Borrowed time

CHAPTER TWO

The hospital’s fluorescent lighting buzzed faintly overhead as I made my way through the sliding doors, every step weighing heavier than the one before. My shift finished hours ago, but the exhaustion was drowned by a deeper sense of despair that tugged me here to this place where hope fluttered away like smoke.

I found Mom sitting by the nurses’ station, ashen-faced and rigid — her hands so clenched that I could have sworn that I could hear her knuckles c***k. I felt relief — at least I wasn’t the only one. I moved to her side.

I was about to ask when suddenly there was a burst of movement at the entrance to the emergency wing. Doctors rushed through the doors, tense faces, clipped sharp voices.

“Mom,” I said in a quaking voice, “What’s happening?”

She didn’t answer. Her stare was blank and glassy, fixed straight ahead. I had hardly gotten my head around it before the pounding of swift feet took me clattering in the direction of the uproar.

The emergency room itself was a blizzard of bright lights and frenetic movement. My father was in a narrow hospital bed, sheet-white, unmoving; he was beneath the blasting machines. Around him doctors and nurses worked with practiced urgency — compressions, intubations, shocks.

The heart monitor beeped off-rhythm, flickering like a sputtering flame.

“Clear!” a doctor shouted.

Electricity shot into the metal paddles I held to my father’s chest and caused his body to jerk uncontrollably. His eyes opened for a moment—nirvana, lost, far away –then after the longest of blinks they were closed.

The flatline crawled over the monitor.

“No,” I whispered, my throat clenching. “No, please don’t… not now.”

Additional shocks, additional desperate compressions, but the machine was beeping at a slower pace until it pierced silence altogether.

“Time of death,” the doc said, matter-of-factly and final.

I shook my head fiercely. “No! Don’t you dare finish that sentence. You’re wrong! He’s not gone!”

He gazed at me with a sad compassion in his eyes but refused to budge.

My mother collapsed, trembling and shattered, and I caught her trembling frame, holding her as if I could somehow keep us both from breaking apart.

“It’s going to be all right,” I whispered, my voice cracking with bullshit.

The words of cold … time of death — just hung in the air, a dense fog that descended on me and never lifted. I gazed down at my father’s still chest, the soft beep of the machines now just an empty echo in my ears.

The walls on all sides receded into an interminable, stifling silence.

He really is gone, it hit me like a hammer blow, all crushing and ridiculous at once.

I longed to scream, to pound the walls, claw at the very space we were in, but my body had betrayed me and was frozen there: numb and shaking.

My own breath sounded strange and shallow, incapable of filling the hole that his death had ripped into me.

And my mother’s muffled sobs wormed out of the silence but even her pain was distant, like watching through a sheet of frosted glass.

I shuffled out of the room, my steps ancient and heavy, mindless feet dragging me over to the row of drinking fountains as if the cool water could anchor me back to something real.

The cold water on my face offered little relief, as I dipped it and kissed the water.

Each swallow was rote, automatic — as if to make some sign to myself that I was still alive, still here, still battling.

I placed my brow flat on the cold wall behind me, I closed my eyes and sank, let it all crash over me.

I let everything crash as I repeat the words over and over again in my mind, shaking out from somewhere deep within:

Please.

Please, when will it end?

For f**k sake please give me time!

Is there even any god out there!

The plea was raw, ragged — like tearing a wound that had never healed.

I need time. Time to fix what I broke. Time to express the things I didn’t say. And time to unspool the time I have lost.

My voice splintered, fragmented by the unbearable weight of the sorrow I had sought to suffocate.

I’ll do anything. Whatever I have to give or lose, I refuse. Just… more time.

Tears spilled, even though they were hot and endless, because tears could bring the pieces back, slap them back together, stitch life to death.

But the silence only widened and deepened, a maw that gulped my desperate words down.

The tears blurred my vision as I sat trembling, shoulders heaving and breath coming rough. The noise of the hospital — a series of beeps in the distance, footsteps, hushed voices down a hall — sounded like it was miles away, as though I no longer lived in that world.

My thoughts were a whirl of shattered pieces.

Then a cold, hideous reality, something I couldn’t bear to imagine and was having trouble believing — all those memories of my father’s laugh, his warm hands, the way he would always say “It’ll be O.K.” no matter how bad things got — collided against this hideous fact in front of me.

How could he be gone? Just like that?

I was choking this time and I wiped my face with shaking hands. My throat was raw from sobbing, but still, a dry heave lodged in my chest.

Then I saw him — or rather, sensed the quiet, almost ghostlike presence of him sitting a few feet away from me in the corner. I’d never noticed him, never caught the outline of a man nestled in the darkness.

His presence was strange. Not threatening, exactly. But there was something off.

A calmness that wasn’t supposed to be there.

The kind of silence that made my flesh crawl.

My heart began to race in my chest, a warning drum.

Who the hell is this?

His dark eyes were searching and he watched me, with his unblinking stare.

I wanted to run, but my body was made of stone, pinned under the weight of shock and grief.

The silence stretched.

Then he said, without approaching any nearer,

“You want time.”

The voice was soft, casual even — but it sliced through my numbness like a blade.

I jumped, startled.

“Excuse you? Who are you?” My voice cracked. “What do you want?”

Is he a psycho who can read minds?

At first he said nothing, merely looked. Then he said it again, a bit more softly, a bit closer:

“You want time.”

Panic fluttered in my chest. I retreated, eyes wide and breath quickening.

“Who the f**k are you? How did you do that!?” I demanded, voice shaking.

I was confused, I didn’t voice it out, it was just in my thoughts so how did he hear me?

Yet, he kept looking without responding — waiting, hoping, like my answer was his biggest concern.

I swallowed hard. “Yes. I want time.” I said hoping that’ll get him to leave me alone

“Who are you?” I pressed, hungry for some hint, any reason this was happening.

“Your friend,” he said simply.

My blood ran cold.

“I’ll give you time,” he added, in a calm but unequivocal voice. “You are going to go back five years.”

I stare at him like he’s crazy.

“To the time you need.”

I shook my head slowly, disbelief weighing me down.

“I cannot do this, I don’t have the strength for this.

It was my cue to leave, which I did unsteadily, and take a halting step toward the door of escape from this lunacy.

But he whispered my name, and it sliced through the fog in my head.

“Aurelia.”

I froze.

“Five years.”

“To fix everything.”

“To save your family.”

I turned, searching his face. “How do you know my name?”

He grinned then, slowly, a cat with the canary in his teeth.

“You asked for time.”

“And now, you have it.”

I even laughed bitterly while my eyes stung with tears once more.

When I looked back…

He was gone.

And he was gone like a shadow melting into the morning.