There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,91

cry out as she comes out through the entrance. Then she sees them there. Just outside the entrance. Loother and Lony.

“Where’s Opal?” she says to them. Lony is crying. He points out toward the parking lot. Jacquie looks down at Orvil. Her arms are shaking. Loother comes over and puts an arm around Jacquie, looks down at his brother.

“He’s white,” Loother says.

When Opal pulls up, Jacquie sees Harvey come running out toward them. She doesn’t know why he should come, or why she calls out his name, waves him over. They all get into the back of Opal’s Ford Bronco and Opal puts her foot on the gas.

Blue

BLUE AND EDWIN MANAGE to get out to Blue’s car without having to stop. Edwin is out of breath and starting to look pretty pale. Blue puts Edwin’s seat belt on, starts the car, and heads for the hospital. She leaves because she hasn’t even heard sirens yet. She leaves because Edwin is officially slumped in his seat, his eyelids half-closed. She leaves because she knows the way and can get there sooner than someone not even here yet.

After the shooting stopped, Blue could barely make out what Edwin was yelling at her from the ground.

“We gotta go,” Edwin said. He was talking about the hospital. He wanted her to take him. He was right. They wouldn’t get enough ambulances there in time. Who knows how many people had been shot. For Edwin, it was just one shot—in the stomach.

“Okay,” Blue said. She tried to help him up, wrapped his arm over her shoulder and pulled. He winced a little but for the most part was pretty unfazed.

“Hold it with pressure so it doesn’t bleed too much,” Blue said. He was holding three or four Big Oakland Powwow T-shirts against his stomach. He reached behind his back and the color went out of his face.

“It went through,” Edwin said. “Out the back.”

“Fuck,” Blue said. “Or good? Shit. I don’t know.” Blue put an arm around him and let his arm hold on to her. They hobbled out of the coliseum like that, all the way out to Blue’s car.

* * *

—

When Blue pulls into Highland, Edwin is passed out. She’d been telling him, yelling at him, screaming at him to stay awake. There was probably a closer hospital, but she knew Highland. She keeps her hand on the horn, to try to wake Edwin up and to get someone to come out to help. She reaches her hand over and slaps Edwin a few times on the cheek. Edwin shakes his head a little.

“You gotta wake up, Ed,” Blue says. “We’re here.”

He doesn’t respond.

Blue runs inside to get someone with a stretcher to come out and help.

When she comes out through the emergency room automatic double doors, she sees a Ford Bronco pull up. All the doors open at once. She sees Harvey. And Jacquie. Jacquie’s holding a boy, a teenager in regalia. As Jacquie passes Blue, two nurses come out with a stretcher for Edwin. Blue knows right away there will be confusion. Should she allow Jacquie and the boy to go in Edwin’s place? It doesn’t matter what Blue has or hasn’t decided. She watches the nurses load the boy and take him away on the stretcher. Harvey walks up to Blue and looks at Edwin in the car. He nods his head sideways at Edwin like: Let’s pick him up.

Harvey slaps Edwin a few times on the cheek and he rustles a little but can’t pick his head up. Harvey yells some incomprehensible thing about getting someone out here to help, then gets Edwin halfway out of the car and puts Edwin’s arm around him. Blue squeezes between the car and Edwin and takes his other arm and puts it around her shoulder.

* * *

—

Two orderlies settle Edwin on the gurney. Blue and Harvey run alongside as they roll him through the halls, and then he’s through the swinging doors.

* * *

—

Blue sits next to Jacquie, who’s looking down at that angle, at the ground, elbows to knees in that position you take when you’re waiting for death to leave the building, for your loved one to come out in a wheelchair with a broken smile, for a doctor with a sure step to come for you with good news. Blue wants to say something to Jacquie. But what? Blue looks at Harvey. He really does look like Edwin. And if Harvey and Jacquie are together, then does