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She didn’t know how long it had been since Detective Drisklay left when the phone by her bedside rang. There was nobody in the window in front of her room. Who was calling?
She reached her uninjured arm across her body and winced as she tried to pick up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Kennedy, sweetheart, thank God I got hold of you.” Sandy’s voice was breathless. Constantly bustling, just like her. “The nurses told me you were awake now. Has the detective come by, hon? I really want to talk to you before he gets ...”
“Yeah. We already talked.”
“Oh.” Her chipper voice fell flat. “So, he told you then?”
“Yeah. He told me.”
“Baby, I’m so, so sorry. I wish I could come over there and give you a big hug. You know that, don’t you? You know I would if it weren’t for the isolation rules, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Talk to me, precious. Tell me what you’re thinking. You don’t need to keep things bottled up, you know. Tell me everything. You know I’m always here for you.”
Kennedy’s throat seized up. She loved Sandy, but talking to her pastor’s wife on a hospital phone was no substitute for burying herself in her mother’s arms and crying. Releasing all that fear. That tension. The sorrow that hadn’t yet even crept up into her spirit. It was there, buried somewhere beneath the surface. She couldn’t access it now even if she wanted to. She felt as calloused as Detective Drisklay himself. So unfeeling.
So homesick.
“What are you thinking, baby?”
Kennedy bit her lip. If Sandy kept talking to her with so much compassion, so much concern, she’d start crying. And once she started ...
“I’m ok. I’m just glad more people weren’t hurt, you know?”
“Well, yes. We’re all praising God for that, I’m sure. But honey, you know what I’m asking about. I’m talking about Dominic. You do know that he ...”
“Yeah. The detective told me.”
“Honey, I’m so sorry. I begged the nurses to let me talk to you first. I thought maybe ...” Sandy’s voice caught. “I thought maybe it’d be easier for you coming from me. I’d come right in that room and hold you if they’d let me. You know that, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How you feeling, babe? Your injuries, are they pretty bad?”
God bless Sandy. It was infinitely easier to talk about her physical wounds. “My arm hurts a lot. And my shoulder. But it’s nothing too serious.”
Thanks to Dominic, she added silently. What was that verse in John? Greater love has no one than this ...
She couldn’t think about it. Not right now.
“Are you ok?” Kennedy hated herself for not asking sooner. “How’s Woong? And what about Carl? Is he all right?”
“Carl and I are fine, precious. In fact, he’s right here.” Sandy lowered her voice. “Here, babe. Say hi to Kennedy for a minute. It’s been a rough day for her.”
“It’s been a rough day for all of us,” came the pleasant-sounding grumble.
“Carl?” Kennedy wasn’t sure if he’d picked up the phone yet or if he was still bantering with his wife.
“Kennedy.” His voice boomed. She was grateful to hear the strength in his tone. “Hey, next time we ask you to babysit our son, I’ll try not to do it in the middle of an epidemic, all right?”
She smiled. “Sounds good.”
“Let’s plan to avoid any more hospital lockdowns while we’re at it, ok?” Good old Carl. Ready to remind Kennedy that joy still existed in spite of terror and heartache. Reminding her that one day she too would find courage to laugh again.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “We were really worried about you. All I heard was Sandy was driving you to the ER.”
“Pshaw. I’m fine. You know me. God’s not about to call me home yet. Not with all the work he’s still got left for me to do.”
“What was wrong?” Was it rude for her to ask? Should she have worded the question more delicately?
Carl chuckled. “Well, turns out that being fifty pounds overweight and snacking on my lovely wife’s cookies and muffins for decades was enough to kill my pancreas, that’s all.”
“What?”
“He’s got diabetes, hon,” Sandy’s voice rang out in the background.
“Oh. Is it serious?”
“Not very,” Carl answered.
“His blood sugar levels were 485 when we admitted him.”
“I’ll be fine,” Carl thundered. “Like I said, God’s not even close to finished with me yet, and when it’s my time to go, there isn’t a soul in a hundred miles who could stop me. But until then, the devil can try to take me all he wants, but God’s not through with me, and I’m just gonna keep on giving him glory.”
“Except now you’ll be giving him glory with diet and exercise,” Sandy added.
“Woman, we got more important things to worry about right now than my insulin levels. Listen, first we get Woong over this infection, we get ourselves home as a family again, and then we’ll talk about my diet. Promise. Here. You take the phone again. I’m about to die of thirst. These hospital meals ...” His voice trailed off, and Sandy came back on the line.
“You still there, pumpkin? Sorry about that.” She lowered her voice. “He’s an ornery patient. Just ask his nurses.”
“I heard that.” There was laughter in Carl’s tone. Laughter that squeezed Kennedy’s heart between her ribs and sent pangs piercing through her spirit with the intensity of the nuclear explosion at the end of Armageddon.
“Did they say when they’re going to let you out of isolation?” Sandy asked.
“Tomorrow night if I don’t show any symptoms.”
“That’s good. It’s the same with me and Carl.”
“You’re in isolation, too?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s horrible, isn’t it? When I should be there taking care of Woong. But they’ve got us two rooms right next to each other, and speakers so you don’t even have to use phones to talk. And the nurses, they’re letting him play XBox when he’s got the energy for it, so he’s the happiest little patient in the history of Providence Hospital. When he’s awake,” she added quietly.
“How is he? Is he really sick?”
“We’re still waiting on his test results, hon.” Sandy’s voice betrayed her heaviness for the first time since they started talking. “Waiting and trusting in the good Lord to do what’s right. His teacher turns out to have a bad case of meningitis, but at least it’s not related to Nipah, so there’s hope there. It just breaks my mother’s heart thinking about all the things it could be, so I’m trying to focus on the fact that right now, right at this minute, Carl and me are together, and our son’s right next to us. He’s sleeping now, but when he wakes up, he’ll want nothing more than to play his silly racing games, big grin on his face. His fever’s down just a tad. So until the doctors tell me it’s time to worry, I’m sitting here counting my blessings.”
“That’s nice that you and Carl get to be by him.” Kennedy would give just about anything to have her parents with her right now, even if she could only see them through the glass.
“Oh, we wouldn’t have it any other way. At first, they wanted to split us all up. When the bomb scare went off, they would have just evacuated, you know. Sent everyone home except for the patients and workers who couldn’t leave. But by then, Woong had come down with this fever all of a sudden. We told them he was one of the students in Mrs. Winifred’s class, and that was before they got her test results in, so they realized they couldn’t just send everyone away. You should have seen the flurry over here. Running and racing and figuring out who’d been in contact with Woong. Once they got it sorted, they let most folks out, but a few of us they had to put in isolation. Problem was they wanted to keep us as far away from the ER as possible, back when they still thought the bomb was in there, and there weren’t enough isolation rooms for everyone. So me and Carl, we just told them to put us together. We said if our son’s sick, well, we’d rather all be sick together, come what may, than stand back and watch each other suffer from a distance. I just wish they’d found a way to put all three of us together, but that has as much to do with Carl still needing a hospital bed as anything else. He won’t tell you this himself, but he’s still hooked up to IVs. Still working to get his blood sugar under control.”
Kennedy was glad Carl and Sandy were together. But she couldn’t figure out how Sandy could be so happy with her son so ill. Well, maybe she wasn’t exactly happy, but if Kennedy had been in her place, she would have been freaking out. Screaming, pleading with God to save her son’s life. Begging every doctor and nurse in the entire country to do what they could to help him.
Of course, she’d never go so far as murder, but she thought she understood a little more clearly what must have been running through Brian Robertson’s head when he strapped himself with explosives and walked into Providence Hospital.
“Well, I’m sure I’ve yacked your ear off by now, but you can call whenever you want to chat. I mean it, I don’t care what time it is. You call, and I’ll be here for you.” She let out a pleasant, ringing chuckle. “It’s not like I’ll be going anywhere any time soon.”
“Thank you.” Kennedy wished her weary spirit could feel the gratitude she knew Sandy deserved. She winced again when she reached over to hang up the phone. She still didn’t know what time it was. Still didn’t know how many more hours she had to go to find out if she’d caught Woong’s disease or not. She didn’t know if grief would overtake her now or if it’d take weeks before her soul could fully realize everything she’d lost in the past twenty-four hours.
All she knew was that she was tired. And that she wanted to sleep for a very long time.