Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
I didn’t see who. I didn’t see from where. I hadn’t seen anything. All I could do was hear it, followed by the ringing in my ears.
Hoping to find something, I looked down at my body, searching for injury. I wasn’t hurt anywhere. Fuck, I’d never wished for physical pain as desperately as I did in that moment.
But damn it, I was fine. No gunshot wounds to speak of. This is not happening.
Reluctantly, my eyes drew up, not wanting to find what logic ultimately said I would. If the bullet didn’t hit me…
“Kain.” I don’t think I’d ever heard her voice sound that way before—a terrifying hybrid of scared and weak. Her hand clutched at her ribcage, just below her left side breast, and underneath her fingers, a growing red stain spread along the white fabric of her dress. “Ka…”
From below, her legs buckled, and if not for my arm reaching out to catch her, she would have fallen face first. This is not happening…
But it was.
Internally, my emotions hit so hard they must’ve knocked the wind out of me.
I was on the ground before I knew it, my arm wrapped around her weakening frame.
Her free hand came up, clutching tightly at my upper arm.
The way her nails dug into my skin confirmed without a doubt in my mind that she was in pain.
But it also told me that there was fight left in her.
“Lauren,” my words were automatic, my brain seemingly running on some adrenaline powered autopilot.
I didn’t even recognize my own voice. Lauren’s grip on the fabric of her dress where the blood stain was spreading was tight, but she wasn’t applying any pressure.
She was bleeding out. “Lauren, baby, move your hand, I need to apply pressure to the… Baby, please move your hand.”
The warmth of her blood running through my fingers only seemed to send a chill running straight through me.
I pressed my palm firmly against her, willing the stream of red to stop if not at least slow down.
With my other hand, I reached for the purse that she’d dropped, and for the first time in my life, I dialed 9-1-1.
They took forever.
The whole left side of Lauren’s white dress was painted red, a horrifying puddle of blood collecting under her.
I tried not to look, opting to focus on the gentle rise and fall of her chest, trying to not to dwell on the fact that as the minutes passed, each rise and fall grew shallower than the last.
“I need you to hold on to the sound of my voice, Lauren. Just listen and breathe.” Her grip on my upper arm had long grown limp, and now the only thing I had left in order to confirm that she was still with me were the barely-there breaths she took in abnormal intervals.
“I’m so sorry for the last couple of weeks.
I understand that I was sulky, and hard to be around for most of the time we were together.
I’m sorry if I made you feel helpless, like there was nothing you could do.
I should have told you that just you being there made every day easier to get through. ”
The backs of my eyes stung like pins and needles, and it wasn’t until the first couple of clear drops fell, mixing in with her blood around me, that I realized what that was. Lauren always seemed to make crying look easy. What she’d neglected to mention was how fucking painful it was.
“Baby, I’m so sorry.” My voice cracked, faltering under the waterfall of emotions hitting me at once.
I was apologizing for everything now. “I’m sorry for telling you I didn’t care the first time you said you loved me.
I’m so sorry I didn’t come back for you after Poseidon.
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I loved you sooner. ”
It was as if she was taking one breath per minute now. The paramedics I’d called at least a half hour earlier were nowhere to be seen, and I was starting to panic.
“Please hold on to the sound of my voice. I’m right here with you. I love you, and I’m right here with you.”
Real life ain’t a movie. The world don’t stop just because you love somebody.
I counted to one hundred and four in my mind, on the edge of sanity as I waited for a sign that she was still breathing. If she was, I could no longer tell. Not a moment too soon, the sounds of sirens finally rang through the air.
But it was too late.
She wasn’t breathing.
And with that realization, everything went numb.
I was hardly aware of the arms that pulled me back and away from her until she was roughly snatched out of my hands.
Medics with the words Jackson Memorial scrawled across their backs surrounded her lifeless body, shouting at one another like they had no sense of cohesiveness.
“I don’t believe she’s breathing!”
Somehow, overhearing what I already knew confirmed seemed to hit me like a new wave of agony. I wiped at my eyes in an effort to clear my vision, only to remember with horror that my hands were covered in her blood.
“Get me a pair of scissors, and fire up the AED.”
They cut through the front of her dress, sticking a wired patch on her upper chest another at her side.
“Do I have a charge? Okay, a hundred and twenty volts! Clear!”
A sound like static rang through the air.
“One thirty! Clear!”
Nothing.
“One more time, one thirty! Clear!” An audible beep sounded off once. “A pulse. We’ve got a pulse.”
***
I was held for a total of six hours by Miami-Dade PD.
After being kept in a room for five and a half hours, my clothes still drenched in the blood of my girlfriend, when they finally did get around to questioning, I kept silent out of habit.
They wanted to know what I saw, what I heard, all of that.
It wasn’t my first time being questioned by law enforcement, and even though I wanted the person behind all of this to be punished, talking to the police was never an option.
“I don’t know,” I must’ve said for the eightieth time, though this particular question I really didn’t know the answer to. Having no charges to hold me for, I was inevitably released.
Rather than waste time going home for a change of clothes, I stopped at a pharmacy across the street from Jackson Memorial Hospital and bought myself a generic black hoodie.
The blood stains against the black fabric of my pants were barely visible, and so I didn’t bother doing anything when it came to those.
Although unseen, the nurse’s station at Jackson Memorial could clearly still smell the blood on my clothes when I walked up to the reception desk.
“Is Dr. Montgomery-Bryce on duty today?”
My sister Monique was a trauma surgeon at Jackson Memorial. I had no hope of getting any of Lauren’s information out of anyone in this hospital but her.
“We’re sorry, Dr. Montgomery-Bryce is in surgery.”
“Do you know when she’s going to be out of surgery? This is a fuckin’ emergency.” A few overhearing nurses turned their heads at the forcefulness of my voice.
“Sir, you’re in an emergency room. Everyone is having an emergency.”
“Fuck it, I’ll just wait in her office.” I jumped over the barrier, headed in the direction where I knew Monique’s office would be.
“Sir, you can’t just—”
“Elise, let it go,” I heard another voice interrupt behind me as I continued to walk on. “That’s Monique’s younger brother.”
The outside door to Monique’s office was locked, and after knocking rather loudly, it was confirmed that Monique must’ve still been in surgery. I found a place to sit near a seating area with a water cooler and fake plants.
My thoughts were racing, a back and forth tennis game of emotions in which I was expecting the worst and desperately hoping for the best. Back and forth, back and forth, unable to sit, just pacing back and forth, up and down the halls outside of Monique’s office.
When an hour had passed with no sign of my sister, I looked overhead at the hospital signs for directions, making a decision to wait for her outside of the operating room she was working in.
Passing through the sterile corridors of Jackson Memorial, a familiar face jumped out at me midstep.
For the briefest second, I felt happy, relieved.
Only for my eyes to later pick up on the differences that let me know I was not looking at Lauren.
What a cruel ass way to be reminded she had an identical twin sister.
Morgan.
I saw her before she saw me, but when her eyes did raise, her expression darkened.
It was as if she were looking in the eyes of her sister’s shooter.
I knew that look because Amir’s mother had given me one just like it.
Morgan sat on the floor, her head leaning back against a wall tiredly.
Her eyes were pink from crying no doubt, and on her upper left arm, thick white gauze bandages were wrapped around.
As if she’d very recently given blood, I noted, coming to the conclusion that she’d probably just did. Lauren had lost so much.
I didn’t have any other options.
So I spoke to her.
“Is she—”
“Don’t,” Morgan whispered, raising a hand to stop me. “I’m not na?ve like Lauren. Don’t stand there and act like you care about her, because I don’t buy it.”
Something in my chest twisted, and I realized that even though Lauren’s sister couldn’t have been more wrong, I didn’t have the energy or desire to fight her on this.
It felt like time was slipping through my fingers, and I didn’t have enough of it to argue.
I didn’t even want to. It could’ve been because I was tired, it could’ve been because of the disarming effect Morgan’s resemblance to her had on me.
“At least tell me if she’s alive.”
Morgan scoffed. “Last I checked, barely.”
“Do you know what room she—”
“I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew.”
***
And so I walked on, deciding I would get the answers without her help. It wasn’t until I’d arrived outside of the surgery wing that a hospital employee finally questioned my aimless walking around. I tried to ignore them, but that only made them get loud.
“Sir, do you need help?”
The sound of their voice only drew attention my way, turning curious heads. Among them, a familiar face. I’d only ever met Joshua Caplan in person once. It was an evening after I had a date with Lauren, and he tried to punch me in the face. For Lauren’s sake, I had let it go.
“No,” I replied to the short statured security guard beside me. “I don’t need help. I’m just waiting on a family member.”
“What the hell is he doing here?”
Lauren and her sister must’ve taken after their mother.
Joshua Caplan stood at about my height, his skin fair, and his eyes set in a permanent glare.
If I didn’t know anything about him, I got the feeling my instincts would still tell me not to trust him.
He shouted again, outraged that I was even here.
“I’m asking you—who the hell let him through?”
The security guard shrunk under the boom of his entitled shouting.
From the way that Caplan fumed, I got the sense that Lauren must’ve been close by.
I walked pass the both of them, eyes scanning each door’s window for signs of her.
It was the rough snatch of hands, grabbing at the back of my hoodie that pulled me out of my mission, my back being slammed against a wall.
Joshua Caplan’s hand circled around my neck, tight enough to convey a threat, but not enough to restrict my airway.
I was exhausted, so even though I could’ve snapped his arm back and away from me, I didn’t fight it.
And perhaps, if there was still a Lauren to do this for, I didn’t fight back because he was her father.
“You!” Venomous was the only word I had for his tone. “You did this to her.”
Lauren once said ‘The blame game is all about varying degrees of association. You can make anything anyone’s fault if you look at situations from different directions.
’ One way to look at things was this—Joshua Caplan could share in some of the blame.
He certainly hadn’t thought about her safety when he kicked her out of his house last month.
I supposed his anger was not out of grief alone, but a desperation to not blame himself.
If only I could be so cognitively dissonant. I wished I could find a scapegoat to levy all my guilt upon. No, I knew what role I played in all of this, and so I nodded. Yeah, I did do this to her. This was my fault.
Caplan’s grip around my neck tightened. “I could kill you right now.”
He wasn’t bluffing. I could see it in his eyes that he meant every word.
And it scared me—not because I found Joshua Caplan particularly threatening.
Nah, this nigga’s hands were softer than his daughters.
It scared me because my immediate thought after he threatened my life was, ‘Hey, maybe that ain’t such a bad idea. ’
But nah, Lauren wasn’t dead yet, which meant I needed to carry this one out. No tap outs.
Evidently the lone security guard on this floor had called for backup, given the three new uniformed guards running up from behind Caplan.
My fingers tightened around his wrist, Lauren’s blood still staining my fingernails, and I pulled his hand away from my neck. An angrier me would’ve broken his wrist for good measure, but I didn’t need to do all of that. It would really upset Lauren if I did.
When I let Caplan go, of course he lunged for me again, this time only to be restrained by hospital security. There was outrage as he shouted—cursed at me, cursed at them.
“I’m the state’s attorney for this district. Let me go or I will have all your fuckin’ jobs.”
It didn’t surprise me at all that Caplan was the type to say shit like that to people. They ignored his threats, pulling him further away from where I stood.
To me, a security officer explained, “Sir, you need to leave this floor. You’re not supposed to be here.”
That warning told me that Lauren had to be here somewhere. I didn’t budge. “I’m waiting for Dr. Montgomery-Bryce to get out of—”
“Dr. Montgomery-Bryce is out of the OR. If she’s expecting you, I can escort you down to her office.”
Resignedly, I shook my head. “I know where it is.”