GARY SAT IN A HOSPITAL ROOM, SLUMPED IN A CHAIR. THE LIGHTS IN THE room were off and the window blinds were closed. He stared at the bed in the middle of the room. Beth lay on it, her eyes shut, her body still and silent, the mound of her stomach covered with a thin white bedsheet pulled up to her chin. Diodes were taped to her temples. Thin plastic wires connected them to a monstrous machine next to her bed. A display monitor on the machine showed an ever-changing array of readouts and numbers that made no sense at all to him.
He’d arrived at the hospital with her more than four hours earlier. It was the same local hospital, McCann, she’d gone to the first time she collapsed. Upon arrival, doctors had immediately rushed Beth into an exam room while Gary sat in the waiting room. After two hours, the young, wiry doctor from their last visit to the ER, Dr. Simpson, approached Gary and told him that Beth and the baby were fine. A sense of relief flooded over Gary, but it only lasted for a second before Dr. Simpson added that they’d been extremely lucky. Had they not gotten to the hospital so quickly, the outcome could have been different.
After delivering the news, Dr. Simpson led Gary to Beth’s room. She offered up a weak smile, briefly spoke to him, then drifted to sleep. Grogginess from some medication they’d given her, Dr. Simpson explained. Gary had questions, but the doctor had few answers. Before leaving he said that specialists and other members of the medical team would arrive in the morning to discuss Beth’s condition.
Gary had stayed at Beth’s bedside since then. Pacing around the room. Searching for answers. Unable to calm down. Twice he broke down and cried.
He shifted his body in the chair but his eyes remained focused on Beth. Her chest rose and fell with her slow, steady breathing. Gary grabbed his smartphone from his pocket and tapped a button. The screen displayed the time: 10:51 p.m. He placed it back in his pocket.
“You awake?”
Gary looked at the doorway. Rod and Sarah stood there, nearly silhouetted in darkness.
“Yeah,” Gary said, keeping his voice low. “I’m awake.”
They walked inside. Sarah set two granola bars onto the table beside Gary.
“We figured you might be hungry,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Gary tore the wrapper from the first bar and threw it into the trash. He took a bite and slowly, methodically chewed. Rod and Sarah walked over to Beth’s bed and stood beside it, looking down at her.
“How’s she doing?” Rod whispered.
“Tough question. She survived. That’s the main thing. But the doctor said it was a close call.”
“Anything we can do?” Sarah asked.
“Did you find two hundred thousand dollars since we last talked?” Gary asked.
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Then there’s not much you can do.”
Gary stared at Beth’s motionless body, lying in bed, hooked up to the enormous machine. He’d been staring at her for the past four hours, all alone in her room, until he finally called Rod and Sarah to tell them what happened. They’d immediately driven over.
“I thought I was going to lose her,” Gary said. His voice cracked with emotion; he cleared his throat and continued. “As I was waiting for the ambulance, her body was lightly shaking and convulsing. Her eyes were rolled back in her skull. I really thought I was going to lose her.”
Gary stood up from the chair and walked over to the window. He peeked behind the blind and looked outside at the dark, still night sky.
“This is terrible, Gary,” Rod said. “I don’t know what to say.”
Gary let the blind fall back into place. He didn’t know what to say, either.
• • •
GARY SPENT THE NIGHT IN BETH’S ROOM, HIS BODY CRAMMED INTO THE small chair at her bedside, his head leaning against the chair’s wooden backrest. It was painful and awkward, but he somehow had his best night of sleep in a week—the exhaustion and lack of sleep from the past few days finally catching up with him.
Beth was sitting up in bed when he awoke the next morning. Gary stood from the chair and hugged her, lightly rubbed her belly, held both Beth and Tyson in his arms for a long, blissful moment.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Groggy,” Beth said.
“Have you been up long?”
“About an hour. A nurse stopped by earlier. We talked for a while.”
Gary’s eyes stayed on Beth. Her unwashed hair was stringy and she looked completely worn-out, but seeing her awake was beautiful to him, so beautiful.
“You’re staring at me,” Beth said.
“Yeah,” Gary said.
“I look like some sort of weird sci-fi robot with these diodes taped to my forehead, don’t I?”
A small smile crossed her lips. Gary reached over and grabbed her hand.
“I was just thinking about yesterday. I was scared, Beth. I was so scared.”
“I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember anything at all.”
“You were in the kitchen, and I heard a noise. By the time I got there, you were on the ground. Your eyes were closed and your body was shaking. I called nine-one-one and it seemed to take forever for the ambulance to arrive.”
Gary shook his head. In some ways, the fall yesterday had been so much more terrifying than her first collapse. He’d been blindsided by her first collapse, but he’d been right there for this second one. He’d had an up-close-and-personal view of almost everything.
There was a knock at their door. Dr. Narita—the older Asian doctor they’d met with previously—stood in the doorway, wearing a white lab coat.
He smiled warmly and walked into the room.
“It’s great to see you awake, Beth,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“A little bit of a headache. Tired.”
“That’s to be expected.” Dr. Narita pulled up a stool next to Beth’s bed and sat down.
“There are a few things I’d like to discuss,” he said. “First off, we were extremely fortunate last night. Your vitals were dangerously low when you arrived. The doctors on duty were able to get everything under control, but we’d like to perform a few brain scans and tests to see just how serious this is. Based on what we find, we’ll determine whether you can be released from the hospital.”
Gary looked at Beth. The expression on her face was the same sad, somber look of helplessness that she’d had in the car after her first collapse, right before she started sobbing uncontrollably. This time, no tears fell.
“We were supposed to hold a fund-raiser tomorrow night,” Beth said. “A way to raise money for the Germany treatment. Can I still go?”
“You’ll have to reschedule it, I’m afraid,” Dr. Narita said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable releasing you until we know more.”
Dr. Narita asked if they had any more questions. They had none.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll be in touch once we’ve figured out a schedule for later today and tomorrow.”
Dr. Narita stood up from his stool and left. The room was eerily silent. No machines beeping. No voices drifting in from the hallway. No sounds outside the window.
“The bad news never ends, does it?” Beth finally said. Her voice was weak but it cut through the silence.
Beth stared straight ahead, at the plain white wall near the base of her bed. There was a frail sadness in her eyes.
“When does the good news come?” she said. “That’s what I want to know. When does the good news come?”
“It’s coming, Beth.”
Gary wanted to say something more, but he couldn’t think of anything that he hadn’t already said hundreds of times before. Stay positive. Things will work out. This will have a happy ending.
• • •
MOST OF BETH’S MAJOR SCANS AND TESTS WERE SCHEDULED FOR TOMORROW, so there was little for them to do that afternoon. After an hour of sitting, mostly in silence, Gary had wandered around the hospital until he found a lounge area on the children’s floor. It had taken him a minute of rummaging in a toy bin to find what he was looking for: a Scrabble game.
“State,” he said now, laying out his tiles. The board was set up on a tray they’d balanced on Beth’s belly, stabilized by a few wadded-up blankets. Gary was curled on the bed down by her feet, just able to see the top of the board.
“State? You wasted an S on a five-point word?” Beth said.
He shrugged. It was impossible to concentrate. He’d hoped the game would offer a distraction, even a slight one, but it didn’t. Everything was still so fresh in his mind: the image of Beth sprawled out on the kitchen floor, the terror that gripped his heart in that moment, the frantic drive to the hospital.
“Pitch, and the C turns hunk into chunk,” Beth said, laying out her tiles. She counted up the total. “Twenty-six points.”
They played on. It wasn’t only the memory of Beth’s collapse that distracted Gary; it was the uncertainty of what would happen next, too. It just felt like bad news was coming. Like things were only going to get worse.
The game dragged on. When it finally ended, Beth counted up their totals and looked at Gary.
“Two hundred ninety-seven to a hundred forty-one. Gary, I destroyed you.”
“Wasn’t my day, I guess.”
Beth cleared the tiles off the board. “Another?” she said.
It was either that or sit in silence.
“Sure,” Gary said.
• • •
ONCE THE EVENING ARRIVED AND BETH DRIFTED OFF TO SLEEP, GARY RETURNED home. A dank, putrid stench hit him the moment he stepped through the door. As he walked down the hallway, the smell intensified, lingered heavily in the air. In the kitchen, the eggs and pancake mix Beth had knocked over when she fell were streaked across the counter and splattered all over the floor. The eggs had hardened into a pasty, coagulated mixture. It reeked horribly. Gary grabbed a bottle of cleaner from under the sink and tore off a handful of paper towels. He got down on his knees and sprayed some cleaner onto the mess on the floor, wincing at the strong stench of the eggs.
So many emotions weighed on him, each like a heavy stone—grief, anguish, exhaustion. Guilt, too. All day, he kept thinking that he was in some way to blame for Beth’s collapse, as if it were some sort of punishment for the unspeakable thing he’d done. He had played God and ended a man’s life—and this was God’s way of reminding him who was really in charge.
It took twenty minutes to clean up the mess in the kitchen. When he finished, he called Gloria from the community center. He told her they had to cancel tomorrow’s fund-raiser. After that, he called the grocery store and told a manager about their situation. Both phone calls went well—Gloria said she’d hold their deposit and work with them to reschedule at a later date; the store manager agreed to give them a full refund for the groceries Beth had purchased for the now-canceled fund-raiser—but Gary barely had any reaction. It all seemed so irrelevant. So meaningless.
After the calls, he showered and put on a clean pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. Right as he finished dressing, Rod called his cell.
“How’s Beth?” Rod asked.
“Better than yesterday,” Gary said. “She’s awake now. We’ll know more after she’s done with testing tomorrow.”
“You still at the hospital?”
“Not now. I’m home.”
“Any chance you could step away?”
“I probably have an hour free. Why?”
“I’ve been doing some thinking. I know how we can find him.”
“Who?”
“The guy who cheated you out of the money. I think I know how to find him.”