bright, eager hope.
“No!” I shouted between clenched teeth. “You can’t do that to him!” My body started to tremble, my heart beating too fast, pumping too much boiling blood through me. Sweat trickled down my temple and dripped from my chin.
“He’s scheduled for the procedure tomorrow morning, so we’re taking you to the hospital tonight to say good-bye,” she said.
Like I could say good-bye. Jonah had stopped talking a month ago. “Is Dad okay with all this? He’s not going to allow it, you know. He loves us too much,” I retorted. He always stood up to Mom when it came to really important things.
Lis gasped. Mom put a hand up to her mouth and tried to stifle a sob. “Honey. Fiona. Your father’s dead, remember? Last month … Jonah …”
An image of my father flashed into my head, where he lay dead on the music room floor, his wheelchair overturned beside the piano. Jonah, my sweet, gentle brother, crouched at his side, weeping, muscles bulging. “I didn’t mean to,” he kept saying over and over. That was the last time he spoke.
Blood surged through my body, faster than before, making my ears ring. “There has to be another option,” I whispered. “You can’t do this to Jonah! Lis! Talk some sense into her!” My breathing sped up and I pressed on my temples.
“Fo, you’re going in, too. To the hospital.” I could barely hear her over the siren shrieking in my brain.
Slowly I climbed from the bed and took a step toward Mom and Lis. Pushing harder on my temples, I squeezed my eyes shut. “For a morphine pump?” I asked.
Mom didn’t answer. I opened my eyes and took a step closer. Fresh tears shimmered in her eyes, and one eye was swollen and framed in black. I blinked and looked at my knuckles, black and blue and still swollen. I had put that bruise on her earlier that day, before Lis came over, before Mom went to the doctor’s office. How had I forgotten?
“No,” Mom said. “We’re not trying morphine on you, honey. We are having the doctor induce comas in both of you.”
At Mom’s words, tears filled Lis’s eyes and gushed out. Seeing my sister so sad made me want to scream. Made my skin feel too tight. Made me want to tear at my skin until it came off.
Instead, I jumped on Mom and tried to claw her eyes out.
I chuck the magazine across the room and curl up onto my side, letting tears splatter over my nose and onto the sleeping bag. My father is dead. He didn’t die when the wall was built. He has been dead for four years. How could I forget that? Forget the fact that Jonah flew into a violent rage and killed him? I should have remembered. And my poor mother. I punched her in the face. Attacked her. And now she’s most likely dead and I’ll never get to apologize. I wrap my arms around my head and weep, soaking the sleeping bag with tears. Somehow I fall asleep.
Bowen lives in my dreams, in a world of green and gold, budding with new life. My mom is there, too, lazing beneath the shadow of a tree, netting covering her face, with Lis, my sister, at her side, mixing honey into porcelain teacups for the three of them. Lis sees me and smiles, swinging her long blond hair off her shoulder and motioning me to join them. Only, I can’t move. My hand, my tattoo, is stuck to the side of a towering wall, and I can’t pull it free.
Bowen waves me over, mouths the words, Come on, it’s time to go. I pull harder but am stuck fast. His face falls, as if he thinks I don’t want to come, don’t want to run with him. He stands, shakes his head in disappointment, and walks off until he disappears against the horizon. Mom and Lis pack up the tea party and wave good-bye, blowing me kisses and leaving me in the looming shadow of the wall.
I wake sweating, still lying atop a sleeping bag in a deserted hotel, trapped in a blazing world. Sweat trickles down my neck and pools in my collarbone. And I am alone.
Night comes too slowly, a darkness that brings fear. It has been nineteen hours since Bowen left, and every hour that passes without his return, I imagine worse things happening to him. And worse things happening to me if he never comes