All Our Yesterdays (14 page)

“They numbed it up before the stitches. How does it look?”

They cut the hair away from the wound, leaving him a bald patch above his ear. “Ridiculous,” I say, all of the residual fear pumping through my veins turning into a totally inappropriate urge to laugh. He’s still here, still safe. And only slightly less gorgeous with a divot of hair cut out of his head.

The doctor hangs up the phone. “You can see the congressman now.”

Ten

Marina

My momentary relief disappears. Luz says she has to go home and check on her grandkids before heading to work, so she hugs me tight, and then Finn and I follow James and Vivianne to Nate’s room in the ICU. All I can think about is the way that lamp shattered when James slammed his fist into it when we were kids. I knew from that day on that there was a hairline crack running through him. I’ve only ever seen glimpses of it in the years since, but I’m afraid the sight of Nate might put enough pressure on him that he finally shatters.

One of Nate’s doctors pulls Vivianne aside to talk with her, so it’s just the three of us who enter his hospital room. James stops inside the doorway so abruptly that I bump into him. His shoulders are rigid, and I crane my head to look around him.

Nate is barely recognizable in the bed, he’s so obscured by wires and IVs and bandages. He’s hooked up to a ventilator, the thick tube taped into place, disappearing into his open mouth and down his throat. The machine hisses softly as it pumps air into his lungs and lets it out again, its robotic rhythm creating a syncopated beat with the heart monitor beside it. Nate is bare to the waist, his chest covered in bandages. What little skin shows through is stained with either disinfectant or blood. His face is a chalky gray color, except for his eyelids, which are such a dark purple that they look bruised. He’s like a battered and discarded shell, no spark of animation to show that anything of Nate is still inside there.

He looks dead.

He looks, somehow,
worse
than dead.

The nurse who led us here goes right to his side and checks one of his IV bags and then looks back at us, clustered in the doorway. “It’s okay. You can touch him if you want.”

I take James’s hand and squeeze it. Neither of us moves. I don’t want this image of Nate in my mind; if he dies, I don’t want to remember him this way. I wish I’d never followed James here.

Finn is the one who steps forward. He leaves us cowering in the door like children, sits in one of the chairs at Nate’s bedside, and takes his hand gently.

“Hi, Congressman,” he says. “It’s Finn. James and Marina are with me.”

“Can he hear him?” James asks the nurse.

“No harm in trying, right?” Finn interjects. “The doctors fixed you up nice, Congressman. You’ll be kicking my ass at basketball again in no time, sir.”

James takes a small step forward, and then another. Eventually he makes his way to the second chair by Nate’s bed. I watch from the doorway, hating myself for the way my feet are cemented to the floor. Finn didn’t even want to come here. He would have left James to deal with this on his own, because he hates hospitals, but now he seems . . . he seems . . .

I realize with a shock that Finn has done this before.

“James is looking pretty rough,” he continues. “I think he could use his brother right now, so you’ve got to hang on, okay, Congressman?”

I pray for Nate’s eyes to open. I can imagine exactly how it will go. His eyelids will flutter. We’ll gasp, and the nurse will whisper that it’s a miracle. Nate will turn to Finn, and in a quiet, raspy voice he’ll say, “I told you to call me Nate.” And we’ll all know everything will be okay.

But he doesn’t. Aside from his chest rising and falling in time with the hiss of the ventilator, he’s still.

“Don’t worry, though,” Finn continues. “We’re taking care of him. Marina hasn’t let him out of her sight. She’s like a very protective, terrifying little dog.”

James reaches forward and slowly takes his brother’s hand.

Finn gets up and takes my arm. “Let’s go.”

For once I don’t argue, and I leave James alone with his brother.

Finn and I sit in the hallway to wait while Vivianne joins James inside. I pull out my phone and check the text messages I’ve been ignoring. I’m up to forty-three now.

Tamsin:
OMG are you okay?

Tamsin:
What’s happening? Are u w/ James?

Sophie:
I just heard! Text me back and let me know how you are, k, bb?

202-555-9054: Hi Marina, it’s Alex Trevino from your bio class. I heard you were there tonight, what happened?

Tamsin:
MARINA! TEXT ME BACK, I’M GOING CRAZY HERE!!1!

Sophie:
Watching the news. This is the biggest thing ever, and you’re actually there! What’s going on??

I turn my phone back off.

Now that I’m off my feet, exhaustion crashes over me. I didn’t realize how tired I was until this moment. I lean my head back against the wall, and soon I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. I let them fall shut, telling myself I’ll just rest for a minute.

“Marina.” A hand touches my knee. “Marina, hey.”

I drag my gritty eyes open and lift my head from Finn’s shoulder. God, I fell asleep on him.

“Sorry,” I murmur.

“Don’t worry about it.” He nods toward Nate’s room, where James and Vivianne are standing in the doorway speaking with one of the doctors. “While you were out, Viv asked me if we could try to get James to leave for a little while. She’s worried he’s going to make himself sick.”

I look at James, who’s wearing my father’s rumpled clothes from Luz’s bag and stitches in his head. “He’ll never go.”

“He might if we both ask him to,” Finn says. “He’s got to get some sleep, or . . .”

The hairline crack. Maybe Vivianne and Finn see it, too.

“Okay,” I say. “Worth a shot.”

We stand and meet James and Vivianne in the middle of the hallway. His eyes are red, but I can’t tell if it’s from crying or being awake for almost twenty-four hours. He looks ready to drop.

“The doctor says we should leave him alone for a while,” he says. “His immune system is depressed because of the trauma, and they don’t want him catching anything while he’s still in critical condition.”

“In that case, I think you should go home and get some sleep,” I say.

“Yeah, man,” Finn says. “You can’t stay here.”

James shakes his head, but Vivianne doesn’t let him start. “I think they’re right, sweetheart. I’ll stay right here, and I’ll call you if anything changes.”

James’s eyes darken as he realizes we’re ganging up on him. “I can’t leave you alone here, Viv.”

“I won’t be alone long,” she says. “Alice should be here any minute.”

James grimaces. His cousin Alice is probably the most overbearing woman I’ve ever met—and I live with my mother—and she has a particular fondness for interrogating James.

“Better run while you still can,” Vivianne says.

“We’ll come back in a few hours,” Finn says, “once you’ve gotten some sleep and a shower.”

“Please, James,” I add.

James leans against the wall, letting it take his weight. “You two
agree
on this?”

“I know, it’s weird,” Finn says. “I feel dirty.”

James sighs. “Fine. But just for a couple of hours.”

Finn goes to the waiting room to collect our things, and James and Vivianne go back into Nate’s room so he can say good-bye. I hover in the hallway, waiting.

“Excuse me, miss?” one of the nurses at the station says.

I turn. “Yes?”

“We found this in the waiting room,” she says, extending a yellow legal pad toward me. “I think it’s your friend’s?”

I take the pad; it’s the one James was scribbling on with such intensity for hours. There are half a dozen pages littered with mathematical formulas and notes. There’s only one bit that makes any sense to me at all. At the top, he’s scribbled,
Is this what’s been missing?
Whatever these symbols mean, they’re important. I rip the sheets from the pad and put them in my pocket, thanking the nurse, and imagine the hug James will give me when he remembers they’re gone and finds out I saved them for him.

Eleven

Em

Finn and I split up when we head back to the hospital. He joins the candlelight vigil and swarm of press at the front entrance, and I make my way around to the back. I stand across the street from the parking lot and keep an eye on the ambulance bay. The area is being kept clear of press and mourners so that emergency vehicles can still move through, so my view is relatively clear, but I’m far enough away that I shouldn’t attract any unwanted attention.

A couple of reporters are back here, doing stand-ups about the second shooting, but most are in the prime real estate in front, where Finn is. I pretend to watch them as I keep an eye on the back of the hospital. It’s important that we keep track of where our younger selves are, because things are different now. Once I took that shot at James, I changed the future, so I now no longer know what Marina is going to do or where she’s going to go. My old memories are useless.

In the pocket of the hoodie I borrowed from Connor is a protein bar and one of the prepaid cell phones Finn and I bought as soon as we arrived in D.C. Finn has the rest of our supplies in his backpack: the gun and extra ammunition, some food and a couple of spare T-shirts. I hope we won’t need the clothes or the food; I hope we won’t be here that long.

I watch the glass doors at the back of the hospital slide open and shut from across the street and rip into the protein bar. I’m not hungry, but I’ve got to do something with my hands. I thought watching James slowly become hard and merciless was the worst thing I’d ever experience, but I was wrong. This is worse. Maybe I was naive to think I could do this. Somehow I’m
still
finding ways in which I’m just a child.

Looking at his face, remembering the boy he’d been and how much I’d loved him, had instantly turned me back into that sixteen-year-old who thought the sun rose and set with James Shaw. I miss that girl, and that boy. I’ve missed them for years, even if I haven’t been able to admit it. And now I have to end one’s life and devastate the other.

It’s unbearable.

The phone in my pocket buzzes, and I jump. I fish it out and press the button with unsteady fingers. “They leaving?”

“No,” Finn says on the other end. “Just wanted to say hi.”

I smile. “You checking up on me?”

“Please, like I care. I’m just bored.”

“I’m fine, okay?”

“Well, that makes one of us.”

The ambulance bay doors slide open, and a guy in a suit with “dignitary protection” written all over him steps out. I edge behind one of the news vans as I watch him walk to the car—a black, unmarked Crown Victoria—and pull it up to the side of the hospital, right in front of an emergency exit.

“I think they’re coming out,” I whisper.

The emergency exit opens, and someone whose face is covered with a coat dashes out, flanked by a uniformed officer and another agent, and slips into the back of the car. Even without seeing his face, I know it’s James. The two television crews still back here must think so, too, because they start rolling.

“I’m on my way,” Finn says in my ear as I watch the other Finn—God, he looks so young—climb into the car after James. “What are they doing?”

“Getting into a car with a couple of agents.”

He swears.

“Finn, if they’re taking him into protective custody, we’ll never—”

“I know.” I can hear the exertion in his breath as he runs toward me. “I’m coming.”

Marina comes out next. That is,
I
come out next. It’s my first glimpse of my old self, and my heart constricts in pure longing for the girl I was. She’s catty and shallow, but only because she hasn’t learned how to like herself. How can she not see how beautiful she is, how special? All she sees is James, bending toward him like a flower to the sun.

“Come on, Finn!” I say.

He comes racing around the corner of the hospital as the Crown Vic begins to roll out of the opposite end of the parking lot.

“Hurry! They’re going to get away!”

Finn runs past me. “Keep an eye on where they go,” he says into the phone. “I’m going over a couple of blocks.”

I watch the car take a right out of the parking lot and stop at the light on the corner. It takes a left when the light changes, and I follow its every movement until it turns out of my field of vision. I turn and go after Finn, finding him two blocks away from the hospital.

“They’re headed north,” I say when I catch up to him.

He’s weaving among the parked cars by the curb, rubbing the frosted glass to look inside the windows. He finds what he’s looking for with a dusty blue Honda and grabs the gun out of the backpack. He uses the butt to smash in the back window. The tinkle of broken glass sounds impossibly loud to me, but no shouts or sirens follow. “Headed toward Georgetown, then,” he says.