When the phone rang, I groped for it on the nightstand. It was the hospital. And it was also 3:57 in the morning. I brushed the hair off my forehead and sat up. “Hello?”
“Kristen.”
It was Josh. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any Josh I’d ever heard. “Kristen, you need to go get Sloan. Brandon’s had a stroke.”
I threw off my covers. “What? A stroke? What does that mean?”
I tumbled out of bed and stumbled around the room, grabbing my bra and jumping into leggings.
He paused. “He’s brain-dead. He’s not coming back from this. It’s over.
Get Sloan.”
The line went dead.
I stood in the middle of my dark room. The phone stayed lit for a moment. When the screen went back to black, I was doused in pitch.
The velociraptor roared, and the ground shook as it lunged forward.
As I drove to Sloan’s, I had the surreal, almost out-of-body realization that I was about to tell my best friend the worst news of her life. That the moment she answered that door, I was going to break her heart and she would never be the same.
My altered state allowed me to process this in a compartmentalized way. I knew that I wouldn’t feel the painful moment when it happened, but that I’d put it into a little box and take it out and look at it often for the rest of
my life.
* * *
I watched Sloan die inside that night.
They called it a catastrophic stroke. A blood clot moved from the wounds in his leg up to his brain. It had probably happened while Josh sat with him. It was silent and final, and there was nothing anyone could have done.
Josh was right. Brandon was gone.
Three days after the stroke, an ethics committee made up of Brandon’s doctors, an organization that coordinated organ donations, and a grief counselor called the family in for an 11:00 a.m. meeting at the hospital. I sat outside the conference room, bouncing my knee, waiting for Sloan to come out.
I hadn’t left her side once since the stroke. Every night I slept in the chair next to her by Brandon’s bedside. Only now he wasn’t healing in his coma.
He was brain-dead.
Josh hadn’t been back to the hospital since Brandon’s diagnosis. He wouldn’t answer my calls.
The shift was strange. Our text thread went from dozens of unanswered texts from him, begging me to talk to him, to dozens of unanswered texts from me, begging him to talk to me. I wanted to know he was okay.
His silence told me he wasn’t.
I wore his sweatshirt today. I’d never wear it when I knew he might see it. I didn’t want to encourage him. But based on his absence over the last three days, I didn’t think I had to worry. And I needed to feel him wrapped around my body today. I needed to smell him in the fabric.
I just needed him.
This meeting wasn’t going to be easy on Sloan. It was about the next steps.
The door to the conference room opened up, and Brandon’s mom came out, speaking to his dad in tearful Spanish.
Sloan walked out of the meeting behind them, and I led her immediately into an empty waiting room.
Sloan was a zombie. She’d died three days ago when Brandon did. The light was gone from her eyes. Her legs walked, her eyelids blinked, but she was vacant.
“What did they say?” I asked, sitting her down on one of the cushioned chairs next to me.
She spoke wearily, her eyes rimmed a permanent shade of red. “They say we need to take him off of life support. That his body is deteriorating.”
The wail of Brandon’s mom came down the hallway. It had become a sound we knew all too well. She broke down at random. Everyone did. Well, everyone except for me. I was void of emotion while my predator and I shared space. Instead of feeling pain at Sloan’s suffering, I spiraled further into my OCD. I slept less. I moved more. I dove deeper into my rituals.
And nothing helped.
Sloan didn’t react to the sound of grief down the hall. “His brain isn’t making hormones anymore or controlling any of his bodily functions. The medications he’s on to maintain his blood pressure and body temperature are damaging his organs. They said if we want to donate them, we have to do it soon.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling tissues from a box and shoving them into her hands. “When are they doing it?”
She spoke to the room, to someplace behind me. She didn’t look at me. “They’re not.”
I stared at her. “What do you mean they’re not?”
She blinked, her eyelids closing mechanically. “His parents don’t want to take him off life support. They’re praying for a miracle. They’re really religious. They think he rebounded once and he’ll rebound again.”
Her eyes focused on me, tears welled, threatening to fall. “It’s going to all be for nothing, Kristen. He’s an organ donor. He’d want that. He’s going to rot in that room and he’s going to die for nothing and I have no say in any of it.”
The tears spilled down her face, but she didn’t sob. They just streamed, like water from a leaky hose.
I gaped at her. “But…but why? Didn’t he have a will? What the fuck?”
She shook her head. “We talked about it, but the wedding was so close we just decided to wait. I have no say. At all.”
The reality suddenly rolled out before me. It wouldn’t just be this. It
would be everything. His life insurance policy, his benefits, his portion of the house, his belongings—not hers. She would get nothing.
Not even a vote.
She went on in her daze. “I don’t know how to convince them. The insurance won’t cover his stay much longer, so they’ll be forced to make a decision at some point. But it will cover it long enough for his organs to fail.”
My brain grasped at a solution. “Claudia. She might be able to convince them.”
She hadn’t been able to make the meeting. And she would side with Sloan—I knew she would. She had influence on her parents.
“Maybe Josh too,” I continued. “They like him. They might listen to him.” I stood.
She looked up at me, a tear dripping off her chin and landing on her thigh. “Where are you going?”
“To find Josh.”
* * *
I went to the station first, but Josh wasn’t there. I found him at home.
He opened the door after letting me pound on it for almost five minutes.
His truck was in the carport. I knew he was here.
He pulled the door open and walked back inside without looking at me or saying a word. I followed him in, and he dropped onto a sofa I’d never seen before.
His face was scruffy. I’d never seen him anything but clean-shaven. Not even in pictures. He had bags under his eyes. He’d aged ten years in three days.
The apartment was a mess. The boxes were gone. It looked like he had finally unpacked. But laundry was piled up in a basket so full it spilled out onto the floor. Empty food containers littered the kitchen countertops. The coffee table was full of empty beer bottles. His bed was unmade. The place smelled stagnant and dank.
A vicious urge to take care of him took hold. The velociraptor tapped its talon on the floor. Josh wasn’t okay.
Nobody was okay.
And that was what made me not okay. “Hey,” I said, standing in front of him.
He didn’t look at me. “Oh, so you’re talking to me now,” he said bitterly, taking a long pull on a beer. “Great. What do you want?”
The coldness of his tone took me aback, but I kept my face still. “You haven’t been to the hospital.”
His bloodshot eyes dragged up to mine. “Why would I? He’s not there.
He’s fucking gone.” I stared at him.
He shook his head and looked away from me. “So what do you want? You wanted to see if I’m okay? I’m not fucking okay. My best friend is brain-dead. The woman I love won’t even fucking speak to me.”
He picked up a beer cap from the coffee table and threw it hard across the room. My OCD winced.
“I’m doing this for you,” I whispered.
“Well, don’t,” he snapped. “None of this is for me. Not any of it. I need you, and you abandoned me. Just go. Get out.”
I wanted to climb into his lap. Tell him how much I missed him and that I wouldn’t leave him again. I wanted to make love to him and never be away from him ever again in my life—and clean his fucking apartment.
But instead, I just stood there. “No. I’m not leaving. We need to talk about what’s happening at the hospital.”
He glared up at me. “There’s only one thing I want to talk about. I want to talk about how you and I can be in love with each other and you won’t be with me. Or how you can stand not seeing me or speaking to me for weeks. That’s what I want to talk about, Kristen.”
My chin quivered. I turned and went to the kitchen and grabbed a trash bag from under the sink. I started tossing take-out containers and beer bottles.
I spoke over my shoulder. “Get up. Go take a shower. Shave. Or don’t if that’s the look you’re going for. But I need you to get your shit together.”
My hands were shaking. I wasn’t feeling well. I’d been light-headed and slightly overheated since I went to Josh’s fire station looking for him. But I focused on my task, shoving trash into my bag. “If Brandon is going to be able to donate his organs, he needs to come off life support within the next few days. His parents won’t do it, and Sloan doesn’t get a say. You need to
go talk to them.”
Hands came up under my elbows, and his touch radiated through me. “Kristen, stop.”
I spun on him. “Fuck you, Josh! You need help, and I need to help you!”
And then as fast as the anger surged, the sorrow took over. The chains on my mood swing snapped, and feelings broke through my walls like water breaching a crevice in a dam. I began to cry. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The strength that drove me through my days just wasn’t available to me when it came to Josh.
I dropped the trash bag at his feet and put my hands over my face and sobbed. He wrapped his arms around me, and I completely lost it.
“I can’t stop cleaning and I have a monster inside my brain and I miss you and Sloan is falling apart and his parents won’t take him off life support, so his organs are rotting. I can’t get all the lines right on the carpet with the vacuum and Stuntman is in a kennel and I haven’t seen him in days, and I just need you to let me clean this fucking apartment!”
I’m not sure how much of it he heard, if any. I was crying so hard I could barely understand myself. He just held me and caressed my hair, and for the first time in weeks the velociraptor hunted other prey.
Josh made me weak. Or strong. It was hard to tell anymore what I was without my coping mechanism. At least when I rode the beast, I got shit done. And now I was nothing but an emotional mess.
But at least the mess was mine.
Why did he have this effect on me? He had this way of waking up dormant parts of my soul. He ripped through me and let everything in with him like a storm surge.
I took on water.
And at the same time, something told me if I let him, he’d keep me afloat. He wouldn’t let me sink. I’d never felt this vulnerable and safe with anyone.
I felt hot and shaky. I gasped and clutched his shirt until the crying spasms stopped. He held me so tight my knees could have given out and I wouldn’t have fallen an inch.
“I can’t be the only one who has their shit together,” I whispered.
His chest rumbled as he spoke. “It doesn’t look like you have your shit together…”
I snorted. “Josh, please.” I looked up at him, my hands trembling on his collarbone. “I need you to insert yourself here. Go talk to his parents. They’ll listen to you.”
He looked at me like seeing me cry was agony. The longing on his face was razor blades to my heart. His sad eyes, the set of his mouth, his knit brows.
He loved me almost as much as I loved him, and I knew I was hurting him. I knew he thought I was enough. But I wasn’t enough. How could one of me be any kind of substitute for the half dozen kids he’d always wanted? It just couldn’t. The math didn’t work. The logic wasn’t sound.
He wiped a tear off my cheek with his thumb. “Okay,” he whispered. “I’ll go. Just, sit down or something. Stop cleaning.” He dipped his head to catch my eyes. “Are you okay? You’re shaking.”
He put a hand over mine to still the tremor against his chest, and the closeness of him made me whole for the first time in weeks.
“I’m fine,” I said, swallowing. “Just hurry, okay?”
He looked at me for a long moment, like he was trying to memorize my face or steal an extra second to hold me. Then he turned for the bathroom.
When he walked away from me, the absence of his body pressed into mine felt like I’d lost my clothes and I stood naked and exposed to the elements.
I missed him. No amount of time lessened it. It made it worse. My heart was a neglected building, and every day I weathered a fierce storm that dripped through my roof, flooded my floors, and broke my windows, and the disrepair just made me weaker and closer to collapse.
The water turned on in the bathroom and I looked around the apartment, my compulsion raging back with a fury now that he was gone.
At least I could do this for him. I could take care of his space, give it order. Wash his clothes and his blankets. Make things smell clean, turn his home into someplace he wanted to be. Do this thing that he obviously couldn’t do for himself at the moment.
I blitzed the place. I stripped the bed, threw open the windows. I was washing dishes when the dizziness started.
Why are my lips tingling?
I pressed a shaking finger to my mouth. And then my vision began to blur…
