Page 113 of Gravity of Love
She sighed, then walked to the nurses’ station. He followed and she logged into the desktop as if reviewing general census numbers, her body shielding the monitor. She clicked through the records, then nudged him closer. “You have one minute.”
Liam scanned the chart, reading the timeline of CPR, EKG findings, initial blood work, the drugs and dosages, and the precise choreography of a code blue that only a fellow doctor could appreciate. He saw the first signature—Cora’s, tremblingon the consent line. He saw the crash cart entries and the language of crisis medicine and felt his own heart race to match it. There was only one sentence he needed to read: Transferred emergency to surgery for CABG x3, condition critical.
He stepped back, exhaling so sharply it made Zeta’s ponytail flutter.
“I have to see him,” he said.
“They won’t let you in.” She closed the chart with a quick click. “You need to be with your family. Cora’s on the verge of a meltdown. Your brothers haven’t stopped pacing. Just—” She looked at him, really looked at him. “I know you want to do something, but right now there’s nothing to do.”
He pictured his father upstairs, cut open and vulnerable, and the idea of sitting in a waiting room felt like cowardice. “I’ll be on six.”
Zeta arched a brow. “You’re going to pace the surgical floor by yourself?”
He let the silence be his answer, then turned and started toward the elevators. He pressed the button for the sixth floor, but the elevator was slow that time of night. He could hear his pulse in his ears as he waited and could feel the static cling of adrenaline in every cell of his body. When the doors finally opened, he stepped into the empty metal box and felt the echo of urgency bounce off the walls as it crept up to the sixth floor.
The ding sounded, and he rushed off before the doors even opened completely, slamming his shoulder into the steel. The usual antiseptic tang and hush of night shift nurses greeted him. It should have felt like muscle memory, the ride up, the left turn at the corridor, and the quiet click of his shoes on fake marble. He’d made this trip hundreds, maybe thousands of times, sometimes hourly, sometimes so fried on too much caffeine the floors seemed to roll under him like a funhouse. But tonight,every step felt foreign, his body moving automatically while his insides lagged two paces behind.
He felt like he was moving in slow motion as he pressed the call button for the observation suite and waited, the seconds stretching so thin he could almost see his own breath in the air. The door opened with a pneumatic whoosh. No one inside. He flicked on the wall of monitors, the blue glow illuminating a bank of empty chairs and the big screen on the far side of the glass. For a moment he just stood there, half-expecting someone to appear—an attending nurse, a tech, a bored resident with a coffee cup—but it was just him and the whirring of the HVAC.
Liam found the feed for the correct surgical suite. The room was flooded with light so bright it whitened everything: his father’s chest, the blue drapes, and the glint of the retractor prying his ribcage open. Dr. Khan, her scrub cap set with a line of cartoon cats, was bent over the table, hands steady as she manipulated the arterial graft. Valdez, hovered at her elbow, passing clamps and wipes, his forehead furrowed in concentration. On the edge of the frame, two nurses moved with practiced choreography, a silent ballet of suction, suture, and hands in latex gloves.
Liam watched, every heartbeat of his own mirroring the beeping of the telemetry on screen. His eyes watched the EKG tracing in the upper corner, he marked the rise and fall of the lines, the way they dove and lurched with every jolt of the heart-lung machine. There was a smudge of blood on the camera lens. He noticed a flutter of movement as someone adjusted the lighting. He watched Dr. Khan snip through fibrotic tissue, the texture bizarrely familiar even magnified to the size of a dinner plate. With each cut, Liam felt his own chest tighten, as if the scalpel was slicing him open too.
He lasted two minutes, three at most, before a wave of nausea swept over him. He staggered back from the monitor.The room spun. He blinked, tried to focus on the clock above the scrub sink.
He needed air. Needed space.
His legs felt like they’d been dipped in cement as he stumbled out of the observation suite, the door slamming shut behind him. Liam crashed against, then leaned on the nearest wall, eyes closed, forehead pressed to the cold paint. He tried to count his breaths.
Helplessness overwhelmed him. It closed in on him. Crushed him. Knowing exactly what was happening, and being powerless to change the outcome by even a single iota made him feel claustrophobic.
Was this what his dad had felt with his mom?
Would he ever have the chance to ask him?
Would it be too late?
He tried to shake that thought off as he continued down the hall to the elevator and stopped, his finger hovering in front of the button.
He couldn’t go down to Cora. Couldn’t face Frankie, or his brother or the twins, without answers. He had nothing to offer them. No explanations, no comfort, not even the pretense of hope.
Like a beacon calling him, he found himself continuing to the end of the hall, to a door assigned: Family Waiting Area. The sign was both a promise and a threat,family,waiting. He hesitated, then pushed the door open, prepared to face anxious relatives, not his, they were in the ER waiting room because his dad had been rushed to surgery from there, but the familiar din of anxiety and hushed cell phone conversations.
Instead, there were just two people. A couple, maybe in their thirties, sat in the far corner, hands clasped so tight their fingers interlocked, sitting in silence. They glanced up as Liam entered, their eyes glazed with exhaustion and fear, then looked awayagain, as if they wanted to preserve his privacy as much as their own. He collapsed into the first chair he saw, which gave a tired wheeze under his weight, and let his head fall into his hands as he rested his elbows on his thighs.
The room felt enormous, every creak of the floor or chair, shift of fabric resounded off the four walls. A television on mute showed the early morning news, weather, stocks, and a local fire. Someone had left a half-eaten bag of chips on the end table. The clock on the wall now read 4:32 a.m. Liam watched as the minutes crawled.
He told himself he’d only sit for a second, enough time to let the tremor in his hands subside. But as the adrenaline faded, all the other feelings started to press in, heavy as an elephant sitting on his chest. He tried to distract himself with a medical puzzle.
Was it just the LAD?
Was there ventricular rupture?
Could they salvage the ejection fraction with hypothermic perfusion?
But his brain refused to cooperate. It kept skipping back, not to the surgery, but to the mess of his own life.
Was this what it always came to?
