Page 112 of Something Like Sunflowers

Beep, beep, beep.

The beeping is loud, but it gets quieter as we run alongside the gurney. I get one final glimpse of her, one last squeeze of her small, limp hand before I’m forced to stop. I hang alongside the counter and shout past the guards stationed by the ICU doorway.

“Dustin, text me as soon as they say something, please, man!”

“I will,” he yells back. “Hey, she loves you, even if she can’t say it right now. We all do. You hear me?”

I grind my teeth. That’s what he says. But Mr. and Mrs. Campbell said the opposite when they blamed me for the wreck and all but shoved me out of the way as soon as they got here.

Like she isn’t mine and I’m not hers.

He walks backward now, jogging almost, turning his head back to check he’s still following them as he shouts his last words to me, words he can say all he wants, but I’ll never agree with.

“None of this is your fault.”

Then he’s gone. The doors swing shut, and I watch my best friend follow his parents and the medical team as they wheel Devyn away from me.

My heart thunders, my fingers gripping the edges of the nurse’s desk that blocks me from going farther than this spot right here. The beeping in the distance that fades to nothing the farther they travel down the winding hallways of the hospital mocks my patience.

Helpless, that is what I feel.

I said I’d protect her, and instead I may have ended her life. And not just hers. Our daughter’s.

Tears fall from my eyes, hard and fast. Our little girl. Gone in an instant.

I shut my eyes tight and hunch over the counter, my sobs waning to nothing more than slopping hiccups over a drenched sleeve, until a nurse comes and puts her hand on my shoulder.

She’s older, maybe sixty. I wouldn’t know. There aren’t many older people in my family who stuck around long enough for me to ask their ages.

I wanted something different for our daughter. For us. I wanted to be that family man who hosted breakfasts with Santa and fall festivals on the farm for the whole town one day, with my family by my side, passing on generations of togetherness. Something I never had. Might never have again.

I wipe my face on my other sleeve, but it’s right soiled too, so I just yank the whole thing off and ball it in a wad, tossing it to a seat by the water cooler.

The kind but militant woman offers me a tissue, and I take one, wiping my face and moving to an empty set of chairs. She sits in the one opposite me and waits patiently, her lips pursed, and hands clasped over one knee.

“Well,” she finally says, “I don’t know about your girlfriend’s injuries because I’m not involved in her medical care. And I wouldn’t tell you if I could due to HIPPA constraints,” she adds with a wink, “but I do know anyone traveling down that hallway needs the staff’s full attention. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nod, taking a few more tissues from her, and then just grabbing the whole box when she arches an eyebrow at me. She wants me to calm down and stay out of the way. That much I do understand.

But she hasn’t left yet.

“Well, are you going to tell me about her or just sit there and sulk privately?”

I snort at that. I never had a grandparent around, and Aunt Sarah was never this blunt with me about anything, but I imagine this is what she’d be like if my mom’s mom were alive right now. Mom had a bit of sass to her bite too, from what I can remember. And maybe that’s what has me opening up to this strange woman I just met.

“She was pregnant,” I say, watching her face soften. “The baby was…they couldn’t save her when they pulled Devyn free.” I pause, recalling the long shards of metal and wood, the whole chunks of vehicle and signage imbedded into her middle. Grief pools over me, so I slam my eyes shut. But the grief is there too, seeping into thoughts and private moments that are supposed to be just for my brain and the thoughts I choose to think.

It sliced through her womb and up her chest. I’ve seen it. It’s burned into my mind like a curse.

“What if they can’t save her?” I grind out, crying to the nurse…Rosemary, her badge reads. But it doesn’t matter her name. For what it’s worth, she’s a stranger in a waiting room. And I’m just the fuckup boyfriend who wasn’t allowed to go back with family.

“Things don’t always work out how we imagine they might,” she says sadly. But that’s not supposed to be what the wise old stranger says in the story. The fuck? Where’s the encouragement or words of sudden understanding?

Where’s my solution to all this?

“So, what? I do nothing? You don’t understand. It’s my fault. It should be me on that table dying!”

“But you aren’t,” she says, “and what you do with that is entirely up to you.”

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