All of My Soul (24 page)

Kennedy and I sat in the back of our black
rented Cadillac CTS while Brody drove. She called their parents
while I texted Rebecca and Emily before calling Carter.

Finally—
finally—
we reached the
hospital, and the three of us jumped out while a valet parked the
car. Kennedy and I swarmed the ER check-in desk.

“My brother is Lincoln Monaghan. We were told
he had been brought here.”

The friendly looking dark-skinned woman
behind the desk gave us a small smile as she surveyed our hockey
attire before cringing slightly. Just that small cringe made my
heart drop.

“What is it? Is he okay?” I asked
frantically.

“Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten
you. I don’t know his status, but whenever a celebrity is brought
in, we have to get permission before allowing anyone back.”

“Permission from whom? I’m his sister!”

“Permission from the patient or an agent or
management. A coach. The team doctor. Someone responsible for that
person.”

“Well, go! Go tell him his sister is here and
freaking the fuck out!”

That woman had to be the most understanding
person in the world. She never even flinched as Kennedy shouted at
her. She simply smiled and left the check-in area through a door
behind her. I craned my neck to spy through the crack in the door,
but I couldn’t see anything.

Kennedy waited by the desk as I started
pacing the area in front of the check-in desk. I hadn’t spoke up
once to identify myself. What if they wouldn’t let me back to see
him? What if they only let Kennedy in since she’s family? I tried
to tell myself I’d be okay if that was the case. At least she could
report back to me.

I walked up to her and surprised her with a
hug. “I’m so grateful you’re here. I don’t know what I would have
done if you hadn’t been with me.”

“That’s what friends are for,” she said as
she returned my hug. When she tried to let go of me, I held on to
her tighter. I could feel her confusion as I clung to her, but she
simply held me and patted my back. “He’ll be okay, Jillian.”

“I know. I know. I just—you don’t know what
it means to me to be able to call you my friend. I love you,
Kenny.” My emotions began to overwhelm me, but I didn’t want to
start crying. I was in love with a hockey player. I couldn’t become
an emotional wreck every time he got checked to the ice; otherwise,
I’d never stop crying.

“Oh, Jillian. I love you too.” She held me
tight now that she understood why I didn’t want to let her go.

“Ladies?” A security guard was standing
behind the desk with the lady who had originally helped us.

Great. Another security guard
, I
thought, but at least this one looked friendly.

“I know you’re upset, but if I could just see
some ID real quick, I’ll take you back.”

Oh, thank God.

Brody came to stand behind me as I dug my
driver’s license out of my wallet.

“You too, sir,” the security guard said to my
bodyguard.

If the situation hadn’t been so stressful, it
would have been funny to watch Brody have to answer to someone
other than Lincoln. It seemed like most people cowered in his
presence and gave him whatever he wanted. Not this guy, though, and
I liked that.

“All right,” he said after looking at our
IDs. “The three of you have been approved to visit this patient.
Follow me.”

He pushed a button on the desk, and the big
glass doors to the left slid open, allowing us in. Kennedy and I
rushed in followed by Brody, and the security guard met us on the
other side.

“Thank you!” I called back to the nice lady
behind the desk as we walked away. I saw her smile and nod at me as
we quickly followed the security guard down a long corridor.

I tried not to look in the rooms as we passed
them, but some of the doors were open, and I couldn’t help but
glance in. Patients wearing hospital gowns laid in beds with IVs
and monitors attached to them. A man with gauze wrapped around his
head and blood on his shirt sat in a chair outside a room, and a
little farther down the hallway an older woman hugged two younger
girls while they all sobbed and wailed. I felt like an intruder
upon their grief, and it made me think of my mother and siblings. I
wondered what they had gone through the day my father died and I
was burned. Did they have their own moment of bone-crushing grief
in the middle of the emergency department?

We finally reached an open area at the end of
the hall. There were several triage rooms—basically just beds
separated by curtains that could be pulled closed for some privacy.
A main desk sat in the middle of the room, but no one was attending
it. Doctors, nurses, and technicians buzzed around, popping in and
out from behind the curtains and disappearing down the long
corridor behind us. Loud coughing and moaning came from one of the
rooms.

The long privacy curtain separated us from
whoever was coughing in that room, but you could still see in
through the foot-wide gap between the bottom of the curtain and the
floor.

The Blackhawks’ insignia lying on the floor
in a pile of clothes caught my eye, and I immediately ran to that
room. I pulled the curtain back and found Lincoln sitting on the
edge of the cot in a hospital gown. His left arm, no longer
splinted against his chest, lay exposed on a pillow. A visible dent
just below his wrist only slightly distracted me from the wires
coming out of his other arm and the tubes in his nose. A nurse
stood next to him, holding a metal bowl up to his mouth. Lincoln
winced and let out a hard, deep cough and spit bright red blood
into the bowl.

“Lincoln! Jesus Christ!” Kennedy said, from
next to me.

He looked up at us and gave me a weak smile.
“Hey…”

I rushed to his side—his good side—and
lightly cupped his face. “Lincoln! Oh my God! Are you okay?” I
sniffled. “Of course you’re not okay. What a stupid question.”

“Shh… shh… ” he whispered as he pulled me
close to him with his good arm. I didn’t know where to touch him. I
didn’t want to hurt him at all, so I just patted his leg.

Another coughing fit seized him, and he
turned away from me to spit in the bowl and then groaned from the
pain.

“Baby, why are you coughing up blood?”

He groaned again and let go of me to brace
his side. A man with dark hair and olive skin wearing a long white
doctor’s coat stepped forward. He had been speaking with the Hawks’
trainer and a man I recognized as the team doctor, but he now
focused his attention on Kennedy and me.

“I’m Dr. Dobra. I’m one of the attending
physicians here. You’re his sister?” He pointed at Kennedy since it
was obvious I wasn’t related to him, considering how we had greeted
each other.

Kennedy nodded, and the doctor continued.
“When Lincoln was hit, it broke a rib and pushed it into his lung,
causing a small tear in the tissue and a partially collapsed
lung.”

My friend gasped. “Is he going to need
surgery?”

The doctor shook his head. “The CT scan shows
a minor laceration. Thankfully, it looks like the rib actually
moved back into place after he took the hit, so it’s not causing
any further damage. His heart rate and pulse ox are good, but we’d
like to monitor him overnight.”

“But what about the collapsed lung?” I asked
the doctor without looking away from Lincoln. Knowing he was not
critically injured helped ease my fear, but I didn’t want to take
my eyes off him.

“
Partially
collapsed lung,” Dr. Dobra
said, correcting me. “He has a minor pneumothorax. Basically,
there’s a small amount of air between his lung and the chest wall.
Right now we’d like to keep him for observation. If the
pneumothorax gets worse, we’ll have to insert a chest tube.”

Lincoln coughed and winced. “That doesn’t
sound pleasant.”

“It’s not,” the doctor said seriously. “We’ll
keep you overnight, and if it goes away by itself, we won’t have to
worry about it.”

“What about his arm?” Kenny asked and the
trainer spoke up.

“They’re going to cast it. Our team will look
at it better once we get back to Chicago.”

“It’s a minor fracture,” Dr. Dobra said to
Lincoln. “It shouldn’t cause you too much trouble as long as it
heals well.”

The team doctor whose name I never learned
nodded. “I’ve seen players with much worse breaks come back just
fine.”

Lincoln nodded while holding the side of his
chest with his uninjured arm. The coughing already seemed better,
and the nurse set the bowl down to check his IV.

“I need to make some calls,” the team doctor
said and pulled his phone out of his pocket.

“Thanks, Doc. Max.” Lincoln winced again as
he spoke.

The doctor nodded and left the room followed
by the team’s trainer.

“Can you give him anything for the pain?” I
asked the ER doctor.

“Absolutely, but it might make you a little
loopy, Lincoln. You have to remember, even though it won’t hurt as
much, you still have a serious injury.”

“Just give me the drugs, Doc.”

My poor man must have been in serious
pain.

The doctor rattled off a list to the nurse
and then excused himself from the room, leaving only Kennedy,
Brody, the nurse, and me.

“You scared the shit out of us, Lincoln,”
Kennedy said and wiped a tear off her cheek. Apparently, I wasn’t
the only one who had been waiting to break down.

“I’m all right.” Lincoln said quickly. I
think he was trying not to speak too much. It must have caused him
pain.

The nurse returned to his side. “Lincoln, I’m
going to need you to lie back on the bed now without moving your
arm.” The head of the bed had been raised up so he would be lying
at an incline.

“I’m going to text Deacon and call Carter and
Mom and Dad,” Kennedy said. “I’m going to be right out there,
though. Come get me if anything changes.”

“I’m not”— Lincoln took a sharp shallow
breath—“dying, Ken.”

Kennedy ignored her brother and pointed her
finger at me. “If anything changes, you come get me.”

When I agreed, she seemed satisfied and left
the room through the curtain. I moved to the other side of the bed
to help Lincoln sit back properly.

Holding his side, he leaned back against the
raised head of the bed and groaned as he settled in. His muscles
were tense, and he tried to stifle a coughing fit but was
unsuccessful. Groaning in pain, he held the metal bowl up to his
lips and spit a small quantity of saliva and blood into it before
resting back against the pillows.

“Okay. Good job, Lincoln. I know that hurt,
but hopefully that was the worst of it,” the nurse said in an
encouraging way. She explained how the pain medicine was
self-administering through his IV. If his pain got too great he
could just hit a button, and it would give him another dose without
allowing him to have too much.

Lincoln immediately hit the button several
times, and almost instantly his whole body relaxed. A small smile
grew on his face, and his eyelids drooped, although he didn’t fall
asleep.

“Wow. That is some good shit.”

I chuckled despite the seriousness of the
situation. Lincoln sounded like Cheech and Chong.

My laugh drew his attention to me, and he
slowly swung his head toward me. “There’s my sexy girl.” With his
good hand he tried to cup my face, but his motor skills were off,
and he only managed to grab a chunk of my hair.

I grabbed his hand to extricate myself from
his grasp and pinned it down on the bed. I knew he would never
intentionally hurt me, but he was strong even if he was stoned out
of his mind.

“Are you feeling better, baby?”

He nodded his head in an incredibly
overexaggerated way and then looked at me with a gleam in his eyes.
“I know something that would make me feel even better.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” I asked, humoring
him.

“You bring that sexy ass into bed with me and
do that thing with your tongue—”

I clapped my hand over Lincoln’s mouth,
stopping him from talking. “Lincoln!” I scolded him as my face
heated from embarrassment. The only other person in the room was
the nurse. She had her back to us, but I could see her shoulders
shaking with laughter.

“You are lucky you are injured, mister.” I
poked his hard shoulder.

He let out a small cough, and I immediately
regretted teasing him. This time he didn’t wince in pain though,
and I was grateful for the medicine despite his loopy attitude.

Kennedy returned and stood at the foot of her
brother’s bed. “Our mother would like you to call her when you feel
up to it.”

Lincoln laughed. “Mother. Brother. Futher.”
He puffed his lips out and blew a raspberry.

“They gave him pain meds,” I explained to
Kennedy as she looked at me with confusion and concern.

“Oh, thank God. I was about to pull the
doctor back in here and have Linc’s head examined.”

A loud burst of laughter exploded out of
Lincoln, and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. I’d never seen him
like this. I’d never even seen him drunk, so this was definitely
entertaining.

Kennedy joined in with our laughter but
rolled her eyes. “Jesus. We should keep him doped up like this all
the time.”

Lincoln’s doctor returned followed by another
nurse.

“Hey! What’s up, Doc?” Lincoln asked with a
laugh. His face turned serious as the doctor approached his
bedside. “Has anyone ever told you… you have insane eyebrows?”

The nurses and Kennedy laughed while the
doctor looked surprised but amused.

“I see the pain meds have kicked in.”

“Oh yeaaaah!” Lincoln replied imitating the
Kool-Aid Man.

“We’re going to get a cast on this arm, and
then we’ll get you moved into a room for the night. Sound good,
Lincoln?”

Kennedy cleared her throat. “I’ve been told
to remind you of our request for privacy. Fans will figure out he’s
here. I doubt there will be a problem, but if there is, can your
hospital security handle it?”