Didi
Walker sits slumped on the plastic hospital seat, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. He’s wearing his wet suit still, but it’s peeled to his waist and someone’s given him one of those foil blankets to keep him warm. It’s wrapped loosely around his bare shoulders. I stop in front of him and rest my hand on his back. He looks up. Our eyes connect and my breath leaves my body like I’ve been punched in the stomach. He can see me. I can’t get used to the fact.
I sink to my knees in front of him. There are around thirty people in the waiting room and Valentina’s quiet crying has silenced us all. I take Walker’s hands—they’re still freezing—and squeeze them tight, trying to warm them. His gaze has dropped to the ground. I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that he failed to save Sanchez, that it’s his fault. Again. I can see it in his eyes—shuttered and dark—in the lock of his jaw.
And I can’t let him go there. I won’t. Not again.
I take his face in my hands and force him to look up at me. He scans my face as though looking for something there, as though he’s still trying to reconcile my voice and my touch—which are so familiar—to the stranger he’s now seeing in front of him. Am I what he expected? What he pictured? What does it matter right now.
“Stay with me,” I whisper to him.
He bites his bottom lip hard, a shadow darkening his face. I want to brush it away but I know there’s no way of doing so. If Sanchez dies, I don’t know how there will be any saving Walker.
I put my arms around his neck and pull him close. His body tenses. He doesn’t respond, but all of a sudden he grabs for me, his arms locking around my waist, his head burrowing into my neck, and he clings to me like I’m the life raft keeping him afloat.
We stay like that for minutes on end, maybe half an hour, and with every passing second I know that the chances of Sanchez making it are fading. We should have heard something by now. And I start to wonder what will happen when they bring the news, how I’ll keep Walker afloat. And what about Valentina?
A commotion by the door makes me raise my head. I pry myself out of Walker’s tight embrace and glance over.
A doctor in scrubs is standing there. “Mrs. Sanchez?” he asks, looking around the crowded waiting area.
Valentina makes a sound, a sobbing hiccup, and steps forward, her face tear-stained and swollen. José is with her and she clutches his arm. And there’s Dodds too, in his wheelchair, sitting over by the door. Everyone is staring at the doctor, fearful and desperate, poised on the knife-edge.
The doctor steps toward her and puts his hand on Valentina’s arm. Her face crumples.
“He’s alive.”
There’s a collective inhalation of air. Valentina’s face blanks. “What?” she chokes.
“He’s alive,” the doctor repeats with a smile.
She shakes her head. Tears go flying. “I don’t understand.”
“You can see him if you’d like.”
She clutches onto the doctor’s arm and then covers her face with her hands and starts sobbing, as all around her people begin to pull out phones and laugh and slap each other on the back.
“Did you hear that?” I say to Walker.
He’s staring after the doctor, his mouth open. He turns back to me slowly and nods.
“You saved him,” I say.
Walker’s shoulders heave. His eyes are filled with tears.
“And you can see,” I say, wiping at my own eyes because I’m now crying too.
Walker smiles. “I can see you,” he says.
I laugh through a film of tears and he pulls me toward him and kisses me.