"The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone."
- Rae Armantrout
The whole way to the hospital, Theo holds his hand.
Luke's in and out of consciousness, seeing things. Seeing light bounce off the insides of his eyelids, watching it sweep across in beams that vanish into darkness. He sees rain. Water droplets dot the windscreen, obscuring the dense forest beyond, fracturing it into tiny pieces, like a miniature house in a snow globe. Hundreds of snow globes. Littered like confetti into little speckles, like pinpricks of blood on his cheeks, on his arms, on the crooks of his fingers.
He doesn't see Nell.
But Theo can feel her. The skin of her palm whispers, dry over the veins of Luke's hand. They stand out, carved from his flesh, but soft, and yielding to the pressure of her touch. And just as she feels the blood pulse beneath her fingers, she feels Nell. Warm. Forgiving. Loving. Everything she hadn't felt in Shirley's basement, she feels flood her now, through Luke.
And under this blanket of love, she feels him, too. Alive. Scared, and slipping away.
She doesn't say anything.
Shirley does, though.
It begins as they pull away from the house. A steady stream of expletives and prayers – it's not her thing, and her pleas sound more like negotiations. Reluctantly afforded compromises.
She gets louder, as she drives herself deeper into anger.
She curses at traffic lights, barks at Theo for the next turn, the next street, the next short cut. Shirley holds back the silence.
Somewhere after Amherst, but before the streets become solid asphalt, snaking out of foggy banks, and pooling yellow streetlights, somewhere around there, she turns her words toward Luke.
"What were you thinking? Why would you do this? Why did you do this, Luke?"
And Theo, holding his hand, skin on skin for the first time in years, says, "He didn't."
"I can't -" Shirley says, "I can't see the road. What's the next street?"
The windshield wipers flick back and forth, beating out a heavy staccato at the corner of her eyes. She swipes at her cheeks, warm and stiff with tears and salt.
"What am I looking for?" she demands.
"It's the next left." Theo says.
And Luke murmurs, "Save me."
The doctors say it's hours before he'll wake up, and it's hours before Steven, his suit black with rain, and haunted by the grief of hundreds funerals, finally finds them again.
They tell him what the doctors said. He nods when they relate their confusion, their caution, and their hopeful outlook. It's strange, apparently, for such a large dose of strychnine to be so uniformly harmless.
But that was before Shirley corrected them. Before she explained about the prick in his arm, and the inflamed veins, and the blood and foam bursting from his mouth, like a creature, like a parasite, or a carrion beetle, feasting on the liquefying innards of its host. It wasn't harmless.
"He died," she said. The she'd screamed it at them, because it didn't seem like they heard her. "He died! And we had to pound on his fucking chest, and scrape the blood and vomit from his mouth, to keep him from that place."
Still, the doctors said, it was a miracle.
Steven nods. He keeps nodding, taking it in, trying to digest it all. He saw it, too. And after he went back, he'd pushed the door open again, and standing on the threshold, looked again for Luke.
He stares at him now.
"He's okay?"
Shirley nods, and Theo snaps, "He's a fucking cat."
Shirley looks at her, and at her hand, back in gloves, but still gripping his above the cover, and she moves to take a seat on the other side.
Steven follows, and they all look down at Luke.
"Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb."
"What's that?"
"Shakespeare," Steven mutters. "Just something mom used to say."
"Mom used to envision us dead?"
"No, I -" Steven hesitates. "What's wrong with his chest?"
He waves his hands over Luke's body. He hasn't touched him yet, not since the house. He doesn't want to feel that horrible, empty stillness beneath him, so he waves his hands over his brother now, as though some complicated incantation is being spilled from his fingertips, and woven into purpose.
"A rib," Theo says. "You broke it, at the house. You or Shirley."
"Oh, God."
"Doesn't matter which. Doesn't matter. You saved him," she says.
They all still. They all hardly breathe, but Luke's chest rises and falls in even swells. One, two, three, four, five, six -
"Did you see -?"
"Nell."
Shirley is so firm in this. Her eyes are glass hard, and all Steven's wishes and dreams, all his ghosts flash over, and are reflected back by her eyes.
"We all did," says Theo.
"We all did," he agrees.
Then Shirley asks, "Where's dad?"
Steven shrugs, and says, "I left him at the house."
The heart monitor punctuates the silence, and so does Theo.
"Punch."