We decided not to get food and go out.
Hunter drove us back to my apartment, both of us silent all the way there.
When we pulled in to the parking lot and found a spot, he threw the car in park, sat back in his seat and sighed, gaping at nothing in particular.
I felt as though I knew what he was feeling, as it was the second time I'd been through something like that. Part of me had started to become slightly suspicious that I was bad karma for drivers in general.
The thing that was different was that the man hadn't been on death's door. He was actually dead.
With Hunter, I'd been working with a breathing and mostly conscious person the entire time.
I couldn't read his expression to get an idea what he was thinking, so I sat with him, not doing much to comfort him. I felt almost guilty at the amount of indifference I was feeling in that moment about the man. I certainly hoped he had been revived -- what for the sake of his family -- but it didn't occur to me to be shocked or frantic in the moment. I'd been hysterical when Hunter was put on the stretcher and lifted, bleeding, into the ambulance. I felt a part of my heart go with him as a result of my efforts to save him, and I hadn't even known him. It seemed like Hunter may have been feeling the same way about this man.
Except that Hunter's heart would've been going with a corpse into the ambulance. Not a living, breathing, conscious person.
That experience -- the attempted revival of a wounded and deceased person on the side of the road, in the rain, under the gaze of hysterical family of the victim -- was something that was scarring enough to essentially mentally cripple somebody. I hoped with everything I had that it wouldn't traumatize Hunter in the head as much as I feared it would.
And I also worried about myself. I wasn't feeling it then. But being with Hunter through it, as well as it having been my second time in a similar situation, had delayed the sinking in of the gravity of the situation.
So I watched as Hunter sat and processed in silence, myself occasionally checking my now blood-stained watch as the moments ticked away.
Finally, after a full twenty-plus minutes as the rain tapped on the roof of the car, Hunter hardly showing any emotion at all, he spoke up.
"Let's go inside."
Without saying a word, I opened the door and stepped out into the light drizzle. A cool breeze accompanying the end of the storm in the evening sun that shone through the waterlogged clouds in the west made me shiver through my damp clothes.
Hunter didn't say a word to me as he stepped out of the car, nor did he make eye contact with me. He couldn't have been any more comfortable than I was.
His white t-shirt was soaked through completely, his blue jeans a dark navy and his shoelaces dripping from the ends. The blood stains that covered his hands and had smeared on his shirt I'm sure weren't helping -- he looked at them in a daze every few minutes and just stared.
He led the way inside.
More like walked as I trailed. He didn't pay much attention to me, and I didn't really blame him.
We didn't ride the elevator. We trudged up the stairs in silence, three floors of clogging wet shoes on metal steps.
When we got to the door of the apartment, he didn't say anything. Just stepped back and allowed me room to put the key in.
I opened the door and held it open for him as he walked in behind me. He took his shoes off and walked over to the refrigerator, putting them underneath the door in hopes that the air escaping from the refrigerator's fan would help dry them. I did the same.
