And I think deep down both Harlen and Chase knew that once they walked out of this hospital room, the boys theyhadbeen, would be buried, too.
My silence taunts me.Say something, anything.But a knock at the door forces Laiken to pull back from me.
Too late.I chew on my tongue. The problem was, I was numb. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe.
Death wasn’t kind.
Death was soulless.
It took my baby sister, and it took Laiken’s mother.
It took the lives of the ones who deserved to live the most. And it renders me speechless.
Because beneath the blanket of one haunted, fucked up night, we’d lost everything.
Including ourselves.
“Sorry to interrupt,” a voice starts. “Laiken, honey, I have your next dose of pain medication.
I don’t look up, but I do watch Laiken out of the corner of my eye.
She doesn’t look at me again, she doesn’t look at the nurse either, walking to the opposite side of the room where she works quickly to flick on the faucet.
She doesn’t wait for the water to run warm, instead cupping both of her quivering hands beneath the stream and splashing it back over her bare face. She exhales a deep breath that hitsmy ears even though I’m sitting across the room, then she spins around, her fingers latching to the ceramic sink at her back.
“Thank you,” she croaks, licking a pearled droplet of water from her top lip. “But I’m okay,” she finishes, walking back toward the window bench I’m still seated on and curling herself under the blanket she left beside me.
I drop my head, clench my molars, pop a knuckle.
Take the meds, Laik.
“Are you sure?” the nurse asks, stepping closer, and I lift my chin an inch, watch the wrinkles at the corner of her gray-blue eyes weave fuller webs at each side.
She’s dressed in pink slacks and a white top, her naturally gray hair pulled away from her face and tucked into a low bun. And something tells me this nurse hasn’t encountered many patients that have refused meds before.
“I’m sure.” Laiken breathes. “It makes it worse.”
“We can get you something a little less?—”
“Thank you, but I don’t want anything.” Laiken’s voice is stronger now, and when my stomach falls, I realize what she is doing, why she’s refusing.
A sick feeling deep in my gut tells me that she doesn’t want to rely on something to help with the pain. That she wants to face it,the way her mother hadn’t.
“Okay, honey, but if you change your mind—” The nurse starts only for Laiken to cut her off.
“I won’t.”
The nurse's sympathetic eyes flick to me, then to Harlen, who is back on the floor, head reclined and pushed into the wall.
She guides her hands into the front pockets of the white cape draped around her shoulders and bows her pointed chin. Sadness twists her thin eyebrows and the lines at the edge of her wrinkled lips. She looks up and nods at me in reservation before exiting the room.
The moment she is gone, Laik starts to cry again.
“I need my mom. I need my best friend."
“Fuck, Laik,” Harlen is on his feet and across the room in a flash, his knees crunching at the linoleum floor in front of us, pulling her in for a hug.
She weeps into the dip of his broad shoulder, and I catch the orbs of my brother's deep-blue eyes, seeing that he’s drowning in the same agony when Laiken starts to whisper about Jade, who was his best friend too.
