“Room number?” he asked.
“Room forty-three,” I told him. He lazily punched some stuff into the computer.
I stood there for fifteen minutes as the guy moved through the required motions with the speed of a snail. I tried to control the urge to reach across the counter and do it myself. Jesus! How long does it take to get a new room key? My skin was crawling with the urge to get back to Clay.
“Here. You need another one; it’ll cost ya twenty-five dollars,” the guy said, already dismissing me as he turned back to the small, fuzzy-screened TV behind him.
I grabbed the key card and took off back toward our room. I had already been away too long. I quickly put the key in the door and pushed. It took all my strength because something was blocking the door from the other side.
After four or five good shoves, I got through the door and I gasped in horror. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Clay had pulled over the television set and the screen had shattered all over the floor. He had pushed the mattress off the bed and ripped and shredded almost all of our clothing.
The item that had been blocking the door was the ancient-looking armchair. Clay had broken one of the wooden legs and it lay on its side. How could one person do so much damage?
“Clay?” I called out, praying for an answer. But of course there was none.
The bathroom door was closed but I could see light filtering out around the edges. My stomach felt heavy with dread. The icy fingers of fear spread through my entire body. I turned the handle of the bathroom door, slowly opening it.
And then I screamed.
Clay had broken the mirror, and glass lay all over the sink and floor. But what made me scream was the sight of Clay curled on his side in a fetal position on the grubby tile floor, a slowly expanding pool of blood blossoming out around his prostrate body.
I hurried to his side, slipping in his blood and falling hard to my knees. I rolled him onto his back. His eyes were open but glassy and unfocused. His skin was ashen and I had to swallow the vomit rising up in my throat as I took in the sight of his wrists.
He had used glass from the shattered mirror and slashed deep into the skin above each palm in a vertical line, almost all the way up to his elbow. Blood flowed from the injuries at a rate that terrified me.
“No, Clay! No, no, no!” I wept as I ripped towels from the rack on the wall and wrapped his arms. My tears mingled with his blood on the floor. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed 911. The dispatcher answered and asked me to state my emergency.
“Please! My boyfriend has tried to kill himself! We’re at the Motel 6 outside of Glass Lake, near the highway. Room forty-three,” I gasped out as I tried to stanch the blood that just would not stop flowing out of him.
“Ma’am. How did he try to kill himself?” The lady on the other end was to the point, yet calm. I picked up the jagged piece of glass from the bathroom floor. It was coated in Clay’s blood.
“He slit his wrists. With a piece of glass.”
The dispatcher began to reel off advice on how to slow down the blood loss. To put pressure on the wounds and to try to keep him alert and lucid by talking to him. She assured me the paramedics were on their way.
“Clay! Please. Talk to me.” His eyes slowly moved to my face, but I wasn’t sure he even recognized me. Their expression was dull and practically lifeless. I pressed my hands over his injured wrists, trying to ignore the fact that the towels were slowly soaking in his blood. I wrapped his arms with another towel.
“Don’t you dare leave me, Clayton Reed! Not after everything we’ve been through! How could you do this to me?” I sobbed as I cradled his body to my chest. My hair fell into his face, like a curtain.
I felt his mouth move against my cheek as he struggled to speak. I leaned down and put my ear to his lips. “Sorry. So, so sorry,” he said, over and over again.
His words just made the tears come faster. So I sat there, on the nasty bathroom floor in the middle of nowhere, holding my dying boyfriend as I told him repeatedly how much I loved him and needed him.
chapter
twenty-four
finally the ambulance arrived, and everything moved way too fast after that. I was pretty much shoved out of the bathroom as the EMTs took over. They made me leave the motel room and wait outside while they treated Clay. I gnawed at the skin of my lips and paced back and forth in front of the door.
After five minutes or so, the three EMTs brought Clay out on a stretcher. I noticed they had bandaged his wrists with gauze. I could tell he had lost consciousness. Two of the paramedics loaded Clay into the back of the ambulance while the third turned to me.
“You’re the girlfriend?” he asked. He was a large guy with kind eyes. I nodded.
“You can get in the back with him. I need to get some information on our way to the hospital.” I jumped up into the ambulance and took a seat beside Clay’s motionless form. He was so pale and still that he looked dead already.
“Will he be all right?” I asked the EMTs as they hooked Clay up to a million monitors and read out numbers that were meaningless to me.
I heard the siren start up and we sped away at a lightning pace. The paramedic with the kind eyes looked at me sympathetically. “It’s too soon to say. He lost a lot of blood. How did this happen?”
