“If you’re good, I’m going to go.”
He knew he couldn’t even make it down the steps without my help. He tightened his hold around me. “Fine.”
I pulled out my phone.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’ve had three glasses of wine, I can’t drive.”
“Right,” Adam murmured beneath his breath.
Sarah returned with the girls and offered to stay there with them, put them to bed and got an ice pack and a pillow for the ride to the V.A. hospital. Joey insisted Adam bring her Harry Potter blanket.
When the Uber arrived—a minivan driven by a woman with a deep love for incense and polka music—I loaded Adam into the back seat and climbed in beside him, the twins waving frantically from the porch with Sarah beside them.
The drive to the ER was torture. Adam did his best to put on a brave face, but every bump and swerve made him wince and clutch his side. I offered to hold his hand, but he refused, instead grasping the “oh shit” handle with a white-knuckled death grip usually reserved for roller coasters and earthquake drills.
We arrived and I managed to help him inside. After waiting in line for about thirty minutes, the nurse at the triage desk checked him in and texted him a link for information to fill out.
After he typed out the pertinent information, Adam slumped into a blue vinyl waiting room chair, clinging to the arm rests like he needed their structural integrity to prop him upright, and let his head loll back against the wall. I sat beside him, close enough that the heat of his discomfort radiated from him, but not so close that I’d risk brushing the wrong nerve or brushing him at all.
“Please don’t wait,” Adam gritted out through clenched teeth, eyes fixed on the monochrome TV bolted high in the corner. It was set to cable news, closed-captioning garbled into a string of nonsense, but he watched it with the intensity of a man trying to levitate the screen off the wall. “You don’t need to stay. I’ll be here all night.”
“No way. I’m not leaving you alone with those nurses. You might escape.” I deadpanned. “Or be taken advantage of. I don’t trust the look of a few of them.”
He blew out a sigh but didn’t turn to look at me. “I don’t need a babysitter, Billie.”
“Good. Then consider me your bodyguard.” I turned his own words back on him.
He made a weak sound, almost a laugh but more of a wince. “Go home. I’ll text you when they let me out.”
I shook my head. “Nope. You’re stuck with me.”
He shifted in his seat, cringing at the movement. “This is stupid. I’m not dying.”
“I know.” My voice came out small at even the mention of the word dying, so I tried again, “But you scared the hell out of Andi and Joey. You scared me.” I regretted the admission the second it left my mouth, but it was too late to snatch it back. “Just let me be here. Just like you were for me.”
“That was different.”
“Why?”
“Because…you were…”
“A big baby?—”
“Terrified,” he cut me off. “I know how much you hate hospitals, just go.”
“I’m fine.”
I did hate hospitals. I didn’t need a PhD in psychology to figure out why. At the age of three almost four, my mom checked into one to have my baby sister and left through the morgue. Ever since then, I’ve gotten panic attacks at the mere mention of the word “hospital.”
Which almost killed me when I was eleven and my appendix burst, and I tried to convince my grandparents I just had a stomachache and went to bed. Thankfully, Adam checked on me when I wasn’t responding to my walkie-talkie. He climbed up the side of the house and crawled through my window, and when he couldn’t wake me up he went and got my grandparents, and they rushed me to the ER while I was basically unconscious.
I could have died, I would have died, if he hadn’t climbed through my window. Knowing how scared I was of hospitals, he snuck in all three nights I had to stay there and kept me company so I wouldn’t be alone because I was petrified.
What thirteen-year-old boy does that?
Adam Knight, that’s who. So even though sitting in the ER waiting room made me want to crawl out of my skin, I wasnotleaving.
