The dots started connecting, one by one. Jonah had mentioned a neighbor calling for the ambulance. “Yes,” he said, clearly having made the logic leap, as well. “His neighbor. Of course.”
“He’s in room 308, down the hall there. I was sitting with him, just to keep him company in case he woke up, but the doctor shooed me out a few minutes ago to do some sort of checkup,” Vivian said.
Natalie’s chest squeezed, but she nodded at Jonah. Routine neuro checks were good. It meant they were keeping a careful eye on his father’s condition. “Do you want me to go have a nurse let Dr. Aronson know you’re here?” she asked.
But Jonah shook his head. “No. Not yet. I don’t want to interrupt the exam. The more he can assess, the better. This way, we’ll get the most current information as soon as he’s done.” For another minute, Jonah said nothing, his brows creased in thought. Then he looked at Vivian and asked, “My father has a picture of me?”
To her credit, the question didn’t seem to throw her, although, God, it tugged at Natalie’s heart. “Oh, yes,” Vivian replied, nodding. “We play cards once a week with two of the other residents, and we rotate who hosts. Your father has a picture of you in his living room, front and center. From when you graduated medical school.”
“I didn’t even know he had one,” Jonah said, and Vivian offered up a wry smile.
“Actually, he doesn’t have one. He has three. You’re just a lot younger in the other two. School photos, both of them. But my, there’s no mistaking you. Your daddy’s so very proud.”
Jonah’s lashes lifted and lowered in a quick succession of blinks. “Proud,” he repeated. “He said that?”
“Not in a whole lot of words. That isn’t really his way,” Vivian said, as surely as if she were stating that A was followed by B, or that the sun set without fail in the west. “He gets a look in his eyes when he talks about you, though, and he’s so excited to see you for Christmas. He told me all about it.”
Her smile faded as she glanced down the hallway, and Natalie instantly recognized the regret on the older woman’s face, along with the sadness that chased it. “I’m truly sorry I didn’t call you myself. Everything happened so fast. I knew when Kenneth didn’t join us for lunch that something wasn’t right.” Vivian paused for a breath, steeling her spine in a gesture that somehow managed to be both elegant and tough at the same time. “But I knew you were his emergency contact, and that they’d call you right away. I just wish I’d had the staff at Rosebriar open up to check on him sooner.”
“You did the right thing, Vivian,” Natalie said, refusing to think what would’ve happened if Vivian hadn’t had them check when they did. Glass half full, she reminded herself. Jonah’s father was here, now, being cared for. That’s what mattered.
Vivian reclaimed a tiny bit of her smile. “Well, I sure am glad you’re here,” she said, reaching out to squeeze Jonah’s hand. “It will bring your father peace of mind.”
Jonah opened his mouth—to protest, if his expression was any indication—but a door opened halfway down the well-lit corridor, a dark-haired doctor stepping out of the room and murmuring to a younger woman in scrubs, who Natalie guessed was a resident.
“Dr. Aronson?” Jonah asked, striding forward just in time for the man to look up. “Jonah Sheridan. We spoke on the phone.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Aronson said, shaking both Jonah’s and Natalie’s hands and introducing his resident, Dr. Lee, to them both. “Your father is stable right now. He’s in and out of consciousness, but we’ve sedated him so he can rest.”
Jonah indicated the electronic chart in the man’s hands. “May I?”
“Of course,” Dr. Aronson said, handing it over. “Your father was altered when he arrived in the emergency department, his speech noticeably slurred and his left side showing moderate weakness.”
These were things he’d told Jonah earlier, of course, but the doctor was no dummy. Family members, even those who were surgeons, could blank on facts in the shock of a moment.
Aronson continued, “The symptoms, along with your father’s vitals, were concerning, so Dr. Reyes called us for a consult, and Dr. Lee immediately ordered a head CT.” He indicated the chart, but Jonah had already pulled up the images. “There’s no bleed, which is good news. But if you look right here—”
Damn it. “There’s a blood clot,” Natalie said, her eyes on the scan.
“It’s fairly small, but yes,” Dr. Aronson agreed. “That’s what’s causing the symptoms. We did a number of additional scans to determine the source, since obviously, proper treatment depends on that knowledge. Your father’s cerebral artery looks clear, but ultrasound shows a moderate narrowing of the carotid artery. It seems the most likely source of the clot.”
Jonah nodded, his eyes still firmly fixed on the images in the chart. He asked, “So, do you think we’re looking at a full-blown stroke or a TIA?”
Hope sprang into Natalie’s chest. A TIA wasn’t ideal by any stretch. A third of the time, they were just a precursor to a bigger, more serious strokes. But two thirds of the time, they weren’t, and patients could show significant improvements over the course of hours, if given the proper treatment.
Glass half full, glass half full, glass…
“It’s still difficult to tell at this point,” Aronson said, not ruling it in but also not ruling it out. “Your father’s vitals have stabilized with the anticoagulants. He’s regaining some left-side motor function, but he’s still altered, which is why we chose to sedate him. We don’t want his brain working any harder than it has to right now, and it’s equally crucial that we keep his heart rate and blood pressure stable.”
“Agreed,” Jonah said, handing the chart to Dr. Lee. “What’s the prognosis?”
Aronson paused, but only long enough for Natalie’s breath to catch in her throat. “The next twenty-four hours are going to be critical,” he said. “While it’s possible this stroke was an isolated event, it’s also possible that he’ll have another, potentially bigger one, within the next day. We’ll continue to treat him with IV meds to do our best to prevent that from happening, and monitor him very closely to make sure he continues to improve. I know that wait-and-see isn’t ideal,” Aronson said kindly. “But it really is the best thing we can do right now while we let those anticoagulants do their job.”
Jonah shook his head, his voice quiet but unwavering. “No, I understand.”
“Of course, you’re welcome to go in and see him,” Aronson offered, gesturing to the door. “But given the circumstances, it’s not likely that he’ll wake until morning. Once he does, we’ll do another assessment, and then we’ll go from there.”
“Right. Thank you, Dr. Aronson.” Jonah reached out to shake the man’s hand and nodded his thanks at the resident, both doctors offering polite smiles to him and Natalie before they headed toward the nurses’ station. A deep thread of emotion flickered across Jonah’s stare as he turned to look at the door to his father’s room, and even though it had disappeared by the time Natalie had registered it, her heart still jerked all the same.
“I can go in with you, if you want,” she offered, making sure that her tone marked the words as a true offer, one that was entirely up to him if he wanted privacy instead. She reached out to slide her fingers around his, and although she’d meant the gesture to be a quick squeeze-and-release of comfort, Jonah grabbed her hand tightly enough to make her breath hitch.
“I…” For a second, he simply stood there, clutching her fingers like a lifeline, emotion rolling off of him in waves. But then, he straightened his shoulders and let go.
“That’s okay. I’ll only be a minute. Like Dr. Aronson said, he’ll be asleep until tomorrow, and he needs the rest. Plus, we’re probably already past visiting hours. I’ll just do a quick check of his vitals and we can go.”
Natalie blinked. “He’s your father. I’m sure they’d make an exception for visiting hours, especially since he’s not in the ICU,” she said. “Really, Jonah. We
can—”
“No.” Jonah’s smile was small but affable, identical to a thousand smiles she’d seen him give to a thousand different people before. “I won’t be long. I promise,” he said.
And then he slipped past the door, leaving her to wonder what the hell had just happened.
23
Jonah made it all the way to the door of the hotel room where he and Natalie would spend the night before realizing he’d probably screwed himself by agreeing to let her accompany him to Charleston. Not that he didn’t want her here. Fuck, her calm, steady presence had been the only thing that had kept him from losing his shit more times than he could count today. But Natalie knew him better than anyone, and that familiarity had grown exponentially over the past four weeks. Keeping a lid on his emotions had been hard enough when they’d been just friends.
Now that they weren’t just anything, and his emotions were churning through his chest like high tide in a hurricane? Yeah. He was going to have to nail that lid into place with gutter spikes if he had any prayer of getting through this intact.
Although, to be fair, he probably didn’t.
You knew this would happen, his inner voice whispered, soft and insidious, and God, he couldn’t even argue.
He had known. Maybe not in the literal sense—being able to predict that his father would have a life-threatening stroke just as they’d begun to bridge the decades’ worth of distance between them was impossible, of course. Yet still, Jonah had known better than to try. He’d been foolish enough to think maybe, just maybe, he and his father could be the exception, the new leaf, the fresh start.
He’d been wrong.
Love didn’t last.
Natalie used the keycard she’d gotten from the front desk attendant to gain entry to the hotel room, which she’d efficiently booked while Jonah had checked in on his father, steeling himself against the frailty of the old man’s body, the pallor of his skin in contrast with the hospital pillow. Jonah followed her over the threshold and into the room, the well-appointed space softly lit by the one bedside lamp that had been left on to welcome them, and she lowered her overnight bag to the tasteful gray and white carpet beneath their feet.
“I know it’s pretty late,” Natalie said, moving toward him with just enough of a smile to weaken his defenses another notch. “But I can go see if the kitchen is still open in the restaurant downstairs. Or maybe we could get room service. You never had dinner.”
Jonah shook his head. “No. Thank you,” he added, smiling back. Okay, yeah. This was good. This, he knew how to do. Smile. Sweet-talk. Lie. “It’s been a long day. Honestly, I think I just want to crash.”
She wanted to argue. Jonah could see it on her face. Christ, he could read her like a billboard, and he knew it had to be killing her to say, “Okay.”
But she did. They went through the motions of normalcy—the brushing of teeth, the changing of clothes, pulling back the cozy down coverlet and turning out the bedside lamp—each action a new brick in the wall Jonah had carefully constructed over the course of years. He closed his eyes even though he knew he wouldn’t sleep, metering his breathing to a slow, steady inhale/exhale to make Natalie think he was drifting off. For a minute, he thought he’d fooled her, guilt mixing in with everything else running amok in his rib cage.
Then she whispered, “Jonah. Talk to me.”
She’d turned to her side, her knees bent so they rested an inch from his thigh, one hand tucked under her cheek. The room was essentially dark, with only a sliver of moonlight spilling through the gap in the drapes to put a silvery edge on the shadows. It should have made things easier. After all, Jonah was an expert at shoving his emotions into a hole, at hiding from the truth. The darkness should only make it so Natalie wouldn’t be able to see him.
Except she did. Without light, without words—fuck, even when he used every last tool in his arsenal to keep her out, she still saw him. And instead of making him feel vulnerable and exposed like it damn well should have, it didn’t. No. Lying here, next to Natalie in the dark, Jonah felt something he hadn’t felt in far, far too long. Something he was certain he’d never feel again.
He felt safe.
“I was six when my mother left,” Jonah said, his heart rising in his throat to tighten the words. “But I still have a lot of memories of her. The way she’d cut my sandwiches into triangles and tell me they tasted better that way. How she’d read me a story every night before tucking me in. The way she smelled like flowers.”
“Those sound like good memories,” Natalie said, and God, Jonah loved her bright-side heart, even if she was wrong about this.
“They should be, but they’re not.” All they did was remind him of how much he’d blindly loved his mother, believing that she loved him in return, only to be proven very, very wrong. “Do you know how she left my old man? In a letter.”
Jonah waited out Natalie’s soft inhale of confusion, then her deeper gasp of shock before continuing, the story clawing its way out of him, all sharp edges and teeth. “And not just any letter, nope. Uh-uh. My mother set the gold standard for Dear John letters by getting up just like she did every day, letting my old man kiss her on the cheek before he left and putting me on the bus to school like nothing-doing. As soon as that was done, she scrawled her goodbye on a piece of paper from the pad we kept by the phone, like it was a reminder from the dentist’s office or a goddamned grocery list. Then she left it on the kitchen table, addressed to my father, packed up every last one of her belongings, and walked out the door. We never heard from her again, other than the divorce papers she had my father served with two weeks later. She signed over her parental rights without contest. Didn’t even ask to visit me once a year.”
He’d uncovered that little nugget years later in middle school, when he’d stumbled upon the divorce agreement in his father’s desk drawer while searching for a spare folder for an English essay. How easily his mother had tossed him aside. It had been a matter of three checkmarks and a handful of signatures, and poof. She’d abandoned him without mention.
“Jonah, I’m so sorry.”
Natalie’s whisper was simple, the words ones Jonah had heard countless times for any number of reasons, and spoken himself countless more. Fucked up, really, that he actually felt the comfort of them now.
“I was finishing kindergarten,” he said. “I had never come home to an empty house, you know? My mother was always there, always…until that one day she wasn’t.” And, of course, he remembered it like it had been a minute ago, because that was the sort of bitch fate was. “I was scared at first, but then I saw the letter. Even though it had my father’s name on it, I opened it. I thought it would say where she was.”
Natalie stiffened beside him, because of course she did. It was a natural reaction to the shit reality that Jonah had been the one to realize his mother had left first, and that he’d had to give his father the news. Then again, it had been meant for both of them. His mother had left Jonah without a backward glance, too, as if she’d never loved either of them.
For a second, his emotions threatened to swallow him, and panic rose in his rib cage, begging him to shut up. But then Natalie’s hand was on his chest, splayed wide over that spot that always ached so fucking much before he sewed it shut, and he kept talking, letting more escape.
“I’d only just learned how to read, and even though what my mother had written didn’t make sense to me, I knew something was really wrong. So, I went next door to the neighbor’s house and told her I was alone, and she called my father, who came to get me. I had to give him the letter, knowing what it said. ‘I’m sorry, Kenneth’,” Jonah quoted, the words ash in his mouth. “‘I just can’t do this anymore’.”
She hadn’t even mentioned him in the letter. For Chrissake, he hadn’t even been worthy of a goodbye.
And still, he’d been heartbroken.
“Jonah,” Natalie said, her tone loaded with emotion even though she didn’t say anything else, just kept her hand right wher
e it was, the pressure steady, the contact warm.
“My mother pretended to love me and she stayed with my father for as long as she could out of obligation, but she was never going to stay forever. She’d just been biding her time,” he said. “Her love was never real, and it was never meant to last. And now, with my father—”
Jonah’s throat threatened to close, his heart slamming against his sternum so hard, it was nearly painful. But this was Natalie, who saw him even in the dark, her fingers pressed tightly over that pain, and the rest just tumbled out of him.
“For all those years, I pushed him away because I was scared that if I got close to him, he’d leave, too. I wasn’t belligerent or mean—I could never bring myself to do that to him. But I was scared. I knew he was a quiet man, just like I knew there was a good chance he didn’t know how to bridge the gap between us. I told myself the distance was smart. That it would keep me from getting hurt. That I probably reminded him of my mother, anyway, all those painful reminders, right there for him to see every day. That it was just better this way. And for years—Christ, for decades—it was.”
“Until now,” Natalie said.
Jonah kept going with his verbal vomit, both hating and being so fucking grateful for how good it felt to finally say everything out loud. “I should have known better than to think I could be close with him, especially after all this time, without the other shoe coming crashing down. But I got so greedy for something I’d been missing for my whole fucking life that I got reckless. I let myself want that closeness. I let myself hope.”
Natalie shook her head, her hair shushing over the pillow in the darkness. “Hope isn’t a bad thing.”
But Jonah shook his head right back. “Hope is a risk that will slap you in the face just as soon as she’ll kiss you on the lips. I was a fool to believe that this would work between me and my father. That we could have a relationship that would last.”
Natalie’s eyes widened in the moonlight. “What? How can you say that?”
Better Than Me (A Remington Medical Contemporary Romance) Page 23