What happened to her, son?
What did she take?
Were you there when this happened?
Did you do this to her?
Did she do it to herself?
Numb to my core, I observe the unfolding madness. A gurney appears and Presley’s placed onto it. A doctor with thick dreadlocks tied into a knot on the back of his head shines a light into her eyes. “Uh, she’s going. Yeahhh, she’s out. Someone call up to the blood bank. We’re gonna need everything they’ve got for this one.” He shouts over his shoulder at no one in particular. A female nurse rallies, though, taking off at a full run toward a row of elevators.
People rush around, grabbing things, shouting for other things—a babbling stream of information firing back and forth between them that makes my dizzy. Amidst the chaos, the doctor with the dreads leads a charge, captaining the helm of the gurney, carting Presley off toward the elevators, and then…
…then…
Suddenly, I’m alone.
Well.
I’m almost alone.
Pete’s still here.
He takes off his black ball cap and scratches his temple. “I tell ya. You never get used to that,” he mutters.
I frown. Why can’t…I feel anything? Why can’t I feel…my hands?
“The blood?” I murmur.
Pete fixes his hat back onto his head. “No, kid. The hope. Every time those doors slide closed, it gets you right here.” He places a hand in the center of his chest. “The hope that they’re gonna make it. Even when they probably won’t.”
9
PAX
* * *
The average human body holds approximately ten pints of blood.
I know this because I look it up outside, staring down at the lake of vital fluids that leaked out of Presley Maria Witton Chase while I was performing CPR on her. Tough to say how much is on the concrete, but it’s a lot. Plenty on my shirt and my jeans, too. On my hands and my arms and splattered all over the tops of my white Stan Smiths. At dawn, a custodian comes and pours a bucket of steaming water onto the mess along with a quart of bleach and scrubs the sidewalk with a stiff brush until he’s wading in ankle-deep pink foam. It takes three more buckets of scalding hot water to wash away the evidence, and after that the sidewalk looks perfectly normal again. Except that it isn’t. I can still see the blood. The outline of the macabre crimson pool is perfectly visible to me, no matter how many times I try to blink it away.
At seven, a familiar face exits St. August’s; Remy sees me standing by the ruin of the brick wall, broken pieces of brick scattered on the ground around my feet, and sighs, shaking his head as he comes over. He sips from a takeaway coffee cup. There’s a dark shadow developing on his jaw, courtesy of yours truly. “You’re still here,” he states.
“I am.”
“You’re covered in blood,” he points out.
I regard him with disdain. “Is this a game of point-out-the-obvious for one or can anyone play?”
He grimaces. I think it’s supposed to be an amused smile, but he just looks pained. I’ve seen the same expression on so many faces before. Interacting with Pax Davis: may cause sudden bouts of frustration, annoyance, hurt feelings and anger. Proceed at own peril. Most people choose to cut contact with me short—the ideal outcome, and my preferred conclusion to social interactions with strangers—but Remy doesn’t know what’s good for him. He squints at me out of one eye, pointing at me as he swallows.
“You’re a lot like her, y’know. Your mother.”
Oh, fuck that. “I’ll stop you right there, thanks.”
“What? You have something against being compared to a family member?” He laughs coldly.
“Meredith isn’t a family member. She incubated me. That’s it.”
Remy angles his head to one side, watching me closely. “Incubating a child for nine months is no mean feat, man. Don’t you think that alone means you owe—”
“No, I don’t. I don’t owe her anything. And just for the record, she only managed to cook me for eight months. She had me taken out a month early because I was crushing her sciatic nerve. My lungs weren’t even properly formed. I needed an actual incubator for weeks. So, go on. Keep telling me what a stellar mother she is.”
He shrugs. “S’pose that is pretty fucked up. Looks like you turned out just fine, though.”
I am spattered with blood, have more ink that your average prison inmate, I shave my hair down to the root, and I haven’t smiled without a heavy dose of malice in the past three years. Sounds like ‘turned out just fine’ is a subjective term to Remy. Then again, he deals with sick people every day. All of my body parts function. I have all of my limbs. I can breathe without assistance. When you see people come through the hospital in literal and metaphorical pieces, a person in my state of being would be considered in peak physical fitness.
“If you’ve come over here to tell me not to go yell at her, you can forget it. The moment the clock strikes one, I’m heading straight up there. And you won’t be here to fucking stop me.”
“It’s hard when someone you love is so sick, huh?”
I nearly choke on my own tongue. “I do not care about that woman.”
“Oh? Not many people I know will lurk outside a hospital for twelve hours, save someone’s life, get covered in blood and not go home to change, because they don’t care.”
“Ahh, fuck off, Remy.” I pull out my pack of smokes for the first time since the Evo nearly ran me over. I pinch one between my lips, scowling as I light the thing, waiting for him to take the hint and leave.
“I s’pose it’d be a waste of time to remind you that you’re poisoning yourself in front of a hospital full of sick people, then?” he says.
I pull on the cigarette, relishing the burn as smoke pours into my lungs. “You would be correct.”
“And you’re not even going to ask about her?”
I side-eye him, picking an imaginary piece of tobacco from the tip of my tongue. “Meredith?”
“No. The girl you saved.”
“You mean the girl who nearly died ’cause you were too busy fucking around on Grindr to find out why I was screaming for help?”
Remy looks like he just bit into something foul. “Is that supposed to be offensive? By implying that I was on Grindr, are you also implying that I’m gay? And expecting me to be upset by that?”
“I’m not implying anything. I don’t give a shit if you’re gay, straight or sexually ambivalent. You heard me yelling and you were too busy with your phone to find out why. I’m calling you on that.”
I expect him to argue but he shrugs. “I should have come out. You were behaving like a little bitch, but that’s no excuse. I should have come and checked what the fuck was going on. Luckily, the girl didn’t die—”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Seriously? She didn’t?”
“Like I said. You saved her life. She’s got a long road ahead of her. Recovery won’t be easy. But she’s breathing because of you.”
I process this silently for a second. I’m relieved, I think. I’ve been doing everything in my power not to think about it, about Presley, since I came out here, but that was as impossible as trying not to breathe. “Doubt I’ll be getting a thank you card in the mail any time soon, but whatever,” I mumble.