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At first, Conrad has no thoughts. There was no way to make sense of the fact that he was suddenly face down on the rough wooden planks of the dock. His ears ring. It wasn’t even that he didn’t know what had happened, it’s that he had no grasp on understanding at all.
As his cognition returns, he registers colors first. The yellow glow of the string lights. The black of the night sky. The bright red of her swimsuit. And the shocking black-red liquid spreading from her side.
He hears himself scream, distantly. She’s not making any noise.
“Noo!”
All of a sudden his focus is sharp, intent, targeted. He is breathing fast but thinking fast too. Call for help. Apply pressure to the wound. Call for help.
“Call 911! Call 911!” Fuck, was anyone even awake? Could anyone hear him? He kneels over her, one hand already pushing on the hole in her side, right above her hip. With the other, he pulls his phone from his pocket, nearly dropping it. He sets it down on the faded wood dock, enters the three digits he’s never had to use before, and then put it on speakerphone.
Fuck. It’s the fourth of July. What if they don’t get here in time?
He’s got two hands trapping her torso to the wood harder than he’d ever let himself touch anyone, much less her. The dispatcher’s voice rings out.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“I’ve got a sixteen-year-old girl with a firework shot into her abdomen. She’s uh, she’s bleeding pretty bad.”
“Are you applying pressure to the wound?”
He nods, then realizes they can’t hear him. “Yes, yes. We’re on the dock.” He gives the address of the summer house.
“OK I’m sending you an ambulance right now. I need you to maintain pressure on the area, including outside the wound. Are there any other injuries?”
“I’m not sure,” he says. The lights just aren’t bright enough.
“Belly, Belly, wake up” he says. “Come on Belly, please.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Belly, please don’t leave me, please.” His breath is harsh, a sob.
“I can’t fucking lose you too. What was the point of staying away if I was just going to fucking lose you too!” He knows he is losing it but he can’t bring himself to care.
His mom is dying. And now Belly is dying. What the fuck was happening? How had this happened anyway? They were so far away from where anyone was setting off fireworks.
Vaguely, he realizes that the dispatcher is still speaking to him. But he has just noticed that the backs of his hands are covered in her blood. He’s been pressing down but the blood has been rising up and he feels sick. He’s never able to do enough.
Loud steps pound along the deck. He turns his head and finds his brother, light blue eyes impossibly wide.
“Con. Conrad. Oh my god. Oh my god.”
Jeremiah looks at Belly, unconscious, bleeding. His jaw drops and he looks like he is trying to speak. Conrad has a job again. Protect Jere from seeing this, get help here faster.
“Jere,” he says, firmly. “Go to the driveway and meet the ambulance. Help them get down here. Tell them she’s bleeding profusely from her abdomen, ok?”
“Ambulance is one minute out,” the dispatcher says, tinnily. Jeremiah runs, losing his flip-flops as he goes.
“Belly, please,” Conrad pleads. “I have so much to tell you. I need you here. Please wake up. Fuck, Belly, I can’t do this without you.”
He feels cruel, how hard he is pushing on her stomach. This can’t be right, can it? He thinks of all the times he’s wanted to touch her this summer and feels sick that this is how his hands and her body are together now.
“Am I hurting her?” he asks the dispatcher. He hears the distant rumble of fireworks as he waits for a response.
“The most important thing is to prevent excessive bleeding. Don’t let up on the pressure even if it seems like a lot. The team will be there soon.”
Another silence stretches out. He’s so focused on Belly, the slight rise and fall of her chest, that when the EMTs arrive he is surprised to find them next to him.
“We’ve got her,” one of them assures him, then lifts Conrad’s hands from the wounds and replaces them with his own. Another EMT walks Conrad to the bench on the dock. His eyes are stuck on her but he feels like he is in a fog.
The EMT asks if he has injuries but he says he’s fine. She’s quickly transferred to a board and they walk her up the dock into the ambulance and he follows.
They let him climb in to the ambulance behind her. He turns to Jere.
“Tell the moms to come as soon as they can.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She’s lucky, they say. The firework only clipped her side, and none of her organs have been affected. It turns out the hole wasn’t as dire as it had seemed with her blood seeping through his fingers.
She comes back to consciousness once before they took her to surgery, and he’s never been happier to see her dark eyes flood with confusion. He’s almost giddy while she looks bewildered.
“It’s ok Belly, we’re at the hospital. You’re injured but it’s going to be ok.”
She looks him in the eyes and her brow smooths out. Fuck, he can’t handle it when she trusts him like that.
When they wheel her hospital bed out to the OR, the nurse takes the time to check him over. He washes his hands four times in the ER room sink until he’s sure that the water runs clear. Once the blood is gone, it’s easier to see that Conrad has a few small burns, mostly on his arms. There are at least two holes in his t-shirt. He has a tiny burn on his temple, and he can’t stop touching it. The pain is grounding. The nurse brings him some ointment for the burns, and apple juice for the shock. He’s just finished the apple juice when the moms tumble into the room.
“Where is she?” Laurel asks, desperately. His mom files in after her, slower than she should be. He remembers that she took a hard fall earlier today. He can’t ask her how she’s doing though. She doesn’t know that he knows that the cancer is back and she’s weaker than ever. He turns to Laurel.
“They just took her back for surgery. They have to clean the wound and suture the wound up but it looks like it didn’t hit anything vital.”
Laurel’s worry doesn’t abate. “I just need to see her,” she says. His mom embraces her and they sit in the remaining folding chairs in the ER room.
“What happened?” she asks him. “Are you okay?”
He shakes his head. “I have no idea. We were just standing on the dock watching the fireworks that the country club was setting off and then, bam, I was on the ground and she was shot. I only figured out it was a firework and not a gunshot because I remembered a green flash. I’m fine. All I’ve got are these little blisters.” His head aches and his ears are still ringing somewhat. But he’s fine. He’s not in surgery.
“I wonder who the hell was setting off fireworks so close to the house?” his mom asks.
They all sit in silence, no answers to be had.
As the adrenaline starts to wear off, Conrad thinks about it. Who did set it off? Did Brad Crenshaw, their neighbor, have a firework go awry? No, he’d seen them go in the house while he and Belly were talking. If they’d been out on their dock, Conrad wouldn’t have tried to kiss Belly. His stomach sinks. Maybe this is the universe saying that he shouldn’t have tried to kiss her. That he’s a hurricane and she’s a tulip and he’d ruin her.
Conrad turns his thoughts again to the firework. Given that Belly’s wound was on the right side of her abdomen, and she had turned toward him…he’s distracted by the thought that she wanted him to kiss her. She was leaning in as much as he was.
Because of the way she was turned, there’s only one direction the firework could have come from, and its their own house. And given that Jeremiah was the only one who ran down to the dock after the impact, Conrad is pretty sure he knows exactly who set off the firework. Why the fuck was Jeremiah setting off fireworks from the house? How could he accidentally have shot her? Was he drunk or high or something?
He doesn’t tell the moms his conclusions. Jeremiah would never have hurt Belly on purpose, and it can’t fix anything now.
The only thing that’s going to fix anything now is the surgeons.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By the time Belly is out of surgery, awake, and they’ve monitored her vitals and her blood counts, it’s 6:00 am. She’s discharged home. She’s been quiet. Smiling at the moms reassuringly, but Conrad can tell she’s in pain.
He drives everyone home. Belly in the passenger seat, loaded from her wheelchair. His mom and Laurel in the backseat.
They arrive home to find Steven and Jeremiah asleep on the couches. Laurel helps Belly up the stairs and into her bedroom.
Conrad moves to sit on the couch but halts when he sees Steven’s wide-eyed look of fear.
“What?” he asks.
“Is that…is that her blood?” Steven says.
Conrad’s face loses all its color when he looks down at himself. Dark red stains mar the white of his shirt and the thighs of his shorts where he was kneeling next to her on the dock.
He looks up at them. “I’m gonna…” he swallows thickly. “I’m gonna go take a shower.”
He’s almost to the stairs when Jeremiah calls his name.
“Conrad, wait.” Jeremiah looks pale too, under his permanent summer tan. His eyes look pleadingly at Conrad. “I didn’t mean to, I swear. I…I…I just thought that it would cause a distraction.”
Conrad feels an acidic rage boiling up from his stomach. His brother never means to do anything wrong. But this was too far. “Jere. You could have killed her. Or me. Fireworks are literally bombs. Why the fuck did you need to make a distraction anyway?”
Jere looks at the floor and suddenly Conrad understands. He’s inches away from Jeremiah’s face before he realizes it, and when he hears his own voice he doesn’t recognize the coldness.
“You didn’t want me to kiss her? Are you fucking kidding me? You risked her life over a fucking kiss? What, you don’t think I deserve her? And you do? I fucking don’t deserve her, you’re right. But you know what I realized tonight? I love her. I fucking love her and I have no idea when it started, but it’s been at least since I was twelve years old, drawing infinity symbols on her pancakes. I thought she was going to die tonight, under my hands. That for the rest of my life, I’d stand on that dock and know that the one person I loved most in the world had bled out under my incapable care. If you loved her, you’d never have risked hurting her. Maybe she doesn’t want to be with me after this, but I need you to think long and hard about whether you just want her or you actually love her, and if it’s worth losing me over. Because she’s it for me, Jeremiah.”
He pauses.
“I can’t believe you fucking shot at us.”
He proceeds up the stairs, refusing to look at his brother.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Four weeks later, things have mostly gotten back to normal. Belly is going to get her stitches out today. Jeremiah apologized profusely, and Susannah and Laurel grounded him for 5 weeks and he has to keep the whole house clean for the whole summer. He can barely look at Belly. Or Conrad. Conrad has made it clear to Nicole that their whole casual thing is over. Conrad’s pretty sure he’s done with casual things forever, actually.
Belly’s injury crystallized so much in his mind. He doesn’t question himself for what he feels any more, or whether it’s wrong for him to feel so deeply for her when she’s younger than him. He can wait for her to grow up, if she doesn’t want to be with him now. But he’s promised himself that once she has the stitches out, he’s going to tell her. Tell her how he feels, the secret about his mom, the betrayal by his dad. He wants her to see him clearly, the way he feels like he sees her.
He looks across the living room at her, gesturing enthusiastically about some debutante dress hilarity with his mom. She was quiet for the first few days, stuck in her bed. He and Steven and Jeremiah brought her movies and books and lounged around on the floor in her room keeping her company. But soon, the light returned to her face. Conrad felt like he’d been taking mental snapshots for weeks. Just in case he lost her for real sometime. This is what Belly looks like when she’s laughing at Steven’s back room poker stories. This is the look Belly gave him when he brought her her pain meds without her asking because he could see the tension in her shoulders. This is the way her small hands look holding UNO cards across a bed.
Fuck, he loves her.