Jada, knowing I was going to have to be okay on my own. I sat near her feet as they continued to work on her. I rubbed her ankle, talking to her while the EMTs did their job.
Her eyelids fluttered, but she never woke up. The machine they’d hooked her up to flatlined, and the pain that flew through me caused me to hunch over as their words rushed over me.
“We lost her pulse. Starting compressions.”
I started a silent chant, please live, please live, please live, as they pushed on her sternum. The force of the pressure against her body turned to numbers, math flying around me.
“Charging,” the other man said as he waited for the defibrillator to ramp up.
My eyes were drawn to the back window of the ambulance. The night beyond the glass was agonizingly similar to the one where Dawson and I had crashed off a cliff and into the ocean. I thought we’d died that night. I thought I’d ruined everything.
This time, it was my friend dying. That agony was almost unbearable. Such a stark reminder of what I hadn’t felt for the loss of my dad because this―losing Jada―it would burn a hole in my chemical makeup I wouldn’t be able to fill.
“Clear!”
The machine hit her chest, and her body jolted with her back curving off the gurney.
“We have a pulse,” one of them said. “Thank God.”
My heart skittered with waves of guilt and relief. A longing to talk to her again washed over me, burying itself deep in my chest. I touched her leg again, speaking to her closed lids. “Jada, I love you. Don’t you dare die on Dawson and me. We need you,” I choked out.
She didn’t wake, but she had a pulse and that was at least something.
She was a fighter. She’d had to be. I hadn’t even known why or how until these last few days. If anyone should have a superhero named after them, it was clearly Jada.
At the hospital, a nurse held me back as they wheeled her directly to the operating room. She tried to get information from me about Jada and her family and numbers to call. I didn’t really know any. Would Jada’s father even come? He was on a plane to Japan, according to his own words. Would they arrest him if he showed up? Would he even care that she almost died?
“There’s just me,” I said.
It was all I could do until Dawson got there. He might know more.
The nurse took pity on me and my blood-covered hands and dress. She took me to a bathroom where I could clean up, giving me a pair of scrubs that were two sizes too big but were better than the mess I was wearing. I shoved the gorgeous costume that I’d never be able to look at again without feeling the pain of this moment into a bag the nurse gave me. The excessive jewelry and sparking heels followed. I covered my cold feet with a pair of hospital socks.
When I was done, she showed me to a waiting room with a look of sympathy. My tears would not stop, and the trembling in my body wouldn’t go away.
Dawson’s phone rang. It said M1.
“Hello?” I croaked out.
“Vi,” Dawson’s voice, full of concern, filled the space. “How is she?”
“I don’t know. She…she flat-lined, Dawson… in the ambulance.” The words tore through me. “But they brought her back. She’s in the operating room.”
“Jesus…” his deep voice cracked over the one word. After a few seconds, he continued. “I’m on my way to you. We didn’t get him…he’s in the wind, so we have police coming to you. Some will be in plain clothes. Don’t be freaked out if they get there before me.”
My body quivered with a renewed fear as Ken’Ichi’s dark eyes flooded my vision. Would he come here? To finish what he’d started?
“Vi?”
“Okay,” I said. It was all I could say. My body was slowly going numb, as if the adrenaline leaving my body had taken all my emotions with it as the shock settled in. I knew this with the science part of my brain, but the rest of me wasn’t registering it.
I could barely hit the off button.
I sat in a chair, pulled my knees up to my chest, buried my face, and let the tears fall. Harder and then gentler, louder and then softer. I missed my sister with a physical ache. I missed her ability to make everything in my world