I looked over at Dr. Seeley. Her mouth was set in a thin line, but she wasn’t looking at me or Alana’s mother, or even Alana herself. She was reading the monitor, glancing between whatever was happening on the small screen and the lower half of Alana’s body.
“Nurse Jackie,” she murmured, so quietly that I wasn’t sure how anyone heard her. But, we all did, loud and clear. “Please clear the room.”
“Wh-what?” I asked, glancing back down at Alana only to find that she’d fallen unconscious.
Suddenly, Alessandro and Marco were beside me, each grabbing at my good arm, my waist, my hands, to pull me toward the door.
I felt as though I was witnessing a movie of my life, standing outside of my own body as I watched one of the nurses, maybe nurse Jackie, tug Sherry Rhodes away from her daughter and out of the room. I fought against my brothers, eyes wide as more nurses flooded into the room, carrying all kinds of machines I couldn’t begin to identify. The doctor was barking orders admist the chaos.
“Luca, come on,” growled Alessandro. “We need to get you out of here.”
“No!” I shouted, struggling against my two brothers’ grips. But, I was still weak from surgery, and they were strong even on a bad day. They dragged me out of the room.
The last thing I saw before the door slammed in my face was a nurse standing over Alana, hands raised as if she was about to begin chest compressions.
As if her heart was no longer beating.
My head spun and the fiery pain returned, roaring through my entire body this time.
I collapsed in the hallway, my brother’s struggling to keep my head from smacking onto the tile. More people rushed down the hall to Alana’s room. Sherry was somewhere beyond my line of sight, sobbing so loud I thought it might shake the foundation of the entire building.
But, all I could was blink, staring at the linoleum inches from my face.
Blink. Inhale. Exhale.
Anna Lorena Varasso was born at 3:26 in the morning on that fateful Monday morning. Miraculously, the rain, which had been pouring down onto the city for weeks, somehow stopped that day. Sunlight poured in through the nursery windows as the nurses cleaned away the birth goo and dressed the little girl up in a small pink onesie; the one that her mother had packed for her to wear when she brought her home from the hospital.
Two days later, we buried Alana Rhodes at her family’s plot sixteen miles north of the city in a peaceful place, dotted with trees and gardens and flowering vines.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I hadn’t felt anything since Alana fell unconscious in her hospital bed. I went about the motions methodically, doing everything that was expected of me.
I listened and nodded when the doctor explained maternal death rate statistics. How uncommon it was. How the autopsy revealed that she’d had a heart defect not a single person had known about, not even Sherry Rhodes herself. I was quiet and patient even as the doctor explained how they’d managed to keep Alana’s heart beating long enough to perform a cesarean section, long enough to deliver our daughter, long enough to cut the cord and declare her perfectly, wonderfully healthy. They hadn’t been able to keep her heart beating for much longer after that.
I made phone calls, arranged the casket, paid for the floral arrangements and the priest and all the other things that you never think are needed for a funeral until you, yourself are laying a loved one in the ground. Left and right, various family members offered their help, but I brushed them off.
I went about my life as if I were a robot. My movements were slow, almost mechanical. My mind was numb, my heart even number.
The only thing that reminded me I was alive was Anna’s big blue eyes, perfect copies of her mother’s. She was a surprisingly calm, easygoing baby, considering who her parents were. She simply slept in my arms as I went about my list of tasks, only offering a gentle whimper when she was hungry or needed to be changed.
Aunt Diana offered to take care of her. Even my brothers, the least tender-hearted people I knew, tried to convince me to let them watch over her while I got some rest, while I collected my thoughts, while I tried to process everything that had happened, while I tried to find the scattered pieces of my life and my future and put them together into some pathetic semblance of what I was supposed to have.
But, I wouldn’t let go of Anna. She was the one thing keeping me from doing Jackson Randolph’s job right for him and putting a bullet through my head.
The memorial, the funeral, the wake. I attended them all. I accepted the hugs and the condolences and the words of wisdom. But still, I felt nothing.
I felt nothing even as I packed up her things and brought them to her mother’s house. Sherry Rhodes had taken to sleeping on her living room floor, curled around old photo albums. I couldn’t look at them, couldn’t bear to see the familiar snapshots of Alana’s life with her wickedly charming smile and glittering eyes. So, I simply stowed Alana’s things away in Sherry’s attic, cooked her a few meals to store in the fridge, and went on my way.
I felt nothing even when my father locked Valentina Varasso’s engagement ring away in the family safe again.
I felt nothing until one day, two months later, on a brilliantly sunny day in June, I found myself wandering through Fairmount Park. The grass had just been cut and the summer heat made everything smell both warm and fresh and so beautiful that I could hardly believe the entire world was simply allowed to go on continuing to exist while Alana Rhodes didn’t.
That day, out of nowhere, the memories starting coming back to me. They stabbed into me from all directions, leaving me paralyzed, clutching the trunk of a nea
rby maple tree for support.
Three Years Ago
Alana’s laughter was like music: melodic, hypnotic, intoxicating. It made me want to laugh alongside her, and laughing wasn’t something I did very often.