Authors: C. K. Kelly Martin
“What happened?”
I croak. I’m imagining an out of control car, history repeating itself in the
worst way.
“She and Chas
tried to stop a robbery they saw happening near his apartment. The guy stabbed
them both. Chas’s hands got sliced up but she got it worse. She’s still in surgery.
Her parents are on their way.”
I’ve fallen
quiet again and Katie repeats, “I have to go.”
“I’ll see you at
the hospital,” I tell her. “I’ll find you.”
I drop the phone
into its cradle and sprint back to my room, yank my hair into a ponytail and jump
into jeans and a warm top. The trains from Oakville to Toronto start early. I
should be able to make it to the hospital in not much longer than an hour.
It’s pitch black
outside and pouring rain. Thunder claps in the distance as I hurry towards the
train station in the hooded rain jacket that’s keeping me dry from mid-thigh
up. Below that I’m soaked through, and as I settle into my seat on the 5:30
train I shiver from both the creeping wet cold and Katie’s terrifying news.
When she said Yunhee’s condition was serious I was too stunned to ask for more
medical details. Besides, there wasn’t time.
She’ll pull through
, I
chant inside my head.
She’ll make it
.
Katie said it sounded serious
but she never said there was any danger that Yunhee wouldn’t make it.
As the train
hurls along the lakeshore towards Toronto, I curse myself for having canceled
my cell phone service months ago. There’s no way for me to receive additional
information until I reach the hospital.
She’ll make
it.
She’ll pull through
.
At Union Station
I transfer from the GO train to the subway and take it up to Queen’s Park. It’s
6:40 when I stalk into the hospital and follow the signs to the emergency
room—the first place I can think to look for Katie and Vishaya. My eyes scour
the waiting area, which is populated with weary, miserable looking people of
all ages. The floor is wet in spots from sick people and their families and
friends dragging the rain indoors with them, and I notice an old woman knitting
a long burgundy scarf, moving the knitting needles with the precision of a
surgeon and the speed of an athlete.
I wish I could
do something that well and that easily.
I wish I was
dreaming and it was time to wake up.
If I don’t hear
something soon my molars will be ground down to stumps. Then I spot a waving
hand with my peripheral vision. My gaze rockets to the space where Vishaya sits
waving me towards her, Katie and Chas. I zoom over to them, stopping directly
in front of Chas, whose hands are both wrapped in loose bandages, blood
beginning to seep through layers of white. There are streaks of blood on his
jeans and sneakers too, although not necessarily his own blood. I wince at the
thought: Yunhee unconscious somewhere in this building, under a surgeon’s
knife.
“We heard, just
a few minutes ago, that she’s out of surgery,” Katie tells me.
“She’s in the
recovery room,” Chas adds, his face swollen with gloom. If I passed him on the
street I bet wouldn’t recognize him as the guy we ran into in the university
library last fall. “We’re waiting to hear where they’ll move her to.”
“What kind of
injury was it?” I ask quietly. I don’t want to put him through the pain of
reliving what’s happened, but I need a clearer picture of what Yunhee’s going
through.
Chas presses his
eyelashes together like he might not ever open them again. “Abdominal,” he
says. “She lost a lot of blood before the ambulance picked us up.”
Vishaya gets to
her feet, propelling me gently away from Chas and Katie. “I’ll fill her in on
everything and bring back coffee for you guys,” she tells them. As we walk on
she turns to me and says, “He’s pretty emotionally torn up right now. It’s been
a crazy night.”
Vishaya explains
that Yunhee and Chas were coming out of the all-night fruit market near his
apartment at around two-thirty this morning when they saw a guy in his early
twenties pull a knife on an old man. The attacker saw them and froze initially.
Chas shouted at him to leave the old man alone. The attacker charged them,
howling obscenities and swinging his knife. Chas tried to grab for it and had
both his hands slashed in the process. Out of control, the man jabbed his knife
into Yunhee’s abdomen and then lurched away, leaving Chas bending over Yunhee,
who had crumpled to the sidewalk. The old man pulled out his cell phone and
called 911 as he darted over to them.
“The cops have
already been here to get a description from Chas,” Vishaya adds. “The old man
was too freaked out to remember much about the attacker, but Chas got a good
look at him.”
Chas didn’t have
phone numbers for any of Yunhee’s friends or family—just her cell and
landline—so after the ambulance had brought them both to the hospital and the
trauma team had taken over Yunhee’s care, Chas called Yunhee and Vishaya’s
apartment to tell Vishaya what had happened.
“He was talking
so quickly that I couldn’t understand him at first,” Vishaya says. “Then he
started saying he should’ve thought to grab Yunhee’s cell from her jacket
because it’d have everyone’s numbers in it. So I ransacked her bedroom, found
her phone book and called her parents in Ottawa.” Vishaya pales and slows her
pace through the hallway as she recounts, “Her mother started to wail over the
phone. It was a nightmare. Then her father got on the line and told me they
were coming straight away. I told him that I’d go to the hospital so Yunhee
wouldn’t be alone. But the hospital wouldn’t let me see her because they were
sending her for X-rays and then into surgery, so I had time to call Katie, who
said she’d call you too.”
I throw my left
arm around Vishaya as we shuffle towards the hospital’s Tim Hortons outlet for
coffee. In the past Vishaya and I have tolerated each other but never really
been fond of one another. She always seemed like the kind of person who
believed that there was only one right way to do something and that her 98.5%
high school average (and equally high University of Toronto grades) proved that
she was an expert on that single correct method. But now I can feel tension
carving into her, creating cracks where perfection has no place. We’re both so
scared for Yunhee that nothing else matters.
“Is Chas okay?”
I ask. “His hands looked—”
“They haven’t
examined him yet,” Vishaya says. “There’ve been lots of people coming in on
stretchers. I think one of them was a heart attack.”
We buy four
coffees and take them back to the ER waiting area, where a teenage boy with
bloodshot eyes now sits beside Katie in the space formerly occupied by Chas.
“He just got called in by the nurse,” Katie explains as Vishaya hands her a
coffee.
“That’s good,” I
say as Vishaya and I slip into seats across the aisle. “Has he gotten in touch
with his parents or what?”
“They’re in
Calgary,” Vishaya offers. “I asked him if he was going to call a friend to pick
him up and he said he’s not going anywhere until he hears that Yunhee’s okay.”
Once again
there’s nothing to do but wait. The three of us drink our coffees in silence as
the minutes drag on and more weary people fill up the seats around us. I think,
as we wait, about how if Yunhee were sitting here in the waiting area with us
her feet, once her shoes were dry, would be up on the chair with her, and I
think about Chas winning arguments he shouldn’t but making her laugh and making
her think.
It’s nearly an
hour before we see Chas again and the first thing he says as he pads towards us
with freshly bandages hands is, “One of the nurses told me she’s still in
recovery. Doesn’t that seem like a long time?”
None of us know
what’s normal in the circumstances; we don’t know what to tell him. “I’m going
to check again,” Chas declares, his eyes frantic. He stumbles back towards the
ER clerk at the counter and in a split second I’m up and following him.
“Yunhee Kang,
the girl I came in with,” he says urgently to the clerk, “they keep telling me
she’s still in recovery, but it’s been hours.”
The clerk
assures him that Yunhee is still under observation in the recovery room
following surgery and Chas begins to dissolve before my eyes. “But it’s too
long,” he insists. “What does it mean that it’s been so long? How come no one’s
coming to talk to us?”
In the
background a child’s alternately sobbing and erupting into hiccups and the
clerk patiently promises that someone will update us once Yunhee’s out of
recovery. Chas’s brown eyes have begun to swim and I lay my hand gently against
his back and say, “Let’s sit down, okay? They don’t know anything yet.” I’ve
begun to grind my teeth again and if Chas, Katie and Vishaya weren’t here with
me I’d be climbing the walls already.
Only now that
Chas is coming apart, I know that I can’t. If I’m going to crumble, it will
have to be some other time. I buy him a fresh coffee to replace the one we had
to dump while he was having his palms stitched and Chas tells us, as he hunches
over his coffee, that what happened to Yunhee is his fault. “I should never
have challenged him,” he says. “You could tell right away he was tweaking or
something. He couldn’t stand still. And I just didn’t think about what could
happen.”
“You didn’t
know,” I counter, trying to console him. “You were only trying to help.”
Chas flinches,
his eyes trained on his coffee cup. “That’s precisely the point, I didn’t
know
.
It’s one thing for me to choose to take a risk, but I made that choice for both
of us.”
Vishaya’s cell
phone rings before anyone has time to protest further. “It’s Yunhee’s mother,”
she announces as she raises the phone to her ear. Chas, Katie and I listen to
Vishaya pass on what little information we’ve gained since she last spoke to
Yunhee’s parents hours ago. It sounds like they’re almost here and once Vishaya
hangs up she confirms that. “They just turned onto Yonge Street—they’ll be at
the hospital any minute now.”
Though it hardly
seems possible, news of their imminent arrival makes the crisis feel more
acute. The limbo the four of us have been in for hours will end shortly. I’m
terrified of what the change will bring. Only two days ago Yunhee and I were
drinking tea together and joking about her maturity level. I wish I’d told her
about Liam now. Any remaining guilt I was carrying with me about the act has
drained down to a lone gritty drop while I’ve been sitting in the ER. The
confession would have been something to share; Yunhee would have enjoyed it.
I’ve felt so old
since January but the fragility I feel now has nothing to do with age. I’m so
scared of losing her that the fear’s like a physical entity, a malicious shadow
thing wrapped around my limbs and my neck, twisting at my organs. A crippling
version of that fear’s been with me since January, but this particular fear is
fresh. It reminds me that I still have things to lose.
One accident
doesn’t prevent another. Bastien’s death doesn’t offer me some kind of immunity
from other pain.
She’ll make
it.
She’ll pull through
. I can’t let myself believe otherwise.
Minutes later
Mr. and Mrs. Kang and Sumi appear in the ER waiting area, dazed yet zeroing in
on us quickly. Of the four of us, Chas is the only one Yunhee’s parents have
never met, and I listen to Vishaya explain that he was the one who was with her
when the stabbing happened. Mr. Kang glances numbly down at Chas’s bandaged
hands before declaring that he needs to find his daughter. We wait as Yunhee’s
parents approach the ER clerk.
The exchange is
swift and their faces, as they turn to walk away from her, reveal something has
changed. Mr. Kang consults with Sumi, who scurries over to us: “They just moved
her to the ICU. We’re going up now. It’s family only.”
Chas, Katie,
Vishaya and I stare in stunned silence. Vishaya regains her voice first. “Your
parents have my number. Will you call me if anything changes?”
Sumi nods. She
looks much more grown up than the last time I saw her, over a year ago.
“We’ll wait here
awhile,” Chas says, a veneer of composure stretched thinly over his distress.
“We’ll wait.”
Sumi follows her
parents away. I’m shivering again, hooking my arms around my waist and
forgetting to breathe.
The same child
from before—or maybe it’s a different one—has resumed sobbing, but none of us
break our silence to say what we’re thinking: that ICU is a hair’s breadth away
from the worst case scenario.
I retreat inside
myself, barely noticing the others until Chas rises and starts staggering in
the opposite direction that Yunhee’s family disappeared in. His face is in one
of his bandaged hands and Vishaya, who knows him better than Katie or I do,
mumbles, “I’ll go after him. Stay here.”
Our
shoulders—Katie’s left and my right—automatically knit together as we wait. I
don’t know if Chas and Vishaya are gone for ten minutes or an hour; the
difference between the two no longer registers. The only thing that counts is
what happens to Yunhee next.
Katie and I
remain motionless and mum in our seats. I send a silent wish out to the
universe, over and over and over again as we wait:
Please, let her live.
And then I pray to Bastien, asking him, should he happen to see Yunhee on the
other side, to send her back to us.
There should be
something else I can do, but there’s not. There’s only the endless waiting and
when Vishaya and Chas return, wearing identical expressions of exhaustion, it’s
as though they never left.
Later we take
turns going to the cafeteria for food, always careful to leave at least one
person behind in the ER because that’s where we told Sumi we’d be. The knitting
woman disappeared long ago but a child still wails periodically. The ER’s
atmosphere itself never changes and I’m starting to believe that it never will,
that the waiting won’t ever cease, when Sumi materializes in front of us.