“Dad, we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?” River said, trying to placate him. His father slumped forward, his arm with the gun dangling, and River thought best to quickly get out of his sight. He turned and started walking away.
“River!” He heard his name a split second before the explosive crack of the gun; just another split second before he felt the jolt of a searing, excruciating pain into his left side. What? He kept on walking, not looking back, not believing his father would actually…until he stumbled forward, his vision going black. He lay still, a roaring sound filling his ears, the sound of his own blood pulsing; pulsing out of his body; and very faint, the sound of the truck’s engine receding away.
He lay still; he couldn’t do anything else. He shot me! I’m going to die! He couldn’t move, but tears filled his eyes; tears of regret for his future, his horse, Storm, his life…for Sierra…he never told her…Suddenly Storm was there, whining pathetically and licking at his face. I’m not dead yet. Still breathing…for each labored breath he took caused pain to shoot throughout his chest, and brought him no sense of getting oxygen. Need help! He tried to move his fingers and surprised himself when he could. Forcing his arm to move, in spite of how it seemed to shock and jar everything inside, he brought it to his back pocket and grabbed the rim of his cell phone. He couldn’t feel it in his fingers but as he forced his hand up to his face, and opened his eyes, he could see its blurry outline. Without looking, he moved his finger down the screen and to the place that should be his contacts. He tried to look; yes, the list had come up on the screen. He pressed the first one and heard it ring.
“Hello?”
“Sierra,” he spoke her name in a croaky whisper, and it seemed most important that she know how he felt about her, before he…
“River, what’s the matter?”
“Sierra, I…you…” He licked his lips, tasting blood. “Been shot!” he said, as if surprised, and passed out.
*****
“River…River?” Sierra repeated, but he didn’t answer. She heard a sound like the whine of a dog. “Storm?” she called through the phone, and Storm barked, hearing her voice. “River!” she tried again. She looked over at the clock, 11:10. Pam had gone to bed around 9:30, but Sierra had been too wound up from the show and didn’t feel tired. With finals next week, she had made herself comfortable on the sofa, her books spread around her, and with plenty of snacks. But she must have fallen asleep when the ringing of her phone inside her backpack woke her up.
“Something is very wrong,” she said out loud, and heard Storm bark again. River was not answering. She pushed her books aside and went to wake up her mother.
“We have to go over there,” she pleaded after explaining the phone call and that River was not answering.
Pam sat up groggily in bed, pushing her hands through her tousled hair, trying to make sense of what Sierra was going on about.
“Mom, please, I think he’s in some kind of trouble. Maybe his father…”
Pam suddenly felt very awake. “Okay, get dressed…oh, you are dressed. Okay, let me get dressed. Do you know his address?”
“No, I only know his driveway where we dropped him off that day after Fiel had colic.”
“Yes, it’s not very far from here,” Pam said; now out of bed and pulling on her jeans and a sweatshirt. “We could try calling 911, but we don’t know the address.”
“I’ll call,” Sierra said, needing to do something. “I can describe to them about where it is.”
“Good,” Pam called over her shoulder as she dashed to the bathroom.
Sierra made the call, and found the operator not very helpful since Sierra couldn’t tell her exactly what the trouble was or an exact address. Sierra pleaded with her that she suspected child abuse, which did get the operator’s attention, and she said she would dispatch a car to the general area.
“Let’s go,” Pam called as she came out from the bathroom with keys and purse in hand. They left the cottage, quickly got into the car, and sped away to about where they thought River lived.
“This is the driveway, don’t you think?” Pam asked as they cruised the road they had taken to drop River off.
“Yes, I remember that mailbox on the other side, painted like a cow,” Sierra said, squinting into the light provided by the headlights of the car. Pam turned onto the driveway, and they slowly maneuvered up the gravel road that ended at the yard of a very large old house in extremely decrepit condition. Pam stopped with the motor idling, and they both scanned the area.
“There!” Sierra shouted, noting a figure on the ground near an old barn. “It’s River!” She saw the shadowy form of a dog near the lying figure. She had her hand on the door handle to jump out, but her mother grabbed her arm, holding her back. “Mom, it’s River.”
“You are not getting out of this car, we don’t know what happened here,” Pam said firmly.
“Mom,” Sierra tried to pull away.
“Sierra,” Pam said again in a tone that Sierra hardly ever heard. “It won’t help him if you or I get hurt also. I’m calling 911 again.”
Even as she said the words, three patrol cars rolled up behind them. Four officers stepped out of the car with guns in hand, two of them moving cautiously up to the house and two of them going toward the body. Sierra could see another officer inside one of the cars on a radio, and then a sixth officer came up to Pam’s window. She pressed the button to roll it down and began explaining what had happened so far.
The rest of the evening became a blur to Sierra. Neither her mother nor the police would allow her out of the car. She watched as the police forced their way into the house when no one came to the door. Shortly after, they came out with a woman and a young man, both handcuffed and pushed into the back seats of two separate patrol cars.
An ambulance had been summoned. Storm would not allow the strangers to approach River, growling menacingly with teeth bared. Sierra had called out to them that she knew the dog, and only then was she allowed out of the car with a policeman on each side of her. Storm came to her when she called, whining pathetically, and Sierra held on to her while paramedics rushed over to River. She didn’t know if he were dead or alive, and suspected the worst at the sight of all the blood pooling at his side. Relief flooded over her when she saw them doing things that must mean he was alive: starting an intravenous needle, putting some kind of tube into his mouth and down his throat, checking his blood pressure over and over, and finally, carefully lifting him onto a stretcher and loading him into the back of the ambulance. One police car with two officers followed the ambulance away. Another policeman escorted Sierra back to her car and she got in with Storm.
“Just a few questions and we’ll escort you home,” the officer said. More patrol cars were arriving with their lights flashing; Sierra never knew how many. She and her mother answered his questions, adding information they thought might be helpful. At last a patrol car escorted them home, where they settled Storm in with Charlie, and then left on their own for the hospital.
The officer explained that almost at the same time they had placed the 911 call, a patrol car had discovered where Cray had driven his truck into a ditch. The police found him clutching the steering wheel, sobbing, a loaded gun next to him, and saying over and over, “I killed my son.” With the information from the 911 dispatcher and the address on his driver’s license, they had arrived at the scene just moments behind Sierra and her mother.
*****
The tiled corridor seemed endless…and dizzying. Sierra focused on each green tile placed at intervals along a row of yellowish tiles in a wall of dull beige tiles…a sea of tiles; very ugly tiles. This is Mom’s world, she thought, clinging to her mother’s arm as she led her daughter from the emergency room where they had entered the hospital to the surgical waiting room. What a horrible place; I do not want to be here. Only holding onto her mother’s arm connected to her solid and confident presence leading the way, kept Sierra moving forward on her trembling knees. Even the sme
lls…really not what she had expected; not a clean, fresh smell, but an acrid, antiseptic smell that tried to smother the odor of sickness and death. River does not belong here! He belongs with me at the stable with the smell of horses…
They reached glass doors that Pam pushed open. Inside, the room offered several green plastic sofas, chairs, and tables piled with crumpled magazines and leftover coffee cups and food wrappers. It was after one a.m., and apparently nobody else had a loved one in surgery, for the room was empty of people.
They sat down to wait…and wait. They had been told by the nurse in the emergency room that River had been taken to surgery and she could tell them nothing more; except he was still alive when the ambulance arrived. She had steered them over to an admitting desk and they had given what information they knew, which wasn’t all that much. “We should call Tess,” Sierra suggested. “She probably knows more about him than we do.” She gave the clerk Tess’s number, who punched it in on her desk phone. They waited until she made a connection, and then the clerk nodded at them in dismissal, telling them to go to the surgical waiting area.
Pam left once to go to a bank of vending machines and came back with cups of bland coffee for both of them. It gave them something to do. Sierra leaned against her mother where they sat on one sofa, and tried to sleep, but as gritty as her eyes felt and as lightheaded as she was with fatigue, she could not doze off.
Tess arrived about thirty minutes later, her face pale and taut. Sierra let her mother explain what they knew while Tess sat on a chair with rigid posture, fingering over and over a plastic figure of a jumping horse and rider on her key chain.
“I feel so guilty,” Pam said after explaining and answering Tess’s questions. “We suspected his father of abuse, and we never did anything about it. Maybe we could have prevented this.”
Tess shook her head, but not in disagreement. “I know he was sometimes rough on River, but I never, never in a thousand years could have thought him capable of trying to kill him.” Sierra suspected she held onto a rather large measure of guilt herself.
The wall clock electronically ticked away the minutes and then hours. They fell into silence, and Sierra believed she might actually have fallen asleep for a few minutes at least.
Finally, a side door to the waiting room opened and a surgeon, still in light blue scrubs, walked over to them. As one, they sat up straight, their eyes full of hope and fear.
“I’m Dr. Hoffman. Is anyone here a parent or relative?” the surgeon asked.
“I’m his employer,” Tess spoke up, “and these are close friends of his. His mother is dead and his father is the one who shot him.” Tess did not mince any words. “His aunt is his legal guardian, but I believe she has been taken into custody.”
The surgeon’s eyes flashed open wider in surprise, and sympathy? He cleared his throat and then proceeded, “I see.”
“How is he?” Sierra blurted out. She wanted to scream, very annoyed with all this useless, preliminary banter.
“He is doing well,” the surgeon answered, and that seemed to draw him back to his role of giving the news. “He is a very lucky young man. The bullet missed his heart and large blood vessels, but nicked part of the left lung, and resulted in a hemothorax.” He cleared his throat again and explained, noting the baffled expressions on everyone’s face except Pam’s. “What I mean is there was bleeding into the chest around the lung, causing its collapse. He lost quite a bit of blood, but the paramedics got to him in time and with their resuscitation efforts, probably saved his life. I was able to remove the bullet and I did have to remove a small amount of lung tissue. I believe however, that he should heal well and regain near normal lung function. He’s just going to need some time.”
There was a collective sigh of relief. Tess asked, “Can I see him now?”
“We’ve moved him to the intensive care unit for now. His condition is serious, but stable, and I want to rest him on the ventilator overnight…well,” he glanced at the clock, “until later today. If you wait here just a little longer, the nurses are settling him in, and one of them will come and get you, probably in about twenty to thirty minutes. He’ll be sedated. We won’t let him wake up until we are ready to remove the endotracheal tube.” Again when he noted their expressions he explained, “It’s a breathing tube into his lungs.”
Pam asked a few more specific medical questions, and then they sat back in their seats to wait again.
Finally, a nurse summoned them to River’s bedside, but she would only allow two at a time. Tess and Pam went in first, and then Pam accompanied Sierra into his room.
River lay in a bed with a tube inserted in his mouth and attached to thick plastic tubing connected to a square machine; the ventilator, the nurse was explaining. Sierra stared into his face, looking so peaceful right now, yet washed of color. How could someone with brown skin look so pale? She had never noticed what long and thick eyelashes he had, but now above his cheeks, they looked like black smudges. There was crusted blood on part of his teeth that she could see around the tube in his mouth. Her eyes went from his face to his body covered with white blankets. A tube the size of a garden hose protruded from beneath the covers to drain into a square plastic container hanging at the bottom of the bed. Thick, red fluid dribbled down the tube – blood? Bags of fluid hanging from poles and with thin, clear tubing threaded into the mechanisms of machines and then continuing on into a needle in the side of his neck and another into a vein in his arm, dripped in, as she watched briefly, drop after drop.
“You can take his hand,” the nurse said to her kindly, “and talk to him.”
“Can he hear me?” Sierra asked, her voice a squeak.
“He is sedated, but we never know what our patients are hearing, even if he doesn’t remember later.”
Sierra stepped closer to the bed and found River’s hand beneath the blanket. A cloth restraint had been wrapped around his wrist and tied to the bed frame.
“It’s in case he wakes up suddenly, and not knowing where he is, could accidently pull out his breathing tube,” the nurse explained.
Taking his fingers and encasing them within her palm, Sierra spoke softly, “River, it’s Sierra; I’m here. You’re going to be okay.” Then her voice cracked and she turned to her mother as tears came in a rush.
Pam rubbed her back and asked, “Are you ready to go?”
“Just a minute,” Sierra gulped, forcefully trying to regain control. When she thought she could trust her voice she turned back to River’s bed and took his hand once more. “Don’t worry, Storm is with me and I’ll watch out for Cory, too.” It almost looked like his eyelids flickered but then maybe it was just her imagination. She squeezed his fingers gently, and then let her mother lead her away.
*****
30 The Marshalls
The best riders in the world have their horses totally under control, but from the half halt – not from strength. – Dr. Reiner Klimke
*****
“Take the day off,” Tess said, glancing at her watch and then confirming the time of almost six a.m. on the wall clock. “I’ll call Manuel to let him know what happened and he or Enrique will help Katrina with the chores.” She had just come back from seeing River once more, and now fumbled through her keys for the one to her car.
Sierra nodded in agreement and she and Pam also left the hospital. They drove home in silence, too exhausted to think, much less talk. Sierra crawled into bed and fell instantly asleep.
Four hours later, her eyes popped open, sunlight penetrating through her bedroom curtains. River. Her mind reeled over all that had happened, and she knew there was no chance of going back to sleep. Leaving a note for her mother who did appear to be sleeping soundly, she left for the stable.
Katrina and Manuel had finished the morning chores and Katrina was brushing Calliope in the crossties when Sierra arrived. “How is he?” Katrina froze with her brush in hand the moment she caught sight of Sierra, her face pale and drawn with evidence of recent te
ars.
“They say he’s going to be okay,” Sierra told her.
Katrina’s face screwed up as she tried to hold back her tears. She dropped her brush and she and Sierra fell into a hug of mutual comfort. “I thought…I thought,” Katrina gulped.
After regaining control, Katrina, sniffing through her stuffy nose, picked up her brush and returned to grooming Calliope while Sierra gave her more details. Katrina brushed as she listened, and then when Sierra finished, continued brushing in silence until she suddenly leaned her face against Calliope, her shoulders shaking as she cried again.
“Katrina, I’m sure he’s going to be okay,” Sierra reassured her.
Katrina nodded but then turned her face to look at Sierra. “It was you he called,” she said in a choked voice.
Sierra’s mouth dropped open in stunned surprise. Katrina is jealous! Ha, if she only knew how jealous I am of her! But she did not believe Katrina needed to worry and she explained, “Of course he called me. I live close to him and he knows my mother is a nursing student. Katrina, he could have died! He needed help quickly.”
“It’s not just that,” she sniffed. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. We ride on the trail together but he’s never really asked me. I just always try to be ready when I know he’s going out. He’s never asked me to help him with Cory.”
Sierra’s heart jumped. The way he looks at me? How badly she wanted to ask Katrina what she meant by that. And she realized that what Katrina told her was true. She had thought Katrina was doing all the things she and River used to do together, but it did seem now like it was mostly Katrina tagging after him. He didn’t ask Katrina to help with Cory or to help out when the shoer or the vet came. And last week he had asked Sierra to hold a horse for him while he treated a swollen leg according to the vet’s instructions. Still…but then she thought back to seeing River’s pale face with blood on his teeth, and connected to so many frightening machines and she prayed with all her heart, just let him be okay, even if it’s Katrina he cares about; I just want him to be okay…and happy.
The Boy Who Loves Horses (Pegasus Equestrian Center Series) Page 32
