Chapter Twenty-Eight
“MAX, YOU need to get here. Something’s really fucking wrong.”
Max threw Jed’s truck into a space. In his dubious peripheral vision, he saw Dan’s hulking frame pacing outside the hospital’s main entrance, and his heart dropped. He’d driven to the city like a man possessed, but the sickening sensation in his stomach told him he was already too late.
He dashed across the parking lot. “Dan? What happened?”
Dan shook his head, his face drawn. “I don’t know. He puked a couple of times last night, but I didn’t think anything of it. I passed out in the chair, and when I woke up….” He shook his head. “Man, he didn’t even know I was there.”
“But he was fine when I left him.” Max pushed through the revolving hospital doors and made for the stairs. “Fine” was a relative term. Jed had been grouchy, but he hadn’t seemed any sicker than usual.
Dan caught Max’s arm. “Max, he’s not on the ward. They moved him to ICU.”
Max stopped dead in the corridor. “ICU? What the fuck for?”
Dan pulled him toward the elevator, pressed the call button and yanked him inside. “They said something about an infection, but they weren’t sure. I couldn’t get any sense out of anyone, and Jed was rambling some shit about driving in the rain.”
Max swallowed hard. Driving in the rain. How did he know?
The elevator shuddered as it heaved its way up the hospital building to the fifth floor. Max didn’t go in elevators much. Flo hated them. Shit. Flo. In his haste to get to Jed, or perhaps knowing she’d object to him driving Jed’s truck, he’d left her at the cabin. He needed to call Kim to go fetch her, or Carla, maybe. Maybe Dan had already called Carla.
“Max?”
“Huh?”
Dan tugged him out of the elevator and leaned him against the wall. “Still with me?”
Max willed his delinquent brain to get a grip. He felt nervous without Flo, but he couldn’t drop now, dammit. Jed needed him. “I’m fine. Where is he?”
“Down the hall, but they won’t let us into the room yet. Max, listen to me. Jed’s in trouble, okay? They had to sedate him and put a tube in his throat. They don’t know when he’ll wake up from that.”
“Just tell me where he is.”
Dan relented. A blur of blank corridors and faceless nurses passed Max by, and a few moments later he found himself staring at the stuff of his worst nightmares.
Max clamped his hand over his mouth, sure he was still at home asleep—asleep and alone. He took an uncertain inventory of the monitors stacked up around the bed. Some he recognized from his own time in an ICU on the other side of the world, but others he’d never seen before. His eyes fell on the tube forcing air into Jed’s lungs.
Life support. Fuck. He was talking to me a few hours ago. How did this happen so fast?
Dr. Howarth touched his arm. “You can come in, Max. It’s okay.”
Max drifted forward, and the closer he got the less prominent the plethora of equipment became, and then all he could see was Jed lying lifeless and unmoving in the bed.
“Talk to him,” Dr. Howarth urged. “And you can touch him. It’s okay. He’s sedated, but there’s every chance he can hear you.”
Max had heard of that before, and he knew it was true. He’d spent three days in a coma after his parents were killed, but he’d woken up knowing for sure that Kim was there with him.
He took Jed’s hand and touched his face. Jed’s skin blazed, and his cheeks were stained pink with an unnatural flush. “Why’s he so hot?”
“Fever. They’re trying to bring it down.” Dr. Howarth pushed a hard plastic chair close to the bed. “Sit.”
Max sat. “They?”
“This isn’t my department. The ICU team is caring for Jed right now. Dr. Greene will be by in a moment.”
“Is he nice?”
Dr. Howarth’s lips twitched, though Max could see he was stressed. “He’s chief of the ICU, the best we have. Max, do you understand what’s happening?”
“Dan said he had an infection.”
“We believe so, yes. Even without his blood work back, he’s deteriorated too fast for it to be anything else.”
“Where did he get it?”
“I’m not sure. The endoscopy or the IVs are the most likely culprits, but we can’t say for sure. We can’t even be sure how long he’s had it. The early symptoms of infection are very similar to the symptoms we expected from Jed’s underlying condition. We might have missed something.”
The door opened before Max could respond. Another doctor, Dr. Greene, entered the room and took his place at the other side of the bed. He introduced himself, looked Jed over, and made some notes, but he didn’t have much more to add. “We’ll know more tomorrow,” he promised. “For now, we need to concentrate on getting him through the next twenty-four hours.”
Max stared at the tube jammed into Jed’s throat. He’d hate that. Even the teeny-tiny nasal oxygen bugged the hell out of him. “Will he wake up?”
“No. Not for a while, at least. He’s in a coma right now.”
And he might not wake up at all.
Dr. Greene didn’t say it, but Max heard it all the same.
“Your sister is outside. She said you have epilepsy. Is there anything you need? Medication you didn’t bring with you? You can’t have your alert dog in the ICU, but we want to help you in any way we can.”
Max thought as hard as Jed’s limp hand in his would allow. He had some meds at Carla’s place, but he needed someone to go back to the cabin to fetch Flo and feed the chickens. “Who else is here?”
Dr. Howarth walked to the door and peered through the tiny window. “Your sister and Ms. Valesco’s mom and brother.”
“Can Anna come in? I need to talk to my sister.”
Anna slipped through the door a few minutes later. Her eyes filled with tears as she took in Jed’s prone form. She touched his scarred shoulder with shaking hands, and Max realized that she’d probably never seen it before… maybe hadn’t known it existed. “Oh, sweetie, you’re not well at all, are you?”
There was no response, but Anna didn’t seem to expect one. “Go on, honey,” she said to Max. “Carla has gone to the cabin to set up the feeders for the chickens, and Jed will be okay with me for as long as you need.”
Max felt numb as he set Jed’s hand back on the bed and left the claustrophobic room. He spotted Kim and Dan sitting close together in a corner of a secluded waiting area.
Kim scrambled to meet him. “Oh, God, Max. What happened? I thought he was getting better—”
“I need you to go to the cabin and take Flo home.”
“Carla already went. She’ll set up the timed feeder for the chickens and take Flo and the kids to Hector.”
Max closed his eyes to the image of gentle Hector Valesco trying to manage Tess. “You should go home. They said he won’t get better for a few days. There’s nothing you can do here.”
He didn’t have to look to see the hurt in her eyes. Kim had come to love Jed, and despite her faults, she’d always been there for Max. “I want to stay with you,”
“No.” Max took her hands from him. “I need you to fetch the spare medication I have at your house. They can give me some here, but it will be better if I have my own.”
Kim left, and Max breathed a halfhearted sigh of relief. He felt bad for manipulating her and sending her on a phantom errand, but she didn’t like hospitals. It was half the reason she’d kept Tess at home the whole time Jed had been sick.
Dan stood and clapped him on the back. “Is Jed awake?”
Max shook his head, remembering with a start that the doctors probably hadn’t told Dan anything at all. “No. He’s in a coma.”
THE REST of the day passed without event. Nurses came and went every few minutes, and Dr. Greene every half hour or so. Nothing changed. No one said Jed was getting any worse, but they didn’t say he was getting better either.
Max listened to medical jargon shoot back and forth as he kept vigil over Jed. The monitors around him beeped and hissed, but Max paid them no heed. Instead, he took stock with his fingertips, tracing the strange pale purple blotches that appeared on Jed’s overheated bare skin and losing count of the racing pulse in his wrist.
Jed’s heart was beating too fast. The stampeding tattoo reminded Max of Flo when she was a pup. She used to sleep on his chest like a newborn baby, and all he could do was worry that her tiny heart would beat right out of her body.
“Have you eaten today?”
Max glanced at Carla. From time to time, the ICU staff relaxed the rules and let someone else in. It was strange watching the Valescos keep watch over Jed, bittersweet in the worst possible way. They loved Jed like he was their own, and their pain at seeing him so sick tore at Max’s already aching heart.
“Max.”
“Hmm?”
“You should eat. He’ll be pissed if you make yourself sick.”
If only. Max longed for Jed to wake up and grumble at him for using every pan in the kitchen to cook pasta. It wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, but Carla was right. He needed to eat, and he needed to sleep. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t be long before he was no good to anyone. “Can you get me something?”
“Kim already did. She’s right outside.”
Max sighed. He should’ve known Kim wouldn’t stay away for long. He left Jed in Carla’s capable hands and made his way to the waiting area. There he found not only Kim, but Nick too.
Max stopped in his tracks. “What’s he doing here?”
Nick stood. “They let me out for a couple of days to be with Jed.”
Max glared, taking in the healthy, nourished glow of Nick’s skin. Without the weathered lines of alcohol abuse, he seemed well rested and at ease.
Lucky him. “Be with him?”
Nick exchanged a glance with Kim. “He’s my brother, Max. I want to see him.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait. Carla is with him.” Max’s gaze fell on a foil-wrapped package balanced on top of Kim’s purse. “Is that for me?”
Kim passed it over without comment. Max unwrapped the sandwich and dropped into yet another hard plastic chair. It was the first thing he’d eaten in twenty-four hours, and it tasted like sawdust, but he forced it down. He wondered if this was how Jed felt all the time, though Dr. Howarth had tried to tell him there was nothing he could’ve done to feed Jed better.
Feed him. Jed said that made him sound like one of the damn chickens. Max let out a sudden hysterical chuckle.
“Something funny?”
“Nope.” Max met Nick’s eyes and tossed the balled-up foil over his head. It missed the trash can. Max picked it up on his way out and glanced over his shoulder. “Are you coming or not?”
MAX STOOD guard by the window while Nick shuffled to Jed’s bed. Nick touched Jed’s heated skin. He gasped and withdrew his hand like he’d been burned. Perhaps he had. Even from behind, Max could tell he was crying.
“I’ve seen him like this before….” Nick sucked in a shaky breath. “After surgery in Boston, he was out of it for days, but he was different then. I knew he was going to wake up and give me a hard time without even opening his mouth. Now… fuck. Now it’s like he’s already gone.”
Max suddenly hated Nick more than he ever had. Hated him for turning his sister into a bored housewife, for teaching his kids to never trust a man, and worst of all, for writing Jed off when he was clinging to life with both hands.
He lunged forward and shoved Nick away from the bed. “You don’t need to be here if you think he’s already dead.”
Nick stumbled. Max grabbed Jed’s hand, but instead of a blazing palm, he found unyielding, stone-like flesh. Jed’s hand was like ice. Max’s heart dropped through the floor. He touched Jed’s arms, his chest and face, but found the same. The fever was gone. Jed’s heated flush had paled to a grayish white, and he was cold… cold like death.
“Oh, God, he’s freezing.”
A nurse ghosted to Max’s side like a spirit. “Jed’s blood pressure has dropped very low. Dr. Greene is on his way.”
“What does that mean?” Nick’s voice cut through the terrifying panic beginning to take hold of Max.
Max rounded on him. “Get out. Get the fuck out. He wouldn’t want you here.”
“I’m his brother.”
“No, you’re not!” Max shouted. “You’re not anyone’s anything. If you were, this would never have happened to him.”
Color ran from Nick’s face. He fled the room and Max fell into the closest chair and scrubbed his face. It was wrong to blame Nick for all Jed had been through. Jed didn’t. Nick had been seventeen when Jed left town. Some young men knew their minds by that age, but Jed said Nick had never been that man. He was easily led, and who better to lead him than his own father? Max stared at Jed. Was that really true? He’d never know, but as Dr. Greene’s shadow darkened the doorway, it didn’t matter anymore.
Max absorbed the bone-chilling news of septic shock with muted devastation. He put his hand on Jed’s chest, felt the too-fast stampede of his fractured heart and thought of his own father, of the man who’d been something of a stranger, and yet had known Max so well. He thought of Makemba too, the woman who’d loved him to death, but remained ignorant of a fundamental part of his being that made him who he was.
Jed was different. He owned a part of Max he’d never given to another. Was it too much to ask that they be given the chance to see it through, or was he doomed to love only ghosts?