I squeezed her hand. “Tish, who did this?”
She opened her eyes and stared past me. Her fingers pushed slightly against my palm. Baxter’s howling filled the room. Her lips began to move, and I leaned closer in order to hear.
“Take Baxter . . . his bed.” She struggled with these few words and then coughed. A trickle of red spilled from the corner of her mouth.
“Tish!” I shook her shoulder. “Tish, don’t try to talk. Just hang on.”
I ran through my first aid training. I knew I had to keep pressure on the wound, but I also knew that gunshot wounds to the chest caused all sorts of internal damage. I remembered one muggy August afternoon during training when they’d talked us through first aid for GSW to the chest. Something about covering the wound so the lung could expand. What was it?
Her eyes opened once more, but they were unfocused. Then I remembered. I needed to cover the entry wound with plastic to allow her to breathe. I got up and rummaged in her kitchen drawers for plastic wrap. I grabbed tape out of her box of first aid stuff.
“You’re going to be fine,” I lied.
I knelt next to her and opened her shirt. I fought the tide of nausea that came over me. How would she ever survive this? Tripling the plastic, I placed it over the hole in her chest and taped it down on three sides. I was pretty sure the next instruction had been to get the person to a hospital as soon as possible. Not knowing what else to do for her, I held her hand and told her reassuring things I didn’t believe. At some point, I knew she couldn’t hear me anymore.
The next several minutes were a blur. I kept checking Tish’s pulse, but it was fading. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. I didn’t think my plastic-wrap trick was helping. I felt my throat tighten and my eyes grew hot. Fighting a rising sense of panic, I shuffled through my mental catalog of first aid maneuvers that I had learned everywhere from Girl Scouts to the police academy. But I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Mostly I forced myself to ignore that this was Tish, one of my best friends in the world.
Finally, the EMTs arrived, but they were too late. They tried to stabilize her blood pressure with fluids, and they put in a breathing tube. She’d lost a lot of blood—I had most of it all over me. My hands were crusted and stiff with blood; the knees of my jeans were sticky and damp where it had soaked through the fabric. A sharp metallic taste stuck in the back of my throat. The EMTs pronounced her dead after ten minutes of trying to resuscitate.
The EMTs sent me to the living room to wait for the police to arrive. It was disorienting after all the blood in the kitchen to see a place untouched by tragedy.
The cozy room reminded me of all the time spent there as a teenager. I used to think it was her decorating that made me feel at home. It was warm and unfussy—unlike my mother’s overly fringed and accessorized rooms. But as I sat there and thought about Tish, I realized it wasn’t her stuff that made it cozy. It was her. A great listener, never jumping in with advice or comments unless I asked, she had always been there for me.
I had repaid all that by suspecting her of murder—spying on her and sneaking around town, prying into her life because I had forgotten who she was. There was a roaring in my ears and a wave of nausea forced me to focus on breathing slowly and staying in control. It was the one part of my police training I could rely on. In the midst of a crisis, I had learned to push all emotion into a small box to be dealt with later. I wished now that I had stormed in the minute I got to her house and scared off the person who had done this. Or that I had been able to foresee what was coming. Why could I sense some things that were about to happen and not others? My “gift” for seeing future events seemed limited and shallow if I couldn’t stop bad things from happening to the people I loved.
Baxter had quit howling just before the paramedics arrived, as if he knew Tish was already gone. I’d forgotten all about him until one of the EMTs dragged him into the room by his collar. Baxter stopped short a few feet from me, sat down, and moaned.
“Come here, boy, it’s okay,” I said.
He didn’t budge.
“Uh, ma’am? He might be able to smell the blood,” the paramedic said, gesturing toward me with his head.
In a daze, I had forgotten about the blood. I’d tracked some of it into the living room, and I felt the stiff and sticky glove of blood on my hands.
“I’ll go wash it off,” I told him. “Just hold on to him until I get back.”
A good five minutes of soap and steamy water seemed to do little. I felt I’d never get my hands clean. I looked in the mirror and saw the terror in my own eyes. I had wiped blood across my forehead at some point. Another wave of sickness assaulted me, and I splashed cold water on my face to calm down.