The Guest Room(92)

She reached into the back pocket of her pants for her phone and dialed 911 with her thumb.

…

Richard could see sky through a vertical chasm in the front door—a sky tinged with eggplant as dusk rolled in from the east—and the skin on his hands and his face was awash in pinpricks: the small shards of glass from the storm door that had been blown in through the rift. He felt like a coward, a feeling that was exponentially worse than feeling like a bad husband or even a bad father, and so he pushed himself to his feet. And, in fact, he was peculiarly not scared. Perhaps it was because of what had transpired in this very house a week ago. Maybe it was because of what he had seen at the morgue that very morning. Didn’t matter. He brushed the glass off his hands (which only made the skin there hurt more) and stood up. He presumed the girl was dead, but he had to be sure. He had to be sure that Kristin and Melissa had fled. The Russians might kill him, too, but if the last things he did in this world were warning his wife and his daughter to run and seeing if there was a life he could save on his front steps, that was not the worst way to exit. Once he had brought the girl inside—if, by some miracle, she was still alive—then he would call the police.

So he opened what was left of the door, once more thinking to himself, This is how it ends. This is how I am going to die, but this time not caring. Not caring at all. So be it.

And there he saw the girl on the ground. Her body was a heap on the stoop—a marionette without strings—her left arm dangling over the side of the concrete, her legs and her hips against the antique milk jug that now housed a dying red zinnia. She was on her side and bleeding—bleeding out?—from a wound somewhere in her abdomen or chest that he couldn’t see. But there was a rivulet starting to spread across the coralline plateau, ballooning already into a puddle. It seemed, on second glance, to originate nearer to her stomach. He knelt before her, presuming she was unconscious, and lifted her arm onto the concrete and rolled her onto her back. When he did, she surprised him and opened her eyes.

“If only I didn’t have stupid dreams of being ballerina,” she murmured, her voice so soft that he wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. Her leather jacket was unzipped and the stain on her blouse—no, this wasn’t a blouse, it was a T-shirt from a tourist kiosk or souvenir store in Times Square—reminded him of the moment when Melissa’s friend Emiko had spilled fruit punch all over her white dress at one of his daughter’s birthday parties three or four years ago. Everything had been pink. Of course. He shook his head involuntarily, shuddering at how the mind could link something as horrific as a bullet wound with a little girl’s birthday party. And then, perhaps because Alexandra had seen him shaking his head, she tried to repeat herself, this time abridging what she had said. Fewer words. Fewer syllables. “Stupid to dream of ballerina,” she whispered, and ever so slightly she winced.

He shushed her like she was a baby and tried to smile down at her, but his eyes were welling with tears. He reached back with one hand to open the glass storm door.

Which was when he heard the second gunshot, was aware of something slamming into his head with incalculable force—for the tiniest fraction of a second he thought, Car accident, as if he imagined his head was slamming into a windshield—and then…

And then nothing.

…

The lead EMT, an admitted adrenaline junkie with thick black hair he slicked down with a gel his girlfriend brought home from the salon where she worked and earlobes (ears, actually) forever deformed from the myriad piercings he’d subjected them to when he was younger, knew this very hot teenager would be dead if the bullet had pierced the heart. And if the bullet had penetrated the lung, there’d be bubbles in all that blood. Pneumothorax. One of those classic sucking chest wounds that he had seen before in Yonkers and Mount Vernon, but never here in Bronxville. Untreated, there would be hypoxia and shock and, eventually, death. But treated? Eminently survivable. Pop open an occlusive bandage to seal the wound. Maybe perform a needle decompression, the needle the size of a pen tip, and insert a catheter to allow the air to escape the chest.

But this wound was lower. And no bubbles.

The EMT’s name was Charles, and he liked people to call him that, because even though he thought he looked nothing at all like a Charles, in his opinion he looked even less like a Charlie or a Chuck. This call was about as good as it got if you were into EMT rush, and he knew it was going to stay with him a long while if they saved this chick’s life—and if the shooters, wherever they were, didn’t whack him, too. When he arrived, there were two people down. Cops everywhere, a SWAT team en route. A chase for some Escalade. Some little girl—near catatonic—being walked away from the shitstorm by a couple of moms pulled straight from a TV commercial for laundry detergent. It just didn’t get better than this.

When he’d gotten to the teen on the stoop, a woman—the victim’s mom, he’d assumed at first, until a cop had told him otherwise—had already taken off her coat and wrapped it like a blanket around the girl to try and keep her warm. That had been smart and he’d been impressed. She’d been pressing a folded hand towel against the hole in the victim’s side, holding it down as hard as she could when he and his partner, Ian, had run up the walkway to the front porch. The towel was a robin’s-egg blue, and the monogrammed C was white. He saw that the teenager’s blood had seeped through the layers of plush cotton the moment they lifted off the woman’s jacket. Her heartbeat and blood pressure were rising, as her body tried to compensate. But a stomach wound in battle? For better or worse—and, in the old days, usually worse—you could live a long time. What he couldn’t tell from where the bullet had entered was whether it was in the stomach or the intestines or the liver. Given the blood, he guessed liver. He threw on a non-rebreather mask to get as much oxygen transport as he could from her diminished blood volume.