While she waited for something resembling warm to arrive, she hazarded a glance at herself in the mirror, hoping she didn’t look as frazzled as she felt. Her eyes widened as they took in the blossoming red stain on her shoulder. She turned sideways and saw even more. What she’d taken to be anxious perspiration was actually a wide stream of blood running down her back.
“Holy shit,” she gasped, reaching out to turn off the water. Temperature be damned, she needed to know if all of that blood had come from his nose or from somewhere else. With a quick squeeze to get rid of major drips, she picked up the washcloth and went back into her bedroom.
Mark hadn’t moved. The alarm was squealing, he still looked grayish-yellow, and the blood had begun to dry under his nose. Kori took a breath and padded quietly to the far side of the bed. She lowered herself slowly, not wanting to startle him, and poised on the edge of the mattress.
A quick check told her that he was still breathing, albeit with some difficulty, and his eyelids fluttered once or twice but stayed shut. She swiped lightly at the trickle of blood under his nostrils, then turned her attention to the stains on his chin. As she reached to wipe there for the first time, she saw the crust of blood caked into the corners of his mouth. Kori blotted his lip with the cloth stretched tightly over her fingers, pulling it lightly away from his teeth.
Blood had gathered in the pocket behind his lower lip and it rolled out in a slow freshet, staining the yellow cloth a bright scarlet. Both his upper and lower front teeth were crimson.
He’s coughing up blood. Oh God no…
She dropped the wet washcloth onto the floor and ran to the kitchen to call for an ambulance.
****
Kori drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, impatient at having to stop at yet another traffic light. She’d long since lost sight of the ambulance. With full lights and siren blaring, it blazed through the intersections, leaving Kori and Zach to nurse their hope and worry during the twenty-minute drive to the hospital.
She wished again that she was riding in the back of the ambulance with Mark. She told herself she couldn’t have done anything but hold his hand, and maybe not even that if she got in the way of the medical team, but it didn’t stop the wanting.
Or the dread. The ambulance crew had assured her that while Mark’s condition was serious, he was far from critical and, with prompt medical attention, he should pull through. Their careful phrasing wasn’t lost on her. Must be part of their training: Blurry Speak and Other Politically Correct Verbiage. Even though the only way to keep JT out was to wall off all of my extrasensory input from anyone, I still know what they meant with their intentionally vague words. They didn’t say he wasn’t going to die; it was all too obvious that he slowly was. And they didn’t say he would be fine, either. It was painfully clear to anyone with eyes that Mark’s days of being just fine were long over.
Still, I can’t shake this feeling that something’s coming, and soon. The light changed to green and she shook her head as she eased through the intersection. I’ve got to stop letting the worry get the best of me. The EMTs know what they’re doing and so does the hospital staff. They’ll get him through this so he can keep dying.
No matter how much she pep-talked in her head, chewing ratlike in the back of her mind was Mark’s standing order for no resuscitation. It punctuated everything she said or thought. And the gnawing was louder when they were separated. What if that critical moment arrived and she wasn’t there? No final touch, no last look into his eyes before the light in them was extinguished forever. No goodbye, no words of love while he could still hear them, no thank-you for all he’d taught her of love and laughter and sharing and believing in herself, things her otherworldly awareness had left her needing to learn from someone with a truly honest and love-filled heart.
She almost ran the next red light and had to stomp on the brakes to keep from hitting the cross traffic. Get a grip, Kori. This is not the time to be maudlin, this is the time to pay attention to what you’re doing so you can arrive at the hospital in one piece.
She glanced over at her son sitting in the front seat beside her, relieved that he didn’t appear at all frightened by their near-miss. She reached out to squeeze his hand and he squeezed back, then looked up at her with eyes full of understanding and a gentle smile of reassurance. Her heart lurched painfully, he looked so much like his father in that moment. “The light’s green again, Mom.”
Kori took her hand back and shifted the car into gear, this time trying to focus more on driving and less on her fear. They reached the street that would take them the last mile to the hospital’s main entrance and once again, as she waited for the turn arrow, Kori’s fingers started their impatient drumming on the wheel.
“Does the siren sound like it got louder to you?” Zach asked from out of the blue.
“A little, maybe,” she answered. “But I think that’s because we’re almost there, so we’re catching up.” The green arrow came on and she began to turn the final corner. “When we get there, I want you to stick by my side, okay? They might try to kick you out to the waiting room because of your age, but unless I tell you to go — Whoa, what the hell?”
She was momentarily blinded as a flash of light caught her right in the eyes. Tree shapes and outlines of things vaguely resembling vehicles stood black in her vision, burned into her retinas by the unexpected brightness in the overcast day. There were so many, all flickering out of sync with each another. The street pulsed grotesquely red and blue and white as the lights of the emergency vehicles spun in the block ahead.
She pulled to the right and slowed, blinking hard to clear her sight and wishing she’d worn her sunglasses even though it was gray and dim overhead. As the dancing black shapes diminished, she realized there was something very wrong about the dazzling lights ahead. One set of them was flashing up toward the sky and back down again instead of side to side like the rest.
She stopped the car, struck dumb by the scene half a block away. A police cruiser wailed by, his flashers adding to the maelstrom of light. The screech of his tires on the pavement as he stopped didn’t make a dent in the chaos in her brain, but the sound shook Zach from his daze.
“Mom, is that Dad’s ambulance over there laying on its side?”
****
Rafe tried to stifle his soft chuckle as the waitress placed the tall glass of iced tea on the table in front of him. She looked at him quizzically. “Is there something wrong with the tea, sir?”
He flashed her a widened grin. “I’m sorry, pay me no mind, luv. I was just amusing myself while I’m waiting for my friends to get here.”
She returned the smile and said she’d check back as the rest of his party arrived then walked off to her next table.
Rafe shook his head and continued to snicker and grin as he thought about when he’d knocked at JT’s room to ask if he wanted to join the rest of the band for a late breakfast. JT opened the door, looking like hell and grumbling up a storm, but said he’d be there shortly.
The rest of the band had dubbed JT’s moodiness PMS, and as a way of dispelling the strain, they’d made it a game to think up different words for the letters. When JT was down and quiet, the phrases were more forgiving. Paul had coined Pathetic Moody Singer, while Clay’s favorite for those spells was Poor Miserable Sot.
Other times it sounded more like instructions on how to deal with him. This morning he’d come up with Pound Me Senseless and he chuckled again. He was looking down into his glass of tea and didn’t notice Paul approaching.
“It’s getting harder to keep my mouth shut when he keeps denying his God-awful mood is due to Kori leaving,” Paul complained as he slid into the booth across from Rafe.
“Shhh,” Rafe admonished with a quick glance around the hotel’s brightly-lit cafe. “I know it is, but you promised. Trust me, I’ve been harping on him to come clean about him and Kori, but he won’t.”
Paul flipped open the menu and scanned it. “Stubborn wanker. Has he
said why not?”
“He’s afraid you might think less of Kori because she’s married.” Rafe picked up the sweaty tea glass and downed half of it in one gulp.
Paul made a face. “Oh, for the love of… he’s the only one of us who would wait until his current flavor moved out of his house before having sex with any other woman. The rest of us either weren’t that patient or just didn’t care. How could he even think we’d judge her?”
Rafe looked around the room and, seeing only Clay as he entered the cafe, replied, “I posed the same thing to JT. He said that this time it’s different and that she’s different. Kori is the woman for the rest of his life and since we’ll be seeing an awful lot of her, it matters what we all think.”
Paul closed his menu. “None of us would hold anyone to higher morals than we impose on ourselves, and he knows it. He’s just being stubborn for the sake of it.”
“I don’t have to ask who you two are talking about,” Clay said from the end of the table. “Who’s gonna shift over now, and who gets to sit next to JT when he gets here?”
Both of them moved and Clay scooted into the empty space next to Paul.
“Ha ha,” Paul singsonged. “You lose the JT Lotto.”
“Bite me, Paul.” Rafe toyed with his iced tea spoon absently. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and Ian’ll come down first so we can stick JT at the end of the table, instead.”
“Nope,” Clay replied. “I stopped at his room on the way out and he said he’d rather stay in than put up with JT’s foul mood this morning. His room’s right next to JT’s and he said he could hear him slamming things around in there already.”
Rafe sighed loudly. “Oh, perfect. I wonder what set him off so early.” Rafe looked toward the entrance to the cafe and raised his hand, giving a single spread-fingered wave. “Well, I won’t have to wait long to find out. Here he comes.”
JT made his way to their booth and edged into the empty seat next to Rafe, never uttering a word. He glowered at the slim phone in his hand, then slapped it down on the tabletop and started drumming his fingertips over its smooth case.
“Hey, JT,” Rafe said in greeting. The others wisely stayed mute. “Wake up on the wrong side of bed again this morning?”
JT glared at him, then at the other eyes staring at him from the opposite side of the table. “No.”
Rafe was tired of the endless eggshell-walking. “We’ve never been a group to keep things from each other, JT. Why don’t you just say what’s bothering you?”
To all of their surprise, JT’s expression softened a bit and he sighed. “It’s nothing. Really. Or maybe it’s something, but I don’t know what.” He stopped drumming on the phone and began to spin it slowly with one long ragged-nailed finger.
“Come again?” Paul chimed in.
“There’s something wrong, but I haven’t the foggiest what it is.” He took in the disbelieving expressions on the three faces around him. “I’m serious. When I woke up this morning, and I know you won’t believe me ‘cause I’ve been such a bear and I fully realize it, I was in a fairly decent mood. Not great, but not bad. But all morning long, a feeling has been building that there’s something very wrong. I just can’t nail down what it is.”
Rafe reached over to stop the cell phone’s lazy spin. “Just call her.”
JT flashed him a look. He didn’t think Rafe had managed to keep their secret, but he’d been hopeful. “She won’t answer. She’s shut me out completely.”
“Still?”
JT raised his brows and simply nodded, then went back to tapping the edge of the phone to set it spinning again.
It was obvious that JT didn’t want to elaborate and no one was willing to pry any further. The table fell into an uncomfortable silence and JT picked up his menu, propping it on the table in front of him. He’d never felt less hungry in his life but it was a convenient way to block their sympathetic eyes. “Let’s not have a pity party for JT this morning, all right?” he grumbled from behind his menu-shield. “After tonight’s gig, we’ve got two days off, then three more days on, and after that I can just slink my lonely, sorry ass back home.” Where ever that may be. Home is where the heart is, and Kori’s got mine sewn into her pocket.
Clay scowled and started to say something. His reply was lost in the chirp of JT’s slowly revolving cell phone. JT looked at the telephone’s display and scrabbled to answer the call, tossing his menu right into Clay’s face.
“Hello,” he said softly, already knowing who was calling and that it couldn’t be good news. She’d been avoiding him like an infectious disease.
“Slow down, sweetheart. I can’t understand you.” His eyes widened then closed altogether and his face went pale. “Oh, God. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
There was a long pause as he listened. “I insist. If you didn’t need me, you wouldn’t have called.” Another short wait followed. “I’ll stay for the gig tonight then, but I’ll catch the first open flight after.”
He listened for a moment longer. “No, I’ll have a rental waiting and I’ll call you with the flight details so you can tell me where to go when I get there. Just keep yourself together, love, and I’ll see you very soon.”
JT sighed heavily and wiped a shaking hand over his eyes before meeting the concerned stares from around the table. “Mark was being transported to hospital when his ambulance was struck and overturned. He’s unconscious and in a very bad way.”
“How bad?” whispered Clay.
JT’s stricken face faded to paper white. “His whole system is shutting down. Two days, they told her. Maybe less.”
****
The stench of pine cleaner and antiseptic was everywhere. The muted light and green-painted walls were some idiot’s misguided attempt to soothe the frazzled nerves of visitors to the ward. She rounded the last corner then paused outside Mark’s door, steeling herself for the broken vision of the once-robust man lying in the bed. With a final sigh, she pushed open the wide door and stepped inside.
Deja-vu all over again. But this time it’s real. Another dream’s come to fruition. Why is it always the ones I don’t like that manifest themselves? I guess I should be grateful for the warning it gave, but can’t I, for once in my life, have a good old-fashioned dream-come-true sort of thing?
Kori had asked that the harsh overhead panels be left off whenever they weren’t needed for some procedure or chart update, and it took switching them off herself several times before the nurses in the trauma ward finally gave in. The room’s only light radiated feebly from the fluorescent tube mounted above the head of the bed, filling the room with a shadowy dusk that should have been gloomy. Instead, it seemed more tranquil in the dim, and Mark didn’t look so jaundiced and unlike his old self when there were more shadows than light. Kori carefully wove through the numerous monitors and their snaking cables to the lowbacked, saggy-seated chair at Mark’s bedside.
Weary as she was, she didn’t want to sit just yet. She picked up his hand, careful of the ridge from the IV needle just under the surface of the bruised, thin skin, and kissed the distended knuckles before gently returning it to the coverlet. Her eyes were clear and tender as they swept over his face. With raggedy-nailed fingers, Kori traced the outlines of his once-angled face, brushing lightly over the cheekbones now buried in swelling.
“I miss you,” she whispered. Sinking heavily into the chair, she dropped her head and stared at the industrial gray tiled floor.
It was incredibly quiet for a trauma unit. She recalled her one other experience with such a place eleven years earlier. Mark had been brought to another ICU trauma center following his collision with the drunk driver. That room was shared, not private like this one. Those halls bustled, patients and gurneys and wheelchairs came and went like traffic in a crowded bus terminal. This ward was different, more subdued and tranquil. She rightly suspected that it was nearly empty. Also, in that other place and time, they’d been fighting to save his life. Now she merely sat vigil at his bedside,
lone witness to a deathwatch.
The room itself was far from silent and every little sound grated her eardrums. Kori found it impossible to tune out the constant low hiss of the oxygen passing through the cannula taped under his nostrils, feeding his unsteady and irregular breathing. And at first, when the noisy alarms had been left active, one or another of them regularly jangled a warning that had Kori ready to crawl the walls.
She’d begged and the alarm sounders were shut off, but the alert lights still blinked on with a barely audible click (a two-hundred decibel thunderclap to Kori’s ears) and winked back off with the same tiny sound when the nurse at the central monitor station checked and reset them.
It was nearly midnight and time for the top of the hour chart rounds. A nurse walked up to the door and stopped, looking in the narrow vertical window above the brushed steel door handle. Upon seeing Kori’s hunched silhouette, she walked on to the next room.
Kori saw the shadow pass from the door and sighed. She knew they were granting her privacy but she was, in fact, dealing with her husband’s broken body far better than any of them perceived. She’d been emotionally preparing for his passing for months. She saw the unexpected crash as a blessing, a gift from a merciful higher power. He wouldn’t have to endure the slow torture of dying while his body failed bit by agonizing bit.
She hoped the unconsciousness spared him the pain of this latest indignity to his already damaged flesh but she wanted to be sure.
And just one final time, she needed to find the man inside, the man he used to be. To say farewell with gratitude and love.
Her slumped posture wasn’t defeat. It marked the careful focus to reach him in the only way left, by tearing down the total blockade she’d erected to shut out all perceptions. At first, she’d merely had to tune JT out, deflecting him so that his hopeful probes glanced off unanswered.
As the days since they’d left the tour marched on, his attempts became desperately stronger, bludgeoning her psyche until her only recourse was to shut out everything. It was a wall fast erected and impenetrable; breaking it apart, however, had to be done with full concentration and taken with slow care to retain her balance. Being hit with the full-volume force of all that was floating just outside her current awareness would, at minimum, lay her flat with a stupefying migraine. That was what she could expect when her energy levels were normal, and right now, normal didn’t even share the same continent.
Dream Me Off My Feet (Sex, Love, And Rock & Roll) Page 56
