Losing Gabriel

by Lurlene McDaniel

  “You do know some kid songs, don’t you?” Lani asked Sloan out of the side of her mouth.

  Sloan sidled her a look. “I’ve learned a few. But for Gabe! I’ve never sung for a bunch of kids.”

  “Sure you have. Just think of them as preshrunk high schoolers.” She flashed Sloan a brilliant smile and pushed Gabe to the door.

  Shaking her head, Sloan was bemused by Lani’s staunch argument for a mini concert, of her calling her famous and a renowned homegirl when she wasn’t. It was totally unexpected and had caught Sloan completely off guard. Sloan hugged her guitar to her side and, smiling, followed them down the hall. A singing gig was a singing gig!

  The fever hit with amazing speed. After the concert, Gabe took a nap, and when he awoke and his vitals were checked, he was spiking a temperature of over a hundred one. When Dawson arrived after work, Gabe had been sedated and intubated again. Dr. Nelson met with Dawson in the hall to say, “Bacterial pneumonia. We’ve got him on IV antibiotics.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s a wait-and-see for right now.”

  Dawson’s heart contracted. The look on the doctor’s face, solemn and somber, told him more than any words. Gabe was gravely ill.

  He called his father, catching Franklin in his office and between teaching sessions, told him what was happening, heard a long silence. “Talk to me, Dad. Tell me what’s going on. Gabe’s getting the strongest antibiotics available, but they’re not working.”

  “Germs are more and more antibiotic resistant. Super-germs. Maybe you’ve heard of MRSA…a staph infection that can live almost anyplace, even in hospitals with excellent protocols. Medical science keeps looking for new drugs to fight them, but they’re resilient, morphing into new strains in order to survive.”

  “But we were always so careful with him.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, son. This infection was most likely caused by the original intubation. Ironic, but sometimes the case.”

  Dawson felt nauseated. “So his previous treatment is what’s caused his pneumonia? But…but there was no other way!”

  “I’m so damn sorry.” The heaviness in Franklin’s voice left Dawson unable to respond. His dad asked, “Do you want me to come? Because I’ll drop everything and catch the next plane. If you want me to.”

  Somehow having Franklin come right now was like giving up hope. Dawson couldn’t do that. Gabe had to recover. He had to! “Not yet. What…what should I do?”

  “Pray the antibiotics work. Tell Gabe Pops loves him. And, son, I love you too.”

  They disconnected and Dawson stood like a statue listening to the hum of the floor, the opening of elevator doors, the ding of electronic devices, the quiet chatter of families coming to visit their children, the brush of nurses passing by him, the passing of ordinary lives. His was Life Interrupted. Dawson sent two text messages and returned to his son’s bedside.

  CHAPTER 42

  Lani was brushing Oro’s thick winter coat after a long ride when a message hit her phone. Assuming it was Melody asking when she’d be home for dinner, Lani ignored opening it until her horse was brushed, fed and watered, and tucked into his stall. She wasn’t going to rush grooming her horse, especially when so much of her time lately had been absorbed by school, mandatory hospital work, and visiting Gabe every chance she got.

  “He’s looking good,” Ciana said, coming into the stable from the November cold. Her cinnamon-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail and tucked through the back strap of a ball cap stamped BELLMEADE RIDING & STABLES.

  “He’s always going to have the marks on his nose. The scar.” Lani rubbed Oro’s muzzle over the door of the stall where the fangs had penetrated.

  “War wounds. He’s a true veteran.”

  Lani smiled at Ciana. “Medal of Honor?”

  “Extra oats.”

  “Thanks for all you did to take care of him.”

  “No problem. Jon marched the field with the dog off and on for two days, but the snake had crawled away on his reptile belly.” She made a face. “The coward.”

  “Smart snake. Didn’t want to face the wrath of Mercer.”

  Lani said good night and walked the lighted footpath from the back stables to her car, where it was parked on a newly poured bed of concrete beside the old barn. On the far side of the property, the huge new house, a stylized Victorian, glowed from up-lighting in dormant flowerbeds. Lani hustled inside her car, started the engine, and reached for her phone to tell Mel she was on her way. Except that when she pulled up the text, she saw it had come from Dawson. Her heart did a stutter step when she read it. She threw the car into reverse, spun the tires on the tree-lined gravel driveway, and wheeled onto the frontage road, speeding toward the hospital.

  Sloan had read the text several times the night before, incredulous over the news. How could Gabe have become so sick so quickly? He’d been squirmy and talkative and giggly after the playroom concert and begging to go home. Now he was back in ICU. Sloan had arrived home very late, but she set her alarm early enough to run into Dawson upstairs.

  He was brewing coffee when she came into the kitchen, and one look at him, red-eyed and unshaven, told her he hadn’t slept much the night before. “Nothing new to report.” He rolled his shoulders, shook out his arms, looking as tight as a compressed spring.

  “You spent the night?”

  “I couldn’t leave him. Just came home to shower and change into fresh clothes.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “He looks the same as before he woke up…tubes and IVs.”

  Was this Dawson’s way of warning her away? “I don’t care.”

  She sounded defensive, and Dawson knew he wasn’t being fair. Sloan had every right to be with Gabe. “I wasn’t telling you not to go, just telling you how it is.”

  “Are you going straight back to the hospital?”

  He shook his head. “I’m going in to work because I need to do something physical or go crazy. If something changes, the hospital will let me know and I can get there pretty quick.”

  “So can I. Don’t have to go in to work until four.”

  “Lani says she’ll be in and out of the unit all day too.”

  When Sloan arrived at the pediatric ICU, Lani was already in the waiting area and didn’t look as if she’d slept much either. They acknowledged each other, then ventured into the unit together to stand over Gabe, looking as if he was merely asleep, as if his eyes would blink open and peer up at them. Sloan stared at the ever-present monitor, the squiggle lines and large blue numbers. Déjà vu. “What do the numbers mean?”

  Dully Lani followed Sloan’s gaze. “Erratic heartbeat, lower than normal blood pressure.” She didn’t elaborate, couldn’t. She’d studied books, listened to lectures, taken written tests and scored high marks on tests, been a hands-on volunteer and an attentive student nurse, but none of it had prepared her for what was happening to Gabe. For what was happening to her watching Gabe struggle to survive.

  The terse comment settled in Sloan’s stomach like a heavy stone. She didn’t ask another question.

  Gabe did not improve, instead spiraling downward, and forty-eight hours later he was moved into a private room and all restrictions on visitations were removed. His family could come at will, stay as long as they wanted. Nurses routinely checked Gabe, but the atmosphere had changed, gone softer, less frenetic…the monitor and respirator kept vigilance, the people were merely attendants. Sloan stayed during the day, and Dawson kept watch by night, folding his tall frame into a sleeping chair, waiting for his son to pass the crisis. Lani stole in and out of the room several times a day like a ghost, never speaking, simply sweeping the room with sad eyes, knowing what no one would yet say—Gabe was dying. Outside the hospital walls, rain came and went, temperatures fell, the sun vanished, but inside Gabe’s room, time was in suspended animation.

  Sloan told her bosses she had a “family emergency” and didn’t know when she’d return to work. One boss told her he cou
ldn’t hold her job, that she needed to come in for her shift or quit, and she told him where he could stick the job.

  On the morning of the third day of no change and after more testing, Dr. Nelson took Dawson and Sloan aside. Looking directly into Dawson’s dark eyes, hollowed out by fear and exhaustion, he said, “You asked me to tell you when you should call your father. I believe it’s time.”

  The words were like nails driven into Dawson’s heart. “Not yet—”

  “Gabe’s put up a hell of a fight, but his kidneys are failing. His heart will too. Nothing left we can do.”

  Dawson made the call.

  Sloan longed to run away from all that was happening in Gabe’s hospital room, as if the very walls, the machines, the personnel, the ticking clock were responsible for leaching his life out of him. She blamed them all. This was a hospital. There were doctors here. They were supposed to fix people, not give up on them! She wanted to walk out the door, save herself from the pain of what was coming. She compared the excruciating wait to an accident she’d once seen on the interstate. Traffic at a standstill, backed up for miles, the slow crawl forward, telling herself to not look, but when her turn came to drive past the wreckage, she had looked, saw the carnage, two cars, their carriages crunched and crumpled like a wad of paper. From one car, with its door ripped away, hung a deflated air bag and a body half in, half out, only partially covered with a bright yellow blanket. She’d recoiled, shaken and angry at herself for looking, knowing that the images were going to be stuck in her brain. For all time. And so would these images of Gabe, his life slipping away like a vapor.

  She couldn’t leave Gabe, despite the realization that no one needed her to stay. Dawson was an island unto himself. Lani appeared, never made eye contact and never lingered. So Sloan hung on, steeling herself for the oncoming wreckage. And when Dawson told her Franklin was in the lobby of the building and that he was going down to meet him, Sloan knew it was time for her to say goodbye. Beside Gabe’s bed, she stroked his arm, touched his soft dark hair, and smoothed his forehead. Leaning closer, she placed her cheek to his, pressed her mouth to his ear. “Something I want you to know, Gabe, something I want to say…before you go.” Emotion clogged her throat. She fought to swallow and keep her composure. Dawson and Franklin would walk through the doorway any second. “A secret…just between us. I’m your mama, Gabe. Me. The lady who sings. And I love you with all my heart.”

  She straightened, hoping that Lani was right about a patient’s sense of hearing, because now Gabe knew the truth, and he could take it with him when he left them all behind.

  When Lani heard Dr. Berke had arrived, she walked off her shift. Dr. Franklin Berke. Her mentor. A man who had believed in her, who had handpicked her to watch over his only grandchild. Her negligence had started the dominos falling, and she couldn’t bear to face him. But she couldn’t leave the hospital either. It was like watching a horror movie with a character opening a squeaky door and stepping into a dark room. She knew something scary and frightening waited in the room and wanted to yell, “Stay away! Don’t go inside!” but like in the movie, the compulsion to sit and wait for the boogeyman to leap out was too strong. She felt immobilized, frozen in place.

  Lani chose to remain in the staff locker room, sitting on a bench below her locker, longing for a miracle to save the child upstairs, knowing against long odds how unlikely a miracle would come. She waited, unmoving, through a shift change of personnel coming and going, laughing and sharing stories of their day. The room had no windows but she gauged the time to be after midnight simply by the foot traffic in and out of the room.

  A voice from the internal PA system startled her with a Code Blue alert, summoning a crash cart and its team to the fourth floor. Her blood went cold, and she began to shake uncontrollably. She didn’t have to be inside that room to know how the action was unfolding, because she’d watched it on a training video. Patient bagged…medication into an IV line…paddles placed on chest to jolt the heart…chest compressions between shocks from the paddles. The team would give the patient probably three rounds of shocks between compressions, a total of maybe twenty minutes, and if there was no response, the attending doctor would call time of death.

  What was happening upstairs was no drill. Lani waited on the bench until she heard a few nurses come in, heard them talking about how sad it was to lose a child. Lani stood, turned, opened her locker, and swept its contents into a plastic sack. She removed her credentials from the lanyard around her neck, found a piece of paper, and scrawled a note. She rode an elevator up to the admin offices, now quiet and dimly lit, stopped in front of Mrs. Trammell’s office, and stuck the note and credentials into the message box hanging on the wall beside the head nurse’s door. She retreated briskly down the hall to the stairwell, pushed open the metal door, pounded downward to the echoes of escape, and ran coatless into the cold night and parking lot dusted by snow flurries, an inner voice chasing her like a banshee: My fault, my fault…my fault.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 43

  Gabe was buried in the Windemere cemetery under a cold gray sky, the ground blanketed by brown grass and dotted with leafless barren trees. Dawson, hammered by grief, asked Franklin to handle the arrangements, for he’d been a kid when he attended his mother’s funeral and the ritual of choosing a child-sized casket, flowers, the order of service wasn’t anything Dawson could face. And yet, on that raw November day of the funeral, he realized that not much had changed through the years in this ritual of goodbye. As before, he stood with his father beside a casket and a hole in the ground covered by artificial grass and looked out on a sea of mourners he hardly knew, heard graveside words that he’d never remember.

  This time, however, Sloan stood with him, clinging to his hand, sunglasses hiding red-rimmed eyes. He didn’t know how to comfort her. How could he, when a chunk of his own heart would be buried with his dark-haired son? During the service, Dawson’s gaze swept the mourners. He thought he saw Lani and her sister standing like stragglers on the far back fringes of the group, but when the service was over and he searched for them, they had vanished. He wondered if he’d really seen her at all.

  For Sloan, if funerals meant closure, as she’d heard, this funeral failed to bring her such a thing. She didn’t know how to let go of a child she’d come to love so late. She should never have returned to the hospital when she’d heard that Gabe had been struck with fever and put back on a ventilator. Yet she did return, and ultimately ended up standing in the room holding her breath, watching chest compressions, until a doctor said, “Calling time of death.” So she felt no closure, and clinging to Dawson’s hand was all that held her together throughout the service.

  Franklin stayed four days after the funeral. On his final night at the house, they sat in the den, a warm fire glowing in the hearth, the woodsy aroma of a pillar candle lingering on the air. Dawson was thinking how normal his dad looked in the old club chair and then how freakishly different things really were. Time never stood still. Except for the dead.

  “How you doing, Dad? Your heart.” Dawson hadn’t asked about Franklin’s health for a long time, but after losing Gabe, he couldn’t stand it if something happened to his father.

  “Heart’s good. No worries.” After a few beats, Franklin said, “Please come to Chicago for Christmas like we planned.”

  “Christmas is for kids.”

  “You’re my kid…always.”

  The words unraveled Dawson, and it took all his willpower not to break down.

  Franklin cleared his throat. “And it’s time you met Connie. She wanted to come with me, but I told her not for a funeral. No place to meet my son for the first time.”

  Dawson pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, considering his dad’s request. “Sloan’s still living here. I don’t think it’s right to ask her to leave just now.” He didn’t know what to do about Sloan. She had returned to her job at the sports bar lounge the day after the funeral, which he understood c
ompletely—keeping head and hands busy helped a person make it through the dark places of the soul. “And I need to work too.”

  Franklin nodded. “I get that. I worked day and night after Kathy died, but sooner or later, the frenzy stops. When you can think about the future, come to Chicago.” He glanced at Dawson, cleared his throat again. “I thought I saw Lani, but she scooted away before I could speak to her.”

  Dawson heard harshness in his dad’s voice. “She took Gabe’s death hard too. Maybe she wasn’t up to talking to us.”

  “She should take it hard. I trained her to know better than to take an asthmatic child into a barn, for God’s sake.”

  “Dad, she—”

  “Don’t defend her to me. I’m glad I didn’t have to face her at the funeral…wouldn’t have been able to control my temper. Sorry I ever got you involved with her.”

  Dawson didn’t know how to fend off Franklin’s anger, was afraid to say how much Lani had meant to himself and Gabe. He missed her.

  Once Franklin flew home, Dawson was adrift, unbearably sad. He slept in spurts, often waking with a start, listening for Gabe on the monitor still in place on Dawson’s bedside table. And then he’d remember. He had yet to enter Gabe’s room, unable to face the sight of his son’s things or the scent of his little boy lost. He awoke one night to the sound of Sloan’s guitar coming through the duct work from the basement, just mournful strumming. He listened until the notes stopped, but minutes later, he heard a rustling, sensed a presence by his bed. He turned, saw Sloan outlined by the night-light from the hallway. She was bundled in a thick robe, her arms hugging her body, and she was crying.

  Without a word, Dawson lifted the corner of the down comforter, and she crawled in next to him, curling against him. He slid his arms around her, cocooning her, feeling the soft velour of her robe on his bare skin, cradling her while she wept quietly into the pillow. “I loved him, Dawson…swear to God. I didn’t want to, didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help it.” Her voice floated on tears.