“Ooo-kay,” the nurse says. “Try to stay quiet. She needs to rest.”
I know she needs to rest,I want to snap, but I’m not going to snap at these nurses. They’re keeping Ava and everyone like her alive, and they’re seeing the ugliest aspects of this whole thing. I’m far from sheltered from what’s going on in the world right now, and I respect these nurses like a lot of people respect the work and sacrifice of people in the military. I’m convinced that these battle-battered souls are going to end up enduring a separate pandemic of PTSD after all this shit is over, the likes of which we’ve only seen in those aforementioned military service people.
So I offer this nurse a simple and respectful, “Yes, ma’am.”
Ava continues to sleep while I sit in the courtyard with an espresso and a cigarette. I watch her struggle to breathe amidst her slumber and notice that it’s causing me to eye the smoldering cigarette warily.
I should quit smoking.
If for no other reason than the anxiety-inducing idea of a virus going around that makes people unable to breathe. In another turn-of-events that is the hellscape of this year, the world is in a state of chaos and uprising that’s unrelated to the pandemic after a cop killed a guy by kneeling on his neck for nearly ten minutes, and the poor guy died trying to holler that he couldn’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
It seems like a lot of people can’t breathe right now for all sorts of reasons, and I’m a lucky—ha ha—bastard for not having any trouble breathing at all, ever. But the idea of all these people dying due to lack of breath is starting to get to me—particularly watching Ava struggle to involuntarily drag in oxygen while she sleeps—is making me feel like a flippant, ungrateful, privileged piece of shit.
I really should quit smoking.
Snuffing out the cigarette, I down the last of the espresso and go back inside.
I find Piper heaving the grocery bags from the front entryway, through the house, and into the kitchen, and I decide to help her.
“Heya, Luck,” she greets me passively while I pick up a couple of bags with one hand, still holding the phone with the other. “You don’t gotta do that. I got it.”
“Got nothing better to do right now, darlin’,” I mumble.
We silently carry the bags into the kitchen and set up the sanitation assembly line. I sterilize everything, and Piper puts it away. All the while my phone is propped up against an empty crystal vase on the center of the large, granite-topped kitchen island. Ava’s still snoozing away, struggling to breathe, but managing it anyway.
“Is that Ava?” Piper’s voice breaks through the silence of our work after a couple of minutes. She moves to stand next to me and eyes the screen.
“Yeah,” I answer as neutrally as I can.
Piper sighs and knits her light brown brows. “Poor little babe. What a nightmare.”
“Yeah,” I say again.
She rubs my back and smooches my cheek, and then we go back to our work.
I stare at the screen while wiping random items with disinfectant, and everything in me hurts. I can’t do anything to help her, and I hate it. Despite being born Catholic by default and spending my earliest years in a Catholic orphanage, I don’t really believe in God, but I find myself mentally murmuring to St. Catherine of Siena, one of the patron saints of nurses. I think of her because she lived during a plague, and who better to understand this shitstorm than her, right?
Just help her breathe, for God’s sake, I plead in my mind, which isn’t a very respectful way to address a saint, I know, but my desperation is at an all-time high.I love her. I need her. She deserves more of a life than the short one she’s had. Throw me a friggin’ bone here and just let her live.
It all feels pretty pointless as Piper and I finish up with the groceries.
But then...hope.
Ava stirs.
It starts as just her nestling her head deeper into the pillow and tilting it to one side, her pretty little hands, riddled with IVs and tubes, tugging at the blanket and pulling it closer to her chin, but I freeze and stare expectantly. Movement in her eyelids follows; a deep flinch followed by a series of more subtle ones. Then her slender shoulders shift like she can’t get comfortable. One of her hands shakily goes to her closed eyes, and she rubs one eyelid with the tips of her fingers.
And then, a tiny little mewl; one that sounds a lot like when Piper was extricating the little shards of glass from Ava’s back. That night when I let myself start falling.
“Ava?” the nurse says. “How are you, hon?”
Another mewl, and then a quiet moan, and then her eyes blink open.
They’re glassy and unfocused, but seeing them again after so long causes me to involuntarily cross myself in a salute to St. Catherine before I pick up the phone to stare intently at the screen.
“I don’t feel well,” Ava mumbles with a little hitch in her throat.
