Page 29 of Keep Me

“Yes, I’m her boyfriend, I’m driving her,” Zane answered quickly. I was not in fast forward anymore, but I was not asleep and I was not paused. I was stuck in this moment, and I feared it would last for the rest of my existence.

“Okay,” she said, then she took a small breath, but it was infinite. “Miss Garcia, we are supposed to wait until you arrive. I am so sorry, your father was pronounced dead at 4:01 AM.”

The phone lay heavy in my hands, but it felt like it was on fire, and I threw it across the dashboard with a sense of anger I do not know if I have ever felt before. The anger was red and glowing, and it was alive and it crawled from the hole in my chest.

“Fuck,” I let the word slip from my mouth. My body started moving. My head shook from side to side. My hands rubbed my face, the pressure harder like I was trying to rub something away. I unbuckled my seatbelt, opened the door, and stepped into the empty road filled with trees that did not understand what just happened.

My thumbs pushed into my eyes. My chest was not caving open, and the ground was not opening. The world was not falling apart around me, but I thought it should be. Everything should be stopping, like time but like I said, time is a worthless liar.

I heard Zane’s door open and then slam shut. He came to me, of course he did. I felt his hands on my shoulders, and I let my thumbs go from their pressure point and looked at him through blurry eyes. Not from tears, but from the way I wanted to push my vision away like it could have rewound the clock.

“Seren,” Zane said. There was a tear slipping down his face but there were not any on mine. “I am so sorry.”

“That’s not fair,” I said and my words were rushed and held something explosive in them. I felt my face distort as I heard them come from my mouth. It was true. It is not fair. “That’s not fair,” I said again. “That’s not fair.”

“No,” Zane ran his hand down the side of my face, cupping it gently. “It’s not fair.”

“That’s not fair,” I repeated. I was not meaning to say them. “That’s not fair. We’re almost there. That’s not fair.”

“I know,” Zane was frowning as he looked at me. He kept pressing gently on my face like he was trying to absorb something through my skin. “I know.”

“That’s not fair.” But this time, it was not urgency. It was despair and it tackled me suddenly and completely. “No, that’s not fair.” Tears found me. All at once. I am drowning.

Something else came from my mouth but I did not know what. It was a scream and a cry and a plea, all the same time and it sounded like I was an animal left alone to die in the woods. I was not making the sound, but it was coming from my mouth, I could feel it, and oh I could hear it and oh, I did not want to hear it. I would hear it forever.

Zane looked like he was being burned alive while he watched me scream. Or cry. Or plea. Or whatever the fuck I was doing. My knees started to collapse on the side of the road. My body wanted to be on the dirt, but Zane did not let me go there. His hands went under my shoulders, holding me from crumbling like water that does not know where to go.

“Help.” The word leaked from me like a Hail Mary. And it was desperate. I needed Zane to help me because the pain was so intense, I was sure it was going to consume me.

Zane closed his eyes. His lips rolled together. He pushed his face so close to mine. I let him because maybe then the pain would lessen and it would not take everything I am made of. His eyes opened. They were so wet.

“I am so sorry,” Zane said but I shook my head because that is not what I needed. I needed help. The sound came out of my mouth again, so loud I wondered how it did not exist in everyone’s ears. “I am so sorry. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

His words rebounded around me.

Zane did not know what to do. My dad is dead. The world is broken.

My body stilled. Or, maybe let go. Zane had all my weight now and if he let me go, I would never come back up. He held me for a while. The tears flowed down my face, but nothing made sense. My mind went empty in a way that was so terrifying I was surprised my blood was not rushing. Empty.

Eventually, Zane lifted me back into the car. He stroked my skin delicately after he buckled my seatbelt. He was saying things I could not hear, or could not remember, or could not understand. We drove the nine minutes to the hospital. I looked at the road but there were shadows moving across it that I did not think were real. Trees moving and changing shapes but there was no wind.

The nine minutes did not have a floor. They were just a drop. When the car finally swerved into the ambulance bay, the tires didn’t screech; they just slid against the wet pavement. We had no reason to rush.

The signs were blue. Emergency. The word was written in all caps, the neon tubing flickering on the last Y. I tracked the frequency. Three buzzes, a pause, then two more.

Zane was out of the car before the engine had even finished its rattle. Then his hands were on me again. He did not unbuckle me; he extracted me. My feet touched the concrete, but they did not register the texture. I was looking at his shoulder. There was a small, white smudge on his jacket. I stared at that tiny white spot while he carried me through the automatic sliding doors, because if I looked at the smudge, I did not have to look at the rest of the room.

The hospital lobby was filled with artificial brightness. There were twelve rows of plastic chairs, all of them bolted down. The floor was a speckled linoleum, white with tiny flecks of black and blue. There was nobody waiting for us.

A woman stepped out from the side office. She was wearing deep purple scrubs with tiny butterflies printed across the chest. Like the pattern Lucy had worn on her shirt three years ago, during my first session in that downtown office. I tracked the butterflies. There were eight of them visible. Two were missing their antennae. One was trapped under the seam of her pocket, its wings folded in half, unable to fly.

“Are you Seren Garcia?” she asked gently.

She used the present tense again. Are you. She was holding a silver clipboard against her stomach, her thumb resting on top of a yellow sticky note.

“Yes,” Zane answered for me. He did not let go of my waist. “We just drove from the city?”

She did not offer a tilt of her head. She did not flinch. “The doctor is on his way out to speak with you,” she said. She did not want any more of our questions or my pain. “If you could just sign these intake forms for the records. We need the next of kin on file.”