Beyond Forever

Chapter 26

February 19, 2021

12 Years Left

It's night, and there's darkness all around me. It chokes like smoke, sliding into my mouth and nose as I run. The impact of my steps jostles through my whole body. The ground moves under me. Cement races on in a river, on and on forever. I can't see anything other than color as my tears drag everything into a melting pool. I claw at the air, pulling myself forward, sprinting like I did when I was young—like I spent my whole life to get here.

I don't know why I'm running until the pain in my chest reminds me. My heart will never let me forget.

I'm driving myself to her.

It's light inside Saint James Emergency Room, sterile, lifeless white. I see it through the doors as I approach. They pneumatically hiss open ripping into me with a bone-chilling wind.

The E.R. is empty, and my footsteps echo eerily. Long crystalline strands of I.V. tubing hang like vines from their stands. They grab at me as I pass them, as I search for something I don't think I want to find. Down the hall, an incandescent light flicker to the same rapid beat of my heart.

"Jennie."

I turn in a circle to Roseanne's voice. I don't know where it came from, it moves in an echo from everywhere at once. It somehow makes my blood colder, the room colder, until my joints are frozen under the wave of fear I feel.

I head to the nurse's station, the only point of reference I can find in the jungle of menacing medical equipment and harsh shadows. It feels like forever that I walk, space stretching to accommodate the endless count of my steps. Again, I hear my name, and it compels me forward. My hands slide over the counter, rattling aside charts and equipment. I see a computer monitor and the flatlined E.K.G. that skitters across it.

I run toward the trauma rooms and slip on something wet in the hall. I brace myself, covering my head as I slam to the ground. I hear a crunch, but I don't feel it, not at first. All I feel is numbness. It's when I go to move that the warp of pain stops me. I think my clavicle's broken and I roll to my back slowly. With shaking hands, I reach for it and ease a jittery breath at the jagged bone that meets my fingers under my skin.

I see blood out of the periphery of my vision. It's what I'm lying in, what I slipped in. I stare at it as it spreads down the hallway beside me, smudged and streaked like something was dragged through it. No...like something broken walked through it. I sit up painfully, cradling my arm. When my eyes fall to a perfect footprint, the outline of which I know so well, I forget my arm, and it falls limply beside me. I smell the whisper of Chanel, and it puts the tears back in my eyes. It's all Roseanne's blood, I know it is. I've never seen a color so stark.

Red had never been so red as the day she died.

And though I don't want to, my body pulls me upright, pushes me inexorably toward the room at the end of the hall. I follow the trail. My shoes are gone now, I can feel her blood between my toes, drying even as it covers me. I repeat over and over that it's too much blood as I get closer to where the trail ends.

When I pass into the trauma room, the sickly sweet smell of gore—of death—that I know so well overwhelms me. I gag on it, putting a bloody hand over my mouth to quell the churn of my stomach. And then, I see her. She's leaning on her hospital bed, untouched, staring at the ground. It looks like she's waiting for me—waiting for me like the million times she's waited so we could leave.

"Roseanne?"

She's so beautiful, perfect. My sweet angelic wife.

"I missed you, Jennie." She says it with a sad smile.