21. Charly
— ? —
Charly
The windshield wipers can’t keep up with my tears or the rain.
I’m driving somewhere, anywhere, nowhere in particular.
The hospital was a lie, there was no call, just my phone screen lighting up with a number I pretended was urgent because I needed an excuse to leave.
Because I couldn’t stand there and watch them together for one more second without completely falling apart.
“It was fake,” I say out loud to the empty car, because saying it might make it land. “It was never real. It was a plan. You knew that going in.”
My phone lights up in the cupholder. His name. I watch it ring all the way out. Then it lights up again, a text this time, the little gray bubble sliding up, and I turn the screen face-down before I can read a word of it. Because I know him.
I know exactly how good he is with words, how easy it would be to let him talk me back into that house and that bed and that whole beautiful lie, and I’m not doing it. Not again. I learned this lesson once already and it cost me everything.
It buzzes again. And again.
I pick it up, hold the button down, and set it to do not disturb. The screen goes dark and quiet and I drop it in the bag on the passenger seat where I can’t see it light up anymore.
There. Done. No more messages or call.
I drive without deciding to, no destination, just turning when the light turns, and somewhere around the river it hits me where my hands are taking me. The hospital. Of course the hospital. It’s the one place in my life that has never once failed me.
People come in hurt and you help them or you can’t, and that’s it.
Nobody’s playing games with you. Nobody’s telling you they’re crazy about you and then letting their ex kiss them on the front steps an hour later.
It’s just the work, and the work is honest. And honestly, I’d rather be busy than sit here drowning in everything that happened tonight.
The night charge nurse takes one look at me coming through the doors out of uniform and doesn’t ask. She just says they’re slammed and could use hands, and I say put me wherever, and that’s the kindest thing anyone’s done for me all night.
I work. I turn my brain all the way off and I work.
I splint a kid’s wrist and I talk a scared old man through his chest pains and I hold a basin for a woman who can’t stop being sick, and none of it is about me, and that’s the whole point.
For two hours I am nobody’s fool and nobody’s secret. I’m just good at this.
Somewhere past midnight I finally let myself stop long enough to grab a coffee from the machine, both hands wrapped around the paper cup, the first still moment I’ve had since I pulled out of his gate.
That’s when the radio chatter picks up at the desk.
“Incoming,” somebody says. “Bad one. Single vehicle, ran off the road out on the county route, medics are three minutes out.”
The unit shifts into gear around me, that fast quiet urgency we all know, and I set my coffee down to go help, because that’s what I do, that’s what I’m here for.
And then I don’t know why, but my hand won’t hold the cup right. It just slips. The coffee goes everywhere, across the counter and down the front of the cabinet, and I stand there staring at it with this cold dropping feeling in my stomach that I don’t have a name for.
“I’ve got the spill,” a tech says. “Go, they need bodies on the bay.”
So I go. I leave the coffee and I push it out of my head and I move toward the doors with everyone else, snapping gloves on, sliding into the part of myself that’s steady when everything else is chaos.
The ambulance backs in and the doors fly open and we’re all moving at once, the gurney coming down, the medic rattling off numbers, and I get my hands on the rail to help guide it through the doors, and I look down at the patient.
And the world stops.
It’s him.
It’s Clarence. There’s blood in his hair and across his face and his eyes are closed and there’s a brace around his neck, and for a second my whole body just refuses it, refuses to make the man on the gurney into the man who had his forehead against mine three hours ago.
“What happened?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “What happened to him, who is this, what is going on?”
“Single car, ran off the county route, hit the guardrail,” the medic says, not knowing, not knowing what he’s telling me. “No other vehicles. He was alone. Found him still belted in.”
Alone. He was driving alone in the rain, in the dark, and I know, I know with a certainty that turns my legs to water, that he was coming to find me. That I turned my phone face-down and put it on do not disturb and he was out there in the storm trying to reach me.
“Charly.” Someone has my arm. “Charly, do you know him?”
I still can’t get a word out. They’re rushing him in and I’m moving with them without deciding to, my hands already reaching for him, and then the machine beside the bed makes the sound, the one that drops the bottom out of the whole room, and somebody says he’s not breathing and somebody else is already up on the bed trying to get his heart going again.
“He’s not breathing. Come on, stay with me.”
I’m reaching for him. I don’t even decide to, my hands just go, and that’s when Dr. Reyes steps in front of me and puts both hands on my shoulders and looks me dead in the eyes. She doesn’t need me to answer the question. It’s written all over my face.
“Not him. Not for you.” Her voice is gentle and it does not bend. “Whoever he is to you, you can’t be the one. Step back, Charly. Let us help him. Step back right now.”
And the worst part of being good at this job is that I know she’s right. I know exactly why you don’t let someone work on a person they love. So I step back.
I press myself against the wall of the trauma bay and I make my hands into fists at my sides and I watch them do to him everything I would be doing, the compressions, the bag, the pads, the count, somebody calling clear, and the tears are pouring down my face and I don’t even feel them come.
“Come on,” I’m whispering. “Come on, come on, come on.”
The monitor catches. A beat. Then another. Ragged and uneven and there.
“We’ve got a rhythm, he’s back.”
The whole room exhales at once and they keep moving, faster now but steadier, and the panic in it drains down into work, and someone says he’s stabilizing, his pressure’s coming up, and they wheel him through to get the scans and the stitches and everything else, and I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor of the trauma bay with my knees up and my hands over my mouth.
He’s alive. He’s not awake, they tell me later, he’s under and they’re keeping him there while his body decides what it’s going to do, but he’s alive. His heart is beating. That’s the only sentence in the world that matters right now.
***
They give me a room to wait in, a chair beside his bed, and the quiet after all that noise is its own kind of loud.
He looks wrong in the bed. Too still. Clarence is never still, he’s always early and moving or working on something, and now there are tubes and a line in the back of his hand and a bandage over one eyebrow and he just lies there breathing because a machine is helping him, and I can’t stand it.
I should call someone. That’s what you do. You call his family.
But he’s barely spoken to his parents in years, he’s told me that much, and the only brother he has is the reason any of this is happening, and I am not, I am not calling Adam. So who. Who do you call for a man who built his whole life on his own.
In the end I call the one person I swore I’d never call again, because I can’t sit in this room by myself for one more minute.
“Charly?” Rebecca’s voice is rough with sleep and shock. “It’s three in the morning, what’s going on?”
“I need you.” It comes out broken. “I’m at the hospital. It’s not me, I’m fine, it’s, please. Please just come. I can’t be here alone.”
She doesn’t ask a single question. “I’m coming.”
She’s there in forty minutes with her coat thrown over pajamas and a grocery-store bouquet clutched in one hand, like flowers were the only thing her hands could think to do, and the second she sees me in that chair next to him she starts crying too, and I stand up and we just fall into each other, two sisters who haven’t touched since the day everything broke, holding on in a hospital hallway because there’s nobody else.
“What happened?” she says into my hair. “Charly, what happened to him?”
“He crashed. In the rain. He was driving and...” I can’t finish it.
“He was coming to find me. I had my phone off, Rebecca. He was trying to reach me all night and I shut him out, and he got in the car to come find me anyway, and now he’s in there.
” My voice falls apart completely. “If I’d just answered.
If I’d just picked up the phone, he wouldn’t have been on that road. This is on me.”
“Stop. Don’t do that to yourself.” She pulls back and holds my face in both hands, and she looks older than I’ve ever seen her, worn down to the bone. “You didn’t make it rain, okay? You didn’t get in the car for him. He decided to drive. That’s not on you, no matter how bad you want it to be.”
“You don’t know that.”
I don’t believe her. But I let her hold my face and say it, because it’s the first time in a year my sister has touched me like she loves me, and I’ve missed her so much it’s a physical thing.
She doesn’t stay long. She can tell, the way she always used to be able to tell with me before everything fell apart, that I don’t need company right now.
I just need to not be totally alone for a minute. So she puts the flowers on the windowsill, squeezes my hand, and makes me promise to call her the second anything changes. And then she’s gone, and it’s just me and him and the quiet beeping in the dark.
***
I take his hand. The one without the line in it. It’s warm, which shouldn’t surprise me but does, because some part of me has been braced for it to be cold.
And then I remember my phone.