Past the netting of the little glass window, and in between the spaces where one paramedic's arm ended and another's shoulder began, she saw him on the bloodied plastic. Saw the loll of his head, the remains of his wire-rimmed glasses on either side; how his forearm was bent at a ninety-degree angle, bone splitting skin.
'Adjacent,' she whispered to the ghosts of her sanity, her eyes tracing the outline of his pain. 'Opposite...hypotenuse.' She'd excelled in algebra at high school. Maybe, she thought, a universal power had always wanted to equip her for this moment: for when she needed to measure regret in degrees, when heartbeats and breaths breathed failed her.
She saw the dimples on his ashen cheeks.
Her forehead rested against the smooth, cool wood. It anchored her to something solid amongst the roaring waves of the moment, though it wasn't long before angry footfalls behind her shook her out of her dazed stupor. 'What do you mean you 'can't do this anymore'?'
She clutched the metal handle of the door, averting her eyes to the pubescent couple behind her. The boy's hair was so shaggy she resisted the urge to march right up to him and snip those golden tendrils off with the scissors from her miniature sewing kit. Eavesdropping was against her values but what could she do when this hurricane was brewing four feet away?
'I can't, I - all you ever do is - '
'For God's sake, Savannah, my mother is dying from CF and you honestly can't expect -'
'She wasn't even a part of your life until two weeks ago!'
The boy let his features scrunch up in utter, irrevocable anger.
And then he exploded.
'So it doesn't matter at all that she dreamt all her life of having a child, carried me for nine months, and gave me up so I could lead a better life, because she knew she didn't have the money to do so? It doesn't matter that she spent nearly two decades making a living and promising that, one day, she'd give me the world?'
The girl's mascara ran down in streaks down her cheeks, leaving trails of incredulous desolation. But the boy beside her was a firecracker and he couldn't stop.
'You know what. Remember when I told you there are only two women on earth deserving of my love? Well, neither of them are you.'
A man and two women - one in a wheelchair with an IV drip - appeared behind them. The women glanced at each other. The one in the wheelchair bore striking resemblance to what could only be her son, but in the other's eyes, I saw a passion that matched the boy's perfectly. Mother by birth and mother by clemency.
Can you love someone you've never known?
The girl bursted into agonising wails then and sprinted through the glass doors of the building that housed the dead and the dying. The boy, too broken to move, buried his hands in his hair as his family chased after the fugitive. It left her shuddering from the coldness in her bones.
Can you love someone you've never known?
The question reverberated in her mind again. She turned her eyes back to him.
Maybe you can.
His arm was in some sort of sling now. She realised she hadn't seen the damage done to the lower half of his body from her view of the emergency room, and for that she was grateful.
From the bitten words and the glares laced with venom and the fact that he spent more than four hours with her every day of her childhood but never bothered to find out her favourite colour, or whether she wanted to try ballet or baking or equestrian, or if Tom the Bully was still tugging her pigtails - her heart collapsed in on itself in what can only be described as half-hearted origami. Because through the chaos and the white coats and the invisible flames and the medical jargon that pounded like a scream underwater, he saw her.
He saw her eyes, spilled coffee on a Saturday morning; her trembling rosebud mouth; the soft curve of her collarbones. The dimples on her cheeks.
And then he was moving his lips. It lasted about two seconds, the feather brushing of bruises against blood. Anyone else would've interpreted it as a futile gasp for air, a moan of pain. But she knew. She knew that his tongue had caressed the syllables of her name. He'd wanted to keep it safe, wedged between the roof of his mouth and the back of his throat, but then it dropped on the ground and broke into a million pieces, a replica of everything she was.
She smiled, and cried even harder.
You see me, she thought.
You see me.
His words had pulled a string of polaroids from the depths of her consciousness. Suddenly she was swung unto great, strong shoulders, and a bubble of laughter escaped her tiny person. She brushed her thumb against the blazing sun and it came back blistered. Then she was blowing little candles on a cake bigger than her and there was waltzing in the kitchen; she was giggling and there was golden confetti and a quilt threaded with joy that smothered her insides. Board games, fairy lights, rock pools with tiny seashells, lullabies so beautiful she swore she'd never fall asleep just so she could listen to every last line, and rusty watering cans and apples in the summer -
She blinked.
- light was bleeding into nothing. Her aching cheeks surrendered to gravity and so did her tears. Someone was shouting. Thrashing and emptiness and then all the sunlight inside was chased out. Broken. Nothing. If people were glass bottles, pieces of glaucous her were scattered on seashores around the world, never to be slotted into one again. Sunlight was supposed to shine through - but it didn't. Gone was her iridescence. She'd grown opaque.
'Mom?' Curious faces glanced up at her. She peered over the crowns of her children's hair and locked eyes with the man who provided her solace when her own father had failed to.
She slid down against the scratchy wall, melting into a pool of her own despair. Her head hung - she was a wilting flower. She only managed to lift it when the doors burst open and uniformed workers wheeled her father out, their movements alacritous.
She stared at her father.
Not the stitches holding him together, or the bandages that kept him from falling apart.
She stared at him, and all that he was.
But mostly, she stared at the reflection of herself. Because hidden behind the curtains of her irises was the beast she'd swore she'd never become.
Him.
Maybe you can't love a stranger after all.
But now that you've finally met, it's a good place to start.
