Page 23 of From the Ashes
The nurse rolled her eyes and hurried away to deal with the other thousand things I’m sure she had on her plate. I could understand her position, but Charlie was hurt and I had to see him.
“Follow me, please,” the doctor said.
I did as I was told. But I was surprised to find that we weren’t moving toward one of the patient rooms. Instead, the doctor pulled me through one of the doors marked ‘employees only’ and into a bank of offices. She stopped in front of a half-glass door that hadDr. Roberts,ER Traumawritten across the front in bold white letters.
“Where’s Charlie?” I asked before I stepped inside. “I need to see him right away.”
“He’s stable,” Dr. Roberts replied in a calming tone. “But there are some…thingsyou need to know before I take you to his room, alright?”
My blood went cold as her words landed on my ears. What did she mean bythings? If Charlie was okay, that was all that mattered, right?But then I thought of the word she’d used. She didn’t say he was okay. She said he wasstable. Those were two totally different things. A tightness gripped my chest, and I had to put a hand out to steady myself against the doorframe. Dr. Roberts looped her arm through mine, pulling me into the office.
“Come take a seat.”
I allowed her to seat me before she closed the door and took her own chair on the other side of the desk. Each second that ticked by was more painful than the last. My mind was running a million miles per hour with every question, bad feeling, and worst-case scenario blazing through all at once.
“You said you were family?”
I nodded. “He… he’s my boyfriend,” I said. The title should’ve brought me joy, but instead it just made my heart hurt more. “We’ve been best friends for eight years. Even our parents are really good friends. Mine are on their way here now but I couldn’t wait for them…”
She nodded. “I understand.” Taking a deep breath, she began to explain at last. “Charlie and his mother were in a terrible car accident up in the mountains. From what the police know so far, they blew a tire and somehow the car flipped.”
I gasped, my hand going to my mouth.
“And then… it went over the side of the mountain.”
I stopped breathing altogether. My entire body went numb from head to toe. It wasn’t until a hot tear landed on my arm that I even knew I’d started to cry again.
“Charlie isalive,” she continued, not making me agonize for longer than necessary. “But he’s pretty banged up. He had multiple broken bones, lacerations, and blunt force trauma all over his body,including his head. Because of that, we had no choice but to put him into a drug-induced coma. He’s currently on life-support and looks a mess, but we’ve patched him up as much as we can. Still, he’ll need time to heal before we can bring him back to consciousness again.”
“But… he’ll live?”
“Most likely. It won’t be easy, and he’ll need years of physical therapy, but I suspect he will live if things go well.”
“Thank you,” I gushed, my hands reaching across the table and taking hers. “Thank you so much. I don’t know what I would’ve done if he’d… if he’d…”
She gave me a soft smile, but there was something sad in her eyes that caught me off guard.
“What is it?” I asked. My brain jumped to the most likely scenario with that amount of injury. “Is… Is he paralyzed?”
She shook her head. “No. His nervous responses are normal.”
“Then why do you look like you have bad news to give me?”
She took a deep breath. “There’s a second reason we’ve decided to keep Charlie in the coma.”
I waited for what seemed like an eternity as she found the right words to say.
“We… We’re afraid that his response to the crash will be severe. We want to make sure he’s healed enough so when he wakes up, he won’t hurt himself further once he learns the truth.”
“The truth?” I didn’t understand what she was trying to say. “The truth about what?”
Another deep breath. “Charlie is the only person that came in from that crash.”
I furrowed my brows. “Did his mom go to a different hospital?”
“No. She didn’t need to.”
That was even more confusing. “She walked away from that with no injuries?”