Page 94 of Requiem

Gaynor can’t talk around her crying.

“Gaynor, please! For fuck sake! Tell me she isn’t dead!”

“She—sheisn’tdead.”

Relief. Breathtaking relief. I've never known anything like it. But I can tell from looking on Gaynor’s face that there’s something else. I get out of my seat, and my legs buckle. This will crush me. After everything, if she’s not going to make it…

“Explain what’s going on.Now. Use as few words as possible.”

Gaynor wipes her mouth with the back of one hand. She steps forward, placing her arm on the top of my shoulder. “Dr. Brighton managed to resect the lesion. The surgery was going well, but at some point, a vessel was nicked and there was a bleed. We don't know how bad it was, but Sorrell hasn't woken up yet.”

They won't let me see her. They won't let me go anywhere near the ICU ward. I threaten to break a security guard’s neck, at which point I'm told that if I don't calm down, I will be forcibly ejected from the hospital.

Dr. Brighton is nowhere to be found. Surprise sur-fucking-prise. I promise myself, the universe, and every false deity and god ever created by the fragile minds of men, that Dr. Ruth Brighton will not live to see another day if Sorrell hasn't regained consciousness in the next six hours.

I pace the hallways. I drink so much coffee that I give myself a panic attack, and then I have a complete fucking meltdown in the restrooms, hyperventilating into my hands, desperately trying to keep my shit together. This is not my first rodeo. I've been here before. How messed up is that? But just because I've been here before, doesn't make this any easier. There is no situation or reality where something like this is evereasy.

At five o'clock, ten hours after Sorrell first entered the operating room, I finally see Dr. Brighton marching her way down the corridor toward me. I leap out of my seat, the fires of hell blazing in my eyes. “Well? What’s going on? You'refinallycoming to give me an update?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Merchant. You seem to be blocking the exit.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m leaving for the day, Theo. Please step aside.”

Words fail me. I open my mouth, grappling with my tongue, trying to figure out which insult I want to hurl at her first. “What do you mean, you'releaving?”

“I have a birthday party to get to.”

“A birth—abirthday party? Are you out of your fuckingmind?”

“Sorrell called me in the middle of the night, and I dropped everything for her. Do you have any idea how long other patients have to wait to undergo a surgery like this? I have some patients on the East Coast who've been waiting months just for an assessment—”

“You fucked up,” I snap. “Just like I said you would. You went in there blind and hacked at her brain like a fucking psychopath. You don't give a shit about any of these people, do you?”

“I assure you, I do give a shit about my patients. I care about them very much. There were complications with Sorrell’s surgery. It's not uncommon for issues to arise once we open up people’s brains. You know this already. I'm not a butcher. I'm a neurosurgeon, at the top of my game. I get paid extraordinarily well for what I do. There’s a reason for that. I’m one of the only people in the country who can perform this type of surgery, and I won't be spoken to like some sort of monster.”

“You opened up a fucking vessel, for fuck’s sake. That’s a rookie error. And now you're just sauntering out of here to go to a fuckingpartylike you work a goddamn nine-to-five. You're not going anywhere. You need to tell me exactly what's happening, and then you need to get back in there and figure out how to fix whatever it is that you broke.”

“In case you've forgotten,Iam the one with a medical degree and twenty years of experience behind me. No mistakes were made. The procedure was executed to the letter. Sorrell needs some time—”

“You’ve said that before!”

“And she was fine! I don't have to justify my decisions to you, and I certainly don't have to justify my actions in the operating room. You’re not Sorrell’s next of kin. You're not her husband. You're not even a blood relative, and even if you were, thereisnothing to report beyond what you have already been told. Now, you can wait here all damn night if you like and perhaps Gaynor will give you an update out of the goodness of her heart, but I have a birthday party to get to and I'm not going to be late. There’s nothing else for me to do here until Sorrell’s situation changes. Now get the hell out of my way.”

I don't sleep. How can I? Gaynor brings me some crappy hospital food when dawn breaks, but I don't eat it. I sit in the waiting room, picking at my nails until they bleed, trying to make sense of this situation. Other kids go to high school. They fall in love. They have normal relationships. They fight, and they fuck, and they fall in love, and they either stay together or they don't. They go off to college, and they finish their degrees, and they either get married or they don't. Either way, they don't find themselves in and out of hospitals, trying to make it from one day to the next, their hearts shredded in a meat grinder over and over again, just when it looks like things might be getting better.

I fucking hate this.

God help me, but a part of me just wants to leave. It wants me to get up and walk out of here, to catch a ride back to the airport, to go home and to never look back. This isn't the first time I’ve felt this way. I'm a human being. Sure, I’ve thought about bailing on this mess a million times over the past couple of years. There is a limit to how much pain and suffering any one person can take, and I've hit that wall too many times to count. I have climbed the wall, or smashed my way through it, or dug beneath it with my bare fucking hands, though, and I have never given up.

When I fell in love with Sorrell, I knew there were consequences. I am neither fickle nor inconsistent. Once I told her that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, that was it for me. She is the be all and end all of my existence, and, just like I told her back in that bathroom at Toussaint, I will navigate all seven circles of hell to be there for her, by her side, when she needs me.

That doesn't mean I've got to like any of this.

At ten in the morning, Lani calls and leaves a voicemail, asking why we didn’t make it back to the academy yesterday. At three in the afternoon, my mother leaves me a voicemail, telling me that an administrator at the hospital called on Dr. Brighton’s behalf, requesting that she speak with me regarding my aggressive behavior. At the end of the voicemail, my mother tells me that she thinks it might be time for me to come home. She's been trying to get me to move on and go to college ever since Sorrell was first injured. The woman doesn't understand love. If she did, she'd never ask this of me.

Dr. Brighton.

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