The Unflattering Light of the A&E

A nurse with a tired face and kind eyes had handed me a clipboard. "Just fill this out when you can, love." The form asked for Ben's date of birth, his address, his allergies. It seemed absurd. A bureaucratic checklist for a soul that had tried to check out. I filled in his name—Benjamin Carter—and my pen hovered over the next box. Relationship to patient. What was I? Girlfriend? Partner? Enabler? Co-conspirator? I wrote 'Partner' and the word looked like a lie.

The waiting room was a diorama of minor and major tragedies. A man with a blood-soaked tea towel wrapped around his hand. A child wailing with the rhythmic exhaustion of a long-held pain. A young woman staring blankly at the scuffed linoleum floor, her mascara leaving black tracks down her cheeks. We were all members of the same temporary, terrible club.

I had called his sister, Cora, from the ambulance. It was the right thing to do. The hardest thing to do. Her voice over the phone had been clipped, controlled. "Which hospital?" was all she'd asked. No panic, no tears. A terrifying composure.

I kept replaying it. Finding him. The blue tinge to his lips. The awful, shallow breaths. Fumbling with my phone to call 999, my fingers thick and useless. The paramedics, their calm, practiced movements a stark contrast to my screaming inner monologue. They hadn't let me ride in the ambulance with him. "We need the space to work, ma'am." So I followed in a taxi, a spectator to my own life's car crash.

The Geometry of Blame

The automatic doors slid open with a soft whoosh, and Cora walked in. She looked impossibly put together for four in the morning, dressed in tailored trousers and a silk blouse, her dark hair pulled back in a severe knot. She scanned the room, her eyes landing on me. There was no sympathy in her gaze. Only ice.

She walked over and stood in front of my chair. She didn't sit. She just looked down at me, her arms crossed.

"Where is he?" she asked. Her voice was low, but it cut through the room's low hum of misery.

"They took him back. I don't know anything yet. A doctor is supposed to…"

"You were supposed to be watching him," she said. It wasn't an accusation. It was a statement of fact. A verdict delivered.

I looked up at her, my own exhaustion and fear momentarily eclipsed by a surge of defensive anger. "You think I wanted this to happen?"

"I think you don't know how to stop things from happening," she replied, her voice dangerously even. "He was fine before he met you. He was clean. He was getting his life together." It was the family's convenient, polished myth. The one that absolved them of any part in his long, complicated history of sadness. I was the scapegoat, the new variable in their equation of pain.

"That's not fair, Cora."

"Fair?" She laughed, a short, sharp, ugly sound. "You want to talk about fair? My brother, my baby brother, is in there, maybe dying, because you were too busy playing house to see what was right in front of your face. Did you even look? Did you check his pupils? Did you notice he hadn't eaten in two days? Or were you just happy he was quiet for once?"

Every word was a perfectly aimed dart, and every single one hit its mark. Because I hadn't noticed. I had been relieved that he was sleeping so much. I had mistaken a symptom for a sign of peace. The guilt was a physical weight, pressing down on my chest, making it hard to breathe.

I had no answer for her. Nothing that wouldn't sound like a pathetic excuse. I just stared at the clipboard in my lap. The empty boxes seemed to mock me. Known medical conditions. Next of kin.

Cora shook her head, a gesture of profound disappointment. "I told him. I told him you were a tourist. You just wanted the drama, the broken boy you could fix. You didn't really want to live in the wreckage, did you?"

She walked away then, over to the admissions desk, her posture ramrod straight. She began speaking to the nurse in a crisp, authoritative tone, taking control, taking charge. Taking him back from me.

I was left alone again on my plastic chair. The child had finally stopped crying. The man with the bloody hand had been called in. The room was quieter now. I felt strangely transparent, as if Cora had stripped away my skin and left all my failures and insecurities exposed to the harsh, unflattering light. She was wrong about why I loved him. But she was right about everything else.