The Blessed

Agnes’s blank eyes were fixed on her mother as she went in and out of consciousness. Her body was unloaded from the back of the ambulance like a raw meat delivery to the local butcher. She was unable to muster the energy to raise her head or her voice in response. Blood soaked through to the pleather pad beneath her, collecting and then streaming toward her dark teal ballet flats before finally trickling down the stainless steel leg of the gurney.

“Agnes, answer me!” Martha demanded, anger more than empathy coloring her tone as an EMT applied pressure to her daughter’s wounds.

Her shrill cry cut through the grating static of police radios and EMT dispatch scanners. The emergency doors
flew open. The hard rubber gurney wheels clacked metronomically as they rolled over the aged linoleum floor of Perpetual Help Hospital in Brooklyn, keeping time with the blips coming from the heart monitor attached to the patient on board. The distraught woman was running, but still could not catch up to her daughter. She could only watch while the plasma—or liquid stubbornness and idealism, as she saw it—drained from her only child.

“Sixteen-year-old female. B.P. one hundred over fifty-eight and dropping. Ten fifty-six A.”

The police code for a suicide attempt was all too familiar to the ER team.

“She’s hypovolemic,” the nurse observed, grasping the young patient’s cold and clammy forearm. “Bleeding out.”

The nurse reached for a pair of shears and carefully but quickly cut through the side seam of Agnes’s T-shirt and removed it, revealing a bloodstained tank beneath.

“Look what he did to you! Look at you!” Martha scolded as she stroked Agnes’s long, wavy auburn hair. She studied the girl’s glamorous, old-Hollywood looks in wonder, her perfect skin and the brassy hair that fell in finger waves around her face, even more perplexed that she could do something so drastic over a guy.
That
guy.

“And where is he now? Not here! I told you over and over again. And, now, this, THIS, is what it got you!”

“We’re going to need you to calm down, ma’am,” the EMT advised, holding Agnes’s mother back at arm’s
length as the stretcher made a sharp turn toward the curtained triage area. “Now is not the time.”

“Is she going to be okay?” Martha pleaded. “If something happens to her, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Something has already happened to her,” the nurse said.

“I’m just so . . . disappointed,” Martha confided, drying her eyes. “I didn’t raise her to behave so thoughtlessly.”

The nurse just raised her eyebrows at the unexpected lack of compassion.

Agnes heard clearly enough but said nothing, unsurprised that her mother needed comforting, validation that she was indeed a good parent, even under these circumstances.

“You’re not allowed back in the trauma rooms,” the nurse said to Martha, thinking it might be a good idea for her to cool off. “There’s nothing you can do right now, so why don’t you go home and get some fresh clothes for her?”

Martha, a rail-thin woman with short black hair, nodded, eyes glazed over, as she watched her daughter disappear down the harshly bright hallway. The nurse stayed behind and handed Martha Agnes’s drenched teal T-shirt. Some of it was still wet with bright red ooze, and part was already dried black and cracking as Martha folded it and crunched it in her arms.

There were no tears shed.

“She’s not going to die, is she?” Martha asked.

“Not today,” the nurse responded.

Agnes couldn’t speak. She was dazed, still more in shock than in pain. White cotton bandages were fastened around
her wrists, tight enough to both staunch the bleeding and absorb it. Staring up at the rectangular fluorescent ceiling lights that passed one after another, Agnes felt as if she were speeding down a runway, about to take off—for where exactly was anybody’s guess.

Once she arrived in the trauma area, the scene grew even more frantic, as the ER doctors and nurses fussed over her, lifting her onto a bed, attaching the various monitors, inserting an IV, checking her vitals. She had the sensation of walking into a surprise birthday party—everything seemed to be going on for her, but without her.

Dr. Moss grabbed her right wrist, unwrapped the bandages, and turned it firmly into the light above his head to peer at the bloody crevice. He did the same with her left wrist and recited his observations to the nurse at his side for the record. Agnes, now slightly more responsive, managed to look away.

“Two-inch vertical wounds on each wrist,” he dictated. “Laceration of skin, vein, subcutaneous vessels, and ligament tissue. More than a cry for help going on here,” he said, noting the severity and location of the gashes and looking her directly in the eyes. “Opening your veins in the bathtub—old-school.”

A transfusion was started and she began to come to, slowly. She watched wearily, transfixed, as some stranger’s blood dripped into her body, and she wondered if she’d be changed by it. This certainly wasn’t a heart transplant, but the blood inside her heart would not be entirely her own.

Agnes started to moan and then became somewhat combative.

“Not a cry for help,” she said, indicating she knew full well what she was doing. “Let me go.”

“You’re lucky your mom was around,” he advised.

Agnes mustered a slight eye-roll.

After a short while, she heard the snap of the doctor removing his latex glove.

“Stitch her up,” he ordered. “And send her up to Psych for an eval after she’s fully transfused and . . . stable.”

“To Dr. Frey?” the nurse asked.

“He’s still up there? At this hour?”

“It’s Halloween, isn’t it?” she groused. “Just him and a skeleton crew.”

“That’s dedication,” Moss observed.

“Maybe, but I think he likes it up there.”

“He’s got some of the worst of the worst in that ward. I’m not sure he has a choice.”