Never Alone

Chapter 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Red lights chased each other across the screen in tiny pixels, waxing and waning in brightness. Up ahead there was a lot of commotion. An ambulance, fire truck, and two police cars were parked outside a comfortable-looking house. The garage door was open and the police were holding back the group of neighbors watching the scene unfold.

"Damien!" His mother was yelling as she struggled to get away from the paramedics trying to administer oxygen to her. His unconscious body lay on a gurney. My hands flew up to my mouth as another paramedic performed CPR, pushing life back into someone who had tried to extract it from himself.

"Damien! Damien!" Damien shouted from his chair in the treatment room, and on-screen he looked down to see the small shoes Jimar had been wearing earlier, sprinting toward his inert body.

Jimar pushed his way through the crowd, ducking beneath the police officer's arm and lunging for the limp limbs hanging from the gurney.

"Jimar," Damien's mom called to him. An officer scooped him up and moved him to a safer location next to her.

"Damien!" he screamed, his voice cracking with each echo, "Damien!" It was a cadence of pleading, his heart pouring into every syllable until gradually the sound trailed off into a loud whisper.

"He'll be okay," Damien's mother told him. "You are okay." She'd started to rock. I wondered if she even realized she was doing it.

The paramedics loaded Damien into the ambulance and turned to his mother. "One person can ride with us." The EMT spoke in a business-like tone, but her face showed compassion.

Damien's father took Jimar from her. "You go, Ronna. I'll take Jimar home and then meet you there."

Ronna nodded and staggered away from them on legs that wobbled. Just before the doors of the ambulance closed, Jimar broke free and ran to them. He was sobbing, his child-sized hands clinging to the door as the paramedics tried to pull him away. "You promised!" he cried. "You're my only friend. Who will be my friend if you die?"

The pixels developed faster, spinning like a tunnel as the ambulance scene quickly shrunk to tiny pixilated specks. The walls were dark again—black, even. It was quiet except for the soft cries from a worn-out throat.

"Jimar?" A soft, sweet, muffled voice called. "You ready to go home?" Light seeped in when a hospital-room door was opened behind a teenage girl, the backlight giving her an angelic look as she crouched next to the boy. She pulled him into her arms. "He's going to be all right."

"You don't know that," Jimar protested. Inside our treatment room it was Damien's voice that sounded hoarse and worn from tears and sorrow.

"He has to be," she whispered. "Because I don't want to live in a world where Damien isn't here to fish my little brother out of trash cans and share his superpowers."

"Superpowers aren't real," Jimar argued.

She tucked his head beneath her chin and answered, "I believe in him."

Suddenly there was an absence of sound and sight. Damien lay in his chair, the screen black above him. Dr. Crimm moved to the edge of her seat, waiting for movement. My own breath synced with Damien's as I watched his chest rise and fall. Where had he gone?

Ken turned to his friend, unmoving beside him.

It couldn't have been more than a minute or two, but that time felt like a lifetime as we waited for Damien to wake up. My eyes moved between his face and Dr. Crimm's as my anxiety sent thoughts swirling through my head—fears that maybe he would stop breathing or that he already had. Would she check his pulse? Would she try to resuscitate him?

The screen above his head didn't show any more images projected from his mind, but a smile curled his lips. His eyes started to flutter. They opened and he looked at us, the dark brown color appearing even richer against his wet lashes. I'd just let go of the breath I'd been holding when those big eyes rolled back in his head and his body tensed with the violent shake of a seizure.

Dr. Crimm moved the tray at his side away from him. She didn't appear to be panicking, although I felt like I was having a heart attack. Ken watched from his position beside him, a look of horror on his face as Damien's body flexed and a loud sound came from his mouth unlike any we had heard from him before.

I hugged my legs tightly. Shima wrapped her arm around my shoulder and Aideen moved to my other side, the three of us huddled together in shock as we watched our new friend suffer. Marco wasn't far from us; he'd jumped up from his seat immediately and now stood with both hands on his head, his fingers laced together. The stress was immense as we waited helplessly.

Finally Damien's body relaxed. Dr. Crimm moved so that she could get his attention. "Damien, you've had a seizure. I'm going to send Marco to get some help so we can get you to your room. You're going to be sore and we'll need to run some tests."

Damien's eyes searched the room, but it didn't seem like he could figure out any of the answers to the questions running through his mind. He nodded his head and then rested it back against the headrest. Dr. Crimm motioned to Marco. "Go to the nurses' station and let them know I need some help getting Damien back to his room." Marco didn't hesitate; he was very practiced at taking orders.

When Marco returned, he had two nurses with him. They moved with purpose to Damien, who was taking out his contacts. "He had a seizure," Dr. Crimm informed them. "It's probably carbon dioxide poisoning, but I'll have to run some tests. I want to get him to his room and have him sleep for a while." The three of them helped him up and guided him out of the room and down the hall to his bed. The rest of us shuffled along behind them.

Once he was settled and the nurses had left, Dr. Crimm turned to us and motioned for Ken to close the door so we were all inside. "I've only had two other teens experience seizures during this treatment. Both were determined not to be side effects of the medication. I'll do the necessary testing to make sure this wasn't, either. Seizures can be a result of the carbon monoxide poisoning, which I think is likely in Damien's case. It's an effect of his attempt to take his life. It's been a long morning. We need to process the session but I want to give Damien some time to rest so we don't trigger another one."

"I feel fine," Damien said from the bed behind her. "We can talk about it now."

"No. I need you to rest. Your health and safety are important to me." She looked down at her watch. "Let's take a break for lunch. I'm going to write up the script for your labs now and a nurse will come in and draw blood. We can meet back in the treatment room this afternoon at two."

After Dr. Crimm left, I wondered if we were expected to leave, too. Maybe it was best for us to leave Damien in his room to get some sleep. I looked at his face and found his eyes wide open and watching us. "Are you guys going to leave?" he asked.

"I'm not," Ken answered. He moved his chair to the end of Damien's bed.

"Me either," Marco seconded. He climbed onto his own bed and folded his hands beneath his head.

Shima looked at me and then Aideen. I could see it in her eyes, too. She wanted to stay like I did. We suffered together and we healed together. It didn't feel right to leave any one of us alone when they were so clearly unsettled. "I'm going to stay, too," she said as she took a seat on the floor against the wall.

"Us too," Aideen answered. She took my hand in hers and tugged me beside her and then down to the floor beside Shima.

Damien's eyes filled with unshed tears. He smiled, but his lips trembled at the edges. "Thanks," he whispered.

"We'd be shitty friends to leave," Ken teased.

"Don't worry, my past friends have set the friendship bar pretty low." Damien said. He closed his eyes and pulled his covers up over his head. It was an odd way to sleep, but after experiencing the world from his perspective I understood his need to shut some of it out. If it were anyone else we might have kept up a whispered conversation or chanced a quiet card game to pass the time, but none of us wanted to pollute his quiet with our noise, so we just sat together and rested our own eyes and minds.