The Sick Wife
Loretta Lost
Copyright © 2021 Loretta Lost
Cover design by Damonza
***
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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Contents
I. Camilla
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
II. Gabriel
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
III. Milla and Evie
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
For Sam.
Part I
Camilla
Chapter 1
Camilla
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask my patient softly. She is strangely beautiful, even with her eyes bloodshot and red from the sickness. Her face is drained of all color, but her dark, wavy hair still frames her cheeks in a flattering way. My heart aches for her. Each time she coughs, that guttural, echo-y pneumonia cough, I can feel the pain in my own chest, like it’s happening to me. I don’t even know her, and I have no idea why I’m feeling such an intense connection to her.
I am not sure when she was admitted—thanks to these long nursing shifts, all the days are blurring together. Her condition deteriorated quickly since arrival, and her oxygen levels are dangerously low. Smoker. A few extra pounds. Only in her mid-thirties, but somehow the virus is hitting her harder than I’ve seen it hit some patients in their seventies. This could be a new variant, but I’m not sure.
“Am I going to get better?” she asks hoarsely.
I hesitate. “The doctor will be in to discuss that shortly.”
She stares at me. I swallow.
I think she can see the fear in my eyes through the plastic face shield. Even the tight fitting N95 respirator, with a blue surgical mask layered on top of it for extra protection, cannot filter out the quaver in my voice. “Can I help you in any way?”
She is looking at me with the awful realization that I might be asking for her final wishes. I look down at her chart, and try to pretend to be reading data to conceal my emotions. I try to avoid looking at her name. I know that it will only make it harder to sleep at night if I know her name. Shit. I barely just glimpsed that it begins with the letter Y. Closing my eyes, I exhale slowly. It doesn’t matter—I won’t forget her face. I already spend way too many hours just staring at the ceiling and trying not to think of their faces.
And a face like hers isn’t easily forgotten. There is something so mysterious and compelling about her—I am certain she looks more attractive while almost dead than I ever have looked while alive in my 31 years on this planet. Her eyes just seem to pierce right through me, and I swear she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
I wish that all this protective gear could hide my feelings a little better, because I’ve never been very good at hiding them myself. My mother always used to tell me that I wear my heart on my sleeve. Lately, it’s been worse… I’ve just been so emotionally worn out from this whole Covid experience—but seriously, who hasn’t? With each passing day, I just find myself feeling weaker and weaker, like I’m heading for some sort of breakdown.
I’ve never seen so many human beings dying horribly on a regular basis.
It’s been a year of this now, and you’d think I would be used to it. But I’ll never get used to it. The dark-haired woman, with a name beginning with the letter Y, has a chilling, ghastly glaze over her eyes that I’ve seen in patients who are only hours away from their last breath. She’s already got one foot in the grave. When you do this every day you begin to develop a sixth sense about who is going to make it, and who won’t.
The look of terror on her face suggests that she also knows.
Her hand moves in a weak effort to grasp the phone on the table beside her hospital bed. The device is nestled within a stylish silver case, jeweled and glamorous—it looks bold and fun, like it belongs to a woman who smiles a lot and lives her life unapologetically. It feels so out of place here. Her fingers, with well-manicured nails, barely crawl to the edge of the mattress before they stop and lay there limply in defeat.
“Can you help,” she mumbles, biting her lip, “call my husband?”
I nod. It’s the most important part of my job these days. I’ve probably facilitated thousands of phone calls between patients and the loved ones who can’t be beside them in their darkest moments.
And every time it happens, when I see the family members exchanging love and tears of joy or pain—I can’t help thinking about the fact that I wouldn’t have anyone to call in a moment like that. I only have my father who suffers from dementia and can’t even answer a phone on his own.
Yes, that’s the kind of horrible person I am. I am jealous of these poor, innocent people dying alone, because they aren’t really alone. At least they still had someone to love in their final moments. At least they really lived, at least they had some kind of life and legacy to leave behind. I have nothing, and no one would even miss me or notice that I’m gone. How depressing is that?
Reaching out to grasp the woman’s limp thumb, I position her phone under her hand to unlock the device with her fingerprint. I navigate to the recent calls, and I grimace.
“Sexy Babe?” I ask with embarrassment as I press the name. Almost every single call is to this name, so naturally—
“No!” she gasps out, and I quickly cancel the call in a panic.
“Not him,” she says, coughing over her words.
“Um… okay,” I say, with my hand frozen awkwardly in the air. I am trying not to reveal how confused I am, and trying not to raise my eyebrows.
“Huge Fucking Asshole,” she explains weakly. “He’s saved under Huge Fucking Asshole.”
“Oh,” I say, as my lips curl up into a grin—which is thankfully concealed by the masks. I scan through her recent calls to find him. But there are no recent calls…
Puzzled, I go to the list of contacts and scroll down. Asshole, Huge Fucking. There it is. “Video or voice only?” I ask her.
She lets out a struggling sound that is part-laugh, part-snort, part-cough. “I look like a corpse.”
I hesitate,
thinking of telling her how weirdly gorgeous she looks while suffering from coronavirus. But there’s no way I can avoid making that sound creepy or jealous, both of which I probably am, so I just nod. “Voice, then.”
Beginning the call, I extend my arm to put the phone beside her ear for privacy. She shakes her head, which seems to visibly cause her pain. “No,” she whispers, almost recoiling from the call with fear. “He won’t talk to me. He hates me.” There are tears gathering in her eyes. “You do it.”
“Uh…”
“Please,” she begs. “Camilla… tell him for me.”
I frown, but I can’t resist the pleading look on her face and the sweet but stern way she says my name. It’s oddly intimate, like we’ve been friends for years. Like I owe her tons of favors that she’s finally coming to collect, not like she just read my freaking nametag ten seconds ago. I somehow feel guilty for not helping her sooner. Damn her… she’s good. I think she could convince anyone to do anything, if she asks like that.
I pull the phone up closer to my face, a few inches away from my mask, and put it on speaker. It’s still ringing. It spends an awful long time ringing, and I’m a little worried that there will be no answer.
Finally, a deep and angry man’s voice is heard.
Cursing and yelling. Viciously. In French.
I took some French in school, but not enough to understand half of what he’s saying. They don’t really teach these types of curse words to students.
My patient, whose name starts with a Y, is rolling her tired eyes, but she looks too exhausted to even roll them properly. “It’s 4 a.m. in France,” she explains hoarsely.
Oh, he’s not in Quebec like I assumed. I couldn’t hear the difference in accent over the unmistakable sound of a childish man-tantrum.
“I can’t take this,” she says, and there are tears brimming against her lashes. She turns her head to the side and presses her eyes shut tightly, looking like she would rather welcome death in this moment than speak to this man.
Heck, I don’t even know her husband and I feel the same. After almost twelve hours on my feet without a proper meal, without anything to drink in ages because I’m dealing with a highly infectious virus and I can’t just easily remove my masks to sip some water… this Huge Fucking Asshole is making me wish I was dead, too. Or at least unconscious so I didn’t have to listen to—
Realizing that my patient’s vital signs are looking even worse since this phone call began, I scowl. I’m still a nurse, and I’m here to make her better, not let someone visibly, intentionally, proactively make her worse.
“Hey!” I say loudly into the phone, yelling over the man’s yelling. He doesn’t even hear me, and I have to yell louder. “Hey! Can you please shut the fuck up? Your wife is sick.”
He quiets down abruptly until there is only silence on the line.
Woops. That came out a bit harsher than I intended. I blink twice, surprised at myself. Did I mention I haven’t been sleeping much? I guess I don’t have the patience for this.
Y has opened her eyes and is looking at me with shock. Like no one has ever told her husband to shut up before. Like he’s some sort of big shot, and if I knew who he was, I would have spoken more respectfully. I really don’t care right now. I’m crazy fuming mad.
Like I said, I’ve handled thousands of calls from sick patients to their loved ones. And I’ve never encountered a more selfish, uncaring, egotistical prick.
“Yvette?” he asks in perfect English. Dammit, so that’s her name. Very pretty and French, just like her. Now, I know.
“What’s wrong with her?” he is asking.
“Covid. I’m her nurse. She’s in a hospital in New York.”
“Shit,” he says, exhaling heavily. “How is she?”
“She’s having trouble breathing and if this continues we might have to put her on a ventilator.” The words just spill out, before I realize that I haven’t mentioned the V-word to my patient. The doctor was supposed to explain it later. I look at her with concern, hoping I didn’t shock or upset her, but she looks too weak to really care.
“A ventilator?” he repeats slowly. “But I don’t understand. She’s 35. She’s healthy.”
“Yes, but…” I hesitate. “It just happens sometimes. It’s a crazy virus.”
“God.” His voice is barely a whisper now.
My stomach does a little somersault. I can clearly hear his hard exterior shell starting to crack, like the first little lines of weakness running across a glass windshield that has been pelted with stones. I can tell that he loves her.
“Dammit, Yvette! Have you been smoking? I bet you’ve been smoking a pack a day or more. You promised me you were going to quit… Stupid woman.”
His voice causes another deep, dull ache in my chest. Even when he calls her a stupid woman it sounds like a term of endearment. I have never been married, so I don’t really know much about marriage or understand the communication between a couple. Maybe he even cares a bit too much. I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know who Sexy Babe is, and I have no idea how he feels about all that.
“Can I talk to her?” he asks me. “Please.”
Heat creeps into my neck at the sudden softness. There was a thick sheet of ice covering a frozen lake, and it just somehow splintered apart in the center to reveal that the water was actually boiling hot underneath. How strange. I’ve never known someone who could flip a switch so instantly and go from sounding like a rabid, snarling beast, basically a fire-breathing dragon, to so gentle, sensitive, and vulnerable.
I clear my throat to try to cast this confusion aside and remain professional. I extend my arm toward Yvette, so that she can speak to her husband. But she shakes her head. Trying desperately to suppress a coughing fit, she wipes a few tears away from her cheek. She pushes the phone away like it’s hurting her. I have the odd thought that she seems to be in more pain from loving this man than she is from the coronavirus.
“You do it,” she manages to say with a rasping breath. “You handle him.”
With those words, she has no idea that she has signed her own death certificate. And possibly mine.
“Okay,” I respond, unwittingly.
Before she spoke, there was only one almost-guaranteed dead woman in this room. Now there are two. She’s about to infect me with something far more deadly than the virus that is killing people all around us.
Our fates are about to become intertwined in a permanent way that will have repercussions for as long as we can both keep breathing. Now it all depends on the strength of our lungs, and hearts, and minds—whether we can survive this or not. Whether we last minutes, weeks, or days.
I can see on the monitor above her bed that her heart is not very strong, and it’s failing her worse by the hour. But I wouldn’t expect her to be in better health after being married for who-knows-how-long to the fire-breathing dragon from the frozen lake, who also sounds sweet enough to cuddle newborn kittens. That kind of emotional rollercoaster would wreck anyone’s body and soul.
Except for mine. I recognize that frozen lake, because I have one too. It’s not on the surface, where I am usually kind and caring and friendly. As a nurse should be. But underneath, my heart is cold and empty from not having been used or touched by anyone in so long—it doesn’t really feel much anymore. I feel tired and worn out from the hard work, of course. But nothing really affects me deeply anymore. So why am I being so affected by this dying woman and this asshole man?
It was just an innocent moment, doing my job. But I’ll never be innocent again.
Chapter 2
“How is that pretty woman doing, the smoker?” Veronica asks. She’s a pediatrics nurse and she only ever wears pink from head to toe. Pink shoes, pink scrubs, pink mask. She is a sight for sore eyes in the dreary breakroom.
“Not good,” I respond, opening the fridge and staring into it blankly. I’m starving, but food seems suddenly very uninteresting. “We might need to intubate.”
&nbs
p; “Crap. Really? She’s so young.”
“Yeah. Close to our age,” I respond.
“I guess you just never know,” Veronica says, stuffing her face. I turn to watch her eating for a second, and it soothes me. She is the sweetest person I know, and it always lifts my spirits up by at least a few inches when I see her. For the past few hours, I felt like my heart was sitting somewhere on the floor, stuck to the bottom of my shoe like flattened gum… my friend is able to make it feel like it’s at least glued to one of my shoelaces instead. Hanging on by a thread.
Better than being smashed like roadkill.
“The weirdest thing happened, Ronnie,” I find myself saying, without really intending to.
“Hmmm?” she asks, with her mouth full.
“That woman… I spoke to her husband on the phone.”
“And?”
“He cursed at me,” I explain. “In French.”
“Okay,” she responds, her eyebrows knitting together. “So?”
“I cursed back at him, too,” I say, wincing at the memory. “A lot.”
She stops chewing and looks at me carefully. “Milla?” she asks with warning. “Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”
The Sick Wife Page 1