Chapter 33
Yours If You Want It
Bryant
The gun fire was so loud, it caused me to flinch. But—I shouldn’t have been able to flinch because that gun fire was Ian shooting me. Delivering me to my death. Right? I felt my chest. Nothing. I turned my head to the left and saw two shoes. The bottom of Ian’s shoes. I lifted to a sitting position and scooted away.
“Come on, dude. We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Adam?”
He ran towards me and helped me to my feet. “I’ve called the cops, they’re on their way but we can’t stay to give statements. We have to get to the hospital NOW!”
His voice was urgent and broken.
“What is going on?!” I shouted as he dragged me outside of the building.
He loaded me into his car but he still hadn't answer my question. My mind raced, thinking the worst had happened.
"Please tell me what's going on." Adam was driving erratically down the roads, his hands on the steering wheel were wrapped so tight you'd think he was going to cut off the circulation of blood in them.
"Look, I wasn't going to tell you, and I didn't want Cricket to tell you because it wasn't our place to give you that information. But, given the circumstances I think you need to know. Amberly has a medical condition she was going to have surgery for soon. With everything going on, we missed the mark on telling the nurses about it when she was taken to the hospital for that wreck. The medicine they have given her caused her to have an episode, though she's been taking other medication to prevent an episode." He paused, slowing down as we neared a light that had just turned red. He looked both ways before running it.
"What are you talking about?"
"A few months ago, Amberly was diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome. She was at work and she fainted. They couldn't figure out the cause of it and, according to her, that wasn't the first time it had happened. But then she had a seizure. Doctors originally thought it was epilepsy. It took weeks for them to figure out what was going on with her and they got permission from the Medical Director to run a two-thousand-dollar test on her. It came back that she had the syndrome. At first the doctors were confident she could take medication and be fine. They put her on beta blockers and an anti-arrhythmic drug. After another seizure they started doing routine EKG's on her. They took it further and did genetic testing to discover she has the rare form of Long QT Syndrome that doesn't respond well to just medication. They scheduled a surgery to implant a defibrillator and there was talk about some cardiac surgery that I can't remember the proper name for."
My heart stopped. Why hadn't Amberly told me?
"She flat lined and they rushed her in for emergency surgery. I got the call from Cricket as I was trying to find you. After I hung up the phone with her, I decided to pull into the parking lot of the police department. You dumb fuck! I knew you’d find a way to prove your innocence but this is taking it too far. You’re lucky I found you in time. And Ian, what the fuck man?”
I started crying, cursing myself for not taking better care of her. For not driving that damn car off a bridge. For keeping it to work on, not knowing it was the cause of everything that brought pain and suffering to her.
"Dude. Are you okay?" Adam was staring at me. "It's going to be okay. She's a fighter. She's going to get through this."
When we pulled into the parking lot, Adam took out his phone and dialed the operator, giving her information about where we were.
"I called 911 before I barged in on what would have been your corpse. They're going to come get a statement from you when they get here. Come on." Adam shoved his phone back into his pocket and led the way to the emergency department. We took an elevator in the hallway to the surgical floor. My heart was breaking with every step. Every minute that passed that I wasn't in front of Amberly felt like a damn eternity, and I was starting to hate the word. I shouldn't have left her. I should've stayed by her side. The anger resided somewhere inside of me, little by little slithering up and out of me. I couldn't contain it, slamming my hand into the side of the elevator.
"Bryant, come on. This isn't going to do either of you any good. You need to be strong for her."
I didn't care. I couldn't care. I didn’t know what I would do if I lost her.
When we stepped out of the elevator, Cricket ran up to Adam and held him close, her face covered in tears she wasn't in control of. "They said it's hit or miss right now. The nurse just came out and said they're doing everything they can."
My body became liquid in that moment. I fell to my knees, bending over to feel the coolness of the tiled floor of the hospital. I prayed. I had never prayed before but I prayed now. I prayed that God take me instead of her. I pleaded with him, telling him she had a purpose on this Earth and he knew it. I bargained that her life was one in a million and the world needed her right now and he could take me because her life was more than mine. I begged him to not take her away. I confessed that I needed her and she needed me. I confided in him that I wanted to unbreak her, that I wasn't done showing her the beauty of life. I requested that he have mercy on her and me.
The possibility that I'd never feel her against me, hear her say my favorite three words, smell the aroma of her perfume, or see the smile she tried not to release because she thought it was unfair to Haylie became clear, too clear for me. I broke a million times over again. She was everything I wanted. Everything I needed.
"Come on, bro." I felt Adam tug at the fabric of my shirt.
If I could have stopped time by staying where I was, I wouldn't budge. But, I knew whatever was going to happen would happen whether I was on my knees or in a chair. God had no control of what happened. I could talk to him until I lost my voice, it wasn't up to him.
"I can't lose her, Adam." I gathered the strength to say the sentence I would say for the rest of my life. It would always be true.
"We're not going to." He promised. I knew his words were empty, without meaning, but we all wanted to believe it couldn't be the end.
Adam's phone rang. "Hello. Yeah. We're on the surgical unit. Waiting room C." He hung up, locking his phone.
"Who was that?" Cricket asked before turning to me.
“We’ll talk about it later, babe. The cops are here to take our statements.”
It took an hour for the officers to take my statement. The floor had been relatively empty, an occasional nurse or doctor taking their strides with such precision, I couldn’t help but watch them as they came and went. The officers grilled me for every piece of information I had before it became a blur. They felt the sooner they took my statement the clearer the details would be. I told them everything, from start to finish. From the moment I was fired from the department to when I had enlisted Lucas' help to now. Digging into police files was illegal, but they wanted to pin it all on Ian, though I wasn't one-hundred percent certain I could get off the hook. I even told them about Amberly's first wreck and her belief that someone was responsible and it wasn't a malfunction on the car. I didn't want to talk about her while she was in the operating room fighting for her life, but I didn't have a choice. I told them about the possible call to my insurance company placed by Mac. I showed them the pictures on my phone of the damage to the car I now had in my possession. They told me to make sure I contacted my insurance in the morning and have them fax or email me proof that Mac had indeed called.
Before they left they asked me to stop by the station first thing tomorrow. I agreed and shook their hands. When they disappeared into the elevator, a nurse came out. Anyone could see she was exhausted, either from a long shift or the surgery was taking its toll on her.
"You are all here for Miss Hodge?"
I didn't have to look to tell I wasn't the only one nodding my head.
"She's lost a lot of blood."
People die every day. For different reasons, at different times, in different families. You can never understand someone else's pain. Someone else's grief will never make sense to you. They may act like it's all okay before breaking down behind closed doors. Others wear their emotions on their sleeves and push through every day because they have to, not because they want to. Loosing someone close to you is unimaginable. It does more than break your heart. It breaks your soul. It breaks everything about you. You miss them like crazy and no matter how often you pray, how hard you pray, it will never bring them back. You hold onto the memories as if they are your lifeline, the lifeline that connects them to your reality. The memories come at the most random times. Memories that you have all but forgotten, memories you haven't thought about in a long time. They come pouring in, like a fountain of despair. They make you laugh, they make you cry, they make you angry, they make a sadness appear that you have never experienced in your entire life. You question it more than you have ever questioned anything. You become empty, waiting for the good in life to fill you back up, though it'll never make you whole again. You move on, somehow. Loosing someone to death is never fair. It's never right. It's never easy. But, somehow you manage to fight for your own life because it's not your time and it's not over.
I thought it was over the second the nurse said she had lost a great deal of blood. I felt nothing good could be followed by her statement. That was before she explained that the doctors had stabilized her and were working on inserting a defibrillator. She gave us a time frame of thirty minutes to one hour. I waited, impatiently. I couldn't wait to have her in my arms again. I was lucky. Not many people are but I was. She was going to wake up from surgery and we were going to be able to visit her. God may not have been the responsible one, but I thanked him anyway. I wasn't going to lose her. Not today.
The nurses waited until Amberly woke up from the sedative to allow us into her room. They wanted to do a quick assessment of her mental and physical health and wanted to make sure we weren't going to overload her with stimuli. The second I walked into the room she smiled a weak but heartfelt smile. Tears fell from my eyes and I didn't care. I'd cry every day for the rest of my life if it meant she would be there to see it.
"Baby." I rushed to her side and lifted her hand up to kiss it. "I love you so much." I whispered, bending down to plant a kiss against her head.
Cricket drug a chair across the floor until it was against my knees and I sat, running my fingers through her hair, not wanting to take a single moment for granted. I didn't want to miss a single blink, a single breath, or a single moment of her.
"What happened?" Her voice was tiny and weak. “One minute I was talking to Cricket, the next I was...” Her words trailed off, trying to remember.
I shook my head at her. “You don’t need to worry about anything but getting better. We’ll talk about whatever you want to talk about when you get discharged from the hospital.” I promised. I didn’t want her worrying about anything.
Cricket sniffled behind me, no doubt she felt as relieved as I did about Amberly making it through the surgery. "I'm sorry but we had to tell him." Cricket blurted the words. "We told him about your surgery."
Amberly nodded, not at all angered by the confession. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner, I didn't want you to worry about me. Please don't be mad."
I chuckled, marveling at the brightness in her eyes. "I could never be mad at you. Not truly." I admitted.
"I'm so sorry, Amber." I had almost forgotten Adam was in the room with us. "It's my fault."
Amberly adjusted herself to see Adam. "What's your fault?"
I turned around to see the crushed look on Adam's face. "I didn't tell the nurses, Amber. I didn't tell them about your medical history. It's my fault you almost died."
Amberly waved a hand in the air and huffed. "It's not your fault, Adam. So many things were going on at once, I wouldn't have even remembered to tell them if I had been conscious when I came in."
I could tell Adam had that weighing on him during the time she was on the operating table. It made me feel horrible I hadn't talked to him about it, but the only thing I could think about was Amberly coming back to me.