39. Norah
Chapter thirty-nine
Norah
The first thing I’m aware of is the light.
It comes through the window at the low angle of early morning, not committed to being day yet.
It catches the edge of a curtain, the rail of a bed, the institutional white of a ceiling that belongs to only one kind of building.
My brain, having apparently survived whatever happened to the rest of me, begins the slow and unglamorous work of assembling these details into a conclusion.
I’m in a hospital, and it’s almost morning.
The doctor is telling someone that the bullet nicked the liver.
Right.
I take a careful inventory of my current condition. There is a persistent and unwelcome burning in my left side. I’m foggy and groggy, and the top of my head is pounding. An IV is taped to my hand.
Shit. I should have told them to put it in my arm. I hate them in my hand.
It occurs to me that my preference of IV placement wasn’t an issue last night, because the last thing I remember is walking to the truck after the best burger of my life, the misty air, the warmth of Silas’s hand in mine.
Then the boom.
Is he here?
I don’t turn my head right away. I need one more second before I accept I’ve recently been shot. I’m entitled to that.
I turn my head.
Silas is three feet from the bed, in a chair that was clearly not designed for someone his size, forearms braced on his knees, eyes already on me.
Watching.
The chair he’s crammed into is two sizes too small. He’s been waiting for me to open my eyes. My chest gives a ridiculous little squeeze that has nothing to do with my liver situation.
Down the hall, a monitor beeps with the steady indifference of hospital equipment, and outside the window the sun is peeking above the horizon.
He says my name.
Just the one word, in the voice I have been holding onto, except lower now and rougher at the edges in a way that tells me everything about the night he’s spent in that chair.
“Hi,” I say.
My voice comes out smaller than intended—the anesthesia’s fault, I suppose, and a very dry throat.
He exhales once. Like he’s been holding his breath since the parking lot.
“Hi,” he says.
I try to take a breath that doesn’t involve my liver and mostly succeed. “So,” I say. “We didn’t make it to Paxton.”
He looks at me for a moment. “No,” he says. “We didn’t.”
“Close but no cigar.”
“Closer than I’d have liked,” he says. And I know they are the words of a man who has been sitting with a very precise linear measurement for most of the night.
“How close,” I say.
He leans forward slightly in the stupid chair. “The doctor said a quarter inch to the right, and we’d be having a different conversation.”
I absorb that.
A quarter inch. In most contexts, it means nothing. In this one, it means everything.
“Well,” I say finally. “Good thing I have excellent reflexes.”
He doesn’t say anything.
He looks at me like I’m the only thing in the room worth looking at, and he’s done pretending otherwise.
“You pushed me,” he says.
“I believe I nudged you.”
“Norah.”
“I know,” I say. And I do. The rest of it can wait. I’m not at full capacity, and we both know it.
“You stayed all night in that crazy, uncomfortable chair,” I say.
“I’m starting to think this county is full of little people.” His eyes twinkle, and I have to laugh. My side erupts in pain, and I wince and go rigid on the bed.
He grabs my hand without the IV and squeezes gently. “Sorry.”
The word sits bigger than it is. Bigger than being sorry for making me laugh at an inopportune time. I’m sorry, too, and it’s not about taking a bullet meant for him or causing him to stay parked all night in a chair that would make a weaker man’s ass go numb.
“We should probably talk,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “We should.”
“Not right now,” I say. “Right now, I think I need another shot of whatever they’re giving me for pain. You know, for my liver situation.”
“Your liver situation,” he repeats.
“That’s what I’m calling it,” I say. “I find naming things helpful.”
I don’t stay awake long.
The pain medication makes the decision for me, pulling me back under before I’ve finished processing the conversation, and I go without fighting it because what I need right now is blissful rest.
I surface twice before it gets dark.
The first time there’s noise in the corridor, and I open my eyes to the ceiling and the dimmed overhead light and turn my head enough to confirm what I already know.
He’s still there.
His head is slightly bowed, his gaze on the floor with the stillness of a man who has been sitting with grief for a long time and has made his peace.
I close my eyes.
The second time the light has changed. It’s evening, and the window is going the color of purple and gray. He’s exactly where he was, and the hand that isn’t connected to an IV is warm inside both of his, and I don’t open my eyes all the way.
I think about what I can see from here without moving.
The blood on his sleeve has gone fully dark—evidence of a parking lot he’s been carrying on his body all day while he sat in this chair and waited for me to open my eyes. Nobody made him change. I don’t think it occurred to him as an option.
I think about the quarter inch, the math of it.
One quarter of one inch, in one direction, and this chair is empty.
The hand around mine is somewhere else. The road to Paxton exists but has a different shape, without him in it, and I’m lying on a different bed not having a conversation with myself about what comes next.
I don’t follow that thought all the way through.
I follow the other one instead. The one where I shoved him. Where my body made a decision before my brain finished the sentence. Where I moved, and what happened after happened to me instead of him. This is the one I’m living in—with his hands around mine.
I made that happen.
Not proudly, not as a calculation. I just moved. The way you move when protecting someone matters more than thinking first.
I close my eyes again.
He doesn’t know I’m awake.
I want to keep that knowledge for a little while: of what he looks like when he thinks no one is watching. The bowed head, without asking for anything from me except to be here when I open my eyes.
He’s still in the chair when I wake up properly.
The light outside is gone. Whatever is left of the day has finished its business without me, and I find I don’t mind.
He looks up when I move.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says.
I take a careful breath. “You look terrible.”
“I’ve been in this chair for fourteen hours.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.
“Yes I did,” he says.
I consider arguing with that, but I don’t.
“They caught the guy, Norah. The shooter. He’s behind bars with a bail so high, he’ll never get out.”
I smile wanly at that. “If I didn’t hurt so much, I’d feel sorry that he’s such an angry guy.”
“Don’t feel sorry for him, ever. I just wanted you to know. We’ll both have to testify eventually, but that will be months from now.”
“Thank you,” I say, not sure what more there is to say or feel about the bitter man, a trial, or what I want to happen to him.
He leans forward. “I need to say something.”
I wait. I’m good at waiting.
“I know what this is,” he says. “What you are to me. I’ve known for a while and I haven’t…
” He stops. Starts again. “There are things I haven’t told you yet.
Things you deserve to know that I’m going to tell you when you’re out of that bed and I’ve slept.
” He holds my gaze. “But I need you to know this. Before you go back to sleep. Before tomorrow. I need you to know I’m here because there’s nowhere else I’d be. ”
I look at him for a long moment.
“Silas,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“I know,” I say.
“You know.”
“I’ve known for a while.” The corner of my mouth moves. “I was waiting for you to get there.”
The lines of his face ease in a way I haven’t seen since before the parking lot.
“We have a lot to talk about,” he says.
“We do,” I say. “But not tonight.”
“Not tonight,” he agrees.
I close my eyes. His hand is still around mine, warm and steady.
“Still going to Paxton. We’re going to be okay,” I say, mostly to myself, already drifting.
“Yeah,” he says. “We are.”
I wake once more in the night. The nurses must have taken pity on him, because he’s asleep in a reclining chair, his head tipped back on a fresh pillow.
My gaze finds him in the dim room.
There’s a road three hundred miles long that we didn’t finish driving. A town at the end of it where only a handful of people know we’re coming. A quarter inch that went the right way, and a man finally getting the sleep he deserves.
A great deal is unresolved. Complicated. Without a clear answer. That conversation is coming when I have better access to my faculties and the liver situation has filed its last complaint.
I close my eyes.