He raised her hand to his lips. “Okay. You do that. Just don’t give up, you hear?”
“Never giving up on you,” she whispered, her eyelids lowering despite her effort to hold them open.
He brushed his free hand gently across her face. “I wouldn’t let you if you tried.”
She thought he said something else, but she didn’t hear the words. Only the comforting murmur of his voice as she slipped into the wet darkness.
Two days after the storm, Haley lay in a hospital bed, one leg encased in a bulky brace, other bandages scattered randomly over her body. Her mother and her aunt sat in the two visitors’ chairs while her dad and her uncle leaned against the broad windowsill. They’d been there almost since she’d emerged from the operating room after being airlifted to the hospital. As much as she appreciated their loving support, she wished they would leave for a little while.
“Why don’t you all go have some dinner?” she suggested. “I’ll be fine.”
Her mom looked immediately prepared to protest. She hadn’t wanted to let Haley out of her sight for the past two days. Even if Haley hadn’t been told the full extent of her injuries, her mother’s behavior would have let her know just how critical her condition had been by the time she’d arrived in the O.R.
“Really, Mom, I’m fine,” she said gently. “Take a break.”
The room was filled with flowers and balloons from Haley’s friends and classmates. Many of them had been by to check on her, as had several of her instructors.
She’d made Ron and Anne go to their rotations, though both of them had wanted to stay close to her. Ron, especially, had been reluctant to start his new assignment while she lay in this bed. She’d told him there was no need for them both to fall behind in their training.
That thought made a pang go through her. She bit her lip, refusing to give in to her sadness in front of her already-worried parents.
Her mother still looked inclined to refuse to leave her alone, but then the door opened and Ron ambled in. He still wore scrubs from his day on the vascular surgery rotation beneath his crumpled white coat. His hair was tousled, and his pockets were stuffed haphazardly with his tools and materials. His left wrist was wrapped in an elastic bandage, there were two stitches in his chin, and a multicolored bruise darkened his left cheek, all souvenirs of the storm. He’d paid no attention to his own injuries until he’d made sure that she and all the others in the diner were tended to.
Their eyes met and he gave her a smile that almost singed the bed sheet that covered her.
“Maybe we will have some dinner now,” her mother said, standing and motioning for the others to accompany her to the door. “We’ll see you later, sweetheart.”
She brushed a kiss across Haley’s cheek before ushering the others out of the room, giving Ron a smile over her shoulder on the way out.
Alone in the room with her, Ron leaned over the bed railing to give her a kiss. “How are you feeling?”
Ignoring the various aches and pains that would plague her for a while yet, she said, “Okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He leaned closer, his eyes locked with hers. “Haley? What’s the matter?”
“It’s stupid.”
He brushed a strand of hair from her face. “What’s stupid, honey?”
“I should be so grateful to even be alive. I mean, I could have bled to death from that piece of glass piercing my artery. If anyone had tried to remove it, I probably would have.”
“You were lucky.” He still got a sick look in his eyes when they talked about her injuries, and she knew he’d been fully aware of how precarious her situation had been. Had medical assistance not been already at the scene, and had a medevac helicopter not arrived very quickly thereafter, the outcome could have been very different. As it was, she’d been rushed into surgery in the nick of time.
She would recover fully. With time to heal and some physical therapy, she’d soon be back in prime condition. She should be very grateful—and she was. But still…
“You’re still fretting about missing the next rotation, aren’t you?”
She sighed wistfully. “I just hate falling behind.”
“Six weeks,” he reminded her firmly. “Just the ob-gyn block, that’s all you’ll miss, and you can make that up next year. The administration has already said they’ll work with you to make sure you graduate with the class.”
“I know, and I’m grateful to them.”
“But you can’t stand knowing that the rest of us are going to be going through rotations while you’re taking time to recuperate from your injuries, can you?”