by Leah Scheier
Liam presses his lips to my cheek as he lowers me back into the sled. “Stay awake, okay, Rainey? Promise me you’ll stay awake.”
I promise him, and he smiles at me, and then my eyes close and he disappears.
ETHAN’S JOURNAL:
When we get to the hospital, they tell me I’m in shock and that I should sit down and calm myself. I try to explain that it’s Rain who’s in shock. Then (in case they’ve forgotten their training) I list the symptoms of shock for them: cool, clammy skin, pallor, rapid pulse and breathing, dilated pupils, confusion, weakness, and fainting. I can’t tell if they’re taking me seriously. I don’t know what their smiles mean. They tell me it’s under control, that she’s going to be okay. I ask Liam if they’re lying to me. He shakes his head and says, “You did great, Ethan.” He hasn’t answered my question, and he’s lied to me too. I haven’t done great. I failed my sister. She’d been complaining of pain all day, and I disregarded it until it was too late. This is the only thing I’m good at, and it wasn’t enough to save her.
Chapter 34
Someone is forcing me to breathe, and I can’t stand it. It’s the worst feeling in the world, like my lungs have rebelled and decided to expand and contract on their own in a rhythm that chokes me. I can’t handle it. I have to take my breath back.
I lift my hands to my mouth and pull. Somebody has sealed my lips shut with tape and a piece of plastic is pushing air into me against my will. I give a desperate tug and the tube in my throat comes free as I cough. There’s a rasping noise and a harsh gurgle, and then someone is shouting next to me. My eyes open, and people are hovering over me, blurry familiar faces calling my name. I search for my brother, but I don’t see him, so I close my eyes and let the world go black.
Later I open my eyes again, quietly this time, with no shouting faces or tearing tape. The room is hushed and peaceful except for an irritating high-pitched beeping next to my head. I crane my neck around to locate the source of the noise, and as I do, there’s a rustling sound next to me and a low gasp.
“Rain! You’re awake!”
Liam materializes by my bed, but he looks so strange that for a moment I don’t recognize him. His chin is rough with stubble, his dark curls hang damp and wild, one eye is bruised and swollen shut. His glasses are gone.
“What happened to you?” I whisper. My voice comes out in a smoker’s wheeze.
He seems surprised by the question. Then his hand goes to his injured eye. “Oh, this. That’s nothing.”
I nod and try to swallow. “Water.”
He hesitates, then glances over his shoulder. “Okay, just a little,” he holds a plastic bottle to my lips. I gulp gratefully, letting the water slide over my cracked lips and dry tongue.
“Thank you.”
“Just don’t tell anyone I gave it to you, all right?”
“Why?” I motion for another sip.
“The doctors haven’t given permission yet,” he tells me in a hushed voice. “And everyone hates me enough already.”
I stare at him. “What? Why?”
“I guess you might as well know,” he says. I’ve never seen anyone look so miserably guilty. “You’re here because of me. This is all because of me.”
I’m too exhausted to feel much of anything; even my surprise is weak. “Huh?”
“Rain!” My father and brother appear in the room and crowd around my bed. “Why didn’t you tell us she was awake?” Dad hisses at Liam, who visibly cowers before him.
“She…she just opened her eyes,” he stammers.
“Call your mom and let her know,” Dad instructs Ethan.
“Mom’s here?”
“You’re at Missoula Hospital,” Dad explains. “Your mother’s just downstairs in another wing.”
“What happened?”
“Good morning, Rain!” a loud voice booms out. My brother steps aside. A broad shouldered, gray-haired man in a white coat bends over the bed and grins at me.
“You’re looking great, you’re looking great!” he bellows. “Much better than when you came in.” He chuckles to himself. My father manages a weak smile. Ethan stares at the large man in awe.
“Are you my doctor?” I ask him.
“No, no,” he replies genially. “I’m Dr. Peters. The OB team is taking care of you, and they’ll be by to check on you in a little while. I just stopped in to say hello and congratulate this brilliant young man here.” My brother winces as the doctor claps him on the back.
“He doesn’t like that,” I blurt out.
“It’s fine,” Ethan mutters.
Dr. Peters raises his eyebrows and lets his hand slide off Ethan’s shoulder. “You’re lucky to have this boy as your brother,” he says in a softer voice.
“I know.” I feel vaguely ashamed of myself, but there’s no way to explain. My tongue is still sticking to my teeth and my words are slurred. “What happened after I fell asleep?”
“You didn’t fall asleep,” Dr. Peters corrects. “You passed out from the internal bleeding. When you got to the local hospital your blood pressure was dangerously low. They stabilized you and transferred you here. And not a moment too soon. They had you prepped and ready for surgery within the hour. If you hadn’t gotten here when you did; if your brother hadn’t insisted on bringing you in—”
“Surgery? I had surgery?”
He looks confused. “Wait. She doesn’t know?” Dr. Peters asks. “No one’s told her why she’s here?”
“She just woke up,” Liam whispers. He won’t meet anyone’s eye.
I try to push aside the covers, searching for some explanation, some clue about what happened to me while I slept. There’s a lot of sheets over me, but I finally get underneath them and stare at the crisscross of bandages that cover my belly. A thin plastic tube attached to a bottle protrudes from a hole in the dressing; the sight of the murky mess in the drain makes my stomach lurch.
“Ugh.”
Dr. Peters throws a sheet over me and clears his throat. “Never mind that. It’s temporary. They did a fantastic job stopping the bleeding. That’s what’s important.”
“What bleeding?”
“Your left fallopian tube ruptured,” Ethan explains softly.
“My… What? Why would it do that?”
“Because you had an ectopic pregnancy,” Liam says.
Nobody speaks after that. I stare at him, then at Dr. Peters, then at my father who looks like he’s aged ten years in a day, then at my brother who is the only one meeting my eyes. And suddenly I understand.
An ectopic pregnancy. A baby. But in the wrong place. The weeks of nausea, the recent stomach pains, the weird spotting I was ignoring.
“Did you know?” Dr. Peters asks me finally. “Most people don’t even realize that they’re pregnant because an ectopic can burst pretty early on.”
“No. I took a test a while back. But it was negative.” I can’t bear to look at the expression on Liam’s face. “I thought I was okay because the test was negative.”
“You probably took it too early. And sometimes the first test is negative. That’s pretty common too.”
Nothing about this feels common. I have a plastic tube sticking out of my belly, and according to Dr. Peters, I almost died. And he’s just implied my brother saved my life.
“How did you know, Ethan?” I ask him.
“I didn’t guess the diagnosis,” he admits. “There were other things it could have been. But I knew that your abdomen was extremely tender. And you looked like you were going into shock. So I realized that we didn’t have time to wait.”
“I shouldn’t have argued with you,” Dad says. “I’m glad you didn’t listen to me.”
“The important thing is she’s okay,” Liam ventures, but my father cuts him off.
“You don’t get to say anything after what you did to her!” he
snaps.
“Dad! Stop it!” It hurts me to shout; the area under my bandage aches and my throat feels heavy and raw. “He didn’t do anything to me. We made a mistake. One mistake.”
“In this day and age, teenagers should know better—”
“In this day and age, people still make mistakes!”
“Legally, this isn’t a mistake, Rain. He told me that you were both under the influence. So your judgment was impaired, and you have the legal right to charge him—”
“What? I don’t want to charge him, okay?” I catch a glimpse of Liam’s face, and my voice breaks. “It wasn’t like that. Please don’t make this more painful than it already is.”
He opens his mouth to answer, but then he seems to reconsider; with great effort, he grits his teeth and swallows his response. “Okay. But we’re going to keep talking about this.”
I can’t talk anymore; I need to be alone. The shock of waking up in the hospital all covered in bandages, the realization that I’d just been through a life-threatening surgery, the knowledge that I’d actually been pregnant, even if only for a short time—
It’s too much. I want everyone to get out and leave me alone. I ask them to go as politely as I can. And to my surprise, everyone begins to file out obediently. Only Liam lags a little; I see him dragging his feet and throwing hesitant looks over his shoulder. I nod quietly and gesture for him to come back, but my father steps between us.
“You’re going now,” he insists. “You’ve done enough.”
“Dad! I asked him to stay.”
“Rain—”
“There are no good guys or bad guys here, okay? Just people. Those are your words, Dad. Your lesson, remember?”
He pauses and seems to consider. My Halloween mistake is not all that different from the one he made years ago, and I’ve just made him see that. I feel briefly powerful, despite my exhaustion.
“Fifteen minutes,” he mutters finally. “She needs her rest.”
“Yes, sir.”
God, I feel bad for Liam.
“I’m really sorry about that,” I say after my dad leaves the room. “And for that.” His swollen eye somehow looks worse than before. “Did my father do that to you?”
He settles down on the bed and gingerly touches his brow. “Yeah. Right after you came out of surgery and the doctor told him what was wrong. I didn’t get a chance to duck.” He tries to laugh, but it comes out like something between a hiccup and a sob. “It’s okay. I deserved it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
This time he actually does laugh. “Why do you keep saying that? What do you have to be sorry about? I’m the one who practically killed you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Killed me how? With your extremely lethal sperm?”
He looks like he’s fighting a smile. “Look at you. You’re like the poster child for unprotected sex.”
“It’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” I point to the plastic bottles on the bed rail and the three tubes in my arms. “Kids, screw up once and this could happen to you! I don’t think anyone would believe me.”
“Maybe not.” He tries to smile, then sobers. “Rain…” His voice cracks. “Why didn’t you tell me? I never even knew you’d taken a pregnancy test.”
“You texted me about that scholarship while I was peeing on the stupid stick. When it came back negative, I figured you didn’t need to know. I didn’t want to ruin your big news. Anyway, things have worked out perfectly for you. You can still use your scholarship and go wherever you want. This doesn’t have to change anything.”
If he wasn’t hurt before, he definitely is now. “Are you serious? I haven’t thought about the scholarship since I told you about it! All I cared about is whether you wanted to come with me. And then when the doctor came out and told us why you were sick, I was actually glad that your father knocked me down! It distracted me for a while, otherwise the guilt would have driven me crazy. For the last three days, all I’ve heard, repeatedly, is that you might not make it. That you’d lost a ton of blood and that even if you did wake up, you might never be the same. Do you have any idea what that was like?” He nearly shouts the question but then, realizing his voice has echoed around the empty ward, he takes a deep breath and continues in a softer tone. “I argued with your brother, do you know that? Just before you passed out in the snow. I was pissed and cold and tired. I told him that you were going to freeze to death because of him. God, if he had listened to me—”
“Ethan never listens to anyone when he thinks he’s right.”
“Yeah, but he hasn’t said anything to me about it since then. Even when we all realized he was the one who saved you. I wanted him to punch me, you know? He had every right to. Or maybe just a simple ‘I told you so.’ But he hasn’t talked about it.”
“He’s not exactly the biggest talker.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know about that. He explained the operation to me in exhaustive detail. And then afterward we talked about kissing.”
“What?”
“He wanted pointers.”
I forget everything else, as I always do when Ethan eclipses my life. And for a moment, I’m happy, despite the miserable state of my own relationship and the countless tubes sticking out of me. I’m happy my brother wanted advice on how to kiss.
“So what did you tell him?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Ew, no. Forget it.” I grin and shake my head. “Hurray for Ethan! Making it to the bottom of the list.”
“What?”
“I mean that he’s doing fine without me.”
There’s something liberating about the feeling too, as if Ethan’s success has set me free. But strangely, for the first time, the freedom doesn’t seem terrifying and depressing. It’s like lifting an anchor and drifting off into unknown waters. The weight of him is still with me, but it doesn’t pull me under. It’s a welcome weight, a grounding force, reminding me where I came from. The problem is, I’m not sure where I’m going now. All I do know is that I want a chance to find my own way for once, without restrictions or obligations.
I realize now why I never told my family about Liam’s international program and my desire to join him. It wasn’t my dream. It was his. And as much as I care for him, it’s too soon for me to share someone else’s dream again. I need to find my own first.
“Have you spoken to Dr. Peters about graduating early?” I ask. “Can you still use that scholarship to go next year?”
His face falls; he sits back in his chair. “Is that what you want? You want me to go?”
“No. But I want us to have a chance. And I know that we’ll never have that chance if you stay for me. Any more than we will if I go with you.”
He reaches out, interlacing his fingers with mine. “But I want to wait for you.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“Why do you want to wait for me? You were the one who didn’t want a long-term anything, remember?”
“I know,” he murmurs brokenly. His head drops over my extended hand, and his face crumples. “But that was before I fell in love with you.”
The words hurt. They’re not supposed to hurt, but they do. My heart begins to pound, but I’m not overflowing with excitement and joy like I should be. I can’t breathe because I realize, suddenly, I’m trapped, bound by the ropes I’ve carefully wrapped around myself. It’s the first time he’s said he loves me. The first time he’s meant it. And I can’t think of anything to say to him. I have no idea how I feel.
“Liam—”
“No, I do. I love every crazy, random part of you. I love how you keep baking truly weird food because your mother’s convinced that it’ll help your brother. I love your fierce and constant loyalty to your family. I love it, and I don’t understand it, and I’m jealous of it because I’v
e never felt it for anyone…until I met you.” He doesn’t meet my eyes as he speaks; the words fall from him like a miserable confession. “And I was willing to wait, Rain. I was willing to wait for your face to light up when you looked at me, the same way it lit up just now when we spoke about Ethan.”
“But we’ve only been dating for a couple of months,” I say softly. “I’ve loved my family for sixteen years.”
“I know, and I’m not blaming you for not feeling the same for me.”
I open my mouth to protest.
“No, don’t argue. I know, deep down, you don’t think that this is real. That I’m too young to know what love is or whatever. That’s what the psychology textbooks would say, right?”
I watch him quietly for a moment, then gently brush the tangled curls off his forehead. “If you weren’t expecting forever, you must have known that we’d eventually go our separate ways.”
He lifts his face a little so I can see his expression; his eyes are damp and bloodshot, his smile defeated.
“I wasn’t looking for forever. But I guess maybe I was hoping for it.”
I don’t answer him. There’s nothing I can say that will make any of this better. For a moment, I’m tempted to lie. To push away his desperation with a false promise. But I’m too numb and weak to find the words.
“I knew I was being stupid,” he admits after a pause. “But I guess it didn’t really sink in until just now when you told me that you wanted me to leave you.”
“It’s not that I want you to go. I just don’t think we should be building our lives around each other. It would be a mistake. We’ve screwed up enough already.”
He doesn’t answer me right away. His head is bowed over my hand. “So it’s really over.”
“Don’t…don’t say it like that.”
He nods and slowly gets to his feet. “I love you, Rain,” he says simply. He leans over and kisses me, then straightens and walks out of the room.
