In Her Eyes (20 page)

Melissa looked down at her next carrot and then up at Casey. “I think July is going to suck, then it might get a little better.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Apparently all the attendings take vacation so they don’t have to deal with orientation of the new interns, which just

gets pushed farther and farther down the line until eventually we get to babysit them.”

That actually didn’t sound bad at all to Casey. A lot of the attendings were kind of a-holes anyways. She finished the last bite of her pasta and pulled out the last breadstick. It was still warm when she picked it up, the garlic-butter spread glistening in the sun. “I love you, Mr. Breadstick,” she said just before she took a huge bite.

Melissa looked over as Casey chewed and she couldn’t tell if she was jealous because she was stuck with carrots and celery, or repulsed by how much food Casey had just shoved in her mouth. The fact that she was talking to her food probably didn’t help her cause any.

Casey was about to finish off the breadstick in one more huge bite when a familiar face walked out of the hospital and into the courtyard.

“Parker?” Casey said.

He looked over at the sound of his name, and she looked around for Ben.

“Hey,” Parker said as he walked up to her table. “Can we talk?”

She was a little caught off guard at his question. He looked serious, but she couldn’t help but think it there was probably a girl at the hospital he wanted her introduce him to. “Uh, yeah.” She looked around for a place to talk. “We can go…”

“You can sit here,” Melissa said getting up from the table. She snapped the lid back on her plastic container. “I think there’s a fly in my ranch now anyways.”

Parker sat down across from Casey after Melissa left.

“What’s up?” Casey said.

Parker looked down, averting eye contact.

“Parker?” 

Parker looked up at Casey and she could tell something was definitely wrong. Not like how-to-ask-a-girl-out wrong, but like wrong-wrong. He started to get up. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you at work.”

“Parker,” Casey said again. “What’s going on?”

Parker hesitated for a minute and then sat back down. “He made me promise not to tell anyone, but I think something is wrong.”

“Who made you promise? Ben?”

Parker nodded his head, and Casey tried to keep calm. Emergency medicine 101: ensure the patient is safe from any immediate danger. “Where is Ben right now?”

Parker looked down at his Apple Watch. “I’m supposed to meet him at Gator Dining in about ten minutes.”

He didn’t actually answer the question, but at least she knew he was okay.

“Okay, now what do you think is wrong?”

Parker just shook his head and stood up from the table. She could tell this time he wasn’t going to sit back down. “I promised Ben I wouldn’t say anything, but I think you should just talk to him.”

Casey stood up and walked several steps in front of Parker, blocking his exit. “Parker. What is going on?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have even said as much as I did. Just talk to him, please.”

Casey watched Parker walk away and she felt as scared as the day she found out Emma might never see again.

49

Grace

June 7, 2015

A couple hours later Parker walked down the hall a few steps ahead of Ben returning from Gator Dining singing the same stupid song he had been singing all day: “
But I would walk five hundred miles, and I would walk five hundred more. To be the man who walked five thousand miles…”

“For the love of all creatures that can hear. Geez, those aren’t even the right words,” Ben said.

Parker turned around. “How are those not the right words?”

“Think about it, if you walk five hundred miles, and then five hundred more, how is that five thousand?”

For a moment Parker seemed completely lost, and then it clicked and he kept on walking. He turned the corner where four chairs sat around a small circular table just outside their dorm room and continued singing. “To be the man who walked one thousand miles—”

Parker stopped abruptly—the moment he saw Casey. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed or trying to avoid being obnoxious around her. It was the mixed emotions spread across her body as she stood their leaning against the door. It was something between terribly sad and terribly angry. Either way he knew, he didn’t want to stick around long enough to find out which one. Because he also knew he might be the cause.

“Finally,” Ben said, noticing the peace and quiet. Parker nearly knocked Ben over as they both rounded the corner going in opposite directions.

“What the…where are you going?” Ben said to Parker, who was walking unusually fast
away
from their room.

“I forgot something,” Parker said over his shoulder.

“What did you forget?”

Parker didn’t answer. He just pushed open the glass panel door and kept walking.

“Okay…” Ben said to himself. Walking into the community room, he reached into his pocket to grab his keys. Across the room he saw Casey standing arms crossed, and understood exactly where Parker was going.

* * *

Asking a girl what’s wrong can sometimes be like asking a starving lion in the middle of a jungle if he’d like to eat you. Instead Ben opted for a hug and kiss, neither of which went exceedingly well.

Ben unlocked the door and Casey walked in. He followed behind her and for a moment considered the fact that if he closed it, no one would be able to hear him scream…

Casey walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, sitting her purse down next to her.

Ben looked at the clock by his bed. It was one of those retro steel framed alarm clocks with the twin bells on top. The kind that made that ticking noise every time the second hand moved. The kind that drove Parker crazy. It was 6:41 p.m.

“I thought I was coming to your place tonight?”

Casey didn’t respond at first, instead she just watched him. And then she said an all too familiar line. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

Ben thought about the question for a moment, knowing there was only one possible explanation: Parker told her what happened.

Ben turned away from her and sat down on the end of the bed. “I’m assuming Parker talked to you today?”

Casey nodded.

“What did he say?”

“He just said that something was wrong and I needed to talk to you.”

“He didn’t say about what?”

“No, he wouldn’t say.”

Ben looked down at the comforter and began picking at one of the clear threads.

She didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to reveal whatever he was hiding. What could possibly be harder to tell her than what he already had?

“I’ve been having some problems running,” he finally said.

“What kind of problems?”

“Sometimes I can’t breathe and my chest tightens up.”

Trying to stay calm, Casey thought back to the arrhythmia that she had dismissed a few weeks ago. “Okay, what did the trainers say?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking back down at the comforter.

“You don’t know?” Casey asked, confused.

“I mean, I haven’t told them.”

This conversation was starting to make absolutely zero sense. Nothing was adding up. It all just seemed like a series of random facts. She kept on trying to work it out in her head.

Obviously Parker must have seen something happen to Ben when he was running…so he came to tell her because Ben was refusing to tell anyone.
What is the one thing Ben wouldn’t want to talk about? His daughter…
“Ben,” she said.

He looked up at her.

She didn’t want to ask this question. She hated the way it sounded as she said it to herself, but he wasn’t giving her any choice. “How exactly did your daughter die?” She knew the answer was medical complications, and she had left it at that when he told her, but now she needed details.

Ben stood up from the bed and walked towards the door. For a minute Casey thought he might be done with the conversation. That she had asked a question he couldn’t quite handle yet.

“She had hypertrophy cardiomyopathy,” he said over his shoulder. “She died during a heart transplant.”

“Is it congenital?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?” Casey said, almost angry. “What did the test results reveal?”

“I never got tested.”

“Okay,” Casey said, fishing around in her mind for options. “That’s not a big deal. I know some of the cardiologists at Shands. I can talk to them tomorrow and—”

“I’m not getting tested.”

“Ben.”

He turned around and the look in his eyes had changed. He didn’t seem distant anymore. He didn’t seem lost in a sea of memories. He seemed lucid. He seemed determined.

“Ben,” she said again, softly getting up from the bed. “You know you can’t keep running if you have this condition, right?”

Ben moved back towards the door. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he said, completely avoiding the question.

“A walk? What? No, I don’t want to go for a walk. I want you to tell me you’re not still planning on running this weekend.”

Ben opened the door. “I’m just going to get some fresh air real quick.”

Casey grabbed her purse and ran after him. “Ben,” she said.

He kept walking until he pushed open the heavy aluminum door that led outside.

“Ben!” Casey yelled again.

Ben looked up through the dusky sky towards the faint yellow glow of the moon.

Casey walked up next to him. “Ben, if you have this condition…”

“
If
I have the condition,” he interrupted her.

“Okay, so let’s go get you tested.”

“I leave tomorrow for the NCAA Championship.” Ben took a step off the curb and onto Fraternity Row. A car came speeding by and honked several times.

Casey walked along the grass next to him. “Ben, why are you doing this? I don’t understand.”

Ben stopped and looked at her. “I’m not asking you to understand.”

“You let me think everything was okay that night I listened to your heart and was so concerned.”

“It is okay.”

“No!” she yelled. “It’s not okay.”

He started to walk away again, but she stepped in front of him. “I understand you love to run. Trust me, I do. But what is so important about running that you’re willing to die for it?”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t even move.

“Ben, please, you can’t run until you at least get tested to make sure everything is okay.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“What? You can’t what?”

“I can’t give up.”

“Ben this is not giving up.”

“That’s exactly what it is!” he yelled.

Casey looked back at him. He had never yelled at her before, and it scared her, but losing him scared her even more. And that’s why she said, “What about Grace?”

Ben’s eyes burned into hers at the sound of his daughter’s name and he stepped closer to Casey. His voice was calm now as he spoke. “When Grace was in the hospital, she always asked me to tell her stories. But the problem was I didn’t know a lot of kid stories. I spent all my days in some cruddy orphanage just hoping I could make it through the night. So, I would tell her about me running in high school and all the different competitions. She always wanted to know how she could be a runner just like her dad, and I always told her great runners only have one thing in common: They never give up.”

“You have to know this isn’t the same thing. You could die.”

“I’m sorry, Casey. I can’t quit.”

There was only one more thing Casey could say to convince him, and she wasn’t even sure if she meant it. “If you leave tomorrow and put your life on the line for some stupid race, then…I can’t promise I’ll be here for you when you get back.”

Ben didn’t even hesitate before he walked away from her. “I’m not asking you to.”

50

Forget Me Not

June 8, 2015

The next morning, an hour before the bus took off for the airport there was nothing but silence surrounding Ben as he stood upon the sacred ground. The wind lifted itself around him and danced between the leaves and branches above, but even the trees fell silent today.

Ben knelt down and pressed his hand against the weathered granite. The damp morning grass soaked into his pants. He could feel the windblown fragments lightly scrape against his skin as he ran his fingers over her name: Grace Lynn Wilder.

He tried to abandon his own mind, to leave it behind in this place where only souls can speak. And for a moment he did, until he reached into his front shirt pocket and pulled out a flower with five petals and a golden center.

He twirled it around in his hand several times and laid it atop her grave. No one knew where the tradition of placing flowers at gravesites came from, or why people did it. Most people didn’t even understand the significance of a particular flower. But Ben did.

This flower was called forget-me-not and it signified the only thing he had left of his daughter: memories.

The wind died down long enough for the flower to rest there peacefully. He turned his eyes towards the headstone to the right, and moved up alongside it. Two words stood out above the rest: mother and wife. He stared at them with an empty mind and a full heart, until the world let him know it was time to leave with a swift breeze that lifted the flower into the air.

For several seconds, though, Ben didn’t move. Instead he whispered several words.

“Lord, I do not know how you want us to pray for those who are no longer with us. I simply ask that you know the fullness of my heart and let that be enough.”

All of time seemed to sit still, until Ben finally stood.

51

Everything

June 12, 2015

They had arrived in Eugene on Monday, two days before the event started. Coach wanted them to have a couple days to get acclimated to the Pacific Northwest.

On Wednesday the hurdles, relays, hammer throw, javelin throw, and shot put were completed. On Thursday it was the pole vault, long jump, and steeplechase. That just left the high jump, triple jump, sprints, and long distance for Friday.