By two thirty in the afternoon, Sarah’s heart monitor had alarmed two more times, and Will hovered in her room, ignoring his growling stomach, refusing to leave her side to eat lunch. He sat in the vinyl recliner reading a movie script that he had been given to consider. He was reading it out loud to Sarah, and he made funny voices for the characters as each spoke. It was a romantic comedy, her perfect date-night movie, and it reminded him of the night of the summer rain when she first admitted she loved him. He was at a point in the plot where the characters were pulled apart with no hope of getting back together when he looked up at Sarah’s face and noticed a tear rolling down her cheek.
He got up and moved to the chair next to the bed. Will reached up and wiped the tear away with his thumb, not sure at first whether it was real. Then he gently brushed a loose strand of hair off her face and whispered, “Sarah?” He wasn’t sure if it was normal for a comatose person to have tears, but he was a little apprehensive to ask about it, dreading more bad news.
Will sat holding her hand and watching her face in silence, hoping for a miracle. He had silently prayed off and on during the day, but his prayers had never saved Jack, so he didn’t put much stock in them. He watched and waited. He stared at her face, searching for a sign—a sign that she would come out of this.
After ten long minutes and no miracle, he said, “Sarah, I’m scared.” He took a deep breath, fighting the moisture in his eyes. He chuckled, adding, “And look, I’m not running.” He took another deep breath. “I’m scared, Sarah, that I’ll never hear your laugh again, that I’ll never see those beautiful green eyes of yours. I’m scared that we’ll never see our children jumping off the dock at your parents’ cabin, that we won’t get to grow old together. I can’t live my life without you. Please wake up, beautiful. I need you.” His breath caught in his throat. “I need you,” he whispered a second time.
Emotionally and physically exhausted, he laid down his head on the bed next to their intertwined hands. He closed his eyes. His head felt like lead as he envisioned the third day after Jack’s accident—the day that he died. Will remembered watching the heart monitor as Jack’s heart started to fail, how the beats slowed and spaced apart and eventually stopped altogether. In his mind, he could still hear his brother’s last gasping breath and could still picture his mouth opening, struggling to suck in air for the last time. He couldn’t get that memory out of his mind. He didn’t want to see Sarah die that way. He didn’t want her to die. The tears started to leak out of his eyes, and he could feel the moisture drip down the side of his hand. He crushed his eyes together, willing the tears to stop, and then he felt something brush his cheek. Will lifted his head to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. He looked at her hand, and there was no movement.
He glanced up at her face. She still looked like she was sleeping. Her breathing was steady. Her eyes were closed.
“Sarah?” He paused. “Did you just touch my face?”
He watched her intently for any kind of reaction. After several seconds, the corners of her lips turned up just a little, and his heart leapt. Ecstatic now, he chuckled.
“Sarah, you smiled at me. Beautiful, open your eyes. I want to see those gorgeous green eyes.” Feeling a glimmer of hope, he brushed his fingertips from her chin to her temple and cupped her cheek in his hand. “Please?”
Sarah slowly opened her eyes and looked at the hand that was still touching her face.
“Sarah,” he bayed in a huskier-than-usual voice.
She moved her eyes to his, and his heart jumped in his chest. Will stood to lean over her, and he gently touched his lips to hers. With Sarah still staring wide-eyed at him after a couple of seconds, he pulled back.
“Please tell me you know who I am.”
Sarah nodded and said in a raspy voice, “Um…”
He looked at her in panic. “You know who I am, right?” he asked again, louder.
“Yeah,” she said with a hoarse laugh. “Ouch.” She instinctively moved her hand to her right side. “Don’t make me laugh anymore. You should have seen your face.”
He just smiled at her, happy to have her back.
The nurse interrupted Will’s bliss by entering and announcing, “It’s so good to have you awake, Sarah. My name is Darlene, and I’m a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. You were in a car accident. How are you feeling?” She flitted around the room, asking Sarah questions and recording information from various instruments. The nurse checked Sarah’s eyes with a small flashlight. She listened to her heart and began to check her over from head to toe.
Will slipped out the door, saying, “I’m going to get your mom. I’ll be right back.”
He sprinted down the hall to the family area. Kate and Lara looked up with a start as he paused a moment, taking a breath. He could feel the positive energy radiating from him.
“She’s awake,” he announced.
Kate squeezed past him in the doorway and raced toward Sarah’s room.
Lara stopped to hug her son, and Will said, “Thanks, Mom, for being here. It means the world to me.” Then he smiled his brilliant one-dimple smile. He was genuinely happy for the first time in days.
When he returned, Sarah was sitting forward in bed, splinting her side with a pillow, and the nurse was listening to Sarah’s back with her stethoscope. Sarah’s eyes met Will’s, and she silently mouthed, “Love you.”
Will’s face lit up.
Kate asked the nurse how Sarah was doing, and the nurse responded, “She’s doing great considering all she’s been through. I figured she was awake—at least I hoped—when I looked up and saw Romeo over there making out with her.”
Kate and Lara turned and looked accusingly at Will.
“What? It was just one kiss—a peck, really,” he explained.
They all laughed.
“I’ll talk to the doctor as soon as possible, and we’ll run some more tests. Sarah will probably get moved out of the ICU today. I don’t think she’ll get to go home for Christmas, but we’ll see what the doctor says.” The nurse finished examining Sarah and left the room for the computer poised right outside at the nurses’ station.
Over the next couple of hours, Sarah continued to get assessed by every discipline at the hospital. She saw respiratory therapy, neurology, cardiac, and dietary. Every field squeezed in her assessment because they knew tomorrow was Christmas Eve and staff would be low. The nurse explained that no one wanted to be called in for an assessment that could be completed today. At one point in between evaluations, Darlene asked everyone to leave the room so she could remove Sarah’s urinary catheter.
Sarah reacted by saying, “My what? Are you serious?” She leaned over the side of the bed, which was quite a feat for her, to spy the bag of yellow liquid dangling on the bed frame. “That’s so gross,” she declared with a look of utter horror on her face.
“That’s nothing, Sarah. You should have seen what was collected in the bubbling ant farm. That was gross.” She seemed mortified at the thought of all that Will had seen while she was unconscious. Will chuckled as he mussed her hair gently. Then he left the room with a huge grin.
While Sarah was being assessed, all the important people were notified of her recovery. Will’s dad, Zander, was boarding a plane from Toronto and would be meeting everyone in Minnesota for Christmas. Lara and Kate had decided that the two families would spend Christmas together, since Will would not leave Sarah’s side and Lara wouldn’t leave Will. They would all have Christmas dinner at the Austins’ house or the hospital, depending on Sarah’s condition. Now that Sarah was awake, they hoped that it could be at the house.
After all the assessments had been completed, Sarah was moved out of the intensive care unit to the medical/surgical floor, one story up, and was placed in a room at the far end of the hallway. Will had used his charm with the charge nurse to get a private room away from the commotion of the floor. The room was as close to a presidential suite as the hospital possessed. The charge nurse agreed that if Jonatha
n Williams was going to be in Sarah’s room, she needed to be away from the rest of the floor, or more security would be needed. The nurse knew that if word got out that he was at her hospital, it would be utter chaos on the surgical floor, so she assured Will that his presence would be kept confidential and that Sarah would be assigned the most trustworthy staff.
Once Sarah was settled in her new room, she was really too tired to converse very long with her visitors, so everyone headed back to Kate and David’s house to celebrate her awakening, except Will. He still wasn’t willing to leave Sarah’s side. He would let her sleep, but would not leave her. She smiled at him as he kissed her forehead. She couldn’t keep her heavy eyelids open any longer.
“Thanks for staying with me, Will,” she said as her eyes closed.
“Anytime, beautiful,” he told her, just happy to have her back.
Will settled into the plum-colored recliner and relaxed for the first time in days. He fell asleep quickly and slept for several hours before opening his eyes again. Slightly disoriented, he looked up at Sarah, and she was staring back at him, smiling.
“Hi.” He stretched his arms straight out and then as far back as he could manage. “You awake long?” Will asked with a yawn. He checked his watch. It was eleven fifteen.
“No, not really. You looked so peaceful that I didn’t want to wake you,” Sarah admitted.
He smiled back at her, rubbing his face. “I guess I needed some sleep. Do you want to talk?”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” she said.
“Do you remember the accident much?” he asked as he moved to the smaller chair next to her bed.
“Most of it. My car was totaled, right?” she said.
He nodded his head in affirmation. “The cars just kept piling into you.”
“I don’t remember being pulled out of my car or the ambulance ride,” Sarah confessed.
“Your mom has all the newspaper clippings and some pictures of your car too. I’m sure she’ll show them to you. You’ll be amazed that you survived.”
“She is really good about documenting everything in scrapbooks.”
“Sarah, I thought you were never going to come back to me,” Will blurted out, searching her eyes for some kind of explanation as to why this kept happening to the people he cared about the most.
“Well, I didn’t come back on my own,” she replied, sounding nervous.
“What do you mean, not on your own?”
She hesitated and whispered softly, “Jack told me I had to come back.”
He gaped at her in disbelief, not knowing whether she was trying to make a joke. “What?” he asked, shaking his head, unable to process what she had said.
She looked at him with a very serious expression. “Jack told me that you needed me and that I had to go to you. He said you wouldn’t survive if I didn’t wake up.” Tears were building in her eyes. “He said you and I were meant to be together and I wasn’t meant to leave you. That—” She stopped and studied Will’s face. “Are you all right, Will?”
He stared at her face in disbelief, wanting to believe her, but not knowing if he could. His heart was beating faster, and he sat as rigid as stone.
“It may have been a dream,” she said, studying him again. “It was probably a dream.” Her eyes met his, and she revealed all the sincerity she was feeling.
“How was he?” Will whispered as he regarded her.
“He was happy. He loves you and has never blamed you for the accident. He wants you to be happy too.”
“I miss him, Sarah.”
“I know.” She intertwined her hand with his, and the corners of her lips turned up slightly. “He’s always watching out for you, though. He called you Jon-a-thon.”
A smile broke across Will’s face. He had forgotten that Jack called him that. He cocked his head, staring at Sarah in amazement. “I never told you that.” He was sure he had never shared that information with her.
She shrugged her right shoulder slightly and smiled lovingly back at him.
“You know, I used to dream about him all the time, especially the first year after he died. They were always good dreams, not nightmares. I hated waking up from them. I haven’t had a dream about Jack in a long time. Every time my phone would ring that first year, I thought it was him. I knew he was dead, but just for a split second, I’d think, ‘Oh, that must be Jack.’ Weird, huh?” he admitted.
She smiled and squeezed his hand.
“It doesn’t happen anymore,” he assured her. He didn’t know what to believe, but he wanted to believe that Jack was looking out for him and Sarah. It comforted him. “I’m glad you came back to me.”
Just then, a perky little blonde nurse peeked into Sarah’s room. “I didn’t think you would be awake. I’m Paige. I’ll be your nurse until eleven tomorrow morning. How are you feeling?”
“I’m OK,” Sarah answered.
As she assessed Sarah with her stethoscope and evaluated her bandages, she asked, “You look like you’re guarding yourself a bit when you move. Are you in pain?”
Sarah nodded.
“You’re due for some pain medicine. On a scale from one to ten, with ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt, where would you rank your pain right now?”
“I don’t know. Eight?” she confessed.
Will looked at Sarah in disbelief. “Why didn’t you say something?”
The nurse looked at him and smiled.
Will offered his hand to the nurse to shake. “Hi, I’m Jon.”
“Nice to meet you, Jon. The Demigod, right?” Paige said, still smiling.
“Yep,” he admitted as he turned to Sarah. “Why didn’t you tell me you were in pain?”
“It only hurts when I move—or breathe.”
“I’ll go get some medicine. Then, after it starts working and you feel some relief, I’d like to get you up and walking, if you’re up for it,” stated the nurse.
Paige left and returned a couple of minutes later.
“This should work for now to get you back on track, but if you want to go home by Christmas, you’re going to have to get your pain managed with oral medicine,” she said as she injected the medicine into Sarah’s IV tubing.
“There is still a chance she can make it home for Christmas?”
“It’s possible, but she has to be up and moving around.” She turned to Sarah. “You can’t allow your pain to get past a three or four anymore. It’s important that you stay on top of it. If you don’t, you end up having to take more medicine than you would if you just took it on a regular basis. OK?” She smiled. “No more lecturing, because you’re newly awake, but you’re due for more medicine at four a.m., and you will be taking it orally—pill form. If your pain gets worse than a four before then, tell me. Are you feeling some relief yet?”
“Yes, I feel better,” Sarah admitted. “I could feel it spread through my blood the second you injected it.”
“Do you want to try getting up?” asked Paige.
“Sure, if it will help me get home by Christmas.”
“You were up walking earlier today, right?” the nurse questioned.
“Just once in the hall. It hurt,” Sarah confessed.
Paige smiled at her and helped her slowly get out of bed, into a standing position. “Are you dizzy at all?” she asked. Sarah shook her head, and Paige added, “Jon, I’m going to have you walk with her. The halls are dead, so no one will see you. It will be good for you to get out of this room too.”
She showed Jon how to support Sarah as she walked, and the two headed into the hallway, dragging Sarah’s IV pole with them. They walked the length of the hall two times before Sarah admitted she was tired. They returned to the room, and he helped her back into bed.
Will slept in the recliner chair next to Sarah’s bed, and Sarah took her pain medicine orally at four without waking Will. In the morning, they were both surprised when Nurse Paige came in, closing the door quickly behind her.
“We have to get you out
of here this morning. I have orders.”
Sarah and Will looked at each other excitedly.
“That’s great!” Will said.
“There’s a group of about eight girls roaming the halls of the hospital looking for you,” Paige added.
“I take it they’re not my friends. They’re looking for Jon, right?” Sarah asked, rolling her eyes.
“Both of you, actually—at least that’s what they said. They are asking everyone in the hospital if they know where to find you. I’m sure it’s only going to get worse, so as soon as the doctor comes in and gives her OK, we will send you on your way,” Paige said.
“Only if she’s really ready, right?” asked Will.
Sarah shot him the evil eye.
“Jon, we would never send her home if she wasn’t ready.” Paige smiled at Sarah.
Twenty minutes later, the doctor came in to assess Sarah’s condition. She told Sarah she was ready to go home, but would have to see her regular doctor on Monday for a follow-up visit. The doctor wrote her several prescriptions and instructed her on how to take them properly. After the doctor had left, Nurse Paige gave Sarah more instructions and reminded her to stay ahead of her pain when taking her medicine. Almost immediately after hearing she was being discharged, Will called Sarah’s house to notify her family.
Soon David arrived with some clothes for Sarah to wear home. The clothes she came into the hospital wearing had been cut off her in the emergency room, and it was too cold to walk outside in a hospital gown. Sarah changed in the bathroom with Paige’s help and bundled up in a coat, hat, scarf, and mittens before climbing into a wheelchair for the ride down to the car. David left to pull the car up while Sarah got ready.
“Wow, you need a new coat, Sarah,” Will said jokingly.
“Yeah, I think this one is from junior high. I thought Mom donated it years ago. This is probably the best he could come up with. All my clothes are at the rental.” The sleeves hung an inch too short, and she couldn’t get it zipped over her now developed chest. “It must have taken my dad a while to find. It was probably on the bottom of the coat closet. I wonder where my coat ended up,” she said.
Between the Raindrops Page 19