Andy struggled to remain conscious. His left eye had swollen shut and his right could see only blurred images. He touched his cheek and winced as his fingers ran over the flap of hanging skin. An emergency medical technician was talking to him, but it all sounded as if it were coming from underwater. He felt softness beneath him and assumed he was on a stretcher.
Kendall’s face appeared above his and then Luke and Sid were next to him.
“You’re gonna be OK, Andy,” Kendall told him. But Kendall’s words lacked their usual conviction. “Just a nice scar to tell the girls about when…” Kendall’s voice cracked before he could finish.
Louis popped his head out of Sid’s coat and barked. Andy smiled—his attempt to comfort them all. “Sounds like music,” he tried to say, but his words came out blurred and jumbled.
They pushed Andy’s stretcher toward a waiting ambulance.
“You taking him to Riverside?” Kendall asked.
The EMT nodded. “We’ll take good care of him. Promise.”
Andy heard their voices, listened to their concern for him, and felt—maybe for the first time in his life—lucky. Perhaps that love had been there for him all the time and his hardest fight was yet to be, the one with himself, where he would need to accept that he was worthy of that love in real time. Everything that had happened before had brought him here. He was not merely the sum of his memories, but only a child born from them.
Andy tried to sit up on the stretcher and got as far as an elbow. He saw the dogs from the church joined together and running with one intention and in one direction.
He knew where they were going even if no one else did.
And he saw the crowd—the grieving, the curious, the sad, the amused, the angry, the fighters, the fallen, and the long-since beaten—follow them.
“The park,” Andy whispered. Kendall leaned in and Andy grabbed his arm. “Get to the park.”
“OK,” Kendall said, but Andy knew it was only to placate him.
They lifted him into the ambulance.
“I’m going with him,” Luke said, and jumped in.
Andy struggled to get off the stretcher but the EMT and Luke held him down. He needed to make them understand. “Another Mount Moriah…”
Andy could see enough through his one eye to know that Kendall didn’t understand. None of them did.
“We’ve got to get him to the hospital,” the EMT said gravely. “Like now.” Without any further discussion, the EMT climbed into the ambulance and slammed the door closed.
As the ambulance began to move, Andy spoke the first words that came into his wounded head. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad—”