. I flailed as they strapped me to my bed. I didn't feel the prick of the needle this time, but a warmth came over me. Under any other circumstances, it would have felt nice, to have that tingling in my veins, lulling me into my own personal night. But I didn't want to waste time if Bobby was still alive. I needed to be by his side.

  “Bobby . . . Lightly . . . Bob . . .” I muttered before the warmth cloaked me in darkness.

  Opening my eyes hurt this time. The sun was bright and a stark contrast to blackness that had been my world since I collapsed on the motel parking lot. I squinted at the blurry figure sitting to my left. I made her out slowly as the fuzzy edges sharpened. Pinned-up ashen blonde hair, freckled cheeks, hazel eyes. My sister and I were so different, even down to the way we looked. Me, with my chestnut hair and copper brown eyes. Though I had a few freckles, I browned in the sun. She was always one to sit in the shade. She couldn't last ten minutes without turning red.

  “Julia?” I choked out.

  She leaned in. “Shhhh . . . I'm going to get a nurse,” she whispered softly.

  I gripped her forearm, and she looked me, shocked. I remembered the restraints and wondered why they were no longer on. I assumed it was Julia's doing.

  “Bobby . . . is he okay?” I asked.

  “I should get a doctor first.”

  “Tell me,” I demanded through a clenched jaw.

  My sister looked at me with tender eyes. It was a rare moment. She shook her head.

  “No. No. No. No . . .” I sobbed. “It can't be true . . . you're lying . . .” I cried. I hoped this was some ploy to separate us.

  Julia quickly looked around, hoping to get a doctor's attention as my fingers sunk into her arm with no concern for her comfort. “He died in the ambulance. I’m sorry.” She grimaced from a mixture of physical and emotional anguish.

  I wanted out. Out of this hospital. Out of my skin. Out of this world. I wanted not to be myself. I wanted to be wherever Bobby was.

  I jolted up, reaching for the IV.

  “No!” Julia shouted, grabbing for my hand. “I need a nurse!” she shouted. She hushed her tone and looked me in the eyes. “Lilly. Lilly. If you don't calm down they will tie you and sedate you again.”

  “I don't care!” I screamed as nurses made their way to me.

  “Just — just give me a second,” my sister commanded. She had a presence about her. Serious. Authoritative. It was one of the reasons she and I rarely clicked. Sometimes she felt more like a mother than our mother did. The nurses paused. “Lilly, please just breathe,” she begged.

  But I didn't want to breathe. I didn't want to exist. I wanted to go back into the darkness. To the warm hug of the sedatives. Maybe I would see Bobby there.

  “I want to see him!” I shouted, trying to leave my bed. The nurses swarmed in and gave me what I needed.

  “From what we can tell, it's still the case . . .” The doctor's hushed voice lulled me out of my sleep.

  I watched his tall blur, in a white coat, speaking down to Julia, her dress a fog of blues, reds, and purples.

  “I'm not sure we should tell her yet . . . she's in no condition,” my sister suggested.

  This time when I tried to sit up, the restraints were still on. “What?” I croaked.

  They both looked down at me.

  My sister let out a big sigh and marched over to me. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Tell me what?” I asked, fighting to stay focused amidst the haze.

  “You should rest. There's no rush.”

  “I'm not an idiot,” I snapped. “Doctor—what is still the case?” I asked.

  He gave my sister a look of concern. She nodded subtly. He turned to face me with his arms crossed and cleared his throat.

  “I, um . . . you were brought to the hospital because of some vaginal bleeding. We performed some tests and discovered you are pregnant.”

  I heard the breath escape my lungs as I sank further into the bed as if I was a spectator outside of my own body. “Are?” I asked.

  “Yes. Your bleeding was heavy enough to be cause for concern. However, it is not unusual for women this early into pregnancy to experience some form of bleeding. There was no tissue in the blood, which is what we see with a miscarriage. You also haven’t bled since. From what we can tell . . . you are still pregnant. But it’s very early. We cannot hear a heartbeat yet. And we aren’t one-hundred percent sure why this happens. Some women just have a scare, sometimes it’s indicative of something serious later in the pregnancy. The head trauma and the stress of your recent experience may have exacerbated the issues. You will need to see your regular physician to monitor this pregnancy closely. Any early bleeding puts you in a higher risk category, which is why I want to make sure you understand while our tests show you are pregnant, we have to be cautious here.”

  “How early?”

  “Well, the heartbeat comes in at around six weeks. Examining you, I’d guess at most, four weeks. Probably three. But there’s no way to be sure.”

  I did the mental math. I hadn’t completed sex with Rory since before my last period about a month ago. My chest collapsed when I realized what this meant. What I already knew but hadn't allowed myself to take on because of the magnitude of the news, until the doctor confirmed it. No matter how much I gasped, the
air that left my lungs would not come back.

  “Please . . . I can't . . . breathe . . .” I stuttered. Maybe Julia was right. Maybe I wasn’t ready to learn this information.

  The doctor waved over some nurses and together they released me from the restraints and sat me up.

  “Oh . . . Bobby,” I cried, as if he could hear me. This should have been good news. But this was all wrong. We were supposed to be celebrating this together. Planning our lives around this blessing. Instead, I hadn't even fully comprehended the news of his loss. He didn't feel gone. I felt like I could get in my car and drive to the lake house and he would be waiting there for me with a smile on his face. And I would jump into his arms and tell him I had a surprise. And we would laugh and then cry tears of joy.

  But I was in a hospital bed, and Bobby was lying in a morgue with two holes in his back. He left with all the good parts of me. I was just a shell. How could I do this alone? How could I raise our child? How could I live a million lives for us when I didn't even want to live this one any longer?

  I finally caught my breath, which only allowed me to sob. “He's not dead. He's not dead.” I chanted to myself. I believed once before he was, and he showed up at my door. And when I first saw him I told him he should have stayed dead. Now, I would give anything for him to come back to me.

  Bobby beat death to see me again. To tell me he never left. That he never stopped thinking about me. That I was what brought him back. If I brought him back once, I hoped my tears could do it again.

  I slumped back into the bed. I didn't want to hear anymore. I didn't want to speak. I just wanted to soak in this despair. This pain that connected me to him. I wrapped my arms around my stomach, to the only living part of Bobby in this world, hugging myself and the life inside of me. I hoped wherever Bobby was he could feel me hugging him, willing him to return.

  But people don't come back from the dead once. And they sure as hell don't come back twice.

  For two nights I cried. I cried more than I thought a person could cry. It felt like I could flood the lake with my tears for Bobby.

  My sister sat there for most of the day and didn't say a word. There was nothing she could say. I didn't care yet about Stan or Rory. The sorrow was so all-encompassing that it stole all the space inside of me. There was no room yet for anger or vengeance.

  Just sorrow.

  Sorrow so deep it was like a mirror reflecting on another mirror. Infinite. Boundless. Endless. Sorrow that hurt my bones. Gripped at my heart with angry claws. Wrung my stomach into misshaped knots. Made my eyes raw.

  It took my breath away at random moments. There were times when I thought I might suffocate, like Bobby stole the air right out of my chest when he left this world.

  I had no room to even love the life inside of me. Because I gave all my love to Bobby; I left it with him, soaked in his blood in that parking lot.

  People try to separate emotional anguish and physical pain as if they are different. But anyone who has ever experienced a loss this tragic understands you feel that pain everywhere. You carry it with you in every cell. It's invisible. There are no cuts or bruises. But every breath aches. Everything hurts.

  The nurses gave me mild sedatives, but whenever I woke, I couldn't take my first breath without weeping. Even they pitied me. When my sister had to leave at night, one of them came and stroked my hair as I sobbed Bobby's name over and over. Throughout the night, I begged for him to come back, but each morning, I woke up and he was still gone. That gentle gesture from a stranger, I am convinced, kept my heart beating, because I was sure this grief would eventually stop it. I didn't think the heart could survive a hurt this strong.

  But underneath all the pain, something started to stir. It was so minuscule—A speck of strength compared to the monolith of devastation. It was Bobby. Inside of me. He did find a way to live. And he needed me to keep him alive. He said he would never leave me and he kept his promise.

  I would get to see him again in eight months. I owed it to him to be strong and carry on his memory through our child.

  So that morning, when my sister came, I decided to stop crying, at least for a while.

  “Do they have Stan?” I asked.

  She sat up in her chair, becoming overly attentive to my voice. “Yes.”

  “And Rory?”

  “The police have him too. They found his car at a bar a few towns over, where a bunch of people had seen him with Barbie. The police want to speak to you, but I told them you weren't ready.”

  “I am now. I want that coward to pay for shooting Bobby in the back. And . . .” I didn't know what I wanted for Rory. I knew his brother's death due to his cowardly actions would be a level of incomprehensible hell.

  “Okay. Well, I'll call them later. It's a mess, Lilly, and I think you should take it easy. The doctor says you need a lot of rest. With the bleeding so early on, you have to be cautious.”

  “I'm not worried about this baby,” I said stubbornly. “She's got Bobby in her.”

  “She?” Julia asked.

  “She,” I confirmed.

  Julia nodded in concession. I don't why I always referred to the unborn child as her. But I had a certainty from the start. Maybe Bobby whispered it to me in my dreams. I think that’s why I was also sure she would be alright.

  “What about mom?”

  “She's with dad. He can't travel, but she's been driving me crazy, calling the hotel every night.”

  “Is she mad?”

  “Mad?” Julia rubbed her furrowed brow, exasperated. “God Lilly, we're past mad. Mom's devastated. She was close to their parents and we just lost them a few years ago. And now? This whole thing is just . . .” she shook her head, and looked out the window, biting her lip to hold her composure.

  I watched my sister, sometimes as hard as stone, grow weary. And I felt compelled to ask her about the thing we silently agreed to never discuss. The thing that never happened. “Julia?”

  “Mmmhmm,” she replied, keeping her eyes affixed on the window.

  “When you walked in on us before the wedding...why did you...why didn't you stop me from marrying Rory?”

  She shook her head subtly and sighed mercifully. “Lilly, Bobby was a playboy. He wasn't serious. You were young and naive. I thought you were testing the waters. Getting a taste of the other Lightly boy. The one who everyone wanted a taste of. Growing up the way you three did, I thought it was only natural you might have been curious . . . Bobby back then, he would have broken your heart. He would have ruined you. He wasn’t ready to share a life with someone. Rory made sense. He was the safe bet. He was ready to settle down. He had the job and the plans. He would take care of you.”

  Never had the safe bet been more dangerous.

  She leaned forward, making sure to get her plea across. At some point, I think she stopped trying to convince me, and was trying to justify her actions to herself, knowing she was complicit in helping her little sister weave the grandest of lies.

  “You never said you didn't want to. It was your decision to make, not mine. It was my job to get you down the aisle. There was no time to work out wedding jitters or curiosity. It was my job to make the decision to leave hard. If you wanted it, I mean really wanted it, it shouldn't have been so easy to stop you. Making a mistake shouldn't be so easy.”

  “Oh Julia,” I said ruefully, “making the mistake is the easy part.”

  She shook her head, and sat back in her chair, the conviction in her earlier defense dissipating into despair. “I didn't know,” she whispered under her breath.

  I let out a thin sigh. “Julia, it was serious . . . me and Bobby. It was so much more than a little fling.”

  She swallowed hard, and looked me in the eyes. “So tell me.”

  Julia and I never talked about boys or crushes. Never bonded over such things as some sisters do. She married when I was fourteen. And she went away to school when I was about eight. For the first time, I was able to share the story of the love of my life. Tur
n this dirty little secret into my truth. To speak of Bobby proudly and without shame or manufactured contempt. Tell the story to someone who knew him and wouldn’t judge him just based on one decision. It was agonizing, but it also made me feel Bobby's presence. When I had to stop, I stopped. When I had to cry, I cried. Sometimes she did, too. I got to see a side of my sister I had missed all these years.

  Julia had known the Lightly boys much of her life, too. Though she more often babysat them than socialized with them. Her pain was different; distant and vague. Dull. Not sharp and splintering like my pain. Her life hadn’t upended the way mine just had. I think she still thought of Bobby as a foolhardy boy, never having seen the man he had become. Nevertheless, the Lightly boys were golden. Full of so much promise. This was not how things were supposed to end for them. There was tragedy in that fact alone.

  Julia’s motherly instinct towards Bobby and me had been reinvigorated by this tragedy. It showed in the way she sat vigil by my bed. It showed in the way she began making arrangements for my hospital leave. She would make sure that our child and I would be safe. If Julia did anything well as a sister, it was taking care of business. She loved not with hugs but by being there when she was needed.

  When we were done, I could tell something weighed heavily in Julia's thoughts.

  “Bobby's funeral is tomorrow.”

  There are some things that even when you know they are coming, they still blindside you. Bobby's funeral was inevitable. But there was still some fantastical side of me that held on to some hope of magic. But the magic had died with Bobby.

  “Rory's out on bail. And he'll be there.”

  “I don't want to go,” I said. I didn't want to see Bobby like that. Bobby was burnt orange and blush sunsets on the lake. He was laughter so hard it hurt. He was the cool grass between my toes on a stifling day. He was homemade cherry pie. He was dancing barefoot on a creaky wood floor to an old record.

  He was not a funeral. He was not a corpse.

  Most importantly, I didn't want Bobby's funeral to be reduced to a spectacle. By now, everyone knew what had happened. How a quiet suburb in the Midwest had become the scene for illicit affairs, drunken car crashes and murder during a sweltering couple of days in mid-July.