With her head down, Heather was fixated on the screen of her phone as her thumb scrolled. I wondered what she was looking for. Did I have the answers she was seeking? For one fleeting moment, I wondered if she might be googling me, like I’d googled her earlier in the day. From that search, I knew certain facts about her. She was fifty-two years old, a Scorpio, and listed her occupation as ‘RJ Contreras’s mom,’ which according to her son was a fairly accurate job description, given she was on his payroll. With tight blond curls that reached to her shoulders and skin tanned to rawhide, Heather gave off the impression of a woman who’d been wild in her youth but had since come into a wad of cash and was now on the board of directors at the local country club. Damn, I could smell the judgment wafting off me. I had to get that negativity in check or I wouldn’t be able to gain her trust. And without Heather’s trust, I’d never get an invitation to her son’s bedside.
I stood up and crossed the room, stopping a few feet away.
“Mrs. Contreras?”
She lifted her eyes for a split second then went back to scrolling on her phone.
“I’m a friend of RJ’s.”
Heather lowered her glasses a smudge to peer at me over the rims. “Aren’t you all. Who let you in here?”
“Oh… I… let myself…”
“Only immediate family of ICU patients are allowed. You never should have been let through the doors. I’ll have a talk with security about this,” she replied with the haughty awareness of a woman who got what she wanted all the time.
Holy crap, she was intimidating, and that came from someone who had grown up with an intimidating mother. But at least mine pretended to be nice to strangers, only talking behind their backs when they weren’t around. Heather was all front-end intimidation.
“Mrs. Contreras, I was admitted to the hospital earlier in the day,” I tried again, offering up my wristband as proof. “With RJ.”
Now Heather raised her head, removing her reading glasses to get a better look at me. “Please tell me you’re not the one who cut my son’s foot off.”
I rocked back, shocked by the stark accusation.
At my silence, her eyes widened. “Oh, my god, you are!”
“I was with him in the parking garage, yes. But RJ made the decision.”
“RJ? He made the decision? To cut his own foot off? Listen to yourself. Do you think I’m dumb? Do you think I don’t know my own son?”
Her anger fueled my own. “I think maybe you don’t know what it feels like to be desperate and about to die.”
You would’ve thought I’d stabbed a knife into her gut the way her expression turned murderous. But years now dealing with mamma bears protecting their young had insulated me from such attacks.
“We were told to evacuate, that the building was about to come down. RJ was trapped, his foot crushed under concrete. He did what he had to do to survive.”
“No,” she snarled. “You did what you wanted to. Not him. My son would rather die than live his life as a cripple.”
“I took over, but only after the pain got too much for RJ. Don’t you understand? I couldn’t let him suffer like that. Someone had to get him free.”
“Oh, and you’re that someone?” she scoffed. “What a savior you are.”
Wow, this was not going according to plan. Now I knew where Chad Woodcock got his fighting spirit. But if I hadn’t backed down from him, I sure as hell wasn’t going to back down from his unreasonable mother.
“Maybe if I explained to you what happened in…”
“I don’t need to know,” she cut me off. “According to the doctors, you made such a mess of his ankle, they had to amputate it even further up.”
I winced at the memory of that moment cutting through tendons and bone. Did she really think that was something I’d wanted to do?
“And you understand the alternative would’ve been a dead son, right?” I questioned, pointing to the television with images of our collapsed building. “Because if I’d left RJ in there with a partially amputated foot, you’d be burying him.”
Heather’s eyes lasered into mine as she dropped her voice to a low growl. “Watch your tone with me. You don’t think I haven’t dealt with your kind before? There’s nothing special about you. You’re not even that pretty. If you think RJ’s going to fall madly in love with you, then you’re sadly mistaken. I know my son, and RJ doesn’t love anyone. Never has. So don’t think you have some direct line, you little tart. I have the direct line.”
What in the living hell? Had Heather just made this some warped competition? And to disrespect RJ like that, implying he wasn’t capable of love! In a perfect world, I would have let her insult go unchallenged. I would have held my head high and walked away. But after the events of today, there was no perfect world, and I had no obligation to keep my mouth shut.
Leaning forward, I spoke for her ears only. “Have you ever thought that maybe he just doesn’t love you?”
It was dangerous, cutting, and the second the words left my mouth, I regretted them. Not because I didn’t think them true, but because I’d just made a powerful enemy. I’d secured my place at the back of the line. Heather would never allow me to see her son now.
Her eyes locked on mine, Heather stood up. “You just picked a fight with the wrong person.”
As I watched her walk away, I knew without a doubt that Heather would make me pay.
Minutes later, I was being escorted out of the hospital doors.
20
RJ: Patient Privilege
I came to behind a long white curtain. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there, blinking up at the ceiling and trying to figure out where the hell I was, but it seemed a long damn while. Was I dead? Was this Albert’s heaven? If so, I was decidedly underwhelmed. Where was my halo? And my dead dog, Bobo? And what the hell was that moaning going on behind the curtain to my right?
As my mind cleared of the drugs, I realized that the beeping of machines, accompanied by the dull, aching pain in my ribs, meant I was very much alive. And then I remembered. My foot! Jerking my head off the pillow, I looked down at my drastically shortened, and heavily bandaged, leg and let out a curse that would’ve made Triple A cringe.
A nurse rushed in.
“Hey, relax. Just lie back,” he said, shoving the oxygen tubes back in my nose. “If you take these out, the doctor might be forced to intubate you again.”
I pointed down at my leg and forced the words out of my raw, swollen throat. “What happened to the rest of it?”
“You don’t remember cutting it off?” he asked incredulously.
Of course I remembered. It wasn’t like the severing of it wouldn’t live on in my memory forever. That shit was what nightmares were made of. No, I wasn’t surprised my foot was gone; I was surprised that it was considerably shorter than where Dani had hacked it off for me.
“There’s like two extra inches gone.” The accusatory tone of my voice somehow transferred all the responsibility for those extra missing inches onto the mild-mannered ICU nurse tasked with caring for me.