I step past him, grabbing my keys as I head for my car.
"You're just going to let him go free?" Andrews asks with disbelief. "He just confessed to killing him, and you're letting him walk?"
"It was self-defense," Jameson says. "I want him behind bars as much as you, but we don't want to look like the bad guys here."
I get in the car, spinning tires as I speed away. I left my house wide open, crawling with police, but I don't care. Not anymore.
They can search every inch of it if they want.
They can burn it down for all I care.
Hospital waiting rooms are Purgatory.
It's that place, between Heaven and Hell, where you're forced to wait for your time, for word as to where you go next. It's not pleasant. In fact, it's torture. But you sit there, and you cling to hope, telling yourself it's not that bad, because you know it could always get worse.
Because you know it just might.
The room is brightly lit, the florescent lights above me flickering and hurting my eyes. Every blink burns. Every muscle in my body aches.
A kid screams in the corner. His mother sobs. An old man keeps sneezing. A woman won't stop talking. The noises surround me, a haze of chaos that makes my ears ring as I grip my hair tightly and stare at the door.
I stare.
And stare.
And fucking stare.
Just waiting for it to open, and for them to give me the final judgment.
Heaven or Hell.
Life or death.
It feels like I'm strapped to a gurney with a needle in my arm, except I don't know if it's a hospital room surrounding me or if it's actually an execution chamber.
A few more minutes.
I keep breathing, in and out, over and over, praying she is, too. Just keep breathing.
The door swings open eventually and a doctor steps out. Everyone around me stares at him, looking hopeful, but he stares right at me, his expression blank. He pauses before stepping toward me, appearing nervous.
My stomach sinks.
No.
No.
Don't say it.
Don't tell me she's gone, too.
Don't tell me her last word was my name.
"Mr. Vitale? Can I speak to you in private?"
I look away from him, glancing around the room. The mother is crying again. The kid is still screaming. The old man blows his nose as the woman tells him about her goddamn canker sores.
It's already Hell, I've decided, not Purgatory.
"Just say it," I tell him. "Get it over with."
"If you insist."
"I do."
"She's in recovery."
It takes a few beats for those words to sink in. I look at him again. "Recovery?"
He nods. "It was touch and go for a bit… punctured a lung, fractured some ribs, but we repaired the damage. She was lucky you were there when it happened. Your quick thinking saved her life."
I should feel relief from that, but I don't.
I didn't save her life.
I almost had it taken from her.
"Thank you," I say. "Can I see her?"
"Soon," he says. "She's still unconscious, but she'll be moved to a room in a little while. The nurse will come for you as soon as you can go in."
It's three hours later when they come get me.
I know for a fact this time, because instead of staring at the door, I stared at the clock. In that time, the old man got good news, the chatty woman fell asleep, and the mother was told her world would never be the same again.
The nurse leads me to a dim room in the ICU. I pause in the doorway, staring at the bed. Karissa lies completely still. She's breathing, but not on her own.
She's on a ventilator.
"You can have a few minutes," the nurse says, "but then I'm going to have to ask you to leave. Visiting hours are already over, so you'll have to come back tomorrow."
The nurse walks away, and I stand there in the doorway, watching her, listening to her heartbeat on the monitor. I don't wait for the nurse to come back.
I just leave.
I don't go far, though, ending up back in the waiting room. I camp out in a chair in the corner, getting no sleep. People come in and out all night long and well into the next afternoon. I wander around the hospital occasionally, passing the minutes in a daze.
I'm standing along a far wall near the ICU twenty-four hours after Karissa was brought in, still wearing the same clothes, covered in her blood. I stare out the window, into the parking lot, watching as the cars come and go, when someone approaches from behind. "Mr. Vitale?"
I turn around, coming face-to-face with the doctor who delivered the news to me yesterday. He stalls when he gets a good look at me, stammering a moment. "You've been here this whole time?"
"Yes."
"You should go home," he tells me. "Get some rest."
I glance down at myself and shake my head. "There's nothing there for me."
"At least get cleaned up," he says. "Let me get you a pair of scrubs. We have showers you can use."