Chapter 95
Tristan
Hope. Mathilde said that promising her I would get her out of here wasn’t me lying to her; it was me trying to give her hope.
Is that what I was trying to do?
I guess so.
Hope is a huge part of my job. It always has been, even when I was an ER nurse. You need a strong sense of hope when you work in medicine or as a first responder, given all the pain and tragedy you see. If you don’t hold onto hope, you become cynical.
I have always been good at holding hope for other people. For my patients. For the people I’m transporting in my ambulance.
But for myself?
Not so much.
As I sit curled up in the darkness underground, surrounded by rubble, I realize that I think my sense of hope died with Warren, over a year ago.
Since then, I haven’t had hope for myself.
Sure, I’ve survived, and I think a large part of me thought that survival was the best I could expect.
I didn’t believe that things could be better than basic survival.
I didn’t have hope.
Ever since meeting Nick, that forgotten sense of hope has been fighting against my walls, my boundaries, my grief, trying to remind me that things might just be okay.
Maybe I had started to accept that before the earthquake. Maybe I was hoping for a future with Nick. Maybe I was about to admit that I loved him.
And then the earthquake.
Where is the hope now?
Now that I am buried underground, trapped beneath concrete, with no way out and no signs of rescue in sight.
I am injured, dehydrated, and very hungry. My body is no doubt going into shock. I don’t know the full extent of my injuries. I am weak and growing weaker by the minute.
I tried to save someone, and she died.
What hope do I have?
Tears start to roll down my cheeks, but I don’t have the strength to reach up and brush them away. Why bother, anyway? I feel like I’ve earned a good cry.
Carefully, I extend my stiff legs, and my boot bumps against something that rattles against the concrete. I frown, unable to see enough in the darkness to tell what it is. I prod it with my foot again. It moves.
Moving slowly, painfully, I crawl forward until one of my scraped hands closes around it.
The radio.
When I tried it earlier, I got no signal. But what did Mathilde say about the radio?
She asked me what I would say to Nick if I had the chance to talk to him over the radio.
I close my eyes.
What would I say?
Maybe he can’t hear me. Maybe he’s not even up there. I have no way of knowing.
But hope isn’t built on things you know.
Hope comes when you don’t know how something will work out, and you try anyway.
I press the button on the radio to contact the truck and whisper in a raw, trembling voice, “Hello? This is Firefighter Tristan Cavanagh with the 27th. Anyone there?”