AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nothing.
Suddenly I am falling, tumbling.
I can hear voices, but the words make no sense and the pain is so pummeling, so brutalizing, that it takes everything I have not to scream.
ALLCLEAR.
I feel my spirit ebbing away, draining out of my body. I want to open my eyes—or maybe they are open—I can’t tell. I just know that this darkness is ugly, cold, thick as coal dust. I scream for help, but it’s all in my head and I know it. I can’t open my mouth. The sound I imagine echoes and fades away, and I do the same …
September 3, 2010
6:27 A. M.
Johnny stood outside Trauma Nine. It had taken him all of five seconds to decide to follow Dr. Bevan to this room, and it took him even less time to decide to open the door. He was a journalist, after all. He’d made a career out of going where he wasn’t wanted.
As he opened the door, he was bumped into hard, pushed aside by a woman in scrubs.
He moved out of her way and slipped into the crowded room. It was glaringly bright and swarming with people in scrubs who had collected around a gurney. They were talking all at once, moving back and forth like piano keys in play. Because of their bodies, he couldn’t see the patient—just bare toes sticking up from the end of a blue blanket.
An alarm sounded. Someone yelled, “We lost her. Charge. ”
A high humming sound thrummed through the room, riding above the voices. He felt the vibration of the sound to his bones.
“All clear. ”
He heard a high wrrr and then the body on the table arched up and thumped back down. An arm fell sideways, hung off the side of the gurney.
“She’s back,” someone said.
Johnny saw heartbeats move across the monitor. The swarm seemed to relax. A few of the nurses stepped away from the bed, and for the first time he saw the patient.
Tully.
It felt as if air rushed back into the room. Johnny finally took a breath of it. There was blood all over the floor. A nurse stepped in it and almost fell.
Johnny moved in closer to the bed. Tully lay unconscious, her face battered and bloodied; a bone stuck up through the ripped flesh of her arm.
He whispered her name; or maybe he just thought he did. He slipped in between two nurses—one who was starting an IV, and the other who had pulled a blue blanket up to cover Tully’s bare chest.
Dr. Bevan materialized beside him. “You shouldn’t be here. ”
Johnny waved the comment away but couldn’t respond. He had so many questions for this man, and yet, as he stood there, shocked by the extent of her injuries, what he felt was shame. Somehow, some way, he had a part to play in this. He’d blamed Tully for something that wasn’t her fault and cut her out of his life.
“We need to get her to the OR, Mr. Ryan. ”
“Will she live?”
“Her chances are not good,” Dr. Bevan said. “Step out of the way. ”
“Save her,” Johnny said, stumbling back as the gurney rolled past him.
Feeling numb, he walked out of the room and made his way down the hall and into the fourth-floor surgical waiting area, where a woman sat in the corner, knitting needles in hand, crying.
He checked in with the woman at the desk, told her he was waiting for word on Tully Hart, and then he took a seat beside the blank television. Feeling the first distant ping of a headache, he leaned back.
He tried not to remember all that had gone wrong in the Kate-less years, all the mistakes he’d made—and there were some doozies. Instead, he prayed to a God he’d stopped believing in on the day of his wife’s death and turned back to when his daughter disappeared.
For hours, he sat in the waiting room, watching people come and go. He hadn’t called anyone yet. He was waiting for word on Tully’s condition. There had been enough tragedy calls in their family. Bud and Margie lived in Arizona now; Johnny didn’t want Margie to rush to the airport unless it was absolutely necessary. He would have called Tully’s mom, even in this early hour, but he had no idea how to reach her.
