He chuckled. “I popped a lung for you. You owe me some KP duty.”
A laughing sob burst from my mouth, but then I was crying in earnest. My head fell to the side of his mattress, and I bawled into his stiff white blankets. “I don’t know how to go on now. Everyone’s dead.”
Another long silence followed until his soft, “I’m not,” fluttered over my ears.
I peeked up at his solemn gaze.
“I know it’s not the same,” he added. “But you got me for life.”
Managing a small smile, I moved to the edge of the bed and gave him a delicate hug, afraid to put any pressure on his shattered chest. “And you have me. We survived the trenches, didn’t we?”
“Maybe the war will end someday and we can go home.”
“Seems impossible,” I muttered as I returned to my chair.
“Canada just won a world war, Sophia. Anything is possible.” He punctuated this with a wink, and a genuine laugh bubbled in my chest.
Before I could explore it, the door to his room opened, and a nurse stepped in. “Time for meds.”
I stood. “I’ll go back to my room. Do you know when they’re going to let you out of here?”
Adam shrugged, but something bleak passed through his eyes. “Come back sometime, will you? It gets boring in here.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
I losttrack of the time, but each day, I visited Adam, and my hands hurt less and less. I stared listlessly while the doctors explained my prognosis. My hands would heal over the next few weeks so long as I kept my activity light. My lungs had improved vastly, and eventually, the doctors saw no reason I needed to remain inpatient.
I’d fare better at the refugee base, they said, where I could heal with my own people.
People who understood.
But no one understood this crippling desire to never wake up. How often had I imagined death? It was almost like a fantasy, a recurring dream I wished to slip into.
Unsure how many sunsets had passed since I first woke in this hospital, I finally signed an X on my discharge paperwork. I dressed in donated clothes, and in a daze, I rose from my bed and settled into the wheelchair they brought. They gave me a plastic bag of my effects, and I gazed dully down at my bloody dog tags, Lucas’s gold ring, and the note I always kept in my bra.
Grief is like snow…
I was surrounded by snow. Buried in it. I would never climb out from beneath it.
Still, I replaced the ring and stuffed the note against my heart where it belonged.
Inside the building, everything was quiet. The nurses smiled as I rolled past. The security guard at the front entrance waved a friendly goodbye.
Outside the hospital, my mouth slackened at the screaming crowd held back by steel barricades. They went wild when they laid eyes on me. Signs waved above them, and for a terrifyingmoment, I thought they were protesting the refugee presence at the hospital. We were foreigners using their resources, after all. Unwanted immigrants. Useless dependents.
But then three familiar words caught my eye, painted in red over a white background.
Until I die.
“What is this?” I asked the nurse transporting me.
He locked my chair before a black, nondescript vehicle. “NAO protesters. They support you, Miss Sophia.”
My gaze darted over some of the other signs.
They chose love. You chose war.
We ship peace.
