“Mr Stone?” she asks, looking at Kenneth.
He nods quickly, reaching up to scrub at his face. “Yes. Yes, hello.”
“Hello, Mr Stone. I’m Doctor Prince, one of the surgeons who was working on your son Jared.” Her eyes flick to me. “Is it okay to talk to you now or …”
Kenneth nods quickly. “Yes, this is Amy, Jared’s girlfriend.”
Jared’s girlfriend. The words are so sweet that I feel emotion clog my throat and sting my eyes.
The doctor smiles at me. “Ah, okay. It’s nice to meet you both. I just wanted to let you know that they’ll be bringing Jared down here to the cardiology ward in a few minutes. Has anyone explained his condition to you?”
He’s alive! He’s okay. I reach up and grip fistfuls of my hair, my stomach loosening a little at her words. I close my eyes and focus on that. Baby steps. He’s out of surgery.
Kenneth clears his throat. “No.” His voice is hoarse, as we sat in silence for so long.
The doctor nods. It’s then that I notice her smile is still tight. “Well, during the crash, Jared sustained multiple injuries. The one we were most concerned about was his chest. He must have hit the steering column quite hard. That caused what we call a myocardial contusion, kind of like a bruise to the heart. It can be serious, depending on how much damage was caused. In Jared’s case, we had to rush him up to surgery to repair some of the blood vessels around his heart.” She looks from Kenneth to me and back again. “We’re happy with the way the surgery went. He seems stable now. We’re going to keep him sedated for a little while and keep him on a ventilator, just to let things settle so his heart doesn’t have to work too hard. Give him a bit of a rest and some time to recover. There’s a chest tube in, just to stop any fluid that might build around the area.”
My whole body is numb as I just stare at her, taking in her words. Kenneth reaches over and wraps his arm around my shoulders.
The doctor smiles sympathetically and continues, “He also had some lacerations to his liver and some internal bleeding, which we’ve managed to get under control. There was also an open fracture to the skull, or compound fracture as it’s also known, but tests we’ve run so far indicate there’s no damage to the brain. We’ll keep a very close eye on him for the next few hours. All being well, tomorrow, we’ll schedule more tests.”
“Skull fracture?” Kenneth repeats.
I close my eyes as I feel the warmth drain from my body. The list of his injuries is alarming, and my stomach begins to ache.
“Like I said, we’ve done scans, and there doesn’t appear to be any damage to the brain. We’ll scan again tomorrow to make sure there’s no change. At the moment, we’re more focused on getting his heart in good working order. The surgeons are optimistic, but it is early days.”
Early days. Code for don’t get your hopes up and be prepared to say good-bye just in case.
Impossibly, my heart breaks a little bit more.
“Once he’s all settled on the ward, one of the nurses will come and get you, and you can go in and see him,” the doctor says.
Kenneth sticks out his hand, and they shake. When the doctor turns to me, my arm weighs so much that I can barely lift it to return her polite gesture.
As she leaves the room, I turn to Kenneth, who blows out a relieved breath and runs a hand through his hair.
“I should call Deborah real quick.” He fumbles with his phone, and I slump back into my seat, listening to him reassure his wife that everything went well and promising to call once we have seen him.
All I can think is the words the doctor said. “Early days.” It’s swirling around and around in my head, the worry building in intensity.
After another few minutes, we’re ushered along the corridor and into a side room containing just four beds. Kenneth rushes to Jared’s side, and I stop at the foot of his bed, looking down at him in sheer dismay. He looks so broken and vulnerable. My hand flies to my mouth to stifle my whimper. He’s attached to all manner of machines and IV lines; tubes are strapped to the side of his bed with bags of blood and fluid collecting in them. There’s a machine squeezing air into his lungs and another showing each precious pump of his heart. His face is bruised and swollen; his chest and head are bandaged. It’s like something out of a nightmare, a nightmare where the love of your life is so dangerously close to leaving you that you can barely stand it.
I let my eyes wander over him, taking him in, watching his chest rise and fall. My six-foot-two giant looks so tiny in the bed. My chin wobbles as silent tears streak down my face. I long to crawl up onto the bed with him and give him some of my strength.
Please, please be okay, I send him a silent plea, hoping he can somehow magically hear me and know I’m here.
I can’t lose him. I just can’t.
twenty.nine
I sit there for twenty hours straight. The doctors don’t even kick us out at the end of visiting; they just pull the curtain around us and let us sit in the chairs at his bedside through the night. We don’t talk. I have no words. Depression has stolen every emotion from me. I’m numb as I just stare at Jared in the bed, willing him to be okay, willing him to wake up soon and come back to me, willing his heart to keep beating.
Kenneth and Deborah take turns in sitting up here with me and swapping to be downstairs with Theo.
He woke after having his leg set yesterday and told his parents and the police more about the accident.
Apparently, a truck had veered onto their side of the road and hit them head-on. There was nothing they could have done to avoid it; it was just an accident. Jared was driving, and they’d just been for a workout at the gym. The driver admitted he was trying to adjust his satnav to direct around some roadworks and took his eyes off the road for too long. He didn’t even realise he’d veered into the other lane until the collision.
Until that moment, everything had been normal, just a normal day and trip to the gym they’d done a hundred times before. The truck had come out of nowhere. It really put things into perspective, how fragile life was and how we shouldn’t ever take it for granted. A freak accident had almost wiped them out.
Nothing is guaranteed in life. After this, I vow to never take another day for granted again.
Before his shift starts this morning, Tim comes up to give me a hug and a much-needed change of clothes that Heather sent in for me. In the bag are also a packet of biscuits and a flask of coffee, which Kenneth and I share for breakfast. All the waiting around and dozing in the chair has given me neck and backache. Time seems to be stretching on forever. Now, I know what they mean when people use the phrase longest night of my life.
The worst of it is the nothingness. The waiting for news. It mingles with the worry and anxiety and churns like a ferocious monster in my stomach. As I sit there, staring at him, it feels like I’m grieving. Grieving for him even though he’s still here.
What I keep coming back to is how stupid I have been. Looking at him now, how did I not know how I felt about him? Why did it take nearly losing him for me to see he is everything I need? Jared—the adorable, smart, hardworking, lovable, thoughtful, funny, sweet, OCD, underwear-folding, sexy guy—is the love of my life. He is the yin to my yang, the Ross to my Rachel, the Bert to my Ernie. Yes, we probably are opposites, but just like a puzzle piece, he completes me. And it took all of this for me to see it. So what if I liked Theo first? So what if liking Theo was what made me give Jared a chance in the first place? All along, I have just been fooling myself into thinking I was in love with Theo, worrying that my feelings for Jared were somehow wrong, confused, tangled with what I thought I felt for his brother. When in reality, they weren’t at all. I was just overthinking it.