The worst part was the silence.
Kathleen had passed out on the living room floor, stumbling in with a knife when she’d suddenly opened her eyes, the world rushing back to meet her with so much force she could hear it, and realized what she was doing. Repulsed, horrified, terrified, she pulled herself to her feet and ran from the bedroom, collapsing on the floor when she couldn’t go any further. Isaac, sensing that it was over, allowed himself to fade into the blackness that seemed to be enveloping him from all sides. Maybe he was dying. Why not, he thought. It doesn’t matter much anyway. Yeah, he thought. This is it.
“Don’t be dead! Please, Ike, please don’t be dead. . .” The words jolted through Isaac’s body as if they were supercharged with electricity. It surprised him to discover that he was able to think. No, he thought. No, I won’t do this. He wouldn’t let his mother kill him. He wouldn’t give in.
Isaac opened his eyes again. He opened his mouth, struggling to find the air to form words, struggling to find words to form. Taylor was kneeling next to him, sobbing.
“Don’t do it, Ike, please don’t do it, please be alive. . . please. . .” Zac was sitting on the bed, his face buried in his arm, too shaken to cry.
“I’m alive,” Isaac murmured. “It’s okay, I’m alive.”
He couldn’t move. He didn’t have the strength to get up, he knew he didn’t have it. But somehow he found it, squeezing his eyes shut against the tears that sprang to his them as pain sliced through his body. I’m not a baby, he thought. I don’t cry because I got hurt.
Isaac looked down at his hands, wondering why it hurt so much to put any weight on them. He didn’t wonder long.
I must have tried to protect myself from the knife, Isaac thought, and thrown my hands up in front of me. The only position he could bear to remain in was kneeling, leaning forward, his jaw clenched shut and his eyes closed tightly.
“Are you alive?” Taylor asked him.
Isaac wasn’t so sure anymore. He shook his head, trying to get rid of the roaring sound that filled his ears. “I don’t know.”
Zac spread his fingers, peeking through them with one eye. “Are you going to be okay?”
Isaac swallowed hard. He could feel his heart pounding in time with the throbbing pain of the stab wounds, feel the blood that gushed from his stomach with each breath he exhaled. He tried not to breathe. It made him feel dizzier. He didn’t think he could stay like this. “Yeah,” Isaac lied. “Yeah, I’ll be okay.”
Taylor shook his head. “There’s too much blood.”
“I’ll be okay,” Isaac told him. Words were slipping away from him. Like everything else, he thought. There was nothing he could hold on to. Maybe he’d let himself float away again. . .
Taylor stood up. “There’s too much blood!” He folded his arms across his chest, glaring at his brother. “It is NOT okay!”
“Tay. . .” Isaac began, but he didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t even think.
Taylor took a deep breath. “I’m calling 911.” What he really wanted to do was sleep, sleep for a long, long time. That was the one thing he couldn’t do, though, and Taylor knew it. “911,” he repeated. “I’m calling it.”
Isaac rubbed his forehead with his hand, streaking blood across his skin. “The phone’s off,” he managed, softly.
Taylor bit his lip, hesitant but forceful. “We have to leave, Ike.”
Isaac’s eyes met his. “I don’t know if I can.”
Tears were spilling down Taylor’s face but he held his ground. “We have to leave, Ike, we can’t stay here. There’s so much blood already. . .”
Isaac closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “We can’t stay here,” he repeated. “I don’t know if I can. . .” he began.
Taylor shook his head. “You have to,” he begged. “Please? C’mon, Zac. . .” He wrapped his arms around his little brother and dragged him off the bed. “C’mon, get your coat on. We’re leaving. Ike has to go get stitches or something.” He bit his lip. He didn’t know what his brother would need.
“Don’t!” Zac wailed. “Don’t touch my arm!”
“Did she do something to it?” Taylor asked.
Zac nodded. “She hurted me.” He was crying now, quietly. “I hate her, Tay. I really do.”
“It’s okay,” Taylor murmured, wishing he believed what he was saying. “It really is okay. . .”
Isaac suddenly realized he was angry. Anger was washing over him as evenly as the blood was pumping out; he was seething. Yeah, he’d get out of here. Yeah, he was going to make it. He couldn’t let his mother have power over him. He couldn’t give her that. As long as he was okay, his brothers would be, too. That was all Isaac had ever known and that was what he turned to now.
Slowly, painfully, he struggled to his feet. “You’re right. We have to leave. I just have to tie a shirt around my stomach or something, to keep from bleeding too much.”
“Your hands are bleeding, too,” Taylor pointed out. “And your face.”
Isaac groaned. “Tay, I’m going to need some help. . .”
Taylor, more than anyone else, understood his brother’s dignity. He knew that it took a lot for Isaac to ask someone to do something to help him and he knew that the more quickly and inauspiciously he did it, the better. He helped Isaac wind a ripped t-shirt around his stomach, both of them flinching at the blood that immediately soaked through the thin material. Isaac wound strips of fabric around both of his hands, too. Had he been coherent enough, he would have rather liked the effect. Now, all he could think about was getting out of the apartment. He knew he’d have to do it, but he didn’t know how he’d be able to.
One foot in front of the other, Isaac thought. I can do this.
The air outside was icy. It cut through your skin and headed straight for your bones. Taylor wished he’d remembered a jacket. He’d zippered Zac into one and made sure Isaac put one on, too. I forgot me, Taylor thought, but there was no way he was running upstairs and going back into that apartment. His mother was there, passed out on the floor, the knife still in her hand. Isaac’s blood was all over the place. Taylor couldn’t go back.
Isaac didn’t know how he would make it to the hospital. He didn’t know if he could make it to the end of the street. But if Taylor wanted him to, he’d do it. He blinked. The world wouldn’t come into focus. Cautiously, he held out one hand and braced himself against the wall.
Taylor didn’t like to be in charge. He’d never been in charge before, and this was a terrible time to start. “We have to start going. Now.”
“Now,” Isaac repeated. It hurt to breathe. He could feel the blood spreading across his stomach, pumping from some deep, hot place inside of him. His head was spinning.
“Now,” Taylor repeated. “If we don’t start now, we’ll never get there.”
It was a stupid idea. It was a stupid little kid idea, something no one in their right mind would have ever undertaken. Later on, Taylor would wonder why he’d decided to do it. He wouldn’t remember the raw terror and incredible desperation he was feeling that night, the fact that all he knew was he had to do something, anything, fast. He wouldn’t remember what it felt like to be six years old and certain his older brother was going to die.
I should have gone down the hall to the neighbors’, Taylor would think. There must have been a phone somewhere I could have used.
“I can’t do this.” Isaac sank down on the curb, breathing so shakily it sounded as if he were sobbing. He might have started, too, if he’d been alert enough for the idea to occur to him. “I really, really can’t. I’m sorry.”
“You have to!” Taylor was more than a little frustrated with his brother. He was crying openly, now, so cold he wasn’t even shivering anymore. “YOU HAVE TO!” he shrieked.
Isaac, despite everything, was rather impressed by his brother’s persistence. He nodded. Just a couple more minutes, he told himself. That’s all. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen after that. He didn’t know whether it would be good or bad and by this point he really didn’t care. He just wanted it all to be over. . .
“Ike,” Taylor said, trying to control himself, “Come on.”
“I’m trying,” Isaac said, tentatively rising to his feet. “I really am.”
“He’s trying,” Zac agreed. He fell into step next to Isaac. “It isn’t that much longer. Just a few hundred million feet.”
A few hundred million feet is what the two blocks between the apartment and the hospital felt like to Isaac. “I’m going to have to stop,” he told Taylor.
“We can’t,” Taylor sobbed. “We can’t stop.”
Isaac swallowed. He felt as if he didn’t have any blood left in his body. He was covered in blood. He could taste blood. The roaring in his ears had increased to the point that he could hardly hear anything else. The streetlights had stretched into brilliant smears across the darkened sky.
“Isaac, you get going! Now!” He heard the voice, but it didn’t sound like Taylor
or Zac. It was too loud and to forceful, not a little boy’s voice at all.
“Did you say that?” Isaac asked.
Taylor’s breath caught before he could let out another sob. “I didn’t say anything.” Without knowing why, he felt calmer.
“Isaac, if you don’t get to the hospital now, you are going to die,” the voice continued. “I’m not kidding. I know you want to stop, but you don’t have a choice. GET MOVING!”
Was it God? Isaac would wonder. Somehow, he didn’t think the phrase ‘get moving’ was in God’s vocabulary. Maybe it was just the logical part of his mind, attempting to be heard one last time over the roar of surrender that was threatening to overtake him.
Either way, Isaac got moving. “I’ll try not to stop,” he told Taylor and Zac. “I’m gonna be all right.”
And after an eternity, there were the emergency room doors, looming, light-filled, on the corner of the darkened street. Isaac pressed his palm against the thick, clear glass for a moment, needing to gather every remaining ounce of his strength before he pushed it open. He blinked at the bloody handprint he left behind. It was his handprint; his blood. Bits and pieces of himself seemed to be scattering all over the place, and he didn’t know how he’d ever find them again.
Taylor made his way straight up to the front desk. He was in charge, he knew what to do, and suddenly he almost liked it. “’Scuse me,” he said to the receptionist, “My brother needs help.”
Ike did it for me, he thought. Now I have to do it for him. It was only fair.
“Oh my God, honey, what happened?” Nora Conway had just finished a fifteen hour shift. She was nearly asleep on her feet as she headed for the doctor’s lounge to collect her things, debating whether or not to call Dan to ask for a ride home. She didn’t trust herself not to fall asleep behind the wheel. When she bumped into Taylor right in front of the receptionist’s desk, she thought for a moment she might be hallucinating.
“Nora?” Taylor wondered if he might be hallucinating, too. He had hoped he would see her so much that maybe he had dreamed her.
“Taylor. . .” Nora began, bending to put her arms around him, “you’re freezing, baby.” Her eyes widened. “Where is all this blood coming from?”
“Ike,” Taylor’s eyes slid to the far end of the waiting room. Both of his brothers were perched on the edge of chairs, Isaac leaning forward with his face buried in his hands, Zac with his thumb stuck in his mouth, his eyes shut as tightly as if he never wanted to open them again. “Oh my God,” Nora repeated, hurrying across shiny tile floor. She didn’t want to know what had happened. She didn’t want to think about where Kathleen was now, or what she was doing.
“Ike,” she said, bending down, “what happened?”
Isaac’s eyes met hers, but Nora couldn’t be sure whether or not he was actually seeing anything. “She. . . she had a knife,” he managed.
“Oh my God.” Without stopping to think, Nora lifted him off the chair, conscious of the fact that she was probably causing fresh waves of pain to rip through his body. “I’m sorry to be hurting you honey. . .”
“You aren’t,” Isaac lied.
“I know I am,” Nora replied. She raised her voice. “I need a trauma room! We have a stabbing!”
“We’re looking at multiple trauma here,” Isaac could hear the voices rising above him, but he couldn’t open his eyes to see the people who belonged to them. He was felt as if he were swirling within an abyss of pain, fading in and out of consciousness and catching little bits and pieces of things.
“I want this blood matched and cross matched, stat!”
“We’re starting him on 500 cc’s of Ringer’s as soon as we can find a vein.”
“Shoot, what happened to this kid?”
“His mother.”
“Shit, his mother? What kind of freakin’ hell mother’d do this to her kid?”
“There’re some crazy ass people out there, man.”