“We’re here, Layla.” Emma’s voice brings me to the moment. We’re at the parking lot of the university hospital, and I’m surprised to find tears tracking down my cheeks.
I don’t know why I’m crying. They told Emma that Hadley is going to be okay, and... I know Nicky is going to be fine. I know it. Even though they said that he’s in the PICU and chances are he won’t survive the night. I mean, what do they know. They said chances are. Right? Chances could mean anything.
So my tears are stupid.
I jump out of the car and make my way toward the front entrance. When I see Thomas, everything is going to be okay. I chant it to myself, over and over. Emma talks to the lady at reception but she is refusing to give us anything. We’re not family.
A movement in the periphery catches my eye, and I turn to find Susan walking down the hallway to the left of the reception desk.
“Susan.”
She is startled to see me walking toward her. “Layla.”
“Why are you crying?” Her cheeks are tear-stained, similar to mine. It makes me feel…panicky. “No. Don’t cry. There’s nothing to cry about. Everything is gonna be okay. They told Emma…” I turn to point her out at the desk. “Hadley’s gonna be fine.”
She covers her mouth to muffle a broken sob. “Nicky—”
“He’s fine.” My shrill voice surprises her and she looks at me like I’m crazy. “Nicky’s fine. Nothing’s going to happen to him. He’s fine.”
“You know he likes to put all his toys in his playpen. Every night he makes me gather them up and put them in one corner.” She hiccups. “He looked like an angel this morning, playing with his little elephant.” She looks like she’s going to fall so I put my arm around her shoulders.
“Then Hadley woke up early and I-I asked her to watch Nicky while I ran to the store to get the formula. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to leave him alone but I don’t know h-how I forgot to stock up on it and he needed it. I thought I’d be back soon, but the store didn’t have it so I had to drive a little farther.”
Susan is full-on crying now. I want to snap at her but just then Emma walks over to us, puts her hand on my shoulders, and shakes her head once, telling me to rein it in.
“B-By the time I got back, he was almost…gone. I called 911 and then I looked for Hadley. She was in the bathroom unconscious.” Susan’s sobs are dislodging something inside me—my stern, stark belief that Nicky is okay—and I don’t like that. I don’t like it one bit.
I move away from her. “Where’s Thomas?”
Susan takes a while to answer, a while that stretches thin and brittle. She tells me he’s on the third floor where the PICU wards are located, in the waiting room. I dash upstairs, unseeing, barely conscious myself.
My feet stop when I catch sight of him. His back is to me. The wide berth of his shoulders is the only thing I see. He’s standing in the middle of the empty waiting room, facing the glass doors that lead to the hallway containing the wards.
It reminds me of the night I saw him through his window. Even through his grey shirt, I see the bunched-up muscles, the tensed patterns on his back. That night I couldn’t console him. I couldn’t touch him or tell him everything was going to be okay.
But I’m going to do it now.
I walk toward him, slowly, my steps quiet like a flickering, dying breath.
“Thomas?”
He doesn’t move. I don’t think he even heard me. I walk around and come face to face with him.
Or something that looks like him. Something that’s as tall and as wide but somehow shrunken. A husk of a man, pale and haggard with barren eyes.
“Thomas,” I call again, this time louder than before. His gaze snaps away from whatever tortured vision he’s been having and settles on me. “Everything is going to be okay,” I repeat for the millionth time. The more I say it, the more dusty and scraping it feels in my mouth, as though I’ve swallowed a sandstorm and my body is filled with crunchy grains of the desert. But, I push on. He needs me. “I’m here now. Everything is gonna be fine. Hadley’s fine.”
I swallow and get close to him. My neck strains as I look at his face, immobile and dead. “Thomas, d-don’t worry. They’re all lying about Nicky, I know it. Trust me, okay. I—”
I’m shocked at the release of a shattered sob. It sounds so much like Susan’s, the woman who thinks Nicky is almost gone. I’m not that woman. My sob shouldn’t sound like hers. I know Nicky is gonna be okay. He has to be. There’s no other option.
The sound of my pain wakes Thomas up, but he still doesn’t see me. He’s too occupied in his own head, too overcome with his grief. I never thought sadness could be violent and savage, but on Thomas it is. His devastation is brutal. I’m readying myself for it to rain down on me. It never comes, however.
He walks away.
His legs eat up the distance and he’s opening the door to the stairwell. I run after him. I snatch his arm and stop his progress just as he reaches the edge of the greenish stairs. “Thomas, wait. Just look at me, please. It’s going to be fine. I’m telling you. Just please, look at me,” I beg, and then he does.
He looks at me, and fury blazes through his eyes. He grabs my bicep and shakes me, jarring every single one of my bones in the process. “My son’s dying, Layla.” He spits out my name like a toxic curse. “They won’t even let me in. They won’t even let me see him. He almost choked to death on a fucking button, and they won’t even let me see my own son.”
He’s at a stage where everything looks like food and drool-worthy. I sob again and it is broken and strangled, with enough power to destroy me.
“Do you know why no one was there to stop him?” His grip tightens on my arm and he pushes me, walks me backward, thumping my back and my head to the cold wall. I bite my lip to stop from crying out in pain. “Because my wife was busy killing herself,” he snarls. “She was busy swallowing down a bottle of sleeping pills.” By the time he finishes, his snarl has become a roar as he belts out his pain. He slaps his palm on the wall beside me.
But then the fight is leached out of his body as if that one slap to the wall was all he had in him. His voice loses its violent quality and is now fraught with torture. “I thought everything was fine. I thought if she let me touch her, then she must’ve forgiven me. She asked me to hold her a-and I thought she must love me back. Maybe not a lot – God knows, I don’t deserve that, now more than ever – but at least a little. And now…everything is broken. My entire family is torn apart when I just got it back.”
There’s a crack in his voice, right in the middle of it. It breaks my heart, crushes it into a pulp. I’m bleeding on the inside.
I remember the odd glow I saw on her yesterday. She was tired but...peaceful. She was happy, and I fucked it all up.
“It was me.” I swallow. “I-I did that. It’s my fault. I went to your house to see Nicky. I wanted to tell him I’d back off, that I broke all the rules and fell in love with you, and I saw Hadley and I—”
“You fell in love with me,” he says. It’s a flat statement. I would’ve been fooled by the calmness of it if not for his pulsating cheek.