Lucian Divine(56)

He smiled, but there was still so much sadness in his eyes. Wiping the tears from my cheek with his thumb, he bent and kissed my lips. “Always the optimist.”

I was trembling from the cramps. Lucian, as weak as he was, picked me up, grabbed the keys, and carried me out to the car. When we reached the hospital, he yelled for someone to help me. I shuffled to a wheelchair just outside of the ER doors, then a nurse wheeled me in, asking me questions.

“I’m having a miscarriage, and my husband is very sick. He should be coming in behind me.” I heard a ruckus from the entrance and saw staff running toward the doors.

The nurse stopped pushing me and glanced back.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

The nurse didn’t answer. She just stared, eyes wide. I stood on shaking legs and looked back at the entrance. Just inside the doorway, Lucian was on the floor, convulsing. I ran to him, feeling blood running down my legs. My gray sweats were drenched.

“Ma’am,” one of the nurses said, but I ignored her.

A doctor was trying to prevent Lucian from banging his head on the ground. His eyes had rolled back in his head, and he was foaming at the mouth.

I was crying and screaming, “Help him!”

“Whose blood is that?” one nurse said.

Then I heard, “It’s the woman who’s bleeding.”

“Help my husband,” I screamed through what felt like an hour of watching Lucian convulse. “Please, help him!”

“We’re doing what we can,” a blond woman in blue scrubs said to me as we all sat on the floor around him.

When the seizure started to subside, Lucian was still twitching. His eyes were back, but he was obviously confused.

“Ma’am, you need help. Let us help you,” the lady in scrubs said to me.

I need help?

Lucian tried to focus his eyes and sit up, but the staff wouldn’t let him. Four men lifted him onto a gurney. When I stood, Lucian glanced at my sweats and began crying. He was trying to form words, but everyone was telling him to relax and take it easy. He reached his hand out to me and I felt it, the energy he was giving me.

When he started to close his eyes, one of the nurses said, “Try to stay awake, sir.”

He was losing consciousness by trying to give me strength.

“His name is Lucian,” I said as I followed the gurney out of the ER lobby.

I was still holding his hand, hoping I could give him some comfort. He was fighting it, I could tell, trying to keep his eyes open. He seemed so human, but I knew he wasn’t. I wondered what kind of tests they would run on him and if they would somehow be able to tell that he was something other than a man.

The nurse who had been pushing me in the wheelchair earlier was urging me to sit back down. I let go of Lucian’s hand, and his eyes shot open.

“I’m sorry,” he mouthed.

I collapsed into the chair, and then Lucian and I were wheeled in different directions. I had to have a vaginal ultrasound to confirm that my baby no longer had a heartbeat. My baby was dead and gone… again. I felt naked inside and out, vulnerable, alone, sick to my stomach, depressed. I missed Lucian and couldn’t stop thinking about how he must have been feeling. I yearned for him to be there with me.

Probing my bleeding insides, the man watched a screen and said without any compassion, “There’s nothing in there.”

“Excuse me?”

He glanced at my face quickly before looking back at the screen. Pointing at something, he said, “That’s your uterus, and there’s nothing in there.”

I wondered whether I should thank him or punch him. It was like déjà vu, being in that situation, in pain and not knowing how to act, whether to be angry or sad. They wheeled me into another room to recover, except this time I was alone. The nurse asked if I wanted pain medication, and I told her no. A male doctor I had never met came in and said that I had miscarried and that everything was fine. But it wasn’t. What a poor choice of words. I had just miscarried. Everything wasn’t fine.

“What’s wrong with me?” I asked.

He squinted, looking confused.

When he opened his mouth to speak, I interrupted him. “This is my second miscarriage. Why is this happening?”

He cleared his throat. “We contacted your OBGYN, so you’ll want to follow up with her, but miscarriages are very common. Consider it your body’s way of ridding what would likely be an unviable fetus.”

Unviable fetus? Again, poor choice of words. “But it already had a heartbeat.”

He approached the head of the bed. He put his cold hand on my arm. “I’m very sorry this happened to you. Try to look at it as a blessing.”

“A blessing?” He nodded, and I shook my head. “Will you please give me an update on my husband, Lucian Casey?”

“Sure. I’ll be right back.”

No one returned. A half an hour later, I was buzzing the nurses station like a lunatic. Yet another nurse I had never seen before, wearing Pepto-colored scrubs, came skipping in, her ponytail swinging from left to right as if her hair itself was happy being attached to her head. I wanted to throw a puke bowl at her.

“I asked the doctor a half an hour ago for an update on my husband.”

“Your husband is Lucian, right?”

She was smiling and on a first-name basis with him, so I knew he was fine. From the blush hitting her cheeks and the glimmer in her eye, I could tell he’d been laying the charm on from his damned hospital bed.