Sacrifice (15 page)

Sam ducked his head in an attempt to hide the tears he knew were glistening in his eyes. It was probably just a reaction the pain meds they were pumping her with. It had to be, his father was dead. Morphine was known for its hallucinatory effect. No doubt her mind was just conjuring up images that brought her the greatest happiness.

“It’s alright, I’m here now.”

She smiled at him, a look of love radiating in her gaze. Sam felt it wash over him and it broke his heart. She believed in him so much, trusted that he was doing the right thing… When he wasn’t. He’d let her down. Betrayed her trust.

“I want you to find someone to love… Someone you can love as much as I loved your father. I don’t want you to spend your life alone.”

Sam smiled sadly down at her. “I met someone… Just wait until you meet her, I think you’ll really like her.”

“Hold onto her, Sam. Hold onto her with everything you have. Don’t make the same mistake I did. I let your father go, I let him slip through my fingers and…”

She turned her face for a second, one lone tear trickling from the corner of her eye. Sam tracked its progress down her cheek and watched as it disappeared into her hair. He waited for her to continue but she didn’t. She was staring at something in the corner of the room that only she could see. Sam tried to follow the line of her sight but there was nothing there but a chair. They were alone in the room together.

She smiled at whatever it was that she was focusing in on. Her breath rattled in her chest and she seemed to struggle for air. The machines beside her bed that monitored her heart and other vitals began to shrill.

His mother had closed her eyes and her breaths came in erratic little gasps. Several people burst in through the door. A tall lanky doctor leading the charge. He stared at Sam before he began to bark orders.

“She’s slipped into a coma, get her on oxygen and stabilise her vitals.” He stood over the bed checking her pupils. When he flipped back the covers and started to press across her chest and abdomen Sam finally found his voice.

“What’s happening?”

“You are?” The doctor asked, his voice brisk and businesslike as he continued to examine her.

“I’m her son, Samuel Harker…”

The doctor glanced up at him, his eyes narrowing in concentration. Finally he let out a sigh and pulled the covers back up on Sam’s mom. He moved around the bed back towards the door as the nurses fiddled with the dials on the machines and proceeded to place an oxygen mask over Miranda’s nose and mouth.

“Step outside with me.”

Sam didn’t hesitate in following him out the door. He stood in the hall, his arms folded loosely across his chest as he awaited what he knew would be news he didn’t want to hear.

“Your mother’s organs are shutting down. One by one they are going offline and she is slipping away. Her abdomen is filled with fluid and that’s what is causing her breathing to be so distorted. Effectively it’s suffocating her, putting pressure on her heart and it’s only a matter of time before it gives out. Now luckily for her she has slipped into a coma. If I’m honest I’m surprised she went on this long.”

Sam lifted his hand, silencing the doctor mid sentence. “Fine, but what can you do for her? What are you doing to help pull her out of this.”

Sam dropped his gaze to the badge hanging on the man’s white lab coat. Dr. Anderson. If Sam was honest the man didn’t look old enough to be a real doctor. He barely looked old enough to grow a beard let alone treat people with terminal illness.

Dr. Anderson shook his head and looked at Sam with something bordering on disbelief. “I’m not sure if you heard me correctly. Your mother is dying. There is nothing we can do anymore, beyond trying to make her as comfortable as possible. I’ve had her morphine pump increased. I’m sure as you can understand we don’t want her to be in any discomfort…”

Sam brushed his hands over his face and blew out a deep breath. “There has to be something you can do, anything. I didn’t just get here in time for her to die…”

The doctor pursed his lips and placed his hands down on his hips. “Look, I can see you care for your mother. But there is nothing else I can do. She is too far gone. Maybe if she had been brought in sooner we could have slowed this down a little. But at the rate her organs are failing, she won’t see the rest of today.”

Sam pushed past the doctor. He didn’t want to hear it anymore. His mother was stronger than that. She might have slipped into a coma but that was probably only so she could regroup, fight the cancer back. She had done it once before, she could do it again. This wasn’t the end, it couldn’t be the end.”

Two of the nurses remained, one of them stood monitoring his mother’s pulse and the other was to Sam’s untrained eyes, fiddling with a small box with a syringe fitted inside it that was connected to his mother’s abdomen. It was all too unreal. It couldn’t really be happening. When he had woken in the middle of the night and watched as Natasha slept peacefully in his arms he hadn’t expected he would end up here.

He’d come to his mother to ask for forgiveness. To beg for her guidance about what he should do… And instead he had arrived just in time to watch her die. If she left him now he would be alone. Utterly and completely alone in the world. Everyone he had ever loved would have deserted him to his fate.

Sam drew his chair back up to the bedside and picked his mother’s unmoving hand back up in his. She had to pull through. It seemed to strange to think of her gone. Her eyes were closed and the mask sat over most of her face. She was so small in the bed, it practically obscured the entirety of her. But there was something more relaxed in her features now. 

Her chest still went up and down with each rattling breath she took. And from time to time she seemed to pause, her breath halting. Every time it happened Sam found himself holding his own breath. And every time she let out her halting breath he felt relief wash over him.

There was so much he wanted to say to her. So many questions he didn’t have the answers for. What had she meant when she said she had let his father go? As far as Sam was concerned his mother had been the only one to really hold his father where he was meant to be. And when she had gotten sick for the first time… He had used it as an excuse to lose his marbles… His father was a train wreck waiting to happen and to know that his mother blamed herself for it was almost too much.

“Mom, I’ve done something terrible. I just wanted to help you get better and we had no money… I didn’t want you to suffer. You deserve the best, you deserve everything dad took away. I just wanted to get it right for once…” Sam’s voice cracked off and he buried his face down in the covers at the side of the bed.

Everything sounded so pathetic to his ears. It all sounded like excuses for his own selfish behaviour. There was no way he could justify any of it… And yet part of him didn’t regret it. He didn’t regret meeting Natasha, no matter how they had been brought together, he was just happy to have found her. And now he might lose her too.

His life was a mess.

“I’m so sorry… I should have been a better son. I should have done more.”

The door opened quietly and a woman Sam didn’t recognise stepped inside. She stared from him to his mother before finally trying to slip into the room. She made her way to the other side of the bed and stared at him with that look in her eyes that he had grown to hate. The look pity.

“You must be, Sam? She talked about you all the time.”

“Who are you?” Sam’s voice was cold, practically dead.

“I’m Sharon, I was your mother’s nurse… I brought her in here…”

“You answered the phone earlier?”

She nodded soundlessly and started to draw up a chair on the opposite side of the bed.

“I’d like to spend what little time I have with my mother left, alone.”

She smiled sympathetically again and shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t. Marcus Grey hired me. He told me to stay with your mother no matter what.”

Anger bubbled up within Sam. Marcus. Of course it was Marcus. Everything came back to him. 

“Get out.”

Her expression hardened and she hovered above the seat for a moment. “He won’t be happy about this.”

“I don’t care. You were supposed to call me. You were supposed to take her to hospital if anything went wrong. The doctors told me that they could have helped if she was brought in sooner…”

Sharon smiled at him, but it was more a bitter look than anything else. “Well what can I say. She needed her family. That would be you, but you were no where to be found… If anyone is to blame here, it’s you. You let her down when she needed you the most.”

“Get out!” Sam gritted the words out between his teeth. His shoulders tensed and he could feel the rage coursing through his body.

“Hit a nerve?”

Sam started to stand but she laughed and held her hands up in surrender. “I’ll go. But only because I’m reporting back to Marcus that your mother is gone.”

Sam shook his head in disbelief and stared back down at his mother. Her hand was cold in his. He searched for a sign that she was breathing. Her chest had been rising and falling merely moments before. And now there was nothing. She was still, frozen. Her face was peaceful, quiet. She looked younger if that was possible. As though all the pain and suffering she had gone through had aged her. And now that it was all over she was free at last…

A small sound escaped Sam. It was beyond words. Beyond human understanding, closer to being the grief stricken sound a wounded animal might make. She was gone and he hadn’t even noticed. For all of his love and care for his mother, he had been too busy to even notice when she had died… 

What sort of a person did it make him? Did it even make him a person at all? How could he claim to have feelings, or be at all genuine when he managed to allow something like this? It was beyond reprehensible and Sam wasn’t sure if he could ever forgive himself…

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Natasha

The trip back to the city had proven to be utterly uneventful. I wasn’t sure what I had honestly expected. Part of me had hoped that Sam would come after me. That he would try and make up for what he had done. But how could he? How did you come back from telling someone that you were tired of pretending to like them? Tired of being with them.

It hurt to think about it. I spent the day trying to throw myself into other activities. Preparing for job interviews and cleaning my bedroom. The first thing I had done when I got back to the apartment was strip the bed. I wasn’t going to sleep on the sheets that smelled of him. I needed to cleanse him from my life, only then would I begin to feel more in control of everything again. Or at leastI hoped that’s how it would work out…

When the apartment buzzer sounded I felt my stomach drop into my shoes. What if it was him? What would I do? Did I want to see him? The answer of course was yes. I wanted to see him, not a moment went by when I didn’t think about him. When I didn’t think about how our morning on the beach should have gone.

Hurrying to the front door I pulled it open. I pushed the butterflies in my stomach down inside and tried to keep the hopeful look from my face. I didn’t want him to think I was glad to see him… All the best magazines said you should keep a guy guessing. Make him think you weren’t bothered, or even all that interested.

Rachel stood on the other side of the door and I felt my heart drop. To say I was disappointed was an understatement and that made me more angry than anything else. Why was I hanging around, acting like a crazy puppy, desperate for any scraps of attention that Sam deemed to throw my direction? Wasn’t I better than that?

“Am I interrupting something?” Rachel asked, the look on her face one of confusion as she peered around me into the empty apartment.

“Nope.” I tried to make my voice as light and airy as I could, but I was a terrible liar. I had never been any good at hiding my emotions.

She moved in past me and dumped her handbag down inside the door. I watched with a smile as she headed straight for the kitchen and began to fill the kettle with water. She wasn’t exactly the type of person who waited for her friends to come out with the truth. She would use tea and biscuits like a weapon until I finally came clean and told her everything.

“So where’s Sam? You two have been pretty inseparable lately?”

I shook my head in an attempt to shake the sudden image of him that her words conjured in my mind. Us on the beach together, his mouth on mine, his hands on my body. The way he made me feel like the only girl in the world. The way he made me feel like I was the only person on this earth that actually mattered. And now all of that was gone, because it hadn’t meant anything in the first place.

“We’re not together anymore…” 

Rachel’s jaw dropped and I could see her struggle to keep a hold of the cup she had just scooped up from the counter.

“Not together anymore? Is that like code for, he’s gone away or something?” She placed the mugs beside the kettle and turned back to me with her full attention.

I shook my head and sat on the edge of the couch. “No it means we’re not together. But I guess that implies we were together and if I’m honest I don’t think we ever were. Not if what he said this morning is true.”

“No, that’s impossible, Nat? Are you sure?”

I laughed at her inability to understand what I was trying to tell her. Why it would be so hard for her not to understand that we had simply broken up, I didn’t know. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I could have told her.

“I’m sure. He told me he was tired of pretending that he liked me. That he didn’t want to be with me anymore…”

The kettle started to whistle impatiently and Rachel just watched me with interest.

“Are you going to switch it off?” I asked, gesturing to the frantic kettle beside her.

“Oh, yeah.” She turned and flipped the switch, lifting it and pouring the boiling water into the mugs on the counter. She didn’t say anything else to me until she had made both cups of coffee.