Kamber

Chapter 10

Amber's mother lied to me.

She isn't in an induced coma; she's on Life Support.

She tells me this after we both stand up together, leaving Amber's body to get some air. She whispers it to me in the hallway, saying she's sorry, and I'm angry but I can't blame her; I think she knew I already knew this, but she wanted to give me at least a few minutes to believe that there was a chance. A chance that she could hear me, a chance that she'd pull through. She knew I'd need those moments to speak with her like she was alive.

I have to leave then, take a walk back into the waiting room. Amber's mom said she'll wait for me before asking them to pull the plug, it's the only thing left she can give me.

I meet the other girl when I go back. The nurses had told me what they knew about the accident before they'd emitted me, and they'd told me there were two girls in the car that hit us and that one of them was dead. I never saw pictures, but when I saw that girl sitting there with the type of ghostly sorrow seeping into every part of her being I knew that was exactly what I must've looked like, which is how I knew it was her. The other one.

The hardest part about all of this is how quickly it happened, and I think that's the part I hate the most. It's selfish, I know, that I'm not the most angry over the fact that the great love of my life is ninety percent dead but rather over the fact that it happened too quickly to handle, because I know that's how all death is. One second you're alive and the next you aren't. That's all there is to it.

But I'm not ready for Amber to die. Not now, not in ten minutes, not ever. I wanted to marry that girl, and move into a house with her where we'd each keep our socks in the same drawer, and have a family, and take her for surprise date nights. I wanted to hold her hand while our oldest, then our second oldest, then our youngest walked up to the podium; walked up to the altar. I wanted to be there for every breath she'd take and every step of the way for the rest of our lives. That's all I wanted, and I know it sounds like a lot, but really it was only one wish; her. And somehow I don't think that one word, as small as that one is, is too much to ask for. So why is it being treated like it is?

I don't know what I'm feeling. Most of the time you'll hear people say "empty", though I think I'm anything but empty. I'm hurt and alone and angry and sad and a thousand other things all at the same time. I guess it does feel kind of numbing all together, but I wouldn't for a second pass that off as "empty", that'd be the biggest lie I'd ever tell. Or maybe second biggest to all of the times I'd promised Amber "forever".

How foolish was I to think anything could last forever? Nothing does, not really. Not life, not love, not death, not really. Everything that begins ends, and even the entire world began once.

I'm not a religious person. I didn't grow up in a pew or a temple or beneath a cross, I grew up on a twin-sized mattress shaped as a race car, so I don't get any of that crap people say about "feeling" someone passing from this world into the next one. Hell, I don't even know that I believe in a next world for that matter. But I believed in it then, the former part at least, because I did; I felt it.

About an hour after I sought out the waiting room, during which time the girl from the other car sat still and unmoving which was probably the closest thing to comfort I'd felt all day, I knew there was no point elongating the inevitable. So I found Amber's mom, who was standing right where I'd left her, and we summoned a nurse.

In movies there's always this moment before the plug is pulled when you see the Alive One holding the Dead One's hand and right when the life leaves her you can see her fingers fall slack from the Alive One's grip, but it's not really like that. Amber is nothing but a computer telling her heart to beat and her lungs to pump, she doesn't have a brain, and the computer has more important things to worry about than to give power to digits. So when I'm holding her hand, even as the monitor is still beeping, marking her counterfeit life, her fingers are already slack. And freezing.

I hold one hand as Amber's mother holds the other. We'd called her dad frequently, telling him we could wait for him to get here, but he's on business in Canada. There wouldn't be the time. I can't help but reach out to him, impossibly sorry that he couldn't be here to witness the leaving of his daughter who is, really, already gone, while I stand in his place as the fraud brother to her fraud self.

The nurse is solemn, and I can't imagine how she's feeling either; making a living killing the dead doesn't sound like something easy to fall asleep with at night. She doesn't offer a word, which I am both thankful and remorseful for.

Since there is no physical difference in Amber's body after the deed is done if it weren't for the sudden hush that falls over each of her surrounding machines in turn, I don't think I would've known it happened. She was cold and still before and she was cold and still after, but then again, she was dead before and dead after; anybody can power a body through cords and electricity, though they can't keep a hold on her soul, which I know was long gone by that point.

However there was something; a different kind of shift. There wasn't a sudden whoosh in the air or anything Hollywood like that. It wasn't with a blast of cold air or a receding whisper that told me she was gone, really gone. It was a sinking in the pit of my own gut.

One second I was holding the hand of her imitated body and the next I no longer felt the point in it. It happened so fast, but all at once the last trace of anything left in my body that I'd been giving up in holding her hand evaporated like surface water and I was left alone without a reason to mount myself to this room at all.

You see, I didn't want to take that monumental One Last Look, because I know I had done that already last night when I'd glanced at her before she'd turned off the headlights and plunged us into the darkness that would lead to her eternal darkness. That was the Amber I wanted to look at one more time, not this plastered cold shadow of herself.

So I left, but I carried her with me.

I carried her with me so I'd have a reason to get out of bed tomorrow and the next day and the next day. I knew it wasn't fair, not in the least, that she'd been taken the way she did. I hated it. I was absolutely repulsed, but I couldn't scream about it. Because there was no point. She was dead. And no amount of screaming or hatred or laughing or love would ever make her not-dead, which was the only thing I wanted, so it didn't matter. None of it.

All that mattered, all that I had left, was what I carried with me. Which I think is the saddest reality about the entire thing- the entire world, even- that you could care so much and so intensely about something but still get it taken away and have nothing but the clothes on your back to remember it by.