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He’s going to be okay.
Please, please, please just let him be okay.
LAKE
Seconds turn into minutes.
Minutes turn into hours.
Agonizingly slowly.
I sit in the chair in the waiting room and stare at the wall.
And I wait.
Genevive spent the first hour marching between the waiting room and the nurses’ station, demanding answers, demanding to “speak to somebody right now!”
Eventually she runs out of steam and sits down.
Those are an excellent fifteen minutes.
Then she’s up again.
Pacing.
I go back to staring at the wall.
When she says my name, I jerk so hard I bang my elbow against the wall and hit a nerve while I’m at it. I wince and rub the hurt spot for a second before I face Ryker’s mom.
“What do you think? How bad is it?” she asks me. Or more like demands.
“Uh…”
She snaps her fingers impatiently when I fail to give her a comprehensive overview of Ryker’s injury.
“You’re a medical student. Surely you know more about broken bones than me,” she says.
“I’m… not?” I say. “I’m a chemistry major.”
“Ryker said premed,” she counters, like being stubborn will change the facts.
“Well. Sure. But that just means a lot of science classes. I’m nowhere near taking the Hippocratic oath here.”
She huffs and sits back down, her head in her hands.
And so, we wait some more.
In the time it takes Ryker to come out of surgery and get settled in a room, Genevive has gotten another burst of energy where she arranges for a private hospital room, has flowers delivered to it so it “won’t look so goddamn drab” and has had her assistant stop by Ryker’s apartment to bring him some things, like his toothbrush and a book and a comb and a whole suitcase of other odds and ends that don’t seem strictly necessary, but she has them delivered anyway.
And then when visitors are finally allowed, I have to dig my heels into the floor and my fingers into the armrests of the chair, so I don’t elbow her out of the way, because it’s family only and one person at a time, and Genevive is his mother.
More minutes tick by.
Unbelievably, even more slowly.
When she finally comes out of the room, she lets out a deep breath and just stands in the doorway for a moment.
My heartbeat goes haywire, and I slowly get to my feet. Her eyes land on me, and she sends me a slight smile.
