So. S is for Sarah. She looks up and tries to smile. “Fine, Teresa, thanks.”
The other nurse hesitates, as though she’s not quite sure if she believes her, then nods. She walks past, too fast for me to catch any of the information on her ID badge, and sits behind a nearby computer. Lost in her data entry within seconds.
Sarah tries again. “It’s not about moving on, I don’t think. You’d know better than anyone that’s not really possible. It’s more like …”
She pauses and wrestles with something. In that pause I can hear everything around me, from the hush of the ductwork to the faint rustling of Gal’s and Mia’s clothes as they breathe. And this moment of clarity arrives, and the sounds from that day come back. Not the screams and the moaning, or the weeping of shattered parents and loved ones, but the regular sounds. Beeps from machines. The skkriik! of the mesh dividers between the trauma bays. The clicks and clunks of medical supplies on tables. The tearing of sterile packages. Urgent but calm voices. The voices of people whose job is to stitch the broken back together when the unthinkable happens.
“You were here,” I say. “Afterwards.”
Sarah nods. “All day and all night. We all stayed.”
They stayed. And were stained, too. And came back to this terrible, hopeful place, day after day.
“I didn’t know that.”
“God, there were so many kids. No one could leave. But it was too much. I asked for a transfer from the ER afterwards. And ended up here.”
“On this ward, of all places,” Mia says.
“With Jesse,” I say.
“We’re supposed to think of him as just another patient.”
“But he’s not.”
“Not even a little.”
Sarah fingers her ID badge, half obscuring her photo and other information. She looks at me and smiles, her eyes squinching up, trapping the overhead lights. She tilts her head down the hallway, lifting her chin toward the security guy, who’s finished his coffee. He’s popped the dark brown lid from the maroon paper cup and is looking into the bottom like he can refill it if only he thinks about it hard enough.
“It’s too bad, really,” Sarah says.
“I’m sorry?” I ask.
“That I can’t help you. That I certainly can’t tell you he always leaves about five minutes after finishing his coffee,” Sarah says. “Magazine in hand. Post-colic thing, I imagine.”
“Post what?” Mia asks.
“Colic,” Sarah repeats patiently. “Of the colon.”
“He has to take a crap,” I say. Mia chuckles. Jesse would call it something else. Gotta go to the shitter, Dills. The Thunder Jug. Drop the kids off at the pool. If I’m not back in ten minutes, wait longer. Ha ha.
Sure enough, a short while later, the guard is fidgeting in his seat. He gets up from the chair and hitches his utility belt higher, his flashlight and handcuffs and pepper spray clicking. He picks up his magazine and folds it in half, tucking it under his arm. Yawns. Starts walking. He passes by and nods at us, just another family seeing just another patient. One of a thousand faceless people hoping to get better.
Sarah looks at the watch on her scrubs and declares she has to go check something. She rises and stands next to her colleague, pointing out something on the computer screen. Her back to us.
Permission, kind of.
“Dills, go,” Mia whispers, gently pushing me toward Jesse’s room. “We’ll wait.”
GOODBYE
There are two beds in the room. Only one of them is occupied. Jesse’s army pension paying for semi-private, but the hospital unwilling to fill the other bed. Even with another paying customer. Forcing that person to recover next to a mass murderer. Someone with loved ones who’d visit. Where would they stand? Where will I stand?
I close the door behind me and move deeper into the room, forcing myself to walk rather than run. The horizontal blinds on the window are partially closed. The divider between the beds is drawn partway, obscuring Jesse’s bed from the hall, the curtain’s gaudy peach and dusty blue further dimming the light into a depressing blush. The smell is depressing, too. A stale mix of floor wax, disinfecting agents, hand sanitizer, urine, and something dank underneath it all. There is a rhythmic sound of air moving in and out. Ventilator. My anticipation fades, the smells and sights and sounds unexpectedly bringing me lower.
I step past the divider.
You’re here. Finally.
“I’m here, Jesse.”
My voice is barely a whisper. Not to be stealthy, or because of that strange reverence you adopt when you encounter sleeping people in hospitals. My throat has constricted itself. There is truth to what people say when you’re about to witness the horrific:
Prepare for the change.
Nothing can prepare you.
You might not know the person in front of you.
This is not Jesse. Jesse is a stocky guy, of a height you’d forget but strapped in muscles you’d remember. He takes a hard life seriously. He kept his form after leaving the military. He stayed ready. I’m supposed to be looking at hands that can skin a bush rabbit without a knife. Baseball forearms. A body as thick and cut as a fighting dog’s. Not an ounce of fat anywhere. Mom will joke with him about it, pinching her own waist and trying to get a grip on his. “You can have some of mine,” she’ll say. He’ll grab her close and kiss her neck, making her squirm but also giving her more chances to try to grab his skin. “You know I love every inch and pound of you,” he’ll say before she slaps him and tells him never to be so specific about a girl’s weight. Mom never refers to herself or other women as girls, only women. But she lets herself think of herself as one around him.
This is someone else. Under the thin sheet I can see that there’s nothing left. A skeleton wrapped in paper-thin skin, faintly yellowing. A couple of taped-down IV tubes look like they have barely enough vein and flesh to be secured to.
And this face isn’t Jesse’s. It isn’t anyone’s. It’s a mess of cavities and pits and scars where his smiles and frowns and laughter used to live. Holdout wounds that have refused to heal. No mouth. No nose. Eyes sutured closed. A breathing tube sewn into his throat, space-age whites and blues against the jaundice of his face. A couple of small bandages are stuck at the top and bottom of what’s left. All this damage by his own hand as the police closed in. He kept one round for himself. Maybe the monster everyone thinks he is.
Stay. Please.
His voice is pleading, strained, like he’s worried that my heart will propel me out of here.
I stay. I stand for a long time, listening to the air get pushed into him and drawn out again. Watching the machines and their polite LED lights. Tracking where all the cords and tubes go. Trying to decipher the mystery numbers and bars and lines on all those screens. Do they predict how long he’ll hold on? Ten minutes? Thirty? A week?
All this time I’ve been holding on to nothing. Like a disappearing breath in the cold. I’ve been cultivating his voice in my head and his memories in my brain and the idea of what he still might be. But this is not someone who intends to wake up. There’s nothing left to support a life. Nothing to recover. No justice. Not even a trial, a formal pageant in advance of a preordained verdict. No chance at redemption, even for the only person who refuses to hate him. Restoration. Reconciliation.
“You never meant to come home, did you?”
My voice sounds like I’ve swallowed a handful of sand. Why did I say that? As though Jesse could walk out. From the moment I saw his ruined face and wasted body, I knew my plan had to change. There can be only one destination for all of this. It was supposed to be simple. But all my simplest hopes are gone.
No regrets, kiddo. That’s what he should be saying to me right now. He hates dwelling on things. He taught me about survival but he never told war stories. He didn’t have to. I read online about where his unit was deployed, one of the most notorious cities in Iraq and the toughest valley in Afghanistan. They humped their gear and their hate all
over hell. They spilled blood, had theirs spilled. He had to survive somehow.
I now see so clearly that when Jesse took me into the woods, it was more about movement than about being in the outdoors. “Keep moving. You can’t kill what you can’t hit,” he told me. Hunting another way to keep form. To stay alive. On that one hunting trip, he taught me how to use a knife to dress a small deer. There was so much blood, but his expression remained calm. “Don’t focus on the mess,” he said. “Focus on the job. There will always be blood.”
“So what happened, then?” I say. “If you had it all figured out, how could you —”
I stop. Of course I do. Kill all those innocent people are the words that usually come next. Unlike those who weren’t there, I can’t say them so easily. The faces arrive too quickly when I try. A best friend named Ethan who sat next to me in every class we shared. Teachers. Kids whose names I only know from the news. I feel bad about that, even though they were in other classes, other grades.
“Why did you come to my classroom first?”
This is the first time I’ve ever said those words out loud. My next question should be Did you want to hurt me? but I won’t ask it.
I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.
I know what the first part is. It’s a non-apology, where you say sorry but don’t say why. Vague. Dismissive. And the next part? “Playing the memory card,” Mom calls it. What happened? Do you mean before, Jesse? After? During? To you as a person? To the dead? To those who survived and have to live with Windsor every day? Probably forever?
“That’s it? That’s all I get?”
Nothing.
“Why did you ask me to come?”
Still nothing.
And so I get mad.
No, Jesse, I think. Not after months of defending you. Reminding everyone of the way you were. Holding on to the old you, who loved me and helped me learn about things and always had an answer. Not after driving all this way because you asked me to, only to find that you aren’t you anymore. That nothing more will happen because you’ve given up.
I feel my hands grip the base of the bed, hard enough to be painful. I want to hit something.
“You don’t need me.”
My voice is no longer constricted, but low and hard. You do that to deliver the truth, even when it’s the toughest kind. Jesse taught me that. “Yelling and screaming and carrying on are tools of the weak,” he said. “Make them listen to you.” It has to be that way because of what has to happen next. What I have to do. What he needs to hear.
“I’m done, Jesse. Don’t talk to me anymore.”
I reach into my pocket. I have to dig deep. I take out my great-grandpa Gene’s watch, the braided lanyard making reassuring pressure points against my fingers. I unravel the braid, the strands unweaving into a kinked spray of olive-green paracord, until the watch is released. The watch goes back into my pocket. Its cracked crystal face is cool through the thin fabric. I clench the loose strands of paracord in my fist before tossing them onto the bed beside Jesse’s withered leg.
My heart wants me to turn away and move back into the hallway. But I can’t. For a long moment I don’t understand why. Then something inside twinges about that sad little nest of paracord. It sits wrong, incomplete, on the bed and inside me. I pick it up and find I can walk out. But I don’t take it with me. I drop it into the garbage on my way out. It hisses into the small white bag lining the bin and then I’m back in the hallway. I don’t look back.
ARRANGED
Teresa, the other nurse, is in the hall when I emerge from Jesse’s room. She glances at the clock on the wall and says something to me, but I don’t hear her. I feel like I’m in a cocoon, my thoughts providing noise cancellation for everything else. I can feel myself looking dumbly at her. She smiles and points at my wrist. The bandage covering the last spots of PI rash has flapped loose. She motions me to follow her down the hall and takes me to a supply cart around a corner. She grabs some gauze and tape and an irrigation syringe and sits me on a gurney. Physically. Two hands on my shoulders. But I don’t want to sit. I want to get back to Mia and Gal and get away from here.
The sound comes back as she removes my dressing. She’s saying something about infection. “It’ll just take a sec, hon.”
“No, they’re waiting for me.”
Teresa looks at her watch. Frowns. I don’t like that frown. Why the urgency? I get up, pushing her restraining hand away.
“Please sit. I don’t want —”
“I have to go.”
When I round the corner, there is a constellation of flashes, spotting my vision. Cameras? A bunch of voices swell and there is movement beyond the orange spots burned into my retina. I’m surrounded. Reporters and photographers. Normal-looking people holding cameras and phones and shouting questions at me. Shouting my own name at me. How did they get that? No one knows I’m here. More flashes. One constant bright light. That must be a video camera. I try to look beyond the gaggle for Mia and Gal, but I can’t find them.
I feel a firm hand holding my bicep and trying to guide me. I’m annoyed — what’s with everyone trying to move me where they think I should be going? — but the flash of purple in my peripheral vision feels familiar. Purple scrubs. Sarah. She leans in and speaks loudly in my ear. Says Teresa’s name and drops an F-bomb and tells me she didn’t know the media had been called. She moves toward a glassed-in room across the hall and slides open the door. All the blinds are drawn. Gal and Mia are inside.
One of the photographers tries to get an arm in and snap some blind photos, but Gal grabs the arm and slams it upward. The camera doesn’t break, but there’s a squeal of pain from outside. The arm and camera pull back.
Sarah slides the door closed and leans against it. “Shit.”
Mia rushes over and gives me a great big hug. Doesn’t speak, just holds on like there’s no one else in the room. Gal and Sarah don’t say anything either. I can hear the clamour outside. The reporters are actually yelling questions through the sliding glass door.
“They won’t come in,” Sarah says. “Privacy laws. It’s illegal to open a closed hospital door without permission.”
“What’s going on?” I ask. “Why are those —”
“The other nurse called them while you were with Jesse,” Mia says.
“I’m so sorry,” Sarah says. “Teresa must’ve figured she could make a few bucks.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re the Windsor Shooter’s son,” Sarah says, “and you came here. That doesn’t happen every day.”
“Stepson,” I say.
“Still …”
Sarah doesn’t finish the thought, but of course she doesn’t have to. My presence is unusual. I might’ve been avoiding it all summer, but for everyone else it’s an exciting development in a near-dead story. Everyone gave up on Jesse a long time ago.
“That doesn’t make what she did all right,” Mia says.
“Of course it doesn’t. I’m sorry,” Sarah says again.
“You don’t need to apologize,” I tell her. “Thanks for helping me.”
“Did it help? Your visit, I mean?”
“I don’t know yet. It wasn’t what I expected.” She nods.
“That’s not unusual on this floor.”
“And thanks for this, too. Helping all of us.”
“It’s the least I can do. I feel terrible. We take privacy so seriously.” She sighs. “Or we’re supposed to, anyway.”
“Will you get in trouble for this?” I ask.
“Probably not. Well, maybe. But I’ll be fine. What do I pay union dues for if not for situations like this, right?” She laughs for a split second before cutting herself off. Shakes her head as though she can’t believe that came out of her in this moment. Adrenalin. I get it.
“How do we get out?” Gal asks.
Sarah moves past us and to the back of the room. Waves her ID badge in front of a small, nondescript box on the wall. The back wall, an
other sliding door, opens with a hiss. “Go this way. There’s an elevator down the hall that can take you to the parking garage.”
“What about the reporters?” Mia asks.
“This area is staff only. It’s how patients from the different floors get moved around for tests, surgery, that kind of thing. No one will hassle you.”
Gal moves into the hallway. I almost pause to thank Sarah again and to wish her well, but Mia takes my hand and leads me out before I can. More leading when I’m not sure I want to be led. But I let her. The door slides closed behind us.
The ride down to the parking garage feels slow, like an hour passes before the doors open into the exhaust-smelling gloom. I worry about reporters staking out the car, but no one’s around when we get there. Gal gets out his keys and clicks open the doors as soon as the car comes into view. The horn beeps and the yellow hazards flash in the low fluorescent lighting. The car next to ours is still warm, clicking and muttering as its engine cools down.
Inside Gal’s car we sit and stare out the front windshield. No speaking. No need to. We can hear our breathing. You forget about real silence until you find it again. Everywhere else is noise and motion.
TOLD
It’s so bright outside. Emerging from the parking garage to the main parking lot feels like I’m seeing sunlight for the first time. Gal pulls a warped pair of sunglasses from behind the sunshade and puts them on, and Mia draws a grubby hat down low. It’s creased and folded, and I wonder how long it’s been in Gal’s footwell. There’s nothing for me. All I can do is hold my hand up to shield my eyes.
We leave the hospital grounds without incident. All seems normal. No TV-satellite trucks fringe every foot of the perimeter, no police cruisers block the entrances and exits, no family cars are parked at panicked, crazy angles. Not like last time, when Mom was finally allowed to drive me home. I look back at the building, brilliant white against the sky, and realize for the first time that Jesse would’ve already been there as I was leaving. He tried to kill himself precisely forty-nine minutes after the first shots were fired. Fo-wer-niner mikes after the first rounds went downrange, he’d say, exaggerating the words. Fo-wer for four. Niner for nine. Mikes for minutes. To sound clearer on a military radio. It was hours before things were settled and documented and straightened out enough to let the survivors leave, so he was definitely there. Rushed in on a gurney like all the others. Alive and worth saving. His own piece of the commotion he created. I wonder sometimes how he could’ve messed up his own death. He should have known better, right?
Nothing but Life Page 16
