Chapter 14 #2
The estate physician was at his daughter's wedding in San Antonio. The urgent care in the next town had no power. The Pinewood Hollow Medical Center was twelve miles up the coast road, and the coast road, the only road, had two feet of standing water on it.
Aurora made the decision in fifteen seconds.
She had not been the aunt of an asthmatic child, and so there was no inhaler in the house, no steroid, not a single object in a seventeen-bedroom Pinewood Hollow estate that was going to help her daughter breathe through the long drive to the nearest hospital.
What she had was a set of car keys, a coast road that was passable in places, and a little girl on the floor fighting for air.
"Yvette."
"Go, chère. I will call ahead."
She lifted Imari off the floor, carried her out into the wind, and buckled her into the booster seat of the Mercedes — the new one, the heavy silver SUV Halston had quietly replaced her old Honda with two months ago, because, he had said, he was not having his three favorite people on this earth in anything that was not built to keep them completely safe.
She pressed a kiss to Imari's forehead and climbed in behind the wheel.
From the front steps, in her starched white apron, Yvette stood in the rain and watched the car disappear down the live oak drive.
The coast road in a hurricane is a different road.
The first three miles went at fifteen miles an hour, through standing water that lapped at the lower edge of the car, the wind coming broadside off the bay hard enough to feel the car sway toward the shoulder twice. In the back seat Imari pulled at the air in small, thin, desperate sips.
So Aurora talked. She did not stop, she held back the tears and talked her Imari into the next breath and the next and the next, narrating every flooded crossroad and downed branch and fallen palm for twelve straight miles — and in the back seat Imari kept breathing.
She got Imari into the Pinewood Hollow Medical Center.
The triage nurse, a Black woman with a name tag that said Patrice, took one look at the small wheezing child in Aurora's arms and called the pediatric ER team without breaking eye contact.
Imari was on a nebulizer in less than four minutes.
Within nine minutes the wheezing had eased and within fifteen minutes she was breathing.
The pediatrician was a woman named Dr. Rosalind Atherton.
She told Aurora that Imari had asthma and probably had had it for at least a year, that the storm-thick air had triggered her, that she would need an inhaler and a controller medication and a follow-up with a pediatric pulmonologist in Houston within a week.
“Mrs. Iverson.”
“Yes.”
“She is going to be all right.”
“She is.”
“She is.”
Aurora sat down on the small chair beside Imari’s hospital bed and put her face in her hands.
For three minutes she did not cry. Then for ten minutes she did.
Imari, on the bed, mostly asleep with the nebulizer mask still loose at her chin and a small pulse-ox clipped to her finger, said into the side of the pillow, “Aunt Rory. I am okay.”
“I know, sweet pea.”
“Is Uncle Halston coming.”
“He is baby.”
“You promise.”
“I promise, baby.”
*****
Halston walked into the room of the Pinewood Hollow Medical Center at nine that evening.
He was soaked through.
He had landed at a private airstrip on the west side of Houston at six and driven the seventy-two miles from there to Pinewood Hollow in a rental SUV through standing water and downed lines, and the last six miles he had done at twenty miles an hour because the bay road kept disappearing under him.
His hair was plastered to his forehead. His suit jacket was wet through.
He had taken his tie off in the car. His beard had little drops of bay water still in it.
There was a small smear of mud across his white shirt cuff where he had pushed a fallen branch off the windshield with his forearm halfway through the drive.
Aurora was on the small chair next to Imari's bed.
Imari, half asleep, the inhaler in her small hand, the nebulizer mask now sitting on the bedside table, lifted her head when she heard the door open.
Halston stopped just inside the door.
“Sweet pea.”
“Uncle Halston.”
He crossed the room in three long strides. He did not even take his soaked jacket off. He bent down to the bed. He scooped Imari up into his arms, IV and all, the soaked white shirt against her cheek, and he held her there.
He did not hold back any part of himself. His face went into the small warm braided crown of her head.
Imari, half asleep, with her small hand on the back of his wet shirt collar.
After a while, Halston, without lifting his head, said into Imari's braids, “Aurora, I am sorry I wasn't here.”
“You are here, baby. You are here now.”
“I am sorry I wasn't here when she was struggling for breath. I am sorry you had to drive her through that storm on your own. I am so sorry, Aurora.”
“Halston. Look at me.”
He lifted his head.
His face was wet.
She got up from the chair and sat down beside him on the side of the hospital bed, on the side opposite the IV pole, with Imari sleeping between them in his arms. She put one hand on his wet sleeve and the other hand on her own stomach.
She said, “Halston, I drove her through that storm but you turned your house into a place she calls home. Do not, baby, sit on this bed and apologize to me for not being on a coast road in a hurricane. You have been here for the entire ride. You hear me. You have been here.”
He bent his head.
He pressed his forehead against her temple.
The three of them stayed on the small bed of the pediatric ward at the Pinewood Hollow Medical Center that night. The storm wound down outside. The wind dropped from a low howl to a long sigh and then to nothing. The lights stayed on.
Imari slept between them in Halston's arms. Aurora slept curled against Halston's other shoulder, his free arm around her waist, his hand flat against the small swell of her stomach.
She woke up at three in the morning briefly.
Halston was still awake. His eyes were open. He was watching the ceiling.
She said, into his soaked shoulder, “Tell me.”
He did not turn his head. He kept his eyes on the ceiling. His hand on her stomach pressed, very gently, in.
“I do not know how to do this,” he said quietly.
“I do not know how to be a man whose wife is going to have his baby. I do not know how to be a father in the morning to a child whose father I am still learning to be. I do not know how to be a husband to a woman whose father calls me son. Aurora. I have spent fifteen years building a defense conglomerate because I did not know how to be anything else. I am terrified.”
“We are going to figure it out. You are going to figure it out. You are already figuring it out. You hear me.”
He closed his eyes.
He turned his head into her hair.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For coming back to me.”
She slid her hand under his over her stomach. She laced her fingers through his.
The hospital room was quiet. Imari breathed evenly in his other arm. The storm wound out into nothing over the dark Gulf.
The three of them slept.