I shake my head.
“I would die for you all over again if I could,” I say.
Andi smiles at me until my vision fades to black.
FARAH
At work, I shut off my personal brain. My own moral, political, and philosophical decisions are cut off with a decision-tree tourniquet. If this, then this. Doctors memorize courses of action so that we don’t need to think about basics in emergency situations. I don’t have to consider the person in front of me. There is no regard for race, gender, creed. I assess organs and functions. When I explain this to people, they have a hard time believing me. Who am I if not Farah playing my role as doctor? It’s not for most people to understand, but it’s true. I have two minds. And this is why doctors shouldn’t treat people they know.
I roll Ted onto his back and stare at him.
His lungs are filled with water, my doctor brain warns. But my conscious brain counters.
He violated that woman in unimaginable ways.
He’s about to go into cardiac arrest.
He took her choice away from her.
Save him.
Let him die.
I pound on his chest as hard as I can. With that out of my system, I get to work. I pinch his nose and lean over his mouth, but on my way down, I catch a glimpse of Andi. She looks stronger than she has since she emerged from the house. As Adam drags Rini’s limp body through the water, Andi’s watching her sister with such intensity, as if her desire alone could empty Rini’s lungs and restart her heart. In turn, I watch Andi and imagine her as one of my clients, the women who call my office in a panic because they’re losing their pregnancy, the women who waddle into the hospital in physical pain but are crying for the existential pain of knowing what it means that the bleeding won’t stop.
My doctor instinct is strong, and it will serve me well because I know how to make impossible choices. Choices that would paralyze a normal person. Ethical choices, like whose care takes priority over another’s. I stand and move away from Ted.
I wait for Rini.
MARGOT
I can count the number of unwanted epiphanies I’ve had on this lawn. The realization that the timing of Ted’s pregnancy confession yesterday couldn’t have been a coincidence—whether he recognized Rini or not, a primal instinct told him to get his story out first before I heard the real one. I also vividly recall his aloofness and disappearances before our wedding. And though I didn’t see it with my own two eyes, it dawns on me that Andi didn’t slip and fall into the water like he said. He didn’t even reach down to help her. Instead he seemed to be willing her to die.
I didn’t pass out again, but when Rini and Ted hit the water, my brain hit a wall. That was the last thing I remember. The rest comes in nonconsecutive snapshots. Farah shakes me. I slump down against a pole. Adam dives under the water. Andi looks away from me.
And then I’m present. On the dock. Farah hovers over Rini and barks out orders. She takes vitals. She digs in her medical kit. Aimee calls out time. I watch from the corner of the dock. A loose kayak skims the water far out in the horizon.
The rain slaps us sideways and I can’t discern which way is up.
“Please,” I call out. My voice is raspy. It hurts to breathe. Andi hears me. I can tell because she’s watching me now. I speak only to her.
“If he did as you said, he should live and suffer the consequences. He will go to trial. He could go to jail. But you’ll never get justice if he’s dead.”
Around the front of the house the ambulance siren screams. Joe, Eden and Rick emerge from inside the house, unaware of the devastation that rained down on us while they were safe and dry inside. Two EMTs run around the house to the backyard. Farah shouts information at them.
“Male and female in cardiac arrest when we got them to surface. I administered 0.3 milligrams of epinephrine to both patients.”
“Why do you have multiple EpiPens?” one of the EMTs asks.
“I’m a doctor. And I have a son with an allergy,” Farah says.
The other EMT steps away from Rini and inspects Ted.
“The male, thirty-nine, was submerged for six minutes after last breath of oxygen, twelve minutes in total. The female, twenty-six, submerged for twelve minutes after last surfacing, seventeen minutes in total,” Farah explains.
Another stranger is part of the group now too. He holds Andi’s hand and looks like he wants to cry but has to hold it together.
My sobs break free then. I cry like an overtired toddler.
“It’s going to be okay,” Aimee says, rubbing my back.
“Vitals?” one of the paramedics asks.
“None,” Farah says.
“For either?”
“None,” Farah repeats.
“For how long?”
“Two minutes.”
“Get the paddles,” the paramedic yells into his walkie-talkie. “We need to get them out of the rain to the defib.”
“I know it looks scary,” Aimee says. “But Farah is an exceptional doctor. She has help now. All these people here, they will save them.”
The EMTs carry my husband off on a stretcher to the hospital. My chosen family—the one person I never thought I’d lose—is drifting away from me.
