Faith (Rescue Me, A Contemporary Romance) (6 page)

Frozen she could see him coming straight at her, laughing, and then suddenly she was knocked to the ground, her neighbor Bill on top of her where he’d fallen after pushing her out of the way of the speeding car. She stared up at him wild eyed and he leapt up, pulling her unceremoniously to her feet.

“Where’s Mac?” he shouted, and started to pull her towards the house. She wasn’t sure if she was holding on to his hand or if it was the opposite. She couldn’t let go.

Stunned she shook her head and started to run. Now it was she who was pulling him along. He raced to keep up with her.

Reaching the wide open back door she stumbled into the hall, Bill close on her heels. Still clinging tightly to his hand. Scared of what might happen if she dropped it. At this point it felt like a lifeline. She didn’t know what she’d find in her once welcoming hallway, but the thread of fear that had started earlier this evening with a long hard look into Emily’s face had grown into a full blown blanket of terror. She knew her life was about to change with what waited for her there.

At first nothing she didn’t see anything. The hall stretched out, empty before her, the only sign that something had gone terribly wrong there was Liam’s battered bedroom door on the right. Across the hall, her and Liam’s bedroom door was closed, completely unharmed. Farther down the hall, just before the living room and kitchen, was the basement door. It was open and ominous. She crept toward it.

“Mac?” She called softly at first and then louder, “Mac??”

Only silence and the faint crackle of the fire Liam had lit in the living room answered her. It felt like a lifetime ago that she had asked him to light a fire. A lifetime ago that she had been standing, happy, with her husband and son in the kitchen, making dinner and sipping wine. How had everything changed in a split second?

Reaching the basement door now she looked down. The lights were off in the stairway leading down to the rec room, but she didn’t need the overhead light to show her Mac’s hand where it lay unmoving on the stair just below the edge of the hallway where she stood.

With a cry she dropped to her hands and knees, screaming for Bill to call an ambulance. She saw the light come on in the stairway, Bill must have hit the switch, and suddenly her husband’s inert form was bathed with yellow light.

He lay crumbled on the stairs like a fallen giant. His head lay on his outstretched arm as if he had been crawling back up the stairs, trying to reach her and Liam, when he’d passed out. She reached toward him and grasped his arms and shoulders to pull him toward her. Bill put a hand on her shoulder.

“Stop it Faith, don’t move him. The paramedics are on their way.” He told her roughly, ripping her hands away from his wrist.

“God dammit Bill, help me!” she screamed vainly, but he was right. He shouldn’t be moved, she might hurt him worse
.

Instead of bringing his broken body to her, she went to him. Crawling carefully around him she laid her hands and head on his back and shoulders and whispered to him.

“Don’t leave me baby, don’t leave me, don’t leave me…” she repeated it over and over again like a mantra.

If she stopped saying it he would slip away. She knew it was illogical, but it felt that way. She didn’t know the extent of his injuries, but she was certain that Mac would only stop protecting her if he was completely gone. Only death would be able to stop him.
Now it was up to her to stop death. If such a thing was possible.

From the hall behind her she could hear footsteps running; the sound of labored breathing, a shocked in and out of breath that she recognized as her child’s. It was Liam.

Before she could think to stop him he was on her. Staring down at the sight of his father’s motionless body and his mother draped across him, in a manner that said only one thing: death.

Looking up at him she didn’t know if she could care. She didn’t want her son to see Mac like this or her so vulnerable. She knew it would hurt him. Scar him, but she couldn’t leave Mac. Couldn’t bring herself to walk away from him and protect her son. It seemed in this instant that if a choice had to be made she was making it in favor of the love of her life and she would deal with the consequences of that later. It was a choice that would change her life. She knew it as she made it, but in the way of desperate choices she didn’t care. Couldn’t make a different one.

She locked eyes with Liam. In that moment she saw in his eyes that he knew what choice she had made and she saw it cut him, deep into his soul. Helplessly she called for Bill to help once again. Needed him to take Liam away, too late now, but still she couldn’t handle the accusing stare in her son’s eyes as she leaned over her husband. She needed to be alone with Mac right now.

Bill came at a run from his post outside the open front door where he waited to flag down the emergency crew when they arrived. He gently took Liam’s shoulders and turned him away from the tableau. She could feel tears running down her face. She didn’t even know when she’d started crying. Slowly they fell onto Mac’s cheek and hair.
Even when the paramedics and police came rushing in in a huge confused crowd of yelling orders and barking questions she couldn’t move.

“Ma’am, we can take it from here. We’re here to help ma’am.” Nameless, faceless rescue workers lifted her off of Mac and passed her from arm to arm to replace her at his side with a stretcher and IV’s.

She watched helplessly from the edges of the crowd, her body held tightly by some neighbor, she didn’t even know who. She couldn’t turn her head to look for her son. Couldn’t spare a thought to the fate of the child she carried inside her. All her attention was focused on Mac and the medical personnel buzzing around him.

A team of concerned looking young men and women loaded Mac onto a stretcher and secured his head and body onto the lift with thick, black bands. He looked so strange lying there unmoving. She’d never seen Mac so still. He was always a blur of energy. This stillness scared her more than anything.

“Is he okay?” she called, fighting her way out of her friend’s tight embrace and rushing toward the door, following them as they carried Mac to the waiting ambulance.

“Is my husband going to be okay?” She screamed. Why would no one look at her?

She tried to get into the ambulance with him, but the attendant gently blocked her path.

“We need you to follow us to St. John’s in your car ma’am. We’re doing everything we can, but we need room to move around.”

Her neighbor Lisa, Bill’s wife appeared at her side.

“C’mon Faith. Bill and I are driving you and Liam. We’ll be right behind them the whole time. C’mon honey.”

She let herself be pulled away from the ambulance toward Lisa’s car. Inside she could see the medical team hovering over the stretcher. Watched them attaching tubes and IV’s and starting some kind of pumping action.

She wanted to be inside that car with him. Mac would never have left her. Would never have let anyone tell him he couldn’t be with her or Liam if they were in trouble.

“I’m sorry Mac,” she whispered to the departing ambulance. “I love you. Don’t leave me.”

At the hospital she sat huddled with Liam and a distraught Lisa and Bill on the hard, plastic chairs in the ICU waiting room. It was a depressing place with sick colored walls and flickering fluorescent lights casting a deathly pall over everyone.

Why must hospital waiting rooms look like the most depressing places on earth, Faith thought as she stared numbly at the same dark, dirty crack in the tiled floor in front of her. Of all the places where a cheery décor could actually do some good, she couldn’t think of anyplace more deserving than the waiting room. The worst thing about the waiting room was the sheer literal truth of the name. Waiting. Room. All you could do was wait. It was the most hopeless feeling in all the world.

“Who were those people?” Bill wondered out loud…not for the first time since they’d arrived.

The police had been there, asking the same question, “why?”

In fact, they were probably still there somewhere, waiting to see if Mac woke up from the coma. Just waiting, like everyone else.

Faith merely shook her head. Liam didn’t move a muscle beside her. She had already explained what she knew when they’d arrived and found out that Mac was in a coma. He was being tended to in an ICU unit. There was nothing she could
do for him but wait.

The police had questioned her and Liam extensively about the attack. She told them about the accident.  It was all she knew. Their fender bender seemed like it had happened a million years ago, but had actually just been hours earlier. She told them about Emily and how the psycho had called himself “Mr. Asher” when he’d been terrorizing her behind the closed door of Liam’s bedroom. She didn’t have anything else to tell them. Couldn’t believe it herself. Liam just shook his head speechlessly when they’d turned to him for answers and clung to her hand like he hadn’t since he’d been a little boy.

“We’ll find them ma’am,” the police had told her, but the blank look in their eyes told her they wouldn’t.

Alaska was a big, empty space. It was a place that criminals and innocent people alike came to hide. It was a state meant for escaping, and with no other clues to go on the town’s small police force would never find the father and daughter
. Not a police force that was used to breaking up bar fights and arresting drunken drivers. They didn’t have much call to do anything more serious, there wasn’t a lot of serious crime in Ketchikan. Until there was.

A sharp pain in her womb made her gasp and clutch her hands to her stomach. Lisa, Bill’s wife, sat up alert.

“Are you okay Faith? Is the baby kicking?” She asked, concerned.

“I don’t know,” Faith told her, just trying to breathe slowly in and out to dull the pain. “Maybe some water would help?”

Lisa jumped up to go get some water, while Faith sat still – one hand on her unborn baby and one hand on her son sitting next to her like a statue.

“Sip this slowly,” Lisa held out the water.

Faith did as instructed and sipped. Each swallow had to fight past a lump in her throat. Here she was sipping cool water while only yards away from them, Mac clung to life. Yes, ‘clung’ to life. That’s what she’d overheard a nurse say to her co-worker when she’d paced past earlier. No one wanted to tell them the truth. Mac might not wake up. She wasn’t sure which was worse. The fact that they all knew how dire the situation was and wouldn’t tell her or the fact that she didn’t want to know; wished she’d never heard the two women talking at all.

“Mrs. Byrne!” A nurse came into the waiting room, a note of excitement in her voice. “He’s awake!”

Faith let the cup of water spill out of her hands onto the tile. She didn’t care and no one else even blinked as the Styrofoam cup rolled noisily under the chairs and puddle of water spread across the floor.

They had all leapt up by now and were crowding around the nurse excitedly asking a million questions at once.

She held up her hand for quiet. “He’s awake, but barely. He’s opened his eyes. The doctor said to come and get Mrs. Byrne. Mrs. Byrne only for now,” she said this last with a quick pitying glance at Liam. “If he continues to improve then he can have all the visitors he wants, but for now he needs complete peace. It’s still a very touch and go time.”

Faith hugged Liam. “Be brave baby. I’m going to let dad know you’re alright. He’ll want to make sure of that before he lets himself get better,” she whispered to him in his ear.

She was practically running ahead of the nurse all the way down the long hall toward Mac’s room.

He was awake. He was awake. He was awake. Her footsteps kept time to the only mantra that would ever matter as she rushed down the hall to her husband.

Bursting into the room she froze at the sight of him. Her big, burly husband who resembled the proverbial bear in a china shop looked small and dwarfed by the tubes and machines that surrounded him. He had oxygen tubes running up his nose and at least four tubes snaking from his arms and even more running to extremities below the blankets that covered him. His skin was pale and almost purple, but his legendary blue eyes were open and looking toward her.

“Faith?” His voice was weak. She could barely hear him above the doctors and nurses barking orders and the machines whirring around him.

“Mac.” She couldn’t move. She was so grateful to hear his voice again, to see his eyes open and his lips moving was something she didn’t want to admit to herself, but she never thought she’d see again.

He closed his eyes again. The strain of opening them seemed to be too much for him.

Finally she moved to him. Sinking to her knees at his bedside she bowed her head over his limp hand in prayer and gratitude. She kissed the skin that wasn’t pierced by one of the tubes and held it carefully. She didn’t want to endanger him by doing what she really wanted to do – hugging him so fiercely she might never let go.

She sat there with him for what felt like an hour. Around the two of them the doctors bustled and prodded and Mac woke up and fell asleep over and over. Through it all she sat still and carefully. Not daring to move.

“Can my son come in?” She asked first one doctor and then another. They all shook their heads no. It was too soon.