He tightened his fingers as he hauled her to her feet and backed her away from Albert. “We all die,” he said in her ear as he stood her next to Tara. “Today is as good a day as any.”
“Here,” Tara whispered, and suddenly Madeline found herself holding the dead weight of a sleeping kindergartner. “Thanks.”
Damn it, she was trapped, and all she could do was watch Albert’s breathing get slower and slower. Rebel lit something on fire and held it near Albert, but the old man didn’t move except to draw in another breath. The seconds between one breath and the next stretched as time got blurry. No matter how much she blinked, the whole world just got blurrier. She could barely breathe, her throat was so closed up.
Albert’s chest rose. And fell.
And didn’t rise again.
The chanting from the corner peaked in a jarringly happy crescendo as Rebel did something she couldn’t see. The world had gotten too blurry, and all she could do was clutch Nelly to her chest because she needed to hold onto someone, someone real and solid and still breathing. Even asleep, Nelly felt like the safest person in the world right now.
Time stayed stretched. People started to move around, some of them even coming up to say things to her she couldn’t understand. She could tell they were talking to her, but the words all came out garbled. Maybe she signed the death certificate, maybe not. She didn’t know. Nothing anyone said or did made any sense.
Then Rebel was next to her, prying her arms away from Nelly and pulling the sleeping child away from her. Madeline clung briefly, but then Tara was there, taking her child back.
“Thank you, Madeline,” Tara said, She sounded like she was whispering at the end of a great tunnel. “Thank you for everything.”
For what? Everything? She hadn’t done anything, nothing she should have. She should have made Albert take the nitro pill and done chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth and gotten the man to a damn hospital. She should have tried to save him. But she hadn’t—she’d just let him die. She’d just let him die. She opened her mouth to say as much, and nothing came out but dead silence.
Rebel was still next to her. She thought he seemed upset too, finally upset. One arm was around her shoulders, and she found herself in a firm hug. “Don’t cry,” he whispered, so low that no one else could hear it. “It’s okay, babe.”
Not cry? What the hell? This was like some horrible, first-person version of The Twilight Zone, where doctors let people die and no one cried.
“It’s not okay,” she managed to get out. She sounded like she was choking. “He’s gone.”
The arms around her tightened. “You need to get out of here?”
Maybe she nodded or said yes or did something—she couldn’t tell, but then they were moving, his arm still holding her shoulders to his chest, still holding her together as the clear air hit her in the face. “We’re going, babe,” he said a little louder now. “Almost to the car.” But then he pulled up short.
She blinked, and blinked again, and the world un-blurred enough that she could see a dark shadow separate from a car.
“A good death?” Nobody Bodine asked.
She did not know what was going on. A good death? What the hell was that?
“Yes. He went with peace.” Rebel answered like he knew exactly what Nobody was talking about, which only added to her Twilight Zone sense of things. “It’s good you were here.”
She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Nobody was somehow embarrassed by this statement. And then he turned to her. “Ma’am.” And he was gone again.
Nothing. She understood nothing about any of this, but she was pretty sure Rebel had been telling the truth earlier. Albert had been calm, not agitated, not scared. Certainly not a prisoner in his own home. And Rebel didn’t seem like a murderer. He seemed like, well, a medicine man taking care of his people. His grandfather.
She was the one who’d been wrong. Completely, totally, wrong. About everything.
Especially Rebel.
“I’m so sorry,” she choked out as Rebel put her back in the Jeep.
“Don’t be.” How could he sound so normal, so calm even after watching his grandfather die? “It’s okay, Madeline. It really is.”
“But you let him go. I let him go.” Saying it out loud made it all the more horrible to her own ears and, in the enclosed privacy of her Jeep, she began to cry. “I didn’t do anything—nothing I should have. You didn’t let me.”
“You did everything you needed to,” he countered in that damningly calm voice again.
For the second time that evening, she thought about punching him, just to get some sort of reaction out of him.