Chapter Thirty-Nine
Darla
Only three hours, forty-nine minutes, and thirteen seconds until I get to visit my Stella again. I’ve tried using the “I work here” card and the “I’m a nurse” card over and over to try to get in more often, but the ICU staff never cracks. Even the pouty lip doesn’t work. They go strictly by the book. So I only get to see her three times a day like everyone else. At least the doctor hasn’t rushed her back to surgery again. I’m going to put that in the win column of the Get Stella Better game. While I wait for the next visitation session, I obsess over every little detail of the waiting room.
There are seventy-two ceiling tiles. I know because I’ve counted them ten times today. The stain on the wall by the water fountain drives me crazy. I think I’m starting to see the image of Mother Teresa in it. It’s either her or one of those cartoon characters that Stella likes to watch on Saturday mornings. And there is not enough toilet paper in the ladies’ room to make it through the night.
One family left, and two more moved in here today. Each parent has the same glassy-eyed appearance, as if they have been hung out to dry. We don’t talk. We don’t share stories. We nod, and in that silent gesture, we empathize with one another. Isaac, Shelby, and Theo’s family left for the day, leaving me alone with too many thoughts.
I slip off my shoes and lie on the plaid loveseat, wearing my worn-out gray university sweatshirt that’s torn so much around the collar, I should probably be using it as a dusting cloth. This loveseat has been my bed since the beginning of this black hole of despair. The magazine I’m reading is six months old and dog-eared from all the readers it has had since it was left here by some other poor soul. Actually, I bet no one has read one complete article. I know I haven’t. I stare at the pictures and flip from one page to the next. Even the perfume sample still dangles from one of the staples.
A thump behind my head interrupts my literature time. I lean my head back to see where the noise came from. It’s Theo. He has a shy expression on his clean-shaven face. He’s wearing his old T-shirt that has “Don’t trust atoms. They make up everything.” printed on the front. He came back. It only took him a few hours, but he’s back, and the resting angry face has been washed away.
“Hey,” I say.
He sits down next to me. “Hey.”
“You shaved. It looks good. Not that the beard didn’t. You seem… younger.” Without his beard, he looks more like how he did in college. “I like the shirt too.”
He surveys the shirt and grins. I wonder if he’s thinking about the night I wore it, because that’s where my mind went.
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he says.
This is the most he has talked to me in weeks. I put my magazine down, not caring about the article “How to Tell if Your Man is Lying,” anyway. Apparently, if he swallows while talking, he’s lying.
“I’m very stressed out and about a quart low on blood.”
“What?”
“Never mind that. The thing is I’m still very hurt and angry. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over being hurt and angry.” He doesn’t swallow.
Uh-oh. I bite my lip. There’s going to be a permanent indentation where my teeth have been sawing my lip in half. I was hoping he was going to forgive and forget, but it doesn’t feel as if he’s headed in that direction.
He continues. “But we have to work together if we want Stella to get healthy again. She needs to feel that we’re a team.” He leans back and slides my feet into his lap. As if on autopilot, he rubs the soles of my bare feet.
Mmm, that feels heavenly.
“And we’re not doing her any good moping around, crying our eyes out every second of the day or snapping at each other. She wouldn’t want that, would she?”
“No, she wouldn’t,” I reply. “She would want us to laugh.”
His head bobs up and down like a little kid, like my… like our Stella. “That’s what I was thinking.” He slings my feet off his lap and drags his duffel bag over to him.
“Are you moving in?” Lord, how I wish he would.
He cracks a faint smirk. “I hope not.” He takes out the first item. “Operation.” He tosses me the game. I almost fall off the couch, trying to catch it. “Maybe Dr. Michaels could use some practice.”
“I hope not.”
Next, he plops the game of Sorry in my lap. “We are going to get that word out of our systems tonight.” He exhales. “I’m sorry I hurt you about the Hangman game. I really thought you were the culprit. I never in a million years would want to hurt you. And you have nothing to be sorry about. No more sorries. Got it?”
Gulp. “Got it.” God, I love him.
His eyebrows dance. “Now, as much as I wanted to, I didn’t bring the Twister game. I thought that might be a little racy for the waiting room.”
I haven’t seen his jovial side in a while. “Good thinking.”
“But…” His eyes get really big. I can only imagine what Christmas morning is like with him. “I did bring the dry-erase board.” He drags it out and shows me that he rewrote my puzzle, but with all the letters filled in.
I give him a high five. “Seems like you’ve gotten better at Hangman.”
He fakes a shocked expression. “Not really. You never could make it difficult. Oh, and one more thing.” He stands up and jerks his shirt up with one hand. With the other, he tugs the waistband of his jeans down. “Do you see what this is?”
Perhaps he should lay off the caffeine. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be seeing.”
He gets a hangdog expression. “You don’t see it?”
“Uh, I see your pump and some very bony ribs. How much weight have you lost lately?”
The beginning of a smile tips up the side of his mouth. “Not important right now.” He points to his underwear.
“You have on clean underwear, I hope?”
He motions for me to continue.
“Okay, they are tagless?”
“No. I mean yes, but that’s not the point. These, my dear, are my big-girl panties.”
I bust out laughing. “What?”
“You told me to act like an adult. So, I’m showing you I’ve put on my big-girl panties, and I’m going to try. I can’t promise anything because, well, you know me. I don’t adult very well. I haven’t had much practice.”
I slap my thigh. “That is hysterical.”
He stares at me. I stare at him. I think we’re both afraid to speak, afraid that anything we say may get in the way of the progress we’ve made in the last five minutes.
“I’m not mad anymore. I know you didn’t keep her from me on purpose,” he says. “Give me some time to adjust, please?”
Whew. I can live with that. “Okay.”
He clears his throat. “So, pick your poison. What will it be first?”
“Hmm.” I survey all the goodies. “Sorry. I’m ready to pulverize you in a good ole game of Sorry.”
He opens the box and drops the game board on the coffee table. “In your dreams, Juliet.”
“Bring it, Romeo.”
If I didn’t know better, I would think we were back in that fraternity house bathroom, keeping score of our winnings on the mirror with lipstick. We had so much fun playing games. It was then that I knew I loved him. It was the night I lost him. It was the moment we made Stella. It was… perfect. I don’t know if I can ever get back that feeling, but right now, I’m loving the fact that he’s not ignoring me. That’s a huge step forward.
For two hours, we battle it out over the Sorry board. We accumulate an audience of ICU families watching us duke it out. As expected, most of them cheer for me. Ha! Take that Dr. Edwards. Theo loans the Operation game and the dry-erase board out to other families, and it’s nice to pass the time mindlessly and laugh. I forgot how much he could make me laugh.
He taps my game piece off the space it was on. He doesn’t even try to stifle a chuckle.
“Do you really think you’re going to get away with sending my game piece back home again?” I ask after he sends it back to the home space for the fifth time. “I don’t think so.”
“Sorreeeee,” he screeches.
I throw a Goldfish cracker at him. Of course, he catches it in his mouth. Show off.
An alarm sounds over the intercom, making me jump so high that I practically hit the ceiling.
“Code Red, Code Red, Pediatric ICU, Third Floor. Code Red, Code Red. Pediatric ICU, Third Floor.”
Theo and I stop what we’re doing and stare at each other.
“Oh God, no.” He jumps up, knocking the game board off and sending the pieces flying everywhere. He runs to the ICU entrance with me not far behind. In fact, every person in the ICU rushes that way with a crash cart.
“Coming through, please move,” the code team barks at us as four physicians rush past us into the ICU.
Theo runs after them, holding my hand, not caring about the rules or the ward clerk yelling at us to leave. We frantically scan around to see which room the code team enters. Oh, God, please not Stella’s. It may be selfish to pray that the emergency is for someone else’s kid and not my own. I should feel guilty, but I don’t.
“No,” Theo says, his voice breaking. He rushes to Stella’s door right behind the doctors.
Jill, Stella’s nurse, blocks his way.
“I’ve got to get in there,” he says.
“Sir, you can’t go in there right now.”
“That’s my daughter!”
“I’m sorry. Not now.” She pushes us backward, toward the ICU entrance.
“What’s happening?” I scream at her.
“Stay back,” she says. “You can’t go in there right now.”
But I can see past her into the room. I can see the doctors surrounding Stella.
“Everyone, clear,” one of the physicians orders to the others.
Oh my God, her heart has stopped. My little girl’s heart has stopped. This can’t be happening.
“Stand clear. Shock.”
A loud, cringe-worthy thump comes from my baby’s body.
Theo takes me by the shoulders and swings me around so I can’t see what’s happening. He covers my ears with his hands. There is so much noise and yelling that I don’t even notice my own screams.
Theo buries my head in his chest, and the pressure of his hands over my ears increases. I know the doctors have shocked her a second time.
He releases me and uncovers my ears. “They got a pulse,” he whispers to me. “Her heart’s beating again.”
Jill grabs us and pushes us out of the ICU. “You have to leave now! As soon as I can, I will come get you.”
We are thrown back into the waiting room. All the other families are dead quiet as we stand in the middle of the room. I rush away from everyone to a corner. I rock back and forth, tapping my forehead against the wall. My whole body trembles. We almost lost her. Our baby almost died. This isn’t supposed to be happening. Our baby needs lots of costumes and play jewelry around her neck and a princess crown on her head, not tubes and monitors, and especially not shock paddles. This is all wrong. She’s supposed to be splashing around in a swimming pool or riding a pony. This isn’t natural.
Theo wraps his arms around me. “Come here,” he whispers.
I lose it. It doesn’t matter if he hates me. I need him right now. I need someone to be strong for me because I can’t be strong anymore. My tears soak his shirt, and the noises I make are those only a mother can make.
He strokes my hair as he cries too. “I know. Shh. She’s okay. They got her back. Try to breathe.”
I push away from him. Breathe in, breathe out. Inhale, exhale, hiccup. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought we were done saying that word.”
I rest my head on his chest again. “I’ll never stop trying to apologize to you.”
He kisses me on the forehead.
“Miss Battle, Dr. Edwards?” the ward clerk asks from the waiting room entrance. “You can come in now. Sorry about that, but they needed space to work.” The nurse ushers us into Stella’s room.
Dr. Michaels is there, consulting with the code team. He waves us over and wipes his sweaty brow. He cracks a grin, the first I’ve seen from him in weeks. “We had a little scare, but this is one tough girl. We got her back.”
I rush to Stella’s side and kiss her face a dozen times.
Theo sighs. “What happened?”
“Your little girl has turned a corner.”
Thank you, God.
“Her kidneys kicked into high gear all of a sudden. Urinary output skyrocketed. Her heart didn’t stop, but she became arrhythmic when her blood pressure dropped suddenly. Cardioversion was the only thing we could do quickly to keep her from arresting. We did a quick check, and her electrolytes were out of whack, so I’ve increased her fluids and potassium to replenish what she peed out.”
He straightens Stella’s sheet before he feels her forehead with the palm of his hand. “I was going to wait until visiting hours to update you, but I might as well do it now.”
I grab Theo’s hand. This cannot be good. Dr. Michaels’s “updates” send me down the rabbit hole of despair every single time. Theo squeezes my hand.
“We’ve had two days without any spikes in temperature and no signs of necrosis. I’d like to take her back to surgery tonight to make sure there is no additional tissue damage. If not, I’ll close her incisions and start weaning her off the ventilator. How does that sound?”
“So, she’s getting better?” Theo asks with hope in his voice.
“No, but she’s not getting worse. I think we can get her up and moving around again and see what happens from there.”
I could kiss Dr. Michaels right now. Stella has been stuck at one stage for so long, I didn’t think this was ever going to happen. If my life depended on it, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
Theo grins at me. “That sounds great,” he says to the doctor. “Do you need me to—”
“No, Theo. You’ve done enough. I think you two should get some sleep. Taking her back to surgery tonight means that you won’t get to see her during the evening visitation. But in the morning, she might be awake.”
“And you think I’m going to be able to sleep now?” I ask.
Dr. Michaels laughs. “Well, at least try. Now go on. Go to the cafeteria or something. Get out of that waiting room. I’m sure the walls feel like they’re closing in on you.”
Theo grins down at me. “Come on, let them work. Suddenly, I’m hungry.”
“Me too.”
We give our unconscious—but one step closer to being well—daughter one more kiss for good measure before we leave… together.