Chapter Sixteen
Blood seeps through my fingers as I cradle the gunshot wound at my arm.
His hands are around the back of Jade’s neck. Her torso is lifted, a sharp slope curving off the blood drenched earth. Her legs are floppy beneath her, her arms too.
She makes no noise.
She is silent.
Frozen.
Paralyzed.
Soundless tears roll in a turbulent sheen down my cheeks.
My best friend's face is covered in dirt, leaves and twigs stuck in her bloodied hair, her lips losing color, and when she opens her eyes, each reaching for mine, all I see is terror, the kind that even if she somehow survived this, it would kill her.
Snap.
I fly upward, cracking my eyes open, finding myself in a bed I don’t recognize, my hands cradled in cool, leathery palms that I knew instantly belonged to my nan.
Safety.
I was afforded it.
My best friend wasn’t.
Nan holds me close, her breath over my scalp, my ear pressed to her chest. I listen to it thud along with the whirs and beeps of machines punctuating the beat of her heart.
“You are safe, sweetheart. You are safe.”
She repeats the same words over and over, rocking me as if I’m a child. The creaking, snapping, sound coming from the skeletonized hospital bed. And yet, I feel all blood drain from my body, like the plug inside of me has been pulled.
It twists my stomach and I squeeze my eyes closed, blocking it out.
I try to remember instead how I got here, among the bleak cream walls of what I knew was Devil’s Peak Hospital, how I got away, and how she didn’t, when I hear the same crack, and the weight of Jade’s lifeless body crashing to the dirt as my feet pounded the forest floor.
My legs move, but my soul has departed.
It stays behind, curled around my lifeless best friend.
My hair is drenched with sweat, strands plastered to the outline of my skull. The carotid in my neck throbbing as I hold hostage the last of my breath.
I was a good runner. It was the one thing I had let myself be great at.
I liked being in control of my pace, knowing exactly where I needed to derive strength from to be able to continue to throw one foot in front of the other.
But today, as I blink, sweat amalgamating with the tears bleeding from my eyes, I knew that if I was to make it out of this alive, I would never run again.
My throat burns as I suck back air, hands trembling when my phone slips from my grip, landing on the forest floor.
I don’t stop to pick it up.
I keep running.
And when the ribbon from my hair becomes stuck on a branch, I let the woods take that too.
I veer to my left, then my right, vaulting over a fallen tree trunk, my toes gripping the dirt, my feet sticky with blood.
I couldn’t hear him, not even as I strained my ears, forcing them away from the paroxysm of terror and fear tugging at my pulse.
Had he let me go?
Was it easier to handle one, than two?
Will he come back for me?
Will I be forced to spend the rest of my life looking behind me?
My chin frantically meets my shoulder, peeking into the gaping hole of the forest. The sinister shadows of trees and their streaky limbs flex and groan, reaching for me, a shackle to my fate.
Spinning back around, I feel my stomach lunge to my throat when I fly forward.
My torn and shredded and bleeding toes catch on a protruding tree root.
The weight of my body meets my shoulder, and then my temple when I crash to the ground, and before I can breathe or groan or cuss or wipe away the stream of tears searing into my cheeks, I return to my feet.
And with blood dripping into my eyes, I continue to run until I can no longer feel my feet.
Until each and every nerve is severed by the forest's teeth.
Until I feel a hint of the sunrise's heat.
Until I’m stumbling onto a road I didn’t know, my knees giving out beneath me.
My cut-up palms fall forward, pressing two bloody handprints into the rocky asphalt and I strip my throat raw when I vomit violently to my side.
And that’s when I hear it, my lifeline, or my demise.
The rumbling pitch of an engine.
I gasp for air when two headlights appear from the belly of desolation, racing toward me.
My bones are vibrating the same way they had when I’d laid myself out on the road. My lungs tightening the same way they had when I’d chased what would remain of my life, and what wouldn’t of hers.
“W-w-who…” I pause to wet my lips, to swallow, to take another breath. “Who f-found m-me?” I ask Nan.
Another tear trails hot and fast toward my ear. I don’t palm it away.
“A young couple passing through. They brought you here, sweetheart,” she whispers.
A chill slithers beneath my skin, curdling the blood in my veins. I reach for my tricep when it throbs, rest my fingers over the plaster, squeezing my eyes closed tighter.
I didn’t remember that part. Couldn’t remember their faces either. All I remembered was seeing the light that had come before.
It’s as if I had switched off, not able to process this latest blow to my soul, my body, my spirit.
I nod, smooth my crusted lips together, look toward the door, then the empty chairs on both sides of the bed.
“Let me guess…” I pause to swallow. “She’s too high?” I ask, voice cold.
And Nan knew I was talking about my mother because she drops her head, shakes it.
Fat globs of tears begin to fall down her velvety cheeks, and something shifts in my stomach as I watch her tremble, as I watch her battle words and sounds that don’t come.
I stare at her, brow furrowing, a film of gray shivering at the surface of my eyes.
I don’t blink.
I don’t set them free.
Not yet.
But when time stretches and Nan whimpers, my tears turn into needles at the back of my eyes, and my throat thickens with swallowed cries. And even though I’d thought about this day many times—almost prepared for it—I could still feel it coming toward me at the same speed of a freight train.
Not today, please not today.
Today, I was a daughter who really needed her mother.
My teeth chatter so hard I can barely get my question out, “She really did it this time, huh?”
Nan dissolves into tears, and it’s all the confirmation I need.
I stare at the wall, eyes unmoving, voice cold. “Before or after?”
She knew what I was asking, and she couldn’t answer me, but whether it was because she didn’t know, I wasn’t sure.
I grind my molars to alleviate the news of my mother’s overdose from severing me in half, then I settle on my own conclusion, because the truth was, before or after, it didn’t matter. It didn’t change a thing.
“I needed her to live with me, Nan.” My voice cracks. “I just…I needed her to live with me.”
Nan nods, then whimpers, pressing her fingers to her lips, crying harder, holding me as tight to her as her frail arms will allow. And tears become a stream down my own cheeks. They roll over my lips, dropping off the ledge of my chin, splattering to the crusty sheets.
My mother was dead.
Jade was dead.
Same day.
Same night.
And the only thought I had now was, why wasn’t I dead, too?