Breathless (11 page)

One afternoon, Darla comes to the cafeteria looking for Emily and me. Her skin is ashen.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“I think he’s in pain,” she says. “His body keeps jerking and they tied down his arms so he won’t pull out any of the tubes.”

My best friend, tied to a bed.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” I ask Emily.

Days later, Emily tells us. “His doctors want to cut off his other leg to help his circulation. And they want to sew his eyelids shut because he can’t blink on his own and his corneas are drying out.”

His doctors never get to follow through with their plans, though, because the next night, the twenty-fifth of June, Travis’s heart stops beating and he can’t be revived.

M
y brother dies in the early morning, when the world is at its darkest, when no one’s around him except IVs, tubes, and machines. Mom is beside herself because she wasn’t at Travis’s side. Dad tries to console her. “Jackie, we couldn’t be there twenty-four seven and still function. We did all we could do.”

I cry, but I can’t say I’m sorry, because I know how he felt about his life.

We bury Travis in the town’s oldest cemetery on a hot June afternoon in a private ceremony. The high school holds a memorial service for him in the football stadium, and half the town shows up. The aquatics team wears black armbands.

Darla comes with her mother and kid sister
but not her father. Cooper shows up with his mother. She looks small and neat in a skirt and blouse, with her black hair pulled back in a bun and fastened with ornamental ivory sticks at her neck. She hugs my mother and father and me. If she remembers me from that night in the spring, she doesn’t show it. We all sit together and listen to people say inspiring things about my brother. And we cry.

Days later, Cooper and Darla and I meet at the lake for our own private memorial service. I drive Travis’s car. He gave me the keys for my birthday. “Now you won’t have to sneak it,” he said.

The lake air smells like summer, like coconut sunscreen and Alabama earth and mown grass. Boats zip past far out in the water, their motors sounding like droning bees. I think of other summers when we came, just the four of us, for swimming, and island picnics, and waterskiing. Now we are three.

We hold hands at the shoreline, tell stories of our best memories of my brother, watch kids dive off the floating wooden platform. The ache inside me throbs. I miss my brother. I wish he could have gotten well—it happens for lots of people who get
cancer, just not for Travis. When we’re through, we stand shoulder to shoulder, awkward and silent, missing the glue of my brother’s life that held us together.

I ask, “So what are everyone’s plans?”

“The army,” Cooper says. “I’m headed to boot camp in a week.”

My knees go weak. He’s leaving.

He turns to Darla. “How about you?”

“Birmingham,” Darla says. “I’m going to live with my sister and her little boy. She had a boyfriend, but he moved out.” She motions toward her car. “I’m packed and loaded. No reason to stay here now. I’m going to get a job, maybe help out in a community theater. I’ve always wanted to be an actress.”

Knowing she’s leaving for good tugs on my heart. I regret ever thinking she was fluffy like a marshmallow. She stayed with my brother through it all, and I should have tried harder to be her friend. “I’ll miss you,” I say.

She looks doubtful, but the look passes and she hugs me. “Take care of yourself.” She hugs Cooper too, then turns and goes to her car and drives off.

“What about you?” Cooper asks. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going on a mission trip with my youth group. We’re building a church in Mexico. In a village that doesn’t have one.”

He grins. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised … although I’ll never get how you can believe in someone you can’t see or touch.”

I look up at Cooper, at the hard planes of his face and his dark eyes. “That’s why it’s called faith.”

He lifts my chin and my heart races. For a second I think he’ll bend down and kiss me. Instead he brushes my hair off my shoulder and takes a step back, and the moment is gone. “Have a good life, Emily Morrison.”

“Will you write to me?” I ask, not wanting to lose him.

“Maybe.”

I watch him walk to his car, and I’m filled with emotions I can’t name or number. So many changes to my life. So much I want. So much I long for. He drives away while I stand on the edge of the lake alone, only me and memories and the sun and the sky and the blue, blue water.

I slip into the hospital wearing scrubs and a lab coat I lifted from a laundry bin days before. I look like I belong on staff, maybe a lab tech. Travis’s room is dimly lit, and the only sounds are the hiss of the ventilator and the beep of his heart monitor. The nurses’ station isn’t far down the hall, so I move quietly.

I stand beside his bed, staring at him, and tie on a surgical mask. He doesn’t know I’m here, but if he saw me, he’d know me by my eyes. And he’ll know why I’m here.

I reach into the pocket of the lab coat. Once I’d decided I had to do it, I managed to swipe two syringes with insulin. No one saw when I took them. I’d watched so I knew when it was possible,
so no nurse would know. It wasn’t easy, but I was determined. I have to work fast, because the machines’ alarms will sound and nurses will come running once his heart stops. Travis is so sick; he’s had a stroke, he’s living on borrowed time. No one will question his death.

This is what he wants. He told us. There is no doubt in my mind. I take a deep breath. “Goodbye,” I whisper.

Then, before I lose my nerve, I stick one syringe into an IV line inserted in his arm and push the plunger. I follow it with the second, the insurance syringe.

I drop the empties back into the lab coat pocket and ease from the room, hugging to the wall like a shadow. I move quickly toward the side exit door and my escape. I hear the noise of a machine before the inside door clicks shut behind me.

I run down the stairwell, ripping off the lab coat as I go. I wad it up and stuff it under my arm. I leave the hospital and walk briskly into the night.

Travis is free from his tortured body. I have given him what he would have given himself if he could have. No one will ever know what I’ve done,
because his death was expected. No one would ever guess I was the one who did it, and I’ll never say a word to the others even though we had a pact to do it together. My silence forever is the only answer.

I know what I did and why I did it. Am I a killer, or a deliverer? I believe I am an Angel of Mercy.

Who’s my judge?