by Rhonda Bowen
“Anyway, I gotta go clean up before the end of the shift,” he said, heading through the door. “Remember what I said, Syd. It’s gonna work out. And if you ever decide to open another Decadent, know that you got me.”
Sydney watched him leave but felt his words still hang after him. Everything’s gonna work according to God’s plan. She had heard that text before. But it took a few clicks in Google to give her the exact reference in Romans 8:28.
And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.
She read it over and over until she was pretty sure she had it memorized. It sounded like the kind of thing to keep someone hopeful. All things work together for good. How? How could losing Decadent and her savings work for good? She couldn’t see it. But maybe that was only the case for people like JJ and Jackie. People who had that perfect relationship with God. People who were so good that they were liable to ascend at any moment.
She was far from that point. Sure, she showed up at church, but her time with God outside of that was relegated to two-line prayers over her food if she remembered. She didn’t talk about him every day or weave the topic of him into regular conversation like her mother or Hayden. She did love God. Or used to anyway. But her ideas on loving God were tangled up with memories of going to one church with Leroy on some weekends and a different one with Jackie on others; it was confused with childhood memories of family worship at Jackie’s, where Josephine took center stage; it was lost in the whispers of church people who told their children not to talk to those kids, not to date those girls—the ones whose mother had all those husbands. She had had a hard time conceptualizing God’s love through all of that. And she suddenly realized that at some point she had stopped trying.
She glanced at the clock: 10:45. It was time to get ready for closing. Forcing her mind to stay focused, she went over the schedule one more time before approving it and e-mailing it to all the staff. It would be one of the last schedules she ever sent them.
Powering down her computer, she packed up her things and prepared to make the final round through the shop floor before closing. She was almost through the door when the phone rang. She glanced back at it but kept going. Whatever it was, it could wait.
When she was almost at the end of the hallway, she felt her cell phone vibrate at her hip. Without pausing, she pulled it out and answered it.
“Hello—”
“Sydney, it’s Dean!” The panic in JJ’s voice sliced through Sydney like a knife.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“There was an accident.” JJ began sobbing and Sydney’s heart beat faster. Her mind had suddenly flashed back to the last time her sister had called her crying. It had been a year and a half ago when Leroy died.
“When? Where? What happened?” Sydney was already on her way back to her office to grab her car keys.
“Dean . . . he was drinking . . . there was an SUV . . . oh God . . . Syd, he’s not conscious.”
After that it was pretty much impossible to get anything out of JJ. But somehow she managed to get the name of the hospital. With quick instructions to Wendy to lock up, Sydney dashed through the door and was in the car before she even got JJ off the phone.
By the time she pulled out onto the main road, she’d called Lissandra and relayed the news. The traffic seemed heavier than ever as she made her way over to Toronto Western Hospital on the west end of the city. She tried to temper the millions of thoughts in her head, but they were completely out of control. She didn’t want to think about what her brother’s fate might be. Whatever it was, he was too young. This shouldn’t be happening to him.
She squeezed her car into the first available space, ignoring the parking information sign a few feet away. When she finally got into the lobby, Zelia’s boyfriend, Luke, was pacing the waiting area.
“Where are they?” she asked, skipping the formalities.
“Fell Pavilion, first floor,” he said. “I’ll take you. . . .”
“No, you stay here,” Sydney said, already running toward the hallway. “Lissandra’s coming and she’ll tear this place up if she doesn’t know where to go.”
Sydney felt like she ran through the confusing hallways of the hospital forever, but she finally found the waiting room where her sisters were. Zelia immediately fell on Sydney in tears.
“Where is he?” Sydney asked, her eyes moving from Zelia’s sobbing form to JJ, who was walking back and forth nearby, barely holding it together.
“He’s in surgery,” JJ said, her eyes already swollen. “Several of his ribs were crushed and one punctured his lung. Plus they say he has head injuries.”
JJ’s face crumpled as tears began to pour out of her eyes, and she rocked back and forth to calm herself down. Sydney turned away from her sisters as much as she could, with the weight of Zelia pulling her down. She couldn’t afford to break down now. One of them had to keep it together. She suspected that no one had managed to call their mother.
“What happened?” Sydney asked after a moment, when JJ seemed to recover a little.
“We don’t know for sure,” JJ said. “Zelia said he took off a little after eight this evening. We don’t know where he was, who he was with; all we know is that Zelia got a call about half an hour ago. They found his driver’s license on him, and she was listed on his file at the hospital as one of his contacts.”
“They didn’t call Mom, did they,” Sydney asked, even as feelings of panic began to stir in her.
“No,” JJ said, shaking her head.
“Thank God,” Sydney breathed. “I don’t know how she would have taken it on top of everything else that’s already happened.”
“I know.” JJ said. She sniffled. “Syd, they say he was wasted. His blood alcohol was almost three times the legal limit.”
“He was drinking?”
JJ nodded. “It’s been happening almost every night since Sheree took off.”
Sydney shook her head. She hated that woman for what she had done to her brother.
She sank into the chair and pulled out her cell phone and dialled. After several rings, her sister Josephine answered.
“Hey, Sydney. How’s it going?”
Sydney winced. Only Josephine could be this perky at 11:15 at night.
“Not so good.”
Josephine’s tone changed. “What’s going on?”
Sydney took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you something and I need you to stay calm because I need you to get Mom.”
There was a pause on the other end. “OK. Go ahead.” Josephine said finally.
“Dean was in a car accident. He’s here at Toronto Western, and he’s having emergency surgery,” Sydney said.
Josephine gasped. “Oh God. Is it serious?”
“Yeah,” Sydney said. “But I don’t have the details.”
“So you want me to tell Mom.”
“Yes,” Sydney said. “But don’t tell her everything. Just tell her there was an accident and bring her here. We’ll explain everything when she gets here. All she needs to know for now is that Dean is alive. Can you do that?”
There was a pause and for a moment Sydney wondered if this was too much for her nineteen-year-old sister.
“You know what, I’m sorry,” Sydney began. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. Forget it. I’ll be over to get her. . . .”
“No, it’s OK,” Josephine said. “I’ll bring her.”
Her voice sounded surer than Sydney felt and Sydney remembered why she had asked her: because on most days Josephine was more mature than most of Sydney’s other siblings. Sydney hoped today would be one of those days.
Sydney let out a deep breath. “Call me when you get here and I’ll tell you where we are.”
“See you in a few.”
Sydney leaned back in the chair and rested her head against the wall, closing her eyes. The gentle sobs of Zelia in her lap and the sniffles of JJ blended with the beep of mach
inery, intercom messages, and other hospital sounds. Sydney remembered the last time she was here. It was when her dad had his stroke. It had been his second one, and somehow she had known that it would be his last. Before her thoughts could descend into any further gloom, JJ’s voice broke the silence.
“Sydney?”
“Yeah?” Sydney answered without moving.
She heard JJ take a ragged breath. “What if—”
“Don’t,” Sydney said, cutting her sister off before she could release the negative thought into the open. “Just don’t.”
She heard JJ sigh again. She didn’t know how long they sat there. Every moment waiting to hear something, anything, felt like eternity. When the phone rang again, Sydney didn’t even check the caller ID before answering.
“We’re in the emerge waiting room on the first floor, Fell Pavilion,” she said. “If you get lost, ask for nursing station 4.”
“Syd?”
Sydney’s eyes flew open and she sat up.
“Hayden?”
Hot and cold feelings ran through her at the sound of his voice. More than anything, she wished he was there right then. But there was something else there. A sudden resentment that she couldn’t explain. The emotions were too much for her to handle and she felt herself break. She tried to cover her mouth to hold it in, but her sobs betrayed her.
“Syd, Syd? Baby, why are you crying—what’s going on?”
Instead of soothing her, the tenderness in his voice sliced Sydney through with grief and anger.
“My brother’s in the hospital. He’s lying unconscious on an operating table fighting for his life because of what your sister did to him—that’s what’s going on.”
“Whoa, Sydney, wait a minute. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What did Sheree do? I don’t understand—”
“Yeah, me either,” Sydney said hoarsely. “Look, I can’t talk to you right now.”
“Hold up. Sydney, wait—”
But Sydney didn’t hear the rest. She ended the call and tossed her phone on the empty seat next to her. She looked up and caught JJ staring at her. But when she met her gaze with a scowl, JJ looked away.
Time seemed to move in slow motion as they waited. Lissandra showed up next. JJ and Sydney took turns retelling whatever they knew and they all took turns crying as they came to grips with the reality of what had happened already and the possibility of what could happen in the next few hours. The real crying began, however, when Jackie showed up.
The other residents of the waiting area, whom Sydney had caught watching them curiously as their party grew in number, watched intently as Jackie came in leaning heavily on Josephine. She already looked weak, as if she had been in an accident of her own, and they immediately made space at the center of their huddle for her to sit. But when she looked up, Sydney knew that her mother still had a lot of fight left in her.
“What happened?” Jackie asked. Her voice was steady and sure, and had taken on the deep quality it did whenever there was a situation to be dealt with.
Sydney stared into her mother’s expectant eyes and tried to construct the least painful version of the events as she understood them.
“Don’t try and sugarcoat it, Sydney,” Jackie said. “I’ve outlived two husbands. I’m not going to fall apart. Just tell me what happened.”
Sydney nodded and took a deep breath. Then she related the details to her mother exactly how she knew them. She watched her mother’s jaw tighten and her eyes close as she listened. When Sydney was done, Jackie let out a deep, shaky breath. With her eyes still closed, she opened her hands, and Sydney saw that they were shaking. She gripped one firmly as JJ grabbed the other, and she felt her mother’s fingers close tightly around hers. The shaking intensified, and Sydney held Jackie’s hand between both of hers as her mother began to rock back and forth. Jackie had lost husbands. But she had never lost a child. Sydney knew that the thought of losing her only son was too much for her mother.
Josephine, Zelia, and Lissandra wrapped their arms around Jackie while Sydney and JJ continued to hold her hands as she moaned quietly and shook.
Then, with her eyes still closed, Jackie did the last thing Sydney expected.
“Father, I know that all life is in your hands. I know that you see my son on the table and I know that by faith, you can heal and restore him. And so I claim your promise, trusting that you will heal him, believing that my son . . .”
Jackie’s voice broke as she choked back a sob.
“The only one that you gave me. That he will not die.”
When Jackie was done, JJ went next. Then Josephine, then Zelia. The air in the waiting room grew thick with her sisters’ prayers, and as Sydney listened to them, something stirred inside her. Something that had been dead a long time, but was now starting to wake up. When the chain of prayer was over, JJ began to sing softly. The sound of her voice was so haunting that it triggered the tears that Sydney had been trying to hold back.
She had forgotten JJ’s voice. She had forgotten how JJ used to sing almost every week in church when they were teenagers. Even then she’d had that deep, husky, soulful voice. The kind that should be coming out of a robust life-weary black woman and not a skinny cocoa-colored young girl. It was the kind of voice that made you feel everything you didn’t want to feel and think about everything you wanted to ignore. But as she sang Jackie’s favorite hymn, “I Must Tell Jesus,” it made Sydney want to dig inside herself for some faith—even if she knew she didn’t have any.
They huddled together in a cluster of clinging arms and hands until a nurse appeared to inform them that the surgery was over and that a doctor would be with them shortly to give an update. Moments later he was.
“Hello.” The young man in scrubs and sneakers had freckles on his nose and couldn’t have been much older than Dean. “I’m Dr. White, and I was one of the surgeons working on your son.”
He clasped his hands together. “The good news is that we have managed to stop the bleeding in his brain and repaired the damage caused to his lung by the fractured ribs.”
“And the bad news?” Lissandra asked.
His brow furrowed. “As you know, your brother came into the hospital unconscious due to head trauma sustained during his accident. Though we have managed to repair some of the damage, he is currently not responding to external stimuli and is showing no motor movement. . . .”
“Translation?” Zelia asked.
“He’s comatose,” Josephine said weakly from where she was sitting.
They all glanced from Josephine to the doctor.
“She’s right. Your brother is in a coma.”
Sydney felt her chest tighten as the doctor dropped the bomb on them.
Coma?
She could barely breathe.
Sydney drew a long, shaky breath before she could speak. “Will he come out of it?”
“We hope so,” the doctor said. “He could wake up tomorrow, or next week, or it might be longer. It’s just too early to tell right now. We’ve put him in a room on this floor and are having him closely monitored.”
Sydney felt like the room was spinning. This couldn’t be happening. Her brother was in a coma? How? This was for other people. People who were careless and who drove one hundred miles per hour over the speed limit on the highway. People who were alcoholics, who didn’t care about anyone but themselves. This was not for people who followed the rules. This was not supposed to be happening to her family.
Jackie, who had been silent throughout the exchange, suddenly stood. “I would like to see him.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s fine. But keep the visit brief. And only two people at a time.”
Josephine jumped up. “I’ll go with you.”
Sydney and her sisters watched as Josephine and their mother followed the nurse to Dean’s room. Almost as soon as they left, Lissandra was on her feet.
“I need coffee.” Without waiting for anyone’s response, she headed down the hallway.
<
br /> No one seemed to be able to speak. It was as if the doctor’s words had robbed them of their voice. So instead, they held on to each other, joining hands like they had when they were little girls, Sydney holding JJ’s hand on one side and Zelia’s on the other. If only life was as simple and painless now as it was then.
Sydney hadn’t even realized her eyes were closed, until she felt the pressure on her fingers from JJ. She opened her eyes and there he was. Sydney’s heart fell into her stomach. The conflicting emotions that had run through her before took on greater force as his compassion-filled eyes met hers. Seeing him was worse than hearing his voice.
“You found me.”
“There aren’t that many hospitals with a Fell Pavilion,” Hayden said, his hands in his pockets.
Sydney stood up and began to walk away. “I didn’t ask you to come here.”
“You didn’t have to ask me,” he said, less than half a step behind her. “You know I wouldn’t let you go through this alone.”
“I’m not alone,” she said, doing double time down the corridor. “I have my sisters.”
“And you have me,” he said.
“I don’t need you,” she snapped, lashing out at him with pain and anger that she couldn’t account for. “I don’t want you. Since you and your family came into our lives it’s been nothing but chaos. You let your sister take everything from me. Everything. And now my brother might die. So as far as I’m concerned, you can all go straight to hell.”
He grabbed her arm to stop her, but she pulled back, beating her fists against his strong frame. She knew her blows hurt. She saw him flinch a couple times, but he never let her go. Instead he put his arms around her.
“It’s OK, Syd. . . .”
“No! Let me go,” she screamed, not caring who was looking at her as she struggled against him.
“It’s OK. Do what you need to do. Hit me if you need to. But I’m not going anywhere,” he said gently near her ear.
She hated that he wouldn’t get angry with her. She wanted someone to shout at, to scream her frustrations at, to wear herself out fighting with so she wouldn’t have the energy to hurt for Dean.