Chapter 6
Chapter Six
S till too sore to drive and still afraid to get behind the wheel, especially during morning rush hour, Ava’s mother drove her to her cognitive therapy appointment.
On their way, Ava kept her focus on the city streets, scouring every sidewalk, storefront, and window for Lucas.
Had she hoped to see him so badly that she’d conjured him up yesterday?
Maybe she’d only seen someone who favored him.
After all, she hadn’t gotten a good look at him in the hospital, and all she had to go on was his online profile picture.
She and her mother parked, went inside, and took the elevator to the therapy offices. Just like yesterday, they signed in and waited.
“Ava St. John?” a nurse called.
Ava left her mother and followed the nurse down the hallway.
“I’m going to take your vitals, okay?” The nurse motioned toward a small office with a scale and a blood pressure monitor. She sat down on the stool and rolled up to a built-in counter. “You can have a seat.”
Ava held her breath, a new tactic to avoid the shooting pain in her ribs when she changed positions, as she sat down in the chair next to the nurse.
The nurse clipped the pulse oximeter onto her pointer finger and slid the blood pressure cuff onto Ava’s bicep. She hit a button on the machine and then entered data into her tablet.
“Home address and personal information still the same?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The machine beeped.
“One eighteen over eighty—not bad.” The nurse entered the numbers and removed the equipment from Ava’s extremities. “Could you hop on the scale for me? You can leave your shoes on.”
Ava slowly stood and stepped onto the scale. The nurse recorded her weight.
“You’re having some tests done before therapy, right?”
“I think so.”
“All right, come with me.” The nurse led her farther down the hallway to a small room housing an exam table covered with a paper sheet. “The doctor will be in with you shortly.”
Ava climbed onto the padded table, rattling and creasing the paper, her legs dangling down from the end like a child on a swing.
Her only entertainment was a poster, tacked on the wall, indicating the parts of the brain.
She scanned each caption about the brain stem, the frontal lobe, and the occipital and temporal lobes, scrutinizing the pastel pink, blue, and green the artist had used to illustrate each element.
The words blurred in front of her. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, trying to find something to keep her busy while she waited.
She wasn’t used to sitting still, and since the accident that was all she seemed to do.
She read the paragraph at the bottom of the poster on trauma and the one on mind-health connection.
Her eyes were getting heavy, and she yawned.
Sitting in silence, with no phone to distract her, her muscles began to relax, and she rested her hands on either side of her.
Was their goal to make her completely comatose before testing her brain function?
A light knock jolted her back into an alert state. The door opened, and Ava was certain she’d actually fallen out cold on the exam table and was now dreaming.
“Lucas?”
He blinked at her, tilting his head as he held his laptop and a small stack of files. “Ava Barnes?”
Dr. Lucas Phillips was her Lucas Phillips.
And he was standing in front of her, in the flesh.
Her skin prickled. Find Lucas Phillips …
Everything she’d gone through since waking that day in the hospital had fallen into place.
She didn’t need any testing to verify she was totally fine.
She could prove to her mom, now, that hearing the voice and finding Lucas couldn’t be a coincidence if he had been both in New York and now in Nashville. It had to be divine intervention.
“How did you …?” She was overjoyed by the fact that she had her sanity to formulate the whole question.
He studied her as if she were some rare stone. “Ava St. John ? You were put on my caseload here because I’m used to the format of the Columbia-Presbyterian paperwork, and I remembered treating you in New York.” He leaned in. “That was you ?”
“Yeah.”
“With a different last name and swollen face, I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Those green eyes that were so familiar searched her face, and the unknown of how her life might have been different if he hadn’t moved away pelted her unexpectedly.
The adult Lucas seemed stoic, less of a free spirit than she remembered.
He’d taken on a more somber stance. Was he always like that now, or did he loosen up outside of work?
She couldn’t expect him to be the same boy he’d been at fifteen, but a tiny part of her wished he could be.
“It’s surreal to see you,” he said.
“Same.”
He set down his laptop and folders and took a seat on a low stool, looking up at her. “Is that why you wanted to find me?”
“What?” Was he a mind reader? “How did you know I was looking for you?”
“The nurse at Columbia-Presbyterian gave me your message.”
“Oh.”
“Did someone tell you I’d moved back to Tennessee?” he asked.
“No, I had no idea.”
His brows pulled together, and he pursed his lips, looking confused.
She scrambled for an explanation. The last thing she wanted was another person to think she’d lost it. “I thought it was you in New York, and I just wanted to reach you to … say hi. But it’s a wonderful surprise to see you ended up here.”
He locked his gaze with hers, but there was something indefinably heavy in his stare.
She’d expected a smile, a chuckle, anything but the storm of bewilderment that brewed on his face.
An urge to soothe him came over her, but she didn’t understand the feeling.
Who was she to guess anything was troubling him?
The young girl within her wanted to ask, though, the way she would’ve back then.
As if he could sense her thoughts, he broke eye contact and clicked a few keys on his computer. “Your address is still New York?”
“Yes.”
He was definitely more serious now. If she hadn’t actually known him as a child, she’d never have believed the Lucas from her youth and this man were the same person.
How much he’d changed from the boy who’d climbed the tree next to her window after bedtime just to tap on the glass and tell her good night.
“What are you doing back here?” he asked, a mixture of fondness and curiosity in his stare.
“I’m staying with my mom while I recover.”
He brightened a little. “She still lives on Willow Road?”
“No. After my dad died she bought a cabin on Marrowbone Lake.”
He visibly recoiled. “Your dad died?”
“Yeah. When I was seventeen.”
“Gosh. I wish I’d known.”
“We’d sort of slowed on our letters by then, and I didn’t want to send such a downer after not hearing from you for a while.”
He looked back at her. “You should have.”
She shrugged, although she recalled how much she’d wished for his arms around her to comfort her. “It’s okay. I managed.”
He peered back at his computer for a tick. “St. John. You’re married?”
“Not anymore.”
He nodded. After a moment’s silence, he took in a deep breath. “Well, I think we should probably get on with your cognitive testing.”
“Yes. To make sure I’m not crazy.”
The words came out as a joke, but she wanted to suck them back in when it occurred to her that she might have to divulge why, exactly, her mother thought she was crazy. She eyed his computer. Was her mom’s conversation about delusion in there somewhere? How would she ever explain herself?
To her relief, he laughed it off.
Now that she’d found Lucas, what in the world was she supposed to tell him anyway?
Given her mother’s response when Ava had divulged her experience while unconscious, he was sure to run for the hills if she told him the same thing.
And despite the time they’d spent apart, after seeing him, she didn’t want him to run anywhere.
A part of her wanted to stop everything, find a quiet place, and hear every detail about his life after he left Spring Hill.
Lucas scrolled on his laptop. “Let’s just see what the concern is here …”
She bit her lip.
“They’re calling for some general testing due to your fractured skull. They want to rule out brain injury …”
He leaned in toward the screen, reading.
Her heart thumped. She scrutinized the boyish features that had matured with age. He had small laugh lines around his eyes, reminding her of the time they’d fallen off the fishing boat in the pond, getting soaked. They’d laughed so hard, she couldn’t breathe.
“At Columbia-Presbyterian, it appears you’ve already had tests on immediate recall, delayed recall, and working memory, as well as sustained attention, divided attention, and selective attention assessments. Those all came out in the average or above-average range.”
He typed a few lines in one of the notes boxes. His hands were more masculine now, but his knuckles and the way he moved his fingers were similar to what she remembered as she pictured his grip on the branches of the crab apple tree.
“I don’t think we need to do any of the fluency or sentence construction evaluations.”
His Southern accent was barely audible anymore. But neither was hers.
He pushed away from his computer, those green eyes landing on her.
“What I’d like to do today is a series of executive functioning tests as well as some visual and perceptual examinations, and then, when you can come back in, I’d like to do more global cognitive functioning, and then, emotional and psychological. ”