AS THINGS STARTED TO SETTLE down, as Test talked to the people who needed to be talked to, I dream-walked toward the back of the silently flashing ambulance. They’d bandaged my hands when she’d stabilized, when everything in the world felt like it was stabilizing.
Allison, who everyone called Lump because she was clumsy and who was trying to take her name back, was less than ten feet away from me, breathing in air that allowed her brain to fire off magnificent signals to her heart which pumped blood and kept pumping blood and kept her living and being Allison or Lump or whatever name she could ever want.
She was sedated and she was hurting, but she was stabilizing.
She had wandered into the cold and found her deer, and when she couldn’t find her way home, I’d found her.
Fuck anyone who said otherwise.
Fuck the people who’d insisted that Charlie and I were hateful or lost.
She was alive and I was part of that.
I tried to figure out which song would fit. Which song would start playing in the movie as I walked toward the back of the vehicle.
And of course it was always going to be “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” The EMTs were talking with the police and talking over a clipboard a thousand miles away and I could hear Guns ’n’ Roses’s opening chords ripping into the sky as I reached out with bandaged hands, grabbed the vertical handle next to the ambulance doors, and hoisted myself up.
Lump was somewhere in a fog of semiconsciousness, wrapped up to her shoulders in a big blue blanket. The kind of blanket that all ambulances and hospitals seem to have an infinite number of; the kind of blanket my family was all too familiar with.
She was pale and an entire side of her face was thick with gauze and her hair was slicked back, but goddammit she was alive. The tubes running out of her arm, the beeping machines, they were all proof.
And she turned her head.
And her eye started to clear.
And she saw that it was me.
And her face crumpled. Even through the thick ambulance door, I could hear her crying and struggling against the machinery.
“Lump?” I said stupidly, because at first I thought she was just happy to see me, but the more she struggled and cried the more it became crystal fucking clear that she was a lot of things, none of which were happy.
It was a dawning, rolling anger that bloomed out from every inch of her.
My stomach dropped to my feet as I stood there on the bumper looking at her thrashing and crying, then screaming when the IV tore loose from her arm.
The EMTs didn’t say anything as they pulled me backward off the vehicle, causing me to spin out and land on my ass. In the moment that the doors were opened and the EMTs were clambering in, I heard the nuance in her sobs and it was only six slurred and hard-fought syllables:
“… supposed to be my friend…” over and over and more and more distant as one of the EMTs administered a sedative.
And I thought of the messages I missed. The clues she’d left that I hadn’t figured out. The long, miserable hours she’d spent thinking she was going to die. And I realized she blamed me; I was the friend who wasn’t there when she needed me to be.
Then the door was closed.
And I saw one of them climb into the driver’s seat.
And then they left.