The Reason

  Jim tensed and then relaxed as his eyes settled on St. Thomas. Even in the dark, there it was. He could see it perfectly clear—the outline of the cross in front of the church.

  “Tell her, James . . . Only believe, and he will be made well.”

  He turned around. “I feel like I need to be up at the hospital with them.”

  Shirley crossed her arms. “They won’t let us in the ICU at this hour, James.”

  “I feel like I need to talk to them,” he said. “To tell her again. To tell them both.”

  “Tell them what?” Shirley asked.

  “Tell them what?” Carla echoed, shaking her head impatiently. “Let me guess—to only believe?”

  “Yes,” he said. “To only believe.”

  Carla stood up from the couch and took her turn at the window. She put her hands on top of her head and then slowly looked up at him. “Pastor Jim, you’ve been telling Brooke that all along.”

  “I know, Carla,” he said. “And Brooke does believe. I know she does.”

  “I know she does too,” Carla said, pausing as if trying to choose her words carefully. “But . . . aren’t we all ultimately made well? If we only believe?”

  Jim frowned, a cool sliver of fear poking at his heart, but Carla continued.

  “Ian is scared,” she said. “And he doesn’t seem like the type of person who gets scared. You should hear his voice.”

  Jim stepped closer to her and held out his hand. “Carla, we have no control over what is happening, and it’s important that—”

  “And I’m scared too,” Carla interrupted, her voice skipping and her lip beginning to quiver. “I have a really, really bad feeling about this. Really bad.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “Carla, what is important is that—”

  “Can you please answer the question?” she pleaded, almost like she was ashamed to ask. “My faith is stronger than ever, but, Pastor Jim, aren’t we all—all of us—ultimately made well if we only believe?”

  “Yes,” Jim said wearily. She was entirely right. “The answer is yes.”

  Carla was silent for a long moment. “Brooke’s hung her hat on what you told her since the day she found out Alex had leukemia.”

  Jim glanced over at Shirley, and he could tell by the expression on her face that she was fighting an unwelcome notion that had begun to dance uninvited back and forth across her mind—the idea of life without Alex.

  “Tell me,” Carla whispered. “Tell me where we are all made well if we only believe.”

  Jim settled his hands on Carla’s shoulders but struggled to say what he had to. He looked back at Shirley, who had tears forming in her eyes.

  “Answer her, James Lindy,” Shirley said bravely. “You know the answer to that question.”

  Jim closed his eyes. Kenneth was right. Carla was right. And now, Shirley was right.

  Why hadn’t he seen it?

  Jim knew where believers were made well. He pulled Carla closer and hugged her, sickened as he whispered the two words he never thought he would regret saying.

  “In heaven.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Isn’t it pretty?” Brooke asked.

  “Yeah,” Ian said.

  Neither of them had said a word in close to three hours as they sat side by side next to Alex’s bed. Out the window and beyond the hospital parking lot was the southern edge of North Jefferson Avenue and the small business district of downtown Carlson. Even though Brooke’s cell phone read 5:07 a.m., the Christmas lights that the Rotary Club had draped across the town’s storefronts and streetlights were still on. They pumped an artificial sense of life into the empty streets.

  “Did you sleep at all?” Brooke asked.

  “A little,” Ian said. “I was out for an hour or so. You?”

  “I don’t know,” Brooke said, glancing over at Alex. “I think I did, but I’m really not sure.”

  Ian considered what she said and he began to second-guess himself, not sure if he slept after all. He sure didn’t feel like he had, and if he did, it was not beneficial. He knew he’d gotten up to use the restroom and that Talia had come in and out of the room maybe fifteen times in the last few hours to check on Alex. Fifteen times? he thought. Or did I dream that? It was hard to tell. He was a notch past exhausted, and part of his subconscious was trying to convince him that none of this was real. It was all one big dream— or maybe he was an actor in a depressing movie or playing a part in a video for some sad song.

  “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

  Ian looked at Alex’s profile—nothing more than a still shadow—and thought about the ball mitt he’d just bought for him. You would have thought he’d handed Alex a bag of gold or had given him a brand-new car. His son had watched in amazement as he performed the age-old ritual of properly breaking in the baseball glove. First, he’d rubbed half a jar of Vaseline into the glove’s pocket, then he put a baseball in it, and finally, he wrapped a shoestring around it before tossing it under a mattress—Alex’s mattress—the same day they’d admitted him to the hospital.

  The respirator inhaled and clicked, then exhaled and clicked. As Ian watched his son, the respirator seemed to get louder as the part of his mind that had muted it for the last eleven hours took a much-needed break.

  “Can I ask you something?” Brooke asked. “And I want you to be honest with me.”

  “Sure, Brooke,” he said, closing his burning eyes.

  She pulled her leg up on the chair and rested her chin on her knee. “What is going through your head right now?”

  It wasn’t the exact question Ian expected, but a distant relative. He hesitated and then answered honestly. “What’s not going through my head? That might be a better question.”

  “I know,” Brooke whispered. “It’s too much.”

  Ian’s mind drifted back to where it had spent most of the night—not in and out of what he thought was sleep—but in the middle of a cruel tug-of-war between pure sadness and wishful thinking about Alex. He agreed with Brooke. It really was too much. “It’s almost like I can’t breathe.”

  “Like you’re being suffocated?” she asked, then nodded, as if answering her own question.

  “Exactly,” Ian said. “It’s like a giant glass has been placed over my life, and I’m trapped here in a new world. I feel like I can’t take a full breath until Alex gets better. And like we’re running out of air—like time is running short—and I want to pick him up, break that glass, and take him with me. But I can’t. All I can do is sit here and watch, drowning in the knowledge that there’s nothing I can do—nothing at all.”

  He leaned forward and put his hand up on the side rail and pointed at Alex. “Since I met him, I envisioned so many things that we were going to do. Reading to him, teaching him how to ride a bike, coaching him at football, basketball, golf—anything he wanted to do. I was dying to—”

  Ian stopped and glanced over at Brooke, wanting to erase the word he’d just used. “I was wanting to spend time with him. Make some memories together. Make up for some of our lost time.”

  Ian could faintly hear the words to that sad song coming from some distorted channel playing in the back of his mind.

  “You can still do those things with him, Ian. You still can.”

  He put his hand on the side of her arm. “Nothing else matters to me more than him getting better, Brooke. Nothing. And I don’t want to say this, but—”

  “Don’t say it,” she said wearily.

  Ian dipped his head back toward the floor and waited. “Maybe we need to realize that—”

  “Ian, no.”

  “Brooke, there’s a good chance he won’t get better.” She had to get ready, be prepared.

  “Please don’t say that, Ian. I don’t want to hear that. You shouldn’t even be saying that! Here! In his room, where he can hear you!”

  He looked at Alex, his tiny chest inflating and deflating, all due to the ventilator. Was he even in there anymore? Was he coming back to them? “Br
ooke, I know we aren’t supposed to think like—”

  “Can I tell you something?” Brooke interrupted. “And I really have no idea what made me think of this, but I want to tell you.”

  “Okay,” Ian said reluctantly.

  Brooke pulled her other foot up on the chair and rested her arms across the tops of her knees. “I remember when I worked at the plant. Alex was a little over a year old. It was a Friday, and Pastor Jim and Shirley had taken Charlie to the doctor’s office with an ear infection, so I took Alex to work with me. It was the only time he ever went there. Remember the nurseries there?”

  “Yeah,” Ian said.

  “They were pretty fancy too,” Brooke said. “Among the six rooms, there were probably one hundred to two hundred kids.”

  “That’s a heckuva lot,” Ian said.

  “Yeah,” Brooke agreed. “They really did a good job trying to accommodate single parents. And it was free. I just never took him there before.” She paused and then said, “I was only an hour or two into my shift, and I kept imagining I could hear Alex crying. After around ten minutes, I knew I wasn’t imagining it. The strange thing about it was that he was on the other side of the plant—not to mention that the production noise was so loud I couldn’t hear the worker next to me talking. But still, I knew it was Alex who was crying. I could hear him.”

  “Kind of a motherly instinct thing?”

  “I guess.” Brooke nodded. “You were my supervisor that day, Ian. And you let me go check on him. When I got there, I realized that part of that wing had a power failure, and three of the nurseries were filled with kids who were freaking out about the dark, including Alex. Among all those crying kids, in the midst of all that noise, I could still hear his cry, and I knew which room it was coming from. I remember opening the door to the nursery. It was still pretty dark, and they had a little emergency generator light on that barely lit anything, and guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Alex was right there. Right near the door, leaning against a little fence, holding his arms over the edge. He quit crying and he said, ‘Mommy.’”

  “So he was already at the gate like he knew you were coming?”

  “Yeah,” Brooke said. “It’s one of those connections, I guess, that mothers can have with their kids.”

  “I’ve heard about stuff like that before.”

  Brooke glimpsed at Alex and bit her lip. “But I know what you’re probably feeling. Why you’re saying . . .” She shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself. “Because I can’t—I just can’t feel that connection right now. I look at that bed, and I don’t know where he is. That’s my son there. That’s our son right there. That’s really Alex. This is all real.”

  “Too real,” Ian said.

  “But there’s another connection,” Brooke said, her composure changing. “There’s something else that I feel.” She hesitated.

  “Go on.”

  “God’s going to make Alex better. I know it.” Brooke dropped her feet back on the floor and pointed at the bed. “Pastor Jim told me to believe, and he’d be made well. What I feel is something I simply can’t explain. But just like I knew Alex was crying at the plant, I know God is going to make him better. I know it.”

  The door opened on the other side of the curtain, and Brooke and Ian turned to see who it was.

  “Good morning,” Macey said, stepping around the curtain and standing at the foot of the bed.

  “Good morning,” Ian said. The doctor looked like she hadn’t gotten much more sleep than they had.

  “Why don’t we go out in the hallway for a minute?” Macey asked.

  Ian looked at Brooke and then at Macey. A bit of that instinct that Brooke was just talking about was telling him that things had gone from bad to worse. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something else is wrong?” Brooke asked. “Is something happening?”

  “Let’s step out in the hall for a minute,” Macey repeated. She walked out and they followed her.

  Macey crossed her arms and paused. “I just met with Talia and Dr. Kelly. We are very concerned.”

  Ian felt Brooke gripping his arm, and he put his hand on top of hers.

  “We’ve had him on two relatively heavy IVs for his heart and blood pressure.”

  “Yes,” Ian said. “And?”

  “And he’s not responding like we hoped he would.”

  “What does that mean?” Ian asked.

  “We’re concerned that his blood pressure has been down so long that maybe there hasn’t been adequate blood flow and oxygen getting to his brain.”

  “Charlie’s brain didn’t have enough oxygen,” Brooke said. “Is Alex going to be—”

  “Brain-damaged?” Ian asked.

  “I’m not prepared to say that,” Macey said, holding up her hands. “But we have a tech on his way up here that is going to run an EEG in a little bit.”

  “How long does it take to get the results?” Ian asked.

  “It will take him probably twenty minutes to set it up and then thirty to forty minutes to record. We have a neurologist making a special stop by here at seven to read it.”

  That glass over Ian’s life had suddenly gotten smaller. “What are we supposed to do? What can we do?”

  “Pray,” Brooke said.

  Macey nodded in agreement. “Why don’t you two run down and get something to eat? The cafeteria just opened.”

  “I’m not leaving him,” Brooke said.

  “Me neither,” Ian added.

  “Please,” Macey said. “I’ll be here with him.”

  Ian and Brooke looked at each other, and then Ian took Brooke’s arm. “C’mon. Let’s go down for a little bit. We’re probably going to be here for a while.”

  “Okay,” Brooke conceded. “But I want to go back in the room real quick before we go.”

  They went back in and Ian looked at Alex. He was doing everything he could to make that connection with his son that Brooke had talked about. As hard as he tried, he just couldn’t feel it. Where are you, partner? I know you’re in there. Where are you?

  Brooke stroked Alex’s arm and bent down to kiss his head. “We’ll be right back, buddy.” She turned to walk out the door and Ian went to grab her coat. He paused at the window, overlooking downtown Carlson. Something seemed different out there, and whatever it was somehow managed to sadden him even further.

  What is it?

  He made his way to the door and stopped. He turned around and went back to look out the window.

  “What’s wrong?” Brooke asked.

  “The Christmas lights,” he said.

  “What about them?”

  “Nothing,” he said, quietly staring at Alex’s reflection in the window.

  The lights had gone off.

  FOURTY-NINE

  Dr. Monica Kelly rubbed the edges of the photograph and then tucked it neatly back into the small leather planner in her desk drawer. The picture served as her daily reminder. Every morning before heading out to the floor, she not only checked her normally unpredictable schedule but also counted her blessings.

  This morning she was counting a little more.

  As head intensivist at East Shore’s ICU, Dr. Kelly was the first to see the results of Alexander Thomas’s EEG that had just arrived from Neurology. She stepped away from her computer and grabbed a copy of the report off the printer in the far corner of her office. She put the report in a blue folder and slid it tightly under her arm before returning to the desk. She picked up the phone.

  “Talia, can you grab Dr. Lewis? I’ll be out in about two minutes.”

  “She’s right here,” the nurse answered.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Dr. Kelly hung up the phone and stared at the desk drawer.

  She opened it back up and took the photo back out of the planner. It was a little over five years old. She held it and looked at her two children—her two healthy children—as they played on the swings in the backyard. Jennifer was seven
in the picture and was pushing little Jack, who would have been two. He was smiling from ear to ear, hanging on for dear life, not caring in the least about the purple Kool-Aid that had stained both sides of his mouth and the front of his T-shirt.

  Dr. Kelly was going to give them each an extra hug tonight when she got home. She kissed the photo, put it back, and left her office.

  As she turned the corner of the hallway, she saw Talia and Dr. Lewis standing side by side against the far end of the nurses’ station. As Dr. Kelly marched down the corridor toward them, she purposely looked at the floor, not wanting to knock the legs out from underneath what little hope Dr. Lewis had left. Not yet.

  “GOOD MORNING,” MACEY SAID.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Kelly echoed, handing the blue folder to Macey, who quickly opened it. It didn’t take long for one of the words at the bottom of the report to jump off the page and punch her in the gut.

  Flat.

  Macey’s head pulled back in disappointment, and she could feel a heavy cloak of sympathy from the other two. She shook her head and closed the folder.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Kelly whispered.

  Macey glanced at the ceiling. “I’ve got to go tell the parents.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Lewis,” Talia added.

  “So am I,” Macey said sadly. Even though this was an inevitable part of the business, no other doctor or nurse had ever told her they were sorry, and it made her feel uneasy.

  There was nothing I could do.