“Oh my God! What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said, then conveyed the few details that Sandy had given me. I was already pulling my hair out of a ponytail and slipping into my shoes when I asked, “You think maybe I should head over there?”
Lisa didn’t hesitate to agree. “Yes! Go! Call me when you find out what’s going on.”
Chapter 13
DIVIDED WE FALL
I grabbed my purse and noticed that my hands were shaking. My body went through the motions of locking my door and sprinting the few steps up to 7th to hail a cab, but my mind was running in a constant loop, Sandy’s words playing over and over in my head: Trip’s been hurt.
Somehow, I made it to the hospital. I rushed the front desk and managed to speak to the first person I saw behind it. “Trip Wiley?”
The receptionist eyed me warily, trying to decipher if I was a friend or foe of their latest patient. She hesitated for a second too long, so I blurted out, “Terrence Wilmington? Terrence C. Wilmington the Third. Please. I’m a friend.”
I must have looked completely panic-stricken, because I could see the shift in her expression, the realization that I knew him personally enough to look so worried. She rifled through a file box on the counter behind her and presented me with a laminated blue visitor pass. “Mr. Wiley is still in the triage area, but you can go down and see him. Down the hall, make a right past the elevators, through the double doors and he’s in bed twenty-four.”
I don’t even know if I thanked her before darting down the hall, my gait somewhere between a brisk walk and a flat-out run. I pushed the button so the heavy steel doors would open and checked the numbers above each drawn curtain. I convinced myself that he mustn’t have been hurt too severely if he was accepting visitors in triage and not unconscious and laid out on an operating table or something. The thought calmed me down and slowed my pace, so that by the time I reached his room, I wasn’t frazzled and out of breath.
I saw Sandy emerge through the curtain just as I reached twenty-four. She was speaking to an invisible Trip when she said, “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. I’ll be back in a few.”
Poor Sandy looked even more haggard than I felt. Must have been a rough day. She turned and saw me just then, relief washing over her face.
“Oh! You’re here! I didn’t know if you would come!” she exclaimed as she hugged me hello. It wasn’t an odd gesture, even considering we’d only met for the first time a few hours prior. We were two women bonded by our shared affection for the same man. I hugged her back, grateful that Trip had someone that wonderful to care for him so deeply.
“How is he?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
Sandy swiped a stray hair from her face, her sleek ponytail from earlier having come undone over the course of the day’s events. “He’s fine. He’s going to be fine.”
“What happened?”
She shot a look over her shoulder at the drawn curtain before answering. “I’ll let him tell you.” She gave me a wink and a pat on the arm before sauntering off down the hall.
I took a steadying breath before quietly parting the mauve curtain to Trip’s “room”. He was lying on his back, eyes closed, with a bandaged arm resting across his midsection. I took an extra second to look him over, to appease my nerves with the truth that he was, in fact, still breathing. He looked so young lying there-not so much like the dynamic movie star that the world knew and much more like the beautiful young boy that I once knew. So peaceful, so striking and perfect... even in spite of the cast around his forearm.
“Knock knock,” I finally said, alerting him to my presence.
He opened his eyes and just lit up when he saw me. The look on his face shot a tremor of pure joy through my blood, before an inexplicable sadness overshadowed it. I realized that aside from Sandy, I was the only other person to be there for Trip in his time of need. Here was this big, hotshot movie star, surrounded by thousands of admiring fans, hundreds of people he worked with, and yet, no one was there but me.
It must be a weird kind of loneliness to be famous.
“Hey!” he said, his voice groggy.
“Hey, yourself.” I shook my head at him. “Jesus, Trip. I leave you alone for a few hours and come to find out you’re all banged up in a hospital bed.”
“Which is why you shouldn’t have left me alone tonight, sweetheart. You and I’d be in a much nicer bed than this one if you hadn’t.”
I just sighed in mock disappointment at his joking words. Same old Trip.
That made him laugh.
I gestured to the cast on his arm. “You gonna live?” I asked.
He appraised the damage and answered, “Yeah. Compound fracture, broken in three places. Blood everywhere. Looked worse than it is. It’s the concussion they’re more concerned about.”
“You got a concussion?”
“Yeah.” He said it like he was disappointed. Pissed at the very word itself.