turned sharply and headed in the direction Nick had left—toward their family, toward that love.
Nick got into the elevator alone and pressed the button for the lowest floor.
He could say to Elisa what he could say to no one else. Now, when it was too late, he could say everything to her.
~ 15 ~
Lia sat in the St. Gabriel’s surgical waiting room and felt empty and alone. A howling, icy wind roared through her mind, and the few thoughts that began to form were quickly swept away.
Inside her chest, her heart beat slowly and heavily, like a mallet on a gong. Each clanging thump ached.
Her sister was dead.
Elisa was dead.
It made no sense. Unable to reconcile such an absurdity with any sense of truth, Lia’s mind simply howled.
Alex’s arm around her felt too heavy, too tight, gave her no comfort, but she couldn’t form the will to push him away.
She shouldn’t push him away, shouldn’t want to, didn’t want to. But she felt heavy and constrained and didn’t know how to undo it.
Across the room, Mamma sat, pallid and stunned. Carina and Ren flanked her, their heads on her shoulders, their arms wound around hers. They’d been crying, but now they only lay quietly on her.
Aunt Katrynn sat beside Ren, holding his hand. Uncle John sat beside Carina, his arm stretched behind her back.
Papa was nowhere to be seen. He’d left the waiting room with Uncle Donnie almost as soon as they’d arrived, and they’d never returned.
Uncle Donnie’s wife, Ari, crouched before Mamma, her hands on Mamma’s knees. She hadn’t moved from that position for as long as Lia had been watching.
There was no room for Lia in the knot of her family’s grief, so she sat here, across the way, caught in Alex’s embrace.
Inside her, the wind howled, and the gong clanged.
“Can I get you anything, babe? Coffee or something?” Alex asked.
Lia managed to turn her head on a neck that felt rusty. She stared at him and tried to remember what an appropriate answer to a question like that would be.
When she couldn’t, and thus only stared, he tipped his head and touched his forehead to hers. “I’m so sorry, Lee. I don’t know what to do.”
He might well have saved her once again, throwing her to the ground, covering her with his body while whatever had happened had happened.
There had been no sound of gunfire. No sounds but the odd shatter of auto glass and the shouts and screams of their family and friends. How could three people have been shot, how could her sister have been killed, without gunfire?
Lia still didn’t understand, and the thought couldn’t hold long enough in her mind to become a question she could utter.
She let her head fall to Alex’s shoulder and said nothing, thought little, felt too much to comprehend.
Uncle Angie stood in the hallway off the waiting room, amongst a small group of men she didn’t know. He paced a few steps, came back, talked, dragged his hands through his hair, paced more. One man, stocky and balding, walked off with his phone at his ear.
All around her, her family huddled together in worry and grief. Her aunts, uncles, cousins formed clusters around the room, standing and sitting together, murmuring in a shared feeling so strong the air seemed to shudder with it.
Alex held her tightly, supported her, but Lia looked across the room, where her mother and siblings clung together, and was alone.
At some point, Uncle Donnie returned alone to the waiting room and went straight to Mamma. Ari stood, and Uncle Donnie hooked his arms possessively around his wife and lingered for a second in her tight embrace before he crouched in front of Mamma and took her hands in his. Whatever he said to her, her head drooped, and Uncle Donnie leaned in and pulled her close. Lia saw her mother’s back shaking with fresh sobs.
The first true thought that caught and held in Lia’s was an instinctual understanding of what Donnie had said to make her mother cry again. Her father wasn’t with him, because he wasn’t coming. That was the news Donnie had shared: Elisa was dead, Trey might be dying, and Papa wasn’t coming to be with the family.
Lia pushed away from Alex and stood. He stood with her.
“Lia?”
“Where’s my dad?”
“I don’t—he went off with Donnie when Tony came in. I guess he’s dealing with what happened.”
How, exactly, did one ‘deal with what happened’ when what had happened was this?