Billion Dollar Man

by Ali Parker

  “Ask Mommy to help me.”

  “What a champion,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” he said, looking up at his mom.

  “Don’t worry, baby. We’re okay.”

  She scooped him up. Two seconds later, a car skidded into the driveway and a man jumped out. I assumed he was the father. He ran to his wife and son, relief clear on his face.

  “I think our work is done here,” Ted said. “Well done, Ben. You did well. And apparently, kids like you more than they like me.”

  “It’s the face,” I said

  Ted laughed and pulled himself back into the truck. As we drove back to the station, I looked out of the window at Portland sliding by. I was happy where I was. I helped put out a fire today, and helping people made me happy. Happier than I had been the last six years. I hoped my dad was looking down on me from somewhere, proud of the choices I’d made.

  I had never been very close to my dad. I stayed behind with my mom in Portland when he’d moved to New York and remarried. But it was the curse of every son that he wanted his father to approve of him, no matter how easy or hard that was. I hoped my father would approve of the person I had become and the life I’d chosen to live despite what he’d set up for me. I knew he had cared, but I was my own person.

  “What did you think?” Tyler asked when we had taken care of everything we had used and put our gear away. We sat on camping chairs on the roof of the fire station with sodas in our hands.

  “I think this is exactly where I want to be,” I said.

  “Good,” Tyler said. “You’re a ton of fun.”

  Chapter 4

  Mila

  On Thursday, I was on rotation at the ICU. Both the ICU and the Emergency Room were chaotic at best. It was also where I felt I could do the most. When patients were in mortal danger and we managed to pull them through, I felt like my choice to become a nurse was the right one.

  “Morning, Mrs. Norton,” I said, walking into an ICU room. Mrs. Norton looked up from her seat next to the bed. Her eyes were swollen from crying and lack of sleep, her hair was a mess after spending one night after the other tossing and turning, and she wore no makeup. It made her look even younger. She was only twenty-one, but with the worry etched on her face, the fading hope, she looked like she was barely out of school.

  “How are you doing today?” I knew small talk wasn’t going to do much, but I didn’t want to ignore her. She was suffering more than the patient at this point.

  “I’m all right,” she said with a thick voice. “How is Charlie?”

  I looked at the patient. He was in a medically induced coma. He had been like this for three weeks now. We had to keep him sedated so the pain wouldn’t be unbearable.

  When he had come in, he’d been a mess. I hadn’t thought he would make it. His wife had told us he’d had a rock climbing accident—the rookie on duty hadn’t fastened the ropes right. That was going to be an ugly insurance battle once we knew Mr. Norton was going to survive.

  He had come in with six broken ribs on each side and a collapsed lung because one of the ribs had punctured it. His sternum had cracked, his collarbone had snapped, and his spine was fractured as well. There was a chance he might never walk again, but we wouldn’t know that as long as he was in a coma. His skull had been fractured due to an old helmet that had been cheaper than a new one. More than an expensive mistake. With all the internal problems, Mr. Norton had nothing but a scratch on his brow, making him look peacefully asleep instead of on the brink of death.

  “He is stable,” I said. “We have nothing to worry about as long as we keep him induced. But the doctor will be by shortly to talk to you about it.”

  Mrs. Norton nodded and took her husband’s hand.

  “We’ve only been married six months,” she said.

  I had known they were a young couple, but six months was nothing. It flew by in the blink of an eye.

  Tears welled up in her eyes.

  “I can’t lose him. Not now. We had so many fights with my parents before we got married. They don’t like him, you know? I don’t speak to my parents now. They didn’t even come to the wedding. If I lost him, I’ll have no one.”

  God, what a mess. I felt awful for her. To be married for such a short time before having your true love ripped away from you had to be hell. It made sense that she looked like death warmed up.

  “Can I get you anything?” I offered. “A warm cup of coffee, maybe?”

  Mrs. Norton thought about it for a moment before she nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  I left the hospital room and walked to the coffee station where I made a fresh cup of coffee. The coffee wouldn’t make anything better, but hopefully, the caffeine would be a small pick-me-up where everything else around her was crashing to the ground.

  She was very dedicated to her husband. Mrs. Norton barely left his side. When she had come in, it had taken one look to know that hospital visiting hours wouldn’t apply to her. She came in at six in the morning and only left at eleven at night. The first few nights, she had slept in the chair next to his bed and used the private shower at the hospital.

  When I returned to the hospital room with the cup of coffee I had prepared, Dr. Rutherford was with the Nortons.

  “His bones have shown significant healing, enough to set me at ease that he will make a full recovery in time. He’s breathing on his own now, and I’m happy that he will continue to do so.”

  Mrs. Norton was crying again, but they were good tears this time. It was positive.

  “What’s our next step?” she asked, sniffling.

  “We want to bring him out of the coma tomorrow. When he’s awake, we can take the next step.”

  Mrs. Norton broke down in tears. “Oh god,” she cried. “He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”

  “It’s still a long road, but it’s looking good,” Dr. Rutherford said with a smile. He glanced at me before he left the hospital room. I stayed behind with Mrs. Norton who was still crying, holding her husband’s hands to her lips, and pressing kisses onto his knuckles.

  “Here you go,” I said, offering her the coffee.

  “Oh, thank you,” Mrs. Norton said, letting go of her husband to take the coffee from me. “Did you hear that? He’s going to be okay. I can’t wait until I can speak to him again. He’ll know who I am, right?”

  “I’m sure he will,” I said.

  “He won’t have amnesia or anything after the bumps on his head?”

  I shook my head. “It’s hard to tell at this point, but I don’t think so.” I sincerely hoped Mr. Norton would recognize his wife. The couple had been through so much already, and it was a difficult road ahead. To have something as awful as amnesia to deal with on top of everything else would be horrible.

  “I have to go,” I said. “You ring us when you need anything.”

  Mrs. Norton nodded and walked back to the seat next to her husband’s bed. It was good to see commitment and true love like that.

  “We have an emergency,” someone called from the nurse's station, and I rushed to help out. An elderly lady was brought in with a mask over her mouth and nose, her eyes closed. Her family tagged behind her looking lost and shaken.

  “What do we have?” I asked.

  “Pneumonia. Advanced stages. She can’t breathe on her own. Heart rate is dropping.”

  I ran with the gurney, pushing it into an open room, and I worked with another two nurses to stabilize the woman while the attending doctor was paged. The family—three men I assumed were her sons—hovered on the periphery without interfering. Bless them.

  When we finally stabilized her, the extra nurses left. I stayed behind with Dr. Nash.

  “Are you her sons?” Dr. Nash asked the three men. They nodded. “Your mother is very ill. She has an advanced form of pneumonia.”

  “We’ve been telling her to come to a doctor, but she’s always been stubborn,” one of them spoke up.

  “How long has she been sick?” Dr.
Nash asked.

  “Two weeks, just about,” he said. “Is it really bad?”

  Dr. Nash paused, searching for words, and I knew the news wasn’t going to be good.

  “I’m not going to pretend this isn’t very serious. At her age, she should have received medical care almost right away. We’ll do what we can, but she is very frail, and she might not respond to medication as well as we would like.”

  “Is she going to die?” one of the other men asked, looking terrified.

  “I hope we can bring her back, but I can’t tell you for sure that we’ll be able to fight this.”

  Dr. Nash left the room after answering one or two more questions, and I was left behind. The three brothers hugged each other before moving to the bedside. The old lady was still wearing the oxygen mask, and she looked so small and frail under the hospital sheets, I worried for her. I worried about them.

  “We should have brought her in,” one of them said.

  “She didn’t want to. We can’t force her,” another answered.

  “But she might die, and this will be on us.”

  The first speaker only shook his head.

  “What would you have done?” one of them asked me, and I was suddenly included in their little bubble of guilt and uncertainty.

  “We have a responsibility to respect our elders and their wishes,” I said. “It’s very easy to look back and say, ‘I should have done it differently,’ but you did the right thing by bringing her in as soon you realized there was a problem. We’ll do what we can to take care of her. Is your mother stubborn?”

  They all nodded.

  “That’s a good thing. Stubborn people are more likely to fight.”

  With that little bit of hope, I left the room and walked back to the nurse’s station.

  “How is she?” Claire, another nurse on duty with me, asked.

  “I hope she makes it. For their sake,” I said. “They’re going to blame themselves for the rest of their lives if she doesn’t.”

  Claire shook her head. “This is a tough business to be in. Sometimes, I wonder why I became a nurse. All we see is the bad side of life.”

  I shook my head. “No, what we see is people beating the odds every day. We see people getting another shot at life. We see the good when people who are knocked down by life can find it in them to get back up.”

  Claire smiled, shaking her head. “You always see a silver lining, don’t you?”

  “In this job, it’s the only thing worth holding onto.”

  When I finally got off work after a twelve-hour shift, I was exhausted. I had been on my feet all day, running from one trauma unit to the next. But it wasn’t just physical exhaustion. I was emotionally drained. There had been a couple of tough cases today, and seeing the pain and suffering of the relatives who were scared they would lose a loved one got to me more than seeing the patients themselves. We could administer medicine that would do the trick in so many cases, but there was very little we could do for broken hearts, for loss and guilt and sorrow.

  I stopped at the store to buy a ready-made meal. I wasn’t in the mood to cook. What I wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep until my next shift, but I had to take care of myself first. If I stopped eating because of everything I saw, I wasn’t going to do myself any good.

  I had learned that the first few weeks on the job.

  “Mila,” someone said behind me when I stared at the meals in one of the fridges. When I turned around, Ben stood next to me, and he looked concerned. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “It was a long day at the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ben said. “I’m sure it gets stressful, but if anyone can handle it, it’s you.”

  That brought a smile to my lips. Talking to Ben made me feel better right away. It was a relief to talk to someone outside of the hospital, and the distraction was welcome.

  “Ben, we’re paying!” someone called from the checkout point.

  “I’m coming,” Ben said before turning back to me. “When’s your next off day?” he asked me.

  “I’m off tomorrow, actually,” I said.

  “So am I. I get off at seven tomorrow morning. Do you want to get lunch tomorrow afternoon? I could do with the break, and I know you can too.”

  I thought about it only for a moment before I nodded. I needed to get my mind off the patients and the difficulties at the hospital, and Ben was a wonderful distraction. I enjoyed spending time with him.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Ben said. “Take care of yourself.”

  “See you tomorrow,” I said. When he walked away, I smiled before I reached in to grab a frozen meal.

  Chapter 5

  Ben

  I drove to Mila’s apartment just before noon. She had texted me her address this morning, and I wanted to pick her up instead of meeting her at a restaurant. I was only being a gentleman. I knew I couldn’t pursue Mila the way I would have liked. With Jerrod being as protective as he was and with him as my best friend, Mila wasn’t exactly available for me to go after.

  But we were friends. We had spent a lot of time together before I had left for New York. She was my best friend’s little sister, after all. We’d had lunch together plenty of times.

  Sure, it had never just been the two of us, and it had usually been at the Castle residence where Mila had still lived back then. But for us to hang out as friends wasn’t strange, and I wasn’t stepping on anyone’s toes by taking Mila out to lunch. We were just going to hang out together like we used to.

  The moment Mila stepped out of her apartment building door after I buzzed up to let her know I was waiting for her, I knew I was wrong. This wouldn’t be like old times, hanging out with nothing between us.

  I wasn’t the same person I had been back then. I had learned a lot about who I was and about the life I wanted to live. I had more money in the bank than I ever dreamed of having, and I knew where I was headed.

  Mila had changed even more. She had grown up. Gone was the high school girl who used to tag along when Jerrod and I would go somewhere under-twenty-ones were allowed. In her place was a mature, confident young woman.

  And my god, she was beautiful. Every time I saw her, I was stunned by how much more beautiful she was than I could imagine. She had an elegance about her that I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it was something that had come with her maturity. Or maybe, now that she was at an age where I could see her as a dating prospect, I looked at her differently.

  Her shoulder-length brown hair was pulled back in a short ponytail which made her big brown eyes stand out. They were hazel, changing color with what she wore. Today, she wore a mint-colored tank top with jeans, and her eyes looked almost green. Her jeans were tight enough that they looked painted on, and she wore ballet flats with it.

  “You look beautiful,” I said when I hugged her.

  “Thanks,” she said with a shy smile. She seemed a little more closed off than when we’d been at The Cottage together, but she’d been drinking then.

  “It feels good to wear normal clothes for a change and not my scrubs.”

  I opened the car door for her before walking around to the driver’s side.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I was thinking of driving to a seaside restaurant. To get away from our neck of the woods a little, clear our heads.”

  “That sounds amazing,” Mila said, and I pulled into the road.

  Mila and I were together in the car for about half an hour to get to the coast. Being in a car together was strangely intimate. With little eye contact because we were seated side-by-side, it made it easier to talk about things that would have been awkward when facing each other. I enjoyed talking while driving.

  “How is your first week at the station going?” Mila asked.

  I nodded. “It’s been hard. I have a lot to get used to, but I love it. It’s exactly what I wanted to do my whole life.”

  “I guess you can say that with certainty
now because you tried corporate. What was that like? Horrible?”

  I shook my head. “Not horrible. Just different. I wasn’t cut out to be in an office all day. It bothered me because I didn’t get out as much as I would have liked. And to be responsible for that many people working beneath me … it wasn’t hard, but I didn’t enjoy it.”

  “I think you did the right thing,” Mila said.

  I glanced at her. “I don’t know. My dad wanted me to follow in his footsteps, and with him gone, I feel obligated, in a way, to realize his dreams.”

  Mila hesitated for a second. “I’m sorry your dad passed away. I know that has to be hard. But can I be insensitive?”

  I chuckled. “I don’t know if I’ll get offended, but asking it that way makes me curious about what you’re going to say.”

  Mila flashed me a gorgeous smile. “What I want to say is that even though I understand you want to honor your dad and his legacy, he had his chance to live out his dreams. Now, it’s your turn to chase yours. Otherwise, you’ll end up feeling unfulfilled, and nothing else would have changed.”

  “You mean despite trying so hard to impress him, my dad will still be dead,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean it so straightforward.”

  “No, you’re right. Nothing will change, and I won’t be happy at the end of it. I’ve never looked at it so plainly.”

  “It’s not easy to distance yourself from something when you’re emotionally involved,” Mila said.

  I glanced at her again. Her eyes were on the road where mine should have been too. But she surprised me with her wisdom. When she looked at me, her eyes were deep, and she smiled at me.

  I turned my eyes back to the road. Mila and I clicked on a level I hadn’t expected. I liked spending time with her. We got along perfectly, and she was so sage, it was refreshing.

  It was a pity she was Jerrod’s sister. I would have liked to court her in the true sense of the word, to take her out and spoil her and to spend time with her, exploring every part of who she’d become. But that wasn’t going to happen. I knew how Jerrod felt about keeping her safe, and it would be wrong on so many levels for me to go after Mila. But I could fall in love with this woman if I wasn’t careful. Something about her was intoxicating.