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Harborview Medical Center, 1997
I finished talking. The only sound in the hospital were the muted beeps of machines measuring heartbeats and blood pressure and who knew what else. I couldn’t look at Olivia. I had unconsciously wrapped my arms around myself tightly, afraid if I let go, my body would melt into a puddle on the hospital room floor.
From somewhere deep inside me, grief rose like a tidal wave about to destroy everything in its path. It flooded my chest, washed over my heart in its watery grip, and squeezed. Part of it continued upward. Before I could stop it, water gushed out my eyes and nose, dripping down my face in a frightful mess. My body heaved and from far away, I could hear a weird sound, like a man sobbing as if the end of the world had come.
Then arms wrapped around me, enfolding me. The sobs came from me, and the arms belonged to Olivia. I buried my head in her soft neck, and my tears washed over both of us as my body convulsed. She held me together so I wouldn’t disintegrate.
Time became irrelevant, just as it had on that night when I sat with my dead fiancée and best friend, having just escaped months in a vile prison only to have the only people who mattered to me destroyed. And the guilt. My God, the guilt at not being side by side with Nik and Anya when they tripped the land mine. It burned me from the inside as if I’d swallowed acid. For years it had eaten away at me, gutted me.
At some point, Olivia must have dragged me into her bed. Exhaustion must had taken over both of us because the next time I was conscious, she still held me wrapped in her arms, lying in her small hospital bed. It must have been the wee hours of morning as only silence marred by those eternal beeping machines that monitored patients to make sure they still lived.
Were we alive, Olivia and me? Two shells of human beings in a tiny hospital bed, although I still didn’t even know the nature of her illness, except it must have something to do with her brain because a neurologist was involved, and her brain must have something to do with her legs.
As for me, I hadn’t cried for my lost love, Anya, except for a few tears of anguish on the night she was killed by the impersonal, cruel land mine that some soldier had planted like a deadly flower by the side of the road. Now that I had cried, exhaustion weighed me down like chains pulling me to the bottom of a brutal and restless lake. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to unconsciousness again.
