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Elliot laughs. “Come on. HBO, at the very least.”
The doctor clears her throat, and suddenly we’re back in reality. Reality sucks.
Elliot squeezes my hand. “Do you want me to ask your boyfriend to come back in?” he asks, all traces of a smile gone now. “Will?”
I shake my head, taking my hand back from his warm grasp and putting both palms back over my face. “No.”
Will can’t handle this. He can’t evenlookat me. He will literally combust and fall into a pile of ash if he has to sit by me while a doctor sticks a speculum up into me and measures how thoroughly I’ve been raped, if she can collect any DNA evidence, if I need surgery, if there’s any lasting damage apart from the pain.
“Can’t you give her something?” Elliot asks the doctor. “Something to calm her? And for the pain?”
The doctor shakes her head. “She’s just come out of a massive overdose. There’s Fentanyl still in her system, but the Narcan is fighting it off. We give her more opiates, her body could shut down all over again.”
I’m right here, I want to say, but I don’t. Because I’m not really here. I’ve started to divorce my mind from my body again, started to unravel my physical being from my mental one.It hurts too much to exist.
One thought rallies me from that sickening falling sensation.Rome. I need to do this for him, I realize. I need this doctor to find some shred of DNA of whoever it was that actually took us, whoever did this to me, so that Rome can be cleared of any wrongdoing.
“What about your friend - Jennifer?” Elliot asks softly. “I’ll sit here all day and night and hold your hand if that’s what you need. But speaking from experience, there is nobody more comforting in a time like this than somebody who you love. Somebody who loves you.”
It’s true; I need somebody I love to help me get through this next excruciating experience. Even though, when I was first in that dark room, I had nobody to hold my hand while I screamed and bled.
I had nobody, and then I had Rome.
And he was enough to keep me alive.
But he’s not here.
So I need somebody who loves me — toloveme. I need that energy, that connection. I need to know I won’t open my eyes and suddenly be back in that room. I need to know that this is real and not a construct of my drugged mind trying to comfort me.
Not Will, though. It can’t be Will. He won’t survive this.
I take a deep breath and turn to Elliot, who is waiting wordlessly beside me. “Nathan,” I say quietly. “Get Nathan.”
Nathan is strong. He’ll be able to deal with it. He was the one whose hands held me up at Adeline’s funeral, even in his own grief. He may as well be my brother; we’ve grown up so close. We know each other’s secrets, and each other’s pain.
I know he will willingly bear this moment with me.
* * *
Afew minutes later, Nathan is sitting in the chair previously occupied by Elliot. He’s a Capulet, just like me. We are used to projecting confidence and biting our tongues until they bleed to get through difficult situations. We are used to putting on a brave face when things are grim. We are fluent in navigating the stages of grief with detachment and poise.
And that’s what he does for me.
“It’s okay, Aves,” he says, over and over.
I scream every time the doctor has to put her gloved fingers inside me to make her measurements, to check if I need to go into surgery. I look up at the ceiling and cry and scream and pant because this pain, the agony of having my wounds touched and measured and poked, is unbearable.
“Look at me,” Nathan says gently, in the midst of the horror. “Focus on me.”
I do what he says. I look into his dark brown eyes and try to separate myself from what’s happening down there. He tells me stories about our childhood. About how I taught him to swim one sun-drenched summer. “Remember?” he implores. He’s trying to push bright, happy nostalgia into my mind as a distraction, but it doesn’t work, and he can tell. So he stops, reducing his words to just a handful:
It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
Focus on me.
It’s almost over.
I’m wild-eyed, bearing down from the pain, like a woman bearing down to birth a baby — but there is no miracle inside me waiting to be pushed forth. There is no relief of the agony ending. Only the brutal truth of what happened in the dark, being dragged out into the light by a doctor in a white lab coat perched on a stool between my spread thighs, her own eyes shining with emotion as she tries to be gentle with what’s left of me.
