Page 16 of What You Left Me

I press the button.

“Hello,” says a fuzzy voice.

“Hi, I’m here to see Martin McFly…I mean, McGee.”

Bzzzt.The door opens.

Down I fall.

The nurse who buzzed me in sits behind a counter. “He’s straight ahead,” she says.

The walls are beige, not white. The rooms are quiet, not buzzing with doctors screaming indecipherable jargon over one another while defibrillating chests and stitching up gaping wounds. It’s not at all the picture hammered into my brain by TV shows and movies. Maybe that’s what the emergency room is supposed to look like? I’m lucky enough to never have had to know for sure. The ICU exists on its own wavelength altogether. There’s a vague sense of doom permeating the hallways, masked by clean scents and good ventilation.

Martin’s name is posted next to an open door. His parents stand against the inside wall of his room, neglecting chairs that surround a not-yet-visible bed. Bouquets are everywhere space allows.

Tragedy makes people so efficient.

Mama Dorothy is more than I expected. She swims in Martin’s football jersey, shorter and stouter than I calculated. I can smell baked goods and cigarettes on her. His dad’s not the Jim Carrey viaThe MajesticI had predicted though. Not an ounce. He’s very tall and very thin, as if his entire existence is extremities. Very pointed noise. Very sharp jaw. Very kind eyes.

I tiptoe in, my heart beating up into my throat. Mama Dorothy takes one look and pulls me to her chest, not a word of introduction spoken between us. She rubs my back in soothing circles, her head nestled into my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McGee,” I whisper.

She jerks me away from her. “Please. It’s Mama Dorothy.”

I fumble over my words for an apology. She tidies my ponytail and kisses my forehead. I can’t tell if she’s mistaken me for someone else or if this is just her being her. I look to Mr. McGee, and he offers a vague, “Nice to see you.”

I turn to Martin.

It’s a lot to take in. He’s half a person. Literally. The right side of his face is so swollen that it looks fake. I gasp and well up, taken by the gravity of the matter.

Thislooks like television. A daytime soap opera in dimmer lighting.

But it’s real, I remind myself. And familiar, somehow. His battered self makes me think of the dream I had last night. I was at graduation. And he was there, covered in blood and shards of glass.

I shake my head in disbelief.

Nausea hits, a by-product of my speedy and dizzying descent into the life and near-death of Martin McGee.

• • •

Something is off about this dream though. I thought you couldn’t actually,you knowin one. That’s what Katie always says. I guess I didn’t really,you knowearlier. I was in the process ofyou know-ing.

Don’t want to think it because I’m afraid it’s a jinx, but I mean being, uh, not quite alive.

• • •

We stand in silence, looking at Martin. On his good side, I notice his eyelashes are quite long. They rest along his upper cheekbone, fanning out from corner to corner. His eyeballs move beneath the lids. My pulse jumps, and so do I, automatically, like a grasshopper avoiding a footstep. If Martin wakes up, I will be the first person he sees.

Mama Dorothy lets out a sharpha, not meant to be mean but definitely laced with something bitter. “They say it’s normal,” she tells me. “I’ll take it. Means my Marty’s still fighting in there.”

A strange, piercing ache pings in my chest. A part of me, selfishly, unfairly, wanted to be the first face he sees. Maybe to prove to myself that this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. My personal stuff can wait. What’s one more day?

I pinch my arm. I’m thinking this while looking at someone who might die.Die. One more day is a lot.

All throughout graduation, I tried not to let myself glimpse more than his profile. I figured if I knew what he looked like, then everything I had started to feel between us would be real. And I couldn’t do real.

Now, I notice a fresh tan line cutting his neck in half. Must be from the dress shirt under his gown. Little craters of scalp are showing from where a razor pulled in too tight on the sides of his head. It will all even out in a week’s time because he’s a boy, and they are lucky like that. They never seem to wear mistakes for long.

This is so intimate. A privilege not ever granted to near strangers, watching someone sleep, studying the intricate details of their being. I can’t help but fixate on a faint scar above his upper lip. Mama Dorothy and Mr. McGee stay perched along the wall like they don’t want to get too close, but they can’t bear to be too far.