Page 73 of Bronx

“Why do you want me to?”

24

Karma

His question hangs heavy in the air as I’m literally breaking into a nervous sweat.

“Actually, I want you to disengage the stop button.”

Bronx’s brows squish together like two worried little caterpillars.

“Are you claustrophobic, Karma?”

“A little,” I admit reluctantly.

“Shit, why didn’t you say so?”

He flips the emergency switch, and we start moving again.

“All I’m trying to say is that I have no expectations from you just because I’m looking for your brother and you’re staying at my place. You don’t owe me a damn thing. So I don’t want you thinking that you have to run away from me, and you damn sure don’t have to run back to him.”

Of course, Bronx thinks my reaction is entirely about him and what happened in his house, but that’s because there are so many things about me he doesn’t know.

That he’ll never know.

I flinched when he pointed at me because I’m on edge and because I’m always nervous in hospitals. They are my least favorite place in the world. They’re supposed to be institutions where you seek healing, yet in my experience, all they seem to be are frigid buildings where people suffer and die. I call them death motels. A place where people check in but rarely check out.

When I was barely five-years-old, my Mother overdosed in the bathtub. I have a distinct memory of it because it happened on the evening of my first day in kindergarten. During the ride in the ambulance, the EMTs worked fervently to resuscitate her, but it was no use. My Mom was probably already gone in the ambulance but was pronounced dead after we arrived at the hospital, which is why it is the earliest association I made between hospitals and pain and death.

Then there was Carla.

After my mother’s passing, Lev and I became wards of the state and were thrust into the foster care system. They separated us because my first social worker thought I was young enough to get placed into a permanent home. She was wrong.

In one of the few stable homes I was ever placed in (and there weren’t many), I became fast friends with another foster kid. She was a cool nine years of age to my eight and we shared a bedroom that had pink frilly curtains and a white bunk bed. But my foster sister, Carla, was always sick and while I didn’t understand much about her illness at the time, I soon learned that she suffered from something that all the adults would whisper about — leukemia.

Carla was dying from cancer and her treatments were failing to work. She often spent short stints at various hospitals and I would hold my breath the entire time she was there, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Until one day, it finally did.

The spring before my ninth birthday, Carla suffered a relapse and died three months later. Where? You guessed it–in Children’s hospital.

And finally, there was the last time I was in a hospital. I was sixteen years old. That time I was in an emergency room with a social worker and a police officer.

I was the patient.

Who’d been violently assaulted.

But unknowingly washed away the evidence.

That’s why I feel almost physically ill that I’m in a hospital again. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my stomach is having a visceral reaction to the sterile smell of this place.

It remembers.

It wants out.

And I’m going to vomit all over Bronx in this hot metal box if I don’t calm myself down. I’m here for a reason.

“I’m not running away from you,” I assure him.