Her Brave Warrior (Omega Sky #6)

Prologue

This was the first time he’d ever been in a hospital. Scratch that. The first time he’d ever been in a hospice center, which was probably worse. He hated it. There hadn’t been a hospital when Luis had died in a car crash, so they just identified him at the morgue. Just the morgue.

His boots didn’t make any sound as he walked over the linoleum floor toward the nurse’s station. He cleared his throat so that the middle-aged lady looked up.

“I’m here to see Graciella Aranda.”

She scowled at him.

“She doesn’t get visitors. Who are you?”

Yeah, because she never told me she was sick!

“I’m her son. Mateo Aranda.”

He kept his calm, just like his mom and the Navy had taught him.

“Let me check my list.”

She flipped through a sheaf of papers. Didn’t they have things like this automated?

“Yes, I found you. You’ll have to wear a badge.”

“Really?”

“It’s protocol.”

He watched as she took out a ‘Hello My Name Is’ sticker and looked back and forth between the name on her list and the sticker to spell his name correctly. She still got it wrong, spelling his name with two T’s.

“Here you go. The elevators are behind me on the left. Go to the second floor and then turn right to the nurses station. Someone will take you to your mother’s room.”

Mateo pressed the sticker to his bright white t-shirt and followed her instructions. The elevator seemed to take forever to get to him. He spotted the door to the stairs, but it was locked.

“You need to use the elevator.”

Mateo looked over his shoulder at the woman manning the front desk. She was smiling with satisfaction. He had seen that look many times before on people bloated with their petty little pockets of authority.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He went back and stood in front of the elevator and tried to will it to go faster. Hospice. His mom was in hospice. A place where people went to die. Why had she only contacted him two days ago?

The elevator was empty when he stepped in, but it smelled. It took a moment for him to discern the scent. It smelled like the time in the desert when his Cascade Blue SEAL team had carried two dead Marines back to their outpost. The elevator smelled like death.

When he got to the nurses station, he found a much friendlier woman behind the desk. She glanced swiftly at his nametag and smiled.

“You’re here to see Graciella. Are you her son?”

Mateo nodded.

She waved a big black man over to her. “This is Rodney. He’ll take you to your mother’s room. She’ll be happy to see you. But I have to warn you, she tires easily and she might be asleep when you go in. I suggest you just take a seat and read one of the books she has at her bedside. But it’s also okay to talk to her. Even if she’s asleep, some patients wake up and say they heard their loved ones.”

Mateo nodded again.

“Rodney, Mr. Aranda is Graciella’s son. Can you take him to her room?”

“I’d be happy to.” He grinned. “She’s a pleasure to have here,” he told Mateo. “She’s pretty well-medicated, so she’s not in pain.”

“Mom didn’t tell me much on the phone. What’s her diagnosis?”

“Stage four pancreatic cancer. It’s my understanding it came on fast.” He stopped in front of an open door. Mateo looked in and saw his mother was in a private room. He knew that her benefits from DuPont, where she was a scientist, were top-notch.

Rodney knocked on the doorjamb. “Gracie, are you up for a visitor?”

Mateo winced. He knew his mother hated the Americanized version of her name.

There was no answer.

“Why don’t I just go in? The nurse told me the drill. If she’s not awake, I’ll just sit beside her. How is she doing?”

It pissed him the fuck off that he had to ask a stranger about his mother’s condition.

“Pancreatic cancer is one of the worst. It comes on fast, and the pain is unimaginable.”

He should have been the one who knew that. He should have been here as soon as she got the diagnosis. His Lieutenant would have given him the time off, he knew it.

Mateo nodded once and marched past Rodney. He was done talking. He wanted to see his mother, and he wanted to see her now!

There weren’t any drapes on the windows, just thin metal slats that sent stripes of light streaming across his mother’s frail body like she was behind prison bars. Her head was turned away from the sun, and he went to the shades and shut them closed with an emphatic snap. She had enough pain going on; she didn’t need the sun hurting her eyes.

When he turned back to look at her, he saw that her face had relaxed. That was good. It was the only thing that was good. The last time he’d seen his mom was at Thanksgiving ten months ago. She must have lost half of her body weight since then.

A large recliner was in the corner of the room, so he picked it up and brought it close to her so that he could hold her hand.

The hands that had once guided him, and sheltered him, and sometimes whooped him, were now feather-light. These were not her hands. He looked at her face and his heart stuttered. This was not his mother.

He sucked in a deep breath, making sure he could hold it together.

“Ma, I got here as quick as I could. Come on and open your pretty brown eyes for me, huh?”

He stroked his thumb across the back of her hand and she slowly turned her head in his direction.

“Luis?” she whispered.

“No, Ma. It’s me, Mateo,” he corrected her gently. She was always looking for his brother Luis. Her pride and joy.

He felt her hand tremble as she tried to squeeze his, then her face spasmed in pain and she whimpered. The IV drip that had to be pumping her full of narcotics wasn’t doing its job. He brought her hand up to his lips and kissed it.

“Just a moment, Ma. I’ll get help.”

He shot out of the chair and ran down to the nurses station. It was the same friendly nurse as before. She was talking to another visitor. Mateo didn’t care, and he interrupted.

“My mother is waking up and she’s whimpering in pain. She needs something.”

She nodded. “I’ll send somebody as soon as they’re available.”

“She needs something now.”

“Mr. Aranda, let me just finish up here and I’ll go there personally, all right?”

He realized it was as good as he was going to get, so he nodded, then hustled back to his mother’s room. Now she wasn’t just whimpering, she was moaning.

“Ma, it’s going to be all right. Somebody is going to come in and help you, I promise,” he said in Spanish.

“English. We’re in America, we speak English,” she corrected him. Just like she always had.

“A nurse is going to be here soon,” he promised her in English.

Her eyes squeezed tightly, then opened. “Luis?”

“No, Ma. I told you, it’s me, Mateo.”

Now he could see her emotional pain as her lip trembled. “I remember. Luis died.”

“Yeah, Ma. He did. It tore us up, remember?”

He watched as she tried to lift up her hand.

“What, Ma? What are you trying to do?”

“I want to touch your face, my son.”

He wasn’t sure if she wanted to touch him, or if she was thinking he was Luis. But he bent forward, picked up her hand, and brought it to his cheek.

“Thank you for coming.”

He cleared his throat, trying to hold back all of his pain and anger. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“This is a hard way to die. I didn’t want you to have to watch me suffer. I know my warrior son, you would want to fix this, and you can’t.”

She did know who she was talking to. She only ever referred to him as her warrior.

“I might have wanted to fix this, Ma, but I would have set that aside. More than anything I would have wanted to share this with you. Maybe if you weren’t feeling well, I could have finally beaten you at Truco.”

She started to laugh, and it turned into a cough. He hated that. He looked over at the door. Where in the hell was that nurse?

When his mother stopped coughing, she gave a hoarse laugh. “Even on my worst day, you couldn’t have beat me at Truco.” For just a moment he saw a sparkle in her eye. He’d have to go find a deck of Spanish playing cards so he could bring them in tomorrow.

“Challenge accepted,” he teased.

Her eyes drifted shut and she whimpered.

“Sorry, Mr. Aranda, can you move out of the way?” the nurse asked as she bustled in.

Mateo realized he and the recliner were blocking her way to the IV. He stood up and then moved the recliner back to the corner. He watched carefully as she fiddled with the drip.

“There, that should help,” she reassured him. “But she’s probably going to sleep for the rest of the day and on into the night.”

“I want to just sit here a little longer, if that’s okay.”

The nurse nodded. “Of course.” She glanced at Ma and lowered her voice. “I want to tell you. She’s talked about you a lot, Luis. She bragged about the scholarship you got and how you were a straight-A student in high school.”

Mateo sighed. “That’s my older brother. He died in a car accident seven years ago.”

“Oh.” He could see she was embarrassed, but she tried to cover. “That must be the reason she talks so much about him. A lot of patients near the end talk about their loved ones that they’ve lost.”

He nodded. There was no point telling her that Luis had always been the apple of her eye.

“Where are you staying?”

“In a little hotel down the street. It has a fridge and a hotplate, so I’m covered. I’m in the Navy so my Lieutenant gave me time to stay with her.”

She stood a little straighter. “Thank you for your service.”

He nodded. He never had any idea how else to respond. She left and he sat back down. He moved the chair closer again and picked up his mother’s hand.

“Mateo?”

“Yes, Mom, I’m here.”

She smiled, then drifted off to sleep.

He walked down the hallway, holding the deck of cards in his hands, anxious to get to his mother. Hopefully, he was arriving early enough like the nurse had suggested, so that his mom would be able to play a game of Truco.

He got to the first hurdle and it wasn’t the same woman as yesterday. If he had to guess, it was a temp.

“Who are you here to see?” the young woman asked.

“I know where I’m going. My name is Mateo Aranda. Just give me my nametag and I’ll go upstairs to see my mother, Graciella Aranda.”

The girl typed his mother’s name into her computer and stared.

“Hold on a minute.”

She picked up the phone, then turned around and bent over, obviously trying to not let him hear something. It was at that moment that he knew something was wrong. But it couldn’t be. The nurses told him that she would be stronger in the morning.

The young woman turned around and gave him a wobbly smile.

“Hold on for just a minute. Someone will be right down.”

“Has something happened to my mother?”

“You need to wait for just a moment.”

Mateo took a deep breath. The girl didn’t even look twenty. She was just a temp. But, she knew something, and she wasn’t telling him.

“Tell me,” he barked.

“Sir, please.” She was practically in tears.

The elevator dinged and they both turned to look at it. The big guy named Rodney came striding over to them.

“Tell me,” Mateo barked again.

Rodney put his hands on Mateo’s shoulders.

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

So sorry for your loss.

Always.

Always.

They were always so sorry for my loss.