Now I had a reason to fight.
32
Jess: The Truth
Michelle’s scream still reverberated through my ears. I could hear it through Grace’s phone, out of the receiver, across the room. It was the call every mother dreaded. No preparation. Those moments of panic and fear. Your child injured. Maybe dying. There was no information—and nothing, nothing you could do. My own terror took a backseat to hers as I imagined what it had to be like to get that callmore than once. Michelle had. And now began her agonizing wait.
By the time Grace, Elliott, Evan, and I were cleared to leave the area by police, the McKallisters had already begun arriving at the hospital. Grace had been in constant contact with Michelle, making her first call to her mother while we were in the outbuilding after running from the venue. Michelle knew every detail we did, but hearing what had happened over the phone was not the same as seeing the bloody evidence on our war-torn bodies when the four of us arrived in the waiting room. Michelle, and everyone else who loved Quinn, broke down.
It took three very long and very tense hours to get word on Quinn’s fate. He’d survived the surgery, we’d been told, but just barely. This was no hero shot to the shoulder, as Quinn had suggested. Instead, he’d taken a direct hit to the chest. According to the surgeons who opened him up minutes after he arrived at the hospital, the bullet had narrowly missed his heart as it traveled through bone and muscle, lacerating a series of blood vessels before lodging in his lung.
Slowly he bled, compressing the lung from the outside, causing shortness of breath and the compounding of blood loss. The slow drip explained how he’d been able to move around for so long without collapsing and how he’d managed to get me and Grace and Elliott and possibly hundreds of others out of the arena before passing out on that chair in the outbuilding. It even somewhat explained how he’d had the strength to stay on his feet while saving Tucker, only to come back and hastily ask for my hand in marriage.
The proposal. Tears welled. Even him popping the question tonight was no cause for celebration. In fact, Quinn’s proposal nearly broke my heart. It was honest; that much I knew, but it was desperate, too. It felt like he was grasping for a life jacket seconds before his head submerged under the waves. Quinn didn’t really want to marry me. He just wanted to live.
Upon hearing my silent cries, Evan lifted his head off the bench where he’d been sleeping beside me. Ever since his father had followed Quinn to the hospital in his own ambulance, the teenager hadn’t left my side. For all his confidence, Evan was still a kid… and a scared one at that. He swung his body up into a sitting position and rested his shoulder against mine.
“He’s going to be okay, Jess.”
I nodded, clinging to his optimism. Thank god for Evan, another outsider to lean on. Because for all the McKallisters’ kindness and support, they didn’t belong to me. They belonged to Quinn, and if he didn’t pull through, this waiting room might be the last place I ever saw them. A wave of emotion overwhelmed me when I tried to imagine life without Quinn.
Enough with the negative thoughts.
“Distract me,” I said.
Evan’s eyes rose to the ceiling as he searched his brain for something worthy of my request. “Okay. Sometimes when I eat Doritos, I check to see what side has more flavor, and I lay that side facedown on my tongue.”
Distraction complete. I chuckled. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Hey, you asked.” He grinned. “Your turn.”
“I separate my M&M’s and eat my least favorite color first. And then second to last. You get the idea.”
He didn’t even let me finish before replying, “Psycho.”
See, I was already feeling more positive. Good for Evan.
“Okay, here’s a good one,” he said, lowering his voice. “Tucker’s not really my father… not Bodhi’s, either. And I don’t know what I’m going to do if he doesn’t make it.”
I knew nothing about this boy, but I felt an overwhelming kinship to him after what we’d been through together. “Hey. Tucker would never let a bullet wound slow him down.”
Evan nodded, clearly not convinced but still allowing my words to soothe.
“Is he your stepdad?” I asked.
There was no emotion in his curt laugh. “No, that would require a mother.”
“So, who is Tucker to you, then?”
There was a long pause as Evan considered his response.
“The only person who ever cared.”
* * *
Evan and I never got to finish the conversation because seconds after his confession, a doctor came for him, delivering the news of Tucker’s successful surgery and whisking him away to his not-father’s room.
But for the rest of us, there would be no whisking away— at least not yet. Quinn’s condition was precarious enough that Michelle and Scott had been summoned to the Cardiothoracic ICU hours earlier, their infrequent texts our only connection to the man we all loved.
