May 17, 2006
Ruby Memorial Hospital
The nurse paused at the door before stepping out, her silhouette briefly outlined in the hallway light.
“What time is it?” I asked.
She glanced at her watch. “Two a.m.,” she said softly, then closed the door behind her.
Darkness reclaimed the room.
Two a.m.?
I blinked into the blackness, surprised. It felt like I’d only just arrived—maybe an hour, maybe two. But time doesn’t move in straight lines when you’re bleeding and broken. It bends and folds in on itself like fabric pulled tight and then released.
The only sounds were the steady beeps and quiet hisses of machines beside me, faithfully recording what was left of me. The right side of my face pulsed with a low, dull ache—each throb timed like a metronome. A towel had been folded beneath the side of my pillow to catch whatever fluid still leaked from the mess that used to be my right cheek.
I tried to open my mouth. Just enough to feel something normal.
Nothing. Maybe an inch.
My jaw wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t listen.
The morphine numbed the edge of it all but not the weight. It didn’t bring peace—it just made me too tired to care. Too tired to press the call button. Too tired to tell someone the pain wasn’t going away.
What little I could see was a blur. I’d lost my glasses during the shooting, and without them, I was helplessly blind. Later, I’d find out my right eye no longer worked at all. But not yet. That truth was still waiting in the morning light.
I wanted to sleep. I was so tired. But every time I slipped toward it, the crack of a rifle echoed in my skull. Loud. Sudden. And I jolted awake, heart pounding, gasping.
Again. And again.
Cousin Mike was asleep on a cot to my left, his breathing slow and steady. He’d stayed with me. I could barely see him in the dark, but just knowing he was there kept me from unraveling completely. Mike lived just over the hill from our farm. We were close—closer now, maybe, than I’d ever realized.
I wanted to wake him. Ask him to talk. Say anything to pull me out of my own head. But he needed the sleep. I let him have it.
I stared at the ceiling. Closed my eyes. Tried again.
Pain radiated through my face and chest. And beneath that, the ache no medicine could reach.
My parents are dead.
The thought came quiet, unannounced. Not shouted, not screamed. Just there. Sitting beside me in the dark.
Murdered.
Shot in cold blood by our neighbor, Dale Eagle.
And somehow…I survived.
But for what?
I wasn’t afraid to die. But living felt empty now, like the part of me that mattered had already left with them. I felt hollow. Alone. Numb.
The ceiling faded to black as my mind clawed backward, through blood-soaked clothes and flashing lights, through the sound of gun shots and the silence that followed.
And in that quiet hospital room, I remembered a time before Dale Eagle became a threat. Before the restraining orders. Before the dread. A time when my parents still asked me to come help with the farm. When their voices filled our house. When I thought I had time.
I laid there, unmoving. No tears. No shaking. Just silence and a single thought spinning like a loose gear:
How did it come to this?
And in that dark, quiet room, I remembered.