Page 56 of Resilience

Athena woke with the foggy sense that the world was being torn apart; she opened her eyes into a nearly dark room. A huge shadow loomed over her, and her next sleep-infused thought was that she was being attacked. She lashed out and punched her assailant in the face.

He reeled back and into the wedge of light coming from the hallway. It was her father.

She sat up and switched on her bedside lamp. “Dad?”

“You pack a wallop, starlight,” he signed. “Damn.”

“Sorry. What’s wrong?”

“I need you up right now and a bag packed with a couple days’ essentials. Anything for Blanche, too.” Minnie had stretched and strolled down the side of the bed to demand pets from Dad. He picked her up and obliged. “I’ll bring Minnie down so she can go in the carrier with her sister. Mom’s got the ladies’ stuff. Twenty minutes tops, okay?”

She knew what all this meant. “Lockdown?”

“Yeah. There’s trouble in Nevada.”

Her heart stopped and then exploded into a frenzy. “Sam’s on the run! Is he okay?”

Her father’s look became so serious Athena felt despair rise at once. Still holding Minnie, he sat beside Athena’s hip and signed one-handed. “What I know is he’s alive. But he took a hit from a shotgun, and one of the pellets opened his neck. He lost a lot of blood, and he’s unconscious. When I got the call from Mav, that’s what he knew.”

“But he’s alive.” She was afraid to think what the other stuff might mean, so she clung to that important fact.

“He’s alive. Gun took a hit, too: two in the back. He’s in surgery, but Mav sounded pretty grim about him.” Dad shook his head and stood. “We gotta go, Athena.”

Heart pounding, limbs shaking, stomach roiling, she tossed her covers aside. “Okay. I’ll be ready.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Good girl. And hey—happy birthday, starlight.”

Athena laughed sadly. Right. Today was her actual birthday. This was a terrible year for birthday events. “Thanks, Dad.”

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~oOo~

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It had been years since the club had locked down. Athena and Sam had been in high school the last time, and that lockdown had happened because the Bulls had gone off to fight a war with the Perro Blanco cartel.

Now, before dawn, the clubhouse was packed with family, close club friends, and pets. The Bulls had all immediately locked themselves in the chapel, and Marcella, experiencing her first lockdown, was directing the old ladies, the club kids, and the sweetbutts, as everybody figured out where to put everyone and how to separate the family cats from the family dogs, got food and drink going, and figured out how to keep the younger kids busy.

Athena was so worried about Sam—about Uncle Gun, too, but mainly about Sam—she felt sick and shaky. Her mom had noticed that she was pale, so she’d given her the task of watching the younger kids. They were still drowsy from the early wake-up, so they were sprawled in front of the TV, watching Bluey. Athena sat in the corner of a sofa, knitting and trying not to freak out.

Sam was alive. He’d been shot and had lost a lot of blood, but he was alive and now he was at a hospital, where they could give him blood. He would be okay. It was making her completely nutso that he was so far away and she couldn’t get to him, but he would be okay. He would come home and be okay, and they would be able to figure out what happened next for them.

Nobody in the family, not even her parents, knew that things had changed between her and Sam, so nobody was fussing over her the way they were fussing over Aunt Leah and Aunt Deb.

When things were chaotic like this, a lot of people forgot that Athena couldn’t hear. Her parents frequently signed when they spoke even when they weren’t speaking to her, but Dad was in the chapel and Mom was so busy her hands were usually full. Athena had been pushed to the side and reduced to trying to glean information from what she could read on people’s lips and in their body language. It was like reading a book where every other page was missing.

Things with Uncle Gun were obviously serious and scary. Aunt Leah was pacing, leading a small cluster of women around with her and Larissa, their daughter. Larissa had been crying since they’d arrived. Aidan, their son, sat in a corner with his arms crossed, glaring at the closed door of the chapel. He was a freshman at OU, but the club had called him home. Were Emily and Anne Becker and James Mathews, the other college students in the family, all of whom went to school farther away, on their way home, too? How far did Bulls danger reach?

Athena had seen Leah speak the word coma several times, and the word paralyzed a few times, and assumed she was speaking of Uncle Gun, but she had no sense of whether these were long-term things, like a vegetative-state kind of coma and permanent paralysis, or if they were just things that were true right now and he’d get better.

Someone had died, too, she thought, but she wasn’t sure. God, it was so frustrating! Athena dropped her knitting and slammed her hands to her eyes, needing to push everything in her head into a manageable size. Her head fucking hurt, and her stomach was doing a gymnastics routine inside her.

In fact ... she might actually need to be sick. She set her knitting on the sofa’s arm and stood; that made her dizzy and even more nauseated, so she ran through the party room, dodging people in every direction, and just barely made it to the bathroom and the toilet before she yarked whatever was left of last night’s dinner into the bowl.

When she was done, she didn’t want to go back out into that morass of panic and confusion. She sat on the floor, her back against the wall, and tried to breathe. Blanche had followed her into the bathroom; now she sat at Athena’s side, ready to be needed. Athena wrapped her arms around her dog and held on.

This was the only bathroom on the main floor, so she couldn’t hog it forever. Eventually Athena pulled herself together, stood and went to the sink to rinse out her mouth and wash her hands. Her reflection stared back at her, looking gaunt and dazed.

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