The Moment Before

Chapter Twenty-Four

TWENTY-FOUR

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, check out my new series, THE EMPRESS CHRONICLES at http://diversionbooks.com/ebooks/empress-chronicles

St. Vincent’s Medical Center is the hospital where Sabine and I were born. It’s also the hospital where Sabine’s body was hauled for organ harvest after the accident. Now, it’s where Dad is hooked up to monitors behind a curtained slice of hospital room. Not only was he in a car accident, but apparently suffered a heart attack as well.

            Connor had dropped me off in front of the hospital, his face stiff with fear, but trying to look hopeful. “This is the best heart place on the West Coast,” he said. “Your dad will be fine.”

            Inside my own heart was squeezed, having its own attack. My father, the minor league ball player. The Nike executive. The strongest man I knew. How could his body fail him? Who would dare to run into him after all he’s been through? “Thanks,” I said, shaking, and trying so hard not to explode into a zillion fragments. “I’ll call you. OK?”

            Connor moved in to hug me, but I couldn’t do it. It was like my entire body had been flattened—a freezer bag before you seal it up. I had nothing. And what I did have, I needed to fold and tuck somewhere safe. Instead of hugging Connor back, I hugged myself as I scrambled out the truck and into the well-lit building of miracles.

           

Mom is in the waiting room area making calls, and she opens her free arm, guiding me in an awkward embrace. “I’ll call you Ma, soon as I know anything.”

            She gets off the phone and has me sit down next to her on the hard foam seat cushions in the glassed-in visitor’s lounge. Soothing aqua paint, a flat panel TV, and an intercom announcing hospital coded alerts every so often keeps us company while she unfolds the sequence of events that led to now.

            A buzz of words I half understand. Hypertension, ventricular arrhythmia, myocardial infarction. And this. He’d been drinking. The car accident, running a light in his Fusion, it was his fault. He slammed into another car and thank God nobody else was hurt. “Thank God,” Mom says, and as though conjuring her inner Nona, she makes the sign of the cross.

            “He’s pretty drugged up now, Brady. But I know he’d love to see you. Can you handle it? Seeing him on a gurney all hooked up to monitors?”

            I’m scared. Really freaked, but I nod, biting down hard on my lip. I don’t tell Mom, but the image in my head is the one in the paper. Sabine under a tarp.

            Mom puts her arm around my shoulder and together we walk down the shiny hall toward a pair of swinging doors. Cardiac Care Unit reads the marquee above them.  There’s a poster-sized sign to the right: TELEMETRY. ABSOLUTELY NO CELL PHONE USE. I turn mine off, and so does Mom, and the doors magically part, like we’re in some James Bond world.

            Inside the CCU everything revolves around the nurse’s station, which is like the hole of a doughnut. The unit is arranged in a circle, with the patients spoked out in their little critical care cubicles. Dad’s behind a glass wall and two sets of curtains, and I can hear him snoring as we walk in. “That’s good, right? That he’s asleep?”

            Mom pushes me in front of her because it’s too narrow for us to walk in side-by-side.

            What I see before I see Dad are all the monitors and their jaggedy lines. It’s like “the wave” in a stadium where people rise and fall as a group. Dad’s heart. There’s beeping that sounds like something’s wrong, but no nurses are rushing in, so it’s probably just part of the normal state of affairs.

            It’s dark in this micro-room, and Dad’s eyes are closed. Green, black, red and yellow wires emerge from Dad’s hospital gown. On his index finger there’s a little clip and another wire tethering him to one of the bleeping monitors. I can see some of Dad’s chest in the split his gown makes, and all his hair has been shaved off. Small suction cups hold the wires in place. Dad’s covered in suction cups. I touch his hand, the one with the clip, and he quivers.

            Mom whispers, “The doctors want him to rest as much as possible. Steady rhythm, they keep saying is the goal.”

            I jerk my hand away, thinking, I’ve probably already screwed up. Dad’s five-o’clock shadow covers the bottom half of his face. He’s a twice-a-day shave guy if the occasion calls for it. Now, he looks a little like a bum. “I love you,” I whisper. “I love you so much.”

           

Dad stays asleep the whole time we’re there, and at some point in the middle of the night, Mom suggests we go home, get some shut-eye, and then return the next day.

            Shut-eye. I can’t imagine it. But I do as she says, and we creep home like zombies. Neither of us can talk. All we can do is look straight ahead and go forward.

            Mom goes into her bedroom and clicks closed the door. I go to Sabine’s room and lie on top of her rose and pink quilt next to the American Girl cheerleader doll with the grassy-green pom-poms wedged into its tiny plastic hands. It still smells perfumy in here, after all these months, but now the perfume is tinged with something else. A rotten, decomposing scent, like flower stems soaked in water too long.

            I open and close my fists, like I’m squeezing invisible lemons. Sabine, what the hell? You’re supposed to be protecting us.

            Nothing.

            Maybe what Nona says is true about purgatory and praying for limboed souls, lest they remain forever in a state of sin. I wonder if Sabine would have done anything differently had she known her fate. Would she have chosen Connor over Nick for real? Would she have tried less hard to be first and best in everything she did? So now, she’s had to outsource her amends to her living relations. We, the Wilsons and Panapentos, have to kneel before the electric candle version of her, the image of a smiling, sweet Sabine. The image Nona and Nono want to take to their own graves.

            I’m furious with her. She doesn’t deserve heaven. Eternal damnation is too good for Sabine. Her father lies in a hospital bed fighting for his life because of her. Connor got kicked out of school because of her. Her beloved cheering squad fell apart after she died. Greenmeadow is now known as “that tragic school.”

How did you turn into such a liar, Sabine?

            Somehow, amid the questions and the anger and the sorrow, I fall asleep. A deep, hard, dreamless sleep. And when I wake up in the morning, sun blasting through Sabine’s bedroom window, the first thing I notice is my hands are still covered in charcoal.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, check out the entire book at http://diversionbooks.com/ebooks/moment as well as my new book THE EMPRESS CHRONICLES: http://diversionbooks.com/ebooks/empress-chronicles