Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Trevor
I'm on my feet before my eyes are open. Sheets kicked to the floor, the bad knee firing a complaint I file away without reading, the hallway creaking under my weight as I hit the doorframe at something between a run and a stagger.
The house is dark — the kind of dark that only happens in the dead hours, when even the light from town has given up and gone home.
I find the wall with my palm, follow it to Eileen's room, and the scene that meets me is the kind that lives in the part of the brain that doesn't forget.
Cole's already there. On his knees beside the bed, one hand on the concentrator, the other working the mask onto Eileen's face.
His hands are shaking — the tremor of fingers that know exactly how bad this is and are fighting not to show it.
Eileen's upright against the headboard, chest heaving in short, useless pulls, the kind of breathing that moves air but not oxygen.
Her lips have gone the gray-blue that turns your stomach if you've seen it before, and I have — a rooftop, a kid from Toledo with a sucking chest wound, his mouth doing the same thing hers is doing now while the corpsman worked and I held pressure and the kid died anyway.
Her hands are in Cole's, trembling — not cold, not fatigue, the full-body shake of a system running out of road.
"The tubing," Cole says. Low. Steady. The kind of steady that costs a man something, and what it's costing him is written all over his face even in the half-dark — jaw set so tight the muscle jumps, eyes fixed on Eileen's with a focus that's holding them both up.
"Check the line. It's kinked somewhere."
I drop to the floor. The carpet's thin, industrial, the kind that came with the house and has soaked up twenty years of spilled medicine and quiet panic.
My palms find the tubing where it runs from the concentrator to the bed.
Cool plastic. I trace it from the machine, under the nightstand, along the baseboard — and there.
A hard kink where it ducks under the nightstand leg, pinched flat enough to choke the flow to a trickle.
My scarred shoulder pulls as I reach, the memory of the round flaring white-hot a second before I push through it.
I straighten the kink. Feel the tubing give, the plastic warming as the oxygen finds its path.
The hiss resumes — pressurized gas through a narrow channel, the white noise of something working the way it should.
Eileen's chest slows. Not much. A fractional easing, the heaving pulls becoming something nearer to real breaths.
Her color comes back. Slowly. The gray-blue receding from her lips inch by inch, like a tide going out, and the slowness is the thing that lands and stays.
Last week's episode cleared faster. The one before that, faster still.
The arithmetic is simple and brutal and neither of us says it, because saying it makes it real.
Cole has the mask repositioned, his thumb on her cheek, steadying the elastic behind her ear, and the gentleness of it — this man who carries rage like it's part of his skeleton, touching his mother's face like she's something irreplaceable — does something to my throat I don't have time to examine.
"Ambulance," I say. Not a question. Cole's already reaching for his phone.
He dials. Gives the address. His voice doesn't shake.
That's Cole — the voice holds when everything else comes apart, and right now everything else is coming apart.
I'm at the closet, pulling Eileen's shoes from the bottom shelf.
Her feet are cold when I slide the sneakers on — the cold of poor circulation, skin that feels ten degrees colder than the room.
I get the cardigan around her shoulders.
Light blue, knit, something she's had since before I left, the fabric gone soft from washing.
She doesn't help. Can't. Her hands are still in Cole's, still trembling.
When I lift her, my shoulder screams. Full-throated, white-hot, the kind of pain that lives in the muscle and doesn't care what else is happening.
I grit through it. Carry her down the hall the way I carried wounded overseas — one arm under her knees, the other at her back, her head against my chest — and the weight of her is all wrong.
Too light. The wrongness of a body that's been consuming itself to stay alive, and losing.
Cole's ahead of us, holding doors, the phone still to his ear, his free hand braced on the frame like he's holding the house up by will alone.
The ambulance takes twelve minutes. We wait on the porch, Eileen between us on the top step, her head against my shoulder because it's the closest solid thing.
The night air is cool — August finally doing its one decent trick, cooling off after dark so the heat doesn't kill you twice.
The flashing lights appear at the end of Cembrook, red and blue washing across the maples, pulsing on the peeling siding like a heartbeat if you squint.
The EMTs are good. Quiet. The efficiency of people who do this every night and have learned that talking too much just gives the fear somewhere to live.
They get her on the gurney, check her vitals, swap her mask for theirs.
One looks at the concentrator, makes a note.
The other asks questions Cole answers in that same steady voice that's costing him everything.
I ride with her. The interior smells like antiseptic and plastic and canned oxygen. The gurney straps creak. The monitor beeps. Eileen's eyes are closed now, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm that's almost normal if you don't look too close at the numbers.
Roan General at four in the morning makes you wonder whether humanity's progressed at all since the invention of the leech.
Fluorescent light that turns skin the color of old paper.
The bored night-shift nurse at the desk, eyes on a cracked-spine paperback, looking up when we come through like we're interrupting something more important than a life.
The antiseptic smell layered over something older, the must of a building that doesn't get enough funding to replace its carpets or its air filters or its sense of basic dignity.
They admit her fast. That's the tell. The speed of it — gurney through the doors, vitals, room assigned, doctor paged — says everything the monitor's been trying to say since we found her. This is the kind of serious that makes paperwork wait.
The room is small. Standard-issue — beige walls, beige curtains, beige everything but the equipment, which is gray and beeping and doing most of the work.
They get her on proper oxygen, a cannula instead of the mask, the prongs in her nostrils, the tubing running to a wall unit that hums with a steadiness the home machine could never match.
A pulse-ox clipped to her finger, the red light through her nail bed, the number on the screen: 92, holding.
Not great. Not catastrophic. The purgatory of almost-okay.
Eileen looks small in the hospital bed. Smaller than she did at home, where familiar walls and her own things gave her dimension.
Here, against institutional sheets with the thin blue blanket to her waist and her hair flat on the pillow, she looks like what she is: a woman running out of road and aware of it.
Her eyes are closed. Her breathing's settled into something that might, with generosity, be called rest.
Cole stands on one side of the bed. I stand on the other. Neither of us talks. The monitor beeps. The clock ticks. The number holds at 92, dips to 91, climbs back, and we watch it the way you watch a horizon when you can't tell whether the storm's coming or going.
Cole's hands are on the bed rail, knuckles white. The shake's gone from his fingers, replaced by a rigidity that's its own tell — the body locking down because the alternative is coming apart, and coming apart isn't an option with the pulse-ox at 91 and the night still young.
I put my hand on the rail near his. Not touching. Close enough that the heat off his skin reaches mine across the small gap of charged air, and a few inches has never felt so complicated or so necessary.
The monitor beeps. The number holds. The clock ticks.
We stand there. We watch. We don't say a word.
Somewhere around six, Eileen opens her eyes, looks at the two of us standing at her bedside like sentries who forgot their posts, and tells us to go home.
Not in those words. Eileen's never sworn in her life, at least not where anyone could hear it.
What she says is, "You're both hovering like I'm already gone," and the thinness of her voice doesn't take a thing off the edge in it.
She's propped on the pillows, cannula in her nose, the pulse-ox reading a steady 93 now, and her eyes are the same ones that used to catch me skipping school at seventeen and deliver the look that could strip paint at twenty paces.
"Go sleep," she says. "One full night. I mean it."
Cole starts to open his mouth. I can see the argument forming behind his face, the set of his jaw that means he's about to dig in and stay dug, and Eileen cuts him off with a lift of her hand so practiced it's almost choreography.
"I'm in good hands here," she says. Her eyes find Cole's and hold.
One beat. Two. Something passes between them I can feel without understanding — a mother who knows her son better than he knows himself, and a son who knows she's right even when being right costs him something he can't afford. "You're not."