Was that the reason Jack and Eleanor’s love had been so strong, because it had been forged through shared heartbreak? It must have taken so much faith for them to try again after multiple pregnancy losses.
“I guess Nate made up for being an easy baby in his difficult teen years.”
Eleanor looked surprised. “Did he tell you about that?”
“He mentioned he sometimes clashed with his father when he was younger.”
“They wanted very different things. Jack wanted Nathaniel to go to college. Maybe even graduate school. He was so good at engineering and math and could have done great things. But he wanted to build things. I think he got that from my side of the family. My father was a builder and Nathaniel adored his grandfather. And he was always puttering around here.”
She shrugged. “Jack had his own ideas for his future. They fought bitterly about it, month after month. Nathaniel finally ended the argument by enlisting after high school. He only told us about it after it was a done deal.”
That must have taken great courage, for Nate to leave behind all that was familiar. When she enlisted, she had nothing left to lose. Nate had been in an entirely different situation.
“And then, of course, he met Michelle and everything changed. I suppose he’s told you about her.”
Jess wasn’t sure how comfortable she was discussing Nate’s late wife with his mother. “A little. Sophie has told me about her, too.”
“Michelle was beautiful, brave, driven. I liked her very much but could see from the beginning that she wasn’t at all the right woman for my son. I can say that now, though I didn’t dare tell him how I felt back then.”
Jess didn’t know what to say, other than to tell Eleanor not to get the wrong idea about her and Nate.
Jess really wasn’t the right woman for Nate. Not with all her baggage.
“After Nate came home with Sophie when Michelle was deployed, he and his father made their peace. Jack just adored that girl. It was the sweetest thing. He loved to carry her around and sing to her when she was a baby. When she got old enough to walk, she followed him everywhere.”
Eleanor took on a distant look and absently rubbed again at her chest.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” the older woman said, though her features suddenly looked strained. Was she more pale than she had been even five minutes earlier?
“Are you sure?”
Eleanor swallowed, mustering a slight smile. “Actually, I’m not feeling well. Perhaps I should go lie down.”
“That might be a good idea.”
She had to tell Nate about these episodes before she left. He needed to know Eleanor was acting unwell. She should have told him earlier.
“Why don’t you rest in the guest room next door so that I don’t disturb you while I’m working in here?”
“That might be...good.”
Jess rose from the floor. “Let me help you.”
Eleanor waved a hand. “You’re in the middle of things. Don’t stop on my account. I’m fine.”
Before Jess could reach her, she stood. She took two or three steps toward the door then suddenly collapsed as if someone had kicked her legs out from under her, falling forward and narrowly escaping hitting her head on the doorjamb.
Jess gasped and rushed to her. “Eleanor! Are you all right?”
She didn’t answer. Had she hit her head? Jess hadn’t heard a crack.
Her eyes were closed, Jess saw when she rolled her to her back, and her face was deathly pale.
What was happening?
Fear scorched through her, hot and urgent. She tried to shake Eleanor but the older woman didn’t stir.
She was still breathing. Jess could see a faint pulse in her throat and her chest was rising and falling, but she wasn’t responding.
“Eleanor!” she called again, even as she reached for the cordless phone next to Eleanor’s bed so she could call 911.
As soon as she started to dial, she spotted Nate’s number. Still trying to rouse Eleanor, she hit the programmed key first, thinking he could rush over while the ambulance was on the way.
She was immediately sent to voice mail after the second ring.
“I think something is wrong with your mother,” she said quickly on the message. “She suddenly went pale, said she wasn’t feeling well and then passed out. I don’t know what’s going on. She’s unconscious but breathing. I’m calling an ambulance. I’ll try to keep you posted where they’re taking her.”
As she ended the call, she saw Eleanor’s eyes begin to flutter. “I don’t...need an ambulance,” she said, voice breathy.
“I’m afraid you do, honey. You passed out and fell down. You’ve been out of it for at least three minutes now. You need to be checked out.”
“I’m just tired.” Eleanor tried to get up, but Jess rested a hand on her shoulder.
“That’s what you’ve been telling me for days now. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
Eleanor was quiet, breathing deeply, then she met Jess’s gaze, raw fear in her eyes. “I think I might be dying.”
Damn it. She should have called 911 first. She quickly dialed the number and spoke quickly into the phone. “Yes. Hello. I’m with a seventy-year-old woman, Eleanor Whitaker, who just passed out. She’s awake and conscious now but still pale. She’s having chest pain. You are having chest pain, right?” she asked Eleanor, who nodded. “Yes on the chest pain. Please hurry. We’re at Whitaker House, just above Sunshine Cove. Twenty-one thirty-five Seaview Road.”
“Confirmed. We have identified your location. Please stay on the line while we dispatch emergency crews to your area. I’ll be back with you momentarily.”
“Please hurry,” Jess said.
Sophie and Nate couldn’t lose Eleanor, too. Not when they were still grieving for Jack Whitaker.
Jess vowed to do everything within her power to make sure that didn’t happen.
34
Nate
An ambulance. His mother passed out. Sick.
Nate listened to the message from Jess that he had missed after turning off his ringer during a meeting. When had she sent it? Only ten minutes earlier, he saw quickly.
Still, that was ten minutes when he had been unavailable. Anything could have happened in that time. He rose quickly.
“I have to go,” he told his team of project leaders in the room. “Apparently my mother is on her way to the hospital.”
“What can we do?” his second-in-command, Kevin Hall, asked instantly.
Just pray, he wanted to say. “I don’t know what’s going on yet. I’ll keep you posted.”
He hurried out of the room, trying to call Jess’s cell phone. Each time it went to voice mail. He tried a third time as he was sliding behind the wheel of his truck and she finally picked up.
“Hi. Sorry. The ambulance just arrived.” She sounded breathless and afraid, which ratcheted up his own anxiety. Jess always seemed so contained, so in control. If she was this upset, he knew the situation had to feel serious to her.
“What’s happened?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. She passed out and she’s got chest pain. They are treating it as a possible cardiac arrest and are taking her directly to the emergency room of the Cape Sanctuary hospital.”
Cardiac arrest. Good Lord.
“I’m at a meeting in the next town. It will take me about twenty minutes, but I’ll meet you there.”
He peeled out, heart racing. This couldn’t be happening! He couldn’t lose his mother, not just months after his father. He still hadn’t figured out how to deal with the huge void in his life left by Jack Whitaker’s death.
Sophie.
If something happened to his mother, Sophie would be devastated. She still mourned her grandfather, but he feared that losing Eleanor, who had be
en more of a mother than a grandmother to her, would crush her.
Nate wasn’t sure how he made it safely on the coastal road to the regional medical center on the other side of Cape Sanctuary, especially as he likely broke just about every traffic law in the county. When he rushed into the waiting room, he immediately spotted Jess talking at the nurses’ station.
“Nate!” she exclaimed. “I just arrived. They didn’t have room for me on the ambulance, so I followed them. They’ve taken your mother back to a treatment room. I was just explaining to the nurse that you would be here shortly to answer questions about advance directives and the like.”
Advance directives. He couldn’t think about that now. All he could do for those first frenzied seconds was grab hold of Jess and pull her into his arms. She was his rock, the one secure thing to grab onto amid the seething tumult.
She wrapped her arms around him and held on before stepping away. “You should go back and see what’s going on. They wouldn’t let me because I’m not family.”
She spoke calmly but he saw how difficult it was for her to be excluded. “That’s bull,” he snapped. “You likely saved her life. You were the one who called for help.”
“It’s fine. You’re here now. What about Sophie? Should I get her from school?”
“I called her friend McKenna’s mom and explained what has happened. For now, I’m going to leave her at school until I have more information. It’s early dismissal day so McKenna’s mom will pick her up after school and let her hang out at their place until I can give a proper situation report.”
“That’s smart. No need to upset her until we know what’s happening.”
He made a split-second decision. “You should come back with me. Eleanor loves you. I know she would want you there.”
He approached the reception area with Jess in tow. Though the woman behind the desk, Cheryl Myers, went to school with him, she stood firm on the hospital policy.
“Right now, we can only allow one person per patient in a treatment room for security reasons. I’m so sorry, Nate. Wish I could make an exception for you.”
“It’s totally fine,” Jess said. “I don’t mind waiting out here.”
“You don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to. I can text you with an update as soon as I have news.”
“I’ll wait,” she said firmly. He wanted to hug her again but knew seeing his mother had to take priority right now.
The nurse gave him a room number and buzzed him back. When he arrived at his mother’s room, he found several nurses and doctors darting around and his mother hooked up to a multitude of machines. She looked frail and frightened and every one of her seventy years and then some.
It shocked him to the core.
When she spotted him, he saw relief and also embarrassment.
“Oh, Nathaniel. Hello.”
“Mom. What’s going on?”
“This is all so ridiculous. I’m perfectly fine. Would you tell these people that I don’t need to be here?”
“You’re exactly where you should be,” a kind-looking woman in scrubs who was monitoring a machine said firmly. “Right now, your heat rate is all over the place and we have to figure out why. Hello. I’m Josie, one of the nurses who will be taking care of your mom.”
“What’s going on? I heard something about a possible heart attack,” Nate said.
“That was what the paramedics thought,” the nurse said. “It makes sense because of some of her symptoms but we aren’t quite sure what’s happening. I can tell you the electrocardiogram is showing some unusual activity. Right now, the plan is to run more tests so her team can get a more accurate picture of what’s happening. The attending physician should be here shortly to talk to you.”
Nate stood beside his mother’s bed, feeling helpless and worried for her. She had closed her eyes, as if trying to block out the whole thing, but would open them to answer questions Josie posed to her.
After what felt like forever, the ER doc, who turned out to be a friend, came in. She was more than a friend, actually. Nate’s company had just completed a beautiful house for Luz Herrera and her wife, Jade, in the mountains north of town.
“Nate. Hi. Not the best of circumstances to see you again. Eleanor. How are you feeling?”
“Mostly embarrassed at all the fuss. I would like to go home,” she answered.
“I’m afraid we can’t send you home until we figure out why your heart rate is going from hare to turtle speed and back again,” she said calmly. “And you’re having chest pain, I understand. How long has that been going on?”
Eleanor looked at Nate with an apology in her eyes. “About three weeks,” she murmured. “It comes and goes.”
Three weeks! Three weeks and she hadn’t bothered to mention it to him?
“We think the reason you passed out is because you were having what’s called bradycardia. Extremely low heart rate. Your heart wasn’t pumping enough blood to your brain to do its job.”
“What could cause that?” Nate asked her.
“Any number of things. Heart disease, genetic factors, chemical imbalance, thyroid issues. That’s why we need to run some tests. The tricky thing in your case, Eleanor, is that you seem to be fluctuating right now between bradycardia and tachycardia, which is an extremely high heart rate. It’s as if your heart has forgotten how to work right and doesn’t quite know what to do. We’ll run some initial tests here in the emergency department and then come up with a plan with the cardiology team, moving forward.”
“What if I don’t want more tests?” Eleanor said.
“Mom. You don’t have a choice.”
She glowered at him, then sighed. “Fine. Do what you have to do.”
She closed her eyes as if she wanted to block out the whole experience.
“We’ll try to make this as easy on you as possible,” Luz promised gently. She continued looking at his mother’s chart, spoke to the nurse monitoring the EKG, said a few more calming words to his mother then prepared to leave.
Nate followed her out into the hall. “What do you really think is going on?”
Luz frowned and looked through the glass wall of the treatment room at his mother. “We really won’t know until we run more tests and get the cardiac team down here to consult. I can tell you something like this rarely comes on all at once, without warning. Has your mother been feeling ill?”
“She’s had a few episodes over the past few weeks, apparently. I should have made her see a doctor earlier.”
“Parents can be stubborn, can’t they?” Luz smiled. “But don’t worry, Nate. She’s in good hands. Everyone in town loves Eleanor. We don’t want anything to happen to her either.”
“What happens if you can’t regulate her heartbeat?”
Luz looked hesitant to answer but finally shrugged. “I should let the cardiac team give you this info but you’ll probably just do an internet search after I walk down the hall anyway. One possible treatment is a pacemaker.”
“A pacemaker!”
“Believe it or not, it can sometimes be needed only temporarily, until the heart can once more regulate itself. But, again, it’s too early to say until we have more test results. I would tell you to settle in for a bit. We’ll probably keep her down here for a few hours during the initial testing and my guess is the cardiac team will want to keep her for a few days to do more comprehensive tests.”
That fear clutched at him again. He hated this. It had been hard enough watching his father die by inches. “Thank you.”
“She’s tough, Nate,” Luz said with a reassuring smile. “Tough and otherwise healthy, from what I can see of her medical records. We will work on figuring this out and try to get her out of here as soon as we can.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Do you have someone to help you with Sophie?”
“Yes. She’s at school right now then going home with a friend.”
“Once we have Eleanor in a regular room, she can have more than one visitor.”
“Thanks for everything.”
The doctor nodded. “She’s in good hands,” she said again.
“I know.”
He returned to Eleanor’s room and found her asleep. As Josie, her nurse, was still at her bedside while watching the EKG, he decided to go out and update Jess.
She was thumbing something into her phone when he walked out. As soon as she spied him, she rose and shoved her phone into her pocket.
“How is she? What’s happened? Sophie was just texting me. She’s pretty frantic. School just got out. Apparently, a classmate told her an ambulance came to the house. She thought it might be you, especially when she tried to reach you and couldn’t.”
He pulled out his own phone and realized he had somehow activated the do-not-disturb feature. He quickly turned it off and was bombarded with texts from a dozen different people asking about Eleanor.
“I’ll reach out to her.”
Gram is fine for now. They’re treating her well. I’ll tell you more as soon as I know. Love you.
She responded with a weird face he guessed was the worried emoji.
“Do you have any more information?” Jess asked.
“Not really. She’s sleeping right now but they need to run some tests. She’s got an irregular heartbeat, which could result from any number of reasons. Apparently, it’s been going on for some time, though she never bothered to mention it to me.”
“I knew something was wrong,” Jess said guiltily. “I should have told you. She had a few incidents in the time I’ve been working at Whitaker House. Random moments when she would suddenly go pale for no obvious reason and then have to rest. She told me she had been ill before I arrived and was still recovering.”
He did remember his mother being sick but she had assured him she was feeling better. “I think she purposely didn’t want me to know anything was going on with her. She knew Sophie and I would both find it upsetting, especially so soon after my father died.”
The Path to Sunshine Cove Page 24