Finally, I lift my head from the window. The bright lights outside shine on my face and I look up at the automatic glass doors to peer inside the hospital. But I’m too afraid to go in. I’m too afraid to get out of the truck.

The hospital doors break apart, and Rian steps through them with my mother beside her.

“Oh, Elias,” my mother cries and reaches for me. I don’t even know how the truck door was opened. “I’m so sorry, honey. This is awful! I’m so sorry.” She squeezes her frail arms around me. I don’t even know how I got out of the truck.

I’m afraid to ask her why she’s sorry. I don’t want to know.

Rian’s cheeks shimmer with tears. A tissue is crushed in her hand. She reaches out to hug me, and although I want her and my mother and everyone to leave me alone, I still don’t have the strength to act upon any of my thoughts or intentions.

I’m sitting on a chair in the ER waiting room. I don’t know how I got here, either. All I see is the cream-colored tile floor, wet and dirty from what my drenched running shoes have tracked in. I’m leaning forward with my elbows resting on the tops of my legs, my hands folded together, draped between my knees. Rian and my mother are sitting on either side of me, but I don’t know which. I hate the smell of this place, so sterile and plastic and offensive. The sound of strange beeping machines in the triage room just feet away frays my nerves even further. I hear the squeaking of leather shoes moving across the floor, the intercom popping in the ceiling, and I see the flash of red lights bouncing against the tall glass window from an ambulance that just pulled in.

I feel a hand on my knee, and I recognize it as my mother’s when I place it with her voice.

“You did everything you could do, baby.” The pain in her voice sears right through me. Is she trying to prepare me, or is she hoping to keep me calm?

I keep my eyes trained on the floor.

Time passes, but I can’t tell how much, and a nurse steps into the waiting room and calls Rian’s name.

I’m scared to look up. I know this is the moment, it’s the moment in my life when I will either die from happiness or from pain.

“Are you Ms. Bates’s sister?” the nurse asks Rian.

I still can’t raise my head. My fingers are digging into the back of my scalp, trying their best to penetrate my skull. My right leg shakes uncontrollably, the heel of my foot bounces up and down against the floor in rapid succession. My mother’s hand touches my back.

“Yes…,” Rian answers and I feel her stand up beside me.

There is no air in the room. It’s all being held inside my lungs.

“She’s in stable condition. You can come back and see her now.”

The air bursts from my lungs all at once and I fall from the chair to the floor on my knees. Sobs rack my entire body. I feel even more hands on my back, but I can’t raise my head to see whose they are. I cry so hard into my hands that I almost puke. “She’s alive,” I say out loud to myself. “She’s alive…” My nostrils burn from the stinging tears.

Finally I raise my head to see Rian and my mother standing over me.

“No, I, uh…,” Rian starts to say. I notice her glance at me and then look back at the nurse. “Please let Elias go back first.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Elias

The room is brighter than I imagined. The walls, floor, and ceiling, stark white bathed by fluorescent lights running along the ceiling panels. The nurse pulls a long curtain closed after I’m fully inside the room. The stench of rubbing alcohol and something chemical rises up into my nostrils.

For a moment, I just stare across the short distance of the tiny room and look at Bray, lying upon the elevated bed with white sheets covering her motionless body. Her hair is still drenched, lying against the pillow. Her arms are visible, extending down at her sides. Hospital bracelets have replaced her hemp bracelets on one wrist, and an IV tube is taped to the other. I look at her sleeping face, so soft and calm, as if her body hadn’t just gone through something so horrific. She looks… peaceful.

The nurse makes a few marks on a paper attached to a clipboard and says, “She’s going to be fine. But you should get with her family and discuss what options there are for admitting her. From what I understand, this is Ms. Bates’s second suicide attempt.”

Everything else she says I just hear bits and pieces. Drug overdose. Nearly drowned. If she hadn’t been found sooner…

The nurse leaves me alone in the room with Bray, and I turn off the light shining over her bed. Quietly, I pull a chair around to the side of her bed and I sit. I take her hand into both of mine and tears roll out of me as I lean over, planting my lips on her knuckles. I stay like this for a long time. Just me and Bray, closed off in the solitude of the room. Every now and then I hear faint voices and footsteps moving back and forth outside the room beyond the tall curtain and the glass doors behind it. Bray never stirs. Not once. Her chest rises and falls as she breathes on her own. I wonder what she’s dreaming, if she’s dreaming at all. She looks so peaceful and soft lying there, even though her hair is dirty and wet and her skin is sickly pale. I fall asleep sitting upright in the chair.

Later in the night, they move her to a room and out of the ER. Rian and my mother join me there, all of us sitting around her bed. No one says much, just a few words here and there to any number of nurses that come in to check on Bray through the overnight hours.

My mother decides to leave when Bray’s parents finally show up.

“You call me soon,” my mom says, holding my hands. “Keep me updated and I want you to come home and stay with me for a couple of days.”

I nod. I don’t intend to do that, but this isn’t the time or place to argue with her about it.

She kisses me on the forehead and I hug her tight before she walks past Mr. and Mrs. Bates in the doorway, dressed like they just left church.

I step aside when Mrs. Bates walks quickly over to the side of Bray’s bed and sits down in the chair I had been sitting in for the past couple of hours. She takes Bray’s right hand into hers and kisses her knuckles just like I had done.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you, Brayelle,” she says with tears in her voice.

Mr. Bates looks at me coldly. “You can go now,” he says.

I go into territorial mode in two seconds flat. My teeth clamp together behind my tightly closed lips. It takes everything in me to keep from knocking him on his ass.