Braden didn’t look at any of us. He threw the door open and flew through it.
“It’s Ginny,” he said.
And then he was gone.
Braden
Every beep of the machine was a knife to my gut, a brutal reminder that my own heart needed to keep beating, too.
I sat at the edge of Ginny’s bed, her hand clutched in mine, pale and smooth and blessedly warm. She was warm.
She was alive.
Her hand was dead weight in mine, though — heavy and motionless. She was sedated and intubated, her chest rising and falling in time with the eeriewhooshof the ventilator, a steady mechanical breath that didn’t belong to her. There was tape on her pale face, blue veins present on her closed eyelids, and her lips were chapped and raw.
The room was sterile, though thankfully the lights were dimmed now that we were stable, and it smelled of sanitizer and plastic. The ventilator filled the silence in a way her voice used to.
I tried to focus on the positive — she was alive, she was stable, she was in good care. But it was impossible to have that mindset for long before the truth of it all would creep in.
Ginny had suffered acute respiratory failure brought on by a cold, and my parents had the worst scare of their life.
It was hard to stomach when they walked me through how it all had happened, how Ginny had struggled to cough, how her breathing had become labored, her communication less frequent, until it stopped altogether. My mom looked like a ghost when she told me how Ginny had pleaded wordlessly, her eyes wide, telling my mom she couldn’t breathe in the only way she knew how.
It had been a mad rush after that — a call to 9-1-1 and an ambulance straight to the emergency room. Her pulse ox was seventy-nine. They’d intubated her as soon as the gurney had been pushed through the doors of the ER.
It was all a haze from there — doctors explaining what had happened and what would come next, their words blurring behind the weight of my parents’ fear until none of it made sense. Mom burst into tears when I arrived, Dad wrapping me in a fierce hug, and we’d taken shifts with Ginny ever since, making sure she was never alone.
On the outside, I was steady. I held my sister’s hand, talked to her, tried to make her laugh even though I knew she was sedated. I hoped maybe she could hear me through it, that maybe I could provide comfort in whatever dreamless sleep she was experiencing.
Inside, I was fourteen again, watching helplessly as my sister struggled to live.
My stomach churned, hollow and sick, my throat tight with emotion as I smoothed my thumb over her knuckles. I longed for the version of her we’d had just a week ago, the one who was gaming and roasting us and making the whole world brighter just by existing.
I held onto hope that she’d be back to us soon, that we’d return to normal, but fear sank its claws in deep and whispered that even if we got her back, it might not last.
This was the reality of AFM. This was the inevitable the doctors always warned us about.
It made everything else in my life seem so small, so insignificant. It made me wonder why I ever thought anything was more important than spending every day by her side.
I should have been here.
I should have checked in more after her last scare. We’d been given a sign and I’d ignored it, too caught up in my life in Seattle, in football.
In Emily.
My heart ached at the thought of her, just like it had the last thirty-six hours since we sat in Claire’s office together having our asses handed to us. That was just another plate of pressure compounding on my already overextended chest.
We’d been caught. We’d been warned.
We were done.
My heart kicked in my chest in protest, and I squeezed Ginny’s hand, holding onto her for dear life. I used her as my anchor, but nothing and no one could keep me from drifting into the dark sea of my own mind.
I startled at the feel of a hand on my shoulder, looking up to find my mom’s sleepy smile aimed down at me. Dad was behind her, each of them holding a cup of coffee and a decade of pain.
“How are you doing, sweetie?” Mom asked, rubbing my shoulder as if I were the one who needed comforting, as if it had been me and not her who’d had to live through the terror. She was so fucking strong — she and Dad both. I would never understand how they survived everything life handed to them.
I sighed, looking back to Ginny. “I’m okay.”
