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The couch squeaked as he pushed away from it and I could hear his footfalls crossing the room, but my eyelids were too heavy to lift. “Don’t get too close.” I tried to keep speaking, but was interrupted by a cough that wracked my body. My ribs ached from the constant coughing.
The couch depressed with his weight as he ignored my command and sat down beside me. I tried again to tell him to leave, but he just grunted and insisted on sticking a thermometer in my mouth. We waited in silence until the shrill beeping went off.
“Fuck.”
I licked my lips, but my tongue was just as dry as my lips and did nothing to wet them. “What is it?”
His response was a gruff. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No!” I cried. “Just give me some more Tylenol, I’ll be fine. I’ve got my last shift in a few hours.”
Pulling me up gently by my arms, he pulled the mountain of blankets from my body and slipped a jacket around my shoulders. He ignored my protests and slid an arm under my legs, carrying me out of the door.
I tried to wrap an arm around his neck, hoping to shoulder some of my weight, but my entire body felt like Jell-O and I was too weak to do more than rest my head on his shoulder. But still, he carried me to his car like I was nothing more than a sack of flour. Gingerly, he placed me in the passenger seat and buckled me in before going back inside to retrieve a blanket to wrap around my shaking body.
“I promise, I’m fine,” I insisted. He didn’t acknowledge that I’d spoken, so I wondered if maybe I’d simply thought it.
I struggled to keep my eyes open on the drive to the hospital, finally giving in to the fatigue
and letting them close.
“Piper?” Lawson called again, placing his hand on my knee. I tried to respond, but it came out as nothing more than garbled noises.
His fingers squeezed my knee, his hand still there as I drifted off to sleep again.
18
Lawson
I’d seen dead bodies before.
I may be a computer geek, but I was a computer geek who worked in security.
So, yeah, I knew what people who just moments ago had been living, breathing beings but had drawn their final breath looked like. Their skin was ashen, gray, a color that Crayola would certainly never make a crayon for. And sometimes their bodies would spasm, giving the illusion that they were breathing, even though their hearts were no longer beating.
And that was what Piper looked like, lying on my couch under a pile of blankets.
I’d sat there for a couple hours, watching her sleep after I’d come home from the office, but eventually had grown tired and nodded off. When I’d awoken, I’d been shocked at how sick she looked.
And now here I sat, in the chair across from her hospital bed as she lay motionless. I refused to fall asleep again, worried she’d be even worse the next time I woke up. Although, I wasn’t sure how much worse she could be. She was hooked up to machines that were beeping and monitoring her heart rate, her breaths, her oxygen level. She had IVs in, giving her fluids, nourishment, antibiotics. She had a mask over her pale face, blasting oxygen into her nose and mouth, forcing it into her inflamed lungs.
The beeping was relentless, nonstop, maddening.
And it was the only thing giving me comfort.
I counted the seconds between each of her breaths. I stared at the heart rate monitor, noticing that in between each breath it would dip. My gaze was glued to the oxygen level, where it sat at an unhealthy eighty-nine percent. It should be at least ninety-three percent, according to the doctors. But I welcomed eighty-nine.
When we’d arrived, she’d been barely conscious, her breaths ragged and labored. Her beautiful lips, the very ones that a few weeks ago I’d nearly kissed, were a shade of blue that should have only belonged on someone who’d been in the Arctic for a month. The nurses had immediately put an oxygen mask over her face, shoving me into a corner as they worked to assess her.
They’d barked out vital signs: Heart rate 150 beats per minute, dangerously high. Temperature 106. The reason I’d scooped her up and brought her to the emergency room. Oxygen saturation: seventy eight percent… Blood pressure 60/40.
I’d been concerned for a couple days while Piper had insisted she was well enough to go to work and school. She’d barely made it in the door last night before collapsing onto the sofa, but still, had insisted she’d just had a long shift and needed a minute to catch her breath.
But when the nurses started throwing around words like “rapid response team” and “crash cart”, my heart had plummeted, and I was downright terrified. Whatever this was, it was more than just a fucking cold like she had insisted.
It had taken what felt like hours to get her stabilized. I’d stood there in the corner of the triage room, watching as they injected her with medicine and took enough blood samples that I was convinced they would need a blood transfusion. Several different doctors had come in all at once, all of them dictating out loud what they thought it could be. A nurse had questioned me, and I’d told them every detail I could remember about how long she’d been sick, what her symptoms had been. When they’d finally stabilized her enough to move her to the ICU, they’d tried to refuse to let me follow, since I wasn’t technically immediate family.
Tried being the key word.
