This poor boy. The things he'd witnessed. The things he'd been exposed to when I tried so hard to protect him, to do the right thing. Now, I just felt like I had failed.
God, I had failed everyone I loved.
With a hard swallow against that sticky ball, now back with a vengeance, I said, “Baby, he's still in sur—”
Through the corner of my eye, I watched a man in scrubs enter the waiting area. Harry was the first to spring to his feet, and I followed, a sickening pang of panic striking my stomach with every shuddering beat of my heart.
Noah was at my side, my parents and Patrick standing close by, as I asked, “How is he?”
The doctor cast his gaze from one pair of eyes to another, addressing us all with a look of somber regret that obliterated my soul a little more with every passing second.
And with every one, somehow knowing what he was about to say, I thought about those last moments I’d had with Soldier.
Those minutes that I knew would surely haunt my dreams and everything in between for years to come—hell, maybe even forever. The seconds before the paramedics had come and brought him back and taken him away. The ones in which I'd held his hand, aware of the blood leaving his body and pooling around us both. Swallowing us into a black hole, where maybe we could both live together—one in which no harm could reach us, no pain or suffering. And I’d told him I loved him. I’d told him over and over and over again because if that was the last thing he ever got to hear, he deserved to know that. As hated as he might've been to some, he was, at the end of it all, loved.
He would always be loved.
My resolve to keep it together was already crumbling by the time the doctor brought his eyes back to mine. My knees locked, my hands holding tight to Harry and Noah.
“How is he?” I repeated, wishing this man would just get on with it and tell us what we already knew.
He swallowed and offered an apologetic smile. One that said news like this never got easier to deliver, no matter how many times he'd had to be the messenger.
“I'm sorry,” he said, holding my gaze. “I'm afraid it doesn't look good.”
Soldier had saved my life three times before I saved his once. And as the bricks holding my walls together were crushed, settling as dust on the floor of that waiting room, I knew it hadn't been enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
TIME TO GO
SOLDIER
At eleven, I had developed a crippling fear of dying after witnessing my grandfather collapse on the sidewalk in front of our house, only to, a couple of years later, watch my grandmother lose her quick and sudden battle with cancer.
My denial was strong—an impenetrable tower in the center of my mind and everything I did—and I got by on the belief that if I simply wanted it hard enough, I alone could avoid death.
I fought hard for myself. I fought harder for my mother. And I survived—we both did—just as I’d believed I would, despite the obstacles that had come our way. I had made sure of it.
But when I was twenty-one, sitting on the side of the road and watching my best friend take his last breath, any fear of dying I’d had disappeared. The realness of mortality was driven home, toppling that tower over with a single blow, and I was overcome by a simple acceptance that death was just an inescapable part of life. Somehow, I’d found a sense of strange comfort in watching Billy die. Almost as though if he could do it, so could I.
And I held to that tightly throughout the rest of my life. That, if I were to meet the end of my life at any given moment, I would do it fighting until I couldn’t fight anymore. I would accept my fate with dignity, and then the transition would be simple. Easy-peasy—just as it had been for Billy.
Because like I said, if he could do it, so could I.
But at thirty-one, I realized that the difference between Billy and me was that he’d believed there was nothing in his life worth living for. Leaving this life and taking that step into whatever came next had come so easily for him because, hell, whatever it was had to be better than what he had been doing here, right?
But leaving Ray wasn’t easy.
Although she had told me repeatedly that she loved me, that she always would, it couldn’t bring me the comfort I needed to settle into the acceptance I’d thought I had. Because acceptance meant giving up, and giving up meant to give in.
I didn’t give in. I held on to every last shred of my life, just to get one more glimpse of her bright emerald eyes. Not until I wasn’t given a choice, and then …
Nothingness.
That was the first time I had died. Before they brought me back and Ray was gone. She’d been replaced by strange voices, strange faces, strange hands, strange sounds. Muttered words of encouragement and reassurance that they had me and I should stay with them and I had to hang in there. As if I had a say in the matter.
But I asked them about Ray in words I thought made sense, and the strangers assured me she was fine, she was safe, and that was all that had ever mattered. It was all I needed.
And I died a second death, knowing now that if I couldn’t be with her, if my body wouldn’t allow it, I wouldn’t be anywhere at all.
And somehow, as the clock struck eleven eleven, I accepted it.
***
I didn’t know where I was, yet I didn’t feel lost.
Encircled by blinding light and a warmth similar to standing on a dock in the middle of the summer, I was met by a presence I knew. One that knew my name, called me buddy, and said it was good to see me again.
Grampa.
He was there with me. I knew it. I felt him all around me, an embrace of comfort and light, but I saw nothing.
“Where are you?” I asked, calm and without fear, searching the white for a face, a hand … anything to see or feel.
“My boy.” Gramma. “Oh, my sweet little man.”
I laughed like they were playing a game of hide-and-seek. I laughed because there was nothing little about me at all.
“I can’t see you guys!”
“We’re right here, buddy.” Grampa’s voice swirled around me, squeezing and soothing, just like one of his hugs.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.
Sully.
“I’ve missed you,” I said, on the verge of tears now. “I wish you could’ve met them … I wish you could’ve seen—”
“We did, honey.”
I searched for their eyes in the light, praying for a glimpse, for proof, for anything to tell me they were really there and I wasn’t trapped in some horrible purgatory, to be haunted forever by the voices of the people I’d loved and lost and missed. But I found nothing. Not even my own hands, held in front of my face. Nothing but light and sound.
“Hey, man.” Another voice now. One that struck a deeper chord and left me choking on the threshold of despair.
“Oh God, Billy.”
He laughed that nasally laugh I had almost forgotten the sound of. “What did you freakin’ do, man? You seriously went and got yourself shot?”
Oh, that’s right. That’s what happened.
“Yeah …” I felt for my body and the blood. My hands met with the firm mass of my stomach, but not the hot stickiness of the blood that had poured from me before.
“Always have to be the hero, don’t you?”
I spun in a circle, desperate to look him in the eyes. “I didn’t save you though.”