The Story of Me (Carnage #2)(136)
Cam ignores her comments and looks at the mangled mess of wires hanging next to the electronic gates, gives her a kiss and says, “What the f*ck has happened here?”
“I was just gonna call Frank to see if he could open the gates from the inside,” Jimmie states.
“Yeah, do that. I’ll make a call and get someone out to look at this. Probably kids, little shits,” Cam says.
Jimmie calls my dad and as I move around her car to get back into mine, I see her. She looks beautiful in an emerald green maxi dress, her auburn hair blowing back from her face in the breeze. Instinctively, I step in front of Jimmie. Tamara’s standing with her legs wide apart and has two hands on a gun, pointed at me. I don’t know at what point Jimmie notices her, but she stops talking on the phone and says very quietly, “Fuck.” Cam is leaning over the wires hanging out of the wall, slightly to the left of me. Out of my peripheral vision, I see him stand and say, “Well the little f*ckers—”
When I watched Cam shoot Terry Riley in a pub car park all those years ago, I realised that guns don’t really go bang. They go pop more than bang and all I can think right now is… that gun just went pop. I wonder why people say bang when really they go pop?
And then I hear it again, pop, and I watch as blood and bones and brain fly out the back of Tamara’s head and she falls in an untidy mess on the ground. Harry will ask me about this moment one day, and I will have to tell him. What will I say? I can hear Jimmie on the phone from either behind or beside me. I don’t know exactly which. I don’t want to turn my head. I don’t want to see what’s going on around me, so I just keep looking straight ahead. If I don’t turn my head, I can’t see him. If I can’t see him, then none of this is real.
“Georgia!” Jimmie screams. I ignore her. “Georgia Rae Layton, get the f*ck down here and help me.” I don’t want to, because when I look, everything will change. My world will change. Life will change. Everything that’s been good will come to an end.
My life was once black. I managed to get it to a lightish shade of grey on the odd occasion, but it mostly remained black, and then Cam came along; he came back into my life and very slowly he brought back the light blues and then the whites. He’d done that by rebuilding my heart. He’d been patient and loving and kind, and brick by brick, he’d done the best job possible of giving me back my heart. It would never be whole. It would always be a little jagged, and there would always be a piece of it that was irreparable. The part that would forever belong to Sean and our children. But, from the pile of broken bricks and rubble I’d been left with, Cam had done an amazing job of rebuilding my heart and filling it with love, light and hope, and now, now what? If I turn my head to the side and see what it is I think I’m going to see, I know that it will be too much. I’m just not strong enough, so as Jimmie screams and cries, “George, help me, f*cking help me. I can’t stop the blood. I need something to stop the blood.” I shake my head.
“No, Jim, no. I can’t. Not again. I can’t do this again.”
I stand and stare straight ahead as I listen to the music coming from Jimmie’s car. Her door is wide open and an old Bread song is playing and David Gates is singing that he would give up everything he owns and I would too, anything and everything, but I refuse to turn around and look at my world once again come crashing down around me.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I stare at the bricks on the wall, counting them, wondering how many bricks it had taken Cam to rebuild my heart. If Cam is gone, my heart will be irreparable. I will go on. I have to. I have four children relying on me, but never again will I allow myself to love or be loved, unless it is by my children or family.
Chaos surrounds me. My dad appears from behind the gates and sirens blare in the distance, getting closer. The image of what Tamara did to herself is burned into my retinas and I silently hope and pray that Harry never asks me about it.
I ride in the ambulance with Cam, but I have to sit in the front as there is no room in the back while the two paramedics work on him. I don’t look at him. He flat lines twice and I don’t turn to look at him, not once. I can’t, not again. I am terrified of seeing that vacant look in Cam’s eyes that I had seen in Sean’s.
When Sean died, I convinced myself he had told me that he loved me as we lay on that cold, snow-covered pavement, but later, when I spoke to the doctors and from what we were told at the inquest, that was impossible. The blow Sean received to his head as it hit the pavement would have meant his perception, comprehension, alertness and consciousness would have come to an instant grinding halt, making speech impossible.
His eyes were open, of that I’m absolutely sure, but they were vacant. He didn’t see me because he was already gone, and that was the look I was so afraid of seeing in Cam’s eyes.
When we get to the hospital, Cam is wheeled into the trauma unit while his heart is once again restarted and blood is fed into him.
I am moved out of the way and knocked into as doctors fight to save his life. I stand and watch as a young doctor sits astride his chest and holds her hand over the wound, trying to halt the flow of blood exiting his body. Another nurse rides on the side of the bed, squeezing at the bag of blood, hooked on the side, so it will pump into him faster than it is bleeding out. All of this is happening while they wheel him by me and up to theatre.