Chapter 33: Fading Pulse
The world narrowed to the shuddering metal box of the ambulance. The siren was a physical thing, a pulsing wall of sound that vibrated in Ethan’s teeth. He sat on a jump seat, his body braced against the lurch of the vehicle, his hand clasped around Mia’s. Her skin was cold.
A paramedic with tired eyes and a calm voice—Leo, his badge said—worked over her, his movements efficient and sure. He’d cut away the sleeve of her cloud-patterned pajama top to start an IV. The sight of her bare arm, so familiar and now part of this foreign medical landscape, made Ethan look away. He stared at their joined hands instead.
Her fingers were limp. Nails painted a chipped sky blue. A smudge of green pastel on the knuckle of her thumb, left over from a drawing session days ago. He rubbed his thumb over it, a stupid, gentle stroke, as if he could wipe the worry away.
“BP’s holding, but it’s low,” Leo said to his partner, a younger woman named Anya who was adjusting the flow of the clear IV bag. “GCS is fluctuating. We need to get that CT.”
The words were cold, clinical stones dropped into the chaos of Ethan’s mind. He didn’t know what GCS was, but ‘fluctuating’ and ‘low’ painted a picture dark enough.
An oxygen mask covered the lower half of Mia’s face, obscuring the blood on her lips. The plastic fogged with each shallow breath. The bruise on her cheek was a sickening palette of violet and black, swelling her eye shut. They’d put a stiff collar around her neck. She looked captured. Contained.
“What happened?” Leo asked Ethan, not looking up from the monitor. “You find her like that?”
Ethan’s throat was sandpaper. “Yeah. In the lot. Her groceries were everywhere. The apples…” He trailed off, the image of the crushed fruit vivid and senseless. “She said something about the apples. Before she… faded out.”
“That’s common. The brain tries to latch onto the last normal thing it was doing.” Leo shone a penlight into Mia’s one open eye. The pupil contracted slowly. “Did she say anything else? Did you see anyone?”
“No. No one.” The guilt was a live wire in his chest. He should have gone with her. He should have insisted. He’d been sitting on his couch, thinking about ice cream, while she was on the ground. “I called her. She didn’t answer. I just knew.”
“Good thing you did,” Anya said softly.
The ambulance took a sharp turn, and Ethan’s shoulder slammed into the cabinet behind him. Mia’s body shifted slightly on the gurney. And then, against his palm, he felt it.
A twitch.
Not a spasm. A deliberate, faint pressure. The barest curl of her index finger against his own.
He gasped, leaning forward. “Mia?”
Her eyelid—the one that wasn’t swollen shut—fluttered. A soft, ragged breath sighed into the oxygen mask.
Leo watched the monitor, his face impassive. “She’s in and out. Talk to her. It can help.”
Ethan brought his mouth close to her ear, below the stiff collar. The siren wailed, but he made his voice a solid thing beneath it. “Hey. It’s me. You’re in an ambulance. They’re taking care of you.” He swallowed hard. “I’ve got your hand. I’m not letting go.”
Another squeeze. Weak, but undeniable. A tear broke free and traced a hot path down his cheek, landing on the sterile white sheet beside her arm.
“I’m right here, baby,” he whispered, the endearment slipping out, rusty and true, a secret he’d held for years now given to the hum and sway of this desperate ride. He said it again, firmer. “I’m right here.”
For a few blocks, that was the rhythm. The siren’s scream, the radio’s crackle, the beep of the heart monitor, and Ethan’s low, steady voice in the spaces between. He talked about her stupid, complicated coffee order. He described the tragic state of the triple chocolate fudge brownie ice cream melting into the pavement. He reminded her of the time in tenth grade when she’d tried to dye her hair purple and it had turned a grim, slate gray.
He didn’t know if she heard him. But her finger stayed hooked around his, a frail tether.
The ambulance slowed, the siren dying in a descending moan. The back doors flew open, revealing the stark, over-bright bay of the emergency room. The air changed, from diesel and antiseptic to the colder, bleach-heavy smell of institutional efficiency.
A new team was there, a blur of blue scrubs and directed energy. Words flew over his head. “Possible basilar skull fracture… decreased LOC… get her to imaging, stat.”
They were moving the gurney, disconnecting it from the ambulance’s anchors. Leo gave a terse report to a nurse. The transfer was seamless, brutal in its speed.
Ethan had to let go of her hand to get out of the way. His hand felt suddenly cold, empty, wrong.
He stumbled out onto the pavement, the night air a shock after the closed compartment. He watched as they wheeled her away, the wheels rattling on the linoleum, through double electric doors that sighed open and swallowed her whole.
For a moment, he stood alone in the bay, the flashing lights of the departed ambulance painting him in pulses of red and blue.
Then a harried-looking nurse with a tablet touched his arm. “Sir? Are you family?”
The question hung in the air. He wasn’t. He was just the friend. The one who found her. The one who loved her in a way words had never seemed big enough to hold.
“She doesn’t have any here,” he said, his voice rough. “It’s just me. I’m her boyfriend though, if that makes a difference.”
The nurse’s eyes softened. “Okay. You can wait in there. A doctor will come find you as soon as they know something.”
She pointed to a set of doors marked ‘Waiting Room.’ It was a bland, beige space with rows of uncomfortable chairs, a television playing a muted news channel, and the ghosts of a thousand other people’s worst nights clinging to the walls.
He walked in. The doors swung shut behind him, muting the sounds of the ER. The silence was worse. He sank into a chair by the window, staring at his own faint reflection in the dark glass, at the blood—her blood—now a dry, rust-colored smear across the back of his hand. He didn’t wipe it off. It was the only part of her he had left to hold.