AN-Alright, I wrote this a while ago, it's a One Tree Hill one-parter. It's basically about what happened when Peyton's mother died, and how Peyton still feels about it years later. So…enjoy
"Get her out," I shout over the clasping thunder, "get her out now!" Everything becomes a blur in my vision from the pouring rain as I force myself to knock Red, my best friend, out of my way. The paramedics were in no obligation of showing up anytime soon from the looks of it, someone had to take their place. I don't know how I reach inside the car, jerking open the door, just to see my wife still wide-eyed, strapped in her seatbelt just as she should be.
Jesus…God, no…
Red comes back from when I shoved him off, laying his hands on my wife, MY wife. Before I know what I'm doing, I punch him, hard, sending him sprawling backwards toward the pavement. "Fuck, Larry!" he says, holding his jaw. I don't notice my other friend, Frank, come up to Red's side.
"It's Anna. Red, it's Anna."
Those simple words were all it took for Red to understand. They tried to hold me back, doing the work for me, but it's my baby, my baby, and I'm not doing anything to help. I blink, for what seems to be a second, and I open my eyes to see Red and Frank loading my wife onto the ambulance. I hear the paramedics, but don't understand anything they're saying. All I can see is them trying to shut the doors to the ambulance before I stop them. "I'm her husband." I manage to say, desperately. The two paramedics nod, motioning me inside quickly. I watch as they tip back the bottom of her chin, clearly about to intubate, and I fall apart.
"Thirty-Six year old female, MVA, severe head injury," I hear them say into the radio, calling in for our ETA. The next sound heard is the cardiac monitor blacking out, my heart seeming to stop itself. I feel worthless, all I can do, watching them tear open my wife's shirt, cutting through her lace bra as if it were cheap cloth. "Get the paddles! Start CPR!" they all talk at once, all other sounds muffled out of my head. With three shocks, the pulse is weak, weak, but back, bradycardia with ventricular escape beats. "Alright! Bag her!"
Before I know it, we're in the ambulance bay. I reach out to touch her, but my arm is snatched away. "Don't even think about it…" one of them warns. They will not let me into the trauma room, and I sit motionlessly as I wait to hear the fate of my lifetime companion. I see my daughter rushing in with Red and Frank trailing behind her.
"Where is she, what happened!" the curly blonde asks frantically.
What do I tell her? That she's not breathing independently? That her EKG flatlined? "Pey, your mom was in a car accident." I manage to choke, watching her eyes widen with worry and tears. The first falls down her cheek and they keep flowing. I pull her into my lap and cry with her, sitting there, rocking back and forth as time goes on as slowly as possible.
Peyton eventually falls asleep, worn out, ready to go home. I however can do nothing near sleeping. It's not even an option. I finally see the doctor come slowly out of the room, that certain look coming across his face.
Oh God…please…no
"I'm sorry Larry," he says soberly, "she's not responding to noxious stimuli."
"Wh-What does that mean?"
"Anna's head hit the window with great force, Mr. Sawyer. It caused a fatal head injury. A respirator is keeping her breathing right now, but she's not showing any signs of neurological activity…she's brain dead, I'm sorry," he says, "Really, I am."
They bring my mom back down to us after the donated organs are all removed. I am the last to go in, following my grandmother and my father-the people who needed to say goodbye. I walk in, seeing my dad sit next to her hospital bed. A tube feeds down her throat, a machine breathing for her. It is up to us to turn it off. I sit down on the edge of the bed and pick up my mother's hand, still warm to the touch, still soft inside of mine. All the times I have spent wondering what would happen in this situation, and I'm still completely at a loss. "Daddy…," I choke tearfully, "I can't do this."
"Sweetheart…she's not here. It's the machine keeping her alive. What makes mommy, mommy is already gone." I turn to him, burying my tiny face into his chest.
"Bu-but she was-wasn-t suppose-ed t-to…" I sob.
I look toward my mother again, and notice my dad is right. There is nothing but a shell. There is no energy to the lines of her face, there is a slack absence to her muscles. "Ok-Okay…" I sob, taking a deep breath. I put my hand on my mother's chest as my dad, trembling, flips off the respirator. I rub her skin on her hands in circles, as if it would be easier for me. When the monitor flatlines, I wait to see a change. And then, I feel it, as her heart stops beating beneath my palm-that tiny loss of rhythm, that hollow calm, that utter loss.
In the English language, there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for children who lose just one parent.
Peyton-2004
There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for one month. That after forty-two days, you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk, take down her writing from the fridge, turn over a portrait as you pass-only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, just like the way we used to measure her birthdays.
For a long time after her death, my father claimed to see Anna in the night sky. Sometimes it was the wink of her eye, sometimes the shape of her profile. He insisted that stars were people who were so well loved that they were traced into constellations, to live forever.
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off of a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty. There were times I stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not listen to my father crying, and to muffle my own tears. There were the weeks that my dad would work all day so he wouldn't have to come home to a house that was now way too big for us.
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left the world, you realize YOU'RE still in it. And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.
AN-I may actually continue this as soon as I figure out where to start out from. Hope you liked it.
-Emily