The Friend Zone(85)

She cycled the blood pressure cuff on Brandon’s arm and smiled. “I’m thinking Tuesday. You on shift Tuesday?”

“Yup.”

She wrote down some notes on Brandon’s chart and then gave me a raised eyebrow. “Any updates with your lady friend?”

I laughed a little. “No.”

The whole nursing staff knew about my depressing love life. I’d gotten hit on a few too many times by some of the younger nurses. I couldn’t claim to have a girlfriend, and I wasn’t married, so it was either “I’m gay” or “I’m in love with that girl over there.”

I’d gone with the latter, and now I wished I’d said I was gay.

They didn’t know why Kristen wouldn’t date me, just that she wouldn’t. It had turned into the favorite topic of the ICU. A real-life episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I rarely got through a Brandon visit without it coming up.

The drama escalated when Kristen had been hit on by the nurses’ favorite single orthopedic surgeon. According to the nurses’ gossip circuit, Kristen told him to go fuck himself.

And apparently she’d actually said, “Go fuck yourself.”

After that everyone was sure she was holding out for me.

Only I knew better.

Valerie checked Brandon’s temperature. “You know, I told that girl myself she’s nuts. You know what she said to me?”

I arched an eyebrow. “What?”

“She said, ‘Just because a man gives you the best sex of your life doesn’t mean you need to date his ass.’ Lawd, I just about died,” she snickered.

I snorted. Yup, that sounded like Kristen.

Well, at least I’d done something right.

Valerie chuckled to herself while she checked Brandon’s pulse. “He’s coming out tomorrow. I bet you’re all getting pretty excited.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “This has been a really tough few weeks.”

“He’s gonna do great.”

She changed out the bag on his IV drip. Then she pulled out a small light from her breast pocket, clicked it on, and opened his right eye. “You know, a lot of the nurses are gonna miss the steady stream of cute firemen coming through he—”

She paused.

She opened his other eye and shone the light into his pupil. She cleared her throat as she clicked the light off and slipped it back in her pocket. “We sure are going to miss you guys.” She picked up his chart.

She didn’t look at me. Her tone changed. Her body changed. I’d done that change myself on the scene of a call.

Something is wrong.

“What is it?”

She didn’t answer me.

I pulled out my cell phone and turned on the flashlight. I leaned over Brandon and opened his eye while Valerie watched me wordlessly.

My breath caught in my throat. “No. No!?”

I looked at the other eye, and my hands started to shake. I stumbled back from the bed and knocked into my chair, dropping my cell phone to the floor with a clatter.

Valerie looked at me, and we exchanged a moment of understanding.

His pupils were blown.

They were large black marbles in his eyes.





THIRTY-SIX





Kristen




When the phone rang, I groped for it on the nightstand. It was the hospital. And it was also 3:57 in the morning. I brushed the hair off my forehead and sat up. “Hello?”

“Kristen.”

It was Josh. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any Josh I’d ever heard.

“Kristen, you need to go get Sloan. Brandon’s had a stroke.”

I threw off my covers. “What? A stroke? What does that mean?”

I tumbled out of bed and stumbled around the room, grabbing my bra and jumping into leggings.

He paused. “He’s brain-dead. He’s not coming back from this. It’s over. Get Sloan.”

The line went dead.

I stood in the middle of my dark room. The phone stayed lit for a moment. When the screen went back to black, I was doused in pitch.

The velociraptor roared, and the ground shook as it lunged forward.

As I drove to Sloan’s, I had the surreal, almost out-of-body realization that I was about to tell my best friend the worst news of her life. That the moment she answered that door, I was going to break her heart and she would never be the same.

My altered state allowed me to process this in a compartmentalized way. I knew that I wouldn’t feel the painful moment when it happened, but that I’d put it into a little box and take it out and look at it often for the rest of my life.

*



I watched Sloan die inside that night.

They called it a catastrophic stroke. A blood clot moved from the wounds in his leg up to his brain. It had probably happened while Josh sat with him. It was silent and final, and there was nothing anyone could have done.

Josh was right. Brandon was gone.

Three days after the stroke, an ethics committee made up of Brandon’s doctors, an organization that coordinated organ donations, and a grief counselor called the family in for an 11:00 a.m. meeting at the hospital. I sat outside the conference room, bouncing my knee, waiting for Sloan to come out.

I hadn’t left her side once since the stroke. Every night I slept in the chair next to her by Brandon’s bedside. Only now he wasn’t healing in his coma.