What am I feeling? Elation? Dread? Some god-awful combination of the two? Whatever it is, it propels me down the hallway in time to see Taylor get locked out of an emergency room. She pounds on the door with her fist. As I get closer, she comes into full, frightening view. Her arms are bare, uniform torn or burned near the biceps. She’s covered in blood, streaming red and coagulated black.
“Taylor.”
Her attention snaps to me, and reveals a face covered in blood spatter. “They won’t let me in,” she whines. “That’s—my brother. He’s—it’s Mason. They have to let me in there.”
“Taylor. He’s with the doctors, he’s going to be fine.” I’m as cautious and calm as I can be, hoping not to spook her. Her dark skin is light beige, and it’s probably from the blood pooling at her feet. “You need a doctor.”
“I need to make sure Mason is going to live.”
“We need a doctor here!” Inspecting Taylor more closely, I spot a dark hole where black blood oozes from her shoulder. She’s been shot. Frantic, I yell even louder. “We need a doctor now!”
“Lucy?” Taylor coughs blood and saliva into her palm, and looks up at me with disoriented eyes. “I think I’m hurt.”
She promptly passes out. I barely get there in time to grab her by the back and lower us to the ground. Taylor’s exposedskin is almost ice cold to the touch, raw and bloody like someone tried to grind her into sausage. “Delilah! Somebody help!”
Delilah rounds the corner and gapes at us in horror. Nurses finally show up with a gurney and push me out of the way to gingerly lift Taylor’s lifeless body onto the mobile bed. Doctors surround her and everyone disappears behind two frosted glass doors that angrily swing closed.
In the nick of time, I find a chrome trash bin, slap off the rounded dome, and vomit into the bag inside.
She’s alive.
If I should fall?—
Cool marble kisses my cheek, the smell of bile and formaldehyde wafting up into my nose. Scrambling to my knees, I again toss up the contents of my stomach into the trash before collapsing against the wall again. Tears stream down my face and into the trash can, then onto the floor as I sink to the ground. Only Delilah is clear in my blurry vision, mouth open and eyes glossy. She’s in shock.
Like me, she flattens against the wall and slides down to my side. “They can’t die. They can’t—they won’t die. They won’t. My babies.”
She whispers prayers in a mix of English and Spanish, wraps her arm over my shoulder, and pulls me into her. White sneakers and wobbly wheels fly by us in an endless race against death. It’s no use, I want to tell them.
Death always comes first.
14
Due to being as useful as a fart in the wind, Delilah has me brought into a nurses’ break room and splayed me on a cot. Time seeps in drips and drabs, hours here, minutes there. Exhausted doctors and nurses arrive off-shift and collapse into metal chairs, grateful to be off their feet. I’m sure they begrudge me the fact that I’m on one of only two cots in the room, but I can’t seem to care. I only leave my cot to use the bathroom or drink from the water fountain. Delilah won’t let me go anywhere else.
Some time later, maybe a day judging by how my stomach gnaws on itself, Delilah reappears in the doorway. The off-duty nurses turn and nod to her. She gives them a tight, insincere smile and beckons me.
“Lucy. Time to go.”
Her words lift and bid me to follow her, my body reacting without my brain. In my mind, I’m padding down the hallway toward my room, my mother tagging along behind me. I snag a book from the dresser next to my bed, flop into my covers, and await her voice to read me to sleep.
When I return to myself, I’m in a clunky metal elevator, chugging up two floors and into another beige, sterile corridor. This floor is much quieter—doors closed, nobody zipping around with wounded people on carts. We stop outside a door marked 729. Assuming Taylor is inside, I go to grab the handle but Delilah nabs my wrist.
“You should be aware of her condition first,” she says in a soft voice.
“Her condition?”
“Some burns. She was shot three times—once in the thigh, once in her left shoulder, and one barely missed her liver.” The hand Delilah has around my wrist tightens as the world spins without me. “Keep it together.”
With a gulp, I straighten my posture and try to radiate confidence. Delilah’s face makes it obvious I failed miserably. “What?”
“She’s in and out of consciousness. The doctors have advised me to limit visitors. There’s a gash on her temple so they think she took a pretty bad hit to the head. So…” Delilah sighs and places one hand on my shoulder, the other on my cheek. Her scent of cinnamon and citrus grounds me. “Be patient.”
Once I acknowledge her advice with a nod, I turn and enter Taylor’s room. Machines create a symphony of beeps and boops, tubes protruding from her like she’s sprouted vines. A white sheet covers her body except for one arm and her head. Her visible arm is the one she was shot in, wrapped in bandages. My entrance doesn’t wake her. She lies in the middle of the bed, still as stone. The tips of her flaxen hair are blackened and burned, brittle ends breaking off onto her pillow.
A soldier returning from war is always romanticized in fiction. He drops his bag on the porch and takes his girl in his arms, twirling her around to swelling orchestral music, scene bursting with the final satisfaction of a longing ache. Reality isfar from romantic. It is painful and complicated. Bittersweet. My mother always said that’s the best word in the English language,bittersweet. No other word so deliciously contradicts itself. Pleasure and pain fleshly entwined like feverish lovers, pushing one another toward mutually assured destruction. There is no pain so acute as the unreachable ache of the bittersweet. That is how I feel.
I lift a chair and quietly plunk it next to her bed. Not wanting to rouse her, I take her hand gently in mine and run my thumb along the mountain ridge knuckles on top of her hand, trailing down the rivers of her veins. Even in her doped-up state, power coils in her hands. Potential energy courses inside the muscles and tendons. I wonder if she’s ever been soft with her hands. Pet a kitten, held a baby, or run them affectionately through someone’s hair. I don’t think she has. Probably a safe bet she’s been denied life’s gentle pleasures.
