Page 50 of Bend Toward the Sun

He nodded. “Yeah, she was—”

Sudden movement and noise erupted at the table next to them. A wineglass shattered.

“Help!” a woman yelled. She was hunched over her partner at the table, fearfully pressing a paper napkin into the palm of his hand. A crimson-black stain bloomed against the white, plainly visible in the meager glow of the string lights above them.

Blood.

Anxiety surged in his mind like a plume of oil, and he was catapulted back to a dark, rain-soaked Los Angeles highway. Inside the ambulance. Harry smelled the blood, hot and coppery, and the matching metallic odor of ozone from the storm.

The sounds. Thunder rippling against the ambulance roof. A squalling newborn. Cora Woodward’s weakening cries.

Your fault.

Your failure.

Nausea crested higher in his gut, and guilt rode on his back like a four-hundred-pound gorilla. He bit his lips together and willed himself not to vomit.

His vision blackened from the outside in. His body moved in slow motion, but his heart galloped like a thoroughbred. Too fast. Too hard.

Numbness seeped into his hands, his lips. His fingers curled inward like claws, frozen against his palms.

Breathe. Fuckingbreathe.

He couldn’t move.

Arden wasted no time. She punched 911 into her phone and hustled to the couple. Over her shoulder, she said, “Stay with me, Harry,” but he felt himself sliding sideways.

His lungs wouldn’t inflate. He was choking. Choking on nothing.

Dying. He was dying, and his little sister had to watch.

“Harry!”Arden had gone far, far away. Somewhere dark.

No.Hewas the one in the dark, far place.

He’d fallen underneath the world, where there was no air.

Everything went black.

HARRY SAT INthe passenger seat. Arden drove his rental truck. There were no roadside lamps outside the window, and no ambient starlight or glow from the moon penetrated the black outline of trees. They were on the rural route back home.

Home.

Was it, though?

“Hey, big brother,” Arden said as he stirred.

“Shit,” he whispered.

Harry had an indelible memory of overdoing it on tequila shots at a music festival as an undergrad. After barfing down his legs and filling his Birkenstocks with vomit, he’d blacked out in a stranger’s bathroom at a later off-campus after-party. He’d lost the entire subsequent day, waking up after dusk, still mildly drunk. The hangover lasted another two days, and he never touched tequila again.

This? This felt worse.

“Anxiety attack.” He slicked sweat-damp hair off his forehead.

“Mm-hmm,” Arden murmured.

His mind had taken him somewhere his body didn’t want to go. He’d been falling with his feet on the ground. Drowning in no water.