Chapter 6
Six
She’s a ten, but sometimes shakes her head to get rid of her intrusive thoughts. She’s my little Etch-A-Sketch.
—Apollo’s secret thoughts
APOLLO
My leg throbbed like a bitch.
But it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as holding a little baby again.
Memories assaulted me, yet I kept burping the tiny, breakable thing in my arm until I got a solid burp out of him.
When he’d finished, I handed him back to Dru.
“You can hang on to him.” She smiled weakly.
“Never been around a kid before?” I asked.
She looked incredibly uncomfortable while holding him, yet she’d offered up no complaint.
“Not really,” she admitted as the iPad vibrated. “Webber’s contacting who he can. He’ll get us out of here.”
“Did he know about the plane crash?” she asked.
“No,” I shook my head. “First he’d heard. Though he had heard about the tornado.”
“Great,” she murmured. “This is bad.”
It wasn’t just bad.
It was DEFCON-1.
As in, likely couldn’t get much worse.
I knew that there had been three hundred and thirty-two souls on board that plane today.
As of right now, I only knew of three that’d survived.
Add in to that the destruction of the tornado, and it was shaping up to be a really awful day.
The house shook around us, and both of us tried to ignore the flickering of the lights.
“Ten bucks say the lights are about to go.”
I shook my head. “I think they’ve already gone. I think that the people have a generator.”
“Where?” she questioned.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But Webber knows my location. If we lose power, he’ll look for us here.”
She blew out a relieved breath. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
A while.
“I don’t know.”
She sat down on the couch and looked up at the roof above her head. “Do you think that the roof will hold?”
“Probably.” I walked around, taking everything in. “Did you happen to see if there was anything to eat?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t look.”
I left her there to go find out what there was to work with.
The baby wouldn’t be able to go long without food without being miserable.
I flicked on the lights in the kitchen, ignored the way the rain was pouring inside from the shattered kitchen window, and started opening cabinets.
I hit pay dirt in the fourth one over.
Powdered milk.
Good.
At least there was something I could offer the kid if we didn’t get anyone here anytime soon.
I grabbed it and walked back to the living room where Dru still sat looking forlorn.
Shocked.
I didn’t blame her.
“Let’s find you some dry clothes.”
She sighed. “What makes you think there’ll be any?”
“Because there’s non-perishables in the kitchen.
They live here at least some of the time.
People tend to leave clothes behind when they live somewhere.
And generally, VRBOs or Airbnb doesn’t generally leave food behind for other people.
I wouldn’t trust opened food, and neither would any rational human being. ”
She stood up and walked with me through the downstairs.
We hit the master bedroom, and I flicked on the light.
Major cracks spiderwebbed across the walls, and I stopped her from entering all the way.
“You stay out here,” I urged.
She stopped in the doorway. “Guess there was more damage than the roof just ripping off.”
“I imagine that the entire foundation shifted,” I admitted. “It being pier and beam, the air can get underneath the structure and lift it up if it’s bad enough.”
“Hmm,” she said as she watched me start to go through the drawers. “Anything good?”
I held up a pair of pants that were so long that there was no doubt they wouldn’t fit. “Dude must be tall.”
She jerked her head toward the bed. “Alaskan King. As soon as I saw the bed, I wondered.”
I moved to the next set of drawers and pulled out some sweats. “At least these have drawstrings and can be rolled up.”
“Try the other dresser,” she suggested.
I moved to that dresser and sure enough, there were some female clothes in there as well.
Though they were still extra-long.
“I’ll bet these people have some Division One athletes for kids,” she mused.
The baby squirmed in her hold, and I looked away while I pulled out a set of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. “Underwear?”
“Uh, no. I’d rather go without.” She grimaced. “I’m not really one to share other people’s clothes, but I certainly draw the line at things that’ll be touching my vagina.”
I winked at her. “You can borrow some of mine.”
“You just so happen to have an extra set in your pants pocket?” she teased.
I groaned. “No. I have a bunch of nothing in my pants pocket. Wish I’d been able to hang onto my phone, though.”
Lightning once again lit up the windows outside, and I forced myself to gather what I needed and head toward her.
“I think we need to get that bottle washed and add some water to it. Just in case the power does go out, or anything else happens here. Then we can have it just in case we need to add some powdered milk to it if the little one gets hungry.”
“Speaking of little one.” She winced. “Fairly sure he just filled up his diaper.”
“Great,” I muttered. “We can get some dish towels. Make a pseudo-cloth diaper. It won’t be the most secure, but I can look for some duct tape or something. We can improvise.”
“The poor kid,” she murmured. “At least one of us knows what we need to do here. I may be a nurse, but all of my patients are adults. I generally steer clear of the children. They give me the heebie jeebies.”
“You don’t want kids?” I wondered.
She followed behind me as I set all the stuff I’d pilfered onto the kitchen table. “Not yet. Maybe in a few years when I have my life straight. But right now, when I have a shitty apartment and I work a ton? No. I’m good.”
I remembered back to her file, and I questioned why it was that it seemed like she had no money.
The lights flickered, and I hurried toward the mostly empty bottle to wash it out and fill it back up again.
While I was filling, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Why do you work so much?”
She hesitated, and I knew whatever she was thinking about sharing wasn’t something she would usually share with anyone else.
But we were danger buddies at this point.
“I work a shit ton,” I told her. “Easier to bury myself in work than think about what life would be like if my son were still here.”
She looked up at me, and her eyes shone with unshed tears. “What happened?”
The old anger rose in my throat as I remembered the day that’d changed my life forever.
I’d had some really bad days in my life, but the day I’d lost Tavi would forever be my worst one.
“A senator’s son was driving his car way too fast on the highway and rammed a concrete construction barrier.
He flew over the median and into oncoming traffic,” I replied, zero emotion in my voice.
Just cold, hard facts. “His car smashed into several cars, killing several more people. My son was in the car with one of my club brother’s wife.
She was out running errands and then taking him to my ex-wife for a visitation after eating lunch with me.
He died shortly after arriving at the hospital. ”
Her breath hitched. “I was working that day. The hospital called in every single available nurse in the city. I was pulled down from the surgery floor where I work to assist downstairs.”
That’s when it hit me.
I’d seen her before.
The day of Tavi’s death had been hard.
So fucking hard.
It was all a blur.
But I remembered a nurse who worked with Chevy, a club brother, on the surgical floor where he worked as an anesthesiologist, had recommended a few things to remember Tavi by after he was gone.
She’d suggested taking a lock of his hair, and his feet and handprints.
She’d been there on the worst day of my life, and she’d helped make it better, even just by a little bit.
“You were with him during his honor walk,” I found myself saying. “And you stayed with him while they harvested his organs.”
Her breath hitched. “Yeah.”
“I never thanked you.”
Her eyes snapped up to meet mine. “You didn’t have to. I was just doing my job.”
I was already shaking my head. “Doing your job would’ve been checking on him. Keeping him alive. You sent me a blanket.”
Her eyes lifted to meet mine. “You…I didn’t sign the card. How would you know that was me?”
Because I’d researched the hell out of the nurses on his floor that night. But since she hadn’t been officially scheduled to work, I hadn’t actually found her name.
But now, seeing her looking so sick at the thought of my son dying, I knew it’d been her.
She likely reached above and beyond for all of her patients like that.
I wasn’t special, and neither had Tavi been.
That was what made her so special.
She treated everyone with the kindness and dignity that they deserved, until their dying breath.
Until Tavi’s dying breath.
Whatever I’d thought that I felt toward this woman beforehand now seemed a distant sort of feeling.
What I was feeling right now was bordering on possessive.
I wanted that kind of kindness in my life.
I’d only thought that I liked her before, but knowing that she’d helped me on the worst day of my life was making me feel like I might be halfway in love with her.
That was crazy, right?
Maybe I was a little bit out of sorts.
I might have a concussion, because no one fell in love with another person in less than a day.
Then again, I might have a lot more wrong with me based on the fact that I’d fallen out of the sky, crashed into the ground, and then had a literal tornado run over me.
But I didn’t think that I was too far gone that I couldn’t realize what was in my own brain.
“That was a really bad day,” she admitted. “But my bad day wasn’t anywhere near as bad as y’all’s.” She hesitated. “Chevy is really intimidating, or I’d ask him, but how is the baby girl doing?”
I smiled at that. “Growing like a weed. She’s crazy, just like her mama. And her daddy has ‘his little terror’ on his hands that gives him a run for his money.”
The smile that tipped up my lips was a genuine one this time.