The Friend Zone

by Abby Jimenez

“Kristen, Brandon’s been in an accident.”

  I told her everything. I knew she would take care of the rest. She was capable—she’d get Sloan to the hospital.

  When I got back, Javier paced the hallway, making phone calls to cover our shifts, a finger pressed to his ear. But there were fires up north. It would be hard to find someone. We were already borrowing Luke as it was.

  Shawn breathed into a paper bag with Luke crouched next to him, looking worried. “They just wheeled him off to surgery,” Luke said.

  I slid down against the wall of the ER hallway as nurses and staff streamed by me. I put my palms to my eyelids and cried like a baby.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Kristen

  I hung up with Josh, and the switch flipped in my head.

  Sloan called it my velociraptor brain because it made me fierce and sharp. Something big had to trigger it, and when it did, my compulsive, laser-focused, primal side activated. The one that got me a near perfect score on my SATs and got me through college finals and Mom. The one that made me clean when I was stressed and threatened to launch into full-scale manic OCD if left unchecked—that kicked in.

  Emotion drained away, the tiredness from staying up all night crying dissipated, and I became my purpose.

  I didn’t do hysterics. Never had. When in crisis, I became systematic and efficient.

  And the transition was now complete.

  I weighed only for a second whether to call Sloan and tell her or go pick her up. I decided to pick her up. She would be too upset to drive properly, but knowing her, she would try anyway.

  From Josh’s explanation of the situation, Brandon wouldn’t be out of the hospital anytime soon. Sloan wouldn’t leave Brandon, and I wouldn’t leave her. She would need things for the stay. People would need to be called. Arrangements made.

  I began to compile a list in my head of things to do and things to pack as I quickly but methodically drove to Sloan’s. Phone charger, headphones, blanket, change of clothes for Sloan, toiletries, and her laptop.

  It took me twenty minutes to get to her house, and I got out of my car ready for a surgical extraction.

  I stood there, surrounded by the earthy smell of Sloan’s just-watered potted porch flowers. The door opened, and I took in her blissfully ignorant face one more time.

  “Kristen?”

  It wasn’t unusual for me to stop by. But she knew me well enough to instantly know something was wrong.

  “Sloan, Brandon has been in an accident,” I said calmly. “He’s alive, but I need you to get your purse and come with me.”

  I knew immediately that I’d been right to come get her instead of calling. One look at her and I knew she wouldn’t have been able to put a foot in front of the other. While I mobilized and became strong under stress, she froze and weakened.

  “What? ” she breathed.

  “We have to hurry. Come on.” I pushed past her and systematically executed my checklist. I gave myself a two-minute window to grab what was needed.

  Her gym bag would be in the laundry room, already filled with toiletries and her headphones. I grabbed that, pulled a sweater from her closet, selected a change of clothes for her, and stuffed her laptop inside the bag.

  When I came out of the room, she had managed to grab her purse as instructed. She stood by the sofa looking shaken, her eyes moving back and forth like she was trying to figure out what was happening.

  Her cell phone sat by her easel and I snatched it, pulling the charger from the wall. I grabbed her favorite throw blanket from the sofa and stuffed that in the bag and zipped it.

  List complete.

  Then I took her by the elbow, locked her front door, and dragged her to the car.

  “Wha…what happened? What happened!” she screamed, finally coming out of her shock.

  I opened up the passenger door and put her in. “Buckle yourself up. I’ll tell you what I know on the way.”

  When I got around to the driver’s side, she had her phone to her ear. “He’s not answering. He’s not answering! What happened, Kristen?!”

  I grabbed her face in my hands. “Listen to me. Look at me. He is alive. He was hit on his bike. Josh went on the call. He was unconscious. It was clear he had some broken bones and a possible head injury. He’s at the ER, and I need to get you to the hospital to be with him. But I need you to be calm.”

  Her brown eyes were terrified, but she nodded.

  “Right now your job is to call Brandon’s family,” I said firmly. “Relay what I just said to you, calmly. Can you do that for Brandon?”

  She nodded again. “Yes.” Her hands shook, but she dialed.

  I drove fast and carefully while Sloan made calls. I scanned the road and went twenty over the speed limit on the freeway. I zipped around cars using my blinker and hand waves. When we got to the hospital, I dropped her off at the emergency room entrance and parked, then ran with her bag to meet her at the front desk.

  “He’s in surgery,” she said tearfully when I jogged in through the automatic doors of the ER, my shoes squeaking on the white shiny floors.

  I looked at the woman behind the check-in desk, like a robot gathering data. I could see everything. The age spots on her forehead, the gray wisps along her hairline. The sterile, white countertop and the shimmer in the petals of pink roses in a vase behind the desk. “Where can we wait? And can you inform the doctor that his family is here?”

  We were sent to a private waiting area for the neurology department on the third floor. Brightly lit, plastic potted plants tucked in the corners of the room, serene blue walls, uniform gray tweed upholstered chairs, magazines and boxes of tissues on every end and coffee table.

  Sloan scanned the room. Maybe it was the finality of it—the cessation of forward movement—but this was when she officially broke down. She buried her face in her hands and wept. “Why is this happening?”

  I wrapped her sweater around her and put her in a chair. “I don’t know, Sloan. Why does anything happen?”

  I knew what things had to be done, what I had to do to make her comfortable. But I couldn’t feel any of the panic or grief that I saw in Sloan. I felt like I was watching a movie with the sound off. I could see what was happening, but I couldn’t connect to the characters.

  We waited. And waited. And waited.

  A police officer came in and asked Sloan some questions. Confirmed Brandon’s name and address. Then he told us that the woman who had caused the accident had been arrested for driving under the influence.

  Sloan sobbed again when she heard that.

  I covered her with her blanket and got her a coffee. I plugged in her phone, made her eat half of a tuna sandwich.

  Family began to show up and they huddled around the waiting room, whispering and crying. Brandon’s mom prayed in Spanish over a rosary.

  I sat next to Sloan, feigning emotion, doing all the motions. Looking somber and rubbing her back but feeling empty and removed because my crisis response was still in effect.

  Now that the rush was gone, the velociraptor paced. I couldn’t shut off my brain and the need to be doing something. But the only thing to do was wait. I bounced my knee and picked at my cuticles until they bled. I texted Josh and kept him posted. They’d found a replacement for him at work, but he couldn’t leave until 8:00 p.m.

  Then, ten hours after the accident, the doctor came out.

  Sloan bolted from her chair and I followed, ready to absorb what he said with an accuracy that I would be able to transpose onto paper, word for word, two days later.

  Brandon’s mom wrapped her sweater tighter around herself and stood shoulder to shoulder with Sloan. Brandon’s dad put an arm around his wife.

  I tried to figure out the outcome from the doctor’s lined, angular face, but he was unreadable.

  “I’m Dr. Campbell, the resident neurosurgeon. Brandon is out of surgery. He’s stable. We were able to stop the internal bleeding. I had to remove a large piece of his skull to alleviate the pressure on
his brain.”

  Sloan gasped and started sobbing again. I put an arm around her, sandwiching her between Brandon’s mom and me as she breathed into her hands.

  The doctor went on. “The good news is there’s brain activity. Now, I can’t say what his recovery is going to look like at this juncture, but the tests we ran were promising. He’s going to have a long road ahead of him, but I’m feeling optimistic.”

  The room took a collective deep breath.

  “For now we’re going to be keeping him on a ventilator in a medically induced coma to allow the swelling to go down and give his brain a chance to heal itself. We won’t know the extent of his injuries until he comes out of that coma. But again, I feel optimistic. He’s a strong young man.”

  “Can I see him?” Sloan wiped at her eyes.

  “He’ll be in recovery for the next hour. Once they get him set up in the ICU, he can have visitors. Fifteen minutes only, no more than two people at a time.”

  “When will he be off the ventilator?” I asked.

  “That all depends on him. Could be days. Could be weeks. Weeks is the more likely scenario.”

  Dr. Campbell handed us off to the orthopedic surgeon, who went over the next steps to deal with Brandon’s broken bones. Another surgeon told us about the repairs to the laceration to his liver. Then a plastic surgeon talked to us about the skin grafts he would need to cover the extensive road rash on his left arm.

  By the time the doctors were done with us, Sloan was wiped. I put her back in her chair and called Josh.

  The phone was still ringing when I heard it behind me. I spun and there he was.

  The second I saw him, my emotional disconnect from the situation clicked off. My coping mechanism snapped away from me like a rubber band shot across a room, and the weight of what happened hit me. Sloan’s grief, Brandon’s condition—Josh’s trauma. I dove into his arms, instantly withered.

  I’d never trusted anyone else to be the one in control, and my manic mind gave it to him immediately and without reservation and retreated back into itself.

  He clutched me, and I held him tighter than I’d ever held anyone in my life. I wasn’t sure if I was comforting him, or if I was letting him comfort me. All I knew was something subconscious in me told me I didn’t have to hold the world up anymore now that he was here.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” I whispered, breathing him in as my body turned back on from being in suspended animation. The sound to the movie around me turned all the way up. My heart began to pound, I gasped into his neck, and tears instantly flooded my eyes.

  He put his forehead to mine. He looked like shit. He’d looked bad this morning at the station—I knew he hadn’t slept. But now his eyes were red like he’d been crying. “Any updates?” His voice was raspy.

  I couldn’t even comprehend how hard it must have been for him to see what he saw and stay at work, going on calls. I wanted to cover him like a blanket. I wanted to cover them both, Josh and Sloan, and shield them from this.

  I put a hand to his cheek, and he turned into it and closed his eyes.

  “He just got out of surgery,” I said. Then I told him everything, my hands on his chest like they anchored me. He stood with his arms around my waist, nodding and looking at me like he was worried I was the one who wasn’t okay.

  It didn’t escape me that we were holding each other and I didn’t care what it meant or what wrong signals it might send to him at the moment. I just knew that I needed to touch him. I needed this momentary surrender.

  For both of us.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Josh

  It was several hours before I got to see Brandon. The limit was strict on visitors in the ICU, and Sloan and Brandon’s immediate family took first run.

  It was night already. I had somehow managed to live through the worst day of my life. I checked my watch: 11:18 p.m. I sat in the waiting room with Kristen and Sloan and a fluctuating, thinning crowd of Brandon’s relatives.

  Kristen held my hand.

  She hadn’t stopped touching me since I got here. I was grateful. I needed her. Just being there with her soothed me. I’d been spinning at work, the images of Brandon running on a continuous loop through my head. The smell of blood, the crack of his ribs under my palms, every injury, replaying itself again and again, and me, questioning whether I’d done the right thing with each one. If I’d done enough to save his life.

  But Kristen’s fingers laced through mine quieted it all. I couldn’t picture going through this without her. I didn’t know how I’d be coping if it wasn’t for her.

  Sloan was a fucking mess. Kristen seemed to orbit around her in a constant stream of awareness, even when Kristen put her head on my shoulder and drifted off. Sloan got up to use the bathroom, and Kristen opened her eyes like she could detect the sound of Sloan moving, even in her sleep.

  Kristen watched her friend walk from the room. When Sloan was gone, Kristen looked up at me with those brown eyes, one hand tangled in mine and the other on my chest, and I was whole just looking at her.

  This crisis laid everything bare.

  I’d found my person.

  She was the foundation. She was the thing that all other things are built on. Everything was secondary to being with her. It didn’t matter where I worked or if I liked my job, where I lived or how many kids I had. My happiness, my sanity, my well-being—it all started with her. And now that I knew that, I didn’t want to just be her boyfriend—I wanted everything. I wanted her to be my wife. I wanted to wake up to her every day for the rest of my life.

  We needed to talk. Not now. It wasn’t the right place or time. But we needed to talk.

  “You can go in now.” A nurse broke into my thoughts.

  Kristen sat up and gave my arm a squeeze. “Want me to go in with you?”

  “No. Sloan will want to see him again. I’ll be fine.” I stood.

  Brandon’s parents had gone home to deal with their dogs and to take showers. Only Brandon’s sister, Claudia, remained in the waiting room. She’d already gone in twice over the last two hours and was sleeping on a bench.

  The nurse buzzed me into the ICU.

  I peered into dim open hospital rooms as we made our way down the hall, the smell of antiseptic swirling around me as I walked.

  We stopped at room 214.

  His room was small. I could see why they limited it to two visitors at a time.

  Like the other rooms, his was dimmed for the late hour. Brandon lay on his back. Hands at his sides, a pulse oximeter on the index finger of his right hand. His head was bound with thick white gauze, his left leg elevated in a sling and bandaged. He wore a ventilator over his face. Wires snaked from his chest under his hospital gown.

  The gentle, quiet beep of a heart monitor and the in and out of the ventilator were the only sounds in the room. His cheek was purple and swollen, the bruising I’d witnessed on the scene blooming.

  I just stood there, like I was looking at a mess too big to clean up and I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know what to do. I felt frozen. This was a soldier in Iraq. A hunter. A strong and capable man.

  And now he was broken.

  Sloan slipped into the room behind me and slid into one of the bedside chairs, gathering up his hand. My legs unlocked and I took her lead, sitting in the chair next to her.

  She looked at him, her chin quivering. Her hair was up in a loose bun, crooked and sloppy. Her face, blotchy and red. “They say he can hear us. We should talk to him, Josh.”

  I cleared my throat and leaned forward. “Hey, buddy. You look like shit, man.”

  Sloan did a laugh-cry. Then she put her other hand over his. “Your whole family was here today, babe. You won’t ever be here alone, okay? Someone will always be in the waiting room for you. I’m not going to leave you. I can’t be in here all the time, but I’ll be just outside.”

  I wondered why someone wasn’t allowed to stay with him. When the fifteen minutes was up and the nurse came to get us
, Sloan went back to the waiting room and I made my way to the nurses’ station. I summoned my most convincing smile, the one that seemed to work on Kristen, and I walked up to the counter.

  The middle-aged nurse manning the station looked up, eyed my firefighter badge, and gave me a warm grin. “Well, hello. What can I do for you, young man?”

  I was grateful for my profession at the moment. Nobody was ever unhappy to see a fireman.

  I put a thumb over my shoulder. “Yeah, I was just visiting my buddy, Brandon, in room 214.” I looked over at the room and came back with a smile that I hoped reached my eyes. “I couldn’t help but notice a lot of the other rooms had visitors that looked like they’d kind of set up camp. Is there any way his fiancée can just stay with him? He’d really like that.”

  My sister Amber was a nurse, and I knew that on the hospital floor, the nurses ruled absolutely. They could bend any policy they wanted to.

  She smiled at me. “Well, it’s against the visitor guidelines. But I think we can do that. I’ll buzz her back in.”

  I made a case for Claudia too and got the nod.

  When I came back out into the waiting room and gave Sloan and Claudia the news, they both hugged me before slipping back into the ICU.

  I turned to Kristen. “We should go home. Get some sleep.”

  We were the last two left in the waiting room, and weariness started to take me down. I was emotionally and physically exhausted.

  I put my hands on her arms. “There’s nothing else you can do for Sloan at the moment, and sleeping in a chair isn’t going to help matters. He’s stable. Let’s go home.”

  She folded herself into my chest, and I tucked her head under my chin and closed my eyes, wrapping her in my arms. I’d never seen her this vulnerable. Her guard was totally down, and it made me feel protective over her.

  “Come on.” I kissed her forehead, and she closed her eyes and leaned into it. “I’ll drive.”

  On the way home she pulled her legs up to her chest and leaned against the door of the car. I held her hand.