The Last Hour

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  “Sure,” he replied. “Or I can find out where they towed the car, I bet your phone’s in there.”

  I sniffed. “That’d be great. I need to let Dick Elmore know about the accident, and a couple other people.”

  “Pretty sure Smalls would have told him,” he replied.

  And so we all walked the two blocks to the hotel. For a few minutes, Michael Sherman put up half of a fight about getting a room on their own, not wanting to take charity. I understood. Ray would have felt the same way. But I grabbed his upper arm and said, “If you’re worried about it, you can pay Julia back later. But right now Ray needs you close by, and cheap hotels aren’t going to be easy to come by anywhere within an hour’s drive. Please?”

  Julia had more money than God; in fact, she had more money than our Dad did, and he’d inherited a lot. And while I knew she gave literally millions of dollars on the charities she was involved with, there was plenty more where that came from. They could afford to buy the hotel we were walking to, and wouldn’t miss however much money Michael was stressed about.

  I didn’t want to deal with my parents right now. The last time I saw my father was at Alexandra’s wedding, and things between us had been awkward, tense. The last time we really talked was before the wedding, in March, after that awful night when he showed up at the condo by surprise.

  We ended up getting together for lunch the next day, while Ray was off with Major Elmore. Dad met me at the Thai restaurant just around the corner from the condo.

  As we sat down, he said, “I’d like to apologize for last night. I was in shock when Ray came into the condo, and I reacted badly.”

  I smiled at my father. “It’s all right.”

  “That said, Carrie, I’m deeply concerned about you. I think you’re making a mistake getting so deeply involved with Ray, given the circumstances.”

  “I understand that. But that topic isn’t open for discussion. I’m committed.”

  He nodded. “What are your long-term plans?”

  “It’s kind of difficult to make long-term plans at the moment. But ... I plan to marry him.”

  My father closed his eyes, then said, “And if he goes to prison?”

  “I’ll deal with it somehow. It’s not like I can’t support myself.”

  Of course, I was putting up a front. It was entirely possible I soon wouldn’t be able to support myself, at least not as a scientist. My father didn’t need to know that right then.

  “You understand I’m not comfortable with him living here.”

  Our conversation was interrupted when the food arrived, so I didn’t answer right away. But once the waitress had gone, I said, “I’ll be clear, Father. I truly appreciate you letting me live in the condo. Obviously, on my salary, I’d never be able to afford it. But I don’t care if I have to rent an eight hundred dollar studio with gang shootings in the neighborhood; I’m living with Ray. Either you accept that, or you let me know, and I’ll find someplace else to live. I’m not a child. I won’t be treated as one. If you want to let me live in the condo, there can be no strings attached.”

  He grimaced then took a bite of his food. Finally, after a long and uncomfortable pause, he said, “I’ll accept it, even if I don’t like it. I won’t have my daughter living in some place that isn’t safe.”

  And that was the end of the conversation.

  My parents have, in some ways, always been fascinating to me. Overbearing, too controlling. There’s no question that they love us, but with my mother’s mental health problems and my father’s cold demeanor, it’s a wonder we’ve turned out as well as we have. My mother used to say the most horrible things to all of us, and it took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t out of hate. Or rather, it wasn’t out of hatred toward us ... it was her own self-hatred that fueled the things she would do. But my Dad ... he was tougher to understand. Withdrawn, isolated, it was often nearly impossible to know what he thought. Half of me was afraid that when they arrived at the hotel, I would hear some version of I told you so from him, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop myself from hitting him if that happened.

  When we got to the hotel, I just sat down on a chair in the lobby and leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes. Dylan and Alexandra took care of getting us checked in. I was feeling queasy again, my stomach doing slow cartwheels, my head feeling swollen. If Ray had been here, he’d have said my head was like Doctor Who’s Tardis: bigger on the inside than the outside. The thought made my eyes prick with tears.

  “Carrie? Come on, we got the rooms set. Let’s get you upstairs.” I opened my eyes. Dylan was standing there. My vision was fuzzy.

  “Sorry,” I said, my voice almost at a whisper. “I can’t even keep my eyes open.”

  He held out his hand and pulled me to my feet. I was so tired I overcompensated and stumbled, and Dylan slipped an arm around my waist and held me up. It was probably pretty comical looking. Dylan’s not short, but next to me he looks it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

  We rode up the elevator in silence. Michael and Kate went in through one door, and I followed Dylan, Alexandra and Jessica into another. It was a large suite on the top floor, with several bedrooms. Jessica stumbled away into one of the rooms.

  “Thank you,” I said to Dylan. “I’m a mess.”

  “Get some rest.”

  “I’m setting the alarm for 5. Don’t let me sleep any later than that. Please?”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll make sure.”

  I collapsed on the bed without getting out of my clothes. I rolled on my side, and half expected Ray to be there. He wasn’t. And for the first time since I was a child, I cried myself into a broken, troubled sleep.

  At one point I stirred in the darkness, and I could hear voices, my parents, Julia, Dylan, arguing. I drifted away, Julia’s voice still in my ears, and then I found myself sitting in the grass on the edge of the Potomac River. I recognized the spot, not far from the Lincoln Memorial, where Ray and I picnicked just a few weeks ago. The sun was shining down, and I felt warm where it touched my skin.

  I was alone, but I could see people in the distance, on the Mall, and they were out of focus, colors wavering. One of them walked closer to me. And then he slowly came into focus. It was Ray.

  I stood and ran toward him. He smiled, and reached out his arms, and wrapped them around me.

  “I thought I lost you,” I said.

  He whispered in my ear, “You’ll never lose me completely. But maybe for a while. I think you’re dreaming right now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either. Just know ... I love you.”

  “I love you,” I replied. “I’ll never give up on you.”

  He sighed and held me closer, and we were dancing, slowly, beside the river. He whispered, “I don’t think I’m going to make it, Carrie. You’re going to have to go on without me.”

  What the fuck kind of dream was this?

  “I don’t want to,” I cried.

  “I know, babe. I know. But Sarah promised she’d be there. And you’ve got Julia and Alex. You’ll be okay.”

  Ray was starting to fade, right in my arms, and I started to sob. “Don’t go,” I whispered. I put my arms around him, as tight as I could, and they just sank through.

  “Ray! Wait, please! There’s something you need to know!”

  But he was gone. My vision swam, and I was falling, like the day we were skydiving. I could see the ground, far below, and the wind buffeted me. I reached out to take Ray’s hands, but they weren’t there, he wasn’t there, and skydiving without him was horrible. I was terrified, and I couldn’t find my parachute. The instructors were gone, and it was dark, and I sobbed, because I didn’t want to be alone, I didn’t want to lose him, I didn’t want to go on, but I had to. Everything spun and went black and I heard, as if it were my own voice, far away, screaming.

  Something to hope for (Ray)

  I was losing
strength.

  I was losing myself.

  What did she mean? There’s something you need to know. What was it? I didn’t know. As hard as I tried to stay with her, as hard as I tried to stay with her dream, and reassure her, I’d spun out of control and lost contact. The last I saw she was falling, and I was afraid I’d done it to her.

  I got up from the bed and stepped away from Carrie.

  Sarah had been right. I was making it worse. Every time I tried to push through and communicate, every time I tried to let her know how much I loved her, I just made it that much harder for Carrie.

  I needed to walk away and let her go. I needed to figure out what the hell was going on with me. I needed to know what to do next. And I didn’t have a clue.

  I walked out of the darkened room.

  In the living room, Ambassador Thompson sat, holding a glass of scotch. His hair was rumpled, a look of exhaustion and sadness on his face. He was speaking quietly with Julia and Crank. I didn’t know any of the three well. Crank and Julia were constantly on the road, and we’d only met twice, last New Year’s and then at Dylan’s wedding.

  Dylan sat on the arm of a chair, his arm casually thrown across Alex’s shoulder. He wasn’t looking so good either, and it bothered me how his eyes kept returning to the scotch. Dylan didn’t drink and came off the painkillers after his leg injury far sooner than he should have. But every time Carrie’s dad raised that drink to his lips, Dylan’s eyes followed it.

  I sighed. I’d have liked to shake him out of whatever dark space he was in. But I couldn’t, just like I couldn’t with Carrie. Because even though they hadn’t signed the death certificate and planted me in the ground yet, I was as good as dead. And the people I loved? They were going to be moving on without me.

  I waved at Daniel, who was standing, looking alone.

  “Come on, kid. Thanks for walking down here with me.”

  I couldn’t stay in here. Somehow, with Sarah gone, it was worse.

  Crazy as she was, she’d helped me stay balanced since the accident. I walked out of the hotel room and wandered down the hall, then found myself in the street, halfway between the hotel and the hospital. It was almost like I was being pulled, back toward my body, and I didn’t resist. Not after what I saw with Sarah. I didn’t know if there was a God. I didn’t know if there was an afterlife. I didn’t know shit. But I’d seen with my own eyes that she’d been sucking the life force right out of her own body.

  I was starting to worry about me and Daniel, and what all this meant.

  I didn’t know if there was any hope for either one of us, but if there was, I wasn’t going to make it any worse if I could avoid it.

  I felt the tension in my body ease as I got closer and closer to the hospital. It was dark out, and probably past midnight. Traffic was heavy, cars rolling by with music blasting, crowds of young people spilling out of the bars and restaurants onto the sidewalk. I walked up the center of the street, ignoring the traffic. A car drove right through me, and I felt nothing. The cars drove away, their red taillights receding in the distance, and just down the street from me I saw a crowd of people, mostly college students, laughing around the sidewalk tables of a bar.

  It was lonely out here. Even with the kid walking beside me, I felt hideously lonely. At one time I would have casually walked up to the people outside the bar. I’ve always been the guy with a ready smile and plenty to talk about, the guy who was comfortable walking up to a bunch of strangers and ending up making a lot of friends. I watched them now, and it was like there was a wall between us.

  I couldn’t help but ask myself the question. Did I believe that anything would come after this?

  Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn’t have believed what was happening to me now. And that begged all kinds of questions. I’d never been a believer. Not in any religion. I went to church as a kid, with my parents, but it was just a place we went. Rituals, a part of life, but what bearing did it have on reality? None that I could see. An afterlife? Laughable.

  Yet here I was. And this was nothing like any afterlife I’d ever heard of or thought about. As a matter of fact, the concept of wandering around like this forever, unable to touch anyone, unable to talk to anyone ... that was the stuff of nightmares and horror films. I’d last maybe a week or two before I turned into a gibbering maniac. If this is what death’s like it’s no wonder people were so horrified by the idea of ghosts. They were probably all nuts, wandering around haunting everyone they had loved.

  And what if it lasted even longer? What if I had to stay in this awful silence and watch Carrie grow old without me? What if I had to watch her die?

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, trying to shake the hideous, maudlin thoughts that were crowding my brain.

  One thing at a time. Right now I needed to focus on today, and the really big question ahead of me: was I even going to live another day?

  With the thought, I found myself in the intensive care unit, my body laid out before me. Daniel followed along. The kid had adjusted to our new reality a lot easier than I had.

  The rasp of the respirator. Inhale. Exhale. The cold, mechanical breath that was keeping my body alive. I studied the electronics tied to my body, the monitors that measured my pulse, my respiration, and my oxygen levels. It was easier to study those numbers than it was to look at my ravaged body.

  I shook my head, then wandered out into the hall. My room was two doors down from Sarah’s.

  A touch of fear tightened my chest as I approached her room. Had I done the right thing? Forcing her back into her body? I didn’t know. I didn’t have any way of knowing. It was just a wild-assed guess that might have been the wrong one entirely.

  She was laid out on the bed, connected to the monitors same as I had been, except that the tubes down her throat weren’t connected to a respirator. She was breathing on her own. I slumped against the wall, studying her. They’d covered her in a sheet up to her neck, but that didn’t disguise how grossly swollen her left leg was. When she woke up, her whole body would hurt like hell.

  Daniel sat in the chair next to her bed as I stood, studying her. The ward was quiet, visiting hours long since over, though I didn’t think that really applied to me. Sarah seriously looked like crap. The bruising all over the side of her face had taken on a purplish, almost black hue, yellowing just along the edges, and one of her eyes was swollen completely shut.

  As I watched, her lips moved, just a little. Her head moved, just a hair, and her lips moved again too. Like she was trying to talk. Like she was dreaming.

  I closed my eyes in relief. If she was dreaming in there, if she was trying to say something, then that meant, just maybe, she was going to be okay.

  “Ray?” Daniel said.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “I’m scared.”

  I opened my eyes and turned toward him, then put my hand on his shoulder. “I hear you. What do you say we walk down to the pediatric ICU and check in on you?”

  He nodded slowly, and we left Sarah and started walking.

  “Is Sarah going to die?” Daniel asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. I think she’s back in her body and recovering. Did you see how her lips were moving?”

  “Why did she attack that guy? It was scary.”

  I sighed. “Long story, kid. But the short version is, he’s kind of a bad guy, and he was being mean to Carrie. And well, you know, Carrie and her sisters stick together.”

  “Is what she did why all that stuff happened? The alarms?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

  We were out in the hall now. “Sarah took you to the pediatric ICU, right? Which way?”

  He pointed, and we walked.

  After a couple of moments, I said, “Listen, I don’t want you to be scared. I know this is freaky, and you miss your mom and dad. But I promise I’ll do whatever I can to help. We’ll stick together, okay?”

  “You’re not going to disappear? Like she did?”
<
br />   I didn’t want to lie to the kid. But how could I know the answer to that? I settled for a half-answer. “I don’t plan to go anywhere until I know you’re safe, kid. All right?”

  I swallowed after I said those words. My life was a web of promises, and it wouldn’t take much to pull the thread on them.

  You look like death (Carrie)

  I felt a hand shaking my shoulder, and I wanted it to go away, so I slapped it, then a little harder, then a voice said, “Carrie, wake up.”

  I mumbled something obscene, then felt, rather than saw, the light come on. It was red through my eyelids. “Leave me alone,” I groaned.

  “Oh, sis, if I did you’d be mad later.”

  I cracked my eyes open just a hair. My sister, Julia, was sitting on the edge of the bed, an unfamiliar bed, and she was touching my shoulder. For just a second, I was completely disoriented. What’s Julia doing here? Where is this?

  And then I remembered. The accident. Sarah, and Ray. And then I felt gorge rising up my throat, and I jumped up, untangling myself from the covers and ran for the bathroom. I just made it, throwing myself at the toilet, grabbing the bowl with both hands as a flood of stomach acid and bile came up my throat, burning my sinuses.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said, feeling tears at my eyes. Then Julia was at my shoulder again. “Carrie, are you okay?”

  I shook my head, the tears starting again, and then, I was vomiting again, out of control. Julia, practical as always, filled a glass with water, passed it to me as I finished and said, “Rinse.”

  I leaned back against the tub. Christ. I stank. My clothes were dirty, and I’d gotten puke on my sleeve. I took a mouthful of the water, sloshed it around in my mouth, and spit it out into the toilet. Julia flushed it, then sat down on the floor across from me.

  This was the first good look I’d had of her. She’d let her hair go natural again earlier this year, something I approved of wholeheartedly because she had lush, wavy hair I would have killed for. She looked tired, but not exhausted, and wore casual jeans and a black t-shirt.