Chapter 12 #2
‘There’s no way you’re getting behind the wheel in this state,’ he’d said to her. And, of course, he’d been right.
Heather’s hands shake so vigorously and are so soaked in anxious sweat she wonders if she’d even be able to grasp the steering wheel.
She opens her phone and takes it off silent.
Thirty-seven missed calls. Twelve WhatsApps.
Seventeen messages. Six voice notes. All from Brianna. Each one more panicked than the last.
‘Shit. Shit. Shit. Heather. I don’t know what to doooooo,’ she says in the last message, her voice a shrill vibrato of panic.
Georgia’s phone, when she tries it now, rings continuously.
Brianna’s goes straight to voicemail. Every mile of tarmac covered in the 66-mile journey to Dundee causes Heather’s heart rate to accelerate.
She feels Gerry’s hand on her knee as they cross the Forth Road Bridge.
He’s driving at exactly the speed limit. An excruciating 40 miles an hour.
‘Take deep breaths, Heather. Slow them down,’ he instructs.
Heather does her best to comply. She’ll be no use to Georgia if she has a full-on meltdown before they even get to the hospital.
If they ever get there.
‘Can’t you go faster, Gerry?’ she says through clenched jaws.
They make it across the bridge then Gerry, thankfully, puts his foot down.
Heather throws her seatbelt off and jettisons herself from the car the moment Gerry pulls up to the hospital entrance, leaving him to park. She runs through the corridors to the Accident and Emergency waiting area.
‘My daughter was brought in,’ she blurts out to the receptionist. ‘Georgia McVey. Nineteen. Someone spiked her drink. She has allergies. Very serious ones.’
The time taken for the administrator to check through the night’s admissions feels interminable.
Heather’s foot taps agitatedly below the desk.
A burly man in a black biker’s jacket with a black eye and a stream of blood from his head saturating a filthy-looking bandage gives her a look of utter hatred.
She knows her foot tapping is annoying him.
But she can’t stop it. Heather has nowhere to put her fear and dread.
If it doesn’t come out in foot tapping, it will come out in screams or obscenities or cries to just ‘Hurry the fuck up!’
By the time someone finally leads her through a curtain to the area where her daughter is being treated, Heather is an absolute gibbering wreck.
It’s only when she struggles to keep up with the nurse walking through the vast hospital corridors that she remembers she’s still wearing a sexy Dracula costume and ridiculously high stiletto heels.
It would be typical for Heather to make a comment to help the nurse interpret her clothing, but she’s too traumatised to talk, and the nurse, truth be told, seems too jaded to care. They arrive at a deserted waiting area.
‘Can you take a seat here, Mrs McVey?’ The nurse indicates one of around twenty steel-framed wipe-clean chairs with a vinyl blue padding on the seat and back. A sign above the double doors to the right reads “Intensive Care Unit”.
Heather grabs her stomach and begins to heave. The nurse leaves her and returns seconds later with a cardboard bowl. Heather retches her stomach contents into it.
‘We’ll try not to keep you waiting too long,’ the nurse says.
The utter agony of waiting consumes Heather.
She understands now why people hit walls when the frustration is more than they can handle.
She’d gladly wallop an inanimate object right now.
Anything to distract her from the pain of not knowing what’s going on with her daughter.
When she hears the double doors at the far end of the corridor swing open, she tears her eyes away from that sign and stares in the direction of the noise, hungry to see or hear from anyone about how Georgia is faring.
Three familiar bodies are walking along the corridor towards her, two holding disposable coffee cups.
A medieval woman in a bat-winged dress, a serial killer in a Hannibal Lecter mask and a regular person in jeans and a coat.
It takes a moment for Heather’s over-stimulated brain to formulate the familiar figures into names and faces. Brianna. Trey.
And Scott.
Brianna’s eyes are wide and her cheeks tearstained. Trey’s face is the colour of eggshells. And Scott’s forehead is furrowed in what she can only imagine is concern for her. He strides ahead of the teens and extends his arms towards her. Heather melts into him.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay,’ he murmurs into her hair. ‘She’s doing alright. They’re keeping her in for observation. But she’s okay, Heather. She’s okay.’
The relief which swamps Heather when she hears his reassuring voice turns her bones to powder. Her head swims, and her legs collapse from underneath her. But he holds her upright. He strokes her back.
‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you,’ he says.
After a few moments, Heather lifts her head.
Out of the corner of her eye, she notices the teenagers standing a few metres away, their faces distraught.
These people were there for her daughter when the chips were down.
Despite all her fears, they’d never left her daughter’s side.
She moves towards them; Brianna and Trey slide into the embrace.
‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’ Heather says as she kisses their tear-soaked cheeks.
The doors to the Intensive Care Unit swing open, and a bespectacled doctor in a blue surgical gown walks towards them.
‘Mr. and Mrs. McVey?’ he says, ‘your daughter will see you now.’
‘They assumed,’ Scott whispers as they walk through the doors. ‘It was the only way I was going to get information, so I didn’t correct them.’
Heather doesn’t mind in the slightest.
SCOTT
She holds his hand, the sexy Dracula with the killer stiletto heels, as they walk towards the bed where Georgia now lies. Her face is the colour of cement.