First Girl Gone(83)

“Charlie, thank God,” Zoe answered. “I called you like eight times. Where the hell are you?”

“Zoe, I’m… I just left Gibbs’ house, and—”

“Charlie. Listen to me. It’s Frank. Something’s happened.”

“Wait,” Charlie said, her mind struggling to catch up. “What?”

“Your uncle. The paramedics are rushing him to McLaren Hospital, but I don’t know anything more than that.”

“But…” Charlie searched for the words. “Is he going to be OK?”

Zoe was quiet for what felt like a long time.

“I talked to the neighbor who found him. Mrs. Humphrey? She said it looked bad.”





Chapter Sixty-Seven





Frank lay in his hospital bed. Eyes closed. Motionless save for the inflating and deflating of his chest.

Wires and tubes circuited from machines to his hand and wrist. A monitor over the bed displayed Frank’s vitals, green for heart rate, red for blood pressure, and on and on.

Charlie watched him through a pane of glass with chicken wire strung through it—the observation window, the nurse had called it. Visiting hours wouldn’t resume until morning, but the small woman in pale purple scrubs had said it was OK for her to look in on him for the moment, at least until they turned out the lights in this hall. Then she went to fetch Frank’s doctor.

Frank’s fingers twitched, just once. Charlie leaned forward, waiting for some other sign of life, but Frank lay still again. His existence reduced to breathing. Nothing more.

Charlie hated seeing him like this. Hated that he was in this place with the strange, jittery energy echoing down the halls and the harsh fluorescent reflections sheening off tile and quartz veneer. Shiny and neat and orderly and utterly fake.

Death surrounded everything in a hospital, but it was always tucked somewhere behind closed doors. Out of sight. Out of mind.

Scrubbed. Sanitized.

A doctor in a white lab coat approached, followed closely by the same nurse from before. The pair paused in front of her, waiting for Charlie to turn her gaze away from the window looking in on Frank’s room.

“You’re the niece?” the doctor asked, putting out a hand for her to shake. “I’m Dr. Anagonye.”

“You’re not his normal doctor,” Charlie said. “His oncologist, I mean.”

“No, ma’am. I’m an internist here in the ICU, but I have been in touch with Dr. Silva. She’s being kept abreast of Frank’s condition.”

“So is it the cancer?” Charlie gripped a fistful of her coat, as if holding onto herself for dear life. “Has it spread?”

The doctor looked confused for a moment before shaking his head.

“No, no. Your uncle was brought in with bacterial meningitis.”

Charlie, who’d been expecting the worst, didn’t know what to make of that.

“But he was fine. He’s been fine.”

“No neck pain or headaches?” the doctor asked.

Charlie remembered then how Frank had rubbed at his neck and commented about sleeping wrong.

“Yes, but—”

“It can come on incredibly fast. And it’s not uncommon with chemotherapy patients. The fact that their immune system is weakened puts them at higher risk for infections like this.”

Staring through the window at her uncle, Charlie felt a surge of hope. This whole time she’d been expecting them to tell her the cancer had progressed, that his diagnosis was no longer treatable. But it was only an infection. They’d pump him full of antibiotics, and he’d be back on his feet in no time.

“When will he wake up?”

Charlie didn’t like the way the doctor glanced over at the nurse, his jaw tensed.

“I can’t say for sure. Meningitis patients that present with a minimal score on the Glasgow Coma Scale have a significantly higher rate of morbidity and mortality,” he said.

Charlie only understood about half of the doctor’s words, but she was pretty sure she knew what “morbidity and mortality” meant in this context. Her eyelids blinked open and shut slowly. It was several seconds before she realized the doctor was still talking and had asked her a question.

“What?”

“Do you know if your uncle has an advance directive?”

Charlie shook her head.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“A living will? It would specify what medical action your uncle would want taken in the event he was unable to make those decisions himself.”

The pause after that stretched out, emptiness swelling to fill the space in the stark hallway. Like those vast black seas of space out there. Nothingness that stretched out eternally, infinitely. When Charlie said nothing, the doctor continued.

“If there’s no living will, as his next of kin, it would fall on you to make the… final decisions.”

Final decisions. Meaning Charlie would have to be the one to decide when to “pull the plug,” so to speak.

The doctor said more, but Charlie couldn’t seem to get her brain to focus on the words. Instead, she found herself staring at a small food stain on the doctor’s lab coat, a smear just left of his sternum. Spaghetti sauce? Maybe chili.

His speech ended then, and she did manage to catch the last sentence, her mind suddenly seeming to snap to attention.