Chapter 35
GIANNA
Everyone in the waiting room of the hospital, some fifty people, are on their feet staring at the blood-soaked Ferro and the stocky man by his side. Ferro is arguing with a nurse. She’s about half his height, but it looks like she’s winning the argument.
“You’ll have to take a seat, Sir,” she’s saying. “You can’t come in. Someone will be with you shortly.”
I run right up to Ferro and get between him and the nurse.
“Where’s my sister?” I ask him.
He blinks like he’s having trouble focusing on my face.
“They took her in… they’re making me wait outside… but I’m her husband… I should be allowed in.”
For such an imposing man, he seems very small right now. Inconsequential, even.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I mutter and run right thorough the sliding door which lead into the ER proper.
The nurse is yelling at me to stop, that I have to wait outside for a doctor to call us in. But I hardly hear her, and I’m sure as hell not going to wait out there while my sister dies alone in here.
The ER is a vast space, full of people, doctors, nurses, gurneys all rushing somewhere or being wheeled there.
Some people are yelling, some are screaming, some are being put in their place by nurses and doctors that sound fed up with everything and everyone.
And there’s beeping. So much beeping my head is spinning, and my ears are ringing.
I have no idea where I’m going, and more nurses are trying to stop me, but I pay them no attention.
It’s like I’m being pulled somewhere by an invisible rope.
It’s a room filled with many people, all crowded around a hospital bed.
All I see of my sister is the ridiculous green gown hanging off the sides of the bed.
I go in. Right to the table, getting jostled this way and that. She’s asleep, the expression on her face neither peaceful, nor scared, nor angry. But she’s not dead.
Blood is still flowing from the wound in her stomach. And her hand is still warm as I hold it in both of mine.
“Who is this?” one of the men trying to stop my sister from bleeding out barks. “Get her out of here.”
Strong arms grab my shoulders and pull me back from the table. Chiara’s hand slips from my grasp like water might.
“Let me go, that’s my little sister, I have to be with her.”
But the man just pulls me all the way out of the room and someone else closes the doors behind us. But I can still see my sister through the large circular windows in those doors. She’s still asleep, still bleeding and the people around the table seem to be growing more and more frantic around her.
The man who pulled me out stands in front of me, blocking the doors so all I see are his green scrubs.
“We’re doing everything we can for your sister,” he says. “But you have to let us do our job now. You can’t be in there.”
He leads me to a bench to the side of some other door with circular windows beyond which someone else is bleeding. “Wait here, I’ll come tell you as soon as we stabilize her.”
He pushes on my shoulders gently to make me sit and I let him. “Will you? Save her?”
A moment of stark, undeniable doubt is quickly replaced by a big smile on his face. “This is the best ER in the state and we’re doing our best in there. So, yes, we will.”
He rushes back into the room, and I decide to believe him. To trust him. To take his words as gold.
Anything else but them saving my sister is unthinkable.
I follow after him more slowly and look in through the window in the door, but don’t try to enter again. And I’m praying to Mother Mary harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life. Even when I was a little girl and still believed prayers got answered.