Chapter 8 #2
Leah understood without my asking. She moved until her body took him out of my sightline and kept her attention on my face rather than his argument.
He could hear the coughs and what came between them.
He was counting what the medicine had failed to fix; I knew that the way I knew the shape of his hands.
Letting him watch frightened me less than letting him help.
I would rather have worked for every breath in front of him than take one thing out of his hand that he might remember later as proof I couldn’t live without him.
Aris listened and asked whether the first dose had helped.
I held my fingers close together. A little.
Not enough. He put us toward the infirmary because the outside route ran downwind of the fire, sent Tessa to clear the connecting door and June to tell Bear I might need transport.
Every instruction he gave came after mine, which mattered, and I couldn’t say so.
My knee went at the corner. Ryder’s hand came in under my elbow and I pulled away hard enough to hit the wall.
“Don’t touch her.” Leah shoved his arm off while Tessa came back through the door and got a shoulder under mine.
“I’ve got you,” Tessa said, matching my pace instead of lifting me. “Tell me if I’m hurting you.”
I shook my head. At the infirmary threshold Aris turned around. “You clear the route. You don’t come in unless Eden asks for you.”
Ryder looked at me for permission. I reached for Leah, and Aris shut the door.
The infirmary air was cleaner. Not clean.
Smoke had come in before the dampers dropped and it sat bitter on the back of every breath.
Aris asked before he put oxygen near my face, set up the nebulizer, and talked in short pieces that didn’t need an answer.
The medicine made my hands worse and my heart run.
The pressure kept building. Air went in.
Getting it back out was the thing that had stopped working, and each breath left less room than the one before it for the next.
Leah knelt by the cot. I sat forward, one hand on hers, the other around the edge of the mattress.
“I’m here. You don’t have to talk.”
I wanted to ask whether the fire had reached the house.
Whether Gladys was covered. Whether the burner was still in my purse.
Whether he had gone back to her when the door shut.
My body took the world down to the next breath before I could pick one.
I spent my whole childhood hating every adult who made asthma the only true fact about me, and I would have given anything right then for lungs ordinary enough that grief could be the worst thing happening to me.
The first treatment ended and the room did not open.
Aris started another. Checked my pulse. Asked whether I felt dizzy.
I nodded. Sweat under my shirt and cold air off the portable unit at the same time.
The wheeze that had followed me down the corridor was quieter now, and I watched him hear that, and watched his face stop working on the machine and start working on me.
“Like the winter?” he asked Leah.
Leah looked at me first, waiting for permission when every breath in the room had already given it. I nodded.
“Year two of the marriage. Respiratory infection, she waited four days, she was admitted for three.” Leah’s voice stayed level. “And the fundraiser at the warehouse, the fog machine, that was the ER.”
Aris asked me to show him with my hand whether this was worse than the warehouse. I put it higher. His mouth tightened before he got hold of it, and Leah stopped looking at the door for something none of us was going to get.
I knew my own body. That was the whole argument of my life. I knew it now. I knew the medicine should have made room by twelve minutes and hadn’t. I knew what came next and I would have chosen it myself if I could have said the word.
“Transport,” Aris called toward the door. “Tell Bear we’re not waiting for the gate to be perfect.”
June answered from the corridor. “Ambulance is holding at the north crossroads. Main gate’s damaged and there’s fire across the direct route.”
“Then bring it in the service road, or bring me a vehicle with oxygen.” Aris adjusted the mask and looked at me rather than at Leah. “I’m treating you the whole time they clear it. You’re going to the hospital.”
I got the first sound of okay out and nothing after it. I have known since I was nine that not finishing a sentence is the sign. Knowing it did not make me calm. It told me why he had stopped offering options.
Leah wiped my temple with the corner of a towel and asked before she did it again.
“Eden.” She had my hand. “Do you want me to call your father?”
He would be on the road inside ten minutes. He would be at the desk in Terre Haute before the ambulance was, with the list of things he wanted stopped.
I shook my head. Once.
“All right.” She didn’t ask me twice, and she didn’t explain it to anybody in the room. “Then it’s me.”
The second treatment finished. The counter on my inhaler read zero; I had been taking it since Sunday and had not once let myself write down how often.
Aris asked for the backup. Leah got it out of the pouch and he shook it beside his ear, and I saw the shake come back too light, and I remembered where that one had lived: the door pocket of the Civic, all June and half of July, in the heat, the one I kept meaning to swap out.
He fired it into the spacer anyway. It came out wet and I got almost nothing.
The door opened wide enough for Jax to put a sealed pharmacy bag through it. “This was in the Civic glove box. Ryder said there was a refill.”
Aris checked the label, opened the package, and had a new device in my spacer at once. The plastic crackled by my knee. The sticker was from my pharmacy in Hadley Creek and the fill date was the eighth of July.
Six days. He had put that in the car six days ago.
Jax read it off my face. “He knew it was there?”
I nodded. Leah stood up so fast the chair hit the cabinet. “He put a refill in her car before he told her about Jess. He knew she’d leave.”
“He expected her to.” Jax looked at the sealed bag, then out through the gap in the door where Ryder was waiting, and the anger on his face had stopped being about an affair.
The fresh device delivered the drug and my lungs still would not give me the room.
Aris put in an IV, said what he was doing before he did it, started the medicine for the swelling, kept the oxygen on me.
Leah stayed where I could see her. Tessa shouted door updates back to June.
Ryder’s voice came down the corridor giving route orders in the tone that makes men move.
Forty miles to Terre Haute. Fifty minutes on a good day, and this was not one.
I hated recognizing his competence while I was frightened.
Engines started. The service gate came open.
He knew which road the fire hadn’t reached and how many bikes the ambulance needed and where to put them.
That was the man I married, and it was the same mind that had built the burner, moved the money, serviced the car, and picked a baby I would not fight.
“Can she hear me?” he asked from outside the door.
“She can hear everything,” Leah said. “That doesn’t mean you get to speak to her.”
“Tell her the route’s clear.”