Twice in a Lifetime

by Jodie Griffin

  “Was your boss,” Chief Robinson said. “You report to me now, remember?”

  I nodded, and he went back over to sit with Delia and Colin again.

  Derrick squeezed me. “What happened?”

  “Someone found out we were seeing each other and tried to make trouble for us. So she tried to protect me by putting in a transfer request after we’d talked about it and I’d told her that I hated the idea.”

  He sighed. “That’s my mama, stubborn to the bone.”

  Gabriela had been standing there silently, but now she spoke, leaning into Derrick’s side. “That’s what’s going to get her through this, you know.”

  From your mouth to God’s ear.

  The nurse, a young blonde woman wearing a thick cross on a chain around her neck, wouldn’t let me into the ICU. She blocked the door, arms crossed, and glared down her nose at me. “Husband or children only.”

  I reared back, stunned, never imagining this scenario. I didn’t know what to say, was struck speechless, but it turned out I didn’t have to say anything.

  Derrick grabbed my hand and pulled me forward with him. “I’m her son, but I have two mothers. My mom needs to see my mama, and you are going to move your homophobic ass out of the way so that can happen.” At six feet tall, with his Marine bearing, he was an imposing presence. “I don’t care what your personal beliefs are, but we are family. Move.”

  Another nurse came over to see what the issue was. Chief Robinson took her aside, and within two minutes, I was standing next to the bed where Eve lay, still except for the rise and fall of her chest at every pump of the ventilator. Her skin had a grayish cast, and the white bandages on her arm and her chest made her look incredibly frail. Derrick made a choked noise and I squeezed him hard. Tears shimmered in his beautiful brown eyes that were so much like Eve’s.

  “She’ll make it, honey,” I said, fighting my own tears. I had to believe it, and I had to be strong. For him, for Eve, for myself. In her, I’d found a happiness and a partnership I’d never expected to find again, and I couldn’t lose her. I didn’t know if I could survive such a significant loss twice.

  “She seems so small,” he said, his voice thick. “And so still. Mama is never this still, y’know? She’s always moving, doing something.”

  “Yeah.” I leaned forward, careful of all the tubes and wires and bandages, and kissed her softly on her forehead. “Fight, babe. You have to fight. Derrick needs you. I need you. Fight, damn it.”

  I moved out of the way, and Derrick leaned in close as I’d had. “Don’t leave me, Mama.”

  My heart twisted painfully.

  He stood, and we held each other as the ventilator breathed for Eve, one even pump at a time.

  I hadn’t left the hospital in the thirty-six hours since I’d gotten here, though Chief Robinson and the Butlers had gone. Someone from the department was here all the time, keeping vigil, a fact I greatly appreciated. Eve’s family was here too—her brother and her sister. Her other sister was driving their parents up from South Carolina tomorrow. They’d asked extended family to wait until she was out of ICU.

  I sat in the chair next to Eve’s bed in the ICU, touching her foot, one of the only parts of her not hooked up to a machine. “I made Derrick go get some dinner with Gabri. He looked like he was about to fall over.” I talked to her almost constantly. I had no idea if she heard me or not, but I needed to fill up the silence so I didn’t focus on the damn beep, beep, beep of the machines. “He didn’t want to leave. He’s as stubborn as you are, though I guess you already know that.”

  My eyes scanned her for the thousandth time, looking for any sign she was waking, but nothing.

  There was the scuff of a shoe at the door, and then a muffled sob. I turned to see Lila, her eyes round and a hand covering her mouth.

  “Oh, baby. Let it out.” I stood and pulled my daughter into my arms, holding her until her sobs eased off and her body stopped shaking.

  She took a shuddering deep breath and wiped her eyes. “Is she going to be okay?”

  My stomach clenched. “They don’t know yet, honey. I have to believe she will be. I have to.” I squeezed Lila tightly, then sat, touching Eve’s foot again. I needed that contact, to feel the warmth of her skin. I hoped she could feel it, that she knew I was there.

  Lila stood beside me until a nurse came in, frowning. “There’s only supposed to be one person in here at a time.”

  “I’ll go,” Lila said, her voice still unsteady. “I just needed to see my stepmom for myself. And I needed to make sure my mom was taking care of herself too.”

  The nurse’s frown softened. “Five more minutes, okay?”

  “Thanks.” When the nurse left the room, Lila squeezed my shoulder, then stepped around me to the head of the bed. She laid a trembling hand lightly on the blanket covering Eve’s shoulder. “You have to get better, Eve. You can do this. Mom needs you. Derrick needs you. Rissa and I need you too.” She sniffed, a half sob. “You make Mom so happy. You have to get better. You have to.”

  My beautiful girl with her loving heart.

  Lila stood there a few more minutes, closing her eyes and bowing her head, and when she was done, she came back into my arms for a long hug. “She’ll be okay, Mom. I know it.”

  I held her tightly and kissed the top of her head. “I hope so, honey.”

  It was nearly eleven, and everyone but Derrick and I had gone home to get some sleep. He was in with Eve, and I was outside talking to one of the nurses when all kinds of alarms started going off in her room. Panic clawed at me as the ICU staff raced to Eve’s side, checking her vitals as well as the machines and their connections. When they called for a doctor, stat, I knew it had to be bad.

  They’d shoved Derrick out of the small space. He stood by my side, gripping my hand as we waited. When the nurses started hooking her up to portable monitors, my chest grew tight.

  The ICU doctor came over, his face grim. “Her vitals dropped below the threshold we like to see and they’re still dropping, which means she’s probably bleeding internally. We’re taking her back down to the OR.”

  Derrick made a pained noise and I squeezed his hand.

  We ran with the team who were hurriedly pushing Eve’s bed toward the bank of elevators. Derrick let go of my hand and leaned forward to kiss his mother just as the doors whooshed open. “I love you, Mama,” he said, his voice choked.

  They had her inside with the doors closing before I could do the same. I blinked back the tears. I could not fall apart now. Could not. “Where do we wait?” I asked, though it was hard to speak.

  One of the nurses who’d stayed in the ICU squeezed my arm. “Come with me. I’ll get you settled.”

  The entire surgical waiting area was empty except for Derrick and me and a young woman pacing the hallway just outside the room.

  We waited, and we waited, and we waited. Derrick called his aunts and uncle and then Gabriela, and I spoke with my girls. As we continued to wait, the young woman in the hallway went home. We made small talk and drank far too much coffee. Finally, after about four hours, a surgeon came out to talk with us.

  “We found a nick in a vein that had been hidden by other damage. It’s been repaired, but she needed more blood. We’re keeping her here in surgical recovery for the rest of the night, in case there’s anything else going on and we need to get her into the OR again. If her vitals stay stable by midmorning, we’ll move her back up to ICU.” The woman hesitated, then continued. “She’s undergone a lot of trauma in the last day and a half. The next few hours will be critical.”

  She didn’t have to explain what she meant, and it was obvious from the guarded expression on Derrick’s face he understood.

  I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep, and I wouldn’t leave. I sat sideways on one of the sofas, leaning my head against a blanket one of the nurses had given me. Derrick paced for a bit, then sat with his arms on his knees, his head in his hand. I didn’t know if he was praying, so I didn’t bot
her him until he looked up again.

  His eyes were bleak. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  I scooted over to him, took his big hands in mine, and squeezed. “It is bad, but your mother isn’t giving up without a fight. She’s in phenomenal shape for a woman twenty years younger than her. Plus, she’s stubborn as a mule. She’s not ready to go yet. She’s not.”

  His jaw worked, and he buried his head in his hands again.

  I wished I knew better how to comfort him, but I didn’t, so I just rubbed his back and kept him company as we waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  It’d been four days since Eve had been shot, four days she’d been unconscious, two days since her second surgery. Derrick was still on leave, and we’d booked a hotel room in Baltimore so we didn’t have to drive back and forth every day. We took turns sitting with Eve, and he had just gone back to the hotel to grab a few hours of sleep. It was around midnight, but we refused to leave her alone, and the nursing staff knew to let me in. Derrick and Chief Robinson had made sure of that.

  I talked to her constantly, both to keep myself awake and to hopefully get through to her. “You know the other cop, the Trooper whose car was rammed into a tree by the same guy who shot you? They sat her up today for the first time. She’s got two broken legs and she had to have been in a lot of pain, but you should’ve seen her face when she got to hold her little boy. Sheer joy. You’d like her, Eve. She’s stubborn, like you. You need to wake up so you can meet her.”

  Nothing.

  My throat grew tight. Every day—hell, every hour, every minute—that went by where she remained unconscious was bad. “I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I know I shouldn’t spring this on you while you’re unconscious, but . . . I love you. I’m not sure when it happened, exactly, but there it is. I love you. You have to wake up so I can tell you when you’ll remember.”

  Not the tiniest twitch, not a single indication that she’d heard me bare my heart.

  I fought back a sob, taking several deep, shuddering breaths. She needed me to stay cool and calm and collected. “I know I told you this before, but they got the guy who did this to you. Remember the day we went to lunch at the amphitheater, and you took down the idiot who grabbed the homeless man’s hat? It was him. Delia got to sit in on his interrogation yesterday, and she said he kept saying you got what you had coming to you. She and Officer Anderson were here last night, and I heard them talking about it.” I rubbed the heel of my hand against my heart and kept on talking. “Turns out his ex-girlfriend is a sheriff’s deputy who dumped him in public one night. He called her a bitch cop, and threats were tossed around. It was overheard by several homeless people who sleep under the bridges along the creek, including the person Isaiah knew. They didn’t want any trouble, but they didn’t want to just let it go, hence the emails. Anyway, apparently the guy tried to get back together with her, and she told him no and that if he didn’t leave her alone, she’d file a restraining order. She’s the officer he killed at the convenience store.”

  I stroked her leg, studied her face. Still nothing.

  “Why didn’t you wait for backup, Eve?” My throat grew tight. “You didn’t have on your vest. We all know you wouldn’t be careless without a good reason, and we need you to tell us why. Why did you get out of your car, knowing he’d already killed someone, knowing you weren’t wearing your vest? I need you to tell me why, damn it. Why would you do something so stupid?” I started shaking and couldn’t stop. “Please wake up, babe. I need you. I love you so much.”

  I dropped my head to the bed, my hand on her leg, struggling not to give in to the tears. I was exhausted, mentally and physically, and I wasn’t sure how much more I could take before I broke into a million tiny pieces.

  Several of the alarms went off, beeping and blinking. I shoved to my feet, fear clawing at me. “No,” I breathed. “No, not again.”

  A team of nurses rushed in and pushed me out of the way until I stood just outside the cubicle. When one of them moved, I could see that Eve’s eyes were open but unseeing, her face contorted and her body rigid. I sent up a fervent prayer and wrapped my arms around my waist. Please let her be waking up. Please, God. Don’t take her from me.

  “Lieutenant Poe, you need to stay still,” the head nurse said, the deep baritone of his voice calm. “The ventilator is breathing for you and you need to let it. Fighting it only makes it worse. We’re getting the doctor now, and as soon as she examines you and says it’s okay, we’ll remove the tube.”

  I couldn’t see her face anymore, but her legs moved under the blanket.

  The ICU doctor stepped into the cube and drew the curtain shut. With fear clogging my veins, I pulled out my cell and called Derrick, both my hands and my voice trembling. “She’s awake.”

  One of the nurses who’d been so kind to me came out from behind the curtain and offered me a smile. Her father was a cop, she’d told me days ago. Retired, but she knew how hard all of this was. “It’s a good sign,” she said, heading back to the monitoring station. “A really good sign. Give them a few minutes.”

  What else could I do? Derrick arrived a few minutes later and joined me as I paced back and forth, worry and impatience warring on his handsome face. It took longer than a few minutes, more like half an hour, and by that time, we’d nearly worn a hole in the floor.

  Finally, the curtain opened. Eve’s ventilator had been replaced by an oxygen tube. Her eyes were closed again, but her chest rose and fell in a much more natural rhythm. As much as I wanted to see Eve, tell I loved her and I was so sorry we’d argued, as soon as the nurse signaled it was okay for one of us to go in, I pushed Derrick forward. “Go see your mother.”

  When he came out, he was fighting tears. I led him to a quiet alcove steps away from Eve’s bed, opened my arms, and held him close, my lover’s child. He shook for a moment as he got himself back under control.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling back and dashing a hand under his eyes. “It’s relief. I was so worried I would lose her. I know she’s not out of the woods yet, but this . . . I needed this. I have my aunts and uncles and grandparents and now Gabriela, but Mama is always, always there for me. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “She loves you more than anyone in the world.”

  “I know,” he said, unable to stop a shudder as he wiped his eyes again. “She couldn’t talk, but she mouthed I love you. I told her I loved her too.” He straightened up and slipped his arm over my shoulder, kissing my cheek. “She’ll want to see you.”

  But when I went back, she was sleeping. I was worried at first, but she drifted in and out of incredibly short seconds of wakefulness for the next several hours, which the nurse said was fairly normal given her condition and her injuries. Derrick was still there, sleeping on the sofa in the waiting room, in case anything changed. I stayed in the room with her, lightly napping in the chair next to her bed. Around four in the morning, I jolted awake to a sound that was different than all the machine noises.

  “Ta . . . l.”

  Eve’s voice was a mere whisper but it brought me to my feet. I came close, carefully took her hand. “Babe.”

  “D.”

  Derrick. “He’s here. You want me to get him?”

  It was a struggle for her to speak. “Lo . . . ve.”

  My throat tightened at the worry in her eyes. “He knows you love him, babe. He knows. He said you told him when you woke up.” A tear leaked from the corner of her eye, and I gently squeezed her fingers. “Shh. Rest, Eve. We’ll be here.”

  Her eyes fluttered closed, and once again she succumbed to sleep.

  I stepped out for a minute, stopped in the waiting room to find Derrick awake and texting. “You okay, honey?”

  He stretched. “Yeah. I’m used to combat naps so those few hours were all I needed.”

  I came and sat beside him. He leaned back against the sofa and drew me with him, his arm over my shoulder. We both
put our feet up on the coffee table. “How’re you holding up, Tal?”

  His use of my shortened name, the one Eve always used, warmed me. I’d only known him for a short while, but he had already claimed a piece of my heart. “Better. She woke again. Wanted me to make sure you knew she loves you.” I looked up at him, once again struck by how much he resembled Eve. Masculine to her feminine, but the family resemblance couldn’t be denied.

  His phone dinged and he thumbed over the message, making one of those male grunts that could mean anything from oh, shit, to it’s about time. “My CO approved my extended emergency leave. I have to update him daily, but right now I’m good to stay. Thank God.”

  I knew he’d been worried about that, and I was relieved for him. “What about Gabriela?”

  “She’s taking some vacation time and she’ll stay here with me. She had a lot saved up.” He squeezed my shoulder with his hand. “You should go back to the hotel and get some sleep. You’re exhausted, and you won’t do anyone any good if you get sick.”

  I couldn’t hide my yawn. “You’ll go sit with her? I don’t want her alone if she wakes up again.” I eyed the sofa. “I’ll just rest here.”

  He snorted. “Does Mama know how stubborn you are?”

  I smiled the first real smile I’d had in days, though it was shaky. “She does.”

  He snorted again and got up, handing me the pillow and blanket he’d used. “Glad to hear it. Someone needs to give her grief when I’m away.”

  He kissed my temple and left the room, and I drifted off to sleep.

  He woke me a few hours later. “She’s asking for you, Tal.”

  I bolted upright and stood, but I got up too fast and my head spun. “Whoa.”

  “Easy there,” he said, steadying me. “When was the last time you ate anything?”

  I thought about it. “Breakfast? Maybe? What day is it?”

  He sighed. “Go see Mama, and I’ll get you some food.”

  I went, but told him not to bother with food because I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat a single bite. Eve’s eyes were closed and I was afraid she’d fallen back asleep, but when I took her hand, they fluttered open. “Ta . . . l.”