“I don’t know. It was just that kid. He’s so young—too young. He reminded me of all the kids I treated in Afghanistan. There were some like him—the lucky ones, who managed to survive—but there were just as many who didn’t,” he said. He ran his hands through his hair, then looked up at her. “And next week I’ll be right back in the middle of things, trying to save the ones I can and having to deal with the reality of those I can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want you to go. I wish—”
“What do you wish?” Scott said as he stood and moved toward her.
He ran a hand down the side of her face, and she wanted to turn to him but knew she couldn’t.
“I wish I was different,” she said as she stepped away from him.
Just two steps, but it felt as if she had run a marathon. It was so hard to walk away from Scott. If only she wasn’t such a coward.
“The rumor is that you’re not coming back here after you return from deployment. Is it true?” she asked as she took another step away from him.
If she was the reason he was leaving she had to stop him. She couldn’t let that happen. She could easily get a job at another hospital. Besides, it had been Scott who got her the job working here, after she’d finally gotten her act together after Ben’s death. If one of them left it should be her.
“I’m leaving all my options open right now,” he said as he walked over to the recycling bin and threw away his empty drink can.
“If it’s because of me, I can leave. It’s not right that you have to give up your job,” she said.
Why did this have to hurt so badly? But how much more would it hurt if she waited for Scott to return while all the time knowing that he might never make it home alive?
“There’s no reason for you to do that. I’ve been thinking about making a change for a while now. This deployment has just changed the timing of things,” he said as he opened the door and they both stepped out into the emergency room.
As they went their separate ways she felt the pain of knowing that Scott was already moving on and making plans for a future without her.
But that was what she wanted.
No, it wasn’t what she wanted.
She wanted things to go back to the way they used to be. The way things had been before that one kiss changed everything.
* * *
Lacey opened her eyes to find her son making a goofy face, crossing his eyes and twisting his mouth into a crazy rendition of a smile. Laughing, she pulled him into the bed beside her and tickled him.
As his laughter filled the room she remembered a time when she would have rolled away from him in the bed, too tired and too depressed to play with her little boy. This kid and his crazy antics meant everything to her. That was why she knew she could never take the chance of being pulled back into that deep hole she’d fallen into after losing Ben. She needed the security of knowing that she and Alston wouldn’t have to go through that torment again.
“Did you get your paper done?” she asked as she got out of bed and yawned, then headed to get dressed. Working the night shift was hard on the body but it worked well with Alston’s school schedule.
“I need some help with my science,” he said as she came out of the bathroom, where she had changed clothes.
“Okay, let’s look at it,” she said as they walked toward the kitchen. “What’s it about?”
“We’re working on our science projects. I’m doing parachutes, so I’ve got to write a paper on gravity.” Alston said as he pulled a notebook from his backpack.
“Well, that sounds really interesting, but I don’t know much about parachutes. Are you sure you want to do this for your project? We could find you one that I could help you with. What about something with seeds?”
“I only need some help with this first part,” Alston said. “Scott’s going to help me with the rest of it. Did you know he jumped out of a plane once? He knows all about parachutes.”
Lacey felt her heart drop into her stomach. She’d forgotten that Alston didn’t know about Scott’s deployment. She’d have to tell him today. Or should she call Scott and let him tell her son? No, she was being a coward again. She would have to do it.
“How about we walk down to the library and see what books we can find on gravity?” she said.
The walk would be good for both of them. And it would give her a chance to tell her son that Scott was leaving. Maybe they would find another subject for his science project while they were at the library...
“That would be awesome. Can we get some ice cream too?” he asked.
“Sure. We’ll have to stop for ice cream on the way back, though. I don’t think the librarians would want us touching their books with sticky hands.”
As Alston ran off to get his shoes she tried to think of the best way to tell her son that Scott would be leaving in a couple days. The two of them had a special relationship that shouldn’t end over her and Scott’s split. She knew Scott would never let that happen, though she would need to explain to Alston the change in her and Scott’s relationship.
She’d spent so much time worrying about moving on and leaving Ben behind. But then she’d taken her first step toward a future with Scott and realized she wasn’t moving on without Ben—she was just moving forward and taking his memory with her.
Scott had been the one to show her that she could do that. It had been when he had explained to the crowd at the awards banquet how Ben was still a part of the veteran program that it had hit her that moving on didn’t mean leaving Ben behind.
And now that she was finally ready to see where the future could take them he was leaving—and she was too much of a coward to wait for him.
* * *
As they walked the ten blocks to the local library the constant jabber of her son lightened her heart—until she remembered that she would soon have to tell him about Scott’s deployment.
Alston had been only five when his father had been killed, and with the resiliency of a child he had accepted the change in his life more easily than she had expected. There had been nights, though, right after Ben had first been killed, when she’d found him crying in his bed when he should have been asleep, but she blamed that on the fact that she had been too caught up in her own grieving to see the pain her son had been hiding from her.
Alston quickly found some books on gravity, and they spent the next hour putting together a paper.
She told herself that it was the cool temperature of the library and being surrounded by books that made her drag out the time as they went through the shelves of books, looking for something to read after they’d finished the paper, but she knew she was just postponing the inevitable.
Not for the first time she considered backing out and having Scott tell her son that he was leaving, but she couldn’t do it. Alston was her son, and she needed to be the one to break the news to him.
As they crossed the street from the ice cream store she took Alston’s hand in hers while they both licked their melting cones.
“Mom, I can walk by myself,” Alston whined. “You treat me like a baby.”
“You are a baby. You’re my baby,” she said as she licked at a drip of ice cream running down her cone.
She might be a little more protective than some of Alston’s friends’ parents, but with all the things she saw in the ER, and after losing Ben, she felt she had the right to be a little paranoid.
“I’m almost nine. That is not a baby,” Alston said as he tried to pull away from her.
They’d almost made it onto the sidewalk when she heard the loud racing of an engine. She looked up and saw a car speed through the red light and head straight for them.
Letting go of Alston, she pushed him toward the sidewalk.
The last thing she saw was her son hitting the concrete—and then there was just pain.
* * *
Scott rushed into the emergency room. He’d been in the process of going through his pantry, to dispose of everything that wouldn’t be edible when he returned from deployment, when his phone had suddenly been flooded with text messages.
Assuming all the messages coming in were good wishes from people who had heard about his departure, he’d finished disposing of the food items into the trash before he’d picked up his phone.
He’d read the first text message, from one of the nurses in the emergency room at the hospital, and then gone on to the next message. None of it had made any sense. There had to be some type of mistake.
But when his phone had begun to ring and the caller ID had identified the hospital he’d grabbed his keys.
A hospital social worker had explained that there had been an accident and that as he was listed as Alston’s next of kin they needed him to come.
“But what about his mother? Where is she?” he’d asked, even as he’d started his car and headed to the hospital.
After being told several times that she wasn’t able to give any information concerning a patient’s condition over the phone, he’d hung up and called the ER directly. When Gloria had answered she’d put him through to the ER doctor taking care of Alston.
He had listened carefully as the doctor had explained that Alston had fallen and had a radius fracture that would require a cast. He’d been pulling into the parking lot when the doctor had gone on to tell him that while the kid was going to be fine, Lacey had been brought in as a trauma and was being cared for by one of the other doctors.
None of it had made sense to his muddled mind. Alston had fallen, but Lacey had been brought into the hospital too.
By the time he made it to the trauma room it was empty. Empty packages littered the floor, along with blood-stained clothes. Recognizing the bloody shirt that declared the wearer a unicorn nurse, he headed to the doctors’ station.
Someone was going to explain to him what was happening.
“Dr. Boudreaux,” Gloria said, “thank goodness you’re here. This is just awful. Alston is worried to death about his mother and we didn’t know what you would want us to tell him.”
“Gloria, I need you to tell me what happened.” Scott made himself stop and take a breath. “Where exactly is Lacey?”
He listened to the unit coordinator as she told him everything she knew. There’d been an accident—pedestrian versus motor vehicle. They’d brought both Lacey and Alston in by ambulance, but Lacey was the one who had been struck by the car and her injuries were more serious.
He tracked down the nurse taking care of Lacey, only to learn that she had been rushed off to surgery due to internal bleeding.
He wanted to bust into the operating room and take over the case. It was at times like this when he wished he’d remained in surgery. But after Afghanistan he’d thought that working in an ER would give him a break. Now he was thinking of making more changes in his life—but none of it would matter if he lost Lacey.
Returning to the ER, he hunted down Alston’s room. The boy rushed at Scott when he saw him and then he began to cry.
“Whoa, now,” Scott said as he carefully supported the boy’s arm, which was sporting a new blue cast.
“Have you seen her?” Alston asked when Scott had picked him up and put him up on the examining table.
A bright red scratch cut down across one side of the kid’s face, but it wasn’t deep and wouldn’t scar.
“Not yet. She’s in the operating room. But I made someone call inside the room and the doctor said she was doing better,” Scott said as he examined the boy for any other injuries, even though he knew a thorough examination would have been done when Alston had first arrived.
“Hey, Scott,” said a nurse dressed in a pair of bright pink scrubs, who was sitting in the corner. “Alston has been cleared by the doctor to be discharged. We were just waiting for you to arrive.”
“Thank you, Amanda,” Scott told the woman.
“I’ll have them bring in the paperwork,” she said as she left the room.
“Do you remember what happened?” Scott asked Alston.
“We went to the library to get some information for my science project. You know—the one on parachutes that you’re going to help me do,” Alston said.
The boy flinched as he moved his arm as if to make the shape of a parachute. Scott would have to see if they could get some pain medication for him before he was discharged. And the science project... Scott had forgotten all about his promise to help Alston with the parachute assignment. Had Lacey explained to the boy that he was leaving?
“What happened when you left the library?” Scott asked.
“Well,” Alston said, “we went to get ice cream after we left the hospital, but we didn’t stay at the store to eat it. Momma said that she had to talk to me about something on the way home and we could eat it while we walked. And then, just while we were crossing the road—and we crossed with the light, like Momma says you have to—this car came speeding up.”
Scott backed away as Alston swung the arm with the cast around, indicating a car speeding past.
“And then Momma pushed me and I landed on the sidewalk.”
As the boy took a breath after telling his story, Scott tried to piece together all the information.
“Then some people came up to me and they wouldn’t let me see my mom.”
Alston began to cry and Scott picked him up and hugged him. The kid had been through a lot already today, falling and breaking his arm, and now he was separated from his mother.
“As soon as your mom gets out of surgery the two of us will go see her—okay?” Scott promised him.
“She’s really going to be okay?” Alston asked as he wiped his eyes and nose against Scott’s shirt.
“I know the doctor doing the surgery and he said your mom is doing well. Now, I’m going to make some phone calls and see if you can go stay with Jason tonight. Is that okay with you?” Scott said.
“That’s okay—but not until after I see my mom,” Alston said.
After Scott had made some calls to his family, then to Lacey’s mother in Florida, he found the nurse and asked for some medication for Alston’s pain, then signed the discharge paperwork.
The two of them were quickly joined in the waiting room by Scott’s mother and father, who had offered to take Alston to Jason’s house after they’d made sure Lacey was going to be okay.
By the time Lacey’s surgeon came out of the operating room Alston had fallen asleep. Picking up the boy, Scott carried him down the hall to the recovery room, where Scott had been given special permission to see Lacey.
“Alston, wake up,” Scott said as he shook the boy awake. “Here’s your mom. She’s sleepy like you are...see?”
The boy opened his eyes and looked over at his mother. “She’s really going to be okay?” Alston asked.
“She’s really going to be okay. She just needs a nap right now,” Scott told him. “I’m going to stay with her for the night, and if anything changes I’ll call you. Okay?”
“Okay. Can I go to Jason’s now?” Alston asked.
“Sure,” Scott said, and he carried him back out to the waiting room.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LACEY AWOKE TO the chattering of her son—something that didn’t surprise her. She stretched, and it did surprise her to find an intravenous line in her arm.
Turning toward her son, she saw the bright blue cast on his arm and slowly the memory of the car speeding toward them returned—and with it fear for her son.
“Alston...” she said, her voice coming out in a croak as she tried to sit up and go to her son.
“He’s okay,” Scott said from the side of the bed.
Alston bounced over to her.
“Remember I told you she’d be sore after the surgery? We have to be careful not to
touch her where she has that dressing on her stomach. We have to be very careful where she has that line in her arm too,” Scott reminded her son.
“Sorry,” Alston said, and he moved closer to her, then patted her hand gently.
“He’s really okay?” she asked Scott as she ran her free hand over the large scrape on his face.
“I talked to one of the cops who worked the scene. The car was being driven by a high school kid who was paying more attention to his radio than to his driving. If you hadn’t pushed Alston out of the way... Let’s just say it would have ended differently,” Scott said.
“The cop said you saved my life, Momma. You’re a hero, just like Scott—only you haven’t gotten an award,” Alston said, then turned to Scott. “I think we should go buy my mom a trophy. One of those big ones, like we won when we beat that soccer team last year—you know the guys with those ugly green uniforms.”
“We’ll have to see what they have in the gift shop. Why don’t I take you down?”
When the nurse came in to give Lacey her pain medication, Scott took Alston downstairs to wait for Rayanne.
Scott had explained the circumstances of the accident as had been told to him by the police officer he had spoken to, but Lacey still couldn’t understand what had happened. She’d just taken her son out for a trip to the library and an ice cream cone. It had been a spontaneous trip, a few blocks down the street from their house. Alston had said that they’d waited for the light, checked for cars, and stayed on the walkway that crossed the street.
She’d almost been killed doing something as innocent and safe as going to the library.
Scott had been right. You could get killed just as easily crossing the street as you could climbing a mountain.
Or working at a hospital in Afghanistan?
No, that was different. Scott would be in a lot more danger than she would ever be crossing a street. But did that mean she couldn’t accept that risk?
She had to make a decision. She’d survived being hit by a speeding car. She’d been given a second chance. But was she brave enough to face a future with Scott in Afghanistan?
Stolen Kiss with the Single Mom Page 13