But it didn’t fill me with anything.
Because I felt empty. Hollowed out.
I wasn’t empty when we walked through the automatic doors leading to the triage waiting room. I was full. Absolutely bursting with terror so visceral that my stomach lurched dangerously.
Because I saw Keltan.
I saw the utter hopelessness and emptiness on his face.
And the blood covering his white tee. Or what used to be a white tee.
It was crimson now.
There were dark red stains on his hands. Going up his arms. He looked like he’d just murdered someone. Or tried to save someone who had been murdered.
“That’s blood,” I said, standing woodenly in the spot right in the middle of the door. It was an inconsiderate place to stand, but I couldn’t move. No way in goddess’s green earth could I move from this spot. I wanted to go backward, like all the way backward to the loft where my biggest problem was a small kitchen fire.
But I couldn’t.
There was no way I could go forward, where my biggest problem was facing a man wearing my sister’s blood on his tee. I couldn’t move forward into the world in front of me. The world that might not contain Lucy.
So I stayed put. In the middle. If I stayed here long enough maybe reality might change into something less ugly and sickening.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off Keltan’s hands. His tee.
“He is covered in Lucy’s blood,” I whispered to no one. “That’s too much blood for a person to wear on the outside of their body. That’s meant to be inside someone’s body. That’s meant to be inside Lucy.”
Suddenly, the limbo I’d been so sure was safe was just as ugly and sickening as that world ahead. There was no escape from the image of Lucy, bleeding, dying, her skin ripped open with violence and pain.
My stomach lurched again.
I yanked my hand from Heath’s and sprinted in the direction of a bathroom.
I made it just in time to empty the contents of my stomach.
But not the contents of my heart. They were shedding my insides.
At some point, hands gathered up my hair, held it back. Another hand rubbed my back in slow circles.
It should’ve touched me somewhere deep, Heath quietly doing what he could in the face of my pain.
But I was empty again.
Heath had not left me since I threw up in the bathroom. He was sitting on a chair in a beige waiting room, elbows on his knees watching me.
He didn’t try to tell me to sit down, to calm down, because he was Heath and he didn’t do things that he knew were stupid. Telling me to do either of these things would’ve been stupid. So he was just...there.
“Critical condition,” I repeated, still pacing.
I hadn’t cried.
I’d thrown up.
I had worn out the soles of my shoes with the pacing. But no tears. Because tears were the first sign of grief. Of loss.
I stopped pacing to face Heath.
“Critical,” I whispered. “Critical means that they don’t want to tell you something to give you hope. Because there’s no hope.”
Heath was out of his chair and in front of me in a moment, his hands framing either side of my face. “You stop that shit right fucking now,” he growled. “You are the one person in the world that has hope in her fucking bones. In her soul. You give it to the hopeless. You gave it to a tortured man four years ago and you carried him through what came after. And if you can do that for someone else, someone damned, you sure as fuck can do that for your sister. Don’t you dare abandon that hope.”
He wasn’t speaking gently with me. Trying to handle me with care. Trying to mind the broken pieces. Which was good. They were broken anyway, no matter what happened from here on out, they’d stay that way, a reminder of how the world can smash everything apart in a handful of moments.
“What if critical turns to...” I trailed off, my voice literally unable to form the word.
Death.
The thought was poison in my mind.
“If it does. We’ll handle it. You’ll handle it. You’ll get through,” he said.
I flinched because he wasn’t placating me with false promises that most people made in situations like this. Because he didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep.
That hadn’t changed in the years between us.
Nothing had changed in four years as much as things had in the last four hours.
I searched his eyes for strength, for comfort. He gave me the former. But not the latter, because no matter how I responded to his hands on mine, to his sheer presence, there was no comfort in this moment. Not even Heath could change that. The only person who could change that was behind double doors in ‘critical condition.’
“Polly?” The strangled voice jerked me out of Heath’s gaze and he dropped his hands.
My mom and dad entered the room, each of them pale, drawn and terrified.
I ran into my father’s arms. He kissed my head.
No one said anything.
We couldn’t.
We were all too busy hoping.
My first full and clean inhale was marred by cleaning products.
Probably because I was surrounded by them. Because I was currently hiding in some sort of cleaning closet.
Yes, I was hiding in a hospital closet, breathing because I could finally do that now.
Because hope somehow won.
Lucy woke up.
She survived.
And she had it in her to joke about how bad her hair looked and demanded someone go and get her “Egyptian Cotton sheets and a pair of Versace pajamas.”
But there was no missing the gray pallor to her face. The shadow of death still lurking in the room, hiding underneath that sterile lemony scent.
But I’d smiled at her bedside. Overjoyed, just like my parents had been, through their tears. Keltan hadn’t left her side.
He’d changed out of his bloodstained clothes.
In fact, he’d changed the next time I saw him after I’d thrown up at the sight of him.
I wondered if Heath had anything to do with it.
Of course Heath had something to do with it.
He hadn’t left. He’d left me to sit with my family, with a panicked Rosie who arrived a few hours before Lucy woke up.
She’d immediately yanked me into her arms and I relaxed into her small but strong embrace. I hadn’t seen her in a year. Not since she up and disappeared to who knew where doing who knew what.
Whatever it was, was bad. Because even though this place, this situation changed us all, there was something deeper behind her eyes, something darker than the Rosie I’d seen before.
“We’re going to kick her ass when she wakes up,” Rosie murmured after letting me go but still holding tight onto my hands.
That was her way of saying “she has to wake up because I couldn’t handle it if she didn’t.”
But she did.
So no one would actually have to live the reality of a world without her. But we would always live this memory.
I had slipped out of the room when I got enough reality to chase away the worst of my memories. Of my demons.
And now I was here, hiding in some supplies closet because I didn’t know where to go to breathe. To let my tears fall.
Because I couldn’t do it in the open, under harsh hospital lights, where people might see. Where I might catch a glimpse of myself.
The door opened and light flooded in. I was about to prepare some kind of excuse to whatever hospital employee opened the door, but it closed quickly again, and I was in muscled arms and pressed into a warm and muscled body.