I stop short.
She says nothing.
In fact, she isn’t reacting at all; she’s lying completely still.
Her chest isn’t moving.
Her eyes are empty, the whites strangely bloodshot.
“Emmy?” I try to say, but my voice sounds odd, as though coming from far away. “Emmy, can you hear me?”
She doesn’t reply.
I look down at her. Her white T-shirt is dirty and dusty, and her jeans are ripped and stained, too. The small gold heart pendant she usually wears around her neck—a baptism gift from her grandfather—has fallen out of the neck of her T-shirt.
I put my hand on her arm and her skin is warm, and I think that she must be OK, that she’s just in pain, that that’s why she isn’t replying, and I shake her and say her name again, and again she doesn’t reply, and I shake her harder and her head starts to loll from side to side like a doll’s, and now I shout at her because all I want is for her to reply, to just say something—say something.
“EMMY, FUCKING SAY SOMETHING!”
Silence.
“Please,” I whimper, and now someone tears me away and shouts:
“Emmy?!”
I didn’t even hear him coming. He’s shoved me aside but it doesn’t matter, because the whole world is shut in a giant bubble and I hear nothing and see nothing, and my field of vision has shrunk to a pinprick and in it all I see are her empty, staring eyes.
“Emmy?” Robert whispers, and he stops shaking her, and when he says her name again it’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard.
Because his voice just …
… breaks.
He can’t turn around.
I can’t see his face.
“What…” I hear from behind me as I sit there kneeling on the dusty wooden floor. It seems to be coming from very far away.
“Oh,” is all Max says, and it’s such a small sound. He says it again.
“Oh.”
We all go very, very still. As though we’re trying to imitate Emmy as she lies there.
I reach out and touch the exposed gap of ankle over her muddy white Converse sneakers.
Her skin has started to cool now.
NOW
It’s Max who reaches out and closes her eyes.
Something about the gesture seems so final that it bursts the bubble around me. The world surges back into me.
Robert stands up sharply and walks off, throws open the doors to our right, and disappears into the classroom. I make to follow him, but Max stops me.
“Let him…” he starts, but he doesn’t finish the sentence.
I look at Emmy again. I can’t stop looking at her. It’s like a disgusting instinct I have, a need to always confirm what I already know, again and again.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper to myself. I say it again and again, probe it. “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”
Is this what shock feels like?
I reach over and grab Max’s arm with a desperate strength that I know must hurt, but his expression doesn’t change. It’s vacant, just as expressionless as his voice, and I’m struck by a sudden need to make him react, make him feel what I’m feeling. To scratch him, scream in his face.
He looks at me with a sleepwalker’s eyes.
“I didn’t realize this would happen,” I force from myself, hoarse and snotty-nosed, and now I retch: “I didn’t realize, I don’t get how this could happen, I didn’t see how badly she was hurt, that—that her ribs had punctured her lungs, or that she’d damaged her spine, or hit her head, or whatever it was, I just…” I let go of his arm, feel my body start to shake like it’s cramping up, and now he seems to finally wake up, and through the fog I see him moving, feel him gently take hold of me, and I want to shake him off me but at the same time I just want someone to hold the pieces of me together.
Like Emmy always used to do.
“We should…” Max begins, his voice shaky and thick with tears, “we should cover her with something, so that she isn’t just…”
I dry my eyes. Try to force my breaths to calm, then pull back slightly from Max.
“I’ll check,” I say. I don’t look at her; I can’t anymore.
I walk over to the room I came in through. The doors are wide open now, after Robert and Max stormed through them. I look out of the window, and for a split second I picture myself jumping out of it, but the image has no real power.
Is it possible to turn back time? Just a few weeks. To delete that email, stop myself from finding her new email address.
To go back to that moment when I paused, unsure, my fingers hovering over the keyboard, and whisper in my ear:
Don’t ask her to get involved. Don’t offer her the job. Just tell her you’re sorry. Tell her you’re doing better now. Tell her you’ll always be grateful for everything she did.
My bottom lip trembles and I bite it hard, bite until I feel the skin break and the taste of blood fills my mouth, until that little red bead of pain gives me something to focus on.
My shaky legs take me over to the bed in the far corner of the room. The sheet is still pulled down, and the faded, dried-on bloodstains make the nausea rise in my belly.
I can’t cover Emmy with those, I just can’t. Nothing with blood, nothing to remind me of what’s happened, of the brutal reality of our bodies. I don’t care if it’s blood from a child’s nose after tumbling in the playground, or the blood of that newborn’s mother.
Emmy deserves to be shrouded in something clean. And whole.
Shrouded.
My mind catches and sticks on the word, while my eyes land on the small cabinet in the corner. It looks like it could contain sheets. I walk up to it and look at the elegant door, but there’s no handle. A small lock gleams mockingly at me.
For one frenzied second I want to kick the cabinet to pieces, but I calm
