Page 35 of Hearts to Mend

“Red,” I say, so relieved I found the word and got it out of me. And I manage to elaborate for clarity. “Red light.”

“We’re almost there, baby,” Dee says.

I’m struck by how sweet her voice sounds, how soft her words feel. She doesn’t talk to me like she talked to the person on the phone, and I like this tone so much better. Plus, she called me “baby,” and that feels like heaven. Which is a strange feeling right now because I think I might be dying.

And if I am dying, I have some things I need to say. “I didn’t get to feed you.”

That’s not what I was going to say.

Dee raises a brow, looking a little confused and a little wicked. She squeezes my hand again. “You filled me up just fine.”

From the front seat, Drew mumbles, “TMI.”

I turn to Dee and look at her, wishing I could see her better. “I never stopped loving you. I never will. You and Matty, you’re my whole heart. I screwed up so badly, and I’m so sorry, and I miss you, and if I die—”

Dee grabs my face, bringing my gaze right to hers, forcing me to see her as she says, “You’re not dying. You’re having a stroke, yes, but if it was going to kill you, you’d be dead already.”

A comforting thought.

“We’re getting you to the hospital as quickly as we can so they can administer a medication that can reverse some or all of your symptoms.”

“Oh.” I’d hoped for something else from her in this moment, but that’s good news too.

Drew whips the car into the hospital parking lot, and I slide across the seat a little as he loops in under the ambulance portico. There’s a whole crowd of people in lab coats and scrubs, standing around an empty gurney, waiting.

As soon as Drew hits the brakes and slides the gear into park, he and Dee jump out of the truck, and all those waiting people spring into action. I’m helped from the truck to the stretcher. Once I’m horizontal, with Dee standing beside me, her fingers once again laced with mine, she yells at Drew, “Find Inez. She’s at church, at the cathedral.”

“On it.” Drew nods and jumps back in his truck. Within a matter of moments, he’s out of the parking lot, his flashers still blinking in the inky blackness of the night.

We’re on the move, too, my vertigo making me feel sick again as I’m shoved down some corridor where the ceiling lights hit at regular intervals, like a strobe. I close my eyes and flop a listless arm over my face, even as someone is talking to me, asking me something.

“No known allergies. Right, Rico?” Dee says as she hurries along beside me, still holding my hand, grounding me.

I squeeze her hand and mumble. “Yes.”

“That’s yes, you have allergies. Or yes, no known allergies?” some other woman asks.

I look to Dee, and she answers for me. “He has no known allergies.”

The rolling comes to a stop, and I slip my arm off my eyes to take a peek. We’ve arrived in a room now, and I’m surrounded by people, all flitting around like fireflies.

Someone takes my hand and says something to me just before she pricks one of my fingers. Someone else wraps a monitoring device around a different finger and a blood pressure cuff around one of my arms. I flinch as someone temporarily blinds both eyes with a penlight, exacerbating my headache.

There’s another prick, this time in my left elbow. And then yet another prick in my right elbow. I frown, this one hurting more than all the rest, and look down at my arms, like I’ll find a pack of Dracula’s brides there, sucking the life out of me. But it’s just IVs, two of them, one in each arm.

Why two? I want to ask someone, but the medical team operates like a pit crew at the Indianapolis 500, where every second counts. I don’t want to interrupt.

Like with Drew, I’m asked to swallow. But now they also want me to hold up each of my legs and arms. It all strikes me as a bit odd, but I do as commanded.

“Good,” the nurse says. “Now, I need to take your jewelry off before we take you for a scan, okay?”

Jewelry? What jewelry?

Before I can get clarity, she reaches for my dog tags and goes to lift them over my head. Oh. Those. I’ve worn them since basic training. They aren’t jewelry to me; they’re my identity. I watch the nurse hand my identity to Dee for safekeeping. I’m comfortable with that, so I don’t lodge a complaint.

Once I’m stripped of my ID, the nurse fits a nasal cannula into my nostrils. The oxygen smells strange, but I breathe it anyway. Another nurse clips a plastic bracelet on me. It’s my new identity: from fighter to patient in under ten seconds.

“Okay, let’s get a scan of your brain, see what’s going on in there,” one of the nurses says, and they start to push my bed toward the door again.

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