48. Holding on
ALEX
The hospital at Erudite headquarters smells like chemicals and antiseptic, almost gritty in my nose. Erudite doctors and nurses and random passers-by all stand in frightened clusters trying to make sense of the collection of memories that have only just now resurfaced in their heads. Others try to be more composed but there is evident perplexity in their eyes as they tend to the frantic wounded. I walk around them just as frantically looking for my family.
When I do find them I almost wish I never did.
Everybody's quiet with blank looks and long faces. Jake is sitting slumped in the chair with his head in his hands. My father has his arms crossed and his back against the wall while my mother is pacing back and forth like Anna does when she's nervous. Chris is quiet, hunching himself into a corner and Annabelle is crying into her lap. It's a dismal scene, to say the least. I don't recognize any of it.
We are the Eatons. We are the family that has everything we could ever need, everything we could ever want. We are the family that everybody wishes they had. All of Dauntless could be up in flames and we would still find a reason to be content. Our reason, I realize now, was always that we had each other. And I only realize it now because now life threatens to take one of us away.
We just stopped a madman and saved the city. We should be shouting and jumping and drinking. Yet here we are, wrecked, and none of us can breathe.
I feel ridiculously self-conscious when I walk into the room although no one is looking at me. I take a seat beside Annabelle and as I do she looks up at me with tear-stained eyes and whispers, "It should have been me," and it feels like there's a fifty pound weight hanging from my chest.
"Don't say that," I whisper back, because it should have been me. I caused this. I pull Anna into me and she rests her head on my chest.
I've lost count of the amount of times we've danced with death in the past three days alone, but never in any of those times did I feel the way I do now. Is it that I was so arrogant to believe that we were untouchable? That we could take on a city and walk out unscathed? No. It's not that. It's that I had already decided that if anyone were to die at the end of this war, it should be me.
"But-," Anna starts. "No," I say softly, shaking my head, cutting her off. "No." And it's all that I can say.
Just then the door opens and everybody jumps to their feet in an instant. My uncle Caleb walks out and my chest hurts. Every step he takes ties a knot in my stomach, making me feel sick all of a sudden. Never in my life did I ever think that I could be afraid to the point of physical pain.
He looks at us with troubled eyes and we all stare back, holding our breaths.
There's a crippling nervousness when you're waiting for news that could change your whole life. It's almost like you stop breathing and your heart stops beating, like you're suspended in mid-air. Everything stops. Everything.
"Talk to us, Caleb," my father says quietly.
My uncle holds the back of his neck and he says, "The bullet didn't hit any vital organs, but it nicked a major artery. She lost a significant amount of blood… and her heart stopped. We were able to bring her back and repair the artery, but…," he pauses.
"But what, Caleb?" my mother asks. He doesn't answer. "But what?" she screams.
He swallows. "She was in a hypoxic state for longer than we would have liked. It's difficult to determine the extent of the damage at this point, but she is in a coma. We just have to do our best and see how she evolves from here," he says.
"When will she wake up?" my mother whimpers.
My uncle steps forward and places a hand on my mother's shoulder and says, "Beatrice, they don't know if she will."
And I feel a sudden throbbing and the room starts to spin around me. It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.
"Let me go to her!" my mother yells.
"You can't go in yet, Beatrice," my uncle says.
Still, my mother slips past my uncle and runs toward the door, but there's a large man blocking her path. She stands in front of him, sizing him up. He'd be a fool to underestimate my mother because of her size. She could drop him to the floor easily, despite the foot and seventy pounds he has on her.
She tries to push past him but my father grabs her tight by the waist and she thrashes in his arms. "Let me go!" she screams as she fights him. Then her thrashing turns into yelling and then sobbing and then she collapses, my father with her.
"I just got her back," I hear Jake whisper behind me.
I feel my heartbeat accelerate inside my chest. I feel my muscles stiffen all at once. I feel my nerves and my body shutting down, but before I collapse, I run. I blink away the blur in my eyes and I run as far away from there as I can. I run back to the last place where I felt safe, and like a child afraid of the monsters in my closet I throw myself on my old bed and I hide under my covers. And for the second time in my adult life, I cry.
My father told me once that when something went wrong and it would hurt too much he would go out on the roof and try to replace the pain with fear. I think I understand that now. Fear is a momentary and superficial feeling. You can tame it, control it, or even hide it. But pain, the kind of pain that hurts your heart and your soul, it's relentless and profound. It controls you.
So that night I climb up on the roof of the Dauntless compound. I swallow hard as the wind begins to hit my face and the city below me comes into view. I walk as close to the edge as I dare to go. Not long after, I hear footsteps behind me and then I see the silhouette of my father standing beside me. Together we look out at the city for a while.
"Is it helping?" he asks finally.
"Barely," I say. He places a comforting hand on my shoulder. I don't deserve it. "This is my fault."
"This is not your fault, Alex," he says.
"Of course it is. This only happened because I agreed to start a war because I couldn't get what I wanted." Like an obnoxious child.
My father looks at me and says, "You know that if you hadn't met Abigail when you did, we wouldn't have attacked. Victor would have released that death serum, killing us and every other Divergent in this city. We wouldn't have known what hit us. You saved this city in more ways than one, Alex. And your sister is proud of you. We all are."
But I didn't save the city. Chris did.
"And if she doesn't wake up?"
"Alex-"
"If she doesn't wake up," I cut him off before he says what I know he'll say. "How could I ever be happy?" I ask, staring back at him. We all say how strong Rae is. We all choose to believe that she'll come back from this. But deep down inside of us all, as far down as we've pushed it, there's the painful truth that things may not work out the way we hope they will.
"Because she'd want you to be. And because you deserve to be," my father says to me. But do I really? Do I not already have more than I need? After all the things that have been given to me, and I want to be happy on top of it all?
"What about Jake?" I ask. "Doesn't he deserve to be with the woman he loves too?"
My father doesn't answer. Because we both know the answer to that question. Instead, he stares out into the blackness of the night and shaking his head he softly says, "Sometimes life just does what it wants to us… Sometimes the son of a bitch can be cruel."
That night I don't sleep. I only close my eyes and pretend to so that Abby would. I awake to what should have been my first morning of freedom, but all I feel is caged by guilt. Nobody blames me, but I do. Every time I look at Abby it makes me wonder if I've traded my sister for her and it makes me hate myself because Rae deserves better, because Abby deserves better.
And Abby tries to comfort me, she really does, but the tighter she holds me the more I realize that if Rae never wakes up Jake may never have this, and it makes me feel like I may have stolen everything he holds precious from him. When I leave my room and I see the agony on my mother's face it makes me feel like I may have blemished my family forever.
There's no escape. And one long, hard day becomes a long, hard week. It's like I'm trapped in an everlasting realm of torment and I refuse to be comforted. I don't think I deserve to be.
Abby's sister, Sarah, is brought over to the house after she got her memories back, although she doesn't remember much at all. Just that Abigail's father had died in the attack protecting them, making sure they had escaped. I guess that's a good death, a meaningful one. It seems to comfort Abigail somehow to know that her father never abandoned her, but that he loved her and died protecting her even before she was born.
My grandmother has moved in too. She helps around the house and does most of the cooking since most days my mom doesn't seem to want to do much of anything. Nobody does these days. The house feels full and some days I feel smothered. Other days when we sit together, we sit so closely to try and ease the crippling emptiness that Rae's absence provokes.
I try to keep myself busy. I walk the compound halls and hope that nobody recognizes me. I don't want to be asked how I am. I don't want to be asked about Rae. Most of all I don't want to be congratulated. After the Dauntless' memories were restored they saw me as some kind of hero. And I guess in a way I am. But I don't want to be a hero. I certainly don't feel like a hero.
My father and Zeke are out everyday releasing the antidote, faction by faction, trying to calm everybody down. The city is in an uproar, but for what it's worth, it's the good kind of chaos; the kind of chaos that brings people together and forces them to put their differences aside. Soon they'll be able to enforce a new system, one where we'll be free to choose if we want to live in a faction or not. And the existing faction manifestos will be altered to lessen the possibility of future problems. No sixteen year old will ever again have to feel the way that Abby felt when she stood in front of those bowls.
Day after day the future of this city looks brighter and brighter. And that's a good thing. That's something I should be proud of. That's something Rae would want me to be proud of. I'm not sure if that should comfort me but it doesn't. Not yet at least.
It's hard. But I know that she wouldn't have it any other way. I know that she'd fight for me and jump in front of a bullet to save Annabelle all over again if she had to. I know she wouldn't want me to blame myself. And after I think about it for long enough I realize that I don't want her to wake up for me. I don't want her to wake up so that I can escape the pain, the guilt, the emptiness of losing her. I want her to wake up because she deserves to.
I kept waiting for my honourable moment, but maybe there's no one big moment in our lives in which we become honourable people. Maybe it's the thousands of little things; the simple decisions we make every day that get us there. And if there is anybody in this world who has made both small and great honourable decisions over and over again, it's Rae.
They move her from Erudite to Dauntless when she is stable enough. I go to see her every day but nothing ever changes. Every time I go in a million memories flood my mind. The day she taught me to jump on a train. The day she taught me how to throw a punch. The way she smiles at me when she calls me baby brother. The way she flicks my ear when I say something stupid.
Yesterday when I walked in her right hand was stretched out and I held it tight. I slid my thumb back and forth over the blazing sun tattooed there. It's like she was reminding me somehow.
Rae always says that after every sunrise there's a sunset. And after every sunset there's a sunrise. That life gets bad but then it gets better again. She says that in the hard times all we have to do is hold on until the sunrise, but no matter how long it takes, it will come. So I'm holding on.
I'm waiting.
A/N: One more chapter left :(
