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She made the noise at 2:47 a.m., fourteen days after her accident.
It sounded like a gasp of pain, and my body, so attuned to the figure lying prone on the bed, was awake in a moment. I began to believe I might have imagined it, but I stayed there, one hand on Stevie’s and the other dialing the number for Jodie.
“What? What is it?” she answered, her voice alert the moment she answered the phone.
“I’m not sure,” I said hesitantly, “I thought she made a noise, I thought—”
“I’ll be right over,” Jodie said.
Then the line went dead, and I watched Stevie intently. She was as still as she’d ever been, a shaft of moonlight falling through the blinds and landing across her face.
The noise came again, and my heart leaped. It was a sticky kind of gasp, and I saw her throat convulse with it. I was so overjoyed. I couldn’t believe that there was a sign ofsomethingafter almost two weeks of nothing. I pressed the call button, not a moment too soon, as her heart rate shot up.
A nurse came in, followed quickly by the on call doctor.
I had high hopes, but I couldn’t voice them in case I was wrong, that this wasn’t what I had been hoping for.
“She’s fighting the ventilator,” the doctor said calmly.
I stepped back and let the small team work. They had taken her off of vasopressors only a couple days earlier, and her cardiovascular health had been stable since then. She had a planned extubation for the next day, but in typical Stevie fashion, she was making things happen in her own time. They brought in an extubation tray, and I stepped out to watch them work.
I bumped into Jodie in the hall and explained what was going on. I watched the careful hope build in her eyes, and we both waited in the hall with bated breath.
“If she fails to come off the ventilator…” Jodie whispered nervously, wringing her hands.
“She’ll have to be re-intubated,” I said calmly, but we both knew what that could mean.
Failure to wean from a ventilator raised your mortality rate with each try.
But if she managed it, she could breathe, and breathing was a step to recovery.
“She’s stubborn,” I said firmly. “She’s not the kind of person to do things twice.”
“I used to tell her that if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing right,” Jodie murmured.
I smiled. I had heard those same words, somewhere, but I knew that Stevie had taken them to heart. She never did anything half-assed.
I took Jodie’s hand and squeezed it.
“She’ll be just fine.”
* * *
We stayed up together, watching through the night how she adjusted to the oxygen. Without a tube protruding from her mouth, Stevie looked a little more like herself. If I ignored the mask, or all the monitors still connected to her, I could almost see her as healthy once again. I dreamed of them all being removed, of her waking up like she had come out of a deep sleep, and of holding her tight, telling her how much I loved her.
“I love you,” I whispered to her while I held her hand. “When you wake up, there’s nothing that will stop me from being with you, if you still want me.”
“I have a feeling she’ll still want you,” Jodie said quietly. “If I know my girl like I think I do, she’s never felt so strongly about anyone.”
Jodie Haber and I had grown closer in the time we’d spent together. It was really just the two of us all day. She had sent her sons to stay with their father, and they came to visit on the weekends. At first, she had been cold and distant, firmly blaming me for her daughter’s accident. Once we’d managed to talk about it all, though, Jodie had melted. She’d become someone just as warm as her daughter, and we’d become shoulders for each other to lean on.
She’d called me a fool for punching Aaron Christophers but had bandaged my hand and patiently listened to me rant. That had been almost two weeks ago, and I couldn’t imagine having gone through everything with Stevie without her being an amazing support and mother, although I suspected I was also supporting her.
I squeezed Stevie’s hand and closed my eyes against the image of her tucked into bed. I wanted one of those little miracles you see in movies to happen, where her fingers twitch while I hold them, and, within an hour, she’s up and talking to us.
Of course, I should have just been grateful that she was starting to breathe on her own—it wasprogress. The thing I had wanted so desperately.
“She’s breathing?” A voice intruded on our quiet moment.
