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On the sixth floor she spoke with a nurse who guided her down the hall to a room. As they entered, Alice placed a hand on the nurse’s arm. “How are they really?”
“They’re st—”
“I said really. How are they really?”
“Your brother got the worst of it. Cops on the scene think he shielded her. Your daughter looks worse than she is, so don’t panic when you see her. It’s a lot of superficial stuff. We’re going to move her into the children’s wing tomorrow. We just want to observe them both overnight. But they’re fine. She has some bruising, a few cuts from the glass, but it could have been a lot more serious. Your brother has a broken arm and a broken leg. The arm is from the impact of the air bag on your daughter’s side.”
“Do you know what happened?” She wanted to get into the room to see them, but she had to know, had to understand what had caused this.
“Police said your brother was driving in the wrong lane,” the nurse said, her tone apologetic, like she didn’t want to tell Alice this had been Kevin’s fault. “They think he must have fallen asleep at the wheel. He overcorrected and drove off the road. Hit a tree.”
Alice imagined the whole scenario in her mind, like watching one of those awful videos in a driver’s training class. She remembered all the nights she’d cleaned up Kevin’s empty beer bottles. He would never…he wouldn’t do something so careless as drink and drive.
But even as her brain said he wouldn’t, she asked, “Was he drunk?”
The nurse must have thought the question was inevitable because she was quick to reply, “No. But there were high amounts of prescription medication in his system.”
He’d taken the wrong pills.
It had happened before, where he mixed his antidepressants and his sleep aids improperly, but in the past it meant she’d found him asleep in the backyard when he was supposed to be cutting the grass. He’d never had an incident in the car, though.
And he’d never put Olivia at risk.
She thanked the nurse and went into the room. Kevin was the first person she saw, the bed just inside the door with the curtain open. She began to cry harder when she laid eyes on him. All the angry feelings she had, knowing he could have killed Olivia, were shelved when she saw how damaged he was.
His arm lay in a sling across his chest, and his leg was wrapped in a cast up to his groin, propped up on a sad little hospital pillow. The left side of his face was a balloon of purple bruises, one eye swollen shut, the other rimmed with black. One cheek was puffy, and his split lip had a crust of dried blood on it.
A half-dozen machines were connected to him, monitoring his heart rate and feeding him a steady flow of painkillers. She wanted to stop, to fawn over him as their mother might have once, but she was a mother, and her child was mere feet away. Passing Kevin, she went to the bed beside his, the spaces divided by a flimsy curtain.
Her heart stopped.
She tried to remember what the nurse had told her, that the wounds were superficial and Olivia had come through relatively unscathed. But logic didn’t play a factor at all when Alice saw her baby—all skinny arms and legs—covered in bruises and bandages, lying like a pale, broken doll amongst the dingy hospital sheets.
“Oh God,” she said, moving to the bed and standing next to her child. “Oh, Liv. Livvy. Baby, it’s momma. Baby.” She took her daughter’s hand, squeezing so hard she feared she might break it, and kissed the girl’s tiny fingers, avoiding the place on the back where tubes were connected.
Alice smoothed the hair off Olivia’s clammy forehead, feeling for a temperature. But this wasn’t a cold or flu. She couldn’t make Liv better with fresh sheets or a damp facecloth. Her child was in the hospital, and there was no way to rationalize that into being an okay thing.
People could say she was fine, but it didn’t make the situation any less awful. It was one of the most terrible things she could imagine, and she was here dealing with it alone.
You have to call Matt.
Not only did he have a right to know, as Liv’s father, but the logical, pragmatic part of Alice’s brain knew there was no way in hell she could afford the hospital bill, even with the insurance she got from the league.
She hadn’t seen any signs forbidding cell phone use in the ward, so she sat down next to Liv’s bed and pulled out her mobile. Matt’s number was programmed in, though she typically went through his lawyers when she needed something. They tended to be more reliable.
At least they took her calls.
It took five rings before she got a terse, “This better be good.”
Her blood boiled at the sound of Matt’s annoyance. What right did he have to treat her like she was a problem? Once—and sure, it had been a long time ago—he had acted like she was the sun of his life. He’d been so sweet and charming. Now he behaved like she was the bane of his existence.
Amazing what happened when you give birth to a guy’s kid.
“No, Matt, it’s not good.”
He sighed. “What’s up, Alice? I don’t have a lot of time. Heading into BP.”
Like batting practice was more important than this. “Olivia is in the hospital,” Alice replied flatly, giving him the same hard version of the truth the nurse who’d called her had.
