by Aly Martinez
Guilt slashed through me. “I don’t mean for it to sound like that. I wasn’t talking about us. Well, not completely, anyway. It’s… Today was so great it almost made me uncomfortable. I’m starting to think I don’t know how to be happy. Is that, like, normal in a situation like this?”
“Charlotte, there is nothing normal about us.”
“Right. I know that. But are you happy?”
“Today? Unquestionably.”
“See, for me, it’s like I go through these spurts where I’m really happy, and then I realize I’m happy and it scares me because I’m well versed in how quickly that can be taken away.”
“I get it, baby. We’ve lived through a lot of sour over the years. But this is the sweet. Remember when I told you I used to come here every year and get in the water, trying to figure out how to let go?”
My chest tightened, but not a single word made it to my tongue, so I nodded.
He pressed a kiss to my forehead, allowing his lips to linger for several beats. “One dip in that pond, knowing you were sitting on the bank, my boy down on the dock, fishing with his grandpa, my daughter playing with her grandmother and her uncle, and I didn’t just figure out how to let go—I felt the pain disappear.”
“See, rational thought tells me that it’s impossible to find the energy to feed the pain and hate when you’re surrounded by so much goodness and love. And yet I can’t seem to relax. No matter how good it is. It’s like I’ve been programmed for the darkness and I’m lost in the light.”
“Sweetheart,” he purred in understanding.
I looked at the water. “I love this life. I’ve never been happier than I have been in the last week. I close my eyes at night, knowing when I open them you’re still going to be there. I still stress and worry about losing Travis, but it’s manageable with you. I, as a general rule, don’t like people.”
He chuckled, but I wasn’t joking.
“I don’t, Porter. But I love you. And I love that he loves you. And then, today, you bring me to meet your family.” I paused when the emotion of my confession became too much. But I refused to cry. Not anymore. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you calling me your girlfriend all day.” I laughed and it luckily kept the tears at bay. “But this all scares me so much.” I peered up into his blue eyes and asked the question I didn’t actually want to know the answer to. “I need to know the truth. I’ve been doing it for so long. I don’t even know what’s real anymore. Are we pretending here?”
He grinned. “Are you pretending?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so or you aren’t?”
“I…uh…” I stammered.
He chuckled. “Charlotte, are you happy?”
I swallowed hard. “Right this second? Yes. But what about—”
He pinched my lips closed with his thumb and forefinger. “Stop with the buts and what-ifs. If you always expect to get kicked in the stomach, that’s all you’re ever going to get. There are going to be ups and downs, sweetheart. But you can’t let the lows color the highs. You had a good day today, right?”
“Yesh,” I mumbled around his fingers.
That damn sexy grin of his grew exponentially. “Good! Then enjoy it. Today, we have it all. And we fucking earned every second of that happiness.” One of his hands went under my legs and the other around my back.
I draped my arm over his neck, assuming he was dragging me onto his lap.
He didn’t.
He rose to his feet with me in his arms.
“You have to embrace the good times or the bad times will always overwhelm you. When you look back on this day, a year from now, I don’t want you to remember the last thirty minutes of fear. I want you to remember laughing and living in the light with people who love you.” A smirk tipped the side of his mouth. “And maybe swimming too.”
My eyes flashed wide as he took a step toward the pond.
“Porter, don’t!” I demanded, squirming in his arms. “There are fish in that pond.”
“They aren’t piranhas though.” He laughed, and that sexy rat bastard just kept walking.
“Please!” I squealed.
“This is as real as life gets,” he said, stopping at the edge.
“If you throw me in that water, you are going to wish you were pretending,” I snapped, but then I laughed when he started swinging me toward the pond. “Stop! I don’t have a change of clothes.” I cackled, clinging to his neck.
“How do you feel right now, Charlotte?”
“Like I’m going to kill you.”
He laughed. “But you aren’t scared, are you?”
“For your safety? Yes,” I shot back.
“A year from now, you’ll remember this.”
“From the inside of a prison cell!”
“Say you love me,” he ordered.
I glanced up and saw that everyone had stopped what they were doing and were now watching us as they smiled. “I love you!” I whisper-yelled. “Now, put me down.”
He jerked like he was going to throw me. “Louder.”
“Porter!” I hissed. “People are staring at us.” I squeaked when he faked me out again.
“Louder.”
“Fine. I love you!” I yelled, tucking my face in his neck as my cheeks flashed hot with embarrassment.
“Good. Then you should have no problem forgiving me for this.”
“No!” I yelled, but it was too late.
He jumped into the water with me securely held against his chest.
Laughing underwater, I tried desperately not to think of the possibility of a fish brushing my leg and, instead, focused on Porter.
Maybe he was right. We’d been through hell. If ever there were two people who deserved a happily-ever-after, it was us. Happiness was a state of mind, not something you had to hold on to for fear you’d never get it back.
But, for people like us, life wasn’t a case of sour and sweet.
It was more like the deepest pits of despair and the high of cloud nine.
And, as my head popped up out of that water, I knew I’d been wrong to ever assume I wasn’t still in that pit.
* * *
“Travis!” Dad yelled as I breached the surface, a smile splitting my mouth.
The panicked tone of his voice shot through me like an arrow. Treading water, I spun in a circle as Charlotte emerged beside me.
She laughed, oblivious. “I’m going to kill—”
She was cut off by my mom’s terror-filled screams.
“Get him! Tommy, get him!”
“What the hell?” I breathed as my sixty-year-old father dove into the pond.
My pulse spiked as my mind struggled to piece the situation together. I couldn’t see anything. But maybe that was the most telling of all. The dock, where my son had just been standing, was now completely empty.
“Where’s Travis?” Charlotte asked beside me, her voice bearing the slightest of trembles.
And then the world rushed to an immeasurable speed. Slingshotting my life into fast forward while I remained utterly still with no way to catch up.
My dad’s hand shot out of the water, catching on the wood beam at the corner of the dock. My son’s lifeless body in his arms.
“Help me!” he roared.
Suddenly, my chest caught fire, and less than a second later, my body exploded.
There had been exactly one other time in my life when I’d swung my arms that fast, kicked my legs that frantically, or prayed that hard.
Time moved at an agonizing pace as I once again waged war with the water in that fucking pond. I couldn’t remember if I took a breath the entire way, but regardless, my lungs were on the verge of collapsing when I finally reached them. They were worthless to me anyway, because I died a thousand deaths at the sight of my son unconscious and unmoving in my father’s arms.
“What the fuck happened?” I barked, wrapping Travis around the shoulders and pulling his back to my front
. I bargained with any and every god that he would gasp for breath or start laughing that it was some sort of sick joke.
But he was utterly still.
“I…I don’t know,” Dad replied. “He was reeling a fish in and just collapsed into the water.”
Charlotte finally appeared in the water in front of us. Her face was pale and her hands were shaking as she tried to check for a pulse. “He’s not breathing. We have to get him out of here. Now!”
“I’m trying,” I replied, struggling to get his limp body up onto the dock, but it was too high for me to be able to lift him.
The tiniest fraction of relief ruptured inside me when Tanner arrived on foot.
“Give him to me!” he shouted, dropping to his stomach and hanging over the side.
My stomach rolled and my muscles strained as I shifted my son in my arms and then hoisted his limp upper body as high as I could. Tanner was able to catch him under the arms and pull him out of the water.
In any other situation, that would have meant safety.
But getting him out of the water was only the first hurdle we’d have to face.
As soon as he was out of my arms, Charlotte’s caught my elbow. “Help me up!”
Her eyes were wild, but she didn’t delay in using my body to climb on to the dock after him.
“Call nine-one-one!” Tanner screamed at everyone and no one as he moved out of Charlotte’s way.
“Please. Please. Please. Let him be okay,” I chanted to myself as I scrambled up, slicing my foot on a splintered edge of the wood. But the pain didn’t even register among the agony in my chest.
Tanner moved to the side, and together, we helped our father up.
“Travis. Baby. Please!” Charlotte cried, tears dripping from her chin as she started chest compressions.
“What can I do?” I asked her, dropping beside them to my knees and brushing his dark-brown hair off his forehead.
“Move!” she barked before starting rescue breathing.
I lifted my hands in surrender and fell back onto my ass as my nightmare played out in front of me.
There was a bustle of activity around us. But my eyes never left Travis.
I aged at least fifty years as I watched her fevered efforts to revive our son, but nothing seemed to be working. And, as the seconds turned into minutes, I became more and more panicked that they never would.
I couldn’t be sure how long it had been since he’d collapsed, but a surge of adrenaline and relief slammed into me when the paramedics finally appeared.
Charlotte rose off his body—and it killed me to admit it, but that was all it was at that point. She started rambling off orders and stats. Even as tears streamed from her eyes, she was able to list his medications and all of his health information.
Meanwhile, I could barely think.
My body was numb, and the air around us felt too thick to breathe.
I’d just gotten him back. We were supposed to be a family. Together. Forever.
This wasn’t allowed to happen. There had been only one option with his heart condition, and dying was not it.
We were happy.
We were supposed to stay happy.
With hollow eyes and an equally hollow chest, I watched them load him onto a gurney, and then he was gone. Charlotte jogged beside him.
But I was stuck. Physically unable to move.
I blinked at the ground. The chair he had sat in only minutes earlier had been shoved out of the way, his fishing pole lost in the pond and his tackle box spilled out, various lures and hooks scattered around. But it was the wet silhouette of his body that tore my heart from my chest.
What if that was all that was left of him?
The sun still hung bright in the sky, but midnight fell all the same. And, in that moment, I feared I’d never escape it again.
The darkness was going to be my executioner.
It was going to crush me, suffocate me, and then devour me.
“Porter,” someone called.
I snapped out of it long enough to see that it was Charlotte.
Hooking her arm in the air, she yelled, “Let’s go! He needs you!”
Needs was present tense.
Hope roared to life inside me.
And only then did my feet become unstuck.
* * *
He was alive.
In bad shape.
But alive.
Which, as I was giving him CPR on my hands and knees, was more than I had thought possible.
After several failed attempts on the ambulance ride over, the ER doctors had been able to shock his weak heart back into a rhythm. Not since I had been pregnant, having my first ultrasound, had the sound of a heartbeat been so beautiful. But the minute the beeps of my son’s heart rising and falling rang through the air as I stood helplessly outside the room, I collapsed to my knees.
I burst into tears and sank to the floor, Porter right beside me, his chest heaving in time with mine, a million curse words mixed with blessed praises rolling from our tongues.
We didn’t touch. Or speak.
We didn’t need words. Or comfort.
We needed a miracle.
The world moved in a flurry as I frantically tried to keep up, all the while watching my hopes and dreams fade out of reach.
We sat there for God only knows how long as doctors and nurses continued trying to stabilize him enough to move him to a room.
The hospital was a small community. And, once word had gotten around that my son had been admitted, the staff flooded the ER. Greg, my partner at North Point Pulmonology, was one of the first to arrive. He’d been acting as Travis’s pulmonologist for the last few weeks, but his orders were coming from friends of mine at Texas Children’s Hospital.
“Did you call them?” I asked, jumping to my feet.
Porter rose to his feet beside me and attempted to take my hand, but I shook it off.
“Did you?” I asked again.
Greg’s concerned gaze dipped to my soaking-wet shirt and then back to my eyes. “I did. Erin said she can’t get away, but Gina is catching a flight out.” He lifted a finger at a passing nurse. “Can you grab them some scrubs to put on?”
“Listen. No. Call her back. We don’t need a pulmonologist. I need a team of cardiologists. The best they have.”
Porter moved into my side and added, “Dr. Kreh is the head of cardiology at TCH. I talked to him a few weeks ago on the phone. He’s familiar with Travis’s case.”
Greg looked at him for only a beat and then ignored him altogether. His face became soft, and his words were gentle. “Charlotte, you know there is nothing he can do at this point.”
“That’s not true,” I hissed.
He sighed and shoved his hands into his pockets. “You’re thinking like a parent. Think like a doctor. There is no quick fix or treatment here. The muscles in his heart are no longer able to support his body. You’ve known this day was coming since he was born.”
“I’ve had him back for two weeks!” My voice cracked. “It’s not supposed to happen yet.”
Greg cut his gaze to the floor, and Porter once again tried to pull me into his arms, but I refused him the contact.
I didn’t want to be coddled. I wanted someone to make this stop.
To change the inevitable.
To fix my son.
“Make the call,” I demanded.
“Charlotte, I—”
“Make the fucking call, Greg!” I boomed, getting in his face. “Do it!”
“I already did. He said there was nothing that he could do.” He kept his eyes down. “He needs the transplant, Charlotte. I know this is hard for you. But we’re going to find him a heart. I swear to you. This entire hospital has your back.”
My body sagged, and the jagged knife of reality stabbed me in the gut. Medically, I knew that what he was saying was right. But, as a mom, I couldn’t stop hoping that he was wrong.
“He’s been on the list for two months,” Porter said, �
��and we haven’t gotten so much as a phone call.”
“He’ll be moved up the list,” I whispered.
He glanced between Greg and me. “Okay. That’s good, then, right?”
“Up doesn’t mean the top.”
“It’s still up,” Porter argued, the saddest tinge of hope coloring his voice.
I didn’t carry the same hope. Lifting my pleading gaze to Greg, I asked, “He’s not leaving this hospital, is he?”
His face paled, he closed his eyes, and then crushed me. “Not with that heart.”
A wave of devastation slammed into me.
Four words.
Every single one of them broke me.
Slapping my hand over my mouth, I stumbled back a step.
With a hand at the back of my neck, Porter forced me against his chest and hugged me tight.
And, for the first time ever, I felt no comfort in his arms.
No warmth.
No solace.
I felt nothing but an ice-cold chill travel up my spine.
I stood there, desperately searching for the relief Porter usually gave me. My heart racing, my mouth dry. But nothing came to me. Not even when I closed my eyes and gave the darkness a try.
There was no reprieve to be found in a situation like that.
“Charlotte,” someone called from down the hall.
My head popped up and I saw Brady racing through the ER, his terrified gaze morphing into a living, breathing beast as he came to a sudden stop several feet away. His wide eyes locked on Porter.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he seethed.
I stepped out of Porter’s arms and lifted my hands in surrender. “Don’t start this here.”
Porter stepped forward and rumbled, “We have bigger things to worry about than your bullshit right now, Brady.” He moved behind me, snaking an arm around my hips and bringing his chest flush with my back.
With his callused gaze, Brady followed the motion down. “You cannot be serious. Why are you here right now?”
“We were together when Travis collapsed.” I tried to explain.
He barked a laugh and planted his hands on his hips. “And why the fuck were you together, Charlotte? Please, God, tell me you aren’t back together with the man who kidnapped your son. For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with you?”