“I’ve got some information on your brother’s condition. Would you like it now or would you prefer to wait for your family? Normally I wouldn’t offer a choice, but for someone with your background...”
With your experience handling disaster... JJ’s brain finished the thought he hadn’t.
“I should go.” Alex’s voice was soft, but it still startled her. Shouldn’t he want to stay, get the latest report so he could update that annoying lawyer guy from before?
“Are you a friend of the family?” Dr. Ryland asked, clearly thinking JJ ought not to be alone with whatever news he was about to deliver.
“Well...” Alex stammered.
“It’s complicated,” JJ surprised herself by offering.
“It’s your call.” Dr. Ryland picked up the envelope. “Until Max is fully awake, you’re making the decisions.” His gaze passed back and forth between JJ and Alex. “A second set of ears is a good thing, but you can wait until your family is here.”
JJ stared at the envelope. It held Max’s future. How on earth could she wait? But did she really want to handle it alone?
“I should go,” Alex repeated.
“No.” It was like the words were coming out of someone else’s mouth. “No, stay.”
Dr. Ryland looked at both of them again as he flicked on the white light box that would hold the X-ray. “You’re sure?”
“No,” said JJ, “but that’s the best I can do for now.”
They stood in the bleary pale light of the box while Dr. Ryland clipped three different X-rays onto the display. JJ sucked in a lungful of air, and she felt Alex’s hand steady her shoulder from behind. She’d never seen a fractured spine before, but it didn’t take a medical degree to see the damage. The terms and phrases coming from the doctor blew over her like gale winds, hard and relentless. She heard them but didn’t register them. She nodded once or twice, heard Alex ask a question, but the room was closing in on itself until a single word snapped everything into focus: Unlikely.
“It’s unlikely Max will regain use of his legs. I won’t say never because I’ve seen enough surprises in my day and Max was in excellent physical shape.”
JJ hated that he’d used the past tense. Something hot and white and unreasonable started boiling in her stomach. She clenched her fists, forcing the air in and out of her lungs.
“His hands and fingers may regain a good deal of functionality with therapy. The position of the...” More medical jargon, more terms and percentages and cautious language. JJ held up a hand to stop the spew before it swallowed her.
“Max will never walk again.” She looked straight into Dr. Ryland’s eyes, daring him to take back the awful truth behind his careful words.
“It’s unlikely. Not with these injuries. But I want you to remember that he is alive and he will recover.”
“Recover? Recover what?”
“Every single bit of function we can preserve for him. We are the leaders in this field, Miss Jones. Max will have therapies and treatments that are cutting edge, and even experimental ones if he chooses.” Dr. Ryland stared hard into JJ’s eyes. “His life is not over, no matter how it seems to you right now. And when he wakes up, he’ll need to see you believe in him and his future. Max is alive. Don’t ever forget that.”
“But he can’t walk. Ever.” The thing building inside her, the pent-up fear and anger, refused to be contained. “Ever again.”
“The doctor didn’t say that,” Alex’s voice was disgustingly reasonable. Condescending, even.
“You don’t belong here,” JJ blurted out, the white-hot thing boiling up beyond her control. “You did this to Max. He’s here because of you.”
Dr. Ryland put a hand on her shoulder. “Miss Jones...”
“Don’t!” JJ snapped her head around, livid at how calm they both were. She focused her glare on Alex. “Leave. Now. I hope I never see you again.”
Chapter Five
JJ watched her mother a few hours later as Dr. Ryland went through the same jumble of cautionary language he had with her. It was hard, watching the emotions she knew so well play out on her face. Max had been a tornado of trouble from the day he started walking. Mom and Dad had been awakened by police and done the dash to the ER with a bloodied Max more times than she could count, but everyone knew this was different. Max wasn’t coming back from this the same way. JJ tried to be grateful Max was coming back at all, but she wasn’t so good at that right now.
“He’s extraordinarily fortunate,” Dr. Ryland said. He looked like he meant it, but again, it was impossible to grasp the silver lining in any of this. She couldn’t help but read her own thoughts—he’s lucky to be alive at all—into his pronouncement. “He had good care and quickly. Those things matter a great deal in cases like this. For the injury he has, I’m optimistic about his prospects.”
Optimistic. How many times had JJ heard that word in the last day? She’d grown to hate it in all its careful use.
Dr. Ryland steepled his hands on his desk as if he had something important to say. Out of the corner of her eye, JJ caught Mom clutching her handbag. “Max will be alert enough to begin asking questions soon, so I’d like to discuss how we share his diagnosis with him. As you can imagine, this can be a difficult task. His body has been through a lot of trauma, and based on what you all have told me about his personality, I think it’s smart to assume that he won’t take the news well.”
“Who could ever take news like this well?” JJ caught a hefty dose of panic in her mother’s voice.
“Believe it or not, we’re actually glad when they get angry,” Dr. Ryland assured. “Anger means he’s invested in getting past this—that he hasn’t given up. It takes a fair amount of fight to come back from something like this. I know it will be uncomfortable for you, but if Max gets emotional and belligerent, I’d take that as a good sign.”
“Max pitches a great fit,” JJ replied, just picturing the tirade Max would likely throw. She’d seen him fly off the handle for far less. “If fight is a good sign, then Max is in great shape.” She filled her voice with enthusiasm she didn’t feel.
“This is hardly the time for cracks like that.” Her mother’s scowl was brittle and terse. It reminded JJ of her father and his military distaste for weakness of any kind.
They hadn’t really gotten along in the years before he died, despite JJ joining the army. Dad had lived and breathed military service in a way that JJ never could. His home had been his own personal battleground, run with absolute authority. No insubordination or weakness allowed.
Once she’d enlisted, JJ had hoped Dad would view her as more of an equal. When she’d come home on leave, shaken by what she’d seen, she’d tried to confide in him—to share her questions and anxieties. The conversation had been an absolute disaster. He couldn’t understand how battle had affected her in ways so different than his own experiences. When she’d tried to express doubts about what she saw, he would never hear it. He died three years ago while she was still on duty, yet from his grave she still felt his disappointment in her weak and troubled homecoming. JJ couldn’t shake the feeling that Arnie Jones was now fully disappointed in both his children.
“Actually, it is a perfect time for jokes.” Dr. Ryland leaned in, taking off the thick horn-rimmed glasses that gave him such an authoritative air. “Humor is one of our best weapons in this. As are calm and strength. Which is why, Mrs. Jones, I’d recommend that JJ and I be the ones to tell him.”
“Why?” Her tone provided the most convincing argument for Ryland’s strategy, sad and full of a mother’s worry.
“No mother on Earth could deliver such news without tremendous emotion. I’d only ask you to do so if we had no other options. He can’t yet respond to you while the breathing tube is in place, so it’s a delicate balance to let him respond fully without the ability to speak. It can be hard.”
When JJ’s mother balked, the doctor held up a hand. “Of course, you are welcome to do whatever you choose—the decision is
entirely up to you—but I thought you would want to consider my suggestion. JJ’s had a little bit more time to come to grips with the whole situation and her background gives her more experience with these sorts of situations.” He paused to let the point sink in, then moved on from delivery to content.
“Now is not the time for cold hard facts. It would be best if we could lead Max up to his diagnosis in bits, not all at once. I do admit there isn’t much hope for Max to walk, but I don’t think it’s wise to take all of that hope away right now. The last thing we want is for Max to give up. We need him fighting.”
“I’ll do it.” JJ had tried not to ask this question, but now it couldn’t be helped. “Is he...all there? Brain-wise?” The words felt ugly and cumbersome, and she hated the resulting panic on her mother’s face.
“Cognitively, we’ve every reason to believe Max is fine. He’s on a lot of medications, so he isn’t quite himself, but we don’t see any evidence of brain damage.” Dr. Ryland gave her mother a gentle look. “If it helps, he’ll probably have no memory of the accident. He might not even remember today or tomorrow, so JJ, this likely isn’t a conversation you’ll have only one time. I like to think that takes a bit of the pressure off this first time. You will need to talk to him again once his breathing tube is out and he’s more able to respond.”
JJ shrugged. “I wish that helped, but it doesn’t.” How do you tell someone you love that their life has changed forever? That they are broken in ways that can never be fixed? How do you say that not just once, but over and over again, seeing them react to it with fresh hurt each time? Thoughts tumbled over one another in her head. She felt alone in the room, isolated as if she were back standing in the middle of the Afghan desert with a sandstorm swirling around her.
She tried to mentally reach for something calming—a time and a place when she felt centered and relaxed. The first memory that came to mind was sitting on the dock with Alex. Scowling, she pushed the thought away. Memories of the friendship she’d thought she’d found were not going to help her now.
This felt so far out of her depth that JJ was sure ten hours of pondering wouldn’t prepare her to tell Max what she needed to tell him—and according to Dr. Ryland, she had an hour.
She stood up. “All right, Dr. Ryland, I’ll be the one to tell him with you. But I have no idea how to do it.”
* * *
“You? You hurt my boy?” Mrs. Jones’s anguish was so heartbreaking Alex was regretting introducing himself in the hospital hallway.
“My company is one of the vendors to the show where Max was hurt.” It was a correction he was sure the woman didn’t hear.
She clutched her handbag and glared at him. “You let Max do this to himself. For television. And now look what’s happened! Arnie would run you over with a tank for what you’ve done to our son.”
He said the only thing that might help. “I’m so very sorry for what’s happened to Max. Please believe I’m trying to arrange for every possible assistance and to make sure he gets the best of care. If there’s anything you need...”
“I need my son to get better.” Her words were sharp and filled with anger. JJ looked so much like her mother that Alex felt the sting that much more. “Can you make that happen, Mr. Cushman? Can you?”
She walked away, leaving Alex to slump against the walls and pray for some way to fix the unfixable. He could live a hundred years and still remember that look, surely. A mother’s agony—was there anything more heartbreaking? She wasn’t handling things well, he could tell. Then again, who could handle something like this well? There was pain everywhere Alex looked, with more than enough blame and resentment to go around and nowhere near enough hope.
No wonder he went looking for the hospital chapel.
It was a small room, soft and quiet with muted lighting and lots of wood. A stained glass window depicting a waterfall sent blues and greens into one corner of the room. Not more than twelve padded pews faced a simple cross set atop a draped table. Every pew held a box of tissues. This wasn’t a room for happy ceremonies; this was a place of grief and solace.
He recognized the blond braid in the third pew immediately and almost turned and left the room. It was her sniffle, the small shake of her shoulders, that pulled his hand from the door handle. Her silhouette was completely different from the last time he’d seen her; she appeared deflated rather than defiant. JJ was hanging on by a thread if she was hanging on at all. No one should have to do that alone.
“JJ?”
Her head whipped around and her shoulders snapped straight as if she were embarrassed to be found there. The fire was there in her eyes, but they were the red-rimmed eyes of someone who’d just cried, and cried hard. She gave him a “You again?” glare but said nothing.
“I didn’t come looking for you. I came looking for God, actually, so this seemed a good place to start.” He really hadn’t expected to find her in here. He waited for her to yell at him to leave. When she didn’t, he took another step toward her. “Are you...are you all right?” It was a dumb question—anyone could see she was miles from “all right.” He hadn’t seen her in the past few hours. She looked like she’d been through a war in that time. “Did something happen?”
She glanced upward, pulling in a breath to right another wave of tears. “I just told him.”
“Told him?”
A tear made its way down her cheek. She had these kid-like freckles that didn’t seem to belong on such strong features. “I just told Max his legs no longer work. Dr. Ryland and I told him together. For the first time. It was awful. He cried. I mean, not out loud—he can’t with the breathing tube and all—but I could still see it. It was all over his face, the pain in his eyes and the tears on his cheeks.”
“That must have been terrible.” It seemed so inadequate a thing to say, but every other phrase that came to mind felt just as useless. “I’m sure he was glad to have you beside him, to be the one to give him the news. That’s unbelievably brave, JJ. Really.”
“Dr. Ryland thought I’d be the best one to be there. He picked right up on Mom’s panic and knew Max needed calm. Seems like a smart guy.”
“He’s the best. Top five in the country, they tell me.”
That sent more tears down JJ’s face. “He doesn’t even look like Max right now, with his face all swollen and those bruises. I can’t even say for sure he understood what I told him. The doctor says his memory is a bit sketchy right now so he won’t really remember.” She balled a tissue up in her fist. “I’ll have to tell him over again. Maybe even a couple of times. I hate this. All this mindless coping, this sitting around waiting for tests or medicines or symptoms or whatever... It feels rotten. I need to do something.”
Alex sat down on the pew next to her. “I think you just did something. Something huge.”
JJ pulled the elastic out of her braid and began unraveling it with her fingers. “You know, I probably should have yelled at him. Dressed him down for the stupid risks he’s always taking. You can never get a word in when you argue with Max, and this was my one chance where he couldn’t yell back. Only...only...” Her voice fell off and she reached for another tissue.
Only. If only. The words were pounding in his own head like a migraine.
“Why aren’t you gone?” The words held none of her earlier anger, but more of a weary befuddlement.
“I’ll go when you tell me I should.”
She rolled her eyes. “I already told you to leave.”
“Yeah, that one didn’t really count.”
She blinked at him, both eyebrows arched. “Because...”
“You know, I don’t really know. Something just told me you shouldn’t be alone yet.”
“My mom is here.”
“Oh, I know.” Alex pinched the bridge of his nose. “Your mother just laid into me in the hallway. She actually told me your father would have run me over with a tank. You didn’t tell me you came from a military family.”
She gave a small laug
h, tiny and thin but there nonetheless. “Went all ‘if General Jones were here’ on you, did she? It’s a favorite tactic of hers, telling us what Dad would have done. Dad could be quite the dictator when he got mad. It’s how she kept us in line as kids, telling us what kind of lecture we had to look forward to when he got back from his latest deployment and learned what we’d done.” She sighed. “Still, I thought she saved that for offspring.”
“She’s worried and angry. I’m as good a target as any, I suppose.”
The look on her face told him JJ had endured her share of dressing-downs at her father’s hands. The exact opposite of his and Sam’s dad, who could never scrounge up enough attention for his sons to get angry. Some shrink somewhere would surely draw a straight line from Sam’s high-maintenance personality to their father’s lack of family focus.
As for Alex, was it any surprise that he coped by putting distance between himself and his problems? He’d never been able to fix his family, and the harder he’d tried to hold them all together the more they’d fractured apart. Alex was a problem solver, all right, but he’d learned not to get too close or too invested in those problems. His best solutions came from the mile-high view—using distance to gain perspective. So why was he down in the thick of it now?
JJ shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
Her words startled Alex. “Wait a minute—your brother’s been injured by my equipment and your mom takes it out on me and you’re apologizing? What’s wrong with this picture?”
JJ’s gaze snapped to him, her face going pale. “So you know for certain? It was a failure of your equipment?”
Alex wanted to punch himself in the nose. He hadn’t meant to say that. No one really knew if that was true, at least not yet. Her unearned apology had shocked it out of him. Now there wasn’t a way to back down from the admission, even though he was sure JJ and her family would jump on anything that didn’t make this Max’s fault. “We don’t actually know yet. I shouldn’t have said something like that.” Even as he said the words, he knew they’d have no effect.
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