The Ransome Brothers_A Ransom Novel

by Rachel Schurig

  “I’m at the hospital,” he says, and a noise like a sob breaks through, the sound going straight to my chest, chasing away the regretful ache Ruby left behind. It calms me, somehow, his panic. He needs me right now. There’s no room for anything else.

  “What hospital?”

  He tells me, and I close my eyes. Of course it’s that hospital, the last place I want to be. But I’m already grabbing my keys, my feet taking me halfway to the door before I even decide to start moving. “I’m on my way.”

  Reed

  Time seems to be happening in flashes. The doctors talking to me, calling Paige’s mom, desperately dialing my brothers’ numbers, over and over, trying to reach someone. I’m having trouble following what the doctors are telling me, trouble understanding how in the hell this could be happening.

  She was fine yesterday. Completely fine.

  Then my dad is here, kneeling next to my chair in the waiting room. From the way he’s saying my name, I think he must have been here for a while now, trying to get my attention.

  “Dad.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  I just shake my head. I feel confused and lightheaded and so scared that I can’t breathe right. Then my dad gets right in my face, shaking my shoulders. “Reed,” he says, his voice firm and loud. I hang onto it, focus on it, trying to get my head to stop spinning. “Tell me what happened.”

  “They said she has meningitis,” I croak out. “I don’t…I didn’t even know what that is.”

  My father’s face looks very grave. “Swelling around the brain and spinal cord. Caused by an infection.”

  I nod, feeling dizzy. “There are different kinds and they said…they said what she has could be really bad. And they won’t let me see her but…” The memory of the doctor’s face swims in my head, telling me they would do their best but it was very serious and I needed to prepare myself. I made the mistake of googling it after that and…holy shit. People lost limbs from this. Went deaf, lost their sight. Had brain damage.

  People died.

  “Dad.”

  “Okay, Son. Just stay here for a minute. Let me go see what I can find out.”

  Time is doing that weird flashing thing again because I close my eyes, seeing Paige the way she looked last night, tired, complaining of a headache, but laughing. Beautiful. And then my dad is there again, sitting next to me, the same doctor from before standing in front of us.

  “Mr. Ransome, your father said you’d like an update?”

  I wonder, vaguely, what my dad had done to get the doctor to come back out, but then he’s speaking again and I try to pay attention, to actually take this in. It’s too hard. He’s talking about strong antibiotics and IVs and her kidneys and an induced coma and fuck, what if she isn’t okay? What if she actually isn’t going to be okay?

  “You didn’t get much of that, did you?” my dad asks. I blink up and realize the doctor is gone again. “It’s okay. I was listening.”

  I breathe out, feeling slightly relieved. Paige’s mom is going to call me back after she figures out a flight—because, God, they told me I should get her family here, and that has to mean this is bad, right?—and I need to be able to tell her something.

  “He said she was lucky you brought her in,” my dad says, his hand on my shoulder. “Fast treatment is the most important thing with a case like this.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “She had a headache last night. I should have made her go to the doctor.”

  “People don’t usually go to the doctor for a headache.”

  “But she’s been sick,” I say, my voice getting louder as the panic rises. “She’s been sick on and off this whole year, ever since we got back from Europe. She had this sinus infection that kept coming back. She wasn’t taking it seriously, she wouldn’t go back to the doctor… And they said sometimes this can pass into the blood through a sinus infection and I didn’t… I should have…”

  “Breathe, Son. You need to breathe. Paige needs you to keep it together.”

  Oh God. I don’t think I can. Because if she isn’t okay…

  I pull out my phone, desperate for something to do, and scroll through my contacts for Karen’s name. “Let me do that,” Dad says, putting his hand over mine. “She’s probably out with Levi. He mentioned a night off.”

  I nod, feeling numb. I already called Levi, too. He isn’t answering. Neither is Daltrey. Lennon is on a plane, heading to Dallas to meet Haylee on the road. Cash is the only one who I’d been able to reach, and he’s in Seattle, a thousand miles away. I called Dad without thinking about it. I felt like I was losing my mind, like I could barely hold on, and I needed someone to be here. And now he’s sitting next to me, calling Levi for me so that he can tell Karen that her best friend is gravely sick in the hospital.

  “Voicemail,” my dad says, then, “Levi, this is Will. Paige is ill and I need you to call me right away.” His voice is calm but authoritative. I hadn’t bothered to leave messages past the first one, and I’m sure I was a mess in it. At least I had the presence of mind not to leave a message for Karen. No way she needed to hear my panic.

  My dad’s phone rings and my heart twists, thinking it’s Levi, imagining how upset Karen is about to be.

  “Cash,” Dad says into the phone. “Yes, I know. I’m here with him.” He’s quiet for a minute then says, “I’m not sure he’s really up for talking right now.” I hold out my hand and he meets my eyes, his searching. “Here he is.”

  I hold the phone up to my ear, Cash’s voice filling my head. I try to concentrate on his words. “…getting on a plane…be there in a few hours…just try to breathe, man…”

  “Cash,” I say, my voice sounding awfully like a groan. “They put her into a coma. They said she could…What if she doesn’t…”

  “You can’t think like that,” he says, and his voice is shaking. I feel Dad’s hand on my shoulder again. “You have to hang on, Reed. She needs you.”

  I nod, even though he can’t see me, and close my eyes.

  “Dad is there with you?”

  “Yeah,” I manage.

  “Good. That’s good. Look, they’re calling my flight. I’ll be there soon, okay?”

  “Okay,” I whisper, trying to take strength from his words. But all I can think about is how bad this is, that Cash is rushing home, and Paige’s mom. People don’t rush across the country unless things are bad, right? Then my dad is taking the phone back and I realize that Cash isn’t on the other end of the line anymore.

  I listen, mute, while he leaves identical voicemails for Lennon and Daltrey. “Rose has been keeping them up lately,” I mutter. “They probably turned their phones off to get some sleep.” Then a horrible thought hits me. “Oh, God. This is contagious. Aren’t babies more susceptible to getting sick? What if…I should have asked—”

  “I asked the doctor about that,” my dad says. “They aren’t terribly concerned, since they aren’t in the same house, but they’ll want to talk to Daltrey, find out the last time Paige might have held her.”

  I breathe out. I hadn’t even heard my dad ask that. I have to get my shit together. Cash was right—Paige needs me.

  “Just relax, Reed,” my dad says, like he’s reading my mind. “You’re overwhelmed and you’re going to miss stuff. That’s okay. That’s why I’m here.”

  I let my shoulders relax a little. “Thank you for coming,” I whisper.

  “Of course I came.”

  I look over at him, meeting his eyes for the first time. His are familiar. Calm and steady. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Reed. You don’t have to—”

  “No,” I interrupt, shaking my head. “All this time I’ve been such an asshole. Not just to you. To the guys. To Paige.” I close my eyes. “I was so caught up in my own shit, I was making everyone else miserable. And if she…if she’s not okay and the last few months I’ve been so awful…if that’s our last time together—”

  “Paige loves you,” he says firmly, his fingers cir
cling my forearm. “You were going through a hard time. She understood.”

  “Of course she did,” I mutter. “Because she gets me.” I feel like I’m on the verge of losing it, my fear overwhelming me. And the fact that my dad is here, without question, after everything, hits me like a punch to the gut. “God, Dad. She changed everything for me. Before her I was so…”

  “You were like me,” he says, a smile in his voice.

  I meet his eye again, wincing. I had been closed off, stressed out, obsessed with work, anxious all the time. And then Paige came along with her silliness and her smiles and the way she just enjoys life and everything was different.

  “She must be a pretty strong girl,” he says, squeezing my arm again. “To get inside those walls of yours—if you were anything like me. I know that’s not an easy thing.”

  “She is strong. She’s amazing, Dad.”

  “Then you have to believe she’s going to be okay, Son. She needs you to believe in her.”

  I nod, my gaze drifting to the floor. “I just wish I could see her.”

  He’s quiet for a moment. “That was the worst part, with your brother. The waiting. The not knowing.” He draws in a ragged breath. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, Reed. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”

  “Except you were alone,” I say, letting myself imagine, for the first time, what that would have been like for him. For his six-year-old son to be in the hospital, to know that it was his wife’s fault. Or later, those times Lennon hurt himself and Dad agreed not to tell us. He would have been alone then, too. And probably so scared.

  Thinking of Lennon makes me think of another hospital, a happier day—though I’d been too pissed off at Dad to truly enjoy it. The day Rose was born Lennon called me out for being an ass, warning me not to ruin it for everyone. I told him it felt like we’d lost Dad and I knew he was bothered by my words. “You know what I remember the most? The thing I remembered first?” he’d asked me. “Dad next to my hospital bed. Telling me it was going to be okay…He helped me. All those times that things got bad for me, I went to Dad. And he always helped me.”

  “I did a lot of things wrong, Reed,” Dad says now, sounding tired. Ashamed. “I’m so sorry. If I could go back and do it all differently, I would.”

  I shake my head. “You did a lot that was right, Dad.”

  I can see the surprise on his face out of the corner of my eye but I can’t turn to face him, too embarrassed. “I wish you wouldn’t have lied to us,” I say, then take a deep breath. “But it wasn’t all your fault.”

  “Reed—”

  I hold up a hand. “It wasn’t. There was a reason Lennon didn’t want you to tell us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I rub at my eyes. “He didn’t trust us, Dad. And that’s on me.”

  “No, Reed—”

  “It is. I was the oldest. I set the tone for how we talked to each other, how we communicated. And Lennon didn’t trust us.”

  Dad sighs. “I think it’s safe to say that any communication issues came from me, buddy.”

  Tears sting my eyes. “We made fun of him. For being too sensitive.”

  “You were kids.”

  I rub at my eyes again, knowing if I start to cry I won’t be able to stop. “God, I feel so guilty about that,” I whisper. “That he didn’t feel like he could tell me the most important things in his life. He didn’t think he could count on me. And that kills me.” One tear slips out and I curse under my breath, wiping it roughly from my face. “So I blamed you instead. God, that was terrible of me.” I finally look over at him, taking in the steady expression on his face. “So long as I was focusing on being mad at you, I didn’t have to think about how guilty I felt. And I’m so sorry for that, Dad.”

  He stands, pulling me up by the shoulders, and wraps his arms around me, so tight I can’t breathe. I stand still for a moment, too overwhelmed to move. Then I’m hugging him back, clinging to him. It hits me in that moment, how much I missed him. He’s always been the anchoring force in my life, the strong, immoveable pillar of strength that held us all together. The man who would never take no for an answer, who would move heaven and earth to get us what we wanted in our careers. It had been hard for me to see him in another way, as just a person—a person who made mistakes, sometimes big ones. But I know, without a doubt, that he loves us. That he loves me. And that’s never going to change, whether I’m mad at him or not.

  “It’s going to be okay, Reed,” he says, his voice steady in my ear.

  I nod, my throat too full to talk, and hug him tighter.

  * * *

  Nothing in my life has ever been as hard as this wait. There isn’t much the doctors can tell me. They’re giving her antibiotics, trying to keep her hydrated, trying to keep her kidneys working. The biggest concern, they said, is that she could go into sepsis, which could shut her organs down. Or that the infection might have done damage to her brain. I can’t let myself think about that.

  Levi calls about an hour after my dad arrived and I listen while Dad tells him what’s happening, his voice calm while his fingers dig into my shoulder. I don’t want to imagine what it will be like when Levi tells Karen. He says they’ll go to Daltrey’s on their way to the hospital. I don’t want to think about that, either. If it weren’t for Paige, Daisy would have never come back to us. It’s never struck me so strongly as it does tonight, how much of our story depends on Paige. How much she means, not just to me, but to all of us.

  Please, please, please, I repeat, over and over in my head.

  And then Karen and Levi are there, Karen’s arms tight around my neck as she hugs me.

  “She thought it was another cold,” I say, my entire body shaking as I hold on to her. “You know how she kept getting those colds? And how she was tired all the time? Then she threw up, and we thought it was the flu. But her head hurt so bad and she said her legs were numb, she was getting all confused and—”

  “You did the right thing, bringing her in.”

  “I should have brought her sooner. I should have known something was wrong.”

  “Don’t, Reed,” she says, and I realize she’s crying.

  “Karen, if she isn’t okay—”

  “Stop it.” She pulls back, fire in her eyes. “I have known that girl most of my life and there is no one stronger than her. She’s going to be fine. Do you hear me?”

  I nod, feeling the slightest bit better, like maybe the fierceness of Karen’s certainty will be enough to bend the universe to her will.

  Daltrey shows up a few minutes later. “Daisy stayed to wait for the nanny,” I hear him telling Levi, and my stomach twists. I know she would want to come with him, that waiting must be killing her, but she sent Daltrey ahead without her. Because she knew I would need him here.

  My dad talks to Paige’s mom the next time she calls, and I’m so thankful that he’s here, with his calm strength and his firm voice. Nancy can’t get a flight until the morning, and I can hear how hysterical she sounds over the phone as my dad updates her on what the doctor said. After she hangs up, he gets on the phone with the label and arranges a chartered flight for her, so she can get here a few hours earlier.

  Cash arrives in the middle of the night. That’s the first time I come close to breaking down, seeing him so out of breath, his hair a mess from running his hands through it the way he does when he’s worried. He sits next to me in the horrible plastic chairs in the waiting room, speaking in a quiet voice. He tells me she’ll be fine, that she’s stronger than all of us put together, that I have to have faith. It helps, somehow, the familiar sound of his voice, and I think he can tell, because he keeps talking, reminding me of all the silly places she dragged us to out on the road, all the ridiculous fun she forced us into.

  I close my eyes, letting those memories wash over me. It’s a while before I realize Daisy is here, sitting on Daltrey’s lap on my other side, holding my hand. That’s how Lennon finds us an hour later, Daltrey, Daisy and
Cash on either side of me, Karen on the floor, leaning against my legs, Levi next to her, Dad beside Cash.

  For the first time tonight I feel like maybe I can breathe, now that Lennon is here. Now that we’re all here, together. My brothers. Daisy, Karen, and Levi. My dad. The people who love Paige the most. The people who love me the most.

  They stay with me all night, talking about Paige, holding my hand. Holding me up. I’m still scared, more scared than I’ve ever been of anything in my life. But I also feel a little flicker of hope. Because I have a feeling Paige can feel their love, just like I can. And if she can feel that, if she can feel how strong it is, maybe she really will be okay.

  Will

  The hours are starting to get fuzzy as the monotony of waiting sets in. For the first twelve hours, all the doctors can tell us is that she’s fighting, but we need to be prepared. Once the other boys are there to sit with Reed, I slip away into the hallway and do the same thing he’d done—consult Doctor Google. I wince as I scroll through some of the results, knowing that Reed must have seen much of the same information earlier. This type of meningitis is very rare and very dangerous. Sometimes deadly. But I take comfort in the fact that most of the search results say the same thing—finding it early is essential. I can only pray that Paige got here early enough.

  “You should eat,” I tell Reed once the sky starts to lighten into gray through the window. He just looks at me, his expression blank, like he doesn’t understand the words. My chest tightens with worry. He’s been looking like that on and off throughout the night, blank shock alternating with sheer panic. I’m not sure which reaction is worse. I look over at Cash, tilting my head towards his brother, and he nods.

  “Come on, Reed,” he says, pulling on his arm. “Let’s go grab a coffee, okay? Maybe some breakfast.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Reed says in a rasp.

  “Just for a minute.” Cash’s voice is soothing. “At least for some coffee. You’re no good to her if you’re half asleep, right? Dalt will come get us if she needs you.”