11. Responding #4
"ICU is family only." She said it to the room and to the regulations. Then she reached over and hit the release, and the doors to the elevators sighed apart. "And I'm sure he's family. Second floor. You know the room."
The elevator took a year. Then the hallway, antiseptic and hush, monitors murmuring behind doors, our boots squeaking too loud, and 217 waiting at the end. I stopped with my hand flat on the door. Breathed once, in through the nose. Went in.
The machines were quieter.
That reached me first. The ventilator still kept its rhythm, hiss-click, hiss-click, but somebody had dialed something back, and the room didn't sound like machinery holding a line anymore.
It sounded like a room where somebody slept.
The blinds sat halfway up, afternoon light lying across the bed in long warm bars, and in the bed my brother had his face back.
Four months of tubes had worn Liam down to a sketch of himself, and I'd taught myself to look at the sketch without flinching.
But the swelling that had squatted around his eyes since the first week was gone down.
His color had climbed out of gray into something with blood behind it.
His brown curls were a disaster, which was correct, which was Liam, and the green numbers on the monitor ran steadier than I'd ever seen them run, and the sheet over his chest rose and fell, steady and deep.
He looked better. He looked young again.
"He looks better." Ghost's voice came soft from just inside the door, hushed the way the room asked for. "A lot better. Last time I stood in here, I watched that sheet to make sure it was moving. Look at him now."
"Color's back." I couldn't pull my eyes off my brother's face to say it.
"And he's still got better hair than you."
"He knows." The laugh came out low and cracked at the edges. "It's a whole thing with him. Don't ever tell him I said that. He'll be unbearable."
"When he wakes up," Ghost murmured, "I'm telling him immediately."
When, he'd said. Like it was already on a calendar somewhere. The word landed in me and stayed warm, and I crossed the room and sat down in the chair I'd worn my shape into over four months, and my hands went to the sheet beside his hand, the same way they'd gone a hundred visits running.
And the last time I'd sat in this chair came back whole. Barefoot. Bleeding. Thirteen miles of desert ground into my knuckles, and an inch of white cotton between my fingers and his that I could not make myself close, because I'd decided that morning that my hands were too dirty to touch him.
I looked at those hands now. Tape gone. Desert gone. The blood washed off six days ago, and the word killer washed off with it by two pieces of paper in a small warm room. These hands had fed fifty people since sunrise. These hands had held on to somebody the whole way here.
I closed the inch.
My fingers slid over Liam's, careful, folding around his hand where it lay palm-up on the sheet. Warm. Dry. Alive under mine, and I bowed my head over our stacked hands and let out a breath I'd been holding since June.
His fingers twitched.
A small pull inward, the start of a grip, there and gone inside half a second, and my heart slammed up into my ears and I froze, staring at our hands. Waiting. Begging.
Nothing more came. The ventilator held its rhythm.
The numbers held their line. Asleep, still climbing, slow, exactly like she'd said.
But his fingers had moved against mine. Some deep part of my brother had felt pressure and answered it.
Four months of silence, and he had answered, and the room went hot and blurred, and I gripped his hand harder, put my other one over the top, and heard my own voice come out low and shaking and completely certain.
"I'm getting you out of this. All of it. The debt, the man who did this, everything. I swear it, Liam. I'm getting us both out of this mess."
"We will."
Ghost, behind me, quiet. Both his hands came down onto my shoulders and stayed, warm and heavy, bearing down steady through my shirt.
"Together. All of us." His grip tightened once. "You're not alone anymore. Neither of you. Not ever again."
I looked at my brother's face under the bars of light.
At his hand held between both of mine. And I felt the truth of it pressing to get in, and I opened the door partway.
Because it was starting to be true. A kitchen full of people who ate what I cooked.
Four strangers out of a Montana labor camp who'd handed me their names.
A nurse counting finger-squeezes like they were gold.
A man standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders, who drove like the wind, and who had never once made me ask.
Partway. The last lock stayed on. Four months and seventeen fights had installed it, and seven days from now I was walking back into a warehouse owned by the man who built this bed, and hope was a thing I'd learned to leave outside a ring.
But Liam's fingers had moved.
And I was done fighting alone.