Nineteen Minutes
Dolly Beckett
Gasping for breath, I scramble back through the window.
It seems to take hours to run back down the hall, through the door, past the bedroom, through the dance studio, across the landing, down the stairs to the foyer, down the hall to the back door, and into the freezing rain.
I run along the walkway to the garden, screaming his name.
My feet slide in the wet dirt, slowing my progress as I stumble over the edge of the garden bed and the trampled decorative plants, shoving my way through several crouched officers to get to him.
“Don’t hurt him,” I scream. “Don’t let him die! He’s my baby’s father.”
“We’re not hurting him,” says Officer Gunn, pulling me away and holding me while I try to reach Preston again. “They’re stopping the bleeding. Just let them do their jobs. There’s an ambulance on the way.”
“Why’d you shoot?” I sob.
“He’s a suspect who was attacking you,” he says, like it makes perfect sense.
“He wasn’t hurting me,” I scream. “He would never hurt me! He didn’t do anything, and you shot him!”
“We saw someone accused of kidnapping the mayor’s daughter, seemingly locked in a struggle with his victim,” he says. “I understand you’re upset. We’ll wait for you to be ready before we take your statement.”
“My statement?” I choke out, too upset to comprehend what he’s saying.
I can’t be reasoned with, but after a while, he’s restrained me long enough that my strength fails me.
I collapse into him, sobbing into his soaked uniform as the paramedics file into the garden and load Preston on a stretcher.
I hear words and pieces of phrases as they crowd around him with their machines—stop the bleeding, and nineteen minutes, and crashing, and bleeding out, and bullet wound to the chest…
I try to make sense of it, but all I can think about is Destiny, how they put her in the ambulance and she never came back.
Officer Gunn puts his arm around me, steering me toward the ambulance.
“This one, too,” he says, finally releasing me into the hands of one of the paramedics. “She might be in shock.”
The doors close, blocking me from the milling faces and uniforms outside, the headlights and blue lights and lightning slanting through the darkness that’s fallen outside, the streaks of rain shooting through the beams. Inside, it’s sterile and white, and they let me sit on the floor and hold Preston’s hand and pray that I won’t lose him so soon, that I won’t regret for the rest of my life that I accepted only a moment of his love when I could have had a lifetime.