“Sara’s not here yet,” I said. “Doc, you have to wait for her.”
He didn’t even slow down or look over at me. “We can’t wait. He’s got to get to the ER right now.”
Right. Because I’d just caused my fucking coach to have a goddamn heart attack and he might be dying. Fuck. “What hospital are you taking him to? I’ll bring her.” I was already dressed. I could leave as soon as she got down here.
“Kaiser,” he shouted over his shoulder, and the doors closed behind them.
Hammer and Bergy were talking, trying to calm the boys down even though you could tell they were just as worked up as all of us were. Hammer especially. He’d worked alongside Scotty for more than a decade. Each time Scotty had been hired by a new team, he’d insisted that Hammer had to be one of his assistant coaches. Bergy had played for them for several years, too, and had been coaching with them for two seasons now.
Whatever they were saying completely went in one ear and came out the other with me. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t think about anything but Doc’s words: He’s having a cardiac event.
Sara came running through the doors, wild-eyed and on the verge of tears with her long brown hair flying behind her.
I didn’t wait for Hammer or Bergy, or even Jim, to tell me I could go. “Come on,” I said to her. “They’re taking him by ambulance already.” I took Sara by the elbow and guided her out to my truck. I’d fucked this up; now I had to find some way to make it right.
“IS HE HAVING a heart attack?” I asked Jonny. He was walking so fast that I practically had to run to keep up, which wasn’t easy to do in my pumps. Why the hell had I even worn them to a game? It was just the other girls and a bunch of hockey players who would see me at the Moda Center. Who was I trying to impress? “Please tell me he was just having some sort of panic attack, something from stress. Not a heart attack.”
Jonny didn’t slow down for a second. “I’m sure the doctors can explain things to you better than I can.”
“I already know he’s having issues with his heart,” I said. “Just fucking tell me, Jonny.”
We’d gone through the glass doors leading to the parking garage already, but he still didn’t slow down. That only made my anxiety increase. Why was he in such a hurry? Why had they taken Daddy in the ambulance without waiting for me? They knew I was here. They knew I was on my way down. I’d left the owner’s box the second Jim had called Rachel and told her something was happening with my father.
Jonny finally came to a stop in front of his pickup truck, a huge monstrosity of a thing, and opened the door for me. Even with my pumps, he had to give me a boost to climb up into the beast. Once I got into the seat, he stared at me with his always-serious hazel eyes, not saying a word.
“It is a heart attack,” I whispered. Tears stabbed at the backs of my eyes, and I tried to blink them away. If it wasn’t something to do with Daddy’s heart, Jonny would have just told me as much. He wouldn’t stand there staring at me like that—silent. His silence told me everything.
“I’ll get you there as quick as I can. They only left a few minutes ahead of us.” Jonny shut my door and raced around to his side to climb in. He managed it a lot easier than I had, and he was backing out of his spot and driving us away in no time.
I brushed the back of my hand over my eyes to dry the tears. I couldn’t cry. Not now. I needed to hold it together until I knew whether there was a fucking good reason to cry or not. But I couldn’t seem to make the stupid tears stop. It was probably because of my stupid hormones. Stupid, fucking pregnancy hormones. I’d been all kinds of stressed out and easily upset lately, and it pissed me off. I wanted it to just stop, but I was afraid it was only going to get worse from here.
Jonny kept giving me these worried glances while he drove, so I tried even harder to buck up and get myself together. I didn’t need him freaking out because I was crying. It wasn’t any use, though. Every time I tried to blink back some tears, new ones pressed to the surface. Fucking tears. Fucking tears and fucking hormones.
A few minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot by the ER and screeched into a parking spot. I still had those damn tears in my eyes, and I fumbled with my seat belt so much that he had to come around to open my door and unlatch the stupid thing for me. He didn’t even wait for me to attempt to climb down; he put both hands on my waist and lifted me out of his truck, setting me on my feet in front of him. Then he took my hand in his and led me into the ER lobby. It was as though he was in an even bigger hurry to get there than I was.
Doc met us as soon as we got through the automatic sliding doors, detouring us to the waiting room. “We paged his cardiologist on the way. He met us as soon as we got here and took your dad back, but you can’t go in there right now.”
“He’s having a heart attack? For real this time?”
“I think so.”
“You think?” Think wasn’t good enough for me. I needed to know.
“His heart wasn’t beating in a normal sinus rhythm by the time we got him into the ambulance. We had to shock his heart—”
“Oh God.” The room was spinning, and I was suddenly glad that Jonny had a firm grip on my hand. “He’s going to die, isn’t he? I can’t—”
“Slow down, Sara,” Doc said. “We shocked his heart, and that brought it back into a normal rhythm. He was alert and aware the whole time, and he got immediate care from the cardiologist who already knows his history. I can’t say with certainty that what he was experiencing was a heart attack, but he was having a cardiac event of some sort. We’ll know more once they’ve run some tests, and then we can come up with a game plan.”
“So he’s not going to die?” I needed someone to tell me that or I wouldn’t be able to breathe.
“You know I can’t promise you that, especially since I don’t know for sure everything that’s going on in his body. But he’s got a much better chance of coming out of this and living a long time than he might have if he’d been at home. Other than being in a hospital, a hockey arena is one of the safest places he could have been. We had doctors on site, EMTs, a defibrillator—everything we needed to get him the care he needed as soon as possible.”
“Come on,” Jonny said. He tugged me over to a row of chairs. “You should sit. It may be a while before we hear anything else.”
I let him ease me down into a chair. He sat next to me, still holding my hand. I didn’t want him to let go of me. His hand, his immense presence, helped me feel safe at a time when I felt as though the rug was being pulled out from under me. He was keeping me upright. He was keeping me steady.
“Exactly,” Doc agreed. “And remember, there’s no reason to worry until they tell us there’s a reason to worry.” He excused himself and went to talk to the others who had come to the hospital with the ambulance.
Except there was every reason to worry. Daddy’s cardiologist had already told him that if he didn’t make changes, a heart attack was likely. He’d said Daddy needed to make those changes before it was too late. Had we already crossed that barrier into too late territory? Had he done too much damage to his heart?
We had a prolonged silence, Jonny and I, during which I ran through a litany of things in my head that I could have done better to make certain my father lived a longer life. I could have forced him to quit eating red meat; I could have started making changes to his diet years ago, once I started noticing he was gaining some weight; I could have made him go to see a counselor to reduce his stress once I’d noticed it was getting out of hand. There were a thousand things I should have done that I hadn’t.
“I’m sorry, Sara,” Jonny said, interrupting my mental berating of myself. His voice was soft. He was always quiet when he spoke, and him speaking much at all was pretty rare, at least around me. Until today, it seemed. Maybe he talked more when I wasn’t around, but I couldn’t know that.
I shook my head. “There’s nothing you have to be sorry about. Daddy did this to himself.”
“No, I�
��” He stopped so abruptly that I looked up to see why. He was staring at me with those damn serious eyes, big hazel orbs full of words that refused to come to his lips. “Just know that I’m sorry. I never meant for this to happen.”
Color me confused, but I didn’t get a chance to sort out what he meant by that. As soon as the words left him, the door opened and the waiting room was flooded by pretty much everyone involved with the Storm—players, coaches, wives, girlfriends, trainers, equipment guys, even some of the kids—all of them here to wait for news about Daddy and to keep me from going insane. Or at least to try to do that. I doubted it would be any use trying because I was pretty close to having crossed that line already.
Jonny let go of my hand and went over to the coffeepot next to the wall. As soon as he left his chair, Dana took it. Laura Weber, who was like a den mother with all the players’ wives and girlfriends, sat on my other side. Other women filled in around me—Laura’s daughter, Katie, and Rachel Shaw, who pulled her little girl, Maddie, onto her lap. These were my girls. They were the ones who were always there for me, who had become my Portland sisters in this crazy life.
They didn’t even have to say anything; I just needed them to be there with me.
I was surprised when Noelle Payne joined us. Noelle was new to our group. She was dating Liam Kallen, a guy we called Kally who’d only joined the team about six weeks ago, at the trade deadline. We’d tried to welcome her in, but Noelle was a little different. I’d always thought of her as a hippie-dippie kind of chick. Not that I didn’t like her. I just didn’t really know her yet.
That was why it surprised me when not only did she come over to sit with us but she plopped down on the floor by my feet, her long, flowery skirt making a pool around her.
“He’s not going to die,” she said. “I would feel it…”
I could only stare at her and blink in my confusion. She would feel it? What did that mean?
But Jonny came back over, holding out a bottle of water. “The coffee looked stale,” he said.
“Thank you.” I took it and held it in my hands.
He nodded and walked away since my girls had taken his seat. I followed him with my eyes. He found a quiet spot in the corner, near Zee and Soupy and a few of the other older guys on the team, the leadership group. He didn’t sit, though. He stood with his back against the wall, this big, hulking, solid presence. And he stared at me.
“Did he tell you?” Laura asked. “God, he probably blames himself.”
I sipped from my bottle and glanced at her in question. What on earth was she talking about? She nudged her head in Jonny’s direction, her lips turned down.
“Tell me what?” I asked. The man almost never spoke. Besides, there was no reason Jonny should blame himself for Daddy’s health. If anyone was to blame, it was me for not making sure he’d done all the things the doctors had told him he needed to do. The only thing he’d told me was that he was sorry. That he needed me to know he was sorry.
Oh God. I dropped the cap of my water bottle on the floor. It rolled away from me, not stopping until it had settled near Soupy’s feet across the way. Jonny did blame himself. But why?
“The guys said Scotty was yelling at Jonny for leaving the bench,” she said. “That he was really laying into him for doing that even though they had told him not to.”
Daddy had been visibly upset ever since that moment in the game. I knew; I’d been watching him instead of the game because I was so worried about him getting too stressed out. He’d gotten up on the bench behind the players, screaming. His face had turned purple. He’d been rubbing his jaw and yelling more than normal and hadn’t been able to calm himself down after that.
Well, fuck.
I shot my head up again, staring at Jonny from across the waiting room. He was still just staring back at me with those too-fucking-serious eyes. Most of the time, I found it hard to stop myself from melting into those eyes. I was always daydreaming about how they would change if he was fucking me. It was safe to daydream about that—not safe to act on it. He was still a damn hockey player, and I didn’t want anything to do with any more hockey players. There were already too many of them in my life, damn it.
But now he was the hockey player who had just set off my father’s heart attack. I knew it wasn’t rational to blame him for it, but the ability to let reason make my decisions for me seemed to have left my body the minute I’d seen those stupid lines on the pee stick.
I got up and headed in his direction without the first fucking clue what I was doing.
SHE FLUNG HER bottle of water in my face.
The water was cool, not cold, but the actual temperature of it wasn’t important. It splashed all over me like a bucket of ice water.
I’d known Sara would be mad. She had every right to be mad. Her dad, the only family she had, was in the hospital after having a heart attack and it was all my fault. I deserved a hell of a lot worse than a bottle of water tossed in my face.
She apparently agreed with that sentiment.
The water had barely started to drip before she started in on me. “You fucking son of a bitch,” she said, but the words came out through tears. Those tears killed me. The fact that she was crying like that hurt me a hell of a lot more than a little water ever would.
I didn’t do anything to try to convince her I wasn’t to blame, nothing to try to mollify her. I stood there and waited for her to get her anger back. She needed to yell some more so she could work it out of her system. Just like Scotty…
That was what I always did to defuse anger that was directed me, at least when I wasn’t in a game-time situation. I stood back and allowed whoever was angry to let it all loose, taking whatever they had to give, until they were done. It was easier that way.
Sara had every right to be angry with me, to take it out on me. She deserved the chance to beat me to a bloody pulp, if that would make her feel any better. I doubted it would, but I was more than willing to let her try. I didn’t even flinch when she drew her arm back, her little hand balled into a really poor fist that she was sending in my direction. But Zee came up behind her and tried to pull her off, gripping her arms in his hands.
I shook my head. “Let her go. Let her hit me.” Mad was a hell of a lot better than broken. I could handle her being pissed at me, especially when I’d earned it as thoroughly as I had.
I was afraid that as soon as she worked the initial rush of anger out, she’d just be a crying mess. That was how my mom had been after my father left her—after he’d left us, actually. She’d been furious, for a while, because he’d walked out and left her with no job, four kids, and a mortgage she didn’t know how she’d pay. But once all the anger had gone, she was just beat-down for a while. Crying all the time. Lonely. Sad. Essentially hopeless.
She’d done the best she could for us, no thanks to him. But if I ever saw him again, I’d probably hit him the way Sara was trying to hit me, only I wouldn’t just be trying to do it, and I’d be sure to do a hell of a lot more damage than she could. I knew how to hit to hurt. Someone ought to teach Sara how to do that, actually. She needed to be able to defend herself, and what she was doing wouldn’t cut it. One of these days I’d give her lessons—if she would let me. Or maybe I should just ask Dana do it. Pushing my luck with Sara right now would be stupid.
Even though I’d asked him to let her go, Zee didn’t do it right away. What had been a manic assault of fists flying at me quickly turned into defeated sobs when his strength outmatched hers. Big, heaving, gut-wrenching sobs, like the kind that Cadence, my youngest sister, had always cried. The kind that tore my heart out. The kind that made me want to rip the head off the asshole who had brought them on, but in this case, I was the asshole.
Fuck. This was exactly what I was not prepared for. You’d think that with three younger sisters and a mother who’d been treated like shit for years and then left by my asswipe of a father, I’d be better prepared to deal with crying like this. But I wasn’t. Not from Sara
Thomas, at least. It wasn’t so much that her tears made me uncomfortable. I just felt fucking useless when a woman I knew—even if I didn’t know her well—was that upset and I couldn’t do anything to fix it.
I hated seeing Sara like that. I knew it wouldn’t be happening if not for what I’d done during the game earlier, and there wasn’t a goddamn fucking thing I could do to make it better. I couldn’t undo her dad’s heart attack or cardiac episode or whatever the fuck the doctors wanted to call it. I couldn’t turn back time and make a different decision in the game so he didn’t get so worked up and this wouldn’t have happened. I couldn’t do anything, and that left me feeling powerless.
I fucking hated feeling powerless.
That had to be what Sara felt, too. Helpless. No control. A passenger, waiting to see what would happen.
Zee finally let go of her arms, but Sara didn’t hit me like she should have. She didn’t run back to the other women she’d been sitting with before coming to beat the snot out of me. She didn’t start cussing me out again. Instead, she collapsed against me, falling into my arms and grabbing both of my lapels in her hands. She pulled me closer to her and buried her face in my chest while these massive sobs wracked her body.
I did the only thing I knew how to do in a situation like that: I put both my arms around her, drew her close, and held on tight. It was the only thing I’d ever been able to do with Mom or my sisters. I had never managed to come up with the right words to say at a time like this. I wasn’t the kind of guy who could make a joke and get them to laugh and then everything would be all right again. All I could do was hold them until it stopped, however long that took. So I held Sara, and I would keep holding her until she wanted me to let her go.
Zee gave me a nod, like he approved of what I was doing, and then he backed off. Fucking lot of help he was. Not that this was a mess he’d had anything to do with creating. This was all on me, so I supposed it was only right that I should be the one cleaning it up.
Delay of Game Page 3
