Page 35 of The Space Between Heartbeats
We finally touch down and it’s a whirlwind. Paramedics lift us out of the bucket, and they move me directly onto a gurney. I keep insisting I’m fine. I can stand…but I know that even if the pins and needles were gone, my legs wouldn’t carry me. I’m shaking and now the pain is starting to come through.
I search through the crowd of people, realizing that they took Knox. “No,” I say to the paramedic trying to fit an oxygen mask over my face. “I need to be with Knox. Where is he?”
Someone speaks in a soothing tone, but I can’t make out their words. I need Knox.
They’re wheeling me toward an ambulance and I finally see him. He’s on a gurney too, heading into the ambulance next to mine. Intense relief crashes through me.
“Knox!”
“I’m here, Thorne. I’m right here.”
But they’re loading him in and loading me in and the ambulances are right next to each other but it feels like miles apart. What if this is the last time I see him?
The thought is irrational. We’re both going to the hospital, we’re both alive, we’ll see each other soon but I can’t shake it. What if something happens? What if they take him somewhere else? What if in all this chaos, we get separated and I never see him again?
And then I remember he was going to say something to me. As we reached the first drop. Whatever it was looked serious and then everything happened and Owen. Oh God.
“Wait!” I yell like my life depends on it, shocking the paramedic so bad he freezes. I adjust myself so I can see Knox through his open ambulance door. They have him inside, medics around him taking his vitals. “Knox!” I call out. “Before, on the ride, you were going to tell me something. Right before we dropped. What was it?”
He turns his head to meet my eyes and I see him fully for the first time tonight. His tanned skin covered in blood, the exhaustion in his dark eyes, his hair matted from tears and sweat. I want to go to him, to hold him and try to offer any comfort I can, even though I’m as ruined as he is.
The way he’s staring at me, it makes everything around us fade. It’s so intense, so unreadable, my skin prickles.
His mouth opens.
Then closes. His lips form a tight line.
“Knox?”
He swallows hard. “It doesn’t matter now. It was nothing.”
“But—”
“It was nothing, Sawyer.” He looks away, fixing his gaze somewhere above him. “Just...forget it.”
My ambulance doors start to close but I’m still staring at the gap, watching the last slivers of him until they shut completely and he’s gone. And now I’m alone with strangers in white uniforms and beeping equipment with oxygen masks and blood pressure cuffs and all I want is to sleep. Maybe when I wake, this will all have been a nightmare.
The paramedic is talking to me, asking questions.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Do you know what day it is?”
“Where does it hurt?”
But I can barely hear her over the ringing in my ears and my hammering heart.
He was lying. I know it in my bones.
It wasn’t nothing. Whatever he was going to say on that ride, while we were suspended at the top of the world with the sun on our faces and everything still okay…it wasn’t nothing.
But maybe some things are better left unsaid.
Maybe some things died up there along with Owen.
The ambulance jolts into motion with its sirens wailing, and I close my eyes and try to breathe through the oxygen mask. If I focus on the physical pain—the ache in my shoulders, the burning in my ribs, the sharp sting on my forehead, the pins and needles in my legs—then maybe the other kind of pain won’tpush its way through. The kind of pain that I can’t put a name to yet but it feels like it’ll tear my insides to pieces.
Owen is dead.
