Kamber

Chapter 9

Kate is two hours gone by the time they let me out of my room.

I think I should’ve cried, it might’ve made me feel better, though I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted a lot of things; I wanted to sit still, afraid moving would inflict a sort of pain, though mental not physical, that would’ve reduced me to nothing more than a spatter on the linoleum floors. I wanted to be alone, though the insistent buzzing of all my fellow East County classmates who’d come out and mingled freely for the first time with the West Fairgrove visitors did anything but allow me of that. More than anything I wanted to find that damn button in the ceiling. Even now I could feel myself picturing the interior of Kate’s car, searching and searching for something that never moved but somehow pulled away.

A few times I’ve forced myself to think about it, really think about it. To think about Kate and everything that made her be a person being taken away, no longer an issue for consciousness to worry about. But it just falls over me, never quite reaching the part of my brain that would make it real.

It’s weird really, to think about death. We as humans like to think we’ve conquered all; land, darkness, mystery. Though we have yet to cheat death, and deep down I think everyone knows we never will. What even is life without the ever-present ticking clock going nowhere but down? There is no negative time, there is no sword you could ever hold Death stymie against. We live our lives constantly awaiting the next thing as the first grade prepares us for the second, prepares us for the third, prepares us to graduate. And what happens after we graduate? We work. And what happens after we work? We retire. And what happens after we retire? We finally find ourselves at the helm of the ship, awaiting the inevitable iceberg we cannot avoid. There will be no swimming to shore, only sinking. All of life is a distraction from our real problems.

But aside from all of that, death is scary. Scary, because it is the only thing left completely unknown. The Christians have an idea of what comes next, though so do the Jews and the Muslims and so on and so forth. At the end of the day nobody knows for sure, because nobody can cheat being dead the way we cannot cheat dying; there is no returning to tell the tale.

Somehow I can’t picture Kate anywhere. When my grandmother died a few summers back, of whom I had not been particularly close, somehow I’d felt I could see her- though not with my eyes, with my heart- above. Not even my heart can picture Kate anywhere except for nowhere now.

There are not words specific enough to describe what I mean, but I know that right now I am the closest to feeling that thing that all good religionists feel in believing what they know about death to be true, and that is that there is no such things.

There is ashes, there is smoke, there is the ground, and there is nothing.

That is all that’s left for Kate now.

And it breaks my heart.

 

Over the next several hours I sit unseeingly in the waiting room, not quite sure what I’m waiting for, as the news circles through the crowds of my classmates that Kate is dead and that I might as well be, so they slowly trickle out until I am alone. But I don’t think I mind the solitude.

A boy walks into the waiting room, and I think that maybe he forgot something and has come back to get it before leaving with the rest of my school, only I don’t recognize his face, and when you go to a school as small as East County (especially when you’ve been enclosed in a waiting room with them as I have) you come to recognize everybody.

Whatever, he’s probably here for somebody else. What else is new in an ICU waiting room?

He sits, and I remain seated.

He stares blankly ahead, and I do too, our gazes running skew to one another, never crossing.

However, he does cry. I don’t look at him to see it, but I hear it in the wearied exhales and the sticky inhales. I think he mumbles something under his breath too, but I don’t strain myself to hear it.

“You were in the other car,” he speaks after long last.

I look up.

His body is intact, sort of like mine, but he sports an array of stitches along one of his cheeks. Now that I am looking I can confirm that he was indeed- is indeed- crying. It’s in seeing the expected reaction to this trauma reflected in somebody else so plainly that finally brings me to tears.

I nod to answer his question, my head rubbing against the wall on which it reclines, because even though I previously had no idea who was in the other car, I can feel that it was him. And, judging from his vivid pain, I know there was somebody else; his Kate.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, shaking his head fervishly as if he can’t control it. “It was all my fault. I heard about your friend, and I am so sorry. I am so sorry that I took her away from you, because it was my fault and it was so stupid and I knew it was stupid but I did it anyway, and I’m sorry I didn’t stop myself. And I’m sorry about where it got us, where it got her.”

I want to think that by “her” he means Kate; I really want to be able to blame somebody and hate somebody other than myself for what happened, but I can’t, because I don’t think he’s that sorry about Kate. Maybe he is, but I know Kate isn’t “her”.

“Who is she?” I ask in a rasp of a voice, as it is scratchy from not being used for so long. My lips taste salt from my own tears when they part.

“Amber,” he tells me.

Amber.

His Kate.

“I’m sorry, too,” I tell him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find the light.”