Good Hope Road (21 page)

The sign beside the road said, SPRINGFIELD 15 MILES. I knew from going for Mama’s cancer treatments that the hospital was only ten.
Ten more miles . . . What then?

Drew’s hands tensed on the steering wheel, as if he were thinking the same thing. “I hope Darla’s gone when we get there,” he muttered. “I’m not in the mood to deal with her crap.”

The knot in my stomach pulled tighter.
Drew’s ex on top of everything else . . .
“It doesn’t sound like things are too good between you and her,” I probed, even though I knew it was probably a subject better left alone. Drew and I had enough problems of our own to deal with. Still, what he’d said to her bothered me.
I told you before, my family is none of your business. . . .
Did that mean they had talked about us before?

“No, they’re not,” he answered flatly, the profile of his face hard, his jaw set in a stubborn line.

I waited to see if he would say anything more. He glanced sideways and saw me watching him as we pulled off the exit to the hospital.

“She’s always in my business, that’s all,” he grumbled, looking over his shoulder to weave into traffic on the access road. “Always trying to get in my head, acting like I’m one of her social work cases, or something. I don’t need that crap.”

“Is that why you don’t want her to know about us?” I wanted to swallow the words as soon as they were out. Yet I wanted to know the answer.

“She knows about y’all.”

“But she doesn’t
know about
us, does she? She doesn’t know how things were with Mama and Daddy and us?” The pain of his rejection stabbed the old wound inside me.

“She doesn’t need to. She needs to learn to stay out of my business.”

“But when you’re married, people expect—”

“We’re
not married
.” He stopped me, cutting a hard look in my direction.

“Well, you have kids together.”

“You sound like her.” Drew pulled the truck into the parking lot of the hospital, threw it in park, and got out, clearly anxious to end the conversation. He stood with one hand on the door, scanning the parking lot, probably looking for Darla’s car.

I peered through the mud-spattered windshield, gazing at Vista Ridge Hospital. It loomed twelve stories high, its dark granite surfaces and mirrored windows reflecting broken images of Springfield that looked like the work of the tornado itself. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure it was only a mirage.

Nearby, a news crew was interviewing a doctor outside the emergency room. I heard the drone of their voices through the open window, but not the words, and I wondered if that doctor had treated Daddy or Nate. I wondered if he had dealt with the kind of chaos after the storm that we had seen in Poetry.

Everything that had happened in the Poetry armory seemed unreal now. The undisturbed city street behind me made it seem as if the tornado couldn’t possibly have happened just an hour’s drive north in Poetry. My mind grasped the idea that I was going inside to see Mama after one of her cancer treatments.

“I guess we’d better go in,” Drew said, following my line of vision to the news crew. “Check on Daddy first, see if he’s awake.”

I nodded, my stomach rolling over. I tried to picture Daddy in a hospital bed, pale and weak, helpless the way Mama had been after her cancer treatments.

“Drew?” His name rasped against my throat like sandpaper.

He stopped with the car door halfway closed.

I don’t want to go inside.
“What do you think Daddy will say?”
Will he ask what happened at home?
“I . . . I mean, how do you think he’ll be?”

Drew squinted at our reflection in the hospital windows. “We’ll just have to see. He’ll be pretty weak, if he’s awake at all.” I could see in him the same thing I felt inside, that thin white line between duty and fear. He closed the door and walked to the sidewalk without waiting to see if I was following.

I slid from the truck and hurried after him, following through the doors and into the building. The air inside was strong with the smell of antiseptic and thick with the odor of people and bedding.

I looked up and down the halls as Drew went to the desk and asked for Daddy’s room number. Around us, both sides of the corridors were lined with beds filled with people. I wondered if all of the other hospitals were as overwhelmed as Vista Ridge.

“God,” I whispered. How long would it be before things were even close to normal?

A little boy stirred on his bed nearby in the hallway, whimpered, and turned over in his sleep. Stepping closer, I laid a hand on his arm and looked at his head, where his hair had been shaved away and a long gash had been closed with sutures. He sniffled quietly, his cheeks and lashes wet with tears as he muttered drowsily.

“Ssshhhh,” I whispered. “It’s all right. Just rest for now.” The straight blond hair clinging to his forehead made me think of Nate when he was younger.

The boy quieted and I stood watching him breathe. I wondered where his mother was, and why he was lying in the hallway all alone with no one to comfort him.

A nurse passing with a clipboard stopped, and I stepped away, realizing I wasn’t supposed to be there.

“He was moving around and talking in his sleep,” I told her.

She nodded, a flash of sadness crossing her face. She wiped it away as if she were erasing a blackboard, looked at the boy’s chart, and took his pulse. “Probably having a nightmare. It’s common. It’ll get better with time. It just takes time . . . and prayer. Lots of prayer.” She hung the chart again and walked away.

Looking at the chart, I read the words,
Male, 10 years prox,
and below that his name,
John Doe.

Tears prickled in my eyes, and I turned away, trying not to think of what it meant, that after nearly forty-eight hours he was still alone and no one knew his name.

Drew stepped away from the information desk and gave me a look of concern. “You all right?”

“It’s just sad to see so many people hurting.” I ran my hands up and down my arms, smoothing away the goose bumps. “Seems like it’s too big of a mess for anybody to take care of, like things will never be all right again, I mean.”

Drew put a hand on my shoulder, and we started toward the elevator. “If you’d seen how bad this place was a couple days ago, you’d think this
was
all right.”

“I guess so.” I thought about how bad Poetry was a couple days ago, and how things were slowly coming back to some kind of order. “I just feel sorry for people having it so bad. That little boy over there in the bed has had surgery on his head, and they haven’t even figured out who he is yet.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I wish I could do something to help.”

Drew laughed softly under his breath as we stepped onto the elevator. “Guess you haven’t changed much. You always did want to rescue every lost critter that got dumped on Good Hope Road. Remember when you found that litter of kittens in the culvert outside, and you hid them in the barn and sneaked milk out to feed them with an eyedropper?”

“Oh, my gosh, I had forgotten all about that.” I had forgotten a lot about those days before Drew left and Mama got so sick. “I kept those kittens for weeks, remember? I used to get you up at night, because I was afraid to sneak out to the barn by myself and feed them.”

Drew rolled his eyes and smiled. “I remember.”

For a minute I forgot where we were, caught up in the warmth of the memory. “We used to sit out there in the barn for a long time, remember, and listen to the crickets chirp and the coyotes howl.” My eyes started to close, and I could smell the damp summer air again, feel the cool mist as it rose from the dew-covered pastures, see stars glittering through the gaps in the old tin barn. “That was so . . . peaceful.” At that moment, everything in me wanted to go back to one of those secret summer nights, when I was safe in the barn with Drew.

“It was.” His eyes were like mine, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was.

The elevator chimed, and the doors swung open. The summer mist, and the coyotes, the stars, the rhythmic sounds of the insects rushed out the door like air being sucked into a vacuum.

Drew let out a quick breath and stepped into all that was left—the sterile corridor of the hospital. “Until Daddy found the damned things and drowned them all.”

Of course, the conversation had come back around to Daddy. Everything always did.

I realized I had never known what happened to those kittens.
Drew told me they ran away. . . .

He pushed open the ICU door, and we stepped into the nurses’ station. Behind glass panels up and down the hallway, patients lay connected to masses of wires and tubes. Around them, medical staff moved purposefully and loved ones stood by bedsides with worried faces.

I followed Drew down the hall, hearing the breath moving in and out of my body, my heart beating slowly, in time with the beeping machines.

Come on, Jenilee, get your head together
. I heard Mama’s voice in my mind. She sounded impatient. I knew she expected me to go in there and take care of Daddy.

I wished we had gone to see Nate first. Seeing Nate, alive and smiling, making jokes and laughing, would make everything else easier. It always did.

“There’s Daddy,” I heard Drew say. He motioned through the doorway of an ICU cubicle, and both of us stood in the entrance, watching a nurse move efficiently around a stone-still body covered lightly with a sheet and wrapped in a tangle of machines, tubes, and wires, like a bull trapped in a barbed-wire fence.

I glanced at Drew, but he didn’t seem to remember I was there. His face was hard, his gaze far away and his eyes glassy.

I realized it took all he had to stand there in the doorway. He didn’t have the strength to help me cross the threshold.

The nurse finished what she was doing and stopped to talk to us.

“You can go on in and speak to him for a few minutes, if you want to. He probably won’t wake up at this point. He was responsive for about an hour earlier today, but he was in a lot of pain and became combative with the IV and tubes, so he is pretty heavily sedated now. We brought your brother down to see him and they were able to talk for a few minutes, but he has since become weaker. His pulse rate dropped and we’ve had to put him back on the oxygen mask.”

Drew nodded, and the nurse slipped through the door.

“I’ll leave you alone now. Only a few minutes, though, all right?” She laid her hand on my arm as she passed. “Things look a little more encouraging today, overall. They think they’ve halted the internal bleeding, but he’s still very weak. Don’t stay long.”

Drew nodded again, but she was already gone.

We stood a moment longer in the doorway. Finally I stepped into the room. Three steps forward, and I stood at the foot of Daddy’s bed.

I squinted at the bed, trying to see Daddy in the swollen, bruised face with the tube coming from the nose. I listened to the slow rise and fall of his breathing, tried to imagine his voice. I couldn’t see anything left of the hard, angry man I remembered. Silent and pale against the wrinkled white sheet, he was just another lost creature, like those kittens, at the mercy of forces stronger than he was.

I slipped my hand into his without thinking. “Daddy?”

The figure in the bed didn’t answer. The room was silent except for the rhythmic sound of the pulse oximeter and the steady beep of the EKG.

“Daddy?” I said again. “Daddy, it’s us. Jenilee and Drew. We’re here.”

Again, no movement from the bed.

I exhaled the breath I had been holding in rhythm with the gush of the machine. “I guess he’s asleep again.”

Drew nodded, standing at the foot of the bed like a reflection of Daddy watching his own body.

“Let’s go see Nate,” I said. “The nurse said they were trying to keep Daddy under for a while. It probably isn’t good for us to be here talking to him.”

Drew nodded, turning his shoulder toward me and stepping to the door. He slumped against the doorframe for a moment.

I turned to follow him. Just before I slid my hand free, Daddy’s fingers squeezed mine. I looked at his face, but there was nothing—no movement, no flutter of eyelids. Laying his hand against the sheets, I turned and followed Drew out the door.

We left ICU and wound through the corridors to Nate’s room. My fingers burned in that hot circle of Daddy’s life. I knew that he would wake up. He would wake up and he would take over our lives, like he always had.

I didn’t tell Drew. I didn’t want him to know how I felt inside. It was wrong of me to think that way about Daddy when he lay near death in a hospital bed. He needed us now.

We came to the room that was Nate’s, and Drew pushed open the door. There was only a small walkway in between rows of beds. Nate was sitting up, his leg raised on a stack of pillows, encased in a cast that ran from his ankle to his hip.

The other boys in the room looked up as the door swished closed behind us. Disappointment that we weren’t there for them registered on their faces. Nate’s face lifted into an easy smile, the smile I remembered except for the swollen black-and-blue eye above it.

“Nice shiner, huh?” he quipped.

All the love I had for him filled me, and I rushed forward, grabbed him in my arms, and drank in the scent and the feel of him.

“Oh, God,” I heard myself whisper, my voice shuddering with tears that I couldn’t keep away. “Oh, Nate, thank God.”

Nate held on to me for a minute, then started trying to wiggle out of my grip. “You’re gonna give me broke ribs to go with my broke leg,” he complained, chuckling in that silly way of his. “Geez, Jenilee, turn loose already.”

I forced myself to let go. Gingerly touching the bruise on his face, I sat back, looking at him.

He rolled his eyes, blushing and looking twelve, not sixteen. “Geez, cut that out already.” Pushing my hand away, he looked around the room, which was filled with boys his age, most of them in casts of one kind or another.