Part 24 (1/2)
”Check your purse,” Rei orders my mom. ”She needs an epi.”
I reach out, and the boundaries of my body are permeable to me now. It's as simple as pulling someone's hand out of a mitten.
”No!” she wails as she pops out for the second time. ”Anna, please! Please don't do this to me!”
The echo of Rei's voice reminds me what is mine.
”Sorry!” I apologize for the last time as I scramble in and ...
Oh! Oh! I don't remember the first allergic reaction I had when I was four because I left fast, and I didn't come back until it was over, but this is ...
... agony!
I desperately want to duck back out of here and tell her she can have my body. I've been free for so long that being stuffed back inside my body feels like I'm trapped in a sarcophagus and buried alive. There is no air in here, something I've taken for granted not needing for the past week, but I need it now, need it badly, and there is none. The itching from the hives is excruciating, and there's so much chaos within my body, it's nearly impossible to get the vibrations to merge. I feel her clawing at me, trying to get a grip on me to yank me out, and I stretch out fast, latch my discarnate fingers into my flesh fingers as best as I can and try to hold on, but all I want is to let go and fly away from all this pain.
I feel myself losing consciousness. Somewhere above me there's a loud buzz and spinning lights and voices sound so very ... very far away. Rei's voice is a mantra, begging me to ”holdonholdonholdon....”
The pain is sudden and sweet in my thigh, and a rush of chemical energy floods through my body, giving me just enough strength to ...
... vomit. Except my esophagus is still swollen and it feels like I've inhaled some of it. I'm wasting all my precious oxygen trying to cough it out, but there's nowhere for it to go.
There's a commotion around me involving people who hold my head and force my mouth open, then they shove something down my throat and I panic and fight against it because it hurts, but everyone is stronger than I am right now. Rei's voice is there somewhere begging me to hold still and it sounds like he's crying.
And then there is air, sweet beautiful wonderful air.
I try to open my eyes, but they feel puffy and through thin slits I see the ceiling above me is filled with unfamiliar faces. It occurs to me that everyone from the courtroom has probably filled the hallways to rubberneck as I'm loaded onto the stretcher and carried out to the ambulance. I hear Rei say he's coming with me in the ambulance and some guy tells him, no, he's not, and then Rei's voice gets that same dangerous tone he used with Jason Trent and he says, ”Yes. I. Am.”
And then I hear someone with that polished television kind of voice asking questions that are n.o.body's business, and my mother's voice says, ”Her name is Annaliese Rogan, and she is the only eyewitness.”
CHAPTER 35.
In the emergency room, they won't let Rei in to see me right away, not until they evaluate my risk for a biphasic reaction, which is, in plain English, a second reaction that's even worse than the first. This is when I know my sense of humor is back because I laugh in the doctor's face with my floppy lips and tell him nothing could possibly be worse than throwing up on the six o'clock news.
They let my mom in, though, and she is full of nervous energy, fluttering all around and driving me batty. She's completely worked up about my reaction, which was probably even scarier than the first time this happened since this time we had an audience of about a hundred people and a television camera.
After a while, they decide to admit me for one night. They wheel me down the hall in plain view of the normal people who are just visiting and can't help staring, so I pull the sheet up over my head and let everyone on the elevator wonder if I'm dead. My mom comes into my hospital room long enough to get me settled, then she leaves to get some lunch and check messages from work.
It takes a long while to settle back into my body after so much time away. It feels squishy and uncomfortable now, and heavy, like I'm made out of lard. I keep wondering why my arm is so sore until I remember, oh yeah, hideous tattoo. I'm still really itchy and puffy and my throat hurts from the stupid tube they shoved down there. I entertain myself by trying unsuccessfully to get the a.s.sorted studs out of my ears, tongue, and nose, but even if I didn't have these stupid acrylic nails on my fingers, my manual dexterity is still way off since I haven't worked all the way back into my fingers. I work on the tongue stud first, which is a royal pain because it has some sort of screw-on backing to it, and I feel like I have lobster claws instead of fingers. I have about half the studs out of my ears when I hear a knock at the open door.
”Anna?” Rei's voice sounds so tentative.
When I look up, he looks so tentative, as if maybe he's intruding or he thinks I might be mad at him. Even though I can no longer fly, I launch myself off the bed and three steps later, I feel his arms around my waist and my feet swing out from under me as he spins me halfway around.
I promised myself I wouldn't cry when I saw him, but that's a lost cause now. It sounds like he's crying, too, so it's okay. At some point during all these tears, he lifts me up, just like he did Taylor and carries me over to the bed. I'm dreading the moment he'll plunk me down, just like he did Taylor, but he doesn't. Instead, he sits and leans back against the pillows, holding me in his lap. ”I'm sorry,” he says over and over into my hair. ”I am so sorry!”
”Stop it!” I cry into his damp shoulder. ”No more sorries!”
He leans back so we are eye to teary eye and whispers, ”You said it was risky, but I thought you were exaggerating because you were scared I'd get caught. G.o.d, Anna,” he chokes back a sob, ”they were pulling out the defibrillator in the ambulance. They didn't think you were going to make it.”
”But I did make it. And you couldn't have known how bad it would be. Even I didn't know for sure what would happen this time.” I look him straight in the eyes so he knows I am fine. We are fine. Everything is fine now.
”I should have listened to you,” Rei persists. ”Yesterday when I kissed her, I thought I could knock her unconscious by pressing on her carotid artery, but it was taking too long and I was afraid she'd figure out what I was doing. I thought the peanut b.u.t.ter cups would be...”
”Shhh,” I hug him tightly. ”It's over, Rei; it all worked out. Don't second-guess it.”
He hugs me back and his shaky sigh of relief seems to blow away the top layer of his sorrow. We sit like this for I don't know how long, and all I can think is how good it feels to be touched again. His neck smells sweet and his breath warms my cheek. Every now and then, he rubs slow circles on my back or brushes his chin against my hair, as if he wants to make sure I'm really here.
Even before I was trapped outside my body, the only person who really touched me was Saya. My father never touched me unless it was to grab my arm and squeeze. My mom always seemed to have fresh lipstick on when she was leaving, so I didn't even get a goodbye kiss from her most of the time. Rei limited himself mostly to those affectionate squeezes around the back of my neck.
But when Rei and I were much younger, we were all over each other the way kids are, totally unconcerned with boundaries. We used to wrestle, tickle each other mercilessly, use each other as a pillow or a footstool. Before Saya was born, Yumi used to give Rei back rubs to get him to sleep, so of course, we used to give each other back rubs, too. Rei taught me games: with our fingers we would draw treasure maps on each other's backs with an X to mark the spot, or he'd draw giant concentric circles on my back that gradually got smaller and smaller until he would pretend to pull a string from the center of the circle and it would feel as though the very core was being pulled from my body. One day when we were about eleven, Yumi walked into Rei's bedroom and found us both s.h.i.+rtless, me straddling Rei's backside with a handful of lotion. To say she was not very happy is an understatement. The two of us got a long lecture about how we were getting older now and what const.i.tutes appropriate behavior between young men and women, and that her Boswellian Body b.u.t.ter was very expensive and not to be played with. After that, it was as though Yumi put a fence between us.
I realize now how much I've missed him, not just during the past week but for the past five years. Even though he was right next door, it felt like some part of me was missing. Rei is the yang to my yin, not my opposite, but a complimentary force that balances me out. Right now, I just want to align myself with him, to stretch out on the bed and pull him over me like a blanket. Right now, there is no other place I want to be.
But nothing lasts forever. Eventually Rei runs his hand up and down my bare calf, which I hope Taylor took the time to shave this morning. ”Are you cold?” he asks, and he squeezes my bare foot. ”You are-your feet are freezing! Didn't they give you any socks?”
”Socks? What socks?” I say and hope he doesn't see the plastic bag containing one pair of fuzzy but hideous gray no-skid socks I tossed on the vent underneath the window. I change the subject. ”Want to help me take out the rest of these studs?”
”Sure. As soon as you get under the covers and warm up your feet. And yes, you do need socks. You don't want to walk on the hospital floor with bare feet. Who knows what you'll catch.”
What would I do without Rei to point out all the dangers I overlook? ”I missed you,” I confess as I slide off his lap and under the blanket.
”I missed you, too. Did you get that tongue stud out?”
”Yes, that took forever with these stupid nails.” I wiggle my fingers.
”I bet. Let me see...” Rei tucks my hair behind my ear and gently pries the back off the first stud. ”Well, at least she didn't put gauges in.”
”No, but she pierced my belly b.u.t.ton. I discovered that when I went to the bathroom.”
Rei grins. ”Do you need me to get that out, too?”
”Um, no. Actually, I thought I'd leave that one in.”
Rei stops mid-earring. ”Really?”
I grin at him. ”Kidding.”
”Oh. Not that you couldn't leave it. I mean...”
”Too late. It's out.”
”Oh.” Rei pries the back off another earring. ”So ... not to get you worried or anything, but do you think Taylor's still around somewhere?”
Okay, so everything is not fine. I don't answer him right away because I'd like just a few more seconds of blissful denial, but Rei is right. I was a little too busy to notice, but I doubt the light appeared this time because I didn't die and Taylor was already dead. She's obviously still stuck in this dimension and she could be hovering in the corner of the room right this minute for all we know.