Raising Connor

by Loree Lough

  It surprised him to see her car parked out front.

  Just inside the door, the toe of his work boot collided with her purse. “Brooke?” he called. “You’d better not be upstairs. The floors up there aren’t stable.”

  Looking up, he noticed the gaping hole directly above the dining room. “What the…?”

  He’d recognize that dainty white sandal anywhere. His boots felt weighted down as he closed the gap between the foyer and the huge mound of debris up ahead.

  He attempted to lift the main support from her torso and failed. She was jammed in there, and he knew better than to move anything. He did a quick initial assessment: blood—lots of it—on her forehead, across her cheek and forearm, and oozing from the jagged gash in her thigh. Hands trembling, he opened his phone.

  “911,” answered a female dispatcher. “What is your emergency?”

  From that point on, things were a blur, with Hunter describing what little he could see between bricks and boards and feeding the woman information about Brooke’s condition. Her pulse was thready. She had a compound fracture of the femur. There was a large cut on her forehead. No response when he called her name. He felt like a fool admitting that he didn’t know if she had allergies to medications or health conditions the paramedics needed to be aware of. Felt more so when he had to guess her height and weight. How could he have known her all these years without really knowing her?

  He heard the sirens getting louder and closer as the 911 dispatcher said, “Stay with her, and stay on the line with me, sir, until the paramedics arrive.” Was she out of her ever-loving mind? It would take an army to get him to leave Brooke’s side.

  Two lean men, one burly guy and a husky woman burst through the door, toting big rectangular cases into the room. “Step aside, sir,” said the woman. “We’ve got it from here.”

  Her radio hissed, startling him as he backpedaled. Then it hit him that if Brooke was here, Connor must be with Deidre. He needed to call her grandmother, but not until he knew more.

  “Hey. Buddy,” said the biggest man, “give us a hand, will you?”

  It took every ounce of their strength to heave the beam aside. From the corner of his eye, Hunter saw the woman toss a chair, a basket, a couple of mismatched sneakers from Brooke’s motionless body. Again he wished he’d been more insistent about renting a storage facility, clearing the place of knick-knacks and furniture.

  Now the the foursome got to work inserting needles, attaching tubes, hoisting up fat clear bags that would deliver antibiotics and glucose into Brooke’s veins.

  One guy fetched a gurney while another secured her fractured leg to a board. Standing two on Brooke’s left, two on her right, they lifted her onto the cart.

  “I’m going with her,” Hunter said, running alongside them.

  “No, sir, you are not,” the woman countered.

  “But…but she’s…she’s my fiancée.

  The woman smiled, but only slightly. “You can follow us and meet us over at Howard County General.”

  His mom had told him the EMTs had said the same thing the day his dad was rushed to the hospital. He’d said it himself during his brief long-ago police career. He had to obey the “no riders” rule, but he didn’t have to like it.

  Two EMTs got into the ambo’s cab, and the big guy and the woman climbed into the back. “Drive safely, you hear?” she said, and slammed the rear doors. And off they went, lights flashing and siren screaming.

  Hunter stood alone in the driveway, vaguely aware of neighbors peering from their windows as he remembered how Brooke had looked right before they loaded her up. Tiny, pale, bruised and broken, like the porcelain ballerina his little niece had brought to him last Christmas. “Fix her, Uncle Hunter,” she’d wailed, handing him the pieces. “She’s my favorite…”

  The quaint neighborhood had fallen silent, save the occasional tweet of a bird or distant bark of a dog. It surprised him that Mrs. Sinnik hadn’t shuffled across the street in her flowered muumuu and threadbare flip-flops. The woman spent every waking hour in the recliner near her bay window. Probably a good number of her nights, too. He climbed into the cab of his pickup. Later he’d call her daughter, make sure the woman was okay.

  He was climbing into his truck when a woman’s voice stopped him.

  “Hunter,” Ivy asked, “what happened?”

  He gave her a quick rundown. “Can’t stay,” he added. “Gotta get to the hospital.”

  She wrung her hands. “If there’s anything I can do…make phone calls or whatever…let me know, okay?”

  “Check on Mrs. Sinnik, will you? It isn’t like her not to show up for something like this.”

  Ivy looked like she was about to cry. Weird, he thought, considering she barely knew Brooke.

  “So much tragedy,” she said. “How much more can one family take?”

  Hunter nodded as she asked, “Will you call me when you know something?”

  “Sure. Of course,” he said, shifting into Reverse.

  At the traffic light on Frederick Road, he dialed his mother’s number. She rarely said hello when she picked up the phone, and today was no exception.

  “I hope you’re not calling me from the road, because that’s against the law in Maryland, you know.”

  He didn’t have time to apologize or explain. Didn’t have time to sugarcoat things, and thankfully, she didn’t interrupt as he told her what happened to Brooke. He wrapped things up with “Do me a favor, will you, and see if Deidre needs help with Connor? She’s a tough old bird, but he can be a handful when he puts his mind to it.” And when Brooke didn’t come home tonight as expected, he might just put his mind to it.

  “Of course,” Constance said. “I’ll call the girls, too. They adore that boy, and so do the kids. I’m sure they’ll all be happy to help any way they can.”

  His brothers’ wives could sometimes drive him to distraction, but they were also the type who’d show up to help, any time, no questions asked. When Brooke came to, she’d be relieved to hear that Connor was in good hands.

  When he pulled into the parking lot, he saw Brooke’s ambulance at the E.R. entrance. Good. That meant she was inside the facility now affiliated with Johns Hopkins, one of the best hospitals in the world.

  Inside, he walked through the waiting room, past a mother comforting a little boy, a guy holding an ice pack to his eye and a hodgepodge of people who showed no outward symptoms.

  “They just brought a young woman in here,” he told the woman at the checkin counter. “Brooke O’Toole. Where did they take her?”

  She looked away from her computer monitor long enough to say, “Sorry, family only back there.”

  Hunter cursed under his breath. Some rules, he thought, were just plain stupid. “She’s my fiancée.” It was easier telling the lie this time.

  The woman looked back at the screen. “She’s in triage.”

  Nodding, he pushed through the E.R. doors. Triage. Such an intimidating name.

  Two of the paramedics who’d brought Brooke in stepped out of a cubicle. When they saw him, the looks on their faces were enough to make Hunter’s knees go weak.

  “How is she?” he asked, falling into step beside them.

  “Too early to tell.”

  The second EMT softened the news with, “But she couldn’t be in better hands.”

  He’d told the “she’s my fiancée” lie back at the house, too. If only he knew the right questions to ask.

  The men exchanged a tired glance. “You should get in there,” his partner said. “They’re at the sixty-four questions stage of the exam. You could help with that.” Then they went to join the other two EMTs, already in the ambulance.

  Sixty-four questions, he repeated, walking into Brooke’s cubicle. He hadn’t been able to ask one that made sense just now. Hadn’t said one useful thing during the 911 call, either.

  A nurse with a clipboard pulled him aside. “You the fiancé?”

  He nodded.

  “Doc
ordered a CAT scan, followed by surgery.”

  He’d barely had time to repeat it in his mind when two guys in scrubs pushed her on a gurney past him. How was it possible for her to look smaller and weaker than when she’d been in the ambulance?

  “Surgery?” he choked out. “For what?”

  The nurse glanced at him. “To rule out internal bleeding.”

  Everything she said after that assumed a faraway underwater quality: Brooke’s spleen or liver could have been nicked, and if that was the case, blood might have leaked into the peritoneum. Broken ribs could have punctured a lung—or worse, her heart—and with a head injury that severe, there were concerns about swelling in her brain.

  “And the leg?” he asked, staring down the long empty hall.

  “Right now that’s the least of her worries.” She tapped her pen against the clipboard. “Now, let’s get this out of the way, shall we, so we can get you to the O.R. waiting room.”

  *

  ONE BY ONE, members of the Stone family filled the waiting room’s short-backed chairs. As the hours ticked slowly by, the number of half-empty disposable cups, doughnut wrappers and lunch-size potato-chip bags littering the tables grew.

  Rafe snored softly in the chair nearest the soda machine, and when Jesse’s can dropped into the bin, he lurched…but went right back to snoring.

  Gabe sat to Hunter’s right, pretending to read a raggedy issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. Yawning, he pointed at a glossy color photograph of grilled chicken. “Think I’ll try this next time we have a barbecue.” He yawned. “I’m tired of burgers and dogs, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Hunter said. “Tired.”

  He appreciated their support, especially when all three had wives and kids at home and schedules far crazier than his own. He’d learned the hard way what exhaustion could do to a cop.

  “You guys should get out of here,” he said. “There isn’t a thing you can do but sit and look at the four walls.”

  “Beats looking at the little woman’s too-long to-do list,” Gabe said, tearing the chicken recipe from the magazine.

  “And Ladies’ Home Journal,” Jesse said, pointing at the magazine.

  Gabe rolled it up and smacked Jesse with it. “Give a guy a break. There’s an acre of shin-deep grass waiting for me at home.” He tucked the recipe into his pocket. “And lucky me. The riding mower is on the fritz.”

  “Waa-waa-waa,” Rafe said, opening one eye. “I’m only here ’cause it’s quieter than it is at home—least it was till the three of you started clucking like a bunch of old hens.” He shifted in the chair and closed his eyes again.

  Grinning slightly at his brothers’ attempts to joke around and lighten the situation, Hunter nodded. “Thanks, guys.”

  Gabe punched his right arm. “Don’t mention it.”

  And Jesse punched the left. “Don’t mention it to anyone, or you’ll ruin our ‘coldhearted cop’ reputations.”

  “Seriously, dudes, can’t a guy catch a few z’s?” Rafe said.

  Jesse and Gabe exchanged looks, and Gabe used the rolled-up magazine as a pointer. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Jesse picked up a tired old issue of Sports Illustrated and the pair marched toward Rafe.

  “Do it,” he said without moving, “and they’ll be checking you in for surgery, to remove my boot from—”

  The doors to the surgical suite whooshed open, and all four brothers stood at attention as a gowned, masked nurse stepped into the waiting room.

  “Mr. Stone?” she said, pulling the mask under her chin.

  Together, the men said, “Yes?”

  She looked confused until Hunter stepped forward. “I’m Brooke’s…” His brothers hadn’t heard the lie yet. “Fiancé…”

  He could feel their eyes drilling holes into his back in reaction to the statement.

  “How is she?” Hunter asked. In the recovery room by now, he hoped, because it had been nearly six hours since they’d wheeled her into the O.R.

  “It’ll be another half hour or so,” she said. “Dr. Norris will be out to update you just as soon as he can.”

  But she hadn’t answered his question, and that worried him. He stepped closer. “So how’s she doing?”

  “So far, so good,” she said, and hit the button that opened the doors. “She’s critical, but that’s to be expected.”

  While he stood there wondering what that meant, the doors closed behind her.

  “That was smart,” Rafe said, “saying you two are engaged.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse agreed, “sometimes that whole ‘next of kin only’ thing is stupid.”

  Gabe didn’t say anything, and when Hunter met his gaze, it was clear he understood that there was more truth than lie to the “I’m her fiancé” statement.

  “So now that the real waiting is about to begin,” Rafe said, stretching, “I think I’ll head on home.”

  “Same here.” Jesse gave Hunter a hug. “Hang in there, okay? I’m just a phone call away.”

  “You coming, Gabe?” they asked, walking toward the elevators.

  “Nah,” he said, tucking his fingertips into his jeans pockets. “Think I’ll hang around until they let Hunter go in to see her.”

  As Jesse and Rafe left the hospital, Hunter prepared himself for a few brotherly wisecracks. Only…they never came. Instead, Gabe grabbed the nearest chair. “You’d think they’d have the decency to turn the volume up,” he said, glaring at the silent TV hanging from the ceiling. “Kinda makes me wish I hadn’t ditched school the day they taught lip reading.” For the next hour and a half, the slowly turning pages in Gabe’s magazine were the only sound in the room.

  Except for the beating of Hunter’s heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  HUNTER HADN’T BEEN in the picture when Deidre buried her first husband or when her only son committed suicide, but he’d heard the stories from her handyman, Felix, and from Beth and Kent. She hadn’t been afraid to grieve or mourn, they’d said, but within months of each loss, she had packed up her black dresses and hats and the sadness that went with them and moved forward. Acting and directing, they believed, had saved her, but Hunter knew better. Deidre’s strength ran deep, and that was what saved her from a life lived in a grieving past.

  She’d changed, though, in the days since Brooke’s accident, from a woman to be reckoned with to a frail old woman who no longer commanded attention when she entered a room. As she stood beside him now, slump shouldered and trembling, staring at the foot of Brooke’s bed, Hunter wondered just how much more misery her poor little body could handle.

  “Have you eaten anything today?” he asked, slipping an arm around her narrow shoulders.

  “Yes. At least, I think so,” she said without taking her eyes from her granddaughter.

  “I wonder if you’d do me a favor….”

  Her eyes seemed twice as green when she looked up at him through shimmering tears.

  “Would you run down to the cafeteria and get me a sandwich? I’m starving.” His stomach growled as if on cue. He couldn’t have planned that better if he’d tried.

  “While you’re down there,” he continued, sliding a twenty from his wallet, “get something for yourself. We’ll eat together, right here.” He pressed the bill into her hand and stooped to kiss her cheek. “You’re the closest thing to a grandmother I have. Gotta take good care of you, y’know?”

  Deidre snorted. But she took the money and grabbed her beaded purse.

  He walked with her as far as the elevators, just across the hall, and as the doors opened, she shook the fist that held the twenty and looked up at him. “I love you, too, you…man, you,” she said, and stepped inside.

  He sensed a hidden message in the words, but the steady sound of Brooke’s ventilator called him back to her side. Hunter scooted the uncomfortable pink recliner closer to the bed. Taking care not to jostle the needle taped to the back of her hand, he slid his palm beneath it. “If anyone had told me you had a laz
y side, I would have called them crazy. But look at you, still lounging around on that air mattress.”

  Silence, except for the ventilator and the beeping of the heart monitor. The doctors told him that with each passing day, her battered body was healing just a little bit more, and that the drug-induced coma had been necessary because pain could hinder her recovery. He got that…but he didn’t like it. Hunter needed to hear her voice and see those too-big-for-her-face eyes light up when she talked about Connor.

  “Connor has been asking for you,” he said, absentmindedly stroking her cheek. “Looking under beds and behind furniture, saying, ‘Brooke, Brooke, Brooke.’ He’s okay, though, so no worries. My sisters-in-law have been taking turns babysitting. Would you believe they’re actually fighting over who gets to keep him?”

  Not so much as the flutter of an eyelid.

  Hunter hung his head. He’d heard that comatose people could hear everything said in their presence. If only he’d thought to ask the doctor if the same was true for this kind of coma.

  “Sent your grandmother down to the cafeteria,” he said. “She’s really worried about you, you know.”

  Still nothing.

  “And so am I.”

  His imagination, or did the blips of the monitor speed up for a second or two? Hunter looked at the machine. No, he thought, gaze fused to the thin green lines, it must have been wishful thinking.

  Deidre returned with their sandwiches, and they sat, one on either side of Brooke’s rolling tray table, sharing a sandwich, barbecue potato chips and chocolate chip cookies. “There oughta be a law,” she said after a few bites. “Charging all that money for stale bread and rubbery ham? It’s highway robbery, I tell you.”