HAVEN BLACK - complete

ABANDONMENT

Chapter 22 – ABANDONMENT

BANG – BANG – BANG –!

"What!" I groaned, half asleep. "Why are you knocking on my door for?" I glanced at the time on my phone's screen. "At four in the morning on the first day of spring break!"

It was dark in my room. The early morning sun was yet to pierce through the gaps in the curtains and the birds hadn't started cawing yet. Steady rain lapped at the window. The knocking suddenly stopped.

"You need to get up and dressed, now Jacob!" the shift nurse urged loudly opening my bedroom door ajar, allowing the light from the hallway to beam into the room. "It's your mom. She's taken a turn for the worst, and I've called an ambulance which should be here any minute now. Quickly get dressed. We'll follow the ambulance to the hospital."

"Is she going to be, alright?" I asked in a panic, now feeling suddenly wide awake.

"I'm afraid..." the shift nurse trailed off and her silhouetted head shook slowly. "No, I don't know, just get ready as fast as you can."

Halfway through changing out of my sleepwear and into clothes, the ambulance arrived, it's flashing lights beamed through the thin curtains, lighting up my room and casting moving shadows. Pulling my shirt over my head just as the paramedics reached my mom's room, I burst through my bedroom door and ran across the blindingly lit hall to where the ambulance staff had gathered. The paramedics had put my mom, who appeared unconscious, on a stretcher and as one medic strapped her to the stretcher frame, the other placed a mask over her face and held up an IV bag. They wheeled the stretcher quickly down the stairs, through the lounge and outside. I desperately trailed behind them trying to get a closer look.

"MOM! MOM!" I kept shouting out, but she did not response. The paramedics were the only ones to hear my cries but I couldn't absorb what they were saying to me – my head felt like it was in a thick cloud of fog.

All I could do was to stare in a muddled disbelief as I now stood in the rain, and while the paramedics wheeled my helpless mom away and into the back of the ambulance, I remained numb, frozen from a refusal to accept that what was happening in front of me was truly my reality.

"Jump in the car, Jacob," the nurse said hurriedly as she stepped in front of me blocking my view of the closing ambulance doors. "We'll meet your mom at the hospital. Everything will be okay."

I brushed off the nurse's shallow promise and dazedly entered her little white hatchback.

We followed the flashing lights of the ambulance through the wet and darkened morning, and about twenty nerve-racking minutes later, we had finally arrived at the hospital and parked behind the wet ambulance under the covered lobby.

Emergency staff rushed out to the ambulance and swiftly pulled the wheeled stretcher out of the back, onto the ground and through the large glass entrance doors with my mom firmly strapped in. I ran closely behind following them into the lobby where the medical staff wheeled the stretcher through a pair of thick swing doors, but before I made it through these doors, one of the staff glanced back with their hands out stretched toward me. "Sorry son, you can't come through here, but trust me, we'll do everything we can for your mom. Please wait here." The doors shut and the locked with a clunk. Staring hopelessly through the small square windows of the swing doors the medical staff disappeared down the brightly let hallway and around a corner.

"Jacob," the shift nurse cautiously said as I felt her hand grasp my trembling shoulder from behind. "Your mom's in good hands now – I promise they'll do everything medically possible to help her."

"SHE'S TERMINALLY ILL!" I snapped out angrily. "AND SHE'S GOING TO DIE!"

The nurse's hand abruptly released off my shoulder and I could hear her feet shuffling away from me.