by Leddy Harper
“My sister works at the hospital—in the pharmacy—and she called me this morning when she heard about him. But she didn’t know anything, so she couldn’t tell me what was going on.” I wanted to move the conversation away from me. “She said he’s been here for two days?”
“Yes. They’ll keep him here until his wounds close. Luckily, he doesn’t have many, and they aren’t as bad as they could’ve been. The doctors said it could be weeks, but they won’t know until he starts to heal. They have him on antibiotics to prevent infection, and nutrients to help his body work faster. His body temperature has lowered by the burns so he’s cold all the time.” She paused for a moment before verbalizing her thoughts. “The skin is an amazing part of our body. I hadn’t realized how sensitive it was.” Her thought drifted off as randomly as it had come.
I waited for her to continue but when she didn’t, I asked, “Where are you staying?”
She waved her hand around the room. “I’ve been here. I wanted to wait until the worst was over before going somewhere else. I’ll end up staying at Carter’s house, though. The doctors said he’ll need care after he leaves, so I’ll be here for that, too.”
“My sister doesn’t live far. I’m staying with her. If there’s anything you need, I’m sure she’d be happy to bring it to you.”
Her eyes widened as they set on mine. “You’re not leaving, are you?”
I took her hand in mine for reassurance. “Oh, no, ma’am. I’ll be here for a week—less if he wakes up and doesn’t want me here.” It was meant as a joke, but it hurt nonetheless. I didn’t want to think about the possibility of him regaining consciousness and telling me to leave. Not after I’d grown so hopeful over the prospect of him asking for me.
“He hasn’t asked for anything else. I don’t think he’ll want you to go.”
Carter started to stir, his groans filling the room with gargled pain.
“I’ll go get the nurse. You stay here with him. I hate to see him when he wakes up; it just breaks my heart to watch him in such agony. It makes me feel so helpless.” She squeezed my hand and stood up. Rather than leave the room as she said, she leaned over Carter’s bed and whispered something in his ear. I couldn’t hear her words, but I didn’t miss her sniffle when she backed away and headed for the door.
His groans became deeper, filled with extreme discomfort, and his feet started to move beneath the blanket. I pulled myself off the couch and cautiously moved toward the bed. I couldn’t touch him without knowing where his burns were, but I knew I needed to do something to calm him down. The right side of his face was free of any sign of damage. I carefully ran my fingertips along his skin from his temple to his jaw and watched as his distress began to fade.
“You’re okay, Carter. Your mom’s getting the nurse.” I gently cupped his cheek while whispering to him. “I think they might be getting you more pain meds or something. I don’t know.” I felt silly talking to him, not having a clue what to say or if he could even hear me.
But then he opened his eyes and turned his unfocused attention on me. One side of his mouth pulled up the slightest degree. It wasn’t a real grin, or even the smirks I’d grown used to seeing on his face, but I knew the intent behind it, and it made my heart soar.
“Baby…” he mumbled, barely parting his lips as the word croaked out. I thought I understood why his mother had thought he’d asked about a baby, until he spoke again. “Where’s the baby?”
Confused, I leaned closer. I knew I had to have heard him wrong. “What baby?”
“Our baby.”
I stroked his clammy forehead with my thumb, wiping away the deep creases that had formed while he tried to speak. “Carter, we don’t have a baby.”
“They took him away…”
His words replayed in my head several times, yet they still didn’t make sense. I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant when the light came on and a nurse walked in. Susan followed behind her, but she remained on the other side of the room.
“We need to change his dressings again,” the nurse—Jenny from the front desk—said and slowly pulled back his sheet and blanket. She glanced over her shoulder at Susan. “You said you pressed the morphine drip?”
“Yes, right before coming to get you.”
“Okay. So he should be good.” She untied his blue gown, but before pulling it away from his body, she looked up at me, standing on the other side of the bed. “As long as Mrs. Hastings is okay with you being in the room, you’re more than welcome to stay. But I should warn you…this isn’t the fun part. It’s gruesome and he doesn’t do well with it.”
I glanced over toward the door and caught Susan’s eye. She nodded and said, “You can stay. I’ll be outside. I can’t handle being in the room for this.”
That should’ve been enough to convince me to follow her out the door, but I couldn’t leave his side. Something compelled me to stay—the same instinct that convinced me to get on a plane and fly back to Florida.
Jenny pulled his gown away from his body. I tried to maintain my composure, but nothing could’ve prepared me for what I saw. Thick gauze covered his torso, his leg, and his arm. He had gloves covering both hands. With the extent of his injuries, it didn’t surprise me he had nothing on beneath the gown, although the sight of his catheter twisted my stomach. Had I taken two seconds to think about his inability to get up and use the bathroom, I would’ve expected it, but how and when he had to pee wasn’t at the forefront of my mind.
Seeing him this way, so helpless, so vulnerable, was unreal. As if this man in this bed wasn’t the Carter I’d spent weeks with. He wasn’t the man who became offended in a matter of seconds and had no problem letting me know. Carter was a strong, determined, capable man. The thought of him lying here in pain, covered in burns, unable to use the bathroom by himself, cut me open and left me bleeding out.
“He’s going to wake up in pain,” Jenny warned me, pulling me out of my shock.
“W–what are you going to do?”
She stood up straight and held her gloved hands limp in front of her. “I have to remove and discard the bandages. As the wounds begin to heal, it’s imperative we keep it free of necrotic tissue, so we have to scrape it. That’s where things get extremely uncomfortable for him. Once everything is cleaned, sterilized, and treated, I will redress the burns.”
Jenny appeared to be a very nice woman. If I had to guess, I’d say she was around forty. She spoke clearly and with confidence, but I felt like I’d just been given a rundown of how to wash clothes. I’d heard the words. I understood what they meant. However, her professionalism separated me from the reality of what I was about to witness.
It wasn’t until Carter grew restless, crying out in pain, that reality set in. His agony pierced my chest, took hold of my heart, and ripped it out. I felt it in my marrow. Jenny hadn’t instructed me to do anything, but I felt compelled to soothe him, just like he did me not too long ago.
The right side of his chest and shoulder were free from burn wounds, so I pressed my hand against the unmarred ink. I ran my fingers along his brow, down the right side of his face, and stroked the pad of my thumb over the flaky skin on his dry lips.
I leaned over him, my face inches from his, and blew a steady stream of air onto his cheek, close to the corner his mouth. “You need to keep breathing, Carter. Breathe for me.” I inhaled and blew calmly against his skin again.
Jenny spoke for the first time since she’d started the dressing change. “Keep doing that. Whatever it is, it’s calming him down.”
Without pulling away from him, I lifted my gaze to the monitors behind his head. I studied the one keeping track of his heart and blew on him again. “You’re doing great, Carter. Your nurse is only trying to get you all better so we can go home, okay? Just keep breathing. It’ll be over soon.”
My heart filled with purpose when I observed his pulse rate slowing down. It wasn’t anything drastic, but at least it was going in the right direction. He’d quieted, al
though his body was still rigid, reacting to the pain Jenny inflicted upon him.
I didn’t move away from him the entire time his dressing was being changed. I continued stroking his face, talking to him, breathing with him until Jenny had wrapped the last bandage around his leg. I hadn’t taken notice of his wounds, nor did I care to. Seeing him this way was enough; I didn’t need the visual of his injuries keeping me up at night.
“I should make a note in his chart to make sure you’re with him for every dressing change. I’ve never seen someone calm down like that in the middle of being scraped. Now I understand why he’s been asking for you.” She pulled off her blue latex gloves and folded the blankets back over his body.
“What about his hands?”
“Oh, he has another team who does that. The hands are more fragile than the rest of him, which is why he has those protective skins on them. They have to pay close attention to make sure he doesn’t lose function.”
I nodded and studied his face. He was asleep again, although it didn’t appear to be peaceful. His jaw was hard and clenched, making his lips tight, almost frowning. His brows knitted, the shallow valleys between them filled with distress.
“About these hallucinations…” I turned to Jenny, catching her before she slipped out of the room. “Are they normal? I mean, do patients normally experience this?”
Her professional expression softened and her shoulders fell forward slightly. “A lot of it is the morphine, as well as the trauma he’s been through. His body went into shock, which took a toll on his mind. He’s recovering, and unlike a broken bone, his whole body has to heal…his psyche included. He’ll be different, but as long as he does everything he’s supposed to, and takes care of himself—mind and body—he should bounce back. What he’s going through is completely normal.”
I didn’t bother to ask her anything else. Nothing she could say would answer my questions. I wanted to know if it meant anything that he’d asked for me, or what he meant when he talked about our baby, but she wouldn’t be able to offer anything useful.
Only Carter would be able to do that.
And as Jenny said, his mind was injured, as well as his body.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The sun hadn’t come up, although the sky filled with warm colors. I sat at the bar in Danni’s kitchen watching the light fill in the darkness through the bay windows. My body was exhausted, my brain sluggish and on the verge of shutting down, but I couldn’t sleep. Danni had picked me up at ten and brought me back to her house, where I laid in bed for hours watching the shadows dance on the ceiling.
Shortly after Carter’s dressing change, his mother had come back into the room and sat with me. Most of the time we didn’t speak, our awkward silence consuming the sterile air around us. However, there were moments I could tell she just wanted someone to talk to. Those were the times she’d laugh her way through stories of Carter as a little boy. She hadn’t offered me anything personal, but I did find myself enjoying the tales of his youth.
When I’d gotten up to leave, she made me promise to come back in the morning. Apparently, the doctors liked to make their rounds early, and she thought I’d want to be there for it. I appreciated her desire to involve me, although I wasn’t sure how Carter would feel about that when he finally woke up and was lucid enough to know of my presence.
“Did you get any sleep at all?” Danni came into the kitchen, rubbing the grogginess from her eyes. She grabbed a mug from the cabinet and poured a cup of coffee. She knew better than to offer me some. I never understood how anyone liked the taste of it without half a carton of flavored creamer. And by that point, you’re really not drinking coffee anymore.
“Maybe a few hours. I don’t know. I have no idea what time I finally passed out, and I must’ve woken up ten times before I decided to give up and come out here.” I fidgeted with the placemat for a moment, and then glanced up at Danni.
She studied me, waiting for me to ask whatever I had on my mind. She knew me too well.
“Why did you call me when you found out about Carter?”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“I did, and I’m glad you told me, but why? Let’s be honest here, Danni, you weren’t his biggest fan. If anything, you were cheering for us to not work out. So why say anything? You knew I’d rush back here to be with him. And more than that, you helped me come back. You found me a flight, picked me up from the airport, made sure I would be able to see him after visiting hours.”
She set her mug down and ran the tip of her finger around the ceramic rim. “I don’t know. I saw the way he was with you when you brought Logan up to the hospital. He stayed with you all night. And then I watched him with my son, and I realized I might’ve misjudged the situation. I was able to see the parts in him you saw, and then there’s the way he looks at you. Like you hung the moon. Like you painted the sunset and carved the mountains.”
I shook my head and stopped her. “You’re romanticizing something that didn’t exist. Trust me. He didn’t feel that way about me. There were times I thought he might’ve…hoped and wished and prayed he did. I wanted so badly to believe it, but it’s just not true.”
“He’s been asking about you.”
“He’s been hallucinating, Danni. He’s not asking for me, the morphine is.”
Her gaze dropped to her mug, disappointment settling in her shoulders.
“I told his mom I’d be there this morning when the doctor comes by, but I think I’ll leave after that. I might stay until tomorrow, maybe see if he wakes up after they cut back his morphine drip, but I don’t think I’ll stay all week like I’d planned.”
“I know what I saw, Kara. Believe what you want, but I know the way he looked at you.”
“If that were the case, he would’ve said something. He would’ve done something.”
“That’s not true. What did you expect him to say? Ask you to stay? Ask you to give up your job and security and move here? Even if he was the relationship kind of man, he wouldn’t have asked you to do that. And what did you expect him to do? Did you think he’d pack up his life, sell his dream house, get rid of his gym, and move to North Carolina? No. There was no winning for you guys, so there was nothing for him to say or do.”
“Then why does it matter how he looked at me? You just said so yourself, we can’t be together. Why am I here? What did I come back for? To sit with his mom, a woman I’d never met before last night, because when she was in town, Carter kept us separate? He didn’t even tell her about me. She found out about me along with the rest of the hospital staff during his delusional ramblings.”
Danni shrugged and turned her sorrowful gaze to me. “You’re here because you wanted to be by his side, so I don’t think you should go running back home until you know he’s okay.”
“I have to go back to work in a week. Who knows how long it’ll take before we know he’s okay. His mom said he could be in that hospital room for weeks, and until he’s healed, he runs the risk of infection. I can’t sit by his side that long.”
“Then go up there today, hear what the doctors have to say, and then leave. It’s up to you, Kara. I know I wouldn’t be able to leave Tommy if it were him in that bed.”
“That’s different. He’s your husband.”
“Even before we were married. When we were sneaking around behind everyone’s backs. I knew from the very beginning how I felt about your brother. It took him a little while, but he felt the same way I did. So maybe Carter does, too. Maybe he just doesn’t know how to admit it. But I’ll tell you one thing—seeing you by his side may just be the push he needs to open up and tell you how he feels.”
Exhausted with the labyrinth this conversation had turned into, I leaned back in the stool and held her stare. “And what good will that do, Danni? Give me peace of mind on my flight back home? Offer me warm and fuzzy thoughts while I lie in bed alone at night? Whether he feels anything for me doesn’t change my job, my address, his gym, his house. It doesn
’t break down the barriers between us. So there’s no point in him telling me how he feels. Just like me admitting my feelings won’t do any good.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I just thought you’d want to be here for him, and I thought he wanted you by his side.”
“You watch too many Disney movies. Real life doesn’t happen that way. Problems aren’t solved with true love’s kiss, dragons aren’t slayed by knights in shining armor, and princes don’t come riding up on the back of a white horse to whisk us away.”
“No, they don’t. I don’t look at it that way. I see problems being solved by determination for the end goal. If you want something bad enough, you make it happen.”
“Well, sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.” I climbed off the stool, gave her a hug, and left before she pulled out the phonebook in some hopeless romantic gesture at finding me a local job.
“I don’t know what we’d do without you, Kara. Thank you so much.” Jeannine, a woman from the gym, gave me a hug.
Earlier this morning, she’d gone up to the hospital to check on Carter. While she was there, she explained the issues with the gym in his absence. Apparently, Carter was more of a control freak than I’d anticipated. He never let anyone take care of anything, and now with him out of commission, payroll hadn’t been taken care of, the schedule was messed up, and the construction on the expansion had halted. I figured I’d go in and see what I could do—if anything.
Sitting on top of a stack of papers in his desk drawer was a yellow sticky note, the words, “I can’t get your lips off my mind,” along with a bubbly pair of cartoon-looking lips scrolled in a thin black marker. There were no pinpricks behind my eyes, no burning sensation to let me know tears were on the horizon, just a flood of pain pouring out, followed by a few hiccupping sobs.
I’d snuck into his office one day before leaving the gym, knowing he was on the other side checking the progress of the construction. I wanted to leave him something, so using the words he’d often say to me, I scribbled him that silly note and stuck it to his computer. I had no idea he’d kept it, and seeing it now, with the uncertainty of his feelings toward me, I couldn’t hold onto my composure. I knew this didn’t mean anything. For all I knew, he’d meant to throw it away and simply forgot. But it didn’t stop my heart from breaking.