Chapter Twenty-Five
Nate bundled her into his car and followed the ambulance but Pippa missed most of the journey. Scenery flashed past the windows, and Pippa kept her gaze locked on the flashing lights of the ambulance—red, blank, red, blank, red, blank—all across the top.
They drove fast, Nate’s siren a steady wail ricocheting through her brain. He took a corner, fast enough to throw her against the straps of the seat belt. From the dash, the radio blipped and crackled in an intermittent stream that made her want to scream.
The hospital rose up in front of the hills behind it. Nate took her around to the front, while the ambulance thundered down the channel marked EMERGENCY. Bodies in white, green, and blue flew into action. Swarming around the stretcher. The stretcher that was Phi.
Nate took her by the elbow and walked her to the admissions desk.
Hospitals all smelled the same. A sickening waft of antiseptic and illness that clung to your skin. Fluorescent lighting bathed the admissions desk in an unearthly glow. Pippa answered the questions. Luckily, the hospital had a record of Phi because Pippa didn’t have the answers to half of the questions.
The admissions clerk looked mildly bored as she typed in all the particulars. Pushed papers at Pippa to sign. An army of troll dolls grinned maniacally from the top of the woman’s monitor.
Nate’s hand held hers in a warm clasp. It was all that stopped her from knocking those stupid grinning trolls to the floor. Would the bitch behind the keyboard pay attention then?
Her anger wasn’t reasonable. A part of her brain kept it under control. Nate’s hand was the lifeline of sane she clung to.
Finally, they were done and Nate rose and tugged her to her feet.
“Pippa.” Matt’s voice came down the stark white passage toward them.
He was in front of her. The blue and green stripes on his plaid shirt filled her vision. He looked like a lumberjack.
He was here.
Nate let go of her hand and she walked into Matt’s arms.
They folded around her in a waft of Matt and cotton, and a warm press of strength. His chest felt hard against her cheek, a button from his shirt stamping an imprint from where she leaned.
“How is she?” Matt spoke to Nate over her head.
“We don’t know,” Nate said. “They admitted her into ER, now we wait.”
“What happened?”
“According to June, she got upset over one of her pieces of jewelry being stolen,” Nate said.
“Her tiara.” Pippa raised her head. “It was a tiara. She wore it when she met Queen Elizabeth. Of England.”
“You’ll stay here.” Nate glanced at Matt then looked at her. “Matt is going to stay with you. I’ll get a description of the tiara from June. You stay here and concentrate on Phi. Okay?”
“Okay?” Pippa burrowed back into Matt. She hadn’t realized until his arms wrapped around her how much she needed to be right here.
“Hey.” Matt pressed a kiss against her temple. “You doing okay?”
“Nope.” Tears threatened again, but she blinked them away.
Matt led her to the waiting area outside ICU and they took a seat.
A young woman with a wan, weary face gave them a sad smile. Pippa smiled back, two strangers united in an intensely vulnerable moment.
Matt put his arm around her and Pippa leaned into his side. He knew what Phi meant to her, there was no need to explain or even speak. He handed her a bottle of water and Pippa thanked him and took a sip. It gave her hands something to do while they waited.
Heels clipped on the hard floor, hurrying in their direction. Her mother headed for the nurses’ station before catching sight of her and Matt. She changed direction and bore down on them.
Pippa stood to greet her.
Emily almost looked disheveled in her jeans and T-shirt. She held out both hands to Pippa. “I was in my garden when the sheriff called. Any news?”
Pippa took her mother’s soft, elegant hands and pressed lightly. “They took Phi in a few minutes ago. We’re waiting.”
“What happened?” Emily shook her head at Matt’s offer of a seat. Her gaze darted between them, a small frown crinkling the skin between her eyes.
“We’re not sure.” Matt took over the explanation for her. “June says Phi found her tiara missing.”
“The one she wore to meet the queen?”
Matt nodded. “Apparently, it upset Phi so much she collapsed.”
“Oh God.” Emily plunked into the seat beside Pippa.
“June found her,” Pippa said. “She was unresponsive.” Her voice shook on the last word and she blinked to clear the tears. Dear God, let Phi be all right. Her grandmother was seventy-eight and had lived her life well. Perhaps she should have tried to stop Phi from drinking so much, or running around like a woman half her age. You forgot when you were with her that she wasn’t a young woman anymore.
Emily covered her eyes with her hand. “Oh God.”
“Nate is looking into the tiara,” Matt said.
“Who cares about a bloody tiara?” Emily glared at him, her mouth set in a tight line.
“Phi cares,” Pippa said.
Emily’s shoulders drooped. “Yes, my mother cares about her tiara. She sent me a picture of her meeting the queen in Buckingham Palace.”
Her mother’s hand found hers and Pippa held on tight. For all their differences, Emily was her mother and she loved her. She needed her mom right now, and her mom needed her.
“I used to steal the tiara and play dress up with it,” Pippa said.
“Did you?” Emily managed a small smile. “That must have been fun.”
“It was.”
A doctor came in and they all jerked to attention. He offered them a brief glance before moving to speak with the young woman. The woman followed the doctor out of the waiting room.
“I hated that tiara,” her mother said. “When she went to meet the queen it was my sweet sixteen, and I wanted her with me.”
Phi had thrown a sweet sixteen for Pippa. The Folly had groaned under a ton of pink and silver decorations. Jammed to the hilt with teenagers from Ghost Falls and Phi’s friends from her opera days. She suddenly pictured a much younger version of her mother sitting alone while her mother did other things. How Emily must have resented that.
Pippa squeezed her mother’s hand. “Phi said something strange to me before she . . .” Pippa couldn’t find the words to describe this morning. She waved her hand around the waiting room. “She said she came home to make up for the time she spent away.”
Her mother stilled, and then shot out of her seat and paced the length of the waiting area. “I’m going to get some coffee. Would anyone like coffee?”
“I’ll get it.” Matt stood up. “You stay here in case there’s news.”
Her mother stood in the doorway, took a step to follow Matt, and then turned on her heel and paced to the window overlooking the parking lot.
The view was dismal. Probably most people sitting here didn’t give a crap what was outside, every fiber of their being focused on what was going on inside. The door to the waiting room faced onto the nurses’ station. One nurse sat behind the desk, quietly moving charts about and making entries in her computer. Others came and went, some even glanced into the waiting room. Most went about their business as if the waiting relatives didn’t exist.
“I couldn’t reach Laura,” her mother said. “I left a message on her phone and another one with Patrick.”
She came back down to sit beside Pippa and took her hand. “How are you doing?”
“Not so good.” Pippa dragged in a deep breath. Her mother’s caring gaze stripped her bare and she looked away. “I never thought of her as getting old.”
“None of us did.” Emily patted her hand. “My mother is a force of nature, wild and larger than anything else. I couldn’t believe Nate was talking about her when he called.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.” Her mother breathed the word out on a shaky breath. “There is so much . . . stuff I want to say to her. I drove here and all the way I kept thinking about how that doesn’t really matter anymore. All I wanted was to be here. Oh, Pippa . . .” A sob shook her mother’s frame. “What if she—”
“We can’t think like that.” Pippa wrapped her arm around her mother’s shoulders. “We just can’t.”
Her mother took a deep breath and gently pulled away. “You’re right. We need to stay positive, focus on the moment.” She sat up straighter, and glared at the nurses’ station. “Surely they can give us some information.”
Her mother got up and stalked over to the nurses’ station, elegant and contained, but every inch of her shrieking intent. She had inherited that from Phi. Emily conferred with the nurse behind the computer and came back again. “They say we should have news soon. The nurse says she’s stable for now.”
Pippa’s breath whooshed out of her in relief. Stable was good, right?
Matt returned with a tray of coffee and handed them out. “Any news?”
“She’s stable.” Her mother took her coffee. She accepted two milks and two packets of sugar and upended them into her cup.
Pippa blinked at her. She’d never seen Emily have her coffee anything but black.
“Mrs. Turner?” A young doctor entered the waiting area.
Pippa started so violently, hot coffee splashed over her hand.
Matt took the cup from her and wiped the hot liquid away with a napkin. He touched a finger to her cheek. “Easy, sweetheart.”
“I’m Mrs. Turner.” Her mother stepped forward.
“Your mother is stable and resting,” he said. He looked so young, too young to have to make the sort of life-and-death decisions that fell on his shoulders. “We think she had a minor stroke, but we’ll know more once we’ve run more tests.”
Stroke! The word clattered around Pippa’s brain.
Matt eased the coffee cup out of her shaking hand.
“Can I see her?” her mother asked. Thank God one of them was functioning.
The doctor nodded. “We’ve sedated her for the moment. But you can go and see her.”
Her mother turned and held out her hand to Pippa. “Come, darling. Let’s go and see your grandmother.”
Like she was six years old, Pippa took her mother’s hand and trailed her down the passage in the doctor’s wake. “She’s in very good shape for her age,” the doctor said. He frowned and looked down at his chart. “It says here that she’s sixty-eight but . . .”
“She’s seventy-eight,” Pippa said.
Her mother squeezed her hand and turned her charming smile at the doctor. “You will find, Doctor, that my mother is whatever age she says she is.”
The doctor led them into a room three down from the nurses’ station.
Pippa stared at the frail figure in the bed. That couldn’t be Phi, lying there under those hospital blue sheets with tubes and wires springing out of her and hooked into various machines.
The suck and hiss of a ventilator cut the quiet of the room, combined with the muted beep from a heart monitor.
“Is this all necessary?” Pippa asked.
The doctor pulled an apologetic face. “Given her age, we thought it wise to monitor her closely for the next twenty-four hours.”
The first twenty-four hours, the most critical. Pippa ran the numbers in her head. How far into that twenty-four was Phi?
She and her mother approached the bed, their hands growing slick where they gripped.
“Hi, Mom.” Her mother dropped Pippa’s hand and cradled Phi’s unresponsive one, careful of the drip attached to the back of it. The veins on Phi’s hand stood out blue and strident against her parchment-pale skin. “I’m here and Pippa is with me.”
The ventilator pump sucked in more air, held it, and released. A drip hung suspended on an iron pole beside the bed. Pippa squinted at the label and then gave up. She wouldn’t know what the hell they were giving Phi anyway.
“You gave us a horrible fright,” her mother said. “But the doctor says you’re doing much better and Pippa and I are here.”
Pippa slipped to the other side of Phi and touched her arm lying above the covers. Phi’s makeup was smeared down her face. Someone had attempted to wipe it off and done a piss-poor job of it. Pippa dug out a pack of facial wipes from her purse. Her mother motioned for a second one, and together they carefully removed the streaks of black-and-pink glitter from Phi’s cheeks and under her eyes.
Phi looked vulnerable, fragile, and every one of her years when they were done, but it was better than the macabre smears from before.
“She needs one of her crazy nightgowns,” her mother said. “She will be mad as hell if she wakes up in this hospital gown.”
Pippa choked on a half sob, half laugh. “She says blue makes her look sallow.”
“She’s right.” Her mother smoothed back the hair from Phi’s forehead. “Stubborn old broad.”
They stayed until the sounds of the shift changing made Pippa aware it was night outside. Her mother spoke to the doctor again.
Matt was still waiting for her, his elbows resting on his knees, a full cup of coffee in his hands. He stood when she came in. Some of the dull dread in Pippa’s middle unraveled. “How is she?”
Pippa told him what the doctor had said.
Her mother came back into the waiting room. “Matt, I want you to take Pippa home.”
Say what? Pippa rounded to argue with her mother. She wanted to be here, near to Phi.
“I’m going to spend the night,” her mother said. “Go home, get some rest. In the morning put some things together for her and bring them back when you come.”
“I—”
“There’s nothing you can do.” Her mother cupped her cheek, her face soft and understanding. “I know you want to stay, but I’ll be here and I’ll call if anything changes. This could be a long wait, darling. I might need you later. You heard the doctor, she’s sedated and she’s going to need all our strength when she wakes.” She turned back to Matt. “Make sure she eats something.”
“I’ll be back soon.” Pippa didn’t care what her mother said, she was not staying away long.
Her mother gave her a wan smile. “I know you will. Go and see to the house. June will want to know how she is. Then come back.”
She left the waiting room.
“I don’t want to go.” Pippa resisted the gentle pressure Matt put on her arm.
“Sweetheart.” Matt turned her to face him. “She needs this. Your mother needs this and she is Phi’s daughter.”
“But they’re not close.”
Matt’s eyes warmed. “Exactly. Your mother needs to do this, and you need to let her.”
It made a weird sort of sense. Pippa glared at him as the battle waged inside her. She was Phi’s “special girl,” Phi was sick and she needed to be here. Then again, that was what she needed. What would Phi need?
Her daughter. The answer rang as clear as a bell in her mind. Phi had come back to Ghost Falls on her retirement to rebuild the bridges she’d shattered over the course of her career.
“I am coming back first thing in the morning,” she said to Matt.
A slow, sweet smile spread over his beautiful face. “Of course you are, and I’m going to bring you.”
“You don’t have to do that.” Pippa said the words, but her heart wasn’t in them. Having him with her was like a rock in a wild sea. Part of her wanted to cling like a barnacle.
“Babe.” He pulled her in close. “Where the fuck else would I be?”