Page 264 of Disarm
The room goes quiet for a second. The air feels thicker.
“You don’t know exactly when he took them,” Luis says gently.
“I know it was in that window,” I snap. “Between me patting myself on the back for not catastrophizing and me texting him a cute little ‘how’s stats going’ message, he was getting ready to die.”
The silence this time is heavier.
“What does that mean to you?” he asks.
“It means I missed it,” I say. The words are acid in my mouth. “Again. First attempt, I was too busy being nineteen and stupid and pretending not to see his sleeves in the summer. This time, Iwas literally in therapy, talking about how I’m not God, while he was… while he…” My voice cracks. “How fucked up is that, man? That’s some cosmic irony bullshit.”
Luis lets that sit. He leans forward a little, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled. “I’m going to say something annoying,” he warns. “Ready?”
“No,” I say, narrowing my gaze. “Do it anyway.”
“You didn’t miss it,” he says. “You weren’t there for the exact moment, no. But you noticed he was louder. You checked in. You talked to him. You got scared when things felt off. And when you came home and realized something was wrong, you acted. Fast. You broke down the door. You called 911. You stayed with him. That is not ‘missing it.’ That is responding.”
I want to fling that back at him. Tell him how useless “responding” feels when you’re kneeling in blood and unswallowed pills. But the image of Caleb’s chest rising, shallow but steady, flashes in my brain.
“Bare minimum,” I mutter. “I did the bare minimum.”
“The bare minimum would’ve been nothing,” Luis says. “The bare minimum would’ve been shrugging off the locked door, assuming he was sleeping, and watching TV until it was too late. That’s not what you did.”
My stomach turns.
“Don’t,” I say hoarsely. “Don’t put THAT picture in my head.”
“I’m not,” he says. “Your brain is. Trust me, it had it loaded already. I’m just naming it so it doesn’t run the show in the dark.”
My palm runs over my stubble and my skin feels too tight. “It still feels like I fucked up,” I say. “We had the safety plan. We had the ‘tell someone when it’s an eight.’ We had the net. And he still got that far. He still had time to—” My hand twitches, remembering the little line across his wrist. “What’s the point of all this if the net has that big of a hole in it?”
“The point,” Luis says quietly, “is that the net caught him before he hit the ground.”
I bark out a laugh. “Yeah, I saw his bandage, alright? He hit something.”
“He hit,” Luis agrees. “He did damage. To himself. To you. To everyone who loves him. I’m not minimizing that. But he is alive. That’s the difference between ‘the net failed completely’ and ‘the net strained under a storm it wasn’t fully built for.’”
I roll my eyes. “Love a good metaphor hurricane.”
“You picked me,” he says. “You knew what you were getting.”
I stare at him, and the anger in my chest has teeth. “I am so fucking mad,” I confess, the words bursting out. “At him. At his mom’s ex. At the system. At his dad. At myself. At you, a little bit. At Dr. K. At fucking anybody who has ever told me, ‘You’re not the only line,’ because when it came down to it, it was still me on that floor with his blood on my hands.”
Luis nods slowly. “There it is.”
“There what is?” I snap.
“The part we need to talk to,” he says. “The one that says, ‘If he lives or dies, it’s on me. My watch. My failure. My job.’”
“If I hadn’t come home when I did?—”
“Ifthe paramedics had gotten caught in traffic,” he counters. “Ifthe doctor had been at the end of a double shift.Ifthe nurse had missed something in the labs. There were a dozen variables between ‘attempt’ and ‘outcome.’ You are one of them. An important one. Not the only one.”
My jaw clenches. “Feels like a cop-out.”
“It feels like not being God,” he says simply.
I stare at the soccer scarf on the spare chair because looking at him hurts. “What if I can’t do this?” I ask, barely above a whisper. “What if I can’t watch him go that close to the edge again? What if the net holds this time but not next time? Or thetime after that? What if this is our life forever, me waiting for him to go quiet, him trying not to, and both of us burning out?”
