“Really?” Summer asked as she stepped to my side and glanced down into the canvas bag. “I could have sworn I just saw you using it…”
“I know,” I let the bag sink back onto the chair, then I scratched my head and glanced around the makeshift workstation that I had set up on the kitchen counter.
Today Summer and I were at a house in West Hartford doing a hair and makeup trial for half a dozen prospective clients: a bride and her bridesmaids. If the bride was happy with today’s outcome, we’d be hired for the wedding.
While the wedding party was flitting around the kitchen in floral bathrobes, sipping champagne and giggling, I felt like I was suffering through the early symptoms of a panic attack, or early-onset dementia. Possibly both.
“Oh, honey!” Summer said suddenly, “It’s right there!”
She pointed to a spot on the counter and, sure enough, my eyes landed on the slender plastic eyeshadow palette that I had spent the last five minutes desperately searching for.
“Of course it was right in front of me the whole time,” I grumbled, reaching for the palette. “I swear, I’m losing my damn mind…”
“It’s been a long day,” Summer said in a soothing voice, rubbing my lower back. “If you want, I can finish up here while you take a break--”
“I’m fine,” I insisted firmly. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, my stomach squealed loudly in protest. I clutched my hands over my bump and grimaced.
“Oh my God!” one of the bridesmaids gasped, noticing me for the first time. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “What was that? It sounded like your baby just dropped a bowling ball in your stomach!”
It feels like it, too, I wanted to retort. Instead, I said:
“I think it’s just my stomach growling.”
“Are you hungry?” Summer asked, sounding concerned. “When’s the last time you had something to eat?”
“Umm…” I tried to navigate through all of the jumbled thoughts that were tangled up in my head. “I think I had a granola bar a few hours ago?”
“Is that the only thing you’ve had to eat today?” Summer’s look of concern deepened. “Vanessa, you have to eat more than that!”
Then, whispering as if it was some sort of secret, she added: “You’re eating for the baby too, you know…”
“I know,” I assured her. “Trust me…there’ll be a giant cheeseburger with my name on it as soon as we finish up here.”
“Are you sure you’ll be ok until then?” Summer asked. She reached for her purse and flipped open the zipper. “Let me see if I have anything in here to tide you over…”
She dug around through the contents of the purse, then feebly produced a small plastic canister of mints.
“Tic-Tacs?” she offered.
“I’ll be fine,” I insisted. “Let’s just finish this job, and then we can grab a bite to eat.”
“Ok,” Summer said reluctantly. She pushed her purse aside and I tried to remember why I had been looking for the Naked palette in the first place.
“Ahem,” another bridesmaid, sitting on a bar stool next to the countertop, cleared her throat. Her face was painted with the wrong shade of foundation. One eye was surrounded by a ring of black eyeshadow, and the other was still bare.
Shit. Did I do that? This is bad...
I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me. I had been feeling “off” all day. Granted, Summer was right: I probably hadn’t gotten enough to eat. But I was used to grabbing snacks on the go, or grazing throughout the day. I had never fucked up an entire face of makeup, just because I was hungry…
“Let’s finish up your smokey eyes,” I said, cracking open the palette and positioning myself over the bridesmaid.
“Did you say smokey eyes?” she gawked back at me, scowling. “I asked for something light and ethereal!”
She hopped off of the barstool and stomped across the kitchen, swiping a hand mirror off of the countertop. She took one look at herself, then she turned back to me. Her face twisted into an expression of pure horror.
“Oh my God!” she squealed, “I look like an Atlantic City hooker!”
“Oh, shit, you’re right!” the bride giggled over her glass of champagne. “Yikes…”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, rubbing my forehead with the back of my hand.
Why did I suddenly feel so light-headed? So dizzy?
“Just sit down,” I said. “I’ll start over…”
The room was starting to spin, and I shot a hand out to grip onto the back of the barstool. I tried to steady myself, but the swivel seat on the barstool spun around, and I spun right with it.
I felt myself slump forward.
“Is she ok?” a nasally voice asked.
“Vanessa?” Summer asked from somewhere behind me. “Vanessa, are you ok?”
I blinked my eyes, but all I could see were shimmery dots of white that were growing and swirling, slowly taking over my entire field of vision.
“I…” I heard my voice stammer, but it sounded like it was coming from miles away. “I umm…”
And then I felt my knees give out beneath me as everything went completely white…
***
“Vanessa?” I heard a voice calling from somewhere far away. “Vanessa, can you hear me?”
I slowly blinked my eyes open. At first everything was fuzzy and distorted, but the room slowly came into focus.
“Where am I?” I tried to ask, but my mouth was too dry to form the words. Then I saw Summer, leaning over me.
“You’re awake!” she said. She looked relieved.
My hands shifted around on either side of me, and I felt crisp bed sheets. I was laying down… I was in a bed…
My eyes drifted past Summer, inspecting the room around me: barren white walls, an impossibly bright white light glaring down at me from the ceiling…
Then I saw the IV bag, filled with a colorless cloudy solution, hanging next to the bed. I followed the long, clear tube away from the IV bag and across the blankets that had been draped over me…and then, with a pang of horror, I found the end of the tube: it was stuck into the roof of my hand, held in place by a strip of translucent surgical tape.
I felt a pitiful squeak sneak out of my lips, and I turned back to Summer.
“Am I in the hospital?” I asked, finding it slightly easier to form words this time.
“Yes,” Summer said slowly. “But everything is ok! Don’t panic!”
“The baby!” I said. Immediately, my hands clung to my bump through the crispy bedsheets. It was still there; I could still feel the firm curve of my stomach, like a basketball.
“I’m sure the baby is perfectly fine,” Summer told me. “The doctor was able to find a heartbeat earlier, and he’s running some tests now just to be sure--”
I knew Summer was trying to calm me down, but I couldn’t take her word for it. I wanted to know for myself. I slid my palms around my bump, feeling for any movement…any confirmation that my baby was really ok. But I couldn’t feel anything. Not so much as a flutter, or a karate kick to my intestines...
“I want to see the doctor,” I said numbly as panic flooded through me.
“I already asked the nurse to bring him in,” Summer said. “I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”
“Is Josh here?”
“Umm…” Summer hesitated, and the expression on her face made the sense of dread inside my double.
“Where is Josh?”
“He wasn’t with us when this happened…” Summer said slowly, avoiding the question. “Do you remember anything? Do you remember being at the client’s house? Do you remember passing out?”
I grimaced and tried to replay the last thing I remembered. I could remember the kitchen…I could remember the bitchy bridesmaids and their stupid matching bathrobes…I could remember feeling dizzy…
“I remember,” I nodded slowly. “How long was I out?”
“You came b
ack pretty quickly the first time,” Summer told me.
The first time?!
“You actually walked with me to the car, and I thought you were getting better. But when we got to the hospital, you passed out again. That was a few hours ago…”
“A few hours?” I grimaced, still squeezing onto my stomach. “Does Josh know that I’m here?”
“Vanessa--”
“Does he?”
“I tried texting him,” she admitted reluctantly. “Then I tried calling him. But…I haven’t been able to get ahold of him yet.”
“What?” I squeaked. My grip on my stomach tightened. “But--”
“I’m sure he’s just busy,” Summer said quickly. “He’s probably at work…or maybe he got called to a fire? I don’t know…”
“No,” I shook my head. “No…I need my phone. Please?”
Summer bit her lip apprehensively, but she reached into her purse and produced my cell phone. She handed it to me slowly.
I clicked on the home button and the digital screen flooded with notifications: calendar reminders, missed calls, text messages, Facebook alerts…but as I whisked my thumb through the list, I didn’t see a single notification from Josh.
I tapped the phone button and picked his number from the list of recent calls. My wrists still felt limp and weak, but I managed to press the phone against my ear. The ringtone vibrated through the phone, rattling through my already-shaking fingers.
Pick up…I need you…
“We’re sorry, but the number you are calling does not have a voice message system set up--”
“Where is he?” I grunted, dropping my phone and sinking back into the pillows.
“Vanessa, I’m sure there’s an explanation--”
“No,” I shook my head, too distraught to listen.
He’s supposed to be here for me. He told me that I could trust him. He promised he wouldn’t leave. Where is he?!
I realized that I was being hysterical, but I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t think about things rationally. My emotions were twisting and coiling inside of me, mutating just as rapidly as the series of high-pitched ‘beeps’ blaring from the EKG machine that was recording my heart rate.
“We’ll figure this out,” Summer promised me. “Let’s just take this one step at a time…”
I picked up my phone again, this time tapping open the web browser. My hands were shaking so badly that it took several attempts before I finally managed to type ‘Hartford Fire Department Firehouse 56’ into the search bar.
The Google search results immediately loaded up on my screen. The top result was a listing for Firehouse 56, including the address and a Google Maps aerial image of the station. I scrolled down, finding the firehouse phone number. I tapped the number with my thumb, and it automatically dialed.
I pressed the phone to my ear and listened to the ringing.
Come on, come on, come on…
“Firehouse 56,” a deep voice answered. The voice sounded so familiar that, for a split second, I actually thought it was Josh. But I knew it wasn’t.
“Is this Brady?” I asked.
“Yes…who is this?”
“Vanessa.”
It struck me that I hadn’t actually seen or spoken to Brady since his wedding day. I hadn’t spoken to Cass in a while, either. It wasn’t intentional; we were both just so busy...
I wondered what Brady thought about all of this: the fact that Josh and I had gotten together at his wedding, or the fact that we were having a baby. I had never thought to ask Josh about how his brother took the news.
“Vanessa!” Brady recognized me, then he sounded confused again: “Are you looking for Cassidy? You know you dialed the firehouse, right?”
“I’m not looking for Cass. I’m trying to get ahold of Josh, actually. I’m in the hospital, and he’s not answering his phone and--”
“Wait, did you say Josh?” Brady asked, sounding even more confused. “And…did you say you’re in the hospital?”
“Yes,” I stammered as my throat started to close up. “I need to talk to him. They’re running tests on me and the baby, but I--”
“The baby?”
“Yes, I--”
“What baby?”
My hand went numb, and I could barely feel the phone between my fingers.
“What do you mean, ‘what baby’?! Our baby…”
“Vanessa, I’m sorry but…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Didn’t Josh tell you?”
“No. Josh hasn’t told me anything about a baby.”
That was the last thing I heard before the phone slipped from my grip and fell towards the tile floor of the hospital room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE | JOSH
“Your grandfather had a stroke,” the surgeon explained from across the sterile white desk in his sterile white office. Doctor Jurgen, according to the name embroidered on the breast of his sterile white lab coat.
He looked way too young to be a ‘doctor.’ He definitely looked too young to be holding my grandfather’s life in his dainty, uncalloused hands.
“An ischemic stroke,” he continued. “This occurs when there’s a blockage in an artery that prevents proper blood flow to the brain. Without oxygen, the brain tissue begins to atrophy and die. There can also be some swelling…”
Doctor Jurgen slid an image across the desk between us, printed on a translucent black film: a CT scan of my grandfather’s brain.
“This scan was performed when your grandfather was admitted to the ER,” Doctor Jurgen explained. “The dark area that you see here--” his finger circled around a dark speck that freckled the shadowy grey brain matter “--is the tissue that was damaged as a result of oxygen deprivation.”
I blinked down at the CT scan, trying to process what the baby-faced surgeon was telling me.
This wasn’t just tissue…this was my grandfather’s brain. Somewhere, amidst the shadowy shapes and foggy clouds that appeared on the film, there were eighty-odd years of life housed in that brain; eighty-odd years of memories and experiences and thoughts and opinions that had shaped Colonel Thomas Hudson into the man that he was.
As Doctor Jurgen drew his finger around the dark speck on the CT scan, I wondered how much of the Colonel had been lost along with that damaged tissue.
Colonel Thomas Hudson was a man of many distinctions: a decorated Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, a pillar of his community, and an all-around American hero…
But there was one distinction that had never quite stuck: “grandpa.”
From the time that Brady and I were old enough to talk, our father’s father had staunchly insisted that we refer to him only as ‘the Colonel.’
It’s not like “grandpa” suited him, anyways. As Brady liked to put it: the guy was about as soft and cuddly as a Brillo pad. While other kids grew up with grandfathers that looked like Santa Claus and retired to Florida, Brady and I just had the Colonel.
He might have been a revered war hero, but Brady and I knew him to be stiff, rigid, and cold. In that sense, he was just like our father.
Unlike our father, the Colonel was a man of duty. What he failed to provide in affection or emotional support, he made up for in stubborn loyalty. Even after my father kicked me out of the house, the Colonel never stopped calling to check up on me. And after my father died, those phone calls started to feel like a lifeline; like one of the last pieces of my family that I had left. Besides Brady…the Colonel really was the last piece of my family that I had left.
The Colonel still called me every few months. And since moving back to Hartford, I had even gone to visit him once or twice. We never talked about anything deeper than football or the weather or politics, but I still found a sense of comfort from those conversations. I knew that in some weird, fucked up way, that was the Colonel’s way of showing that he cared. Those brief, awkward phone calls gave me a stronger sense of family and loyalty than my father had given me in the e
ntire eighteen years that I spent under his roof.
“Your grandfather was very lucky,” the doctor said, dragging me out of my thoughts and back into that sterile white office.
“He was at a grocery store when the symptoms presented. A bystander recognized the signs of stroke and called 911. Your grandfather was immediately brought to the ER. We were able to operate and remove the blockage before he suffered from any substantial tissue loss or damage.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Will there be permanent damage? Will he be ok?”
“It’s too early to know for sure. Sometimes the tissue can heal and function normally again, and other times the damage is permanent and the patient will suffer from some form of impairment.”
“Impairment? What kind of impairment?”
“Reduced motor skills, difficulty speaking, behavioral changes, cognitive deficiencies…anything, really. The brain is a fragile thing, and every patient responds differently.”
I slumped back into my chair, feeling numb.
“The good news is that we caught this early,” Doctor Jurgen continued. “With the proper rehabilitative care, I think your grandfather has a good chance at making a full recovery. Rest assured, he’s in good hands.”
I wasn’t going to feel ‘assured’ about anything. At least not as long as I was stuck in that sterile white office, sitting across from this dumbed-down Doogie Howser and his little ballerina hands.
“I want to see him,” I said.
“He’s still recovering. It might be a while before he’s awake, and it might be even longer before he’s cognizant enough for visitors--”
“I want to see my grandfather,” I insisted. “Please.”
Doctor Jurgen sighed, then he stood up from his desk and motioned for me to follow him.
As soon as we stepped out of the office, I caught a glimpse of the cloudy grey morning sky through the tall glass windows that lined the hospital corridor.
“It’s morning,” I noted, feeling surprised.
“Just after 7 AM,” Doctor Jurgen confirmed with a glance at his Apple Watch. Then: “It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re at a hospital, because in here it feels like time stands still.”
The Complete Firehouse 56 Series Page 32