Chapter 15
Nick holds my hand as we get off the elevator on the intensive care floor of the hospital.
Because we’re not family of Kathryn’s, the staff at the nursing station can tell us nothing about her condition. Instead they direct us to a waiting room that’s filled with other anxious and grieving people. Nick and I take the only two vacant seats next to each other. And then we wait, sandwiched between a set of parents trying to reassure their fearful children that their grandpa will be home again once his heart is better, and a middle-aged man with tear-stained cheeks staring zombie-like at the muted flat screen television while he absently twists the worn gold wedding band on his finger.
Although there is a heavy swinging door that separates the seating area from the ICU corridor outside, there’s no escaping the constant jarring barrage of hospital noise and activity. Intercom announcements summon doctors and other personnel. Nursing staff moving occupied gurneys and wheelchairs tethered to IV poles and medical equipment sail past the narrow window of the waiting room in a seemingly never-ending parade.
Each time I hear the sudden piercing alarm ring out from a patient’s room outside, my throat constricts with panic.
“I wish they’d let us see her.”
Nick wraps his arm around my shoulders and presses a kiss to my temple. “I’m sure they’ll tell us something soon.”
Although he sounds confident and his embrace is warm and tender, when I look at him I’m not sure he actually sees me. There is a tension around his mouth that I haven’t witnessed before. His mood has been grim since we left the rec center. Each mile that brought us closer to the hospital seemed to make him withdraw a little more.
And I haven’t forgotten the odd silence that had engulfed him even before then.
I swivel my head to look at his unreadable profile. “Is everything okay?”
His eyes meet mine and I know he understands what I’m really asking. Are you okay? Are we?
“Yes.” His expression is utterly earnest. In Nick’s solemn, honest gaze, I feel our connection as strongly as ever. He’s giving me that now, trying to let me in. Tenderly, he draws my hand to him, linking our fingers. “I’m here with you, baby. Don’t ever doubt that. I’m not going anywhere.”
I want to believe that. And I don’t doubt he cares about me, or even that he might love me as completely, as desperately, as I love him. But there are times when I feel Nick is always just a hairbreadth out of my reach, existing somewhere no one can ever truly touch him.
It’s that part of him I fear the most. The part that makes me worry if I hold on too tightly, probe too deeply, he’ll be gone.
I recognize that elusiveness in him because I’ve spent most of my life in that place too.
The waiting room door swings open and Kathryn’s personal nurse nods at Nick and me in greeting. She gestures for us to join her in the hall outside.
“She’s stabilized,” Pauline assures us right away. “She was in one of her stubborn moods and refused to take her afternoon pain medicines. I’m her nurse and she pays me to take care of her, but I can’t hold her down and force her to swallow those pills.”
“No. Of course, not.”
She lets out a regretful sigh. “Twenty minutes later, I found her out on the terrace, slumped on one of the chairs. I can’t be certain how long she’d been there, but she wouldn’t respond and her blood pressure was bottoming out, so I immediately called 911.”
Nick curses low under his breath. “You say she’s all right now?”
“As best as can be expected, considering the progression of her disease,” Pauline offers gently. “The doctors are administering IV fluids and pain medications. They’ll monitor her here in ICU overnight most likely, then reevaluate her tomorrow.”
Relieved somewhat, at least temporarily, I swallow the knot of dread that had been sitting in my throat since we arrived. “Can we see her now?”
Tapping a code into the keypad at the entrance of the secured intensive care wing, Pauline brings us past room after room of patients in various states of trauma or illness. Nick still holds my hand as we walk, our fingers threaded together. His grip is firm, and I don’t miss the subtle tightening of his grasp as we make our way deeper into the ICU.
Pauline pauses outside the door to Kathryn’s dimly lit room. “She’s been sleeping on and off for a bit. Stay as long you like. If she wakes up, I know she’ll be happy to see familiar faces.”
She leaves us then, explaining that she needs to speak with Kathryn’s oncologist. Nick and I quietly enter the room. He directs me to the cushioned vinyl recliner in the corner while he seems to prefer to stand, ignoring the metal guest chair situated at the foot of the bed. For a long time, we simply wait amid the steady beep and hiss of monitors.
I notice Nick has hardly looked at Kathryn since we came in. His gaze darts aimlessly from one thing in the room to another. Never at the bed or the machines. Never at her lying so still on the bed. He once cared for Kathryn enough to be her lover for a time and although they had their falling out years ago, I don’t expect it’s easy for him to see her like this.
Resting on the elevated mattress, she looks pale and dramatically frailer than when I saw her just this morning. Her steel-gray hair is thin and matted against her skull, her cheeks sallow and gaunt. An oxygen tube rides under her nose, and taped to the back of her hand and the bend of her elbow are IV lines running from multiple bags hanging from the pole at her bedside.
She stirs, moaning softly in her drugged sleep.
At her sudden agitation, Nick begins to pace silently near the door while I go to her side and gently comb her hair with my fingers.
“It’s okay, Kathryn,” I tell her, despite that she probably can’t hear me. I need to say the words in case she can. “You just rest, now and feel better.”
When I glance at Nick, I find him watching me. There is a heartbreaking tenderness in his eyes but there is also pain. There is an anxiety about him that he is struggling to keep clamped up tight, yet I see it in the careful set of his jaw. I feel it in the grim tension that’s practically rolling off him where he stands.
Good Lord. He is miserable in this room—in this place. And while I know he understands the gravity of Kathryn’s condition, I sense his distress is coming from a deeper place.
When Pauline appears at the door and quietly enters, he jolts at the intrusion.
“Avery, can I speak to you in the hall for a moment?”
My gaze slides to Nick for a second, but if he feels at all reluctant to stay behind in the room, he doesn’t let on.
No, all I see in his face now that we’re not alone is calm control and confidence. I see the facade of cool detachment that Dominic Xavier Baine presents to the world. The one he presented to me in the beginning, too, before I learned to see past it.
But have I really?
The question clings to me as I follow Kathryn’s nurse out to the corridor.