“What do you mean?”
“Well, two things came out of that moment. The first one was me realizing that all I wanted to do when I grew up was help people like that. I wanted to be that man who had scooped me up in his arms and carried me into the ambulance and held my hand and told me not to be afraid. I knew that I wanted to do that for someone one day,”
“You did for me. You were the only thing, the only voice, the only hand that made me feel better.”
“I’m glad.”
“And what was the other thing?” I asked.
“Sindi,” he said. “Because my mom could no longer have biological children, my parents adopted Sindi. And it’s weird, you know. The moment she came into our lives we all knew she was meant to be in our family. She was already one year old and had been waiting for an entire year for a family. Just waiting for us to find her. And if you ask my mom today, she’ll tell you that Maggie—that was going to be my biological sister’s name—however much she was wanted and is missed, just wasn’t meant to be. Because Sindi was meant to be in our family. She was the sister and daughter we had all been waiting for.”
Tears made my chest tight. The first one fell and I wiped it away with my fingers and looked down at the wet tips.
“So, you can’t say that things that have happened in the past are worth forgetting. Or regrettable. Because they just can’t be.”
“Thanks for telling me that,” I said. No one had spoken to me like that before and I realized how much I wanted this. Arealhuman connection. A connection beyond the cards. “I don’t think anyone has ever told me something so personal.”
“I find that hard to believe. You’re so easy to talk to. People must talk to you all the time.”
I hung my head. “I worked at that company for seven years, and no one knew who I was. I was, quite patently, invisible. I don’t think I’ve had a single conversation with any of them in seven years.”
Noah turned again and gave me that smile. A dazzling bloody smile it was. “Well, now you have someone to talk to.”
I felt that little rush of warmth in my body again. “You’re so nice. That’s why you make such a brilliant paramedic. You get people. Even if I don’t get myself.”
“I’ve actually been feeling these past few years that it’s not enough for me anymore, being a paramedic. When you’re a paramedic, you only help people for a short period of time. You get them to where they need to be and then leave. You don’t get to watch them on their journey of recovery, and that’s why I want to go to nursing school. A few of my colleagues have been teasing me for wanting to go into such a female-dominated profession, but I don’t care. Besides, I’m not afraid to admit that I’m not academic enough to become a doctor. Nurse it is. I just want to do more for the patient. I want my journey with them not to end at an emergency room.”
“Kind of like me,” I said. “You’re seeing me all the way through. In fact, you could say that I’m your first real patient.”
“You’re not a patient.” His words came out in a strange tone. It felt like it was laced with something, I don’t know what. I didn’t think I was that good at conversations with undertones like this. I didn’t think I had the social skills for tone interpretation.
“What am I?” I asked.
“Well, I’d like to think we’ve become friends?”
I smiled to myself and looked at the road in front of us. “Friends. That sounds nice. I like that. I don’t have many friends.” “Many” was downplaying it. I didn’t have any friends. Although, in the last few days, I’d collected four phone numbers of people, and my phone was the fullest it had ever been. “Friends,” I repeated to myself, and then, as if the universe was punctuating that statement, a massive sound made us both jump.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, looking around as an explosion rocked us.
Noah and I leaned forward and looked up at the sky. Thick, rolling black clouds had almost swallowed it up. We’d been talking so much, we hadn’t noticed this blackness sweeping across the once-blue sky. I couldn’t believe it.
“Thunder,” Noah said. “Very close. But it’s still blue in front of us.” He pointed at the light sky on the horizon. “If we keep driving, we’ll probably miss it.”
I looked up again. “I think you’re right. It’s right above us. If we just keep moooo—what was that?” I asked, grabbing onto the dashboard as the car seemed to rock back and forth.
“Wind!”
“Wind that moves cars?” I let go of the dashboard when the car stopped rocking. “What kind of wind moves cars?”
“That kind!” Noah pointed to the sky ahead. The dark clouds above seemed to be rushing to fill the blue space there. They reached out with wild, black twisting arms, like those inflatable people with the arms that move around like crazy outside tire stores.
The wind raged and the entire sky soon turned black as the last of the sun disappeared. It reminded me of the storm that had raged outside Sheik Khalifa’s oasis which Amanda Stone had gotten caught in. She’d looked up to the sky to see the sun finally swallowed up by the red dust that twisted up from the dunes.A shadow fell across the once-illuminated landscape and Amanda knew that she was in serious trouble.Were we in serious trouble?
Noah pulled the car over on the side of the road as the clouds ripped open and rain poured out of them. It thumped down on us relentlessly; it sounded as if giants were jumping up and down on the roof, and we both looked up at it. I was petrified the whole thing might buckle and bend.
“Will it hold?” I shouted at Noah over the deafening sound.
“Yes,” Noah assured me. “I mean . . . I think so. It should . . . probably.” Okay, so now he wasn’t sounding as self-assured.
