Page 10 of PS: I Hate You
“Don’t make me chase you through a graveyard.” The command of his voice and the pound of his footsteps urge me faster.
“I could never make you do anything!”
I sprint away from Dom, dodging between stone slabs with the names of people who might exist in the same realm that my brother does. They’ve all left behind people like me. Did any of them set impossible tasks for their loved ones?
The breath in my lungs burns, struggling to leave and struggling to return. The wheezing turns high-pitched, a siren of warning that I’ve pushed myself too far and am about to face the consequences. I stumble to a stop next to a particularly large headstone and brace my hands on my knees as the air labors from my throat.
I shouldn’t have run.
I hate when Dom is right.
“Maddie?” The man looms over me once again. He’s good at that. Looming. Hopefully his massive form and judgmental eyes aren’t the last things I see before I pass out. “Damn it. Where is your inhaler?”
I pat my bag, attempting to find the little container of medication. A strong hand brushes mine aside and sneaks into the side pocket, as if he knows exactly where I keep the device. Dom tugs it out, checks the mouthpiece for obstructions, then presses the inhaler into my palm.
While my mind goes into desperate survival mode at the loss of oxygen, I shake the device, then try to remember to time my inhale with the puff of my medicine, so the drugs make their way into my lungs. Best practice involves using a spacer—a tube-like attachment—with the inhaler, but the thing is so bulky that I never bother to carry it with me. Not when I usually go months without a flare-up. Sounding like an inner tube with a leak, I squeak through a few more breaths, roughly guessing when another minute has passed, then spray a second round that’ll hopefully make it the rest of the way into my lungs to calm the damn things down and open passageways that don’t want to comply.
When I was a kid, my asthma attacks would pop up all the time. I think the only reason Florence took me to get my prescriptions filled was so she’d stop getting calls from the school nurse that I was on my way to the hospital.
As I’ve grown, things have gotten better, and I’ll go long stretches without an incident.
But the combination of grief, anger, and running was too much for my sensitive airways to handle.
As the minutes tick past slowly, breathing becomes less of a strain. At some point, I realize I’m sitting on a bench, and I wonder if I made this move or if the man standing in front of me, blocking out the sun with his broad shoulders, guided me here.
That would be a very Dom thing to do.
“Did you”—I wince and wheeze, working around the tightness in my throat—“call an ambulance?”
“No.” He kneels in front of me, staring into my face. “I’ve seen enough of your attacks to know when to drive you to the hospital.”
“When I turn blue,” I offer. That was the joke Josh would say.
When you look like a smurf, we know things are bad.
Dom’s lips tighten, and I remind myself to keep my eyes far away from his mouth.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” he asks.
I shake my head.
No. Hell no.
Last time I was in the hospital I was holding Josh’s hand, his skin cold and chapped as his body tried to conserve energy to survive.
Dom nods, but he stays crouched on his haunches in front of me.
I scowl. “Stop staring at me. I’ll be fine in a minute.” Probably. At least I can talk now, with only a few gasps at the end of each sentence.
Dom’s eyes narrow, but he straightens and paces away from me. My brief hope that he’s on his way out, leaving me alone to my misery, evaporates when I watch him bend over to pick up something in the grass.
The envelope.
In my frantic attempts to breathe, I must have dropped it. He spreads the opening, then tips it over. A cascade of smaller envelopes slides into his large palm. Dom shuffles through them, and my fingers curl against my stiff skirt, wanting to snatch them away.
“Eight,” he says.
“One for each state.” Just like Josh said in his letter.