“What?”
“This is not your fault.”
It is my fault.
“I love you for saying that,” I say.
“I love you, too. Text me. Every hour. I’m not sleeping until you do.”
I hang up and press the back of my head against the wall. I close my eyes and breathe. Somewhere down the corridor a machine beeps in a steady rhythm. I try to match my breathing to the beeping to calm me down.
When I open my eyes, the blonde guy is standing nearby. He’s about ten feet away. Holding a cup of coffee from the machine. He’s looking at me with that same expression from the bar, serious, focused, as if he’s working through a problem step by step. He walks over to me and holds out the cup.
“It’s bad,” he says. “The coffee. It’s really bad. But it’s hot.”
I take it. Our fingers brush and he pulls his hand back so fast the coffee almost spills.
“I’m Stormy,” he says. “I’m with Tex. The big guy.”
“Benji.”
He stands there awkwardly. He’s clearly trying to figure out what he should do to comfort me. After a moment, he reaches out and pats my shoulder. Two stiff careful pats.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I start sobbing again and don’t answer. He frowns. Pats me again. One more pat. Then, with a determined look as if jumping off a high dive, he leans forward and puts his arms around my shoulders. It lasts about two seconds. His body is rigid. His arms barely touch my back.
It’s the most awkward hug in the history of physical contact. This guy, who clearly finds hugging unnatural, just put his stiff, uncomfortable arms around a crying stranger.
He pulls back quickly, his face flushed. He shoves his hands in his pockets and stands there next to me against the wall like that’s where he’s decided he needs to be.
I cry harder. Not because of the hug, although the hug is part of it. Because he tried.Oh God, did he try his best. He didn’t have to try to comfort me. He could’ve stayed in the waiting room with his people and let me stand here alone. But this guy chose to stand next to me. And that means a lot.
We stand there, side by side against the wall. Not talking. He doesn’t try to fill the silence. He doesn’t ask me what happened or whose fault it was. He just stands there with his shoulder four inches from mine and he lets the silence be what it is.
After a while he says, “Mickey’s tough. He’ll be okay. He will be.”
I turn to him. My face is a mess. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry this happened.”
He looks at me and holds my gaze longer than I suspect he holds most people’s. “It’s not your fault,” he says.
That’s twice now. Two people in twenty minutes telling me the same thing. Dante on the phone and this guy, Stormy, both saying the same words.
I want to believe them, but I don’t. They don’t know the whole story.
Eventually, we walk back to the waiting room together. Tex is on the phone. He’s standing by the window with his back to the room and I catch fragments of his voice, low and calm.
“He’s stable enough for surgery. They took him in about an hour ago. No, I don’t know yet. They haven’t come out.” He pauses. “Mama Weaver, please don’t cry. Listen to me. He was talking when they put him in the ambulance. He was giving orders to the paramedics. That’s Mickey being same old Mickey. That’s your boy. He was bossing people around with a bullet in him.” Another longer pause. “I know you can’t leave him,” Tex says. “Mickey knows too. You stay there with Walter. We’ve got him. We’re all here. Me and Sheila and Stormy. I’m right here and I’m not leaving until he’s out of surgery and I’ve talked to him myself. I’ll be here as long as it takes. Don’t worry.”
He listens for a minute. His free hand is pressed flat against the window glass and his head drops forward an inch, and stays there.
“He’d want you to stay with Walter,” Tex says. “You know that. He’d say, Mama, stay with Dad. That’s what he’d say and you know I’m right. There’s nothing you can do here right now. I’ll call you the second I know anything. Yes, I promise, Mama Weaver. The second I hear, I’m calling you.”
He hangs up and stands at the window for a moment with the phone in his hand and his forehead touching the glass. Then he turns back to the room and his face is the one that carries the burden for everyone. He walks back to his chair and sits down. The chair groans under his weight and nobody mentions the phone call.
I’m sitting in an ugly beige chair and Stormy is sitting next to me. Tex looks over and sees where Stormy is sitting now and a look crosses his face. As if he recognizes that Stormy is making a statement simply by where he’s choosing to sit.
We wait in silence. It’s almost midnight now. The bar fight was around eight.
