The Driven Series

by Bromberg, K.

  My entire body breaks out in a cold sweat as I realize what that look is trying to tell me, what she’s trying to ask me. I swallow loudly as the buzzing in my head assaults me, then leaves me shaken to the core, as I angle my head up to look at the patient brown eyes of the woman in front of me.

  “Are you the father?” she asks again with a somber pull to her lips as if she’s smiling to abate the words that she’s about to tell me.

  I just stare at her, unable to speak as every emotion I thought I’d just emptied out of myself while my dad held me comes flooding back into me with a fucking vengeance. I sit stunned, speechless, scared. My dad’s hand squeezes my shoulder, urging me on.

  “Rylee?” I ask her, because I have to be mistaken. She has to be mistaken.

  “Are you the baby’s father?” she asks softly as she sits down next to me and places her hand on my knee and squeezes. And all I can focus on right now is my hands, my fucking fingers, the cuticles still caked with dried blood. My hands start to tremble as my eyes can’t move away from the sight of Rylee’s blood still staining me.

  My baby’s blood staining me.

  I raise my head, tear my eyes away from the symbol of life cracked and dead on my hands, and hope and fear for things I’m now not sure of all at the same fucking time.

  “Yeah,” I say barely above a whisper. I swallow over the gravel scraping my throat. “Yes.” My dad squeezes my shoulder again as I look over at her brown eyes as mine beg for a yes and no at the same time.

  She starts out slowly, like I’m a two year old. “Rylee is still being tended to,” she says, and I want to shake her and ask what the fuck does tended to mean. My knee starts jogging up and down again as I wait for her to finish, jaw grinding, hands squeezing together. “She suffered from either a placental abruption or a complete previa and—”

  “Stop!” I say, not understanding a word she’s saying, and I just look at her like a goddamn deer in the headlights.

  “The vessels attaching her to the baby severed somehow—they’re trying to determine everything right now—but she lost a lot of blood. She’s getting transfusions now to help with—”

  “Is she awake?” My mind can’t process what she just said. I hear baby, blood, transfusion. “I didn’t hear you say she’s going to be okay, because I need to hear you say she’s going to be fucking okay!” I shout at her as everything in my life comes crashing down around me, like I’m back in the goddman race car, but this time I’m not sure what parts I’m going to be able to piece back together … and that more than anything scares the fuck out of me.

  “Yes,” she says softly, that soothing voice of hers makes me want to shake her like an Etch A Sketch until I get a little more assurance. Until I erase what’s there and create the perfect fucking picture that I want. “We’ve given her some meds to help with the pain of the D & C, and once she gets some more blood transfused, she should be in a lot better state, physically.”

  I have no clue what she just said, but I cling onto the words I understand: she’s going to be okay. I hang my head back into my hands and push my heels into my eyes so I don’t cry, because any relief I feel isn’t real until I can see her, touch her, feel her.

  She squeezes my knee again and speaks. “I’m so sorry. The baby didn’t make it.”

  I don’t know what I expected her to say because my heart knew the truth even though my head hadn’t quite grasped it yet. But her words stop the world spinning beneath my feet and I can’t breathe, can’t draw in any air. I shove myself to my feet and stagger a few feet one way and then turn to go the other way, completely overwhelmed by the buzzing in my ears.

  “Colton!” I hear my dad, but I just shake my head and bend over as I try to catch my breath. I bring my hands to my head as if holding it is going to stop the turmoil bashing around inside of it. “Colton.”

  I push my hands out in front of me gesturing for him to back off. “I need a pit stop!” I say to him as I see my hands again—the blood of something I created that was a part of Rylee and me—saint and sinner—on my hands.

  Untouched innocence.

  And I feel it happen, feel something shatter inside of me—the hold the demons have held over my soul for the last twenty-something-years—just like the mirror in that goddamn dive bar the night Rylee told me she loved me. Two moments in time where the one thing I never wanted to happen, happens and yet … I can’t help but feel, can’t help but wonder why hints of possibilities creep into my mind when I knew then and know now this just can’t be. This is something I never, ever wanted. And yet everything I’ve ever known has changed somehow.

  And I don’t know what this means just yet.

  Only how it feels: different, liberated, incomplete—fucking terrifying.

  My stomach turns and my throat clogs with so many emotions, so many feelings that I can’t even begin to process this new reality. All I can do to keep from losing my sanity is focus on the one thing I know that can be helped right now.

  Rylee.

  I can’t catch my breath and my heart’s pounding like a fucking freight train, but all I can think of is Rylee. All I want, all I need, is Rylee.

  “Colton.” It’s my dad’s hands on my shoulders again—the hands that have held me in my darkest hours—trying to help me break away from this smothering darkness trying to pull me back into its clutches. “Talk to me, son. What’s going through your head?”

  Are you fucking kidding me? I want to scream at him because I really don’t know what else to do with the fear consuming me but lash out at the person closest to me. Fear that is so very different than ever before but still all the same. So I just shake my head as I look up at the brown-eyed lady trying to figure out what to do, what to feel, what to say.

  “Does she know?” I don’t even recognize my own voice. The break in it, the tone of it, the complete disbelief owning it.

  “The doctor’s spoken to her, yes,” she says with a shake of her head, and I realize in that moment Rylee is dealing with this all by herself, taking this all in … alone. The baby she’d give anything for—was told she would never have—she actually had.

  And lost.

  Again.

  How did she take it? What is this going to do to her?

  What is this going to do to us?

  Everything is spiraling out of control, and I just need it to be in control. Need the ground to stop fucking moving beneath me. Know the only thing that can right my world again is her. I need the feel of her skin beneath my fingers to assuage all of this chaos rioting through me.

  Rylee.

  “I need to see her.”

  “She’s resting right now but you can go sit with her if you’d like,” she says as she stands.

  I just nod and suck in my breath as she starts to walk down the corridor. My dad’s hand is still on my shoulder, and his silent show of support remains until we walk farther down the hallway to the door of her room.

  “I’ll be just outside, if you need me. I’ll wait for Becks,” my dad says, and I just nod because the lump in my throat is so huge that I can’t breathe. I walk through the doorway and stop dead in my tracks.

  Rylee.

  It’s the only word I can hold on to as my mind tries to process everything.

  Rylee. She looks so small, so pale, so much like a little girl lost in a bed of white sheets. When I walk to her side I have to remind myself to breathe because all I want to do is touch her, but when I reach out I’m so scared that if I do, she’s going to break. Fucking shatter. And I’ll never get her back.

  But I can’t help it because if I thought I felt helpless sitting in the back of the police cruiser, then I feel completely useless now. Because I can’t fix this. Can’t charge in and save the damn day, but this … I just don’t know what to do next, what to say, where to go from here.

  And it’s fucking ripping me to shreds.

  I stand and look at her, take all of her in—from her pale bee-stung lips, to the soft-as-sin skin that I kno
w smells like vanilla, especially in the spot beneath her ear; and I know this feisty woman full of her smart-mouthed defiance and non-negotiables, owns me.

  Fucking owns me.

  Every goddamn part of me. In our short time together she’s broken down walls I never even knew I’d spent a lifetime building. And now without these walls, I’m fucking helpless without her, because when you feel nothing for so long—when you choose to be numb—and then learn to feel again, you can’t turn it off. You can’t make it stop. All I know right now, looking at her absolute beauty inside and out, is that I need her more than anything. I need her to help me navigate through this foreign fucking territory before I drown in the knowledge that I did this to her.

  I’m the reason she’s going to have to make a choice, one I’m not even sure I want her to make any more.

  I sink into the seat beside her bed and give in to my one and only weakness now, the need to touch her. I gently place her limp hand between both of mine, and even though she’s asleep and doesn’t know I’m touching her, I still feel it—still feel that spark when we connect.

  I love you.

  The words flicker through my mind, and I gasp as every part of me revolts at the words I think, but not the feelings I feel. I focus on the fucking disconnect, on shoving those words that only represent hurt out, because I can’t have them taint this moment right now. I can’t have thoughts of him mixed with thoughts of her.

  I try to find my breath again as the tears well and my lips press against the palm of her hand. My heart pounds and my head knows she just might have scaled that final fucking steel wall, opened it up like Pandora’s box so all the evil locked forever within, could take flight and exit my soul with just one thing left.

  Fucking hope.

  The question is, what the hell am I hoping for now?

  MY HEAD IS FOGGY AND I’m so very tired. I just want to sink back into this warmth. Ah, that’s so nice.

  And then it hits me. The blood, the dizziness, the pain, the rectangular tiles on the ceiling as the stretcher rushes down the hallway, once again foreshadowing the doctor’s words I never expected to hear again. I open my eyes, hoping to be at home and hoping this is just a bad dream, but then I see the machines and feel the cold drip of the IV. I feel the pain in my abdomen and the stiff salt where tears have stained my cheeks.

  The tears I’d sobbed when I heard the words confirming what I’d already known. And even though I’d felt the life slipping out of me, it was still heartbreaking when the doctor confirmed it. I screamed and raged, told her she was mistaken—wrong—because even though she was bringing my body back to life, her words were stopping my heart. And then hands held me down as I fought the reality, the pain, the devastation until the needle was pressed into my IV and darkness claimed me once again.

  I keep my eyes closed, trying to feel past the emptiness echoing around inside of me, trying to push through the haze of disbelief, the unending grief I can’t even comprehend. Trying to silence the imaginary cries I hear now but couldn’t hear last night as my baby died.

  A tear trickles down my cheek. I’m so lost to everything I feel, so I focus on every single feeling as it makes the slow descent because I feel just the same.

  Alone. Fading. Running away without any certainty but the unknown.

  “And she’s back with us now,” a voice to my right says, and I look over to a lady with kind eyes in a white coat—the same lady that broke the news to me earlier. “You’ve been out for a while now.”

  I manage a weak smile, my only apology for my reaction, because the one person I wanted to see, the one person I need more than anyone isn’t here.

  And I’m devastated.

  Does he know about the life we’d created? Part him, part me. Could he not handle it so he left? The panic starts to strangle me right away. The tears start to well as I shake my head, unable to speak. How is it possible that God would be so cruel to do this to me twice in my life—lose my baby and the man I love?

  I can’t do this. I can’t do this again.

  The words keep running through my mind, the scalpel of grief cutting deeper, pressing harder, as I try to feel anything but the unending pain, the incomparable emptiness owning every part of me. I grasp for anything to hold on to except for the handfuls of razorblades I keep coming up with.

  “I know, sweetie,” she says, rubbing her hand over my arm. “I’m so very sorry.” I try to control my emotions over the baby and Colton—two things I can’t control—and two things I now know I’ve lost. My chest hurts as I draw in breaths that aren’t coming fast enough. As I try to swallow over the emotion that’s holding my air hostage. And then I think it’d be easier if I choke. Then I’d be able to slip away, creep back under that cloak of darkness, and be numb again. Have hope again. Be bent and not broken again.

  “Rylee?” she says in that questioning way to see if I’m okay or if I’m going to freak out on her like I did when she told me about the miscarriage.

  But I just shake my head at her because there’s nothing I can say. I focus on my hands clasped in my lap and I try to get a hold of myself, try to get used to the loneliness again, the emptiness.

  When I’ve finally calmed down some, she smiles. “I’m Dr. Andrews. I told you that before but understandably you probably don’t remember. How are you feeling?”

  I shrug, the discomfort in my empty womb is no match for the deep ache in my heart. “I’m sure you have questions, should we start or do you want to wait for Colton to come back first?”

  He didn’t leave me? I gasp in a huge breath of air as the lump in my throat loosens, lets air in, and her words help the slice of the proverbial scalpel hurt a little less. She just angles her head and looks at me with sadness, and I feel like she’s telling me something without telling me. But what? Colton’s reaction to the news? I’m so scared of facing him, of having to speak to him about this on the heels of knowing how he reacted with Tawny’s bombshell, but at the same time a flicker of relief shudders through me that he’s still here. “He’s here?” I ask, my voice barely audible.

  “He just left for the first time since you’ve been here,” she explains, sensing my fears. “He’s been beside himself and his father was finally able to get him to go stretch his legs for a minute.”

  The words fill me with such a sense of relief, shivers dancing over my arms as it hits me that he didn’t leave me. He didn’t leave me. Silly really to even think he would, but we’ve been overloaded with so many things lately and every person has a breaking point.

  And mine passed a long time ago.

  I finally find my voice and look back up to meet her eyes. “Now is fine.” I have so many questions that need explanations. So many answers that I fear Colton is not going to want to hear. “I’m trying to process everything still.” I swallow as I bite back the tears again. “What…?”

  “…happened?” she finishes for me when I don’t continue.

  “I was told I could never get pregnant, that the scarring was so …” I’m so shaken, mentally and physically, that I can’t finish my thoughts. They hit my mind like rapid fire so I can’t focus on one for more than a few minutes.

  “First off, let me say that I spoke to your OB and reviewed your files and yes, the chance of you being able to carry a fetus, conceive even, was extremely slim.” She shrugs, “But sometimes the human body is resilient … miracles can happen, nature prevails.”

  I smile softly, although I know it doesn’t reach my eyes. How was I carrying a life—my baby, a piece of Colton—and I didn’t know it? Didn’t feel it?

  “How did I not know? I mean how far along was I? Why did I miscarry? Was it my fault, something I did or was the baby—my baby—never going to make it full term anyway?” The questions come out one after another, running together, because I’m crying now, tears coursing down my face as I wear the vest of guilt over the miscarriage. She just lets me get all of my questions out as she stands there patiently, compassion filling her eyes. “Was
this a one-time thing, or is there a possibility that this can happen again? I’m just so overwhelmed,” I admit, my breath hitching. “And I don’t know … I just don’t know what to believe anymore. My head’s swimming …”

  “That’s understandable, Rylee. You’ve been through a lot,” she says, shifting her position, and when she does he’s right there leaning against the doorjamb, hands shoved in his pockets, shirt stained with blood—my blood, the baby’s … our baby’s blood—and if I thought the floodgates had burst before, they completely disintegrate at the sight of him.

  He’s at my side in an instant, face etched with pain and eyes a war of unfathomable emotions. He reaches out to comfort me and hesitates when he sees my gaze flicker down and focus through my tear blurred vision on the stains of his shirt. Within a flash, he has his jacket off and his shirt over his head, throwing them into the chair before wrapping his arms around me, pulling me into him.

  The ugly tears start now. Huge, ragged, hitching sobs that rack through my body as he holds onto me—completely at a loss for what to do to make it better—and lets me cry. His hands move up and down my back as he whispers hushed words that don’t really break through my haze of disbelieved grief.

  And there are so many things I feel all at once that I can’t pick a single one out to hold onto. I’m confused, scared, devastated, hollow, shocked, safe, and I feel like so many things have been forever altered.

  For me.

  Between us.

  Hopes, dreams, wants, that were ripped away from me and predetermined by a fate that I never got a say in. And the tears continue to fall as I realize what I’ve lost again. What hopes might just be a possibility I never expected to be able to get back.

  And all the while Colton laces my tear stained face with kisses, over and over, trying to replace the pain with compassion, grief with love. He leans his head back and his eyes fuse with mine. We sit there for a moment, eyes saying so many things and lips saying nothing. But the worst part is, besides utter relief, I can’t get a read on what his are telling me.