Everything You Are: A Novel

by Kerry Anne King

  “I’m family. Of the girl, Allie. Please.”

  His voice softens, but he moves to block the top of the stairs. “You’ll help her best right now by letting the medical team work. Please go back down.”

  “But can you tell me anything? Anything at all. Please.” She presses her palms together like a prayer.

  “They’re alive, that’s all I know and all I can tell you. Now, please.”

  “What hospital will they take her to? At least tell me that.”

  The cop’s face registers sympathy. He hesitates a moment. “I’ll ask if you wait right here.”

  “Promise. Not budging.” She grips the railing with both hands to signal her intent, and he turns and walks to the open door. She can’t hear what’s said, no matter how she strains her ears, and it seems an eternity before he returns.

  “Swedish. Ballard Campus.”

  “Bless you.” Phee retreats but doesn’t rejoin the others. The girl, she sees, has vanished, but her place has been taken by a middle-aged woman who is filming the open doorway and the cop outside it with her phone.

  Phee calls Braden back. “Alive,” she says.

  “What happened? What did they . . .” She hears the words stick in his throat, knows he’s envisioning blood and ropes, guns and pills, the same images that are filling her own brain with graphic intensity.

  “They wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Is she . . . will she be okay?”

  “They’ll be taking her to Swedish. What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ll cancel the Uber. Come get me.”

  “On my way. She’s in good hands, Braden.”

  He’s waiting in the driveway, shaking so badly he can’t get the door open. Phee leans over and opens it from the inside. As soon as he’s in, she throws her arms around him, and he grabs on to her as if she’s a life preserver, his cheek pressed against her hair. He begins to weep, and Phee feels her own grief and guilt and fear cresting along with his.

  He needs her, though, and she forces herself to breathe. A long inhale, a controlled exhale. Slow and easy. Gradually, his trembling eases, his breathing slows and steadies to match hers.

  “Thank you,” he sighs, releasing her, blotting at his eyes.

  Phee blinks hard to clear her vision, then puts the car in reverse. They are silent all the way to the hospital.

  “What if . . . ,” he begins as she pulls into the parking lot.

  “Shhh,” she answers. “She’ll be here. Don’t even think it.”

  She reaches for his hand, and his fingers clamp around hers so hard it hurts.

  ER reception is small and crowded. Two women sit in chairs side by side. A man talks to the receptionist, a bloody towel wrapped around his arm. A set of official-looking double doors are posted with a sign: Staff Only. Another door is marked Family Room.

  When the locked doors open and a woman in scrubs helps the guy with the bleeding arm into a wheelchair and then back into the ER, Phee holds Braden back, feeling his muscles tense as if he’s going to make a break for it.

  “How can I help you?” the woman behind the desk finally asks, her eyes weary but kind.

  “We’re looking for our daughter,” Phee says, low and steady. “We understand an ambulance may have brought her in.”

  “Name?”

  “Allie Healey.”

  The woman frowns, taps a few keys.

  Braden fidgets while the woman consults her computer. Phee squeezes his hand, her own heart accelerating in an agony of impatience.

  “Oh, here we are. You can wait in the family room. I’ll buzz you in.”

  “How is she?” Braden asks. “Can you tell me anything?”

  “Please wait in the family room. A doctor will be in to talk to you shortly.”

  A buzzer sounds, and Phee opens the door and pulls Braden through behind her. The family room is mercifully empty, with the exception of a young woman trying to soothe a crying baby. There are comfortable chairs, magazines, coffee, and Styrofoam cups.

  “God, Phee. I can’t.”

  “She’s here, they’re taking care of her,” Phee says. “Try to believe in the best.”

  If only she could follow her own advice.

  Braden paces, staring at the door on the other side of the room, as if willing it to open. Phee sits in a chair, focuses on her hands in her lap, her feet on the floor.

  Was the receptionist trying to keep something to herself or just being professional? If Allie was okay, maybe she’d have said something. Maybe waiting in the family room like this means the worst has happened.

  Braden comes to sit beside her. He’s barely holding it together, she can tell.

  “Hey,” she says, a hand on his forearm. “Hey. Stay with me.”

  “Panic attack,” he says through stiff lips. “I don’t have time for this shit. I need to be here for her.”

  “Breathe, Braden. Slow it down.”

  She puts a hand on his chest and wills calm into him. Little by little, his breathing eases.

  “What if she dies, Phee? I don’t think I can—”

  “She’s not going to die.”

  Please make it true, she thinks. Please.

  The door opens, revealing a woman in surgical scrubs, blonde hair escaping from a clip that tries to hold it back. Both of them get to their feet, linked together by their hands and a single indrawn breath.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Healey?”

  Braden nods. Clears his throat but doesn’t speak.

  “I’m Dr. Javitz.”

  “How is Allie?”

  “She overdosed, Mr. Healey. She’s responded to the naloxone—that’s something that counteracts an opiate overdose, so that’s encouraging. We’ve pumped her stomach and she’s breathing on her own. We’re running a tox screen, but it would be helpful to know what all she took.”

  “I—I have no idea. She’s going to be okay, right? Please tell me the truth.”

  “Do you have any prescriptions she might have taken?”

  “None. I . . . had some Librium, but it was gone. My wife might have had something . . .”

  The doctor looks at Phee.

  “No, no, my wife’s dead.”

  “Your daughter has been drinking, in addition to the pills. She’s got a blood alcohol of 1.2.”

  “No alcohol in the house as far as I know.”

  “The police did recover prescription bottles from the motel room. They belonged to the boy’s father, apparently. Oxycodone and Xanax.”

  “God,” Braden says, and Phee isn’t sure if it’s a prayer or an epithet or both combined.

  The doctor’s expression shifts to sympathy again. “I’m sure this is very hard to hear, Mr. Healey. There were two small bowls on the table. His was empty. Your daughter’s still contained pills, so she didn’t swallow all of hers.”

  Phee should have said something. Should have told Braden about what really happened in the graveyard. The signs were all there. The girl lying on the grave in the rain, the note she’d written. God, she’s screwed this whole thing up so badly.

  “We’ve had to put the boy on a ventilator, but I think your daughter will pull through without any extraordinary measures. Lucky it wasn’t hydrocodone—the acetaminophen in that is so hard on livers.”

  “Can I see her?” Braden asks in a strangled voice.

  “Yes, of course. If she remains stable over the next few hours, as I think she will, we’ll be moving her up to the general unit. Come with me.”

  Allie looks very small and young lying on the stretcher in a room filled with machines and medical equipment. Her eyes are closed; her mouth gapes just a little. An IV runs into one arm. A tube inserted into one nostril connects to a suction bottle on the wall. Oxygen hisses through nasal prongs. Leads on her chest connect to a machine. A steady beeping indicates her heart rate. The IV machine clicks and whirs as it pumps fluids into her body.

  Braden bends over her, brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes, takes her hand in both of his.
Her eyes flicker open and try to focus.

  “You’re here,” she whispers.

  “I’m here.”

  “Ethan?” she whispers.

  “Alive.”

  She sighs, and her eyes drift closed again. Slow tears trickle from the corners of her eyes, streaking her temples, dampening her hair.

  “It’s all going to be okay, little bird,” Braden says. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Phee feels she is one person too many in the room, a voyeur. Dashing the tears off her cheeks, she retreats, wordless, leaving the two of them alone together.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  BRADEN

  Braden feels Phee’s absence the minute she leaves the room. She reminds him, in some ways, of his sister, Jo. Strong. Somebody he can lean on. Lilian was never that. She could be strong enough for strangers—she had to be as a nurse—but when it came to her own family, she was brittle, unable to bend. Even with the kids, it was all rules and schedules, everything laid out, neat and orderly and controlled. Anything that fell outside of the lines she drew sent her into meltdown.

  Phee will be back, Braden tells himself, shifting all of his attention to Allie.

  “Lucky,” the doctor said, and that word is a raft to cling to in a surging sea of shock and fear.

  Lucky.

  Not a word he has connected with himself in years, but Allie is still alive, and that’s the luckiest thing in the world.

  Memory fragments surface and sink, none of them connected by a thread of logic or order or time.

  Allie, barely more than a toddler, tucked between his legs and the cello, absorbing the music.

  Allie, singing to herself when he tucked her in at night. “Sing the lullaby with me, Daddy.”

  Her tiny, perfect face on the day she was born, and how he held her and marveled at the miracle of her existence, wondered who she would turn out to be.

  An alarm goes off and a nurse bustles in, checks the IV, and adjusts something. “Nothing to worry about,” she tells him, but the sound sends his memory down another track.

  Waking in a hospital bed under a pile of blankets, his hands swathed in bandages, an IV dripping warmed fluids into his arm.

  His sister’s face, broken by grief.

  He hears music, loud and insistent, the tones so clear and perfect he looks around for the cello and the player, but of course it’s all in his head.

  Hold it together, Braden, this is no time to lose your shit.

  The nurses move in and out, checking vitals, reassuring him that Allie is fine, she’ll make a full recovery.

  Phee pops back in, squeezes his shoulder, tells him she’ll be back in the morning and all he has to do is call if he needs her before then.

  Every time he needs to step away from Allie, even for a minute—to go to the bathroom, or when the nurses come in to do procedures—it edges him toward panic, and when he’s asked to return to the waiting room while they transfer her to a room upstairs, it’s agony.

  Lucky, he reminds himself.

  Lucky she’d taken oxycodone rather than hydrocodone and been spared the liver damage. Lucky she didn’t take all the pills. Lucky she didn’t vomit and aspirate. Lucky they found her when they did.

  The nurse who comes to tell him he can go into Allie’s room now is very kind. “She’s doing so well. Are you sure you don’t want to go home and sleep?”

  “I can’t leave her,” he protests. “Not now, not yet.”

  And the woman smiles and shows him into the new room. It’s softer, not so clinical. Allie is still connected to monitors, but the tube has been removed from her nose and the oxygen discontinued. Her sleep looks more natural. There’s a hint of color in her cheeks.

  Braden pulls a chair to the bedside and wraps his hand around hers, wishing for full sensation but grateful for what he has. He needs the physical link between them to reassure himself that she’s here, alive, not in a coffin, not dead in a tawdry motel room.

  His hand, her hand, and then her words, echoing in his head.

  There’s nothing wrong with your hands.

  It’s not the first time he’s heard these words, though he’s worked hard to submerge them under gallons of alcohol.

  “What if there’s nothing wrong with your hands?”

  The psychologist is short, thin, with a ratlike nose and wire-framed glasses, a know-it-all who dares to suggest the loss of sensation—paresthesia, he calls it, drawing out all of the syllables—is in Braden’s head.

  Braden laughs at the absurdity of the question. “I have no sensation in my fingers. Pretty sure that’s not normal.”

  “Your medical reports say your hands are fine now. Fully recovered.”

  “The docs are welcome to borrow my hands and see for themselves. How do they know what I feel?”

  “Can we talk about what happened?”

  “I don’t remember what happened.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Only what I’ve been told.”

  The psychologist tents his fingers. “Don’t you want to remember?”

  “Of course!” He says it vehemently, knows it’s a lie. Dread coils in his gut whenever he dares to stare into the abyss of what he’s forgotten.

  “What if remembering could heal your hands?”

  “Memories can heal frostbite now?” A deflection. A desperate one, but the psychologist is not to be deterred.

  “There is a condition called conversion disorder, a psychological block that affects the body. It’s caused by trauma and protects the sufferer from having to face a decision or action that is too horrific or terrifying for their consciousness to handle.”

  “The only thing I’m suffering from is nerve damage brought on by frostbite.”

  “Possible.”

  Braden bolts up out of his chair. Shouts: “I don’t believe this. I came here so you could help me deal with this loss. And now you’re trying to tell me it’s not a loss at all. I don’t need your psycho mumbo-jumbo quackery. Excuse me, but I’m out of here.”

  Out of the office, into a bar. Drowning the very possibility in an alcoholic haze.

  Braden drifts in and out of memories and sleep, sometimes waking sharply with no idea where he is or what he is doing here, whether he’s been remembering or dreaming. The nurses move in and out on quiet feet. Sometimes they work around him. Sometimes they rouse Allie to check her level of consciousness, to care for her personal needs, shooing him out to pace in the hallway. Always, when he returns, he takes the chair beside her bed and claims her hand again while the slow clock ticks away the hours of the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  PHEE

  Phee also watches the clock, restless in her own bed, clear now on what she needs to do. Long before dawn, she gets up, showers, takes Celestine out for a walk.

  Time crawls as she waits for a reasonable hour to start making phone calls. Nine o’clock, her mother always taught her. Phee lasts until seven. If she wakes people, so be it. Her first call is to Braden to check on Allie. Then to Oscar. Her last is to Braden’s sister.

  “Jo. It’s Phee.”

  “Well, aren’t you the early riser.”

  “Sorry if I woke you.”

  Scoffing laughter. “I get up at four. Have for years and can’t break the habit. I haven’t talked to Braden yet, so—”

  “Something’s happened, Jo. It’s Allie.”

  The silence on the other end is deep and shocked, and Phee rushes ahead. “She’s alive, she’ll be fine, but—”

  “You shouldn’t do that to a woman. Near gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t want you to hang up.”

  “My God. What happened?”

  Phee tries to soften news that can’t be softened. “She took a bunch of pills. She was with a boy.”

  “Braden must be wrecked. Where is he? Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s at the hospital with her.”

  “And you’re calling because?”

  �
�Because I want to help. Allie is a casualty of what’s going on with Braden. If we help him, we help her.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want to bring them both out to the place where your husband died.”

  Silence. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “He needs to remember what happened.”

  “And you think that’s going to help him? Excuse me, but none of us wants to remember that night.”

  “If you don’t remember it, you can’t grieve it. Trust a former alcoholic on that one. Did he always drink?”

  “No,” Jo says. Phee can almost hear the wheels spinning in the other woman’s brain. “Now that you mention it, he never did. He hated the way our father got when he was drinking.”

  “Abusive?”

  “I don’t know that I’d say that. Belligerent. Not physically, just—he would say things. He was hard on Braden at the best of times, worse when he was drunk. You know, add alcohol for instant asshole.”

  “Why was Braden out there in the first place? Do you know?”

  “He and Lilian had some kind of fight. He said she was making him choose, either her and the kids or the cello. He’d come away to the hunting cabin to think about what he was going to do. Had the cello with him, of course. I can’t imagine that sat well with her. He was obsessed with music, I’ll grant that. Not an easy man to be married to, but she should have known that before she said yes. It’s not like he ever tried to hide it.”

  Phee closes her eyes. An impossible choice for a musician like Braden. It wasn’t like music was a thing he did, more of a thing he was.

  “And your husband?” She gentles her voice to soften the bluntness of her question. “What was he doing out there?”

  “Nobody knows,” Jo says. “I mean, he spent lots of time at the cabin, but it wasn’t hunting season. The ice was too rotten for ice fishing. He packed a cooler, mostly with beer, and said, ‘I’m taking that poor bastard some liquid encouragement.’ Only it’s not like he and Braden were ever close, you know? And like I said, Braden didn’t drink.”

  “And your husband?”

  “Functional alcoholic. That’s what they call it, right? Never missed a day of work. Good with our son. But he drank a lot in the evenings. Wasn’t the nicest drunk, either. Not so mean as my dad, but he could be a dick. Didn’t think my brother needed that, so I told Mitch to stay home, that Braden had gone out there to be alone. He was acting weird, anyway. Twitchy. Unsettled. Wouldn’t listen, manlike. ‘Later, Jo.’ That’s what he said when he got in his truck to drive off. The last words I had from him.”