Chapter 21
My family was my life.
Leighanne, Brooke and Bonnie… I loved them more than life itself. I mean that, with all the heart I have left. Even though I believed life was a gift, I would have given up my own to save them. Christ died for my sins; I would have died for my family.
But I didn’t. I’m still alive. Technically speaking. Not that it matters. The line between life and death is fuzzy now. My heart’s still beating, somehow. That’s more than I can say for “them.” But what truly separates the living from the dead, and even those in between, is the soul. And even if my broken heart still beats, my soul seems shattered beyond repair.
How can I call myself alive?
I didn’t die, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have saved them.
My family is dead.
My family was my life.
My life is over.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
2:00 a.m.
Brian awoke with a start, his head jerking up from the mattress. He looked around, confused by his surroundings, and remembered he was in the twins’ room. Exhaustion must have interfered with his night’s vigil. He’d fallen asleep there, slumped across the foot of Bonnie’s bed, his cheek pressed against the Disney princess comforter.
Upon realizing this, he was instantly alert, and he crept to the head of the bed to check on his daughter. Even in the dim, blue glow of the Cinderella lamp burning on the nightstand next to her, he could see the flush of fever in her cheeks, and when he put his hand to her forehead, he could feel the heat radiating from it, as it had all night. He smoothed her sweat-soaked hair, tenderly, and though she gave a faint moan at his touch, she did not awaken.
A ripple of fear coursed through him, as he took in other details of her appearance: the sores dotting her face like leopard spots, the dried beads of foam at the corners of her cracked lips from her earlier seizures. Maybe she was beyond waking.
Despair twisted his heart until he was in agony. How had this gotten so bad, so fast? It had started out like a simple stomach flu, with the twins’ complaints of not feeling well and Brooke throwing up her dinner. But it had escalated quickly, until both girls were vomiting and burning with fever. Brian had called the emergency room at the hospital. He would never forget the receptionist’s words:
“Sir, we’re already packed with patients with the same complaints. I don’t know what’s going on, and to be quite honest, it doesn’t look like the doctors do either. They don’t know what it is or how to treat it; all they can do is make people comfortable. Not very comfortable, at this point, since we’re out of beds. You’re better off keeping your family at home and doing what you can for them there. Give them plenty of fluids, and use cold compresses to bring down their fevers. That’s all I can tell you at this stage. Good luck.”
He’d hung up the phone with a cold, hollow feeling in his gut, but he’d followed the woman’s instructions, treating the girls as if they just had a bad case of the flu, though he knew it was something more than that. But when Bonnie had started convulsing, sometime before midnight, he’d panicked and dialed 911. Nobody had answered. Nobody had come.
Brian had known then that he was on his own.
Bonnie hadn’t woken up since the seizures, and neither had Brooke. Brian sat with them in their darkened room, watching them sleep, maintaining his vigil. He left only to check on Leighanne. It was easy, though, to nod off himself, with no one to talk to and nothing to do but sit and watch and wait. The fog of sleep rolled in again, and oddly enough, it was sudden silence, not sound, that lifted him out of it.
His chin snapped up, his breath catching in his chest. Though nothing appeared to have changed, the room seemed too still, too silent. The silence was heavy and noticeable, the way it seems after the air conditioner shuts off, and the white noise you didn’t even notice while it was humming away in the background suddenly stops.
What had stopped this time?
He leaned forward and realized he no longer heard the rasping sounds of air rattling in Bonnie’s lungs. Beneath her polka-dot pajamas, her skinny frame was still. Fighting panic, he tried to keep control of himself, to think rationally. Maybe she had just drifted into a deeper phase of her sleep cycle. He pressed his palm to her chest and closed his eyes in concentration.
He felt nothing.
The panic got stronger. He tore open the front of her pajama top, sending smooth, round buttons flying like BBs, and lowered his ear to her still-warm skin.
He heard nothing.
The panic took over. “No, Bonnie… no, baby,” he howled, as he scrambled into desperate action. He had taken a CPR class with Leighanne the year before, shortly before having open-heart surgery. She had wanted to be prepared, in case something should happen after she brought him home. Neither of them had ever had to use their training. But Brian used it now, hoping he was not too late.
He cupped his hands over his daughter’s chest and began to pump it up and down, stopping only to listen for the precious sounds of her heart. He tried a few breaths, forcing his own air into her lungs, and watched her chest inflate, then expel the stale air and lie flat and still. Refusing to give up, he went back to the chest compressions, pushing more forcefully, trying to jolt her heart into beating on its own.
He tried to block out the sight of his seven-year-old daughter’s flaccid body twitching, as his hands thrust her down into the mattress, again and again, refusing to give up. It took the muffled sound of a crack and the feel of ribs splintering beneath his palm for Brian to stop, horrified. He fell back, gasping, and dissolved into sobs, as the strength went out of him.
Gathering her broken body in his arms, Brian hugged Bonnie to his chest, wishing his own thudding heart could pulse life into hers, knowing it could not. She was beyond saving. Her small frame drooped like a rag doll, limp in his arms. Her lungs were empty. Her heart was still. Her soul was in Heaven.
Her twin was in bed on the other side of the room.
Remembering Brooke, Brian’s breath hitched in his chest again, as panic and fear muted his grief once more. He gently lay Bonnie down against her pillows and ran to Brooke, determined to save at least one of them. But when he reached her bed, he found that he was already too late. Her body was as lifeless as Bonnie’s, her chest just as silent. Her skin was still warm from the fever, but when he lifted one of her eyelids, the wispy blonde lashes tickling his fingertip, he found the blue eye cold and staring, not a sparkle of life left in it. He smoothed the lid down again, and a tear fell from his own eye to wet her cheek. He lowered his trembling lips to kiss it away, tasting the salt of his tears and the remnants of her sweat.
This time, he didn’t try any heroics. He couldn’t bear to damage her body more.
Brooke was gone.
Bonnie was gone.
And then his thoughts turned to Leighanne.
He left his twin daughters lying in their beds, deep in eternal sleep, and rushed into the room he shared with his wife. In their bed, her body lay, just as silent, just as still, but he clung to the last ounces of his faith as he climbed onto the bed beside her. “Leigh,” he croaked, his throat congested with grief. “Leighanne?” What would he say if she awoke? he wondered. How would he tell her their daughters were…
The word was in the back of his mind, but he refused to bring it to the surface. He couldn’t yet think it, though he pictured their bodies, identical in death. There it was: that word he’d been trying to avoid. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force both the word and the image out of his mind. But when he opened them again, there was Leighanne, lifeless in the bed.
“No… no…” He shook his head, refusing to believe that she, too, could be gone. He held his fingers beneath her nose, over her lips, feeling for the faint, warm puff of her breath. He peeled back the covers and watched for her chest to rise. Nothing. Again, nothing.
“Leigh… please… Lord, please…” Begging, crying, he hovered over her. Tears streamed from his eyes and trickled into her blonde hair as he bowed his head and kissed her forehead. “Please…” His lips moved against her skin, touching the rough patches of sores that had erupted there. He could still feel the heat from her body, and the warmth on his lips sparked renewed hope.
With one last rush of frantic determination, he scrambled up. He straddled her hips, tugged her camisole down off her shoulders, and thrust his hands between her breasts. The skin there was clammy, and his own sweating palms slipped around as he pressed down on her chest, forcing her heart to constrict, to pump blood and warmth and life to the rest of her body. He couldn’t let the warmth leave her. He couldn’t sit back and let his wife die, too.
He pumped and pumped, pausing only to feel for the rhythm of her heart beating on its own, and when he felt nothing, he pumped some more. His breath came in heavy pants, as his arms began to tire; the mattress squeaked on its springs with his effort. The cadence of desperation began to slow.
Finally, his arms gave out, and he collapsed in exhaustion, slumping over her body, resting his head on her bosom. Her chest was as silent as the room around him. Her soft skin, kept warm only by his touch, cooled quickly beneath his cheek. Leighanne was beyond saving, not by man, medicine, or miracle. As the truth of this realization finally sank in, Brian began to weep, helpless, hopeless in his grief.
After some time, he finally found the strength to roll away from her, in essence, letting go. Lying on his side of the bed, he clasped his hands together and whispered a few words of prayer. He prayed for the souls of his wife and daughters. He prayed for the strength to get up, the strength to go on without them. Even his faint voice sounded unnaturally loud in the eerie quiet, and he wondered how he would ever be able to live in this silent house alone.
Wiping his eyes, he sat up slowly, feeling shaky and weak. His heart fluttered in his chest, and he fought the fleeting urge to vomit. Were these the symptoms of the virus that had killed his family, finally staking its claim on him, too? Or was it just grief making him feel this way? He realized he didn’t care either way.
He clung to the banister as he staggered downstairs. In the kitchen, he leaned against the counter, the phone in his hand. He squinted at the magnet stuck next to the memo board, the one with the emergency numbers: fire, police, poison control. The numbers blurred before his eyes. His fingers were trembling so badly that he had to dial twice. Finally, the phone rang. And rang. And rang.
No one ever picked up.
