Promise Me (Pointe Royal 3rd Generation Book 1)

by Lee Wardlow

  I explained what I knew when he said hello. I heard him moving around as soon as I said the words Ronan is at the hospital. I heard him kiss Ryan, his wife of two years. “I’m out the door now,” he replied. “I’ll meet you at Mom and Dad’s house.”

  Ciaran lived in the house where Mom once lived next door to Dad. Dad’s house was where we grew up as boys. Mom and Dad had history. A teenage love affair that had gone bad but they had gotten back together. That is another story. They had been married for a lifetime and this was going to kill them.

  I pulled into my parents’ driveway just a few minutes later. None of us really lived far from Mom and Dad except Ronan and Liam. My brother walked across the lawn to meet me. He had a coffee in his hand and another cup for me which I accepted gratefully. “He’s going to be all right?” Ciaran said.

  “I hope so man. Liam said he’s not good.”

  We walked up to Mom and Dad’s door and rang the bell. Mom answered in her nightgown. My mom, Stevie Bonds Moore is in her fifties. She was and always has been a spitfire but with us she was the calm in the storm. Dad, the enforcer. We were scared of him. I’m not ashamed to admit that. Even as a grown man, I could be intimidated by Declan Moore. She was going to take this hard. Dad was going to take this personally.

  Her hair was a tumbled mess of silver curls that hung past her shoulders. Fionn was the only one of us to get her hair color. The rest of us were dark haired like our dad. Her eyes, a pale, hazel-green, we all got right now were sleepy. We had woken her as well. “What’s wrong?” Panic was written on her face.

  I didn’t want to tell her. I glanced at Ciaran. He looked at me. “Mom, we need to go to the hospital downtown where Liam works. He called me,” I said.

  She covered her mouth with her hand. Uncertain and afraid. I didn’t like seeing Mom like this. I saw Dad over her shoulder. He was a big guy. Taller than any of us except Fionn. He was solid still in his fifties. His hair was touched by gray. Lines around his dark eyes. He was bare chested right now but wearing jeans that were low on his hips.

  “Who is it?” He asked.

  “Ronan,” Ciaran replied.

  “What happened?” My mother asked.

  The thing you never want to hear about your child, we had to tell our mother. “He OD,” I replied.

  My mother’s eyes filled with tears. She glanced over her shoulder at my dad. Then mom turned and went into his arms. “Come on Stevie. Get dressed so we can go downtown with the boys.” We were still his boys even though Liam and I were almost thirty. The younger ones were almost twenty-eight but the five of us would always be his boys.

  **

  So with a typical heroin overdose, they give you narcan or naloxone to counter the effects of the drug. You don’t die. Whatever was in the heroin I took was lethal. My breathing eventually stopped and my heart too. They pounded on my chest and intubated me so I could breathe.

  I saw the light at the end of the tunnel and I followed it. Not looking back once. No thought of the family I was leaving behind. I covered my eyes to avoid the brightness of the intense radiance before me. Then suddenly I could see as I passed through. Wow, now that was pretty fucking amazing.

  I recognized Grams and she was not happy with me. Her arms were crossed over her ample chest. Behind her stood three people I definitely did not know.

  Chapter 2

  “Ronan,” Grams said. “Sit down.”

  I scratched my whisker covered jaw in confusion but I followed her to a chair where I sat down because she told me to. I thought I knew one of the people. He had to be my grandfather Joey because he looked like my Uncle Chance. I could only assume the other two were my great-grandfather Luke and my grandmother Betsy. Grams straightened me out on who they were right away and I was right about their identities.

  We sat at a perfectly simple table made of oak wood. With straight backs and hard seats. I don’t think you were supposed to be comfortable when facing your past mistakes and answering to a higher power. “So, Ronan. How’s your Gramps?” She asked.

  “He’s having trouble sleeping. The kids keep him in line though,” I told her.

  “Good. Tell him I miss him,” she whispered behind her hand.

  “I will,” I promised.

  She gave me her best stink-eye look. “You’ve fucked up,” Grams informed me.

  My eyes were wide and showed surprise at her language. She was Grams after all. A petite woman. A sweet disposition. Hair longer than Mom’s hair. Eyes like mine. A hazel-pale-green that looked amazing against her warm, golden skin. Her mother was half black and half white. Each generation kept some of her features but our skin became lighter and lighter with every combination of mother and father.

  Ciaran and Fionn’s kids were lighter than us. Fionn’s daughter Gracie had the silver blonde hair like Grams and Mom but Ciaran’s daughters had the dark hair of my father. They were all beautiful kids though. Knockouts that I wanted to see grow up. I wanted to be there to protect and love them. I wasn’t sure that was going to happen because I was dead at the moment.

  I don’t know that I had ever heard Grams use such language so I was a bit taken back by it. Me and my brothers, yeah. Mom on occasion. Dad for sure but not Grams. “I did Grams,” I agreed.

  “Your Mom’s heart is going to be broken.”

  I nodded my head in agreement. Wait. What? “Am I permanently dead?”

  They looked at each other. Then at me. “Possibly,” my grandfather Joey told me.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Damn. That’s not good. I’m only twenty-seven.” Betsy made a snorting noise that let me know I should have thought of that before I stuck that needle in my arm. “This is really cool getting to see you guys though.”

  “Ronan, you have an opportunity here,” Luke told me. He reminded me of my dad in a way but he looked more like my Uncle Noah. I glanced at my grandmother Betsy. Yeah, Dad had more of her features than Noah did. Noah was the very image of my grandfather Adam and his dad Luke.

  “I do?” I finally said still trying to get over the fact that I was speaking to the dead grandparents. An effect of the drug? Maybe I was dreaming? Hallucinating? Or maybe I was really dead and I was talking to the spirits of my dead grandparents. Who the hell knew? I think I was supposed to be focusing on the lesson not the fact that I was actually with them at the moment.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “You can turn things around. You haven’t always been nice in your life. You haven’t done good things. The drugs. Women. Everything in your life has been about you. It’s time for a change.”

  “Okay,” I replied. I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. I wasn’t really sure what they expected of me. I was also pretty uncomfortable with the knowledge that they might have been watching my life unfold.

  Grams slapped her hand down on the table in front of me. “This is it Ro,” she told me. “This is your last chance. You can make things right or you can continue to live your selfish life and the end the next time won’t be so pleasant.”

  “All right Grams.” I threw up my hands in surrender. I sure didn’t want to be the one to make Mom cry. Inside I was trembling. I was afraid. I was too young to die. She must have sensed my fears. As a child, Grams had held me. She came to me and put her arms round me and kissed my forehead.

  “Go back now Ronan. Re-evaluate your life and do things differently. Stop wasting the life that you’ve been given. It is too precious. There are people who fight desperately to survive while you are throwing your life away.” I nodded against her. “Something important is about to happen to you. Embrace it Ronan. Do the right thing and be the man I know you can be.”

  The tunnel was before me again. I didn’t even remember getting up. I glanced over my shoulder. The bright light behind me getting further away. My grandparents disappearing as well.

  My body jolted with the shock of the paddles restarting my heart.

  **

  I stood at the door to the room and watched Ronan’s body jolt with the force o
f the paddles sending currents to his heart. I heard the monitor start to beep. My eyes flew to the screen to see the blip moving across it showing me that his heart was beating once again. Twice, they lost him. Twice they revived him. Refusing to give up on him. Tears burned my eyes. I watched my younger brother die twice. I was struggling right now to hold it together.

  “Liam,” a nurse named Sissy, most likely my mother’s age stuck her head through the door and whispered to me. “Your family is in the waiting area. You need to come talk to them.” I nodded but I kept looking at Ronan.

  After a few minutes, Doctor Alvarez, Alex glanced up at me. “Liam, he’s stable for now. Go out and talk to your family.”

  What do I tell them? I turned and went out to the waiting area. Down the long hall, staring at the plain tile floor I struggled with what I had just witnessed. The bright lights blinding me because tears were glistening in my eyes. Damn Ronan. That jackass. What did he do and why?

  My grandfather, my dad, my mom and three brothers waited for me. “Liam, is he all right?” Mom asked me jumping to her feet when she saw me.

  I sighed. “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “We lost him twice tonight. He’s stable right now. Whatever he took was bad shit.”

  I watched my mother crumple towards the ground but my brother Fionn caught her in his arms. He pulled her in tight and held her. My dad just stood there staring at me. How had this happened? I could see it on his face.

  Shock.

  Hurt.

  Confusion.

  They were feeling all those things. The same gamut of emotions that I had been feeling. My parents were occasional drinkers on the weekend. We never had seen either of them drunk. They were careful about what they did preferring to teach us by example. “Let’s sit down,” Gramps suggested. He was the rock of our family.

  I followed them to an area where only a few people were sitting. There we could talk privately. I sat next to Ciaran. Mom sat between Fionn and Gramps. Dad was sitting next to me on the other side.

  “When can we see him?” Mom asked me. I heard the desperation in her voice.

  “It will be a while,” I didn’t want her to see what I had seen. She nodded as if she understood but I don’t think she did. She just needed to see her son. I got it but how do you really understand something like this?

  It was a shock to all of us. Your son, your highly successful son, grandson, brother who just finished law school at the top of his class; studying for the bar; overdosed on heroin most likely. None of us knew that he took drugs. Was this a one-time thing? An ongoing problem? We didn’t know what we were facing with him if he pulled through. Dad asked that very question. “Did you boys know he was doing this?”

  We all agreed that we did not. We were as shocked as they were. He nodded. I saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed hard. I glanced across the ER when I saw my uncle Noah racing through the doors with Shawn Martin right behind him. Shawn apparently drove Uncle Noah downtown.

  “Is he all right?” Noah asked when he reached us. He was panicked too. We were all as important to my uncle as his kids were to my mom and dad.

  “He’s stable,” I replied. “For now.”

  Noah sat next to my dad. He laid his hand on Dad’s back and that is when my Dad lost it. He went into my uncle’s arms and laid his head on his shoulder. I watched my father cry for probably only the third time in my life. The first time would have been when Grams told us she was dying and the second time was when she actually died. He was not a person who let his emotions show easily.

  Mom rose from her chair and walked across the small space to him. “Declan,” she said his name. He turned away from Noah and laid his head against her stomach, squeezing her hard. “We’ll get through this like we have everything else,” she told him.

  “This is my fault,” he said. “I was too hard on the boys.”

  “No Declan,” my mother reassured him running her fingers through his hair. “It isn’t your fault.”

  “I agree with Stevie,” Noah said.

  “He can’t die,” my father cried shaking his head back and forth against her body. “I can’t bury a son too.” I was fighting my own tears at that point. We had actually been pretty sheltered when I thought about it. I realized that they had buried two mothers and a father. They were afraid they were going to bury a son.

  **

  Alex came out to the ER waiting area and I stood to greet him. He was much smaller than me and was practicing for much longer, maybe ten years. He patted my shoulder. Alex knew how upsetting this was to me and my family who stood behind me waiting for word on Ronan. Alex addressed me.

  “Liam, your brother is stable right now so we’re moving him to ICU. It will be a while before the lab results come back showing us what he took. We expect it was the animal tranquilizer laced Heroin. In about half an hour your family can see him. You know the rules for ICU. Two at a time, besides you. You can go in anytime being a doctor of the hospital.”

  “Thanks Alex. I’ll take them up to ICU. Greg made it in to cover for me?” I asked.

  He clapped his hand on my back. Even he was surprised that Ronan Moore OD on something. He knew that my brother was on his way to a lucrative career in law. His life was planned out in the grand scheme of things. We had talked about our families. He was married with his first kid on the way while I was a struggling young doctor who had nothing but my family.

  “Yeah, he’s already on the floor. Don’t worry about anything. Go with your family.”

  “Thanks Alex.” I didn’t want to leave him shorthanded on the weekend. That is always when the shit hit the fan at our hospital.

  I wrapped my arm around Mom’s shoulders and led the parade of Moores to the elevator. She was being the strong one for a change. I admitted, I was shocked by this. My dad stood in back of all of us with Noah and Shawn. When the elevator doors opened I guided them to the waiting area outside of ICU while I went to see if Ronan had arrived yet.

  Scanning my badge got me through the first set of doors. As soon as they closed behind me, I leaned against the wall and pressed my hands into my thighs; just trying to breathe. “Hey,” I knew whose voice it was before I looked at her. “He’ll be up here in a minute. You okay?”

  I straightened and looked into the most amazing green eyes. Her long, black hair was pulled back in a wavy ponytail. “Are you his nurse?” I asked.

  “I am and so is Amelia. We’ll take good care of Ronan, Liam.”

  “Thanks Harley,” I responded. She was beautiful. My co-worker and my friend. I had considered asking her out but didn’t because she was my co-worker. Work and personal relationships weren’t a good idea in my mind.

  “You okay?” She asked again.

  I shook my head no. This was my baby brother by only two years. I watched them use paddles on his chest twice tonight to revive him. “Do they know what it is?” I asked her.

  “If it’s the same stuff the others have taken it’s an elephant tranquilizer called carfentanil laced in the heroin.”

  Leaning my head back against the wall, I just wanted to cry. I felt the tears burning my eyes so I stared up at the bright lights. Pressing my fingers into my eye sockets I prayed that I didn’t make an ass of myself in front of this beautiful girl and sob like a baby. She touched my bicep. “Liam, it’s okay. I would be upset too if it were my brother. I guess you didn’t know there was a drug problem?”

  “I don’t know if there is one?”

  “Liam, you don’t just try heroin one day. He had to be doing something. Weed, coke, meth, pills.”

  I shook my head. Unwilling or unable to grasp what she was saying to me. “I guess.”

  Her fingers were cool against my burning skin. “Come with me to the desk,” she said. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  Following her was easy. Seeing my brother when they brought him to ICU was not so easy. I went with Harley and Amelia to Ronan’s room while they hooked him up to the many machines that wo
uld let them know whether he was still breathing and whether his heart was still pumping. I looked at the monitors. I looked at him. A tube was down his throat; he was intubated to assist with his breathing. Monitors covered his chest. IV ran out of his arm.

  “He’s sedated heavily Liam,” Amelia said while she took his vitals. “He’s stabile for now. He’s one of the lucky ones.”

  I ran my hand across my face. Everything in my body trembled. The IV was in his forearm pumping fluids into him. His bare chest covered in monitors kept track of his heart rate and blood pressure which was still pretty low. His face shockingly pale beneath the warm, golden tan it usually was.

  “Can my parents come back?” I asked.

  “Yes, by the time you bring them here, we’ll be finished.”

  I walked to the doorway of the room and Harley stopped me. “How many are out there to visit Ronan?” She asked.

  “Seven plus me,” I told her.

  “Bring them all in just this once,” she said. “They all have to be scared and need to see him. They can’t stay long though.”

  “Thanks Harley.” She nodded and smiled at me. Her face was all compassionate and kind.

  I walked down the hall towards the double doors. I knew this was going to be hard. I scanned my badge and the doors opened. I walked through and everyone stood.

  “He’s in his room in ICU. The nurses are going to let you all come back for a few minutes so you can see him.” I just wanted to prepare them. “It isn’t going to be easy. He’s sedated so he won’t be able to respond to you. He’s been intubated to help with breathing. There are all kinds of wires attached to him for monitoring.”

  “Let’s go,” my mother said. She just wanted to see her son. I could understand that.

  Everyone started forward but my dad. “Dad aren’t you coming?” I asked.

  “Can I come later? After Mom has seen him?”

  I looked at her and she nodded. “Sure Dad.” I was confused by him.

  “I’ll stay with Declan,” Shawn offered. “The rest of you go with Liam.”