I stare at Isaac's bruised, tired face as he makes his statement.
"I buzzed Sophie's apartment but she didn't answer. Apartment 4B. It was seven o'clock." Isaac says to Officer Quintana while another officer scribbles in a small notepad. "The door to the lobby was open so I just let myself in. I heard a scream come from above, through the open staircase, and I thought it sounded like Sophie. I wasn't sure, but I ran up there anyway. When I got to the third floor there was a guy, dark skin, Hispanic, with jet black hair. He was tall, like me. He was walking down the stairs calmly, but with an angry face, and I asked him if he heard the scream."
Isaac pauses and gazes down at his hands as Officer Quintana lowers the volume of the radio clipped to his hip. It sounds as if someone is specifically calling to him through the static. He urges Isaac to continue.
"I think he jumped at me with a knife or something. I put up my arm and it hit hard. We rolled down the stairs. He was coming at me. I just fought him off, but when he started running I chased him. I wasn't thinking clearly. I just wanted to kick his ass, you know."
Officer Quintana nods. "Go on."
"I caught up to him on the first floor, in the lobby, and he slammed me down on my arm. He stomped on it and I think that's when I passed out. I remember waking up to Sophie screaming. This time I was sure it was her. I went back upstairs to see if she was okay. I didn't even notice my arm was broken up until I got to the fourth floor. I couldn't pick her up, so I slung her arm around my shoulder and helped her down the stairs. She was crying and holding her side, saying she was stabbed. By the time we got to the first floor, the lobby was full of people. She passed out on the first-floor landing. I couldn't pick her up. I sat there with her, with my hands on her side, pressing. I didn't want to stop pressing down on her wound, even though people were pulling on my arm, probably trying to help me out. I thought if I stopped pressing, then she might die."
Officer Quintana nods again.
"You saved her life," I state proudly, hoping to calm the fear in his eyes.
"Is she all right?" Isaac asks.
"Is that all that happened? Can you think of anything else?" Officer Quintana asks without addressing Isaac's inquiry.
"People started helping us. Someone gave me a blanket and I pressed it against Sophie's body. When the paramedics arrived they took her away and someone helped me to an ambulance parked outside. Is she okay? Can I see her?"
"Not yet. We're collecting all the accounts first, including hers. Then maybe you can see her."
Isaac's forehead wrinkles. "Maybe?"
"They think you may be involved." I say, momentarily glowering at Officer Quintana.
"What?" Isaac says, adjusting himself in his bed. "Why? I had a date with her. I met her last Friday. We were-"
Officer Quintana interrupts, "We don't think you're involved. It's a matter of finding out all the facts first before letting anyone see Sophie. You seem to be cleared, but we have to get Sophie's account first, unless you can have someone close to her who can vouch for you."
Isaac shakes his head, "There's no one. This was our second date."
"Well, then we're just going to have to wait for her statement." Officer Quintana says as his phone rings. "Excuse me." He leaves Isaac's bedside and heads for the emergency room exit.
"This is bullshit." Isaac grunts as he sits himself up on the hospital bed. "Why would I do this to Sophie?"
To my own surprise, I reply in the detective's defense, "He's just doing his job. He wants to make sure you had nothing to do with it first, for Sophie's sake."
Isaac looks exhausted. The constant grimace on his face tells me he's in a lot of pain. The doctor informs me that Isaac has a high fever and will have to stay overnight for observation. The breaks on his forearm are minor, but because of the swelling they won't put on a cast until tomorrow. Isaac is going to be in a lot of pain until then.
"Can you tell me about Sophie Ramirez?" Isaac asks the doctor who is checking his clip board. "She was brought in earlier with a stab wound in her abdomen."
"I'll see what I can do," the doctor says in a tired voice. I give him just a few years older than me, but the grays sprinkled all over his hair make him look older, wiser. He brings a small tray over with a sealed plastic bag filled with metal implements. He mumbles something to a nurse by his side as he pulls on rubber gloves. "Let's check out that arm."
The agony on Issac's face is uncharacteristic of him. I've always known him to be stoic, a suffer-in-silence type, so seeing him wince at the doctor's seemingly gentle touch tells me the knife wound is severe. The doctor undresses and redresses Isaac's half-splint arm within a few minutes. He asks Isaac to move his fingers, and he does so with shards of pain streaking his face. The doctor gives him some advice on how to move his arm with less discomfort, tells him he will recover fine, and leaves. A nurse comes over with morphine.
For the next few seconds Isaac stares at the ceiling. "There was so much blood," he says softly. "I wasn't sure I was pressing down on the right spot. Her clothes were soaked in blood," he mutters before closing his eyes to the effects of the drug and trailing off into a numbing sleep.
My thoughts are suddenly transported back in time. I recall the amount of blood on my parents' bodies when they were hit by the eighteen-wheeler along the Long Island Expressway. The truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and sideswiped my parents Volvo. The car flipped three times from the sixty-mile-per-hour impact. Seven cars were involved in the accident. Ten people were injured. Two died. I was fifteen.
Isaac and I heard a crash from my backyard, and we immediately ran to the highway to watch the commotion just outside the Douglaston exit on the L.I.E. I froze when I saw a car that looked like my parents' beige Volvo flipped on its hood, upside-down on the highway pavement. People were wobbling around in a daze, others helping. A man was squatting next to the Volvo, tilting his head to look inside, shouting. I ran to the car and squatted next to him, holding my breath. When I saw my mother's arm bent inward, incorrectly, with the black leather watch my dad and I gave her last Christmas on her wrist, I knew my parents were dead.
An hour later, after the traffic started flowing on the two left-most lanes, after the paramedics pulled my parents' bodies out onto the highway pavement to wait for the coroner's truck, I stood along the busy expressway just staring at the long white blankets soaked through with my parents' blood. There was so much blood.
I can still picture my parents eating their breakfast that Saturday morning, before the accident, before they went shopping for a stupid camping tent we were going to use the following weekend, before the truck driver clocked in his fifteenth hour on the road. We were all supposed to go shopping, but I always hated malls so they went without me. I was old enough to be left home alone and to have Isaac come over to throw a football around without parental supervision. We were old enough to ride our bikes around the neighborhood and even into the next town over. We were old enough to hang out on the edges of town, right next to the highway, and watch traffic zoom by east and west, and talk about everything or nothing until the sun set. That morning, I remember feeling old enough to take care of myself. That evening, after my parents were taken away in the coroner's truck, I remember wishing I had my mom and dad to take care of me. I wasn't old enough to be on my own. I needed my parents.
The grim look on Jubilee's face, when she told me about her parents on Friday, appears in my head. They died within months of each other when Jubilee was twenty two. The way she described the hollow feeling in her chest, from knowing that she would never have a home to visit, or a family dinner to attend, felt sadly familiar. As Jubilee stared past the drink in her hands, down towards the ground with her lips pursed in concentration, in the middle of the bustling crowd at the bar, I felt intimately close to her, connected, like two lost souls floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean. We know what it means to be completely alone.
I take out my phone and search for Jubilee on Facebook and find the photo of her and Aryana - simply beautiful. After staring at Jubilee's exquisite face for a few seconds, it dawns on me like warm sunlight – Jubilee must be aware of what's going on with Sophie. I remember Jubilee telling me that Sophie's parents live in Florida and that she and Sophie are close, almost like sisters, since they were kids. Maybe she's here in the hospital. Her "sister", the only other person in the world she calls family, has been stabbed.
I run to the doctor who tended to Isaac's arm. He starts talking before I arrive. "Yes, she is out of surgery but in ICU. Only family and relatives can see her there. Isaac can't see her because he isn't family."
"Where is the ICU?"