Chapter 8 #3
“I’ll tell her what matters.” Leah came back and took my hand. “Ambulance is coming through the service gate. Aris rides with you until the hospital team takes over. I’m riding with you. You aren’t doing this alone.”
I looked at the door and hated the part of me that wanted him inside that promise.
He has ridden in ambulances with me. He has slept in the chair with two fingers around my wrist so the machines couldn’t hide my breathing from him.
I used to trust him most at exactly the moment I could not protect myself.
He took that person away from me on purpose, and the needing him stayed, with nothing left underneath it I was allowed to act on.
The next breath barely moved.
The room narrowed to Leah. Then it opened enough to show me Aris’s hands on the mask. I tried to ask whether it happens this fast, whether there is time to be afraid. Nothing came out.
The bedroom upstairs. The white queen on the nightstand beside the inhaler, where he set it Saturday night.
If I stopped here, Jess kept the jacket.
The baby grew up on this compound. I would be the wife whose lungs quit before the husband leaving her had finished leaving, in the place where he replaced me, and the last thing he would know about me was that I heard him choose them first.
Panic got into my hands and I fought the mask. Aris held it near my face and didn’t force it and told me to look at Leah. She leaned in until she was all there was, the door and the cabinets and every future gone behind her.
“Stay with me, Eden. You’re not dying here. Squeeze my hand if the mask feels wrong.”
One squeeze for no. He set it back.
The oxygen didn’t take the pressure off.
It gave me something to follow. Leah talked about the house, because she knows home is worth more than reassurance.
Windows intact. Porch clear. Gladys still on the counter under the towel I left over the bowl.
Nobody had been in my bedroom. She said what she was doing before she did it, every time, because losing my voice had not made my body public property.
She never said his name.
The crew came in with smoke on their uniforms and moved me onto the stretcher while Aris gave them the facts. Tessa walked beside Leah to the outside door. June stood near Bear with the civilian list against her chest, crying and still checking her groups.
Ryder was at the service entrance with his weapon pointed at the ground, dirt down his front and blood dried from a cut at his hairline.
Jess stood behind the interior barrier with both hands over her mouth.
He didn’t look at her. He looked at me with a terror so complete that I almost believed I was still the center of his life.
Then the stretcher came level with him and I remembered the porch. A man can stop loving his wife and still refuse to watch her die in front of him. Fear doesn’t make an affair false. It doesn’t put the money back or change whose baby is still there after the ambulance goes.
He stepped toward the stretcher and stopped when Leah put herself between us. “I cleared the route. Two bikes ahead, two behind. Aris has the county frequency.”
“Bear gave me the route.” Leah climbed in without thanking him. “Eden chose me.”
He found my eyes before the doors came together. He lifted one hand and let it drop.
Fifty-six minutes, they told me later. The mask, Leah’s fingers, Aris saying the last treatment hadn’t done enough, the vehicle slowing while the bikes took an intersection, then hospital light sliding across the ceiling in bars.
When I woke, the light past the blinds had changed and a machine beside the bed was counting my pulse with real persistence.
Oxygen ran under my nose. My hands ached.
Every breath came with a soreness that frightened me until I understood the soreness was the whole breath arriving.
Leah was asleep in the chair with her chin on her chest and one hand near mine, not on it.
I moved my fingers. She was awake immediately. “You’re in the hospital. You’re safe. Aris is downstairs arguing with somebody about discharge, so he’s recovered enough to be unbearable.”
My voice came out small and scraped. “How long?”
“Most of the night.” She reached for the water, then stopped before she picked it up. “Do you want a drink?”
I nodded. She raised the bed and held the cup where I could take it myself.
It hurt going down, and holding it was worth the hurt, so I drank again.
The taste of smoke was still in it, and the smoke brought the rest: Ryder outside the infirmary door, his face at the ambulance, the jacket over the back of Jess’s chair, Jess and the baby come first.
“Did he stay?”
Leah looked toward the blinds. “Until Bear ordered him back. They needed the Road Captain on the perimeter.”
“Did he go back to Jess?” It took enough breath that she could have pretended not to hear it. She has never once lied to make my pain smaller.
Her hand closed around the empty bottle. “Jess is at the clubhouse. Ryder went back there.”