Branded

by Tara Sivec

  “Where’s your guard dog?” Suzy asks as we get into the elevator and I press the button for the first floor.

  I didn’t really want anyone at the hospital knowing my business, but it was hard to hide the fact that I had a constant shadow in the form of a police officer. I told her the absolute minimum, just that I had gotten a few weird notes at home and the police wanted to keep an eye on me.

  “He had to go to the bathroom. He’s going to meet us downstairs,” I tell Suzy as I let my mind wander back to DJ while we descend downstairs.

  As soon as I can go back to my place, the first thing I’m going to do is throw away that fucking lighter and pack of cigarettes. I know doing that doesn’t mean I’m completely healed. I know I should probably go back to therapy or some shit, but that can come in time. For right now, I’m going to let DJ be the healing balm to my wounds, mentally and physically. We can spend more time together getting to know one another, I can show him with my words and actions that I do trust him and I can finally remove that last burrier between us, confident that he’ll understand and still love every part of me, fucked up or not.

  “As much as I like this more chipper part of you, you might want to dial it back a notch. I heard this accident was pretty bad and the family members might not like you humming the song ‘Happy’,” Suzy says with a laugh.

  Putting on my game face when the elevator doors open to the first floor, I push the blood cart out into the hallway and pick up my pace as we head to the ER. I hear Jackson yell my name to let me know he’s right behind me when we turn the corner and see a madhouse of hospital workers, racing back and forth between curtained areas.

  Suzy grabs a blood collection kit from the bottom shelf of the cart, but a worker stops us to let us know that only two patients were transported via ambulance instead of the original three we were told about.

  “Well, that’s good news, at least. You want me to take them?” Suzy asks.

  I shake my head. “No, you go on back upstairs. I can handle it.”

  She shoves her tray back onto the cart and disappears down the hall. Pushing aside the first curtain, I head inside with my cart. There’s a man lying in bed talking to a woman I assume is his wife based on the way she’s fussing over him and kissing every inch of his face.

  “Knock, knock,” I announce, pushing the cart up next to the bed.

  The woman moves back, but doesn’t let go of his hand.

  “I’m just going to take a few vials of blood to make sure everything is okay. How are you feeling?”

  He starts explaining the accident to me and I keep him talking, asking a bunch of questions to keep his mind off of the needle prick while I fill up four vials of blood. It’s over in seconds and I’m untying the tourniquet from his arm when he looks down in shock.

  “Wow, you’re fast. And that was pretty painless,” he tells me with a chuckle. “Do you know how the driver of the red car is? I saw the whole thing happen and it was really bad.”

  I finish marking his patient information on the vials and stick them into the blood collection tray so they can be sent up to the lab for testing once I’m finished with the next patient.

  “I’m not sure, but I think they’re bringing her in next. I’ll check and let you know,” I tell him, disposing of the needle and syringe in the red biohazard container on the wall next to his bed.

  Slipping off my latex gloves, I toss them into the trashcan before grabbing my cart and moving back out into the main hallway. The wife holds the curtain open for me and thanks me as I go.

  I hear a loud commotion at the end of the hallway and move my cart out of the way. The doors to the ambulance bay have burst open and I see a gurney being wheeled in, surrounded by paramedics. Figuring this is the second accident victim, I start grabbing things off of my cart so I can be prepared when it’s my turn. Glancing down at the fast moving bed as it whizzes past me, my supplies drop from my hand and clatter to the floor when I see who’s on it.

  My legs move on autopilot as I follow behind the gurney into an empty, curtained area. I push my way between the paramedics as they count to three and then lift Finnley from the gurney, moving her to a hospital bed. I immediately lean over my best friend, running my hands down her blood-covered face.

  “What happened? What the fuck happened?” I cry as a doctor and two nurses rush in and get all of her stats from the paramedics.

  “Phina, you need to move away,” one of the nurses I’ve worked with off and on through the years says from behind me.

  “Tell me what the fuck happened!” I bark at her.

  “Car accident, that’s all we know,” she tells me as she hangs her IV bags on a portable stand and starts moving her stethoscope all around Finnley’s chest.

  While the doctor walks to the opposite side of the bed and starts checking her vitals and ordering things from the nurse, I press my cheek to Finnley’s.

  “You’re going to be okay, honey. Please, just open your eyes,” I sob.

  I can’t stop touching her as the doctor orders me to move back. I smooth her blood-caked hair away from her face, run my hands down her cheeks, throat and chest and breathe a small sigh of relief when I feel her heart beating strongly under my palms. I cradle her head to my chest and squeeze my eyes closed, praying that she’s going to be okay.

  The doctor keeps shouting at me to leave and I ignore him until the nurse grabs onto my arms and forcibly pulls me away from my friend. The tears fall steadily down my cheeks as I take a step back and watch them rip open Finnley’s shirt and press heart monitors onto her skin. I hold my hand against my mouth to stop myself from sobbing as everyone barks orders and rushes around her bedside.

  I finally notice Brad standing off to the side and he walks over to me.

  “What the hell happened?” I ask him as we both stand there staring at Finnley.

  “Ran a red light and some guy t-boned her,” Brad explains quietly while the staff works on her.

  I tear my eyes away from Finnley long enough to look up at Brad in confusion.

  “Finnley wouldn’t run a damn red light. She yells at me if I have the radio up too loud because I won’t be able to concentrate on other motorists and she clears her throat in this really annoying way if I go one mile over the speed limit,” I tell him.

  Suddenly, I remember the page DJ got earlier and I realize this was the car accident he had to respond to. Jesus, he must have lost his mind when he got there and saw it was Finnley.

  I quickly pull my cell phone out of my scrub pocket and realize I turned the damn thing off before I came down here. I turn it on and immediately see that I have a couple of missed calls from DJ.

  “Shit, DJ tried to call me,” I mutter.

  “Yeah, he showed up a few minutes after I got there. Calmed her fiancé down and was going to bring him here in his own truck. That guy is one calm motherfucker under pressure,” Brad tells me in awe when we hear Finnley’s weak voice across the room.

  “Collin?”

  I race to her side and I almost scream in happiness when I see her brown eyes staring back at me.

  “What happened? Where’s Collin?” she asks with a scratchy voice as she tries to get up.

  I gently press my hands to her chest and ease her back down on the bed.

  “You were in an accident, sweetie, and Collin is on his way,” I tell her, grabbing her bloody hand and holding it to my stomach. “Jesus, you took ten years off my life when they wheeled you in here.”

  She brings her free hand up to her head and groans. “Fuck, my head hurts.”

  I laugh in relief when I hear her curse as the doctor starts asking her some basic questions like her name, what day it is and what all she remembers. As Finnley speaks, more and more of the accident starts coming back to her and I hate that she remembers the sounds. She tells the doctor she just keeps hearing glass breaking, metal crunching and a loud bang. Working in a hospital and listening to patients talk after an accident, that’s their major complaint –
that they can’t get the sounds out of their head.

  “I tried to stop in time. I saw the light change red and I had plenty of time. I pressed on the break, but it wouldn’t work. I kept pressing it and pressing it, but I couldn’t slow down,” Finnley tells him.

  A strange feeling settles in the pit of my stomach, but I push it away, figuring the bump on her head might be messing with her memory a little bit. If she actually pressed on the break, the car would have stopped instead flying through an intersection at top speed. I start thinking about the call I accompanied DJ on the other night with Mrs. Martinez when she spoke about crashing into the front of a Red Lobster. Now that Finnley is alert and seems to be okay, I kind of want to tease her and ask her if she mistook the break for the gas like poor Mrs. Martinez did, but the doctor asks me to step away from the bed to give Finnley a chance to close her eyes and rest for a few minutes.

  “She’s stable. The laceration on her head is pretty bad and is going to require some stitches. The nurse is going to put a temporary bandage on her head so we can get her upstairs for an ultrasound and CT scan to check for internal bleeding. Her abdomen is soft and pliable right now, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that, but it’s always better to be safe. If everything goes well with the scan, we’ll keep her for observation just to make sure she doesn’t have any swelling on the brain. All in all, I’d say she was pretty lucky. The paramedics out in the field did a great job.”

  My heart swells with pride when I hear this. Even though I’m sure it must have killed him on the inside, DJ did what he was trained to do and he probably saved Finnley’s life. I want to kiss the hell out of him right now.

  I walk back to Finnley’s side and give her a kiss on the cheek and tell her I’ll wait here for Collin and send him up to the digital scanning area as soon as he gets here. An orderly comes in then and pushes Finnley’s gurney out from the curtain towards the elevators.

  With a deep sigh and a quiet ‘thank you’ to God for keeping my friend safe, I push through the curtain and wait in the hallway for Collin and DJ. A few minutes later, the doors to the ambulance bay burst open again and I look up to see Collin running through them, his eyes anxiously searching all around the busy area until they connect with mine. I run up to him, throwing my arms around him and giving him a hard squeeze.

  “She’s going to be okay. The doctor said she’s going to be okay,” I tell him as I pull back to look at his face.

  His tense shoulders sag with the news and he closes his eyes in relief.

  “They just took her upstairs for a CT scan. She was alert and talking right before they took her and she was asking for you. I told her I’d send you right up.”

  Collin thanks me and takes off running for the elevators. Five minutes after he leaves, DJ comes through the doors and I run into his arms just like I did with Collin, but this time, I pull back and pepper his entire face with kisses.

  “Thank you so much for taking care of her. I don’t know what I would have done if…”

  I can’t even finish that statement. Thinking about losing my best friend is not an option.

  “Where’s Jackson?” DJ asks, looking past me down the hall.

  “He was back there somewhere sitting in a chair last I checked,” I tell him in confusion.

  “Stay here, I need to talk to him,” he tells me as he starts to walk around me.

  I sidestep him and get in his way. “What’s going on? Why do you need to talk to Jackson?”

  He won’t look at me, just continues to search over my head down the hall.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just sit here and wait for Collin and Finnley to come back down and I’ll be right back.”

  He tries to get around me again, but I slap my palms against his chest. “Stop it! Talk to me! What the hell is going on?”

  He lets out a huge sigh, tilting his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “Please, Phee, just let it go for now. I’m going to take care of it.”

  I shake my head back and forth. “No, absolutely not. We’re in this together. If something is going on, I have a right to know.”

  Thoughts start screaming through my head, bad thoughts. Things I don’t want to believe, but if DJ needs to talk to Jackson after just leaving an accident that my best friend was supposedly responsible for, there’s only one reason for that.

  “It was her fault, right? Brad said she ran a stoplight and even though she’s the most conscientious driver I know, accidents happen sometimes. Tell me it was an accident, DJ,” I beg, even though I know just by looking at the sadness and fucking pity on his face that it’s not true.

  He tries to wrap his arms around me, but I swat them away. I don’t want his comfort right now, I want the fucking truth.

  “The cop on the scene told us there weren’t any skid marks from Finnley’s car,” DJ tells me softly.

  Okay, so that could happen. Especially if she just wasn’t paying attention. God, how bad of a friend am I that I hope she just wasn’t paying attention as opposed to the alternative?

  “And?” I prod.

  He bites down on his bottom lip as if he’s trying to shut himself up and stop himself from telling me more. I can tell by the conflicted look on his face that he really doesn’t want to tell me more.

  “DJ!” I shout in irritation.

  He growls, throwing his hands up in the air in frustration, spitting out the next bit of information as quickly as he can.

  “Dax called when I was parking the car after I dropped Collin off at the doors. He went to the accident site and checked over her car.”

  He pauses and I hold my breath, trying not to curse at him.

  “Her brake line was cut.”

  My breath leaves me with a sob. DJ tries to pull me to him once again, but I back away.

  “Phee,” he pleads.

  I shake my head back and forth as I continue walking away from him.

  No! No, no, no!

  This is my fault, all my fault. It should have been me today, but I’ve had Jackson on my ass since I left DJ’s house and he couldn’t get to me. He hurt my best friend because of me. He almost killed my best friend because of me.

  I can physically feel my heart breaking in half. My chest hurts and I want to curl up in a ball and scream until my throat is raw.

  DJ starts to head towards me when another paramedic grabs him from behind, pulling him down the hall away from me to help with another emergency that’s coming into the hospital. I watch as he tries to struggle away from the guy, keeping his eyes glued to mine, waiting for me to call to him, to beg him to hold me and stay with me.

  I close my eyes and turn away from him. There’s nothing he can do to help me now.

  I curse my fucking job and the biker who was hit by a car that I needed to help move from the ambulance into the ER when I should have been racing after Phina. That goddamn stubborn woman is blaming herself for what happened to Finnley. I wanted to hold her and erase all of that blame from her head, but she wouldn’t let me. I could see the exact moment she shut down and forgot about everything we’d promised each other. Her eyes became vacant and her face shuttered every emotion from me. There is no fucking way I’m going to let her shut me out. Not now. Not after everything that’s happened and how far we’ve come.

  By the time I helped move the injured biker, Collin and Finnley were back down from CT. I wanted to leave immediately and go to Phina, but my best friend clearly needed a little support. He was visibly shaken even though Finnley was still awake and talking both of our ears off about the accident. I stared at the huge bandage over her forehead, noting most of the blood had been washed away by one of the nurses and memorizing the irritated look on her face as she complained about the hospital food she would have to eat for the next twenty-four hours. I would much rather commit this face to memory than the one of Finnley unconscious and pale with blood covering almost every inch of her.

  “Thank you for being there and making sure Collin didn’t beat someone’s
ass,” Finnley tells me.

  Collin looks away sheepishly and I laugh, patting him on the back, figuring he must have come clean with her about his behavior at the scene. I try to keep the mood in the room light and purposefully avoid telling either one of them about what Dax told me. They’ll find out soon enough when he comes in to question them. Might as well give them a few moments peace before the shit hits the fan.

  “Go easy on the guy,” I tell her. “He’s a macho man and I don’t think he liked the fact that he couldn’t go in and save the day. Feel free to call me your hero any time you’d like.”

  Collin punches me in the arm as Finnley laughs, quickly stopping to hold her hand up to her head. “Uuuugghhh, get me some pain killers already. This headache isn’t going to heal itself.”

  I reach over on the nightstand and grab the TV remote, pressing the red call button for the nurse.

  “Relief will be here shortly, Crash,” I tell her with a smile.

  She closes her eyes with a groan and rests her head back on her pillow. “Get that nickname out of your system right now because you are never uttering it outside of these walls.”

  “Whatever you say, Crash,” I repeat with a laugh.

  The nurse comes in with some Tylenol and lets Collin know that they’re going to be moving Finnley up to her own room in just a few minutes. Collin looks at me expectantly and, as much as I want to follow them upstairs, there’s somewhere else I need to be.

  “I need to leave. I’ll come back later to check on you guys, okay?”

  Finnley swallows the Tylenol and hands the empty cups to the nurse before looking at me.

  “Is she okay?” Finnley asks softly.

  Even though she’s got a concussion and a massive head wound, Finnley didn’t miss the absence of Phina in the room and I’m sure she wonders where she is. I don’t want to tell her that she’s probably drowning in guilt right now and I’m scared to death about what that’s going to do to her, so I just shrug.