Page 118 of The Fall

Fifty-Eight

The morning of my surgery arrives bleached of color.

I am awake hours before any thin light begins to dilute the darkness.

Blair sleeps beside me. His breath puffs warm against my shoulder.

He has insisted on staying around the clock, folding his long frame into a question mark around mine day and night.

Across the room, Dad is a shadow in the visitor’s chair, his head tipped back against the wall.

Today they cut me open.

Blair shifts. His nose brushes my collarbone, and coconut floods my senses, mixed with that trace of Key lime that always clings to his skin.

The scent pulls me under, back to beaches we haven’t walked yet, summer days ahead of us that exist as promises.

All our tomorrows are stacked up like cards, waiting for me to claim them.

The clock on the wall ticks forward. Four-seventeen. In three hours, they’ll wheel me away. In three hours, Blair will have to let go.

His fingers twitch against my side. For these last quiet moments, we breathe together.

The darkness beyond the window holds steady, patient as the night always is before surrender.

Blair’s breathing catches, then evens out again as his arm tightens around me.

He knows I’m awake, has probably known since my breathing changed ten minutes ago.

We’re both pretending, holding this fragile quiet between us.

Four-nineteen now.

The surgical team shows up too soon. They’re professionally cheerful, checking charts and adjusting my IV while explaining procedures I can’t focus on. Blair won’t let go of my hand. Dad sits on my other side, steady as granite while Blair fractures in slow motion.

The nurse adjusts a bag on my IV pole. Metal clinks against metal. Dad’s breathing stays even beside me, each exhale an act of faith. He’s holding himself together through sheer will, the same way he held our family together after Mom left. The same way he’ll hold Blair together if?—

Blair’s grip tightens. His whole body leans toward mine, pulled by invisible threads that have bound us since that first day on the ice. The fluorescent lights cast shadows beneath his eyes, turn his skin pale as winter mornings.

“You’re going to—” Blair’s voice splinters. He is losing his battle against his own terror. “You’re going to be back here soon.”

The surgical team continues their preparations around us.

His breathing hitches—in, out too quickly, in again. Fresh tears gather at the corners of his eyes, and his hand weaves tighter through mine, as though he could keep me here through touch alone.

Dad’s hand settles on top of Blair’s, around mine. “We’ll be right here when you wake up.”

Our hands are stacked together. Dad’s are warm and steady, the same ones that taught me to tie my skates, that caught me when I fell learning to walk. Blair’s—who has loved me with his hands, who has held me and carried me and worshipped me—are shaking.

Blair’s tears spill over. They track down his cheeks, catch in the stubble he hasn’t shaved in days. He doesn’t wipe them away. All his energy focuses on me.

“Torey.” My name breaks apart in his mouth.

The nurse touches my shoulder. Time has run out. We’ve used up all our minutes, all our borrowed seconds.

Dad squeezes once more, then releases. His eyes hold mine, and all the words we need pass between us in that look. Blair clings harder, his body curving over our joined hands.

This is what I will hold onto, this image of them and the fierce love that fuels it.

“It’s time to go,” the nurse says gently.

They unlock the bed’s brakes and wheel me out of my room. Blair walks with me, refusing to let go of my hand. My dad stays at Blair’s side.

The wheels whisper against linoleum, each rotation carrying me closer to that inevitable threshold. Blair’s palm burns hot against mine, fever-bright.

The surgical wing waits, its doors marked with warnings about restricted access. Blair leans closer, his forehead brushing mine. “I love you,” he whispers, fierce and broken.

“I love you, too.”

The automatic doors push open. The nurses allow us a final moment, and Blair’s free hand comes up to cradle my face. The fluorescent lights turn his tears to crystal before they fall.

The nurse touches the bed rail. “We need to go now.”

Blair nods against my forehead. He breathes me in, coconut and Key lime mixing with hospital antiseptic, with fear, with love so vast it reshapes the air between us. “I love you.”

The doors swing wide, and I’m wheeled through. My neck cranes back, desperate for one final glimpse.

Blair crumples. His knees hit the floor hard, and a sound tears from him.

It’s animal grief, a guttural scream that shatters the air on its way out.

He folds into himself in the hallway, shattering the way he must have shattered before, in some other corridor, when Cody disappeared behind doors that never opened again.

Dad drops beside him and wraps his arms around Blair, and Blair collapses into the shelter of my father’s arms. They rock together on that cold hospital floor, my dad’s hand cradling the back of Blair’s head while Blair’s shoulders heave with sobs that crash down the corridor.

The doors seal shut between us.

The ceiling tiles blur overhead. Each one identical, each one carrying me further from that sound, from Blair breaking apart in my father’s arms. The surgical wing swallows all outside noise.

Only the squeak of wheels remains, the soft breathing of the nurses, and the hum of machines waiting to remake me.

How many times can one person watch love disappear through hospital doors before the watching itself becomes unbearable? Blair knows the answer. He’s living it right now, reliving it, the past and present colliding in that sterile hallway where my father rocks him.

The gurney turns a corner. The walls close in, funneling toward those final doors marked with red warnings.

The operating room is a shock of cold and bright-white light as voices drift around me.

An anesthesiologist leans into my line of sight, her eyes kind above her mask.

She explains the process, the medication that will pull me under, and the cool seep of an IV begins in my arm as a mask lowers over my face.

“Breathe normally. You might taste something metallic...”

I have absolutely no idea how this ends. I’ve never been here before. This is uncharted territory, and there are no memories to guide me, no déjà vu, no future glimpses to lean on.

Her voice drifts above me, counting backward from ten.

The edges of everything soften. The surgical lights above fracture into stars, then halos, then nothing at all. A hand adjusts the pillow near my head. Metal instruments clink together, a distant music that belongs to another world entirely.

Seven... six...

Blair. Dad. Their faces blur together, love and fear and faith all tangled too large for my fading mind to hold. Each breath pulls me further from the surface of myself.

Three...

The bright lights above stretch into ribbons, white bleeding into white bleeding into?—

My last conscious thought is of ocean-blue eyes and a hand over mine.

Darkness swallows me whole.