Beautifully Awake

by Riley Mackenzie

  What the hell?

  His familiar eyes were bloodshot, completely glazed over and about to pop out of his head. They were colorless and frantic. He was so close, too close. His wretched trench mouth mixed with drenching sweat churned the bile rising in my chest. The smell, his stench, was vile. Vomit mixed with body odor. I gagged. Dry heaved. I was so confused. I involuntarily strained my ears, attempting to decipher the mumbling crazed gibberish coming from his mouth.

  Oh my god!

  Wet noodle. Useless.

  Dr. Jennings ... Carl Jennings ... Fucking CJ. It all made sense. Horrible sense.

  Pearl size sweat beaded across his forehead. His skin was pale, a putrid shade of green. He looked rabid, like a sick animal. Crazed and high.

  As quickly as the door slammed shut, his body slammed into mine, but with a force ten-fold that of steel. It all happened in slow motion.

  I closed my eyes. Tight. I imagined stepping onto one of those amusement park rides where I strapped myself to the wall. The lights would go out, the music would start blaring and I would spin. And spin and spin. Faster and faster. No time to feel nauseous. It was too fast. My head cracked against the cold tile. Then the music stopped. Everything stopped.

  Epilogue

  Only the rhythmic sound of the heart monitor interrupted my silence. A sound that I now thanked fucking god for. I would sit and listen to that beautiful sound until hell froze over if I had to. I brushed the gorgeous brown locks out of her face. Her eyes were closed. I told myself she was just sleeping and would wake up for me any minute. But minutes were hours were days. Time stood still. I knew better.

  I was in my nightmare, living it, wide awake.

  I wanted to yell and scream. I wanted to break down and sob. But I didn’t. Instead I sat motionless, staring at her with wide eyes, scared to fucking blink. Waiting. Just fucking waiting like a helpless useless fucker. Just praying that she would open her eyes one more time.

  “Colton, you need to calm down.” Even his voice pissed me off. I raked my hands through my hair. I could have ripped every fucking strand out by the root; my insides were on fire.

  “What the hell is going on, Adam? You’re the fucking head of the ER. Why the fuck is she not in the goddamn CT scanner yet? It’s been fifteen minutes since I found her lying at the bottom of a fucking flight of stairs. Time is fucking brain tissue, you know that!” He needed to start giving me answers. Right fucking now.

  “Chase, you’re too close to the situation. You shouldn’t be making medical decisions. Her parents are on the way; they should be here any minute. They’re her next of kin.”

  “Don’t give me that next of kin bullshit, Adam. I’ll make any decision I fucking choose. She’s mine. Do you hear that? She’s the only thing I have. I won’t fucking lose her, so do me a goddamn favor and put her in the scanner.” I paced the room like a fucking caged lion, my fist aching to make contact with flesh. And not Dr. Adam Gupta’s either. Although, if he kept talking and didn’t start wheeling her fucking stretcher down the hall himself, I was adding him to the fucking list. “This is a level one trauma center with a fucking dozen multimillion dollar high speed scanners, for Christ’s sake.” Now, sixteen minutes. Fuck.

  “As soon as I have all her labs back, she’ll go. Chase, listen to me, she is stable right now.” Just because she had a fucking pulse and decent blood pressure didn’t make her stable.

  “Stable? She has a fucking Glascow Coma Scale of four. That is not fucking stable!” It was a step above a fucking vegetable. “Do you need a fucking brush up on emergency medicine? Anything below an eight is fucking severe, so either move her toward CT or I will. I have an OR open and waiting. If she’s got a fucking bleed, I need to get her up there now. Understand?” It wasn’t a fucking question.

  Adam looked over my shoulder. “Chase, her family is here. You go talk to them. I’ll take care of her. I’ve got this.”

  I closed my eyes and exhaled fire from my nose. You fucking better have her. I turned around and my chest got even heavier if that was possible.

  Jim nodded his head with the saddest, most terrified look in his eyes, a look only a parent could have when faced with losing a child. A look that should had been seared into my fucking soul eighteen years ago, but no, my self-absorbed excuse for parents never had that look. Not the night of the crash, not the night they said Kimi would never wake up, not even the night she died. You only get that look when you fucking love someone more than yourself or your fucking country club membership. I didn’t have time to waste thinking about them. Not one fucking millisecond more.

  I updated Jim and explained that we needed a scan before we made any decisions about surgery. He stared at me with those fucking eyes. And if they didn’t look just like my girl’s … fuck me. I wished he would punch me square in the face or curse me out. He had to blame me, and so he should. I told this man point blank I fucking loved his daughter, and this was how I protected her.

  My insides sizzled with so much built-up rage I was sure I was in hell. And all because I told her to leave my case early. Alone. It had nothing to do with making a flight. I was a jealous imbecile, pissing on my territory and making the point that she was mine. I hated that Guy had tasted her sweet lips, even if the jackass was too drunk to remember. A stupid dick move that left my girl vulnerable, like she hadn’t been through enough.

  And how the fuck did I miss how unstable that douchebag was? I kicked his ass out of my OR on more than one occasion because he always seemed dazed and confused. In hindsight, he was fucking strung out.

  Damn it. This was all fucking wrong. All of it. She was so excited to spend the morning with her parents, to tell them about last night, about us, about being mine. She beamed when I kissed her delicious lips goodbye this morning.

  We quietly stood together and watched transport wheel her lifeless body from the trauma bay toward CT. It ripped the fucking heart from my chest, slicing it back into a million pieces. Pieces my girl just stitched back together after all these years.

  Adam interrupted our eerie silence, introducing himself to Jim, Sharon, and Sierra. “I’m sure Dr. Colton has explained the serious nature of Lili’s injuries. Her vital signs are currently stable, but she’s still unconscious, which is worrisome. We won’t know more until we have imaging studies back. She’s on her way to MRI as we speak.”

  CT scan took thirty seconds and was the test of choice for a head injury. “Why the fuck did you send her for a MRI? That takes twenty minutes!”

  Gupta stared at me like I had two heads. His mouth needed to start moving with an explanation because if his fucking incompetence wasted one more precious second of my girl’s time he was going to need brain surgery himself. And I sure as fuck wasn’t the one doing it. “As I said, her vitals are stable, as well as her blood count, so I felt it was safer to send her to MRI.”

  “What! That makes no fucking sense.”

  “I don’t get it! Why is that test safer? What the hell is he talking about, Chase?” Sierra pushed past Sharon and got right in my face. “Would you two mind breaking it down for the rest of us without a medical degree!”

  There was no time for medicine 101. My whole life, the reason I woke up in the morning, the reason I breathed easy again—fuck the reason I breathed at all—was lying in a fucking magnet, probably hemorrhaging into her fucking brain. All because of a strung-out junkie who called himself a doctor. That useless piece of shit got caught stealing drugs from his anesthesia cart by his own girlfriend. Behind bars for fucking life was the only safe place for Carl Jennings.

  That shit needed to wait. I needed to get a grip and focus if I was going to operate on her. Gupta looked like he was choosing his words carefully. “A CT scan is usually the test of choice, but it would expose Lili to a large amount of radiation and-” he continued, but all I heard was silence. The loneliest, most heartbreaking fucking silence imaginable. The vice around my chest where my heart had been ripped out tightened like a vacuum sucking all the
fucking air from the open hallway.

  “Doc, are you telling me my babydoll’s pregnant? Chase? You knew this?”

  I ignored Jim’s question.

  No. He was wrong. This was a fucking cruel mistake. Adam was wasting time with a MRI over a fucking lab error. Blue was not pregnant. She was OCD with taking her birth control pills. Same time, every day without fail. The thought of getting pregnant again scared the living shit out of her. It was her way of taking back control. She cried in my arms that day on the beach and told me next time she got pregnant it needed to be on her terms. Prenatal vitamins, the whole nine.

  “It’s a mistake, the lab screwed up. Run it again.” I was surprised at how even toned and rational I was.

  “Chase, I’m sorry, there is no mistake. Lili is pregnant. I can’t be the first to tell you that no birth control is one hundred percent, and a lot of things can interfere with the pill. Has she been sick?”

  No fucking way. Period. This asshole was not speaking to me like I just walked into day one of medical school.

  “Don’t give me that shit. She weighs a buck ten soaking wet and she’s not even on a low dose pill. Run the fucking test again. That ninety-seven percent effective bullshit has more to do with people fucking it up or it being too low of a dose. You know that-”

  Sierra stopped me dead in my tracks. “Chase, she was … she was sick.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? When was she sick? I would have known if she was.”

  “She had a really bad urinary tract infection ... um ... when, when you were away.”

  Away? I fought the sensation to vomit in the closest garbage can. I turned and sat in a chair. Fuck no, this was not happening, not now.

  She meant the week I walked away. The week I tried to convince myself she was better off without my fucking demons. The week after that piece of shit forced her to relive being violated in court. The week I fucking pounded my fists to shit when I should have been home holding her against my chest. The week I tracked down that son of a bitch responsible for the vulnerable look in Blue’s eyes and informed him that he was never to step foot near her again. The bastard didn’t even deny it, didn’t even pick his hands up to defend himself when I knocked that smug look off his face. The eviction notice was the least of his worries. That week. The week she fucking needed me most.

  The deafening beat down taking place in my head was a sharp contrast to the dead silence surrounding me. Jim and Sharon refused to look in my direction. Fuck, I wouldn’t look at me either. Shit. My poor girl was sick, pissing razor blades and I never knew about it. Worse, there was no doubt my insatiable need to bury my mouth and cock deep inside her sweetness every single chance I got caused the fucking UTI. I couldn’t help myself. Her smell, her taste, her tightness, the way our bare skin fit together were two pieces of a jacked puzzle that only made sense intertwined. She was my heaven. And with my sins, she was the only heaven I’d ever know.

  I choked on the burning realization.

  Blue was pregnant.

  Pregnant with my child.

  Our child.

  We weren’t near ready yet, not by a longshot, but there was no doubt in my fucking mind that Lili would want this baby. Her miscarriage three years ago almost wrecked her. That bastard violated her and she conceived in the worst way imaginable, but she was still ready to love that kid, ready to be a mama. That’s who she was. Pure Sweet.

  Utter devastation rocked my soul. And the only person to fucking blame on every single level was me. She trusted me. She loved me. Damn. I needed her to wake up so I could tell her over and over again how much I loved her. She was my baby.

  The pain was indescribable. Cracking my chest open without anesthesia would have hurt less than the pain I was in.

  I dug the heel of my hands deeper against my eyelids and stared at black. “The images are up. Want to come and look for yourself?” Adam asked. Was he fucking kidding?

  “Of course I want to look at them.” I stood and the sick, empty pit in my stomach churned. It didn’t stop me from storming down the hall to the small dark cave housing the radiologist.

  “Chase, I’m so sorry to hear about what happened to Lili. She’s a great girl, sweet and friendly.” Did he think I wanted to bullshit about how fucking friendly he found my girl?

  “Let me see the images,” I hissed.

  He looked like he was twenty-two. No chance in hell he was deciding the fate of my Blue.

  He clicked the mouse and the two huge computer monitors filled with dozens of black, white and grey images. At least the cocky ass was smart enough to step back. I sat in his chair and scrolled through, image after image. You had to be fucking blind to miss the fracture in her skull. A fucking basilar skull fracture and enough diffuse cerebral edema to make her a wait-and-fucking-see case.

  “FUUCK. Not again.” A stream of hot bile slid up my esophagus and scorched the back of my throat. Kimi lay in that bed for three fucking years, waiting and seeing, until I finally inherited my trust and flew in every fucking specialist with a pulse. The final consensus was a basilar artery hemorrhage that left her in a total locked in state. People thought being a vegetable was the worst possible fate. They were wrong. Take that nightmare and multiply it by a thousand and that was what my sister suffered through. She was wide awake and aware of everything, yes, fucking everything. But every voluntary muscle in her body, including her goddamn eyes were paralyzed. And none of us had a damn clue, for three fucking years.

  My eyes darted back and forth, permanently burning every detail on the two screens into my memory. No matter how many ways I flipped Lili’s images, the diagnosis was the same, the reality was the same. “Fuck.” There was nothing to operate on, no quick fix. “Cancel the OR.” I pushed away from the desk before I put my fist through the screen. Eighteen years later and I was still left waiting and seeing. I stormed out of the dark room squinting against the blinding hallway fluorescents. How the hell radiologists functioned in the dark was beyond me.

  “Chase, I called Taylor Hines, head of neurology. She’s on her way in.”

  “Well, fucking call her and send her back to her goddamn Labor Day picnic.”

  “Chase, I hear you, man, but she’s not a surgical candidate. Take a step back and think like a doctor for a second. Let Taylor manage her. You are way too close.”

  Again, with the too close? This woman was my everything. My lifeless heart beat again the first time she nailed me with those blue eyes. My boiling resentment toward the world melted the night she said she trusted me, and my suffocating guilt stopped strangling me the day she said she loved me. Fuck you, too close.

  Gupta stared at me, unsure if I was gonna flip out and start throwing shit or slip into a deep dark depression. Honestly, either was a real possibility.

  “Fine, I don’t care who you call. I’m not too arrogant to get another pair of experienced hands on deck. And while you’re at it, call the Chief of OB. Have her meet me-”

  “CODE BLUE MRI”

  “CODE BLUE MRI!” blared through the hospital’s overhead speaker system.

  “CODE BLUE MRI”

  “CODE BLUE MRI!”

  My feet took off and I sprinted down the hall. I pushed past half the twenty person code team to get in the fucking room. My feet felt like fucking lead. Like I just got slathered in cement. Her naked breasts bounced with every forceful thrust; her ribs cracked with each chest compression. The air bag they used to pump oxygen into her lungs blocked my view of her face. It was a clip from a horror movie.

  “Hold compression!” someone screamed over the commotion. Everyone froze and looked toward the monitor. I still couldn’t see my girl past the chaos. Voices started echoing from every direction.

  “Asystole.”

  “Resume CPR.”

  “Another round of epi...”

  The flat line on the screen arrested my heart. I was dying. I was dead.

  “She’s not responding, it’s been twenty minutes.”


  “We’ve done six rounds of epi.” The voices got more muffled, more hopeless.

  She was lying there motionless and … alone. I broke through the cement. She needed me. She wasn’t going to be alone. I wasn’t leaving her alone. I rushed to the head of the bed. Finally seeing her eyes, I was consumed by an overwhelming sense of peace. Honest and pure peace, heaven.

  “Stop compressions.”

  “I’m calling it … time of death 2:57 PM.” The dominant voice stopped the chatter. He was calling it. It was over. I closed her lifeless eyes. I walked out of the room.

  When I reached an empty hallway, I bent over and fought for more oxygen. Thank fucking god, I breathed.

  “Chase, oh shit. Are you okay? I thought it was Lili too, man. I can’t imagine what was going through your mind … she already went to the ICU.” Adam kept talking. “You need anything?”

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  I breathed really fucking hard. “Yeah, my team and the KimCore.”

  “But Chase, hypothermia induction is contraindicated. She’s pregnant.”

  Like I needed a fucking reminder.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  “No shit, but I need to do something to get the swelling down, and there aren’t many options. I’m not gonna just sit back and let THAT fucking happen to her, Adam. If I lose her, I lose the baby too. So just get my fucking team ready.” Fuck.

  I left Adam for the stairwell. Taking two at a time, I cursed the entire way up to the tenth floor. But I needed the time to get my head back in the game, to process what the fuck just happened. I didn’t know who the girl was, but if she had a husband, I knew him. For two excruciating minutes, I was him. And he just died too.

  Jim and Sharon were pacing outside the ICU entrance. When he saw me approach, Jim looked me square in the eyes. “It’s okay, son. What’s going on? We need to know. I want the truth.”