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MALACHI
I felt a familiar darkness creep up on me again and my vision tunneled once more when all of sudden someone shook me.
“Let her go! SIR! YOU NEED TO LET HER GO!”
Blinking I didn’t realize who was speaking until two paramedics were taking her out of my arms and placing her onto a stretcher. David pulled me back as they cut open her clothes and prepared the defibrillator and I watched as they sent a jolt of electricity.
“Ahh.” I hunched over and grabbed my chest as if the electricity had gone through me instead. But I welcomed it. It was better than the darkness, than the nothingness.
“One more…” I whispered so softly I wasn’t sure if they could hear me begging them but they did it again.
And when they did, they said, “We’ve got a pulse!”
I could breathe again.
A pulse meant that she was alive. And I could do alive.
We can do alive, can’t we beloved?
DAY ONE
It felt like everything was sped up. Time was going and things were happening, but I couldn’t look away.
One moment we were in the ambulance and they were giving us warm fluids through an IV. The next, we were in the hospital. I had no recollection of our movements, my eyes stayed only on her.
I was alive but I felt numb inside. Everyone was moving and talking and living, but I was just sitting and waiting.
Before I knew it, we were in a room. She was laying on a bed and I was sitting beside her.
“Mr. Lord? Mr.
Lord?” The woman snapped her fingers in front of my face, but I didn’t move or speak. “Mr. Lord, do you want to help her?”
At that, I looked over to the black woman with large-framed glasses and white hair. I tried to speak but my throat, I noticed, ached.
“H…how?” I asked her.
She lifted a change of clothes for me. “Change, eat, and I’ll—”
“When does she wake up? She should’ve been awake by now.” I turned back to Esther and watched her heart rate monitor.
“If I have to worry about you, I worry less about her.” She put the clothes in front of me again and this time I took them.
“Her heart stopped,” I told her even though I was sure she already knew. “Severe accidental hypothermia with cardiac arrest. You gave her warmed intraosseous fluids, warm humidified oxygen, but …”
“Are you a doctor, Mr. Lord?”
“Once upon a time ago,” I whispered.
“Then you should know that you’re putting yourself at risk like this. You need to eat—”
“I can’t leave her.” Who knew what happen if I left her again.
She sighed. “I’ll step outside and come back in and we can talk about her all you want but you need to get changed first.”
I didn’t have anything to say and when she left, I sat there for a while before finally rising and stripping off hospital scrubs they’d forced me to wear the first day we’d come in. They’d told me to layer up but I grabbed whatever I could and didn’t honestly care if I wore thicker clothes or not. Sweats didn’t make me warm, she did…Esther did.
Nevertheless, I changed quickly into the new clothing before sitting back down. I lifted Esther’s hands to kiss the back of them. She was warmer, much warmer, but she still felt so cold to me, like she wasn’t…
