Aftermath

by Terri Blackstock

  He covered his eyes and sucked in the sob rising to his throat. “What’s going to happen? Is she going to suffer more?”

  “She does have pain, and we’re helping her with that. Most likely, she’ll fall asleep and be in a state of unconsciousness for some time. You might hear a rattle or deep snore.”

  “The death rattle?” he muttered.

  “That will mean she’s in transition.”

  Travis shook his head and took a few steps away, then turned back. “You think that’s going to happen? Like today? Tomorrow?”

  “I can’t say when. But soon.”

  “She’s just sleeping,” he said. “She’ll wake up. She’s not there yet.”

  “Meanwhile, we’re taking her off the new course of treatment. It’s not working well for her.”

  Travis slumped against the wall. “If you take her off the treatment, what will you do instead?”

  “Go back to what we were doing before.”

  “But she was going downhill. This had so much promise. You said it could be a game-changer. That she might get worse before she gets better.”

  “Promyelocytic leukemia is aggressive, and her body is too weak to fight the rapid disease progression. She’s rejecting platelets as fast as we transfuse her.”

  “I’ll get more people to give blood.”

  “Her mother gave yesterday. We can’t take more from her until at least tomorrow.”

  Travis wiped the tears under his eyes. “So what do we do?”

  Dr. Grafton looked down at the printout of the test results he held, as if studying them again might shed one more ray of light on her illness. “We keep transfusing her with platelets. If we can bombard the bloodstream with enough of them, sometimes we can neutralize the antibodies.”

  “I gave blood yesterday, too. What else can I do? There must be something. I can’t just sit here and watch her slip into a coma!”

  “Keep talking to her. Sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost them, they come back. Crystal’s strong. She’s still got some fight in her.”

  “Yeah, she’s the strongest person I know. She wants to see the kids. That might help her.”

  “It could hurt her more than it will help. She can’t fight infection. We’re trying to keep her from going into septic shock.”

  “I get it,” he said. “There’s no good answer.”

  “Do whatever it takes to appeal to her strength,” Dr. Grafton said. He squeezed Travis’s shoulder and forced him to meet his clear, thoughtful eyes. “Just know that I’m not giving up.”

  That was little comfort. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  He waited for a moment until the doctor had gone, then returned to the sterile area at the entrance to Crystal’s room, slipped a gown back over his clothes, stepped into the paper boots that went over his shoes, and put on the cap and mask that would make it less likely he would transport germs into the room. Then, stepping through the door, he went to her bedside.

  “Wake up, Crystal,” he said in a wobbly voice. She was sleeping hard as blood saturated the packing they had changed just half an hour ago. “Please God, wake her up.”

  There was no response, but he kept standing beside her, watching her breathing patterns, her peaceful slumber. But she wasn’t at peace yet, he told himself. She was in misery. Her lips were bruising blue, and her nose—packed with gauze—was bruised and purple, the color extending to the circles beneath both eyes. Pull her back, he told himself, but something deep inside him, some growing sense of compassion, questioned him ruthlessly. What are you bringing her back for? More pain? More agony? More failure? Hasn’t she earned a chance to rest?

  He thought of Mason and Miles. She couldn’t go yet. She hadn’t said goodbye. She hadn’t made her peace with leaving them.

  He thought of the elation they’d felt in this very hospital just over two years ago, when they’d held those two little pink squirming boys, fussing about their treacherous journey through birth as they breathed their first breaths of air. Joy had been diapered and swaddled that day, and motherhood had completed Crystal. He had never seen her so happy.

  It was brutal to take that from her now.

  He lowered himself to the bed beside her, collapsing from the weight of his emotion, and bowed his head as tears plopped onto her gown. He wondered if they contained germs that could do her harm and hurriedly wiped at his eyes.

  “Crystal, please wake up,” he said in a louder voice. “Please! I’m not ready to say goodbye yet! I won’t do it!”

  When there was still no response, he stood and leaned over her again, feeling a fury like none he’d ever experienced. “Crystal, you’re just letting yourself slip away. I’m not ready yet. Please, just wake up!”

  In the quiet that followed, he could have sworn he heard a heavy sigh wheezing from her throat and a distinct change in her breathing. Is she coming back? he wondered, taking her hand and holding it to his mouth, every fiber of his being pleading for her to make the effort.

  “Come on, baby, you can do it,” he said. “Just fight it. You’ve never been a quitter. Don’t quit on me now.”

  He saw her lips move infinitesimally, and she squeezed his hand.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to tell him she was still there. She wasn’t gone yet.

  36

  It was late afternoon when Dustin finally left Jamie’s office and headed toward the hospital to check on Crystal. Several times during the day, he’d called the nurses’ desk to try to get information on her condition. “Critical” was the latest report.

  He reached the hospital and pulled into a space beside Travis’s truck. He got onto the elevator with a man and a little girl of no more than four, holding a Get Well Soon balloon. Dustin smiled at her.

  “I got a balloon for my mom,” she announced.

  “She’ll love it,” Dustin said.

  The elevator stopped on the second floor, and they got out. The little girl looked over her shoulder at him and waved, and he waved back. As the doors closed, sadness swept over him. He said a silent prayer that the child’s mother would be okay.

  A fleeting thought of Avery, smiling as she interrogated him, skittered through his mind. She was a doll, so much like Jamie. How could Joe have valued getting high more than his wife and daughter? Didn’t he realize what he had?

  He had never liked Joe when Jamie dated him in high school. He’d heard too much about him and had seen him at parties. He was always the one who had a stash of weed or pills. When Dustin warned Jamie about him, she insisted he’d changed. He was a great guy, according to her.

  She was always interested in Dustin’s opinions, and he expressed them without reservation. But she still dated Joe. And when they got engaged . . .

  He got off the elevator on Crystal’s floor and went to her room hoping to find Travis. Instead, he found the door open and the bed empty. An alarm rang out in his heart, and he turned around, searching the halls for someone—anyone—who looked as if they might know what was going on.

  A nurse came out of a room across the hall, and he touched her arm. “Crystal Grey. Where is she?”

  She glanced toward Crystal’s empty room. “Oh, she’s been moved to a laminar air-flow room.”

  Dustin took a few seconds to catch his breath. A laminar air-flow room—where no germs could penetrate the sterile walls, where only the sickest patients were isolated and treated. “I guess her husband’s with her, huh?”

  “Yes, and her mother, I think.”

  “She’s going to pull through, right?”

  She glanced away. “We just have to wait and see.”

  Dustin closed his eyes, and the nurse added, “But she has the very best doctors. Really, they’re doing everything they can for her.”

  He nodded and looked in the direction of the special rooms, knowing he couldn’t go in. He wasn’t family, no matter how much he felt as if he were. “Could you tell her husband that Dustin is here when you get a chance?”

  “Of course
,” the nurse said. “I’ll give him the message right now, but he might be a while.”

  “Oh.” Dustin let out a deep sigh, then looked back up the hall. “Never mind. He’s got a lot on his mind. I wanted to go down and give some blood, anyway.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  She went to the nurses’ station, and Dustin went back to the elevator and waited for the doors to open. He should have come earlier.

  He got off the elevator on the main floor and cut across the lobby to the room he’d frequented so often to give blood. The thought of what Travis was going through made him shudder.

  Years ago, when their greatest worry had been getting through basic training and then their deployment to Afghanistan, they’d half expected to be killed in battle or maimed due to an IED. Once they were back home, they thought the danger was over, never dreaming they’d have to face even greater disasters just living their normal lives.

  When he was finished donating blood, his phone vibrated. He glanced to see which news outlet was trying to reach him now, but it was a client, asking him how he could get in touch with Travis. He had an emergency situation.

  Dustin returned the call. “Jeff, this is Dustin Webb. Travis is tied up right now with a family emergency, but I can help you.”

  He braced himself, expecting the caller, the security director at one of their local builds, to say he didn’t want to speak to an alleged terrorist, but the man seemed oblivious to what was going on. “Yeah, Dustin, we had a power outage and our mainframe crashed, and now our security system isn’t accepting any of our passcodes.”

  “I can take care of that,” Dustin said. “I’ll be right over.”

  After he hung up, he realized he would have to go by the office to get into his database of passcodes, or else go back to the Airbnb to get his computer. But maybe Travis’s was in his truck.

  He texted Travis.

  Hate to bother you right now. But I’m downstairs. Just got emergency call from Twin Tech. I don’t have computer with me. Is yours here?

  He waited a minute, then Travis texted back.

  Yeah, it’s in my truck. You have my key?

  Yeah, I’ll get it. Is Crystal okay?

  No. Still bleeding. Fever too high. Getting septic.

  Dustin’s stomach sank. This was bad.

  He wouldn’t let himself dwell on that right now. He went out to Travis’s truck and unlocked the door with the key he kept on his keychain, since he often drove the truck himself to transport equipment. He slipped into Travis’s passenger seat.

  He looked around the cab of the truck for the computer and found it under the seat. He pulled it out and looked for the charger in case he needed it. Travis had a computer bag on the back floorboard, so he retrieved that and looked inside.

  He found the charger and grabbed it, but a paper in there caught his eye.

  It was a xeroxed copy of a diagram of canisters, with the letters “RDX” written at the top. He pulled out the paper and studied it. The lines drawn between the cannisters connected them all and continued to the side, to a single point where Travis had written “Detonator.”

  He felt a kick in his gut.

  Take it easy. It’s not what it seems.

  He sat there for a moment, studying the drawing, trying to make sense of it. There was an explanation. There had to be.

  He put the paper back into the bag and took the computer and charger to his car. A growing knot of fear rose to his throat as he started the engine. He pulled out of the parking lot in a fog, wishing he could just drive for days until all of this was behind him.

  37

  Jamie left the office after receiving a text from Dustin saying that Crystal was in dire need of blood. Giving blood was something she could do.

  As she drove, her phone vibrated, and she answered on bluetooth. It was Max, from work.

  “I came by your office,” he told her, “but you’d left.”

  “I’m heading to the hospital,” she said.

  “Jamie, I know what the partners said today, but I wanted to appeal to you personally. This isn’t going to be good for our firm. We lost the Stolzer account this afternoon.”

  She didn’t have time for this. “They weren’t even our clients. They were only considering us.”

  “Well, they’ve ruled us out now that all this has happened.”

  “Max, I’m not dropping the case.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you’re probably not the best one to represent him anyway? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had an attorney. Call someone like him.”

  “Tsarnaev was guilty. My client is not. And he has faith in me. I know I can do this.”

  Max started into his lecture as she came to a red light. She stopped and glanced at the car in the next lane. The driver was staring at her.

  She squinted through the glare of her window, but couldn’t see clearly.

  “Jamie, I don’t think you’re taking the mood of the country into account.”

  The light turned green, and Jamie started to move forward, then stepped on her brake to see if the other car continued on. But that car hesitated, too. Jamie went ahead, and the other car pulled into her lane behind her.

  Was she being followed?

  “This is serious, Jamie. Are you listening?”

  She looked into her rearview mirror and tried to see the driver’s face. It was a woman, but she couldn’t quite see her features.

  “Jamie, are you there?”

  “Max, I need to call you back. I have to go.”

  “Jamie!”

  She clicked off the phone as she reached the hospital parking lot. She turned in, and the woman followed her.

  She found a parking space close to the door she would go in. The woman in the other car had turned up another row of the parking lot. Jamie sat still and watched her in her mirrors.

  The car slowed as it came around to Jamie’s row. As she passed Jamie’s car, Jamie caught sight of her face. It was Taylor Reid.

  Jamie jumped out of her car and walked through the parking lot toward the girl’s car, but Taylor accelerated and drove out of sight.

  Why was Taylor following her? Did she want to give her another piece of her mind?

  Jamie reined herself in. Maybe Taylor hadn’t been following her at all. She could have been coming to visit another survivor of the bombing. She could just be at the wrong building. It could all be a coincidence.

  But why had Taylor driven away when she knew Jamie saw her?

  Was she following Jamie, hoping to get a glimpse of Dustin? Another layer of uneasiness fell over her as she hurried inside.

  38

  Jamie called her mother as she went through the maze of the hospital corridors, looking for the blood donation lab. “Mom, are you busy?”

  “Just finishing up some work. What’s up?”

  “Dustin’s friend in the hospital is having a hard time, and she desperately needs blood. He said they’re looking for donors. Do you think any of your women’s group members might be willing to help?”

  “I’ll call them,” her mom said. “And I’ll sure come.”

  “Really?”

  “Anything for Dustin.”

  Jamie saw Wendy on the phone in the hall just ahead of her, under the sign that pointed to blood donations. “Wendy!” she said, hurrying toward her.

  Wendy got off the phone and hugged her. “Hey, honey.”

  “I’m here to give blood, and I called my mother, and she’s getting some of her friends to come and give, too.”

  “Oh, God bless her!” Wendy said. “That would be such a help. I’m waiting for some others to get here, too. I’ll take you in and introduce you.”

  Jamie followed her toward the room. “Is Dustin still here?”

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  Wendy pointed her to a nurse who was already drawing blood from some others. Wendy hastily introduced the couple as Travis and Crystal’s friends. Jamie took the table ne
xt to the woman.

  Wendy hurried back out. A friendly nurse approached Jamie. “I’m so glad so many people are coming for her,” the nurse said as she started Jamie’s IV. “That patient is having a hard time, it sounds like.”

  Jamie looked away as the needle found her vein. “Tell me something,” she said. “Why is a nosebleed so critical in a leukemia patient?”

  “Because she can hemorrhage to death.” Jamie watched her hang the bag and connect the tubing. The nurse checked the bag to make sure the blood was flowing the way it should, then resumed her explanation. “Platelets are her problem.”

  “So how do transfusions help? Is it just to replace what she’s lost?”

  “She needs platelets so her blood will start clotting again. She’s had problems before with her body rejecting the new platelets, though.”

  Jamie closed her eyes and imagined how futile the whole ordeal must be to Travis and Wendy, and even to Dustin. “How awful.”

  “It can be overwhelming. But these families keep doing everything in their power, and maybe there’ll be one thing that will work. I’ve seen it happen over and over. Prayer works, too. Do you pray?”

  Jamie leaned her head back on the pillow as her blood filled the tubing. “Yeah.”

  “That’s stronger than any medicine,” the nurse said as she walked away. “Call me if you need me.”

  Jamie closed her eyes and thought about her answer to whether she prayed. She did pray throughout the day, quick hit-and-run prayers as needed. But she knew those weren’t the kinds of prayers that moved mountains or helped dying people heal.

  Where had she lost that?

  Maybe it was after Joe died, when she had gone from feeling numb, to outraged, to guilty, then numb again. She had blamed God for not protecting Joe from himself, and for not guarding her family. For a while, she hadn’t prayed at all. After all the prayers she’d prayed for Joe’s addiction problems, prayers that had never been answered, she had been overwhelmed with the unspoken sense that prayer didn’t matter.