All Our Yesterdays (10 page)

The table followed the lamp as he heaved it over. It fell onto its side with a crash. I clambered to my feet and away from him.

“I’m so sorry,” I said tearfully.

But James couldn’t hear me anymore. He was beyond words. He howled like a wounded animal as he tore the library to pieces. I knew I should stop him, comfort him somehow, but I couldn’t. My best friend in the world was suddenly something alien and absent, and it frightened me. I ran from the library and back to my parents’ side, and when the sounds of James’s cries began to filter down the stairs, Nate excused himself and the staff showed us out.

I didn’t see James again for three weeks, and we never spoke about that day. I tried to forget it ever happened.

But now it’s all I can think about.

“Marina?”

I feel a hand on my shoulder and dimly realize there’s someone crouched beside me. I turn and focus my bleary eyes on him. “Finn?”

“Get up, okay?” He helps me to my feet, and I don’t resist. “God, you’re freezing. Where’s James?”

“The, uh . . . The paramedics came, and . . .” Finn’s jacket is suddenly warm on my shoulders.

“James went in the ambulance with Nate?”

The sound of Nate’s name throws the real world into sharp relief. I really
see
Finn for the first time, and I hit him hard in the chest with both hands.

“Where did you go?” I cry as he reels backward and crashes into a decorative end table supporting a lush flower arrangement.

“Marina—”

I hit him again, but he’s ready for it this time and catches my hands in his. “You left us! James
needed
us!”

“I ran after the gunman!” he shouts over my hysterics. He squeezes my hands hard, and the pressure brings me back to earth. “The shot came from behind us, and I thought—it was stupid, but I thought maybe I could catch him. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

I dissolve into sobs, and Finn’s arm comes tentatively around me. He’s practically holding me up, but I still push at him, shoving my hands between us, hitting his chest, unable to stop, and he just lets me.

“I hate you,” I say.

“I know,” he says, and he holds me until I can breathe again.

I pull away and wipe my eyes. “Sorry,” I mumble.

“It’s okay. I’m sure I’ll deserve it someday.”

“We’ve got to get to the hospital. James’ll be—” I choke and can’t finish the sentence. “He can’t be alone right now.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Finn says. “What if we’re just in the way or . . .”

“Things gotten too serious for you?” I snap. “James needs us, and we’re going. You’re the one who’s so desperate to be his friend. You’re not getting out of it now.”

“Yeah, okay.” Finn raises his hands in surrender. “Let’s find your shoe, and we’ll get a cab.”

There’s already a small crowd forming outside of the hospital. Someone is passing out candles. How do they do that so quickly? Did someone run to the CVS and clear them out? The sight almost starts me crying again, but I clench my teeth together so hard it hurts and concentrate on that instead.

I march toward the desk inside the sliding glass doors with Finn trailing me. One nurse is busy with a line of ER patients who are coughing or clutching bleeding wounds or screaming babies, and another is busy entering information into a computer. I push my way past the sick people to the front of the desk.

“I need some help,” I say.

“You’ll need to go to the back of the line, miss,” the triage nurse says, barely glancing at me.

“Hey, excuse me!” I wave my hand at the second nurse in front of the computer. “This is important. I’m looking for James Shaw, the congressman’s brother? I need to know where they’ve taken them.”

“We’re not giving out any information about the congressman,” the nurse says, “and you need to get to the back of the line.”

“Look, you don’t understand. I
know
Nate Shaw, okay, and his brother will want me—”

Finn pushes me aside roughly. My vision goes red, but before I can tear his head off, he’s speaking to the nurse in a smooth, calm voice. “Nurse Shapiro? I apologize for my friend. She doesn’t mean to be rude; she’s just worried. See, we’re friends of James Shaw and we were with him tonight at the Mandarin. He’s just a kid, like us, and you must know what happened to his parents. I know you’re only trying to do your job and we’ve barreled in here making demands, but isn’t there anything you could do?”

Unbelievably, the nurse’s face softens. She picks up the phone on her desk. “Just a moment.”

Finn turns to look at me and sees my openmouthed shock. “What? Some people find me charming.”

“Apparently.”

“Plus, you might find people more helpful if you don’t order them around like they work for you.”

“Well, considering how much money my family contributes to the hospitals of this city, they might as well.”

Finn rolls his eyes and turns away from me, and I watch Nurse Shapiro speak quietly with the person on the other end of the line, trying to figure out what they’re saying. After a moment, she covers the receiver with one hand. “The duty nurse upstairs has gone to speak to Mr. Shaw and the special agents on the floor. You’ll need their permission to go up.”

“Do you think—” I turn to Finn and stop when I see his expression. He’s staring into the ER waiting room, which is separated from us by a glass dividing wall. Sometime in the last thirty seconds, his face went from normal to a sick shade of gray. His focus seems to be on a white-haired woman in a wheelchair who’s playing cards with a little girl sitting beside her. “You okay?” He doesn’t hear me, so I tap his arm. “Hello?”

He turns and blinks at me, as though remembering I’m here. “Yeah.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

He looks away. “I just really hate hospitals.”

“Well, sorry I dragged you here,” I say. “Nate was only
shot
, after all.”

“That’s not—”

“Miss?”

I spin around to look at the nurse. “Yes?”

“An agent is coming to escort you upstairs.”

I release a breath. “Thank God.”

The nurse directs us to an elevator at the end of the hall and tells us to wait there. When the doors ding and slide open, a plainclothes agent from the Capitol Police stands inside with Mayor McCreedy. Finn does a double take that would be funny if everything weren’t so horrible.

“Oh, Marina, thank goodness you’re here. James is frantic.” The mayor turns to the agent beside him. “She’s fine, I know her. This is your friend?”

“Finn Abbott,” I say. The agent takes the ID Finn offers. “He was with us at the fund-raiser.”

“Come in, come in.” The mayor waves his hands, and we step inside the elevator. “They’re fine, right?”

The officer nods once he’s checked Finn’s ID against the list of names in his hand and presses the button for the third floor. My stomach drops as we start to rise.

“How’s Nate?” I ask.

“No word yet,” the mayor says. “But not good, I think.”

“Has someone called Vivianne?” I ask. She’s Nate’s fiancée, and she’s been in New York on business.

“She chartered a plane from JFK. She should be here soon.”

So James is alone. Enclosed in this tiny space, sandwiched between the mayor of D.C., a Capitol Police agent, and Finn Abbott, I have a sudden, wild desire to bolt. James will be a wreck; what good will I possibly be to him? God, what if Nate
dies
? Finn was right; we don’t belong here. I should be at home under my covers, with Luz bringing me mugs of warm milk and murmuring to me in Spanish. I can’t breathe in here.

There’s a ding, and the elevator doors open. My choking claustrophobia should get better, but it doesn’t. It gets worse. We’re here, and there’s no going back.

The floor is nearly deserted. Two nurses—a woman in peach scrubs and a man in green—sit at the nurses’ station, and there are Capitol Police in black uniforms, plainclothes special agents, and a few members of the Secret Service gathered in small groups up and down the hall, but there are no rushing doctors, no patients ambling along trailing IVs, no loved ones with flowers. The floor has been cleared. Everyone’s here for Nate alone.

The waiting room is across the hallway from the nurses’ station and is also walled in glass. There are several men inside—I recognize Senator Gaines—all talking together in low voices, and an officer stands beside the door. He nods at us as we approach.

James is sitting by himself in a corner of the room, hunched over in a chair with his hands clasped in front of him. For a second, he’s that little boy hiding in a library armchair again.

He looks up, and his eyes meet mine. I rush to kneel at his feet. “Oh my God, James—”

“H-he’s in surgery. They don’t know if . . . if . . .”

He crumbles forward, burying his face in the place where my shoulder meets my neck, and I feel hot tears against my skin. I glance up at Finn, who’s edged closer to us, and we exchange a helpless look. He sits beside James and puts a tentative hand on his shoulder.

“Why would someone do this?” James says between sobs. “Why Nate?”

“I don’t know,” I say helplessly.

“There’s no reason, man,” Finn says. “You can’t make sense out of this.”

“I wish my mom and dad were here,” James says.

I rub my hands across his back. “I know.”

James eventually pulls away from me, wiping his face clean with his sleeve. He leans back in his chair to rest his head against the wall, and I see for the first time that his white tuxedo shirt is stained with blood. A large red patch on his chest, where he cradled his brother, has dried and turned brown and stiff. Nate’s blood. Dry and dead on James’s shirt.

I can’t look at it.

I’m suddenly filled to the brim with can’ts. Can’t comfort James, can’t fix Nate, can’t change what’s happened.

But damn it, I can get James a clean shirt.

“I’m going to find you something else to wear, okay?” I say shakily.

James looks down at his chest and frowns, like he’s noticing his bloody shirt for the first time. He touches the stain softly, almost reverently.

“There was so much blood,” he whispers.

I swallow. “I know. We’ll get you cleaned up.”

“Yeah.” Finn jumps to his feet. “Come on, Jimbo. Let’s go to the bathroom.”

James doesn’t resist. He barely even seems to notice Finn pulling him to his feet and maneuvering him toward the men’s restroom at the end of the hall. I head for the nurses’ station.

“I need some scrubs or something,” I say, “for my friend to wear.”

The nurses look taken aback. Nice, Marina.

“Sorry,” I say. “But do you have anything he could change into? His clothes are . . .”

I can’t finish the sentence.

“I’ve got some extra scrubs in my locker,” the male nurse says, rising. “I’ll get them for you.”

He comes back with a neatly folded pair of blue scrubs. As I take them in my hands, I don’t feel completely useless for a whole half a second.

I got James a clean shirt. What an achievement.

I rap on the bathroom door. “Guys? I’ve got some clean clothes.”

“Come in,” Finn calls.

I’ve never been in a men’s restroom before, and with everything happening right now, it shouldn’t feel as weird to me as it does, but I still push the door open slowly, like I’m afraid of getting caught. Inside, James is leaning against a sink, and Finn is wiping tiny droplets of blood off of his neck with a damp paper towel. James’s blood-drenched shirt and jacket are draped over a stall door, and his stomach and chest are wet from the recent washing. I try not to look at James’s bare torso. I get an impression of skin pale from months of winter and a stomach taut from hours of laps in the pool, and then I close my eyes. I don’t trust myself not to think terrible things.

“Marina?” Finn says. “Can you hand me those?”

I open my eyes again and find Finn looking at me, annoyed. He has one hand paused with the paper towel against James’s neck and the other outstretched.

“Sorry,” I murmur and step forward to hand him the scrubs. James looks at me with dazed eyes, and with his body naked to the waist, he suddenly seems incredibly vulnerable. Like I could break him with one hand.

“Arms up,” Finn says. He gathers the clean shirt in his hands, and when James raises his arms, Finn expertly slips it over his head like a parent dressing a toddler. It’s an odd sight. James emerges from the shirt with his hair rumpled, which makes him look as young as Finn is treating him.

“Pants,” Finn says, all business, and James obediently reaches for the fly of his tuxedo trousers.

“Oh. God.” I turn away. “I’m going to go.”

“I told you, man,” I hear Finn say as I leave. “Taking off your pants is
not
the way to get a girl. Just scares ’em.”

Before I close the door to the restroom, I actually hear James laugh.

A few minutes later, a freshly cleaned and changed James follows Finn back into the waiting room. He sits down for about ten seconds before rising to pace across the length of the small room, mumbling under his breath.