Disclaimer: I don't have a medical background! All apologies to those of you who work in the medical field who are reading this story and shaking your heads, saying, "THAT'S not how it happens!"
I hope you enjoy, anyway:-)
XXXXXXXXXXXX
She hated hospitals. It was something she had never quite gotten used to: the antiseptic smell, the way sounds echoed ominously off the cold, sterile tiles. But there was something else, too.
She always felt comfortable working in the morgue. There was a sort of calm that permeated the air, as if the souls that lingered there had peacefully accepted their fate. Here, the halls seemed filled with the overwhelming presence of anguish and fear.
She shuddered and glanced down to the doors at the end of the hallway. He was in surgery in a room just behind those doors. She wasn't supposed to be here. When she arrived at the emergency room, she was told that Woody had already been taken up to the OR.
"Can I go up there?" she made the mistake of asking.
"Are you family?" the desk clerk had asked mechanically in return.
Jordan hesitated for a moment. "No."
"Well, then I'm afraid you can't go up there." The clerk turned her attention back to her paperwork, and Jordan waited for the first opportunity to slip past her and make her way up to the OR waiting area on the fourth floor.
Now, she sat in the hard, molded plastic orange chairs outside the operating rooms, staring down at the linoleum floor. A pile of months-old magazines sat on the end table next to her. Did they really expect people to read up here?
She thumbed mindlessly through some women's magazine with articles on "cute crafts for Christmas" and "how to drop two dress sizes in three months." She let the magazine drop to the floor and buried her face in her hands.
She had been running on automatic back at the convenience store. There wasn't time to think about anything other then getting Woody to the hospital, fast.
Now that she was alone with nothing more than a stack of unread Good Housekeepings, her mind ran over the events of the last few hours in an endless loop.
It was her fault, she knew. If she hadn't made him pull over...if she hadn't been crying...if she hadn't led him on at the club. Her fault.
He's not going to make it. The thought sprang unwelcome to the front of her mind. She shook her head. He's going to be fine. He has to be.
She rose from her seat and began to pace the hall restlessly. She would need to make phone calls.
Cal. She needed to call Cal. Woody had mentioned that he had gone on a rock-climbing trip out West with some buddies, and she had no idea how to reach him. He was the next of kin with both their parents being dead.
Oh, God. Woody's father. The realization flooded back into her with horror. The elder Hoyt, the town sheriff, had been gunned down in a gas station robbery fifteen years earlier. He had died a lingering, agonizing death, and Woody must have lain on the floor there wondering in terror if the same fate awaited him.
The image of him lying helpless on the floor in a widening pool of his own blood was forever seared in her mind. He had tried to bear it with his typical Midwestern stoicism, but she knew when he had looked up at her with pleading eyes that he had been racked with pain and fear. He was a cop; he knew as well as she did what his chances were.
He was a young, vital man with his life ahead of him, and she had held his hand and watched the life being drained from him. How often had he escaped death in the line of duty just to be cut down in some filthy Gas 'n' Guzzle?
She brushed away a short shower of anxious tears and collapsed back onto her chair. No, she wouldn't think about it. He was going to be fine. Fine.
The doors opened then, and a male figure in scrubs moved toward her. She looked up at him expectantly. His face was bleak.
"I'm Dr. Harris. Are you Mrs. Hoyt?"
"No, I'm a friend. How is he?" She jumped from her chair.
His face fell, and he hesitated. "I'm sorry. I can only release that information to family members."
"Please, I was there. I know what happened to him. Can't you at least tell me how he is?"
The doctor shook his head with regret. "I'm sorry...it's these new privacy laws. I can't give you any information unless you are a family member. I'm sorry. Really."
He nodded and turned to go. Jordan ran after him in her bare feet. "Wait!" He stopped and looked over his shoulder. "If you can't tell me as a family member, tell me as a doctor." He looked at her curiously. She let the words spill out of her in a rush. "I'm a doctor. An M.E. in Boston. If you don't believe me, you can call them. There won't be any privacy issues, since I'm bound by confidentiality, too. But Please. Tell me something. Please."
He pursed his lips in thought for a moment and looked up and down the hallway. Finally, he spoke in a low whisper. "All right. As a professional courtesy. He's in ICU. He made it through the surgery." Her shoulders dropped in relief. "But it was touch and go for awhile. We found the bullet. Looks like a .22. It hit the bowel and then the liver. The damage was pretty extensive, but we managed to stop the bleeding."
Her mouth was dry with fear. "Is he going to be okay?"
He paused briefly. "We'll know more in the morning." He gave her arm a pat and hurried down the hallway.
In her haze, she managed to stumble down the hallway toward ICU. There was a nurse there at the duty station going through some charts.
"Excuse me. I'm looking for Woody Hoyt's room," she croaked. The nurse looked up, and her face registered the shock of seeing Jordan standing there. Jordan could only imagine what she must have looked like.
"Are you his wife?"
She paused for a moment. "Yes. Yes, I am."
The nurse nodded sympathetically. "Room 12A, Mrs. Hoyt. Three doors down."
She turned and moved uneasily down the hall, afraid of what she might find inside. Her heart fell when she saw him.
He was unconscious, of course, she had expected that, but she hadn't expected him to seem so small and vulnerable. And she hadn't expected to feel the way she did, seeing him there.
The room was unnaturally still and quiet except for the soft, reassuring beep of the heart monitor. The lights were dimmed, and she moved quietly into the room as if she were afraid to wake him.
The nurse from the duty station appeared in the doorway then. "Excuse me, Mrs. Hoyt?"
Jordan turned. "Please. It's Jordan."
"Jordan. I thought you could use these." She held out a pair of teal colored scrubs.
Jordan blinked. "Oh. Thanks. I guess I should..." The nurse smiled in understanding and turned to go.
Jordan went into the bathroom and took a breath before looking at herself in the mirror. It was worse than she had imagined. Her hair had come loose from its pretty silver clasp and was hanging in an unkempt mass against her tear-streaked face. Her clothes were soaked through, too, and she tore at them, pulling them over her head as if they burned her flesh.
She stepped in the shower and stood under the stream for a long time, watching with grim fascination as the water emptied into the drain, first a deep red, then fading to pink and finally running clear.
The fresh scrubs felt cool and clean against her skin, and she crept back out into the room and eased herself into an armchair beside Woody's bed.
"I'm here, Woody." She whispered and brushed his arm with her fingers. "I'm right here."
We'll know more in the morning. She thought of the doctor's words and knew what had gone unsaid:
If he makes it through the night.
"He'll make it," she whispered aloud.
She had been going on adrenaline since the shooting, too numb to really feel anything. A hard crash was inevitable. She bent her head against the edge of his bed and began to sob quietly.
She cried for him, for his unimaginable pain, for the life he might never know. And she cried for herself with guilt and regret, and some other unfamiliar emotion she couldn't quite yet recognize. She only knew that the thought of losing him now seemed more than she could bear.
"Please...please..." she whispered prayer-like into the darkness.
Finally, drained of all emotion, she curled up in the armchair and watched him sleep, waiting for the long stretch until morning.
