The Last Hour (Thompson Sisters), Sheehan-Miles, Charles [reading an ebook .txt] 📗

I’m worried they’re giving me tattoos or something.”

He snickered. “Why would they give you tattoos?”

“Kid, you never know what a bunch of women will do when your back’s turned.”

I don’t know why I felt such urgency to go back down. Maybe just to ... see.

How do you really know what hope can accomplish? Unless you try? So we slowly made our way back downstairs, back to the intensive care unit. Everyone was still there. Mom and Dad were leaning on each other, wounded, exhausted. Dylan looked like he was about to explode, and Alex was speaking with him, urgently, a serious and loving expression on her face. Crank and Julia were sitting across from her parents. I walked down the hall, eyes skipping past them, and glanced in at Sarah. Jessica was curled up in the chair next to her bed, eyes closed, and Sarah was asleep. Jesus, she was going to have a long haul recovering from this. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of pain she must be in with her leg cut open that way.

“Almost there,” I said to Daniel. And then we walked several doors further down.

My body was in there, the monitors all hooked up, the rasp of the respirator still forcing my body to inhale, exhale, because I wasn’t breathing on my own.

“You don’t look so good,” Daniel said.

“Thanks, kid.”

“But you didn’t die yet.”

I nodded. “There is that,” I said. I reached out and touched my body, and felt a shock, like when you accidentally touch a live wire. But I didn’t let go.

Was it possible?

I swallowed. I had a little time to decide. Because I wasn’t going to leave Daniel here alone. But when Daniel was better ... I was going to fight. I was going to fight to heal, fight for my life, fight for Carrie.

“It’s kinda creepy in here,” Daniel said.

“Yeah, it is,” I said. I reached out with my other hand and touched my body, and the contact was like two magnets coming together with a resounding click. This was so weird. I closed my eyes, and tried to feel what was going on in there. And ... well ... there wasn’t much. Not much at all. My heart was beating, and I could feel the blood rushing through my veins and arteries, pushing oxygen into my brain. But nothing from the head. It was like a big empty basket, and that could mean I was brain dead, or it could mean I just needed to be in there for anything to be happening. And I had no way of knowing which it was.

But ... just maybe.

I exhaled, audibly, and with some force pulled my hands away. Then I said, “Let’s go down the hall and check on your mom, okay?”

“Okay. Do you think they’ll still be sad?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? I’m guessing yes, because they love you and want you to be okay.”

He gave a half smile.

We walked back out toward the door of the ICU. My eyes darted from one to another of my family, both my parents and the family I’d inherited from Carrie. And I had a crazy moment where I felt such love for every single one of them, even Carrie’s dad and her crazy ass mom. It made me smile.

“So Daniel, when you get out of the hospital, you gotta keep all this secret, okay? Cause no one’s gonna believe you anyway.”

“Sometimes my mom calls me Crazy-Daniel.”

I laughed. “Well, in that case….”

I stopped talking. Because one moment he was skipping along, laughing and talking, and the next he bent over, his arms across his stomach, and he let out a groan.

“Hey kid, you okay?” I asked.

Oh, crap. He was fading, just like Sarah, just like I had. I saw the floor right fucking through him, and he looked up at me, terrified.

“Ray?” he asked.

“Come on, kid. We gotta get going.” I picked him up, and half walked, half ran to the PICU with Daniel in my arms. He wasn’t heavy, and with just about every step I took he was getting lighter.

When we got to the PICU, I spied his parents. They were holding each other, and sobbing. Crap, crap crap, I thought. No. So I ran with Daniel in my arms, and burst into his room, and there was the kid.

He didn’t look like himself. Wasted away. His skin was almost grey. The doctors and nurses were surrounding him like a mob, the tiny little kid surrounded.

Sometimes, like with Speedy, there’s no time to make a choice. There’s no time to think, to react, to do anything.

But sometimes there is. Sometimes you look at a situation, and think about what could happen. I had ... maybe one second. I thought about everything I’d learned. I thought about what imagination and hope could accomplish. I thought about that little boy in Afghanistan with a bullet hole through his forehead, and the other little boy on this hospital bed—dying. And just like that, I made my choice.

I muttered, “Oh, God, Carrie, I’m so sorry.”

And then I did what I had to do.

You tell the truth (Carrie)

If I could tell you that I was in any way sane when I got back to the hospital I would. But I can’t. The court-martial was over. Ray was exonerated. But it was too late. When I got back to the hospital, they pulled me into a conference room. And all I could hear were the doctors saying the words crisis and asystole and brain-death.

I screamed and fell apart, and somehow Dylan and Julia dragged me away from the intensive care unit, and down to the hotel, where I collapsed in a sobbing mess.

I lay there, crying all night off and on. For the first time since I was twelve years old, my big sister Julia slept in the bed with me, because I couldn’t take being alone. When the sun shone through the windows, I was numb.

How could I make a choice