March 7th 2020
Chapter 67
Their Fear For the State
Melinda Friar had had sufficient time to drive out from Austin, reach Houston, and text her son to let him know she was picking up breakfast for everyone before a doctor came along – at last – with news on Sophie's condition.
Everyone in the waiting room remained so on edge, waiting for the moment when they'd finally know something, anything. They would watch as doctors and nurses went by, following each one's path in hopes that any one of them would make their way to them, to Chiara and Mrs. Zvolensky, and every time when they'd go off somewhere else, or when they'd approach another person waiting out here with them, it would always leave them to deflate and wait again. The cycle would just keep going on and on, hope and deflation, again and again.
And then, finally… A woman came striding through double doors, and as they'd looked up and zeroed in on her, they barely had time to go from 'Is she the one?' to 'Wait, wasn't she at Sophie and Chiara's wedding?' before Diana Zvolensky rose to her feet, pulling her daughter-in-law from her prayers once more to indicate the doctor definitely headed toward them.
Her arrival seemed to rob many of them of breath in their lungs. She carried with her the thing they had all yearned to hear and dreaded all the same. Couldn't she give some sign, one way or the other… preferably the way that meant that Sophie would be alright?
"Gwendolyn…" Diana addressed the woman, her voice tinged with a plea they all carried.
"Can I speak openly?" the doctor asked, taking note of all the people standing by and watching her now. Diana and Chiara both nodded. "Right, well, we've got her stable now, but I can't say she's out of the woods yet, I…" She'd been silenced as Chiara took two steps forward and embraced her.
Around this hold, the meaning it carried could only settle like a wave of relief over the gathered men and women. She was alive… The danger was still not completely gone, they'd heard that, too, they had, but they'd been given good news along with that caution, and they needed to cling to that, even for a little while.
Lucas had been standing behind Maya when the doctor had come toward them, and he'd put his arms around her, almost to brace her for whatever they'd find out. When they'd been told that Sophie was stable, he'd felt his fiancée just… quake, for a moment, like she had allowed herself the smallest crack in her composure, to let out some of the pressure of everything she'd been keeping bottled in since the call had come. For his part, he couldn't help but hold to her a bit tighter. Thinking about what Chiara had been going through all night, he kept thinking about how he might have felt if it had been him, with the woman he loved in peril. It was not an easy thought to navigate, but then he had her, right here, and he wasn't going to let her go.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Chiara let the doctor go, stepping back as she pulled herself a bit more upright. "You must be tired, I'm sorry." It was the most English they'd gotten out of her all night, and it still came off far shakier than they'd ever known her to speak it. But she'd been given that small glimmer of hope and it translated in this way.
"Please, don't apologize," the doctor assured her with a small smile. "I can only let the two of you in to see her for the time being, and it will be a little while longer before you can go, but I wanted to come and give you at least what information I could. I know all of you have been left to be patient these past hours," she addressed all of them now.
By the time Melinda Friar rolled up to the hospital, calling on her son for help bringing in the breakfast bags, Chiara had been whisked away along with Sophie's mother, off to go and see the recovering young officer. This left the rest of her vigil to hang back and wait for their return, for more news of her condition. It proved difficult not to shift completely into relief mode, when they had to remember what the doctor had said. Yes, she was stable now, but there was still a chance that this would change, and if that happened…
"My mom's here with the food," Lucas told Maya when he saw the message on his phone. "Be back in a minute?" he gave her a smile before leaning to kiss her forehead.
"You better," she smiled back.
Collecting Asher, Ray, Rosa, and Mrs. Carlton, who insisted on helping, Lucas went out to find his mother waiting by the car. The bags waited all along the passenger seat, front seat, and in the trunk. As the others started to grab what they could, Melinda told them what each of those contained before turning to her son and wrapping her arms around him like she'd been wanting to do it ever since she'd gotten Katy's call. It may not have been her kid who was in danger, but it was close enough that she needed to feel that he was alive and well.
"Thank you for the update," she told him as they pulled back. All of them who had parents out there who knew Sophie had found out about the incident by now, and so when they'd gotten their update, as small as it was, they had obviously sent out the word to their families. Lucas had texted his mother, Maya had done the same for her parents and for Sam, Riley to her parents, and so on. And then there was also…
"Uh, Lucas?" Rosa came to tap his arm and pointed to a car rolling up behind them. It was just the kind of car they had taken whenever they had flown anywhere by courtesy of what they referred to as 'Air Zvolensky,' and when the passengers climbed out, they knew that was exactly how these people had arrived.
Chiara's mother and father, all the way from Italy…
"Mr. and Mrs. Mantovani?" Lucas jogged toward the couple. Of course, it was very like Diana Zvolensky to have flown out her daughter-in-law's family, so they might be there for Chiara in whatever happened next, good or bad. Mrs. Mantovani was the spitting image of her daughter, and right now she seemed to echo her worries as well as the rest, which Lucas rightly assumed to be due to the fact that Sophie's mother had been the only one to know they were coming, and seeing as she hadn't had the chance to get in touch with them since the moment where the doctor had come back to them with an update, they still only knew what the rest of them had known through the night.
"How is Sophie? Has there been any news?" Chiara's mother asked, pulling him into a quick hug in greeting before doing the same for Rosa as she came to join them. The Mantovani family had essentially grown to consider the girl as one of their own, and to offer themselves as a connection to her Italian roots, where her own late father had been unable to provide it.
"She is out of surgery and recovering," Lucas nodded, much to the couple's relief. "The doctor said that she's not completely out of danger yet," he was forced to add before they assumed that they were in the clear or that the worst was behind them. "Chiara is with them, along with Sophie's mother."
"When she called us, she was already on the plane," Mr. Mantovani explained. "She told us what happened, and she was simply… out of sorts. She realized only after she had left England that she might have seen to all three of us flying together, but I told her she made the right decision. She needed to be with her daughter as quickly as possible."
Already, as Lucas and Rosa had been with Chiara's parents, the others had started to bring the bags into the hospital, where Maya, Dylan, Riley, Nadine, and Zay pitched in with distributing the food. It was greeted with as many thanks as the coffee and treaters earlier in the morning hours. When those of them inside had learned of the Mantovani's arrival, they'd had more or less the same reaction, a mix of 'wow, really?' and then 'right, makes sense.'
"Take over for me for a minute?" Maya asked Asher as he brought a load of bags and the news of the new arrivals with them. When he nodded and moved to do just that, Maya moved to talk to one of the people at the nurses' station. "Excuse me? Sorry to bother you, our friend, Officer Zvolensky, her wife's with her in recovery, I guess? Her parents just arrived from Italy, are they allowed to go back there to find her?" Chiara had just had a hell of a night, and she'd finally been able to go and be with Sophie, they couldn't possibly pull her away now.
Mr. and Mrs. Mantovani had been led off back to find their daughter, as the others huddled up together in the waiting room for breakfast and the nourishing of that quiet hope for Sophie's recovery.
"Is it bad luck if all I can think about right now is… memories of her? When we met her, and… when she became our friend?" Zay asked as he bit into his waffle, not even cutting it, just biting a chunk off the thing.
"I don't think so," Nadine reassured her husband with a smile. "We're keeping her in our thoughts, Sophie as we know her."
"I just can't stop thinking about her, when we were all in dance class together," Zay indicated himself and Lucas, who smiled and nodded. "Man, were we ever that small?"
"We've been smaller," Lucas pointed out.
"Yeah, not you," Asher waved his fork at him, making the others chuckle, just barely.
"You remember the look on her face when we told her we knew them?" Zay asked Lucas, nodding to Maya, Riley, and Nadine. "Girl looked like she was gonna leap off like a rocket."
Maya looked to her bandmates, the three of them out of the original lineup. They remembered plenty about the time when Sophie had come into their lives. She used to be so shy around them, like they were genuine celebrities, and that somehow made them something other than normal girls her age. It had taken a while before she'd managed to make the transition, to realize that they were her friends, plain and simple.
"The first thing I always think about is the day she came to camp, when we were counselors in the summer. She came up, and it was the morning after she'd found out about… her cousin, what he did," he stole a look to Maya, who quietly leaned her head to his shoulder. "She figured out what really happened, and she decided she was going to get me to Philadelphia, to find Maya, to straighten things out with her parents. I'd never seen her like that, like nothing was going to stop her from doing what needed to be done."
They were quiet for a time after that. That was always her, wasn't it? Doing what had to be done, no matter the cost… And now here they were, because she'd done exactly that, to her own life's peril. Suddenly, their exercise in memory, in life… only felt like it brought them back down again. She had to get better. It couldn't end like this.
TO BE CONTINUED
See you tomorrow! - mooners
