by Loree Lough
He nodded. “Yeah. But that’s forgotten, too.”
Eyes shut tight, she shook her head. “Your mom must hate me.”
“No, sweetie. She loves you as much as if you were her own kid. And if she wasn’t up at the house, keeping your nosy little girl from running down here to see if her pony survived the fire, she’d tell you that herself.”
“I didn’t…never meant for the…”
“Julie, honey, for goodness’ sake, will you be quiet and save your strength? The ambulance is on its way.”
“Don’t blame you, not wanting to hear that this fire was an accident, too. And I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe me. But—”
“If I have to tell you to be quiet one more time, I’ll—”
“You’ll what,” she said, mustering a strength in her voice that belied her condition. “Empty threats. I’ve got nothing, nothing,” she said, and looked away. “You’ve got me.” He kissed her again. “And you’ve got Amy. Look at me, Julie,” he said, sobbing now, “You can’t leave me. You can’t leave Amy. We need you!”
The ambulance came to a screeching halt beside the pickup. One paramedic tended the semi driver while a second quickly set out orange cones to block the road. A third walked up to Adam. “You her husband?”
“Yeah,” he said without looking away from Julie. “The paramedics are here, honey, and they’re gonna take real good care of you. Now, you fight, you hear me? Fight like you never fought before. Do it for Amy and me!”
“All right. I’ll try.”
“Do or do not,” he said, quoting the old movie line, “there is no try!”
“Okay, Adam. Okay…”
Lamont’s heart ached for the boy. Adam looked as helpless as he’d felt on half a dozen occasions in his life. Like the night his own wife had died in an accident much like this one, and the night Cammi told him that she’d eloped with some loser who’d gotten himself killed—in an accident much like this one.
He’d draw on his own experience to help the boy.
He’d pray that Julie would make it.
Pray that if she didn’t, Adam wouldn’t waste precious time wallowing in self-pity, because Amy would need him, just as his own girls had needed him after they’d buried Rose.
Prayed the Lord would see fit to grace him with the words this poor kid so desperately needed to hear, no matter how things turned out.
He walked slowly toward Adam and held out his arms. And there, in the red-and-blue strobes of the ambulance, amid the flurry of paramedics, running back and forth between their vehicle to what was left of the pickup, it was impossible to tell one man’s sobs from the other.
It had been hours since a nurse or doctor had come out to update them on Julie’s condition, and the waiting was taking its toll.
Lamont and Adam took turns pacing in the tiny, dark-carpeted space, stopping now and then outside the double doors leading to the surgical suite, while Nadine cuddled her sleeping granddaughter.
The elevator doors hissed open, and a tall, thin man stepped into the hall, balancing a drink holder on a big box of doughnuts. “Thought y’all might need somethin’ to eat and drink,” he said, depositing his gift on the round table in the center of the room.
Amy sat up and, stretching and yawning, climbed from Nadine’s lap. “Hi, Mr. Jim!” she said, hugging his knees. “I haven’t seen you in forever!”
After saluting a silent hello to Adam and Lamont, he bent to make himself child-sized. “Been in Lubbock,” he explained, “visiting my pa. Now, tell me, how’s that purty mama of yours?”
She heaved a sad sigh. “The doctors are op’rating on her.”
“Well, don’t you worry none, li’l sweetie,” he said, sitting beside Nadine, “she’s gonna be fine, just fine.” And after opening the doughnut box, he added, “Got two here just for you, chocolate with rainbow sprinkles.”
Grinning, Amy looked at Nadine. “Can I have one, Grandmom?”
About an hour ago, she’d noticed that the sun, peeking through the slats of the miniblinds, had painted bright yellow stripes on the floor, announcing breakfast time for her early-rising grandchild. An egg bagel would have been a healthier, heartier breakfast, but Nadine didn’t want to leave long enough to get one from the cafeteria. “Sure,” she said with a wink.
She watched as Amy spread a paper napkin on the table, then sat on her knees, Japanese-style. “Mommy taught me this,” she said with a nod, “to keep germs off my food.” She looked at Jim. “Do you think I look like my mommy?”
“Yes, yes, I do.”
She took a gigantic bite out of her doughnut, tilting her head and squinting one eye as she chewed. “Do you look like your mommy, too?”
Jim chuckled quietly. “Some people think so.”
“You mean, your mother is bald?”
That drew a laugh from Nadine—from Lamont and Adam, too.
“Oh, no,” Jim said, “my mama had a lot of hair. All the way down to her toes. Like a mermaid.”
Amy’s shoulders lifted in a dainty shrug. “Do you have a picture?”
“’Fraid not, li’l sweetie. At least, not here with me.”
She put down her doughnut and slid a piece of white paper from her backpack. “Then I’ll draw her for you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Where does she live?”
“With the angels.”
“You mean, you mean she’s dead?”
“Yeah, but she was very, very old. It was time for her to be with Jesus.”
Lamont and Adam had stopped pacing, Nadine noticed, to watch and listen to the interaction between Amy and the gentle giant. If she read their expressions correctly, they’d both changed their opinions of Jim. Or at the very least, reconsidered them. Will wonders never cease? she thought.
She stood to give Lamont and Adam a cup of the coffee Jim had brought, then put the juice box he’d bought Amy beside her drawing. She’d barely returned to her chair when the OR doors whooshed open and a bespectacled doctor burst into the waiting room, still wearing his surgical scrubs.
“Mr. Greene?” he asked, looking from face to anxious face.
“That’s me,” Adam said, extending a hand. “How’s Julie?”
He took one look at Amy’s haggard, wide-eyed face and said, “Is Julie your mommy?”
Both blond pigtails bobbed as she nodded.
“Well, you’ll be happy to know that she’s doing just fine. She’s fast asleep right now, but you’ll be able to see her in a day or two, okay?”
She looked up at Lamont. “Like when Obnoxious got poisoned?”
The doctor’s brow furrowed.
“Sort of like that,” Lamont said to Amy.
The surgeon signaled for Adam to follow him down the hall, and with a bob of his head, Adam signaled Nadine to come along.
“Your wife did very well,” he said in hushed tones. He ran down the list of what procedures he and his team had performed—from relieving pressure on Julie’s brain to draining blood that had collected in her chest cavity. “We had to put her on a ventilator, to help her breathe. In a few hours, we’ll start weaning her off it, and if she does all right, we’ll be able to move her to the ICU.”
“When can I see her?”
“Right now, if you like. But I’ll warn you, she’s heavily sedated and attached to a lot of equipment. She won’t even know you’re there.”
“I don’t care,” Adam said. “I just want to be with her.” Then, “I, uh, you should probably know that she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Soon as she’s able, I’ll need to talk to someone about having her transferred to a facility that can get her on the right meds, make sure they’re regulated. If I’d done that years ago, none of this would have happened.”
“Mr. Greene—”
“Adam.”
“Adam, it’s been my experience that things like this happen, no matter how hard you work to prevent them. You won’t do her or you or your little girl any good if you let yourself get all bogged down, trying to take the blame fo
r something over which you had no control.”
Nadine stepped closer and gave her boy a sideways hug, and he nodded.
“Well, I’ll be checking in on her every few hours, so if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.” He stretched. “I’ll take you back to see her, and then I’m headed for the showers and a nice long nap in the doctors’ lounge.”
Adam faced Nadine. “I think I’m going to stay a while. No sense in all of you hanging around. Besides, Amy looks a little rough around the edges. Would you mind taking her home?”
She hugged him. “Don’t you worry about a thing, sweetie. We’ll be praying like crazy.”
“I know.” He sent her a thin smile. “Thanks, Mom.”
And with that, he left Nadine alone to explain to Amy why she had to go home without her father…and without seeing her mother. Lord, she prayed, be with me now…
As the weeks passed, Nadine was forced to put her house on hold in order to help Adam and Amy, and hold up her end of the bargain with Lamont. And bless his big Texan heart, he never once made her feel rushed or put-upon. In fact, he’d taken to doing most of the shopping and cooking to help lighten her load.
Daily visits to the hospital were time-consuming and tiring, but she made a point of spending time with Julie, first thing in the morning or last thing at night. And, every day, Nadine saw small improvements that gave her hope that her daughter-in-law could soon be released to a psychiatric facility, where extensive testing and careful monitoring of medications would determine the best way to control her disorder. After that? Well, after that, God would guide them.
Shortly before her release from the hospital, the neurologist who’d treated her head injury asked permission to include Julie in a study he and his colleagues were conducting, to determine if massive head injury reduced or exacerbated the problems of schizophrenics. He ordered MRIs to study the different lobes of Julie’s brain. His conclusions amazed everyone, including the renowned specialist himself.
“You see,” Dr. Yadeen said, using his pen to point at the MRI results, “we most commonly find enlarged lateral ventricles, these fluid-filled sacs, here, around the brain.” Blood flow, he explained, was usually lower in afflicted people, “and the temporal lobe tends to be smaller as well. This is important, since it is involved with sound, emotion and speech.” He showed them past scans of Julie’s brain, where vast differences were visible when comparing her brain scans to those of non-afflicted patients.
Next he showed them the most recent scans.
“As you can see, her prefrontal cortex—which is directly associated with memory—was severely impacted in the accident. I’m assuming she seemed somewhat scatterbrained beforehand?”
Adam nodded, and Nadine agreed.
“In the case of schizophrenics, dopamine receptors are—”
Adam stepped up to the viewing screen. “Whoa. Doc. Are you telling us that the accident might have cured her?”
The doctor shrugged. “This would appear to be the case, though it is entirely too early to tell for certain. With a brain injury of her severity, it’s quite possible that things—if you’ll pardon my American slang—were mashed and rearranged to the point that what wasn’t transmitting before, is transmitting now, and the parts of her brain that once didn’t send the proper signals, are.”
“Like…like a miracle.”
Another doctorly shrug. “I am a scientist and, as such, I do not believe in such things, Mr. Greene, but if that is an explanation you can live peacefully with, I’ll not contradict it.”
“Does that mean Julie won’t need to be institutionalized?”
“For now, I’m quite comfortable in saying that you can take her home as soon as the rest of her doctors release her.”
Adam slapped a palm to the back of his neck—exactly as Lamont did when he was confused or flustered. “It’s all good news to me,” he said, shaking the neurologist’s hand.
“You’re more than welcome to stay here in my office and study the films if you choose,” the doctor said. “I’m afraid I have to go make my hospital rounds.”
He left them sitting in stupefied silence, blinking and grinning and shaking their heads.
After several minutes, Adam got to his feet. “If you need me,” he said, “I’ll be with Julie, trying to figure out how to earn her forgiveness.”
“There’s nothing to forgive, son. How could you help her when you didn’t know that anything was wrong?”
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing for me that marriage is for a lifetime, then, isn’t it?”
Nadine frowned. “I hate to be thickheaded, but I don’t get it.”
“I’ll have years and years to make up for lost time.” He gave her a big hug, then said, “You should go home, give Lamont a break, maybe take a nap with Amy.”
Laughing, Nadine agreed. “Yeah, he’s been on ‘Amy Duty’ a lot these days, hasn’t he?”
She pictured the way he looked, sitting on the floor as Amy clipped tiny pink barrettes in his dark hair. And as sat on a tiny chair, knees nearly touching his earlobes as he pretended to sip tea from a lavender cup that, in his big hands, looked like a thimble.
He’d hung coloring book pages on his fridge and displayed bunnies made from modeling clay on the corner of his mahogany desk. Her heart throbbed with love for the man who’d taught a frightened little girl how to make a fried bologna sandwich, and taught a lonely big girl the truth about the adage that “His bark is worse than his bite.”
She walked with Adam to Julie’s room, and after a short visit with them, headed for the hospital chapel. Like Adam, she felt an enormous desire to make things right between herself and Lamont. Hopefully, she prayed, she hadn’t waited too long to ask for his forgiveness.
Nadine waited until the house was quiet, then tapped on Lamont’s partially closed office door. How awful that because of her, he’d taken to holing up in here most evenings after supper.
“Yeah?”
Hopefully, what she’d come here to say would change all that. “It’s just me,” she said, shoving the door open just enough to slip into the room. “I thought you might like a cup of tea.”
Lamont muted the tiny TV beside his desk. “Thanks.” He put Julie’s cat onto the floor, and as Peeper stalked off, singed tail flicking, Lamont cleared a space for the mug. “Funny, but I was just sitting here, thinking that it I wasn’t such a lazy oaf, I’d get up and fix myself a cup.” Grinning slightly, he added, “Because of you, my day just doesn’t feel properly ended without one.”
She grabbed a coaster and placed the mug in its center. “Am I interrupting anything important?”
“Nah.” He turned off the television. “Unless you call listening to a couple of newsmen bicker something important. Where’s your tea?”
“In the kitchen.” She sat on the edge of one of the wingback chairs facing his desk. “I know it’s late, but…” Nadine sure would love a sip of that tea right about now, not only to wet her parched throat, but as a stall tactic while she summoned her courage. “I was hoping that…” Eyes closed, she prayed for the Almighty’s assistance.
He’d been leaning back in his big leather chair, ankles crossed and boot heels propped on the corner of his desk. One foot hit the floor, then the other, as he swiveled to face her.
Oh, what she’d give to erase the worried frown on his handsome brow, especially considering she’d painted it there. “I have something to tell you,” she began, “and something to ask you. And neither will be easy for me, so I hope you’ll let me get it all out before you say anything.”
“Uh-oh,” he ground out, “I don’t like the way this is starting out…”
Nadine took a deep breath, then reached for his mug. “Sorry,” she said, taking a sip, “but I’m more parched than the prairie.”
He shrugged. “I meant it when I said what’s mine is yours.” One corner of his mouth lifted in a slight smile. “Right down to that.”
His big gray eyes glittered with th
e truth of his words. Every moment spent in prayer these past weeks served to make her more and more certain that this was the man God had chosen for her. And if her unreasonable fears—carried to shield herself from possible heartache—hadn’t messed things up beyond repair, she’d spend the rest of her days making it up to him. She cleared her throat. “I won’t repeat my ‘I’m so grateful I could pop’ speech, because I know it upsets you. Instead, I’ll start by saying I’m sorry…”
Nadine knew even as he opened his mouth that he aimed to tell her she had nothing to be sorry for, so she held up a hand to silence him. “I apologize for behaving like a childish little ’fraidy cat. I should have trusted you more. Trusted you sooner.” Nadine took another sip of Lamont’s tea. “Anyway,” she continued, “you have my word, I’m one hundred percent finished with that nonsense. Permanently.”
She almost wished she hadn’t told him not to interrupt her. Almost. Because his cooperative silence only underscored how humbling it was, looking into eyes so filled with love, despite all she’d put him through.
Lamont wiggled his fingertips, then pointed at the tea. “Mind if I have a sip?”
“Oh.” A nervous giggle popped from her lips. “Sorry.” As she returned it to the coaster, her fingers grazed his. “It’s probably not even hot anymore.” Rising, she made a move to take it back. “Let me warm it up for you, and—”
“Let me hear your question instead, since it appears you’ve finished what you were going to tell me.”
Lord, don’t fail me now, she prayed, walking around the desk. Nadine knelt beside his chair and, fingers linked on his knee, looked up into his face. “I love you, Lamont, more than I’ve ever loved a man.”
“I know.”
Tears misted in her eyes. “You do?”
Nodding, he pulled her into his lap and kissed the tip of her nose. “Please tell me that isn’t your question.”
She’d given this moment a lot of thought, a lot of planning, and a whole lot of prayer. Fingers trembling, Nadine slid a dented and tarnished ring from her shirt pocket. “What. Is. That?” he asked, laughing softly.
“It’s Amy’s. She saved it from Lily’s wedding reception. It was wrapped around the little parchment announcement beside each guest’s plate, remember?”