I dropped the phone as it slid out of my hands and then picked it up again to call 911. I wasn’t thinking straight.
“911 what’s your emergency?”
I couldn’t speak, all I could do was cry.
“Hello?” the operator asked
I screamed and sobbed as I held Michael’s head up to my chest.
“Okay ma’am just hold on. Help is on the way to your phone’s location.”
I frantically looked over Michael’s body. I tore the shirt off him and threw my hand over my mouth. There were so many bullet holes in his chest that they were all bleeding together.
“No, Michael please, not you. I can’t lose you too, I can’t…”
I pressed my face against him as I held him and tried to force him to stay alive by sheer willpower alone. I was covered in his blood. I could see it on my hands and taste it on my lips. There was too much of it, too much of it that should have still been inside his body.
I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to the faintest sound of his heartbeat.
I will die if he dies. It will be over then. I can’t lose him too.
“Holy shit!” Rob exclaimed as he and Adam ran into the room.
Adam ran up to me and tried to see if Michael still had a pulse. Rob picked up the phone and started taking to the 911 dispatcher. I heard Adam tell me that he thought Michael was still alive and I closed my eyes and held onto Michael as Adam held onto me, until the paramedics arrived.
This is my fault. Again.
I couldn’t let any more of this be my fault.
Hospitals were the most scary and uncomfortable of places, at least that’s what I had always thought. They were full of sickness and death, and they always smelled like a science lab.
They had taken Michael into surgery hours ago. So many hours ago that I had lost track of time. I sat in the chair with Adam for a while as he held me and rubbed the side of my arms and told me that everything would be okay; that Michael was tough and that he would pull through. That sounded like the same kind of crap they told people in the movies right before someone they cared about died.
The only good part about those movies was that usually—after the hero or heroine lost their one and only true love, or their child, or their mother, or someone of the utmost importance to them—they would go through a period of desperate sorrow which was always followed up by them becoming some sort of “fuck it all” vigilante.
I got up from Adam’s lap because if I had to hear any more positive reassurance I was going to throw up. Also, he was so nervous as well, that he was rubbing my arm so hard that my skin was about to come off. I started pacing the halls of the waiting room and then I paced right out the doors and into the halls of the hospital. Rob saw me and tried to get me to come back into the waiting room, but I gave him a look equivalent to the one where the little possessed girl’s head spins around full-circle and then he left me alone.
I knew now how it was that those movie characters ended up going rogue on such morally jaded paths; because after you’ve lost so much you just don’t give a fuck anymore.
I walked through all the hallways that weren’t behind locked doors and I read the names on the door tags. Some of the doors were partially open and I could see the withering and decaying people inside. I hate hospitals. I made up stories about the patients in my head; which ones would live, and which ones wouldn’t, and who would grieve for them when they died. A nurse asked me if I was lost and I told her yes, but then I just kept walking the halls anyways. Maybe I would end up in a mental institution just like my aunt.
She did this.
I didn’t know how yet, but I know that she did. This was what she was going to do, kill them and take them all away. This was what she meant when she said I couldn’t have nice things. I tried to think back and remember why I liked playing with her as a child. I certainly didn’t like playing with her now as an adult. Aunt Naomi always had a very vivid imagination and when we would play, she always made the characters seem to come alive.
Now I remembered what it was that I liked about our plays so much, it took me a second but then it hit me as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday.
She always made the girls win.
We would play princesses and princes and she would always make the princess go fight the dragon while the prince cowered behind a big rock. Then the princess would end up taming the dragon instead of killing it and she’d make the dragon eat the prince. I always laughed at that part when I was little, but I wasn’t laughing at it any longer. When we would play with dolls, she always made the boy dolls act all stupid and funny when they came to pick the girls up for a date and then the date would usually end with the boy getting run over by the car. Even when we would just color pictures in my coloring books, she would draw horns and tails on the boys in the pictures and my mom would usually yell at her for it, but Naomi would just laugh as if it were our little secret.
I liked Aunt Naomi when I was a kid because she made me feel powerful and she made scary things feel funny.
Amazing how quickly those details can become sordid in adulthood.
When I heard someone call my name I didn’t turn around because it didn’t quite register that they were talking to me. But then when Rob’s hand grabbed my shoulder, I turned around and heard what he said.
“He’s alive.”
I ran down the hospital hallway so fast that I slid and fell on my tailbone with a loud cracking sound. I didn’t even care that it hurt when I got up and started to run again. As soon as we reached the waiting room, Adam grabbed me and pulled me tightly against his chest. I wrestled away from him because I wanted to see Michael.
“He’s alive,” Adam smiled at me. “The doctor just came out and said he’ll be okay after a while.”
“I want to see him,” I said.
“We have to wait until he gets into a recovery room,” Adam said.
“No! I want to see him now!”
“Lisette,” Rob said as he grabbed me by my head. He put both hands on the sides of my face and put his eyes right up against mine. “Listen to me. I know you’re upset, and I know you don’t think you can take anymore. But you have to calm down. There’s a lot of people watching the hospital right now and watching us. Cops, university board members, even your aunt is here.”
What?
Rob kept talking and it pulled me out of my head. “If you want to see Michael and not get removed from the hospital, you need to calm down now. Do you understand?”
I nodded my head, but I didn’t have the forethought to speak.
“Okay,” Rob said as he let go of my head and kissed me just to make it look like I was getting an embrace and not a “talking-to”.
