9-1-1.
My hand is sweaty, sticky, when I lift the handset to my ear, and I can’t think about the red streaks.
Mom’s blood.
Malcolm’s blood.
Mom’s bl—
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
“Please send help. My mom and my friend have been shot. There’s so much blood. Please.” I lift my gaze to the ceiling and whisper words that have never hurt so much. “He’s dying right now.”
“Are you in danger?”
“I—”
The gunshot jolts every bone in my body. I drop the phone and run upstairs.
Run.
Run.
Run.
I fall and run, slip and run. I grab the doorframe and swing myself inside.
The pool of blood beneath Malcolm has stopped growing, Mom is slumped over on her side, and my grandmother lies on the floor with a hole where part of her head should be.
One Year Later
Sometimes just before it’s going to rain, when the air grows heavy and the clouds hold their breath, Mom will rub her leg. The wound is long healed, but the ache resurfaces. The one in her shoulder too. No one who meets her now would notice the limp except on the wettest days, but I see it.
It’s only when I’m close enough to hug her that the scar tucked up in her hairline is visible. It stretches across her temple and disappears behind her ear. Not that big, considering how much it bled, but they always say scalp wounds bleed the most. I’d say they’re right, other than for gunshots to the gut.
When the EMTs arrived that night, I was the one they circled first. We watched the movieCarrieon Halloween a few weeks ago, and during the scene when the bucket of blood is dumped on the main character, Mom told me that’s what I looked like. None of it was my blood, though.
I’d thought Mom and Malcolm were both dead. They should have been. I’d collapsed between the two of them, burying my face in Mom’s bloodied chest and clutching at Malcolm.
But of the four of us left alive that night, I was the one with the most claim to that status.
I had various cuts and bruises, a mild concussion, and a sliced-open forearm, but nothing that kept me in the hospital for long. Not as a patient, at any rate.
Mom and Malcolm didn’t fare as well.
Her running days are over, figuratively and literally, and she still has a bullet in her shoulder. It migrated too close to her heart to safely remove.
When I’d screamed out Mom’s name downstairs, she’d forgotten about the hole in her shoulder and the gaping wound in her leg. She’d even forgotten about my grandmother. And she tried to army-crawl after me.
My grandmother saw that as her opportunity to grab the eight-inch bronze statue of her late husband off the shelf and try to bash Mom’s skull in with it. She got in only one hit before Malcolm, tapping into a reserve of strength the doctors say should have been physically impossible, dragged himself to the gun and shot her.
We still don’t know for sure when his ribs broke or whether it was his last-ditch effort to save my mom’s life that finally snapped them, but they did puncture his lung, which led to a host of respiratory problems, including a near-fatal bout of double pneumonia. The gunshot did the most damage, though, and he had to endure a number of surgeries to put his insides back together again. He was skeletal and fully bearded when they released him from the hospital, but they did release him. Mom too. And not into police custody either. That was almost more shocking.
Derek Abbott’s death was ruled an accident.
Malcolm wasn’t arrested for cybercrimes.
And I don’t have to live with the burden of having taken a life, since the bounty hunter made a full recovery in time to stand trial for everything he, Blue Eyes, and my grandmother’s investigator conspired to do.
