When I’m finally still, he holds me close, and I let my weight sink into his body, wishing we could combine and knit our cells together, just for a minute.
“I love you,” he says, stroking my sweaty hair before pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “We’re okay. Everything’s okay.”
I let out a slow, shuddering breath, and for once, I make the choice to believe him.
Chapter Eighteen
Things have evened out ever since Silas and I talked. Not that we really got into it in that much depth, but it felt like everything that needed to be said was said.
There was never any doubt that we fucking love each other, things just went off the rails for a minute and I got a little carried away. It doesn’t help that my anger at my dad—something I’ve held onto for over a decade with no fucking issue—has suddenly decided that it’s a festering wound, ready to burst open and cover my skin in putrescence for no real reason.
But it’s fine. Everything is fine. I will keep my temper under control, I will pay more attention to Silas, my dad will eventually get bored and leave, and everything will go back to normal.
It’s fine.
That’s been my internal refrain for days. It’s kind of holding up.
At least going back to work was uneventful. I got cleared to go back and do basically everything except super heavy lifting, which I’m more than happy to make Tristan do on his own. Hespends too much time in Ford’s backyard gym now, working on his fucking abs. Might as well make him use that shit for something real. I’m too busy paying bills to finely hone my lifting regime.
If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. Things are probably better now in a macro sense than they ever have been, but for whatever reason, that just comes with a mounting sense of pressure to keep providing. This is the first real opportunity I’ve had to give my sisters a normal life, instead of scraping by all the time. Silas and I combined make okay money. The house is paid off and taxes and shit in this area is not the worst. There’s always food and it’s not a fucking nightmare to sign off on school trips and new sweaters and all the other shit kids shouldn’t have to worry about.
It feels like if I just push a little bit harder, I can give them the kind of childhood I dreamed of. If that’s not a motivation to skip working out and keep picking up extra shifts, I don’t know what is.
Which is why I’m capping off my normal work week with a twelve-hour overtime night shift. Tristan is off, so today I’m paired up with Sharon—a salty old workhorse of a paramedic who’s been employed here almost since before I was born. She’s not chatty or maternal, and that suits me just fine. I’m itchy from feeling like Tristan was peering into my soul all week.
I’ve been good! Zero beers. Zero fights. Minimal thoughts about Dad, and no complaining whenever Silas fed me fucking cabbage. If you work enough hours, you don’t have time to have a mental health crisis. This is a well-established law of the universe. It has never, ever backfired.
It’s been a less-than-eventful night, which is giving me enough space to let the exhaustion kick in. I’m on my third energy drink, so I’m starting to smell the damn things coming out of my pores, and I could really use an exciting call sometime soon.
Of course, as soon as we get an address, my heart sinks.
It’s 5 a.m.. Which is a special time of day when people start waking up and noticing that the people around them are not right, and probably haven’t been all night. No one calls an ambulance over bullshit at four or five in the morning. They call because grandma won’t wake up and there’s bloody foam coming out of her mouth.
I know this address though, which is what makes it worse. This is Jaden’s house. And I know it makes me a shitty person, but I’m crossing my fingers the entire drive there that his dad is really the one that’s sick and there was a miscommunication with dispatch.
The house seems still as we pull up. It’s late/early in a residential area, so we’ve got lights but no sirens, and as soon as the blue and red washes over the walls of the exterior, the front door opens. Mr. Halloran looks haggard. I can see that, even through the blue light. He has a cigarette pinched between his fingers, and he waves us in with a peculiar mixture of urgency and fatigue that tells me more than anything else about what we’re about to find.
Sharon and I hustle out of the rig and towards the house, stretcher in tow. Neither of us says more than the bare minimum. Inside, most of the lights are still turned off. Jaden’s mom is barefoot, wearing an old bathrobe, while the dad looks like he hastily pulled on some jeans and boots. They both look completely drawn. No one’s crying.
Sometimes you’re too far past the point of crying to get it out.
Jaden is on the couch. He has slow, shallow respirations and his color is terrible. Sharon and I quickly move to the floor so we can move around him and get to work.
“I went to wake him up and he just…” her mom starts. “He just wouldn’t wake up. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem right.He’d wet the bed, and I couldn’t get him to answer me. Paul brought him out here.”
Sharon asks her more questions and makes a couple quick notes while I get his vitals, and then she works on placing an IV.
We won’t be here long. He’s not responsive, so he’s going to a hospital no matter what, and the faster we get him there, the better. Who knows how long he’s been having back-to-back seizures for, and because his seizures are non-convulsive, there was no noise or anything to wake up his parents.
Which could potentially have been prevented if he’d been seen by a fucking neurologist the first time I told them.
I take a deep breath and push that thought away. If I let myself dwell on the what-ifs right now, I’ll never stop, and I have to focus.
It feels like I’m in a daze the whole time. My hands move on auto-pilot. I answer when Sharon speaks to me, but otherwise I’m her silent assistant, getting Jaden strapped in and loaded into the back of the ambulance as quickly as we can. His mom rides in the back, while his dad decides to take their car so they have it at the hospital.
It takes us 26 minutes to get to the ER. Every minute feels like agony. Jaden doesn’t improve or decline. There’s not a lot for us to do other than continue to monitor him, give the supportive care we’re already giving, and keep communicating with the ER. We don’t exactly have an EEG back here, so we can’t even run many helpful tests.
His mom doesn’t ask many questions, just silently holds her son’s hand and tries not to let anything show on her face. I can’t imagine how she feels, and I don’t want to. The only thing worse than getting pissed right now would be to get empathetic, because I’ll end up picturing one of my sisters in front of me and I don’t think I can handle that.
