Chapter 4
Jules
Five Years Later
“Gus,” I say, but my voice is muffled through the plastic mask that’s been shoved over my face. It blows gentle, clean air into my nose and mouth, but the smell of it is making me sick.
Blinking hard against a headache that butts up against the back of my brain, I stare up at the swirling fluorescent lights above me. I’ve always gotten motion sickness easily, and this whole being wheeled around thing is not helping matters.
I’m clearly in a hospital, having come through large sliding doors in a whoosh, plunged into the rapid beeping and blinking and the sharp, astringent smell of bleach and antiseptic.
There’s a gloved blue hand on the railing, pushing my stretcher along, and I turn to it, finding it attached to a woman—a girl?
—who looks like she must be easily ten years younger than me.
Do they allow twenty-two-year-olds to work in hospitals?
Wheel people into the emergency room against their will?
I stare at her, try to speak again, but she either doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to. Stretching the elastic of the masks, I pull it away from my nose and mouth and try to sit up. When I speak, my voice comes out rough and thick through mucus in my throat. “Where is Augustus?”
She glances down at me, looking exhausted and weathered, and it’s only—well it must still be some time in the morning. It can’t have been that long since I first saw the flashing lights of the ambulance.
Reaching for the mask and trying to put it back in place, she says, “Ma’am, please don’t touch the oxygen, you need—”
I push it away again, knocking her hand to the side and fully sit up on the stretcher, which only makes me feel more nauseous. If they just stopped pushing me around the room, I could take a breath and get my bearings and not vomit up my iced coffee.
It was the one I allow myself per week, and this morning I made the mistake of going to Dunkin,’ only to find the shaken espresso latte completely different from the last time I had it.
Thinking about that coffee is only making me sicker, but I still don’t want to waste the seven dollars by throwing it up now.
“Ma’am,” she says, and finally, mercifully, the stretcher—gurney?—stops moving. “Please, just leave the mask on, and we’ll—”
“I need to find Gus.”
“Who is Gus—?”
I shouldn’t even be in the emergency room. What about I’m fine don’t these people understand? And, knowing that Gus is here somewhere, surely scared and asking for me, I definitely should not be on this hellish carnival ride, rolling around the room, and not without him.
Raising my voice, looking around the chaotic emergency room, my gaze catching on more and more people in scrubs pouring into the area, I ask again, “Where is my son?”
The last I saw of him was when they were pulling him from the car.
I hadn’t realized something was wrong until the Prius was careening off the highway. At first, I couldn’t make sense of the sudden jolt through my body—I almost thought it was a twitching muscle or something, maybe a cramp in my neck.
Then I realized the world around us was moving wrong, the car propelling forward and then to the side in the opposite way I was trying to steer it. And my first instinct was to look in the rear-view mirror, to find Gus in the back seat, to make sure he was okay.
But I couldn’t see him. The impact—or my hand, or something?
—had knocked the rear-view mirror all out of alignment, so what it reflected was no longer road behind me and the top of my son’s mop of dark brown hair, but the top of the car, that beige, slightly stained fabric from the time a Pepsi exploded up there and I couldn’t get the mark out no matter how hard I tried.
Then I was trapped, listening to the blinding screech of tearing metal and tires somewhere behind me.
After a second, realizing I was okay, the scene started to puzzle itself out to me. The car was right side up—thank God—the alarm blaring. Which, for some reason, struck me as oddly funny. The car reacting to the situation with far more panic and emergency than I was.
“Gus, honey?” I rasped, trying to reach for my seat belt, but finding it hard. Something warm trickled down my forehead and into my eye.
There was no answer from the back seat.
Sometimes, he was just like that—I’d try to talk to him, but he would be off in his little dream world, his mind far away from the moment we were actually in. And now could be even worse if he was scared from what had just happened.
What had just happened?
I was driving along on the highway and saw a slowdown up ahead. There’s been construction on this road for ages. It’s part of the reason I was dreading taking Gus to his appointment today.
After seeing the back-up, I’d flicked on my hazards. Then, the jolt and the sliding. And then our car was in the grassy area beside the highway.
And when I tried to turn around and look at Gus, to find his eyes with mine and make sure his damned car seat was doing its job, I couldn’t move. Pinned down so I couldn’t even reach the seatbelt.
It hadn’t taken long for them to reach us—somehow the paramedics were already nearby, I suppose—and as they pulled me from the car, I asked about Gus over and over, only for them to talk over me about potential injuries and the bleeding on my head, oxygen levels and which ambulance to take me to.
One of them assured me that Gus was stable, and that the ambulance was going to take us to the same hospital. It’s the only reason I let them strap me onto the damn stretcher in the first place.
“Hi, hi, what’s your name?”
Now, a doctor materializes in front of me—or maybe a nurse?—smiling down at me with kind eyes, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, a blue disposable mask pulled down under her chin.
“Jules,” I say, “and I need to find my son, Gus. He’s five, he was supposed to come here with me. He was in the backseat—he has brown hair and he’s wearing a dinosaur onesie. I mean, it’s kind of like a costume. I wouldn’t let him wear a real costume, since he had a doctor’s appointment today—”
“Gus, okay, yes, we’ve got him just right over there,” she says, pointing over her shoulder. I look, but don’t see him. “He’s stable, doing just fine, getting the same check-up we’re giving you now. I’m Dr. Jonston. Do you remember what happened?”
“…someone hit my car,” I say, the details finally solidifying. “We skidded off the highway.”
“Lucky you did,” she says, nodding and grabbing at tools, looking in my ears and mouth, flashing a light in my eyes. “Apparently, there’s a big pile-up. Getting out of the way probably saved you from a lot of the wreckage.”
I gape at her—it was a pile-up?
“Can I see Gus?”
“We’re just going to need to scan your head, run some tests,” Dr. Jonston says, pushing me gently back. “Is there a dad, mom, partner? Grandparents? Anyone we can call for Gus? So, you have someone here?”
“No,” I swallow, think of Ettie—my friend and neighbor—wondering if she’s busy. Would it be overkill to call her now? I really do feel fine. “No—is it bad?”
“Not bad,” Dr. Jonston shakes her head. “Listen, Jules, I know the only thing you can think about is getting to Gus right now, but we need to take you to scan your head and make sure there are no brain bleeds. I promise you that we are taking excellent care of both of you, and Gus is in great hands. Not to be harsh, but if you have a brain bleed right now and we don’t catch it in time, that’s not going to be good for your son, either.
Okay? The moment we get you back from the scan, we’ll get you in a room together. Does that work?”
It’s the last thing I want to do, but slowly, reluctantly, I nod and lay back, trying to ignore the constant pressing need to find my child as soon as I possibly can.
I run my hands over the papery white blankets on my bed and stare at the curtain separating my portion of the room from the other. I will the curtain to open, will a nurse or a doctor or anyone to come in and see me.
Nobody has been here since the imaging tech dropped me off five minutes ago. When I asked them about seeing my son, they shrugged and said someone should be in shortly to check on me. No urgency.
I don’t have a clear concept of time—I didn’t think to glance at the clock when I was being rolled in on a stretcher—but my gut tells me it can’t have been more than twenty-five minutes since we first got here.
It’s the fastest I’ve ever gotten a scan in my life, but maybe they move you up in the line when you’ve just been in a car accident.
Now, I grab the blanket, swing it up off of me, and get to my feet, which are bare against the cool linoleum. At first, I’m just going to go, but then I realize I’m still hooked up to the IV.
I find my clothes in a plastic bag, so I change into them quickly, the best I can with the tubes connected to me. I feel better once I have my shoes on again, and I set off down the hallway, rolling the IV stand with me.
As I make my way down the hall back toward the emergency room, I try to look inconspicuous. Not at all like a woman who’s just broken out of her hospital room. I really should call Ettie, or even Sienna, who’s surely setting up her stall in the market right about now.
Gus must still be in the emergency room. Unless they took him off for a scan, too?
If I didn’t have this damn IV bag, I could just go right up to a counter and ask for him. I pass several other wings and bays, smiling at anyone who passes. Some of the doctors give me an odd look, but nobody stops me.
When I get to the trauma center, I walk right in behind a woman pushing a tall cart full of equipment and come to stand next to the large circular desk in the middle of the room.
Doctors, nurses, and staff move around me, walking at a fast clip, pushing patients in wheelchairs, and wheeling along carts with trays of vials. This area of the hospital is a lot more frantic than the others, and it takes me a moment to gather myself enough to search through the place.
After a quick scan, I see a familiar mop of chocolate brown hair and the green tail of a dinosaur onesie I almost shut in the car door this morning. Both are moving fast, the little hop-hop of Gus’s trot.
“Gus,” I say, turning and walking toward him, but he disappears around the side of a curtain. “Gus!”
I stalk right over to it, heart thudding—if he’s up and moving around, surely he’s fine, right? When I get to the little section and whip the curtain back, I expect to see my son there, staring up at me with his gray-blue eyes.
But he’s not the only one in the room. Next to the bed stands a tall, handsome man with a sharp jaw, wearing a button-down shirt and nice slacks, talking to Gus, saying, “You’ve just got to stay in your bed, and—”
He cuts off at the sound of the curtain moving and turns to look at me. At first I’m on edge, because he’s not in scrubs or a doctor’s coat, and I have no idea who this strange man is. Then I see the badge clipped to his shirt, bearing the navy-blue Burch Hospitals & Clinics logo.
When he sees me, the side of his mouth curls up in a way that is startlingly familiar. Everything about him feels like deja vu, from the broad shoulders to the way he towers over me, his eyes somehow gentle and cutting, all at once.
Maybe it’s the fact that he looks like every hot actor cast in every action movie I’ve ever seen. Under his shirt, it’s obvious his muscles are obscene—the kind you only get through concerted effort and meticulous dieting.
Never mind the fact that he’s definitely too old for me—my heart jumps at the sight of him there, like I’m actually seeing a famous person in my son’s hospital room.
“Ah,” he says, in a deep, familiar voice that sinks right into my chest. “You must be Mom.”