Fly Away (Firefly Lane 2)

And then there was Marah. He didn’t know if she’d even take his call.

“Mr. Ryan?”

Johnny looked up sharply, saw the neurosurgeon coming toward him.

He wanted to stand, to meet the man halfway, but he felt weak.

The surgeon touched his shoulder. “Mr. Ryan?”

Johnny forced himself to stand. “How is she, Dr. Bevan?”

“She survived the surgeries. Come with me. ”

Johnny let himself be led out of the public waiting room and into a small, windowless conference room nearby. Instead of a floral arrangement in the middle of the table there was a box of tissue.

He sat down.

Dr. Bevan sat across from him. “Right now, the biggest concern is cerebral edema—the swelling in her brain. She sustained massive head trauma. We’ve put a shunt in to help with the swelling, but the efficacy of that is uncertain. We have lowered her body temperature and put her into a medically induced coma to help relieve the pressure, but her condition is critical. She’s on a ventilator. ”

“May I see her?” Johnny asked.

The doctor nodded. “Of course. Come with me. ”

He led Johnny down one white corridor after another, into an elevator and out of it. At last they came to the ICU. Dr. Bevan walked over to a glass-walled private room, one of twelve placed in a U-shape around a busy nurses’ station.

Tully lay in a narrow bed, surrounded by machines. Her hair had been shaved and a hole had been drilled into her skull. A catheter and pump were working to relieve the pressure on her brain. There were several tubes going into her—a breathing tube, a feeding tube, a tube into her head. A black screen behind the bed showed the intracranial pressure; another tracked her heartbeat. Her left arm was in a cast. Cold radiated off her pale, bluish skin.

“Brain injuries are impossible to predict,” Dr. Bevan said. “We don’t really know the extent of her injuries yet. We hope to know more in twenty-four hours. I wish I could be more definitive, but this is uncertain territory. ”

Johnny knew about brain injuries. He’d suffered one as a reporter covering the first war in Iraq. It had taken him months of therapy to become himself again, and still he couldn’t remember the explosion. “Will she be herself when she wakes up?”

“If she wakes up is really the question. Her brain is functioning, although we don’t know how well because of the medications we have her on. Her pupils are responsive, and that’s a good sign. The coma will give her body time, we hope. But if a bleed develops or the swelling continues…”

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Johnny knew.

The ventilator’s thunk-whoosh reminded him with every sound that she wasn’t breathing on her own.

This was what it sounded like to play God and keep someone alive—a cacophony of beeping monitors, droning indicators, and the whooshing ventilator. “What happened to her?” Johnny finally asked.

“Car accident, from what I’ve heard, but I don’t have any details. ” Dr. Bevan turned to him. “Is she a spiritual woman?”

“No. I wouldn’t say so. ”

“That’s too bad. Faith can be a comfort at times like this. ”

“Yes,” Johnny said tightly.

“We believe it helps to talk to comatose patients,” Dr. Bevan said.

The doctor patted his shoulder again and then headed out of the room.

Johnny sat down beside the bed. How long did he sit there, staring at her, thinking, Fight, Tully, whispering words he couldn’t say out loud? Long enough for guilt and regret to turn into a knot in his throat.

Why did it take a tragedy to see life clearly?

He didn’t know what to say to her, not now, after all that had been said—and left unsaid—between them. The one thing he knew for sure was this: if Kate were here, she’d kick his ass for how he’d unraveled after her death and how he??d treated her best friend.

He did the only thing he could think of to reach Tully. Quietly, feeling stupid but doing it anyway, he started to sing the song that came to him, the one that had always reminded him of Tully. “Just a small town girl, living in a lo-nely wor-ld…”