When she finally sat down, tears threatened to explode out of not just her eyes but her soul as well.
I can’t do this, she thought as she awkwardly reached across with her right hand for the toilet paper while holding the johnny up, while peeing, while not passing out, while not getting tangled in the IV tubing, while being terrified about everything, while mourning her mother, her father, her brother . . . Danny.
The bathroom became so crowded with her mind’s chaos and sorrow that the oxygen was forced out of it, her lungs pulling nothing in as she began to hyperventilate.
It was a while before she reemerged. And she would have preferred to wash her hands and face first, but this wasn’t a hotel. There weren’t guest towels hanging off to the side of the sink or little bars of soap. No bath mat to warm the soles of her bare feet or printed notice that there were toiletries available courtesy of the front desk if she forgot to pack something.
This was not a vacation. And there was going to be no getting away from what she had lost.
That hand that no longer existed was going to take up more space than it ever had when still attached to her arm.
Back out in the room, two nurses, a resident, and an attending were standing in a kick line, and they were singing the bars to an old familiar: “You’re a Slip-and-Fall Risk, Please Lie Back Down.”
Which was the theme to a little-known Disney movie, actually: Why Can’t She for Once Be F*cking Reasonable.
Anne just walked out on that production. She already knew how it ended. Had the T-shirt, the download, and the book.
Heading down the hall with her IV pole, she discovered that she had to force her eyes to focus or she was going to lose her balance. Every step required a tremendous concentration, her forward motion not anything that happened naturally, but rather a conscious orientation of hips and shoulders that required constant maintenance.
The marching band of medical staff behind her was so annoying.
At the elevators, it took her a couple of tries to peg the up button, her forefinger trying to hit a moving target—which seemed a little weird given the fact that the hospital should have been a static inanimate, but whatever. She managed to light it up.
As the doors opened, she was just about to step inside when something hit her hard behind the knees—and as her weight went out from under her, she pinwheeled in a panic.
Only to land in the seat of a wheelchair.
“I told them this was a losing battle. So we were just going to have to roll with it.”
Anne looked over her shoulder at the familiar voice. “Oh, God, Moose . . .”
Robert “Moose” Miller, Danny’s former roommate, came around and lowered his heft down at her feet. His familiar, bearded face made her eyes water.
“Come here, baby girl,” he whispered.
As he held out his arms, there were tears in his bloodshot eyes, especially as he looked at her bandage.
“Don’t call me ‘baby’ or ‘girl,’ ” she choked out.
“Okay, Anne. I won’t.”
She went up against his chest and held onto his shoulders, staring off to a nursing station she saw nothing of.
“I was going to his room,” she said roughly. “Danny’s.”
“I’ll help you get there, but they may not let us in. He’s in ICU.”
“I want to try.”
“Okay.” When they pulled apart, he took a bandana out of his pocket. “Here.”
She unfolded the red-and-black square and pressed the faded, well-washed softness to her hot, swollen face. “I don’t want to look weak in front of him.”
“You could never be weak, Anne.”
Moose shooed away the medical staff, and then wheeled her into the elevator while she held her IV pole like it was the leash of a dog with biting history. They went up four floors, and then they were going down a hall with signage she couldn’t seem to read and foot traffic that had only two speeds: fast and distracted or slow and somber.
“How bad is he?” she asked as they went along close to the wall. “Do you know?”
“Bad.”
“Is he paralyzed?”
“They haven’t even gotten to the part where they worry about whether he can walk.”
As they came up to the nursing station, Anne was aware of the staff stopping whatever they were doing and staring at her, but she kept her eyes straight ahead as Moose did the talking—and they must have gotten clearance to proceed because they started forward again.
Passing by a number of glassed-in rooms, she saw patients swaddled in blankets, like caterpillars cocooned. On this floor, there were few visitors, and no one was coming and going with flowers or balloons. Death was what paced these halls, playing “eeny, meeny, miny, mo” with its bony finger, picking and choosing, at random or perhaps with a plan, who it would play with next.
Moose stopped them about halfway to the end and went around to open the glass door for her. “You want to go in alone?”
“Yes.”
With resolve to get on her feet, Anne went to put both her hands down on the armrests, but as a bolt of pain lightninged up her arm, she gasped. No hand there. Only that raw open wound that had bandages for flesh.
Blinking back the agony, she thought, I can’t deal with this. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?
Who am I going to be?
Pushing all that aside, she struggled out of the wheelchair and went to enter the room—
“Hold up. Don’t forget this.”
As she glanced at Moose in confusion, he moved the IV pole forward. “Oh,” she mumbled. “Right, thanks—”
He didn’t release it from his hold. “I need you to know that I tried to— I mean, we all wanted to get to him sooner. We worked as hard as we could to free him. But . . . oh, shit, Anne, he was under these beams that were so fucking heavy they’d crush a car and . . .”
She hugged the man when he couldn’t continue, and it was a sad relief to be with someone who also felt guilt. “No one could have done a better job rescuing him.”
“This is my fault, I should have—”
Anne pushed him back. “Stop it. How could you have gotten to him any earlier? And you didn’t put him there. I did. You and the boys are heroes.”
“What if he doesn’t make it?” Moose eased back and dragged a hand through his hair. “I can’t breathe every time I think about it. He’s my best friend.”
As she stared into his tortured eyes, she knew they were all crazy. Every one of them who got into turnouts, and took their bodies and their minds into open flames for little money and lots of risk, for strangers, for animals they didn’t own, for houses they didn’t own, for people they weren’t related to . . . they were all insane. Because this was the other side of the adrenaline rush, the savior complex, the fight.
Tragedy was but a moment. Responsibility for it was forever.
And eventually, the latter turned you dark on the inside, molding over your emotions, making you toxic and uncleanable even as you looked the same on the outside. For every firefighter she knew who’d been hurt or died on the job, she knew even more who were corpses in their own skin.
They didn’t tell you about it when you were in the academy.
Good thing, too.
“Don’t blame yourself,” she said roughly. “You didn’t let him down, and you’re going to be there for him as he heals. And he will. He’s Danny Maguire, for godsakes. He’s unkillable.”
“You haven’t seen him yet, Anne. You need to prepare yourself.”
She looked into the room. So many machines and wires and tubes—a reminder that the human body was an incredible miracle, its countless autonomic functions a gift when they were operating as intended, and a cumbersome nightmare to have to approximate when they were not.
Taking her IV pole, she entered the sterile space and the sound of the whrrrring and the beeping got her truly frightened. And then she actually looked at Danny’s face.
Anne gasped. “Dear . . . God.”
There were stitches all down one side, as if part of his cheek and half of his forehead had been stripped off. Everything was swollen and purple and red, the features distorted to the point where if she hadn’t known it was him, she wouldn’t have recognized him.