“We need to call Theo. We’re going to need his help with Mom.” The look in Alik’s eyes was pained. “She needs to be our primary concern now. The rest of it will wait; either that or we’ll just have to deal with it as it comes up. Mom’s health takes precedence.”
“I think you’re right,” Meg agreed. “We need to call and let Theo know what’s happened. He’ll be able to help get access to the tests and equipment we don’t have at home. Besides, I am really worried Mom’s injury is,” Meg swallowed the huge lump that appeared from nowhere in her throat, “more severe than we’re prepared to manage ourselves.”
“So we’re agreed? We ask Theo for help?” Alik looked around the cabin. All eyes met his and everyone was murmuring in agreement.
“Okay,” he said, and reached out to grab one of the inflight phones. From his back pocket, he pulled out his wallet, slipped a prepaid card out, ran it through the scanner and dialed Dr. Andrews’ cell phone. He listened for the first ring and wondered what he was going to say to the man who’d done so much already for his family.
Chapter 19 Dr. Theo Andrews
The ICU room at the Dallas hospital to which his son was assigned was like any other. The hospital bed was the focus of the room and all around it were what most would recognize as common equipment an ICU would include: mechanical ventilator, cardiac monitor, drains, catheters and intravenous lines.
If he could look around and force himself to see everything strictly professionally, he would be much better off. During the light of day, he could pull off his clinical detachment, for the most part. He stood with his hands on his hips calculating and nodding as Cole’s doctors spoke to him just outside the ICU room. He offered ideas and suggestions as a talented and experienced ER doctor in his own right. He looked over the results of his son’s tests himself using his medical eye to interpret them.
So to the hospital community, he looked as though he was handling his son’s tragic car accident marvelously.
At least, the day nurses thought that.
The night nurses knew better.
He had always been of the opinion that if you want to truly know a person’s spirit, watch them after the sunlight has left every corner of the room and they are enveloped in darkness. Watch, wait, and see for yourself how thick their mask sits on their face. At night, tears of heartache and pain racked the middle-aged doctor until there were no more tears to cry.
Then he would stare, unblinking.
He would forget to breathe and find himself gasping periodically—his body’s desperate attempt to keep alive.
The body of his baby boy, his only child, lay motionless, except for the forced breaths from the mechanical ventilator.
Cole’s desperation over a girl had brought him to the brink once before, when he dosed himself with the Infinite serum. Now, heartbreak over that same girl was the catalyst that drove his son to this.
His sweet, gentle-hearted boy whose humor had made everyone around him smile.
And now look at him, Theo thought. My little boy.
Theo stared.
He couldn’t even bring himself to stand and pace the room, or flip on the television. No. His sleepless nights, sitting alone in the dark with his unconscious and broken boy was all he had and there was no easing his pain.
Margo left him.
The love of his life, the woman he was dreaming of marrying, walked out of those doors and didn’t even look back, even after everything they’d been through together.
Theo leaned forward and held his head in his hands.
I just don’t get it, he thought for the hundredth time. I don’t understand how she could throw her hands up and walk away from me when I needed her the most. She knows I would move heaven and earth for her. She knew how upset I was at seeing Cole so hurt. Why couldn’t she just listen?
Theo yanked his wire-rimmed glasses off his face and rubbed the exhaustion in his eyes.
Cole had only been in the ICU for three days, but they felt like a lifetime. Cole suffered a fractured skull, a broken collarbone and multiple fractures throughout his ribs one of which lacerated his liver. He also shattered his right knee. On top of all that, he had suffered multiple lacerations all over his head, face and neck from hitting then flying through the windshield on impact. He was kept in a drug-induced coma while they were trying to give his body time to respond to treatment.
Staring down at his empty, shaking hands, Theo realized there was a certain horror to watching his life explode.
The cell phone he kept on its charger across the room began to vibrate across the laminate surface of the table there. For a moment, Theo considered not even going to see who would be calling him at eleven at night, but his ingrained sense of responsibility got the better of him. He stood and shuffled, exhausted to the phone. And just before he reached out to flip the screen over so he could see the caller ID, he felt a rush of panic. Something horrible happened; he knew it in his gut.
Chapter 20 Floating From Reality