Fall From Grace

by Kelsey MacBride

  Sarah! Sarah! Wake up! It’s me your Uncle Kev!

  He wanted to shout out to her and tell her everything would be okay. He willed his lips to move, but he couldn’t bring himself to say her name.

  “Kevin?” A nurse’s anxious voice pierced through his fugue, snatching him back into the moment. “Are you okay?”

  Before he could answer, another nurse cut in frantically. “She’s not breathing. Her pulse is gone. What do you want to do?”

  Kevin struggled to get his bearings, briefly trapped in the cold limbo between past and present. He sucked in a deep breath. This was not Sarah. This was Rachel Knight.

  Sarah was already gone. But Rachel wasn’t. He needed to do everything he could to save her. He wasn’t able to help his niece, but he could help this young girl, and he would. He looked all around, and suddenly his years of training kicked into high gear. He was suddenly a doctor, not an uncle, and he began yelling out commands as quickly as he could. He had to save her. There was no room for failure.

  “40 units of epi,” he told the nurse, beginning chest compressions. “We’re going to do everything we can to bring her back.” The epi was administered, and he forced himself to focus on his training. 30 compressions. Two breaths 30 compressions. He repeated it like a silent litany, flashing his desperate gaze over to the monitors every few seconds. A spark of hope burned in his chest. Please, God.

  Then there was a blip on the flat line of her heart rate. Kevin jerked his hands away from her. “Clear the table!” he shouted. He switched places with a nurse and grabbed the paddles of the defibrillator someone else was offering. “Shock!” Rachel’s body jumped, but there was no response on the monitor. The blip had disappeared. “Keep going,” he told the nurse and watched Rachel’s heartbeat like a hawk through sixty seconds of breaths and compressions. His grip on the defibrillator paddles tightened. “Clear!” As soon as everyone had stood back, he shocked Rachel one more time, holding his breath as her body jolted off the table.

  Still, nothing.

  The emotionless, unchanging beep of the monitor bored into Kevin’s head like a drill. He dropped the paddles and went back to CPR. How could it be that Rachel Knight looked so much like Sarah? It couldn’t be a coincidence. It had to be a sign. This was to be his atonement, his second chance. He could feel it.

  Staring into the girl’s blank face, he saw Sarah again, not Rachel. Poor, sweet, innocent Sarah, who would still be alive if not for him. He breathed into her lungs, hoping against hope that somehow the air would carry life back into her body.

  But it soon became clear that if saving Rachel was a test, Kevin had failed. The monitor continued to show a flat line, and finally, Kevin stopped. He grasped her shoulders with his hands and shook forcefully. “Wake up!” he shouted, not realizing until he heard his own voice, that he had spoken out loud. “Come back!” As the futility of his actions began to sink in, his words lost power. “Please come back.”

  No one said a word. At last, someone reached over and turned off the heart monitor. The silence that filled the room in its wake was almost unbearably heavy. Head low, Kevin balled up his fist and pounded the edge of the table, making one of the nurses jump. He glanced at the clock on the wall and forced the dreaded words past his lips.

  “Time of death: 2:20 a.m.” His tone was cold, robotically professional, but inside he felt raw.

  A hand came to rest on his shoulder. Kevin didn’t bother to look around at its owner. “You okay, Pierce?” He recognized the voice as Dr. Turner’s. He could hear the words but only vaguely. It was as if they were standing at opposite ends of a train tunnel.

  “No,” he said quietly. “She—Rachel—reminded me of my niece.” A sigh escaped him. “Young girls like them ... they never even had a chance to live.”

  Dr. Turner nodded sympathetically. “Do you want me to inform the family?”

  Kevin shook his head. “She died on my watch. It’s my fault. I should be the one to tell them.” Slowly, he pulled off his bloodied gloves, tossed them into the biohazard bin, and walked out through the doors to the waiting room without looking at his team. Nobody stopped him. Nobody seemed to have the heart.

  Rachel Knight’s family sat clumped up in a circle in the uncomfortable plastic chairs, looking lost. They had formed a sort of protective barrier around one woman at the center, whose tawny hair and bright blue eyes were just the same as her daughter’s. The family were all whispering among themselves and trying to get her to communicate with them. She didn’t say a word and just stared out the window in silence. She had a quiet desolation about her that seemed to pull at his heart.

  Upon seeing her, Kevin thought fleetingly about how beautiful she was, how he might have been attracted to her under different circumstances. But he willed his heart to fill with steel; it was not the time or place for him to feel anything but sorrow and sympathy. He dreaded this part of his job. There was nothing worse than telling a parent that their child, their baby was gone forever. He didn’t know if he would be able to live if a child of his fell into the same fate as this woman’s daughter did. It was hard to imagine, and the closest experience he could pull from was the loss of Sarah.

  Under the circumstances, he couldn’t help but feel like a failure. This was the part that made him want to crawl into a hole and hide somewhere until everyone was gone, and the world had forgotten all about him. But there was no turning back. He needed to be strong, not only for this poor mother who stood in front of him, but also for himself. It was his obligation as a doctor. He couldn’t imagine what level of emotional suffering the girl’s mother was going to experience, but being a typical guy, he knew he wasn’t equipped to offer the comforting help that she needed. He could feel dampness in the palms of his hands, and his throat tightened with emotion as he prepared to deliver the dreaded news.

  The woman rose when she noticed him and broke free of her family to approach. “Are you Dr. Pierce?” she asked. Both her voice and face were full of hope.

  Kevin’s heart ached and with an effort, he gave her a smile. “Yes, I am.” He clasped his hands, hoping that the action of squeezing them together would somehow ease the task at hand. “You must be Rachel’s mother.” She nodded. “Ma’am ...” Kevin felt detached as if he was standing outside of himself, looking in. He was at a loss for what to say. Even though he had delivered the same tragic news to other families more times than he cared to remember, there was something very different about this soft-spoken woman standing in front of him. Something pulled at him and made him feel even worse about giving her the devastating news. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder before sucking in a breath. The words tumbled out in a monotone voice. “Rachel passed away a few minutes ago.”

  “What?” Stephanie’s beautiful face looked stunned for a moment, and then twisted into a mosaic of overwhelming grief. “No.” She clutched his hands with desperation like the sick woman had done to Jesus’ garment. “No, that can’t be right. You must have the wrong person. They said they saw no major injuries, only some bleeding around the head. That’s what the paramedics told me.” Her voice began to crack.

  Kevin gently shook his head. “I did everything I could to save her,” he said softly. “I promise. It was just out of our hands.” He was aware of the other family members pulling in around her like a blanket. “I’m so very sorry.” Kevin bit his lower lip, disappointed at the hollow sound of his apology. He wanted to do so much more for this woman. To hold her tight and softly stroke her head and let her know everything would be okay. But all he could do was stand there like a blubbering idiot.

  She broke away from him and let out a long, heartbroken wail. A man behind her caught her under the arms as she sank to the floor, and for a moment or two, Kevin knelt beside her. He wasn’t sure of the words that kept flowing from his mouth, only that he kept repeating the same phrase over and over. I’m sorry.

  She wasn’t hearing him anymore. Her grief washed over the whole family, and Kevin was intruding on the
ir pain. He straightened up and turned his back on them, hurrying back through the double doors into the relative safety of the operating area. There was a sheet over Rachel now; he saw the ghostly imprint of her features on the material and looked away, escaping into his office and closing the door behind him. He thought his heart would burst from the unspeakable guilt. First Sarah, now Rachel. It seemed fate had paid him a second visit to prove his feelings wrong. His niece’s life hadn’t been enough.

  How could he, one of the most promising ER doctors at Harbor, have let this happen?

  Chapter 4

  Stephanie Knight’s life had ended the night her daughter died on the emergency room operating table at Harbor Hospital; at least, that’s how it felt. She barely remembered what the doctor had said to her, but the moments directly afterward were vivid in her mind. She recalled screaming, falling to the floor, her father’s hands under her arms. The doctor had stayed for a minute longer, and then he’d disappeared through the doors. She hadn’t seen him again, not even when the nurses took her back to see her baby before shuttling Rachel’s body off to the morgue. That was the hardest part, and she had shuddered when she thought of all that her daughter must have endured.

  That’s what had haunted her for days afterward—the morgue. The thought of her sweet, vivacious baby girl lying in a freezer among dozens of the dead was enough to break Stephanie all over again. She had wanted to stop them when they wheeled Rachel away. She’d wanted to scream, to beg them not to bring her down there. But by then, she had no strength left, and all she could do was let Rachel go.

  She worried what her daughter felt before she died. Did she have a lot of pain? Was she unconscious? Did she hear the paramedics or anything going on around them? These were questions that she knew she would never get the answers to in her lifetime. She would only know these answers after her own death when she met with her daughter again. She knew she would see Rachel again someday, but worried how long it would be before that moment.

  She felt like a terrible, awful mother. Why had she even let Rachel go out that night? No matter how many times she berated herself, Stephanie knew the answer was simple: She hadn’t known Nadine would be driving. If she had, she would have said, “Absolutely not, Rachel Grace. You know how I feel about your friend’s driving.”

  But she didn’t. And now they were all gone.

  Her parents, Valerie and Howard Knight, made most of the funeral arrangements. Stephanie had stepped in to pick out the casket. Then there were the flowers, and the dress in which Rachel would be buried, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak on the phone about her daughter’s death or to meet with the mortician in person.

  The days following the accident seemed like one seamless blanket of emptiness. When Stephanie was alone in the house, she would cook, or clean, or watch TV, anything to keep her mind from falling back into the bottomless abyss of her sadness. The days seemed like months.

  Often, she would find herself on her couch, staring into the living room and seeing nothing. She could only feel the loneliness and incredible pain in her heart. In the moments when she couldn’t keep herself from thinking of Rachel, she pulled out photo albums and worked on immortalizing her daughter’s memory, creating love-filled collages of her short life and trying not to get her tears on the poster board.

  The images of Rachel’s face, from gap-toothed kindergarten smiles to shots at thirteen just before a school dance the weekend before the accident both soothed and saddened Stephanie. She held each picture for a long time, running her fingers over the images as if she could reclaim the moments through touch. Everything seemed so incredibly distant like it was a dream. She felt as though her pictures were the only proof that Rachel had ever existed.

  After a week, she couldn’t manage to spend another night at home alone. The silence was too eerie and devastating. She couldn’t breathe. Unable to live under the heavy cloud of hopelessness, she finally gathered some of her clothes and essential belongings and within hours had driven over to her mom and dad’s. She poured out her pain to her parents and finally collapsed in a pile of tears on the floor of her childhood bedroom.

  The fact of Rachel’s death seemed surreal, and yet ... it was so very, painfully true. And Stephanie had no idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life without her.

  Ever since the divorce, when Rachel was only five years old, it had been just the two of them, the dream team as Stephanie used to say. Rachel was the center of her universe. Thomas, Stephanie’s ex-husband and Rachel’s father, had minimal involvement in her life; only seeing her at holidays and occasionally for a weekend here and there. For Rachel, home was wherever Stephanie happened to be, and everybody knew it.

  But now she would never come home again, and her future memories of Rachel would only be those of the recent past. Stephanie cried out to God, pleading for some reasonable explanation for her daughter’s tragedy. But only the nighttime silence answered her as she cried herself to sleep.

  ***

  The day of Rachel’s funeral was beautiful, the sun beaming down from the bright blue dome of a cloudless sky. Stephanie stood numbly at the head of the visitation room, gazing at the light streaming in through the uncovered windows. She couldn’t bear to look to the left and see her daughter’s lifeless face framed by the satin lining of her coffin, her pretty hair done up in ringlets. The sweet smell of flowers overpowered her nose. Her heart began to pound as adrenaline coursed through her body. Her legs desperately wanted to run, to carry her some place far away from the gut-wrenching torture she was about to face.

  People began to filter through the doors at the other end of the room. They took memorial cards, printed with Rachel’s last school picture, signed the condolence book, and made their way slowly toward Stephanie, speaking in hushed tones. She gave a lot of hugs that day, offered as many tissues as she accepted and shed enough tears to last a lifetime.

  There were laughs too and smiles, but not enough. It broke her heart to see Rachel’s friends balk as they peered into the coffin; even the boys struggled against tears. An hour into the viewing, with an hour left to go, Stephanie desperately needed a break. She told her mother that she was going to the bathroom and slipped out into the hall, narrowly escaping the clutches of a gaggle of well-meaning church ladies, who surely would have smothered her with their sympathies if she had let them.

  In the restroom, she reapplied some of her makeup, staring emotionlessly at the pallid, worn face in the mirror. Was that her? It was certainly the face of someone bereaved, a mother who had lost a child. She paused in the application of her mascara. Yes, that was her. That was her identity now, this great, defining tragedy. Had she decided to not have a child with Thomas, she might have been spared from the devastation she was now going through. But in her mind, she knew that would have never happened. She loved Rachel more than anything else, and she couldn’t imagine a life without her at its core. And if that meant she’d grieve for the rest of her days, so be it. She would always be a mother.

  On her way back to the crowded room, a deep voice stopped her in her tracks, one she’d been expecting and dreading at the same time.

  “Steph?” She looked up to see Thomas standing just outside the doors with a bouquet of flowers in his hand. He looked like he’d been crying.

  “Thomas,” she answered, in a much softer tone than she had thought herself capable of using with him. She walked up and touched his arm, noticing that he had gotten a new suit, that he’d shaved and combed his hair. She was almost proud of him, or she would’ve been if it hadn’t taken his daughter’s funeral to force him to clean up. “How are you?”

  “Not great.” He pressed his lips together in a thin line. “Is she ... is she in there?” He paused to swallow. “Can I see her?”

  Stephanie nodded. Her ex-husband looked as broken as she felt, and it made her feel cruel for doubting the depth of his fatherly love. Their separation had been anything but cordial, and she recalled for the first time in year
s how bitterly he had fought her for custody of Rachel, and now she wondered if it was because he had really loved her as much as she did. “Will you be okay?” she asked as she placed her hand on his arm.

  “I don’t know.” Thomas rubbed his face. “I mean ... good Lord.” He gave her a sad, crooked smile that was a tragic caricature of the one that had made her fall in love with him. “I guess I thought that once you’re a parent, you stay that way forever.”

  Stephanie stayed quiet. She didn’t trust herself to speak at that moment without dissolving into sobs. Instead, she just took him by the arm, and they walked into the viewing room together. Thomas stiffened at the sight of the coffin. His face was a map of every emotion she’d been feeling for the week since Rachel had died: fear, anger, sadness, love. She could see the same debate raging in his eyes. He didn’t want to see her; not like this. And yet, he knew he had to.

  She stood back to give him privacy as he approached the coffin. For a moment, Thomas simply stood, gazing down at Rachel’s face. Then, he did something Stephanie had never seen, not once in their entire tumultuous relationship. Thomas Knight got down on his knees in front of his daughter’s body and prayed.

  Stephanie thought about that for a long time afterward, especially at the cemetery after everyone had left, and she stood alone at Rachel’s graveside, unable to bear the pain of leaving her behind. She took the bobby pins out of her hair and sat down on the grass, looking down on the tops of the white lilies they had tossed onto the casket. She was at once impressed by and envious of Thomas’s show of faith, even though part of her doubted that it was anything more than regrets and the spur of the moment. He hadn’t ever expressed any interest in going to church or teaching his only child the ways of the faithful—that had all fallen on her and her parents. Stephanie would have gone so far as to say he had no right to speak about God to Rachel because she knew Thomas was estranged from the Lord.