“Let’s pack up and we’ll go over this at the garage. Come on, I’ll help. We need to get to Greg. He hates hospitals,” I said.
Everyone agreed and we went to work loading up the trucks. Less than an hour later, we were headed to the hospital. The entire team swarmed into the emergency room lobby, and Dad and I approached the desk. He gave Greg’s name, and the woman behind the desk assured us when the doctors said he could have visitors, she would let us back.
We reluctantly took over an entire section of the waiting room and sat in the blue plastic-cushioned chairs. A television bracketed up in the corner played some sort of competition show, but the volume was so low I couldn’t follow it, which didn’t really matter considering how jumbled my thoughts were. It felt like it took forever, but finally the woman at the desk called us back up and said two of us could go in at a time. Dad and I going first was the obvious option, and we rushed to the door for them to let us through into the ward.
Greg looked like a hot mess when we got into the room. One leg was already bandaged up and strung up in a sling to keep it steady and prevent blood from pooling in it. Even from where I was standing, I could see he was covered in road rash, but he still managed a smile when he saw us get to the door.
“Hey,” he said. “How’d you finish?”
They had obviously given him some medication to help him with the pain because his words were slurring. But he was speaking, and that made everything less terrifying.
“I came in second,” I told him.
He smiled. “So, you got the position you would have gotten anyway if I didn’t get knocked out of the race.”
“If by second, you mean first, then yes,” I told him.
Greg managed a hint of a smile before the pain medication took him off to sleep.
18
Kelly
The team was at the hospital with Greg late into the night. We were all so worried about him that we barely even noticed the time passing. By the time I got home, it was close to morning and I was beyond exhausted. It took every bit of strength I could muster just to get into the shower and wash away the smell of the race. That wasn’t something I wanted to bring into my bed with me. Though at that point, I was so exhausted I might not have even cared.
But once I got out and felt how nice it was to have clean skin and slip into fresh pajamas, I was grateful I’d managed to scrape together the energy to bathe. There wasn’t a whole lot left, just enough to get me to my bed where I crawled beneath the covers and fell asleep before my head sank all the way into the pillow.
The morning of the race, Willa woke up when I looked into her room. The next morning, she did me one better by waking up well before my eyes were open. Granted, they’d only been closed for a couple of hours when the sound of her laughing, clapping, and mumbling broke through my sleep. I woke up still tired, but it wasn’t like I could just sleep all morning. I dragged myself into my daughter’s room and saw her sitting in the middle of her bed, surrounded by her stuffed animals. It still hurt my heart a little bit to see the big-girl bed rather than her crib. The mesh railings along either side still made it similar to a crib, but there was no mistaking my little one was growing up.
But at least in that moment I could stand at the door and watch her happily mumble to her stuffed animals and live in her own imagination. Willa finally noticed I was standing there and grinned up at me.
“Mama!” she said happily, then held up her animals.
“I see,” I told her, walking across the room toward her bed. “You have all your animals. Are they having a party?”
“Race,” she said. “Rrrrrooom rrrrroooom!”
I crouched down beside her bed and kissed her. Despite all the disappointment and worry of the night before, seeing her so happy immediately took all the negativity away. It always made me feel good to see her so happy, and that day, I needed the boost.
Close to the head of the bed Pam sat in a rocking chair, a blanket draped over her lap and folded arms as she slept. I felt bad seeing her that way. I vaguely remembered interacting with her when I got home from the race before I got into the shower. I didn’t remember the exact conversation, but she reassured me it was perfectly fine how late it was, and she appreciated me checking in with her earlier to tell her I was at the hospital with Greg. She told me to go on to bed, that everything would be fine and not to worry. At the time, I figured she was talking about Greg and didn’t want me to stress out thinking about him being hurt and what was going to happen moving forward.