I watched in crippled horror as my father fell apart, his face crumpling as he stumbled forward to lean against my trembling body. His arms wrapped around me, hugging so tightly, I thought he’d crush me. Tears hit the leather on my shoulder, pattering rapidly as he cried and struggled to catch his breath.
“I-I’m so sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry. My fucking God. I’m so sorry.” Who he was apologizing to, I didn’t know. It could’ve been me. Could’ve been Jake, Mickey, or even God, for all I knew. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was sorry, and he was in pain and so was I.
I hugged him back. I held him and he held me, holding each other up when otherwise we’d fall. I forgot Audrey was there, standing behind me, until her hand gently touched my shoulder.
“Blake,” she whispered, afraid to penetrate the moment that was so simultaneously heartbreaking and precious.
Quickly, I stepped away from my father, as I wiped at my eyes, and saw my mother enter the ER waiting room. She looked about ten years older from the last time I’d seen her on Thanksgiving, all frail and ready to shatter. She approached us like a ghost, her feet barely moving along the floor, until she stood in front of us. Her eyes moved from my father to me, and then to Audrey, when she curled her lips into a snarl.
“Why the fuck are you here?” she spat through gritted teeth.
“Don’t you talk to her like that,” I immediately reacted, raising my voice and stepping between my mother and girlfriend.
“She shouldn’t be here. I never said for her to be here.” She turned to my father, replacing her hurt with anger, and snapped at him, “Why the hell is she here, Paul? She’s not family!”
“Diana,” he muttered, lowering his gaze to the floor. “Just stop. Please. Just stop. Tell us what’s going on.”
“I won’t say a damn thing in front of her.”
I moved forward and backed my mother into a wall boasting a poster about keeping the ER clean. She gasped as I towered over her, and I realized that she was scared. Scared and terrified of her own son, and all I could think was, good.
“We wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you!”
“Blake, stop,” Audrey said, grasping my arm and pulling me back.
I shrugged her off but didn’t say anything else as I waited for my mother to speak. “Don’t you dare blame me. Don’t you dare put this on me! You are the last person who should be blaming me!” she cried as tears zigzagged along her cheeks and dripped into her mouth. Then, she sputtered, “Don’t you fucking—”
A throat being cleared grabbed our attention, and we turned to face a doctor. He wore an expression so grim, I thought of him as an angel of death, here to deliver the bad news.
“Mr. and Mrs. Carson,” he spoke to my parents, eyeing me warily. “I’m afraid I—”
“Oh, God. Oh, no,” Mom pushed out between trembling breaths, and to my astonishment, Audrey rushed to her. She wrapped her arms around my mother’s shoulders, holding her tightly, and Mom didn’t shove her away.
The doctor stood, patient and waiting, before continuing, “It doesn’t look good. He flatlined and we thought we’d lost him.” I choked on an immediate surge of bile, rampaging through my throat to meet my tongue. Swallowing and gasping, I pinched my eyes and forced myself to listen. “We brought him back, but I’m afraid it doesn’t look promising. As of right now, the machines are all that’s keeping him alive.”
My mother combusted with a sob, holding on to Audrey and crying. My father backed into the wall, using it to hold himself up before he gave in to the need to collapse. My eyes remained affixed on the doctor, on the cold, clinical look on his face as he spoke of my brother, not by name but by his gender. He spoke of Jake like he was just a body, a body on a table to try and save. And if he couldn’t, oh well, there were others. There’d always be others. But Jake wasn’t just a body, he was my fucking brother, and this asshole with his white coat and nametag was standing here, instead of saving his fucking life.
“So, why the fuck aren’t you saving him?” I fired at him, tensing my fists at my sides.
The doctor shook his head. “Sir, we’ve done all—”
“Don’t tell me you’ve done all you can do!”
He sighed morosely. “I am telling you that, because I promise you, I have. It’s up to him now.”
I shook my head and looked away. At a time when I was so dangerously close to shattering into a thousand pieces, I felt unreasonably proud that I’d turned around to face the wall, instead of thrusting my fist through his face.
Dad cleared his throat and wiped at the tears staining his cheeks. “Can we, um, can we see him?”
“He’s in a coma,” the doctor informed us. “But yes, you can see him.”
The words rose to my mouth and I spat them out through clenched teeth. “He has a name.”
“What was that?”
I whirled on my heel, forgetting I was only wearing socks—why the hell hadn’t I grabbed my fucking shoes?—and nearly fell on my ass as I faced him. “I said, he has a fucking name, you son of a bitch.”
The doctor’s face was now etched with a sympathetic pain that told me maybe he had a heart inside his cold, crisp exterior. But still, he said, “Sir, I understand what you’re going through, but if you can’t calm—”
“You’re not listening to me,” I shouted, stepping toward him. I hardly noticed that Audrey had released my mother and was now turned to me, reaching out to grab my arm and saying my name. “He has a fucking name. Just use his fucking name. None of this he, him bullshit; use his fucking name!”
The doctor swallowed as he nodded once. “I understand. But if you cannot calm down, I’m going to need you to leave.”
“Oh, my God,” I laughed darkly. “You can’t just say his goddamn name. Do you even know what it is? Do you even care what it is? Does anybody fucking—”
“Sir, I’m gonna ask you to come with me,” a deeper, authoritative voice said from behind me. I looked over my shoulder at the security guard with his hand resting on the taser at his belt.
I never stopped to realize that I was behaving like a raving lunatic. I never once took a look at my own erratic behavior and thought to stop. Neither of my parents said a damn thing as I left the emergency room of my own accord, walking with an angry purpose to drop myself on the curb just outside of the sliding doors. The cold was bitter in a dark world full of bright snow where the slush accumulating along the sidewalk seeped through my socks and to my feet. Yet, I didn’t feel it. I felt nothing but the agony chewing its way through my skin and tendons and bones, and I felt it all so deeply. So internally, beyond my physical self, that I knew, without a doubt, there was more to me than this sack of skin and bones. I was so much more and it took my brother lying on what could be his death bed for me to realize it.
The quiet slapping of rubber against concrete broke the wintry hush around me. Audrey approached in her unseasonal flip-flops and sat beside me on the curb. “Blake, I talked to them. They said—”
“I want you to leave,” I blurted out, hanging my head.