by Melissa Yi
But by the time I busted out of the room, they’d drag me right back to this chair. Being cops and all.
So I told them the story. Over and over. And over. And over. And over. Until my throat chafed and my vision blurred, but I kept answering until they finally fell silent.
“Now can I see him?”
They conferred for a while before they lifted their heads and said one word. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 46
Hospitals no longer felt like a safe place to me. They felt like irrational, chaotic buildings that could transform into makeshift prisons at any time.
Through the tank’s windows, I spotted patients lolling in the ER waiting room, playing on their phones or leaning on each other to try and sleep. UCH had mounted its Christmas decorations, too: giant, tinseled candy canes battling it out on the wall above patient registration.
I wanted to scream at them, This could end any second. Don’t you know that?
The tank pulled up right beside the building, lights flashing, engine still running, and I thought, Good. Announce our presence. Let me through.
I clambered out of the tank after the female officer, still in a mini pedestrian convoy. We paused at the back door while the black officer punched in the entrance code. Because it was the middle of the night, we had to cut through the University College emergency department. Ambulances flashed their lights around us. It was cold enough in mid-November that my running shoes crunched in the snow and my breath coalesced faintly in the air.
I used to joke with Kevin that I was a dragon when I made “smoke” like that.
I shivered. I still had that scratchy wool blanket around my shoulders, but my jacket, my boots, my backpack, and probably my phone were all back at St. Joe’s. I’d fled in the night like a refugee. The officers had offered me a jacket, but just like denying myself food and water, I’d turned down the coat.
They opened the door and waited for me to enter.
I froze.
My heart wanted to head straight for Tucker, but my body refused to cross the threshold.
I glanced over my shoulder, trying to see the sky, trying to suck the November air into my lungs, in case I didn’t make it out again this time. The hospital had built some sort of covering over the entrance, to protect people from the snow and rain, but further in the distance, I saw streetlights.
My breath was coming short and fast.
The female officer pressed her hand on my shoulder in silent understanding. She probably saw PTSD all the time. Hell, maybe she had it herself.
“You don’t have to go in there. Your family wants to see you,” said the green-eyed officer. “Your mother…”
I could just imagine Mom melting down, my dad trying to hold it together, and Kevin wrapping himself around me like a barnacle while Ryan crushed me in his embrace, saying nothing, just smelling like his leather jacket and himself.
I wanted to see them all. I loved them so much.
But one man had thrown down for me, had stood in the lion’s mouth with me, and he was the closest to death. I had to see this through.
“I’ll go in with you,” said the female officer, and I nodded. If her uniform and gun could get me in any quicker than my badge, I was all for it.
“We’re all coming with you,” said another voice behind me, and I nodded again. The more firepower, the better.
“I love you,” I said to Tucker, in my head. It might have been out loud, I don’t know. But it was my way of praying, as I stepped onto the rubber mat and stomped the crust of snow off my shoes. Somehow, that bit of normalcy made me feel better, as did the fact that I had to pull off my fogged-up glasses.
Even with my myopic vision, I could tell people were watching us march in. Not just the stretcher patients lined up inside the hallway with paramedics, waiting to be unloaded, as well as the unlucky folks trying to sleep in the corridor, but the staff wearing uniforms with their names embroidered across their hearts.
We probably looked like something out of the Matrix. They stormed in, a mass of black uniforms and crackling radios. Their boots thumped on the floor. Their billy clubs swung with every step. Each of them armed and dangerous.
“It’s Hope Sze,” said a short, bespectacled brown guy in blue scrubs.
I shoved my own, barely-useable glasses back on. His badge said “Marco” and he’d pasted a Peanuts sticker beside his picture, but I was pretty sure I’d never seen him before in my life.
Marco started a slow clap.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
I stared at his hands, rhythmically striking each other, and gazed up at his unfamiliar face, my eyebrows crocheted in confusion.
A black woman in turquoise scrubs joined in. The secretary whistled. And suddenly everyone in the whole department started to applaud, to laugh, to yell, “Hope, Hope, Hope, Hope, Hope!” and bang on the desks and stamp their feet.
Some of the patients on the stretchers joined in. At least one toothless man who’d barely managed to shave his face shook his bed rails, although I couldn’t tell if it was in approval or an escape attempt.
Even a few officers laughed before the black officer made a “turn it down” gesture, and they subsided, still grinning at me.
Tucker would have loved this. I could picture him bowing at them. He’d shout, “Merci! Gracias! Danke! Obrigato! Xiè xie! Mm goy! Thank you, and good night!” Milking it. Feasting on it.
He loved the limelight.
Damn it. I was talking about him in the past tense like he was dead. As far as I knew, he wasn’t dead. Yet.
I couldn’t bring myself to smile at them, but I waved. I guess that’s why the Queen likes waving so much: acknowledgement without commitment. Then I kept walking. If they led me to the morgue, I could figure it out.
Instead, they steered me toward a bank of elevators and pressed the button for the tenth floor. We were in the big times now. St. Joe’s doesn’t even have a tenth floor. And I’m pretty sure the morgue would be in the basement.
So Tucker was still alive. Right?
But as we shuffled our way into the elevator, jockeying for position, I bit my tongue and closed my eyes. I couldn’t count on anything. Even if he died, they might not ship him down to the morgue right away. We sometimes keep the deceased in the emerg for a few hours, to allow family to visit, because it’s too traumatic for them to go down to the morgue, and the funeral home won’t necessarily make a stat pickup in the middle of the night.
So Tucker might be in a room. Even if he was dead.
I watched the white lights of the elevator slowly, slowly mount toward number ten.
Would they hold an ICU bed for him? Would they have kicked him out already, to make room for the next casualty? Or would this be their version of a hero’s welcome, that they kept him in his bed for me and let me say goodbye here, instead of surrounded by cold steel and other dead bodies?
At the tenth floor, the door paused before it opened. I sprang toward it, but the officers wanted to check the hall before they beckoned me out.
Finally, our small army stood in front of the locked, frosted glass intensive care doors. The black guy negotiated at the speaker until someone consented to release the automatic doors for us.
My footsteps faltered on the rubber mat outside the ICU.
Don’t die, Tucker. God damn it. Don’t die. I need you.
And then it was like I could hear Tucker’s voice in my head, replying to me. He who has a ‘why’ to live will survive almost any ‘how.’
Tucker had read this book by Viktor Frankl. He even brought the book to FMC to show me, but I wasn’t that interested in reading about Nazi inhumanity to man. No offence, just that I was already burned out by all the murders, and Tori ended up taking the book home instead. Still, Tucker had said, “You gotta read it next, Hope. It’ll help you the next time you run into a murderer. I mean, you’ve been through hell, but not concentration camps, you know what I mean? And if you’ve got a reason to live, you’ll survive almost any how.�
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Tucker understood what it meant to have hope. And if he made it, he could have Hope, too, if you know what I mean.
“He’s here,” said the green-eyed officer, pointing to a room on the right, and I started to run.
I detected a white, bedridden shape through the frosted glass.
“Don’t,” said the female officer, but I was already leaping onto the mat to make the individual room door fly open. I didn’t care that this was the ICU, and all the other patients were asleep, whether real or artificial rest, with multiple lines sprouting out of their limbs and more leading out of orifices. I didn’t care that the nurses were quietly writing notes on their patients, with only small, single lights illuminating their work stations.
This was my man. He was mine. And even if he was dead, I’d crawl right into bed with him and beg him to take me with him.
The door yawned open.
Maybe that mound in the bed was Tucker. It could be him, was it him, the hair was squashed and looked too dark, the eyes were closed—
—but the monitor was on and his vitals were flashing: 76, 98%, 22, 107/70.
“Tucker,” I said. I wouldn’t believe it until I knew for sure it was him. Would they put another body in there, to pose as him, so that I wouldn’t go postal and burn down the ICU?
His eyelids flickered. They didn’t open, but they moved. I felt dizzy. He was intubated. He couldn’t talk with the tube in his throat. But his chest rose and fell steadily. That was a good sign, right?
“Tucker,” I said again, and this time, I climbed on the bed.
Things started beeping. His IV, probably. That’s one of the first to get kinked. The O2 sat probe gets knocked off pretty easily. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d dislodged some of his heart monitor leads.
His face furrowed. His eyebrows and his eyelids, like he was irritated in his artificial sleep.
I didn’t care. My heart was starting to beat again, for real. He was alive. Alive. Alive-o.
He opened his eyes.
I opened my mouth.
I’m sure that I smelled absolutely putrid. Like unwashed hair and stale breath and Manouchka’s blood and Bastard’s remnant stink.
But I kissed him anyway, as best I could, around the tube. Which meant that I kissed him beside the tube. Just a corner of his lips. But enough.
His lips stirred faintly under mine, a twitch barely signaling life, and that would have broken my heart if I hadn’t been thinking, He’s alive! He’s ALIVE!
I still didn’t know what had happened to him, where he’d been shot, what surgery they’d put him through, but I knew he’d survived this long. He’d made it through the golden hour and come out on the other side. And he was young and healthy.
“I love you, Tucker,” I whispered against his lips.
“Love. You.” I felt, more than heard, the shape of his words. His breath smelled like an old, dank cave, but I didn’t care. He still loved me!
His nurse came in the room, but she didn’t say anything. She watched us.
I tried to sit up.
His arms jerked into a hug around me, so I stayed where I was and murmured in his ear, “You’re my hero.”
He grunted. It sounded like a disagreement, but at this point, I didn’t care. I was so happy that he was alive.
“We made it. We’re alive,” I couldn’t help saying out loud.
Tucker’s eyes flickered again. His lips shaped one word. I thought he was saying, “You.”
“Yes. I’m alive. Thanks to you.”
His lips pursed again. I still thought he said, “You.”
I figured he was trying to return the compliment, so I nodded and smiled.
His limbs stiffened. He croaked something that still resembled a contradiction.
“You’re alive,” I said, puzzled.
He turned his head away from me.
My stomach plummeted. Maybe I was confused about what he was saying. The tube was in the way, blocking his larynx, but his body language was...not what I was expecting.
His nurse stepped forward. “He really shouldn’t talk so much. And he needs to be alone.”
Tucker’s arms seized around me again. “He wants me to stay,” I said, above the beeping machines. “I’ll fix his monitor and his sat.”
“We can’t have people lying in bed together in the unit,” she said.
Why not? It would probably make them heal faster than isolating them. We have kangaroo touch for babies. Why don’t we have anything for grown-ups? Maybe I was on to something here! “Touch helps babies,” I said.
The corners of her mouth jerked, but she fought back the smile and said, “Five minutes.”
I bumped my forehead against Tucker’s. He’d already closed his eyes. He must’ve been feeling pretty raunchy. And in fact, I was feeling a little exhausted myself.
That was the last thing I remembered before the nurse tapped me on the shoulder.
I opened my sleep-crusted eyes. Tucker had drifted back into real or drug-induced sleep, so I peeled his arm off of me, even though his eyebrows flickered and he grunted. I kissed him on the cheek and said, “I’ll stick around as much as I can. I love you.” Now that I’d started saying it, I couldn’t stop.
Just before I stepped out the door, I glanced backward, but there wasn’t much to see. His nurse redid his wires and tweaked his blankets over his shoulders with a certain fussiness that broadcasted, There. Now that’s better.
I still felt a little uneasy, but put it down to Tucker being near death and on drugs. He still loved me. He even said so.
Now I just had to tell Ryan.
CHAPTER 47
The officers brought me right to my apartment. I mean, up the elevator and everything. They checked every room before giving me the all-clear. The female officer offered to stay, but I was too busy getting buried by my family, who had the key to my place and had been making bone soup, from the smell of it.
“We were waiting for you!” my mother yelled, even as she and my dad hugged me.
“I know,” I said.
Kevin stood back for a second before he locked himself around the side of my body. He was so tall now that his face was in my chest, and the top of his head almost reached my shoulder. I looked at him and silently marvelled at how much he seemed to grow between visits. The last year or two, his baby teeth had fallen out. Now he was basically his own little man.
To think how close I came to missing him growing up.
I patted his hair. I love his hair, spiky and springy. Real Chinese hair: if you cut it, it sticks straight up, like mini prongs into your palm. The way hair should be, I thought, remembering how I’d stroked Ryan’s hair, just before I moved my head in real time and Ryan’s eyes and mine locked.
He looked drawn. I’d never seen him like that before. I’d seen him in university after all-nighters, occasionally propped up by Coke or Red Bull. I’d seen him sleepy after a night of marathon sex. But I’d never seen him look like some of his life force had been sucked out.
Out of all the people surrounding the building, my beloveds who’d served by standing and waiting, he was the one who’d best understood that I might die in there.
Kevin was still too young. My dad played everything close to his chest. And my mom…my mom lingered in her own protective bubble, obsessing about recipes and the best way to arrange her junk, and so not too worried.
But Ryan knew. He’d known that I was holed up with Tucker and that he and I might never see each other again.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. I know it sounds funny, but Anne Lamott once wrote that for a true believer, death is just “a major change in address.” I guess in the back of my mind, I thought that Ryan’s super faith might protect him from despair.
Just looking at him, I knew it hadn’t.
But he stared at me, with his liquid, nearly-black eyes, and I mouthed, “I love you, Ry.”
The right corner of his mouth shaped a faint smile before he whispered it
back to me.
Did I feel bad, telling two different men that I loved them?
A little, since I hadn’t explained the full picture to either of them. But I also knew that if a meteor struck me down right now, I’d rather go out with them both knowing how I felt than with my eternal dithering. (Every other woman on the planet probably hated me even more, like I was trying to grab two stuffed animals at the carnival instead of one, but tant pis. I wasn’t living my life for anyone else for one more second.)
“What was it like in there?” said Kevin, pulling his head back so he could watch my face.
“Scary,” I said, without thinking.
“Really? Like, the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”
“Yeah.” I’d have to say so. One woman told me, after delivering her baby, that labour wasn’t so bad because you could see the end of it, and it served a purpose. But being held hostage was the opposite: no end in sight, and no real purpose. We’d never even found Casey Assim. Speaking of which...“What happened to Casey Assim?”
“She’s safe,” said Ryan. “She came to St. Joe’s to deliver, but as soon as they realized what was going on, they moved her out, to another hospital. She delivered a baby boy.”
How strange. Bastard had been right about all those details, and yet so insane. Was she really the fully-dilated woman Stan had intended to deliver?
I was too tired to figure it out now.
I let my family hug me. Ryan moved closer, and I snuck a hand out to hold his. He squeezed so hard that I thought he’d crack my metacarpals, and I didn’t care. I wanted him to.
He was mine.
CHAPTER 48
Later, after I choked down a bit of bone soup, drank enough water to flood Montreal, and savoured an orange, Ryan drew me into the living room and said, “Can you talk about what happened in there?”
“Sure,” I said, although my brain stalled. I should tell him about Bastard, but he also needed to know about Tucker. “I guess I’ll stick to the most important bits.”
