Chapter Thirty-One
Darren
Ignoring the stares of the nurses, I turned and walked out of the lobby into the rainy night. Rain was slapping the gutters with a constant thumping, and the head lights of an ambulance shone brightly through the haze. A couple of paramedics were unloading a man on a stretcher.
I stood there for a moment waiting for the road to clear so I could cross to my car. The urge to run back inside and apologize to Penny was strong, but I wasn’t even sure what I would be apologizing for. I had spent most of the week waiting miserably for her to call or text me, and I would have come to the hospital if Nic hadn’t warned against it. “She needs a lot of space,” she had said. “You don’t want to come across as inescapable. If she starts to feel trapped, she’ll begin looking for a way out of the relationship.”
So I had waited, and that, too, had proven to be a mistake. She had just broken up with me, and there was no telling what I could have done to avoid it. Maybe she would rethink her position after she had had a few days to calm down. I wasn’t about to give up on her, not yet. But at this point, charging back into the hospital and trying to rescue the relationship wasn’t going to help.
By now, the paramedics had fully unloaded the stretcher and were pulling it over the concrete. I had begun crossing the street, but froze in my tracks when I saw who was on it.
It was Dickie.
A new sensation of panic gripped me as I watched him being dragged through the doors. Without a second’s hesitation, I turned and followed the stretcher through the lobby and into the ground-floor elevator.
I waited until the door had closed and the elevator was ascending to the twelfth floor before questioning them.
“What happened to this man?” I asked.
The taller of the two paramedics turned and looked at me in mild surprise, as though having only just noticed I was in the elevator. “Do you know him? He got into a nasty accident while racing illegally. His Mustang hit a wall and went up in flames; he was immediately knocked unconscious, and somebody only just managed to rescue him. Any later, and he would have died.”
“As it is,” said the second paramedic, a Hispanic man with wide, arching eyebrows, “we still don’t know if he’s going to make it. He has a pulse but has been unconscious since impact.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, a note of desperation in my voice. “Is he, like, in a coma?”
The first paramedic exchanged glances with the second, as though they were both surprised by the level of intensity in my voice. “We don’t know anything for sure yet,” said the first paramedic.
“His doctor should be able to tell you more in an hour or two,” added the second. “In fact, I shouldn’t have even told you this much. I could lose my job.”
I started to ask another question, but just then the elevator door slid open, and the two paramedics led the unconscious Dickie toward a small room at the end of the hall. I followed with a dazed feeling, wondering what sins I had committed to invite so many disasters on myself at once. Within the space of about an hour, I had lost my girlfriend and my best friend. And I still hadn’t made it out of the hospital.
I didn’t yet know what I had done to offend Penny, but Dickie’s accident was almost certainly my own fault. Cold waves of guilt burst over me as I recalled our conversation that morning. He hadn’t wanted to race, but I had insisted on it. If I hadn’t talked him into it, we could be sitting in a bar right now knocking back drinks and trying to solve the infinite mysteries of women. Instead, he appeared to be in a coma, and there was no knowing whether or not he would ever come out of it.
I went and sat down in the twelfth-floor waiting room, resisting the urge to light a cigarette. Weak and exhausted but unable to sleep, I paced the floor silently in the haze of the fluorescent lights.
After what felt like an hour, the door opened, and a woman in glasses, carrying a clipboard, entered the room with a grave expression.
“Are you Richard’s friend?” she asked.
I nodded, not liking the way she had phrased the question, as if I was his only friend. Though when I thought about it, I supposed I was. “How’s he doing?”
“The best I can say at this point is that he’s still breathing. He’s in critical condition, and we’ve taken the precaution of placing him in an induced coma, temporarily.”
“Isn’t he already in a coma? Why would you do that?”
“It’s a necessary step in the process of allowing his body time to heal itself. You’re welcome to come sit with him, though, of course, he’s going to be unresponsive. Does he have any relatives that you know of?”
I shook my head. Both his parents were dead, and they had no other children. Penny was the only other person he had been close to, and if he died, the two of us might be his only mourners.