My Soul to Keep

by Melanie Wells

  “I realize that. That’s not what I meant.”

  “Life doesn’t just go on without skipping a beat, you know. Some things demand immediate attention.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I just—”

  “What did you mean then, David? I don’t ask for these things to happen.” I took a breath and walked the length of the kitchen, trying to calm myself down. “Look, I’m not even really involved. I’m just some target in a gigantic video game. Running around hiding in manholes, trying not to get vaporized. You think I like all these bombs going off in my life?”

  He pushed his beer away. “No. I don’t. If I implied that to you ever, I’m sorry.”

  Neither of us said anything. David got up to leave. I stopped him and pulled him back to the bar stool. I sat him down and stared at him for a second while I forced myself into the penitence I knew he deserved, then hiked myself up on the bar and sat facing him, my bare feet on the worn knees of his chinos.

  “I owe you so many apologies, I don’t know where to begin.” I reached for both his hands. “I’m sorry. I am.” I shook my head and squeezed his hands, loving the feel of his fingers wrapping around mine. “But geez. After all this time …” I looked down and blinked away a tear. “Why do I always manage to feel attacked when there’s no enemy in the room?”

  He shrugged. “Who says there’s no enemy in the room?”

  I looked around, half expecting to see Peter Terry standing in the doorway, overcome suddenly with that eerie feeling you get when someone’s watching you.

  “You’re shooting at the wrong guy, sugar pea,” David was saying. “Next time, maybe you should find out if you’re dealing with friend or foe before you unload your clip into him.”

  “So which is it? Friend or foe?”

  “Friend.”

  “Friend. I don’t know if I can be friends with you, David.”

  “I don’t know if I can be anything else, Dylan.”

  I hopped down and went to the fridge and poured myself a glass of wine. I set the bottle down on the bar, took a sip, and closed my eyes, letting the taste settle in on my tongue.

  “Sauvignon blanc,” he said, tilting the bottle so he could read the label. “New Zealand?”

  I nodded. “It’s the best.” I took another sip and held out my glass. “Want a sip?”

  “I’ll stick with my Shiner.”

  I set my glass down, and our eyes locked in a long clinch. “You broke my heart,” I said finally.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Sure you did.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, maybe a little.”

  “Don’t do that anymore, okay?”

  “Hurt you?”

  “Yeah. I can’t take it. I haven’t got any fight left in me.”

  “All evidence to the contrary.” He looked at me, then down at his hands. “I can’t get back together, Dylan.”

  I felt a tear slide down my cheek. I reached up and swiped it away quickly, before he looked up. It is a rule in the universe that a girl should never break down and sob hysterically in front of an ex-boyfriend. I intended to adhere to the handbook on this one. I had my self-respect to consider.

  “I don’t want to get back together either,” I lied. “But you are the one person in the world who isn’t qualified to comfort me right now, David. You DQed yourself the last time you walked out that door.”

  “DQed?”

  “Disqualified. Technical foul. Penalty for piling on.”

  “For what? I play a fair game.”

  “You broke my heart.”

  “You mentioned that,” he said.

  I thought I caught at least a glimpse of remorse in his eyes. I looked at him expectantly. “Where’s my apology?”

  “I’m, sorry, Dylan. I really didn’t think you cared that much.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “I know,” I said. “You deserve better. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re right. I do.”

  He stood and picked up his keys. I followed him to the door, resisting a sudden, overwhelming impulse to drop to my knees, grab his legs, and beg him to stay. If I’d thought it had a gnat’s chance of working, I might have done it. I’d have regretted it, of course. Begging is not an optimal relationship tool. But still, it was tempting.

  He stopped at the front door and hugged me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of his shirt.

  “Nice touch,” I said when we stepped back.

  “What?”

  “The cologne.”

  “I wear it all the time.”

  “That’s not why you wore it tonight.”

  He blushed. “Dirty trick, huh?”

  “A little bit, yeah.”

  “Take care of yourself, will you, Dylan? And will you please let me know what I can do?”

  “Oh, sure. Absolutely. You’ll be the first one I call.”

  “Liar.”

  “I’m trying to be nice.”

  “Don’t.” He kissed me on the forehead. “I like the real you better.”

  I shut the door and watched through the peephole as he walked down the walkway, got into his car, and made a phone call. I felt a spike of jealousy as he smiled and laughed through a brief conversation. Then he started the car, turned on the headlights, and drove off into the night.

  I sat in the kitchen and cried into my wineglass for a while, trying to convince myself I wasn’t an unredeemable loser who’d just managed to run off a perfectly good boyfriend. But since I was an unredeemable loser who’d just managed to run off a perfectly good boyfriend, my task was a little tough. I eventually admitted the obvious, blew my nose, put my dishes in the dishwasher, and scrubbed the sink with my new bottle of lemon-scented Soft Scrub with Bleach, just to cheer myself up, buffing the porcelain to a high shine with a clean cup towel. I reached into the fridge for a bottle of water and began contemplating a bubble bath.

  I had just flipped off the kitchen light and put my hand on the bedroom doorknob when I heard the first scream come from behind the door.

  7

  I FLIPPED THE KITCHEN light back on, flung the door open, and let a stream of light into the otherwise dark bedroom. The bunnies were racing around in circles, whimpering and squealing, their little rabbit toenails scratching against the wood floor.

  Liz was kneeling on the floor beside Christine’s pallet. She looked up at me with wild eyes. “She’s not breathing.” She began slapping Christine on the cheeks and shouting her name, screaming hysterically and begging her to wake up.

  I grabbed the phone and dialed 911. After a quick conversation I was back in the bedroom, peering into Christine’s lifeless face. Her skin was pallid, her lips blue.

  I shoved Liz aside and started CPR. My last refresher course had been when I was a lifeguard my last summer in college, several presidential administrations ago. But the instructor’s advice turned out to be true; it was indeed like falling off a bike. I cleared Christine’s trachea and started compressions, yelling at Liz to breathe into Christine’s mouth on my count.

  The rabbits scooted in and snuggled next to Christine, puffing themselves up into warm, fluffy balls, their eyes half-closed, their ears laid back as though they were sleeping. There was no sound in the house other than our barked communications and the puffs of air as Liz breathed into Christine’s lungs at regular intervals. We plugged along in rhythm until the ambulance arrived a few minutes later.

  The paramedics made quick work of getting oxygen into her. Christine pinked up right away. Her brown eyes flew open, and she started blinking frantically, her chest convulsing as she tried to cough the tube out of her mouth. She began to fight, struggling to push the paramedics away. One of them grabbed her arms and pinned her down. She started kicking then, her little feet punching their legs and stomachs until she nailed one of them in the groin. They finally gave her an injection to calm her down. Her body went limp, but her eyes remained wide, darting around the
room, big wet tears running down her cheeks and pooling in her ears.

  Liz wasn’t much easier to manage. She kept trying to claw her way past them to get to Christine. One of them finally shouted at me to get her out of there, which I did. Liz and I stood in the kitchen and hugged while they finished their work and got Christine onto a gurney.

  Liz rode in the back of the ambulance. She was holding Christine’s hand and whispering into her ear when they closed the doors and sped off, lights flashing red against the gray-painted bricks of my little house.

  I hopped into my truck and followed them, dialing David as I drove.

  He didn’t pick up.

  I cursed violently, threw my phone down, and sobbed the entire way to the hospital.

  On the way there, weaving through late-night bar traffic, it finally occurred to me to pray, though I can’t say I followed the prescribed routine. I mentally stamped my feet and demanded that God heal Christine immediately—without that whole TV-preacher, slain-in-the-Spirit routine—and return Nicholas to his mother right this minute. In mint condition. I reminded the Almighty of my reasonably good behavior in recent months. I promised a lifetime of devotion to the entire Trinity, even though we all knew I couldn’t deliver. And then I screamed obscenities at Peter Terry, ordering God in the next breath to flatten him without mercy and to doom him to suffer cruelly for all eternity.

  God has a tendency to not follow my orders, a niggling little policy of His I find quite maddening. After all this time, He still refuses to budge.

  By the time I parked my truck in the lot at Children’s Medical Center and threaded my way through the ER, Christine and I had both calmed down. She was alert and placid, lying there in her hospital bed, blinking in the fluorescent light and clutching a white blanket.

  Liz was still hysterical, however. I pulled aside an ER doc and asked her to prescribe some Xanax for Liz. Two hours later we were all in a room on the seventh floor, limp and exhausted.

  They’d removed Christine’s breathing tube in the ER, though she was still tethered to an IV and a breathing monitor. She had so many drugs in her system at that point that she slept like a stone through that long, brutal night as nurses walked in and out of the room, flipping on lights and checking her monitors.

  After they’d settled Christine into her room, I went downstairs to the cafeteria. I don’t usually drink coffee, but there was no tea in sight. Coffee would have to do. I ordered some for Liz and me, and I brought a little cardboard tray back up with two steaming cups, complete with sugar packets and that crummy fake cream in the little plastic thimble cups with the peel-off foil tops.

  I handed Liz a steaming cup and offered her a plastic straw to stir her coffee with.

  Her eyes were swollen and red, her nose stuffy.

  “My head’s killing me,” she said.

  “Want some aspirin?” I asked. She nodded. I got up and felt around in my bag for Sudafed and aspirin. I found a box of Kleenex in Christine’s bathroom.

  Liz took a sip of hot coffee, wincing as she tried to force the pills down her throat. She plucked a Kleenex out of the box, swallowed again, and closed her eyes. “You saved her life.”

  “The paramedics saved her life.”

  She dabbed her eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  I looked down at my coffee and didn’t say anything.

  “I took CPR,” she said. “But I couldn’t think. I panicked.”

  I scooted my chair away from an unwelcome blast of air conditioning and blew on my coffee. “You’re not beating yourself up, I hope.”

  “No. I can’t go there. I just … I’m grateful. That’s all. Thank you.”

  I held up my foam cup. “To survival.”

  “To survival.”

  The coffee wasn’t too bad. I guess they splurge for the parents of sick kids. We sat silently for a moment, listening to the beeps and bangs of a busy hospital in the nighttime and gazing at Christine, who was breathing peacefully, her thumb in her mouth. She slept deeply, her cheeks still sticky with tears.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Hmm?” Liz asked. I’d jolted her out of a daze.

  “How did you know she’d stopped breathing?”

  “The rabbits.”

  “Come again?”

  “The rabbits woke me up.”

  “Eeyore and Melissa?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I am absolutely not kidding you. I heard this thump, and then they both started squealing and scratching the floor. I tried to shush them, thinking they’d wake Christine. But they wouldn’t shut up. I got out of bed to find them and put them in their hutches. I didn’t turn on the light because I didn’t want to wake her. She’s had so little sleep the past few days.”

  I realized I was listening with my mouth open. It was a mouth-open kind of story.

  “I kept trying to catch them, but they were too quick. I could feel them hopping up onto her chest. I kept grabbing for them, but they’d hop down onto the floor for a second and then bounce right back up there. It finally dawned on me that she wasn’t waking up.”

  “It’s like one of those hero-dog stories.”

  “Except they’re rabbits. Who ever heard of that?”

  “We should call People magazine.”

  She took a sip, leaned her head back to swallow, and let out a long exhale.

  “I finally thought to lean down and listen for her breath. It was still pitch black in there.” The air conditioner rattled loudly behind us. “There was no breath.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Maybe she choked on something? I can’t imagine what. She didn’t cough anything up.”

  “What did the ER doc say?”

  “Asthma.”

  “I didn’t know Christine had asthma,” I said.

  “She doesn’t.”

  “Then how—”

  “They don’t know what happened. It’s a guess—a bad one, I think. Christine has been healthy as a goat her entire life.”

  “I think asthma can start at any time, though.”

  Liz sipped her coffee and didn’t say anything.

  “Liz? What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  Liz looked at me. “I’m thinking bad things happen when we’re with you.”

  I caught my breath and blinked back a sudden flood of tears.

  “I’m sorry, Dylan. I know it’s not intentional or anything. But there’s this cloud or curse or something …”

  There was no point denying it. “I know. I’m sorry, Liz. I’m so very sorry.”

  She touched my arm. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you personally. Bad things happen all the time. But something is terribly wrong. And somehow, right now at least, you seem to be in the middle of it.”

  I put my head in my hands, briefly contemplating breaking into the nurses’ station and foraging for narcotics.

  “Dylan.” She reached for my arm. “Look at me.”

  Liz met my gaze with kind, brown eyes.

  “Christine is a special kid,” she said. “An important kid. I’ve always known that. You’ve always known it.”

  I nodded.

  “I think there are … forces out there fighting over her.”

  “I do too.”

  “So. The wrong side almost won tonight. That’s all.”

  “Maybe Earl tipped off the rabbits.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” She set her coffee down. “They’re fighting over you too, I think.”

  “Not over me. Around me, maybe.”

  She shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

  We didn’t talk any more that night. There was nothing more to say. We were both numb with exhaustion.

  My cell phone rang at two that morning, jarring me out of shallow sleep. I groaned and reached for it, my bones
stiff from dozing upright in a chair. It was David. I hesitated, then took the call on the fourth ring.

  “You called me,” he said.

  “You didn’t pick up.”

  “I’m calling you back.”

  “You didn’t pick up.”

  “I’m sorry, Dylan. I didn’t hear the phone.”

  I shoved the whine out of my voice and tried not to sound petty. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter.” I got up and went out into the hall.

  “It does. I asked you to call and you did. I blew it.”

  “Okay. I take it back. It does matter.”

  “Give me another shot. Want to call me again and I’ll pick up this time? On the first ring, even. Real eager.”

  I started to cry, hating myself for it. I am generally not a crier, but I couldn’t control myself.

  I could hear the alarm in his voice. “Dylan, where are you? Are you at home?”

  I started to sob into the phone.

  “Tell me what’s happening.”

  I slid to the floor and crouched in the hallway beside the door, my head in my hand, my shoulders shaking. The nurses’ shoes squeaked past me on the linoleum. Each little scuff, each tap rattled its way up my spine and jangled and pounded its way into my skull. I shut my eyes and tried to tune out the smells and sounds of broken children.

  David didn’t say a word. He just let me cry. He’s good that way. He always knows what not to say.

  When I could finally talk, I said, “I’m at Children’s. Can you come?”

  “Room number?”

  “Room 709.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  Exactly ten minutes later, he walked out of the elevator. I was in the waiting room, curled up into a ball, clutching a wad of spent tissues, staring dumbly at a copy of Dallas Child magazine. The cover article was about birthday parties. I flipped the magazine over and threw it facedown on the sticky coffee table.

  David sat down beside me on the hard, vinyl couch and took me into his arms. I felt a shock surge through my body as he touched me. It had been so long since I’d received comfort from anyone. I latched on to him and dissolved, my face smashed against his chest, dumping wet salty tears all over his “I’m big in Japan” T-shirt.