by Cat Connor
“We have to wait until all the drugs are out of her system. Then I can begin the brain function tests.”
Then he can begin the process of declaring her brain dead that was what he meant.
“Where’s Dad?”
“With Joey, for the moment.”
“How’s Joey?”
He shook his head. “Joey is not going to make it.”
Joey’s not going to make it.
I heard a noise outside the room. A female voice, then Rowan’s. I stood up and left.
“He’s with me,” I said to the nurse who was trying to stop him entering Carla’s room.
“Sorry, ma’am,” she apologized and shrank away.
Rowan’s arms circled me and I pulled back. I couldn’t let him do that. My mind screamed. Don’t touch me. I can’t do this if you touch me.
“Ellie?”
I held up my hands and stepped back. The confusion on his face softened as he got it. He knew me well enough to know that it wasn’t the right time, yet.
“She’s in here,” I said but my voice faded so I didn’t think he’d heard me. I tried again. “She’s in here.”
Kurt was standing next to the bed, talking on the phone. He motioned me to sit back down. Rowan grabbed another chair and moved next to me. The ventilator hissed.
Kurt finished his call. “Rowan,” he said. “We’ve got no news at this point. We’re waiting. All we can do is flush out her system and wait.”
“How long?”
“Million dollar question. As long as it takes.”
“Can she hear us?”
“If she can she’s not responding. But, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t hear,” Kurt replied.
“When is she going to Intensive Care?” I asked, touching her hand and willing a response. If she were anything like me, she’d do it just to spite Kurt.
“In a few minutes. You can both go with her. It’s a good idea if you do. Settle her, talk to the staff.”
“Who is the neurologist up there?”
“Who do you want?” Kurt asked. Picking up his phone again.
“Leon Kapowski,” I replied. “At least get him to consult with whoever they have in ICU.”
Kurt made the call. I swapped places with Rowan, so he could talk to Carla and hold her hand. I fought tears listening to him tell her about his day, and how he was supposed to be surprising us, not the other way around. He pulled out his phone and played her a song. I hadn’t heard it before. As it played, he told her it was hers, the one they’d written last time she stayed at his place. It was going on the new album.
Waves of anger rolled over me. There was so much good in her life. So much love. I watched Rowan stroke her hair and I wanted to slap her. Slap her hard. Wake her the fuck up and yell at her. How fuc’n dare you be so goddamn selfish? How dare you!
Kurt’s hand landed on my shoulder. “They’re taking her up in a minute.”
I nodded. “Why did she do this …?”
His fingers squeezed my shoulder. “I don’t know.”
I doubted we’d ever know, or ever understand.
“I’m in the middle of wrapping up a case. I need to get back to work.” I tried to stand but couldn’t. Kurt’s hand pressed me down into the chair.
“No one’s working the case tonight. We are done with the case. The only thing you wanted was Campbell’s take on the situation.” Kurt’s voice was firm. “Not tonight. You need to be here.”
“No, I don’t. I need to work. Dad is here, Rowan is here.”
Panic rose. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. I couldn’t let those words out.
I can’t be here.
I can’t watch her die.
Kurt checked his phone. I heard it buzz, a text. “Sam and Lee are waiting outside asking if they can come back in,” he said. “Do you want them in here with you?”
I nodded.
His phone buzzed again. He smiled and showed me the text. I read it out. “‘Kurt, please tell Ellie that I am here. Caine.’”
Another buzz.
“The Director is here …” Kurt said taking his phone back and reading the next text.
“Great. It’s a regular FBI party,” I replied.
“News travels fast.”
Bad news travels fast. Good news takes its own sweet time.
Sam and Lee entered the room. It felt crowded, claustrophobic. They looked from me to Rowan to Carla.
“Chicky Babe, we’ll be outside,” Sam whispered in my ear. “We’ll wait out there for you.”
“Thanks. Caine is here somewhere.”
“Hang tough, Chicky Babe.”
My words left me.
Lee moved around the other side of the bed to get close to Carla on the other side of the bed. “Carla. It’s Uncle Lee and Uncool Sam. You need to fight, kid.” Lee’s voice cracked like I’d never heard before. He looked at me as he left. A tear ran down his face. I looked away.
It was too close, too much, and too soon.
Their footsteps faded.
I blew out a long breath.
Seconds later, two women in scrubs appeared in the room. Kurt introduced himself, then me and Rowan.
The blonde was Maria and the brunette Daria. I waited to see if ‘Maria Nay’ would start up again in my head. Nothing happened. I was thankful the songs had paused.
Kurt and the intensive care nurse and doctor – turned out Daria was a specialist in intensive care – began the process of moving Carla. They attached her to a portable ventilator for the journey down corridors and up the lift.
As I walked behind the gurney and the people charged with keeping my child alive, it occurred to me I hadn’t asked if she was going to be okay. If she did survive, would she be the kid I know and love or would she be brain damaged? I just assumed we were fighting a battle that we would lose. I heard footsteps behind me. I didn’t look. I knew who they belonged to. Caine, Cait O’Hare, Misha, Sam, and Lee.
Running feet.
The running feet that joined then passed them, the panic I felt coming up behind me. That was Aidan. My brother. The hand that grabbed my arm to slow me down, the one I didn’t shake off, but that dropped off as soon as I looked at him. My brother.
“Where’s Dad?” I said.
“With Joey. His parents aren’t here yet, and Dad won’t leave him. He told me to tell you, he’ll meet you and Carla upstairs.”
“Okay, thanks Aid.”
“It’s quite the parade behind you, or hadn’t you noticed?” He smiled. I knew he was trying to get me to react. It’s what he did.
Procession not parade. Funeral procession. That’s what it was.
“Aid…” I looked at him for a second. “If only she knew.”
I stopped walking and leaned on the wall. Rowan carried on, because I made him. Sam said, “You want us to stay?”
I shook my head. “Go with her.”
Go with her and make her fight! She’s not trying. She’s not trying to live.
First I was walking, and then I was running, back through the hospital, out through the glass doors and into the ambulance bay.
Cool night air. Away from everyone. She didn’t need me.
Not now.
I couldn’t think what she did need but it sure as hell wasn’t me watching her fade away. Or maybe it was me that didn’t need that. At the end of the ambulance bay, I stood and watched traffic on Gallows Road. Across Gallows was a wooded area that bordered the entrance to ExxonMobil and a flood of memories. My eyes scanned the night, and hearing a trail bike somewhere bought a host of feelings to the surface. Mac was there once with me.
I waited by the traffic lights. The lights were taking too long and traffic was sparse. I ducked across the road. The entrance to ExxonMobil was almost hidden by the night. I stayed on the left hand side of the road that led to the complex within the woods. It was hard to see my way. There were no lights and the woods cast creepy shadows every time the clouds parted and the moon shone. I was okay with creepy shadows. My hand re
ached for the Glock I wore on my hip and came up empty. That was confusing. I felt for my holster. Nothing.
I hurried along the edge of the road looking for the path I knew that led off the road in and into the woods. During the day, it was a beautiful meandering trail through to the other end of the entrance; at night, it was dark, marked by occasional trail markers that glowed in the moonlight. To my left I could hear traffic on Gallows Road. It wasn’t loud, but I could still hear the cars as they slowed for the lights. I walked along until I came to a seat secluded in the woods. I sat down for a while. My arm bumped my side, a reminder that I wasn’t armed. The events leading up to me being in the woods without my gun played out on the movie screen in my head. I saw my Glock on my dressing table. I was home and safe.
Home and safe.
No one could get to us at home – yet I couldn’t protect her from the enemy within.
I didn’t do a very good job of keeping my kid safe at home. How is it I could build a panic room, install state of the art surveillance and security to protect her from threats but couldn’t protect her from herself?
Time sank into the darkness taking me with it.
I was startled back to the present when a voice rang out from the road behind me. “Ellie!”
The voice called out again. It wasn’t any closer. I figured he didn’t know where I’d gone. Time to move. Hell, I didn’t know where I was going. Just back, back to a place I knew once. I doubted I could find my way to the underground parking garage in the dark, not that I wanted too. I didn’t want to follow the old tunnel all the way into DC.
A smile crossed my lips. If I did, no one would find me.
No one would find me. Then what?
Disturbing thoughts echoed in the caverns of my mind. Could I disappear? Run away? Even I knew I couldn’t run from this, or me. My phone rang. The noise disturbed wildlife. Things skittered in the undergrowth. I pulled the phone from my pocket and checked the display. Kurt.
I pressed the end button. The call stopped. The phone rang again while I held it. Kurt.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Conway, where’d you go?”
Behind me somewhere on the trail I heard footsteps.
“For a walk,” I replied. “I need air.”
“Stop, let me catch up.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Conway. Stop.”
His voice was in my ear. His voice was behind me. My feet stopped walking but I didn’t turn around. I ended the call and shoved my phone back in my pocket. No sense talking on a phone, he was about to catch up with me anyway.
The waiting afforded me more opportunity to listen to the rustling in the woods next to me. It took a lot of energy to remind myself that clowns weren’t evil and there wasn’t one in the woods. Maybe it wasn’t a clown. Maybe it was Christopher Chance. Kurt’s footsteps were soft but unmistakable on the asphalt path.
“Ellie?” he called. “Ellie, wait.” The sound of his words tore into my brain. They twisted, contorted, and became a child’s cry. My child’s cry. I spun on my heels my eyes searching for her as she cried out again. “Mommy!”
My heart pounded along with a sudden surge of adrenaline.
“Ellie … where are you?” Kurt again.
“Ahead of you, fifty yards maybe,” I replied. “I’m waiting.” As the words left my mouth, they flew, like butterflies. Dipping and soaring, silvery words on diaphanous wings.
Circling Kurt’s head as he came into view were silver butterflies. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Hey …” he said.
What else do you say to someone who has run away from a hospital and into the woods? Carla cried out, “Mommy!”
“Hey,” I replied.
“You want to come back with me?”
I shook my head. “I don’t, but I can hear her crying and I have to.”
Kurt’s blue eyes locked on mine, the color faded by the night.
“You hear her?”
“Yeah.”
Mommy!
I expected to see a raccoon carrying a balloon in the woods beside me. Little feet scrabbled in the leaf litter and twigs. Instead I heard Bryan Adams singing, ‘Everything I do I do it for you’. My breath caught in my throat as I waited to see if Robin Hood would emerge from the thickets, or at the very least an arrow whiz past my head and the Sheriff’s men scatter under a hail of arrows and rocks.
No arrows. Not even a glimpse of Alan Rickman. Yet, Bryan Adams was still doing everything for me. The song wound around my heart and squeezed. It is worth trying for. And whatever was wrong, it was not worth dying for. It squeezed tighter.
“Kurt …”
“Right here.”
“Suicide pact. It’s a Romeo and Juliet situation.”
“You’re sure?”
“I read her diary. She said they don’t want to be apart and that they have everything they need now.” I kicked at a branch. “Joey’s parents were taking him away.”
“That sounds like a pact or at least a plan to stay together forever.” His eyes burrowed into mine. “What else is going on?”
“I can hear Bryan Adams singing―”
“Conway, I didn’t know Adams sang a suicide song.”
“Everything I do I do it for you, apparently it was worth dying for …”
“Could that be about something else, I always thought that was a love song?”
I shook my head. “Yeah, me too, but what else could it be about and why am I hearing it?”
I know I wasn’t thinking straight but Kurt was right in front of me telling me it was a love song. Duh!
“The reason Rowan is in town?” he suggested without making it about himself, even though I thought it was about him and how he felt.
Rowan called Carla today. He had a surprise. She knew about it and she still did this? I clapped my hands over my ears but the song wouldn’t stop. I heard myself talking to Fiona Sutherland and saying I hoped I was getting something special. It was nowhere near my birthday. He’d been at an event with diamonds. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
Kurt took my hands from ears. “You still think you can stop the noise in your head by covering your ears … jeez, Conway.”
“Did he say something to you?”
“No, he showed Carla something that was in his jacket pocket.”
“Did she react?”
“No.”
“He carries his cell phone in his pocket …”
Kurt shook his head. “He didn’t show her his cell phone. It’s a love song and for what it’s worth, I think it’s about Rowan. But I think you’re right about the suicide pact anyway.”
“I know I’m right, and Rowan is probably here for a gig, and wanted to surprise me.”
He could’ve been here for a concert, but he wasn’t. I knew that much. His next concert wasn’t until the event in New York. I gave Carla the tickets.
Kurt’s phone rang. Skittery noises followed. I glanced around expecting to see evil red eyes watching me from nearby. Hell, between Mac, Costner, Pennywise, Chance, and the world turning into a comic book in front of my eyes, I was just glad I could still walk and talk without drooling.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could.
Kurt may have been talking but the words scrambled between his mouth and my ears. Damn, a speech bubble would be handy for moments like those. He reached out and grabbed my hand. “I’ll help you out with this one, okay?”
I nodded. “Go on then.”
“Rowan was going to propose.” His hand tightened around mine. “We have to go now.”
Thirty-Four
Everything I Do I Do It For You
Kurt let my hand go as we approached the nurses’ station in the intensive care unit. He glanced at me. “Don’t go anywhere. Stay with me.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
Carla cried, “Mommy!”
When I turned toward her voice, she was standing in the doorway. “Carla!”
> Everything jumbled.
She stood in a hospital gown. Crying.
“Carla!” The closer I got the farther away she appeared. She turned and followed Kurt into a room.
Dad reached out to me as I entered. “Ellie, come here.”
From above Carla’s bed, I detected movement, my eyes focused on a shadow figure melting into the wall. Joey.
“No, I can’t. Carla wants me,” I said, shrugging his hand off my arm and hurrying to the bed. “Carla …” There was a chair by the bed. I perched on it and took her hand. It was cold.
Confusion crowded in. She didn’t react as I squeezed her hand. Her eyes were closed.
Leon walked in. “Ellie,” he said, moving close to me and offering his hand. I swapped hands, holding Carla’s with my left, and shaking Leon’s hand.
“Thank you for being here.”
“Has Doctor Henderson told you anything?”
I shook my head. “No. I heard Carla call me.”
The doctors looked at each other.
“We’re trying something. Kurt started the process by giving her a cold IV in the ambulance. We’ve been decreasing her core temperature since she arrived in the emergency room. It may protect her brain from oxygen deprivation for longer.”
“She’s on a ventilator, won’t that protect her brain?”
She was so cold. I wanted to rub her hands and warm her up.
“The hope is that we can hold her core temperature low enough to allow her body to begin to recover from the effects of the drugs, while protecting her brain. The ventilator is necessary because she is so heavily sedated she cannot breath for herself.”
“She was breathing when Kurt gave her Narcan?”
Kurt nodded. “She was. We hope we started treatment early enough. But she didn’t respond as well as she should have to the Narcan. Could be that she didn’t take much Demerol but took more of another drug, that we suspect was Triazolam.”
That made sense: The Triazolam in my bathroom cabinet.
“How long will you keeping her cold?”
“Twenty-four hours then we’ll start warming her up and then we’ll start running some tests.”
“She was talking, she was walking.” My stomach back flipped to what Dad told me about lunchtime, she was walking and talking. Focus Ellie. “What are the tests for?”
