Eight Boys and a Walker girl

28 | Breathing

28 | Breathing

Me and Mum are allowed to sit in the back of the police car during the drive to hospital, the night whizzing by us outside our windows in a blur of city lights. Mr and Mrs Lacey follow behind the car in their own car, their daughters squashed up in the back, expressions stunned. Elena looks like she'll never breathe again. Mrs Lacey is crying, and Mr Lacey is gripping onto the steering wheel of their car so tightly, his knuckles are white.

The McCartney boys follow behind the Lacey car in Harry's truck, though of course none of them can have the slightest clue what's going on. Last time I saw, Bailey was shrieking excitedly at the prospect of a wild police chase like in movies. Seeing him like that made me unexplainably angry, though I know that if I was his age, I'd have acted the same way.

Beside me, Mum is a mess of tears, fingers clinging to my arm so tightly that I'm sure I'll have bruises up and down my skin when she removes herself from me. She's shaking too, so violently that I can feel her bumping against my side.

"He has to be okay, hasn't he?" she gabbles, and I expect she's talking to me, though it sounds more like she's trying to reassure herself. "They found him...he's breathing...he's alive...they have to be able to make him better, don't they? Don't they?"

I'm too numb even to nod. Ever since the police came and told us what they did, it's like a switch has been turned off in my body, not allowing me to feel a thing. It's like I'm too scared to feel emotions incase it turns out that he's not ok, that he's going to die. I can't allow myself to feel happy until I know.

Until I can see him.

It's what I've been waiting and longing for for weeks- ever since It Happened. Since the police hunted and hunted, but they couldn't find my brothers body. Since everyone else just gave up, simply coming to claims with him being dead. It would have been easier if I'd have done that aswell- I could've tried to move on. But it was the not knowing- the not being able to ave a funeral, because we didn't have a body. The constant childish hope that my brother wasn't dead after all- that he was still alive- nomatter how many times Mum told me this wasn't at all likely. I believed.

And now they've found him. He's alive. Breathing. My brother. Breathing.

Despite my efforts, an emotion begins to seep through the numbness, and I can't help it, or hold it back. I guess it's closest to relief, but on so much of a bigger scale- it's huge, and I hardly know how to process it. I want to jump up and down and shout all the relief out, because I can't contain it all inside me. My brother's alive. Jamie is alive!

"We're here. We'll get staff to take you directly to where they're keeping the patient," the policewoman- Stefansen, her name is Detective Stefansen- says to me and Mum, turning round in her seat and meeting our eyes with her own dark, grave ones. "But- I- just- don't get your hopes up too much, loves. He was barely alive when we found him. The doctors are doing the best they can, but-"

"Yes, we know," Mum says, trying to sound in control, though there's a clear tremor in her voice, and she grabs my hand and grips it tightly. "We know not to expect too much. Come on, Evvie."

We step out into the darkness, and suddenly everything seems very cold.

The next fifteen minutes or so pass like one of those TV hospital dramas- being led across the night-darkened car-park, blue lights flashing all around us from ambulances and various vehicles, and the muted sound of traffic from the city streets all around us- the countryside is a world away from here. We left the country peace behind, far behind, along with the cottage, and the last time I truly felt relaxed. Right now, I feel like every muscle in my body is tense, as if waiting for something. We're taken into the hospital foyer, and though I've never really had a fear of hospitals before, the situation that has brought us here makes me want to retch when I see patients being wheeled about in trolleys and wheelchairs, a reminder of all the sickness and death that is happening all around me, behind all these closed doors.