Chapter 35 #2
Minutes feel like hours before the sound of a siren fills the street, followed by flashing red lights and a pair of medics spilling out of the doors of an ambulance.
Each of them carry a small pack and they work quickly to pull Emmett away from me, asking him questions which he can’t answer while they assess him.
I try to fill in the blanks, but the only things that I know are his name, his birthday, and that he’s allergic to penicillin and cats.
One of the medics says something to the other before using a tool to shove a plastic tube into his mouth and down his throat before loading him into the back of the vehicle; and I think I might be sick.
I finally stand, heading for my car, which is still running. “I’m meeting you there.”
With a nod, the medic climbs behind the wheel of the vehicle and I watch as they peel away, taking my pretty boy and a piece of my heart with them.
Even without the water, he’s managed to drown himself.
He’s going to die.
He’s going to die, and he has no idea how much I love him.
·
I abandon my car at the entrance to the emergency room, landing at a check-in desk, and I drop my hands onto the counter. “Emmett Fowler was just brought in. I need to be with him.”
“Are you family, sir?” The nurse behind the desk asks as she types something on the keyboard in front of her.
“Yes.” It may not be the truth, but it isn’t a lie, either. “I’m his husband.”
After what feels to me like another hour of typing and fucking waiting, I’m pointed toward an elevator, which I follow up a few floors.
Another desk waits for me as I exit, the nurse behind this one directing me to an area nearby laid out with a series of uncomfortable-looking, plastic-upholstered chairs.
Only a handful of people sit in the chairs, each seemingly here for someone different, as none of them are waiting together.
I take an empty seat, surrounded on either side by three others, and I drop my head into my hands while I wait to hear something. Anything.
In my peripheral, I see Fowler jogging down the hall, looking disheveled as if he’d just crawled out of bed.
The Texan follows closely with a hand on Fowler’s shoulder, looking as if he’d left a party before coming here.
Both of them look panicked. Neither of them speak, neither of them look anywhere but to the room directly ahead of them.
I want to follow them into that room; I want to see him with my own eyes, but I’m terrified of what I’ll find. My feet anchor themselves to the ground beneath me and don’t allow me to move. My lungs barely allow me to breathe. My mind struggles to sort through thousands of racing thoughts.
A blue light shines over Emmett’s door, pulsing with a steady beat as a bell chimes both from the room itself and from the nurses’ station that I passed as I entered. The world slows almost to a stop as I sit immobilized, watching a team of people take off toward that room at a run.
As one of them pushes a large red rolling cart into the room, the Texan pushes Fowler out of it. His arms wrap around his friend’s body and he uses his own to pin Fowler against the wall behind them, as if that embrace is the only thing keeping him standing.
Emmett is dying.
The only person that I care about at all in this miserable world is dying; and I can’t do anything. My head drops into my hands once again with a heavy sob.
I led him to this; I pushed him too far, too hard.
I should have fought for him when I felt him pulling away from me; I knew how I felt about him weeks before that night, and I should have told him that.
Three simple words that I was afraid to give him simply because I was afraid that he would run from them, but I fucking ran from him instead.
Just three words and he might have been fine.
‘The Devil has touched you,’ my mother cried to me as she packed my bags, ‘he wants to make you one of his demons.’
If I’m a demon, Emmett is my angel. He, and he alone, is my salvation.
I’ll do whatever you want, I silently plead with my eyes squeezed closed. I’ll go back to church. I’ll go to confession and vomit up all of my sins. Punish me if you have to, but I’m begging you not to take him.
Agonizing minutes pass before the chaos behind Emmett’s door seems to quiet and almost all of the people who had run inside exit.
A few of them look exhausted. One of them looks on the verge of tears.
The blue light above the door dims and my chest squeezes so tightly that I think my own heart might give out.
Finally, my body allows me to stand, and I hurtle toward one of the nurses as he passes the waiting area that I’ve been trapped in. “The man in that room,” I ask with my hands on his shoulders, “is he okay?”
“You’re the husband?”
“Yes.” I’ve only said it twice, but I’m even starting to believe it myself.
“His condition is serious,” he tells me. “He arrested, but we were able to resuscitate him, and a pump is being placed now to help flush some of the alcohol and opioids from his body.”
“Opioids?”
“Yes sir,” he nods.
“He doesn’t even take aspirin.”
Pretty boy, what have you done?
I drift toward his room in a stupor, barely absorbing the image coming into view.
Emmett lies on his back with one tube extending from his throat as another is placed into his nose.
Grey wires extend in several directions that lead to a series of machines behind him, and a pair of IV lines run into his arm.
My heart cracks straight down the middle at the sight of him, and everything good he’d given me feels as though it’s seeping out.
My steps falter as a hand pushes hard against my chest and the Texan leans in to my ear, speaking in harsh growl. “Fuck off unless you wanna be on a vent, too.”
“Do whatever you have to do to me,” I tell him. “I’m not leaving.”
“Yeah,” he says with a nod, “ya fuckin’ are, before Colt sees you here.
‘Cause if he figures out what I just figured out, I’m the least of your problems.” His fist balls at his side as he nods to a nearby orderly.
“My buddy here needs help finding his way to the parking lot, darlin’, think you can help him out with that? ”
“Of course,” she answers. “Right this way.”
“Texan…”
“Three seconds until I lose it, man,” he warns.
I move my gaze to Emmett and the machines which are, for all intents and purposes, keeping him alive.
My eyes scan over Colt Fowler as he speaks to someone in a white coat at the entrance of his son’s room.
I’ve known the man for more than a decade.
I’ve seen him agitated, I’ve seen him laugh, I’ve even seen him enraged; but I’ve never seen him like this.
The expression on his face – on his entire being – is that of a profound sadness.
“Okay,” I finally concede, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my dirtied pants.
Without further argument, I follow the orderly to the elevator and step inside, letting it take me away from the only place I actually want to be right now. He’s alive, and I have to let that be enough.
I sit in my car, not bothering to turn it on or to run the heat.
Instead, I just stare at the building, watching the comings and goings of the people inside – including the Texan.
I’m not sure how long I sit there, staring.
Long enough that I begin to feel a chill and I finally remember that I no longer have my sweater with me.
It’s on the street outside of a shitty bar where no one can be bothered to help someone when he’s fucking dying in front of them.
As if on instinct, my hand grips the gear shift and I push the car into drive as I peel out of the parking lot.
·
Al’s Bar isn’t more than ten minutes from the hospital – though I sped back here nearly as much as I did on the way to the hospital.
It’s a run-down building; small, the only signage reading ‘BAR’ in flickering neon lights, with another lit sign below it indicating that the business is still open.
The single window at the front is caked with dirt around the edges as if it hasn’t been cleaned in years, and there are only a few cars parked along the sidewalk, leading me to assume that most patrons either walk here or take a cab.
Among the row of cars sits a white Silverado with the Texan standing at its side, reaching into the bed of the truck.
“What are you doing here?” I ask him as I approach.
Pulling a nine-iron from a caddy bag with a loud sniff and a clearing of his throat, he tells me plainly, “I’m gonna fuck up an old guy’s bar. The fuck are you doin’ here?”
“I came to ‘fuck up’ the old guy, I suppose,” I shrug.
He considers for a moment, turning the club over in his hands. He hands it to me with a firm nod. “Alright, then.”
Giving the club a few practice swings while he pulls another from the bag in his truck, I follow the cowboy toward the nearly-empty bar, letting both my rage and my fear simmer beneath my skin.
As the Texan’s club makes contact with the glass door, shattering it, I follow suit, taking aim at the dirty window next to it.
The long-forgotten memory of my mother and sister singing Ave Maria plays through my mind as we enter the bar together, swinging our clubs across the table tops, sending glass and melted candles flying across the room.
A prayer that I’ve recited both in song and desperation more times than I would ever be able to count.
The last prayer that I recited before I was loaded into my father’s SUV and left on my grandparents’ doorstep.
The Texan vaults behind the bar to smash the bottles behind it while the building’s owner, Al, cowers near a wall.
Swinging the club above my head, I make contact with the light fixtures, bringing a few of the rusted ones to the ground.
As they fall, I abandon the club, picking up a chair instead to hurl it across the bar.
The Texan shouts obscenities as he raises his foot to kick the beer taps, knocking them out of place.
By the time we’ve finished, both of our clubs are broken and discarded on the floor.
Shattered glass crunches beneath our feet, covering nearly every square inch of the floor.
Tables and chairs have been snapped and splintered.
The wall of bottles behind the bar has been shattered in its entirety and the owner has run off, along with any patrons that remained when we entered the building.
The two of us silently step out of the bar into the freezing night air, heading back toward our vehicles with heavy breaths and our appearances disheveled. The cowboy turns to face me with a curl of his lip. “I still don’t fuckin’ like you.”
“The feeling is mutual, brute.”
A chime sings from his pocket and he reaches for his phone to check the message that came in. “Shit.” He hurries toward the cab of his truck, pulling open the door and climbing inside. “Listen,” he says to me, hanging his elbow out of his window, “you give a shit about the kid?”
“I do.”
“Then leave him the fuck alone.”
With that, his tires squeal against the asphalt as he tears away from the bar at a speed that brings a cold sweat to the back of my neck.
I move to sit on the ground, resting against the side of my car as I stare at the destruction that I helped to create; an accurate depiction of the wreckage left inside of me.