Page 29 of Soup Sandwich
I’m not supposed to be working now. Hell, I don’t even get paid, but whatever. I’m here to learn and I’m grateful for the experience. But on a random summer evening when every asshole with a beer in their hand thinks that they’re freaking invincible is not the best day to be a volunteer.
Today is Wednesday, not even a Friday or Saturday, but you’d never know it with how this place is lighting up with patients.
I was supposed to be off an hour ago, but the ED is swamped and there aren’t enough hands. I’ve been running labs and comforting kids and helping people to the bathroom. Then Drew comes at me and says with a no-bullshit expression, “I need your help.”
Instantly I swallow hard. “Sure. What’s up?”
“I have a family coming in. A tractor-trailer on I-95 slammed into their car, spinning them around and smashing them straight into the guardrail. It’s bad. The parents were critical and intubated on the scene, but the kid appeared unharmed. I need you to be on the kid after pediatrics check her out.”
My insides turn to slush, and I gulp down the sudden rush of tears. Once upon a time, I was that child. My parents were killed in a car accident, and I was unharmed in the back seat, and I… how do I look at this kid? I will do what I need to do for her, butfuck.
I send up a silent prayer, asking for her parents to make it and then stand in the exact place Drew tells me to. His wife, Margo, who is the nurse manager here gives me a reassuring wink, but then she’s all go and no stop.
The parents are wheeled in with a paramedic straddling the husband, giving him compressions. They’re not even working on the wife anymore. They simply wheel her into the trauma room, the monitor reading asystole—no heartbeat—with blood coming up her ET tube.
“There!” Drew points to the neighboring trauma room and I run like my ass is on fire straight in there. A girl, maybe five or six, sits on the gurney. She has dark-blue eyes and chestnut hair and a fractured look on her face.
She’s quiet, but the second her eyes meet mine—freaked and distrustful—they immediately start to water. “Where’s my mommy and daddy?”
I don’t know what to say. I can’t answer her because it’s not my place to, but she doesn’t need me to answer. She already knows the way I knew when I was her.
I die along with her mother because I can’t… I just can’t. This little girl…
“Hi,” I say, swallowing down every emotion I’ve ever felt along with copious amounts of air. Doesn’t matter. My voice trembles like a leaf in a hurricane. “I’m Layla. What’s your name?”
She stares at me and then starts screaming. Likescreaming! “Mommy! I want my mommy! Daddy! I want my daddy!” She’s thrashing and kicking and fighting and attempting to fly off the gurney to get to the trauma room.
Oh hell.
I don’t know what to do. I’m too new at this and I haven’t been trained. I grab her in my arms and hug her as tightly as I can, compressing her body with my own. She fights me and she’s strong and incredibly good at it, and all I can do is hold on. I just hold on and hug her, and I don’t let her go. I tell her I know she’s scared. I tell her that I’m here and that she’s not alone, and after more struggling and screaming and kicking and hitting, she shatters.
Just completely breaks apart in my arms, and finally, her small body gives up and she lets me hold her as she sobs. I start sobbing too because I have to sob.
We cry and cry and cry for so long that there aren’t any tears left, just gasps and body-racking hiccups and painful shudders.
I peek up to find Drew’s grim face in the window of the trauma room. He shakes his head and I fall apart some more. I just lose it right here, holding this little girl while I question everything. Like how maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, and maybe I was wrong when I thought I was impervious and over losing my parents and that nothing affects me.
It’s not supposed to, but it feels like I’m holding myself that night all those years ago and I can’t stop it. I want Amelia here. I want to hug her and thank her for being my person. For dropping her life for mine. For doing absolutely everything she could for me when she was also losing our parents right alongside me.
My eyes close and time seeps away from me as I hold her. Eventually, she grows limp in my arms having worn herself out, but I don’t let her go. Even as I sense that we’re no longer alone.
“Has anyone called him?”
“Not yet.”
“We need to. He’s listed as the emergency contact for the girl and her parents.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. She’s been like this for at least twenty minutes.”
I open my eyes, cloudy and crusty with tears, to discover Drew and Margot talking in hushed voices in the corner while the little girl is asleep in my arms.
“What is it?” I ask, clearing my throat of the gravel and tears.
Margot steps forward and gently pries the little girl from my arms, setting her down on a clean gurney and tucking her in with a blanket and a stuffed animal I’ve seen in the gift shop.
“The parents didn’t make it.”