Gun Shy(8)

He didn’t wake up. An ambulance arrived on the bridge, then another. Damon was back, his face ashen, bright blue eyes bloodshot, a streak of blood painting his left nostril down to his lips. I did that.

“I don’t need an ambulance,” I said to him, as the paramedics pried my fingers away from Leo and lifted him onto a stretcher.

He said something I didn’t quite catch, something like “other”, pointing to the other side of the embankment where a second team of paramedics were taking a stretcher, and that’s when I understood. My vision narrowed to two pinprick tunnels, and all I could see was my stepfather’s bright blue eyes and the fire as I deciphered his words. He wasn’t saying “other”.

He was saying mother.

My mother had been in the car. In the passenger seat. In the fire. There’d been a party at the high school to celebrate the football team getting into the finals. My mom had been there since her husband–my stepfather–helped coach the team after work and on weekends. Leo, I surmised, must have been giving her a ride home. It was less than a mile from the school to our house. Yet somehow, in less than a mile, they had driven off a bridge instead.

I watched in horror as the paramedics rushed my mother past me. She looked dead. Her lips were blue, half her face was melted like a wax crayon left too long in the sun, and the paramedics were yelling at each other over her still form. One of her legs hung off the stretcher at a strange right-angle and blood flowed like muddy rivers out of her mouth and nose, carving tributaries through her burnt flesh.

People were talking to me. I guessed they were asking which ambulance I wanted to travel in. As if in slow-motion, I looked between the two vehicles with their flashing lights and bright red sides. The two people I loved most in the world.

I opened my mouth to speak. Closed it again. I couldn’t hear anymore. Everything was a staccato hiss, everything the sound of the rain as it hit the rocks I stood teetering on. The world tilted suddenly as my legs disappeared beneath me, I heard a loud thwack as the back of my head hit a sharp rock, and then nothing.



Later, in the sterile white of the hospital hallway, I started to hear things again. Two rooms, side by side, where teams of doctors worked on the two people I loved most in the world.

I started to hear things I did not want to hear.

My mother was in a coma.

She was almost certainly going to die.

My boyfriend was awake.

He had burns on his arm and a concussion.

My boyfriend was holding his hands out; wrists suddenly handcuffed to the stretcher he was sitting up on.

Leo. The guy I was going to marry.

This was all his fault.



* * *



The cop shifted to the side after cuffing Leo, and he spotted me in the hallway. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed, his eyes glassy and red.

I looked down at my own arm, bandaged from the burns, and wished I’d left him in his car while the flames took over.

“It should have been you,” I said loudly, my hand burning with pain from where the fire had licked at me. “It should have been fucking you.”



* * *



And so we sat, bleary-eyed, on a row of hard hospital chairs. Damon held an icepack to my bleeding skull and we waited. There was so much waiting. For news, good or bad. At that point, we still didn’t know if my mom would make it out of surgery.

I fell asleep on the chairs, concussed and still wearing my Dana’s Grill uniform, a hot pink shirt and navy blue skirt. I’d taken my sweater off, the sleeves ruined from the fire, and while I slept somebody had wrapped me in one of those emergency tinfoil blankets and covered me with Damon’s dark green SHERIFF jacket. I woke up with a start, muffled words piercing my exhaustion as the back of my skull lanced with pain and I felt fresh blood seep through my matted hair. I needed stitches, but I refused to let anyone near me until I’d heard about my mother’s surgery.

“I think we should speak in private,” the doctor was saying to Damon, eyeing me with one of those pity looks that I became so accustomed to in the aftermath of the crash. Everyone was so fucking pitying, it was nauseating.

“No,” I said, sitting up suddenly. I sounded drunk from the Percocet they’d given me. “You can’t leave me by myself.”

Damon squeezed my hand. “It’s okay,” he said to the doctor. “She’s old enough.”

The doctor ushered us into a blank room. Bare walls, bare floors, nothing except three hard plastic chairs and a wooden cross hanging on the wall, crooked. Where was the furniture? This was like an interrogation room, not a place of refuge. The only thing to focus on was Jesus’s face, contorted with agony, crucified for a lopsided eternity.

I sat in one of the hard chairs. Damon paced.

“Sheriff,” the doctor urged. “Please. Sit down. You’re both exhausted.”

Damon turned and gave him a look so scathing, he took a step back. Pride blossomed in my chest at his outrage. We’re in this together, I remember thinking.

We hadn’t always gotten along, Damon and I. My mother had often been a mediator between the two of us when he first moved into our house. But now, we were a single unit. We would pray for my mother to wake, together. Such was the power of our love for her.

“Sheriff—”

“Damon.”

“—Damon. Your wife was gravely injured. Did she often ride without a seatbelt?”