Hooked (Harlequin Teen) (26 page)

When the paramedics hauled in the stretcher, Ryan gently pried
my fingers from Dad’s hands, one finger at a time. “He started to squeeze,” I
insisted, daring anyone to doubt me. “I know he did. I felt it. Twice, I
think.”

“Yes, you did,” Ryan said quietly. “Come on, Fred. I’ll drive
you to the hospital.”

“What about Mom?” I said, my voice cracking. “Where is she?” I
suddenly realized that the wailing and moaning had stopped. She was gone.

“She’ll ride in the ambulance with your dad.” Carefully, he
took both my hands in his and coaxed me to my feet. He held me till my knees
stopped shaking. My legs tingled from being wedged into a single position for so
long. How long, though? I wasn’t certain.

Ryan dropped one of my hands but held the other.

“Where are they taking him?” I dragged my free hand down one
cheek. It was damp from tears.

“Phoenix General,” Ryan said. “I know the way.”

We followed the paramedics, but I stopped at the front door,
staring at all the red-and-white flashing lights outside the window. The
ambulance and fire truck dwarfed the front yard. “Will he be all right?” I
whispered to Ryan, tugging back on his arm. Pleading. Begging. “Will he?”

When Ryan didn’t answer right away, my chest tightened.

But then he said, “Yes. He’ll be okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“The paramedics are doing everything they can.”

I drew back a breath, mostly to steady another wave of nausea.
My body began to sway. Ryan swept his arm around my shoulder. My vision turned
cloudy again.

“Come on,” Ryan said. He pulled me forward, gently. “Let’s
go.”

As I climbed into the passenger seat of Ryan’s Jeep, the
ambulance had already vanished down the driveway with its sirens wailing and
lights flashing. “Hurry, Ryan. Please.”

Ryan turned the ignition, and within seconds, we were behind
the ambulance. “Seat belt, Fred,” he said, buckling his own.

I pulled the strap across my chest and then placed my hands in
my lap. I stared ahead, anxious, until Ryan placed his warm hand over mine. My
eyes dipped briefly to study our hands. Then, slowly, I studied Ryan’s profile.
His brow was furrowed; his jaw, set. He concentrated on the ambulance like he
expected it to disappear. Finally, I said, “How did you know what to do?”

Ryan swallowed, pressing hard on the accelerator to keep up
with the ambulance as it approached the freeway. “My mom’s a doctor.” His
shoulders shrugged. “Some parents take their kids to the zoo when they’re
little. My mom took me to medical seminars. I just kind of learned.” He sniffed,
embarrassed-like. “From watching people.”

I looked back down at his right hand like I was seeing it,
touching it, for the first time. It was smooth and slightly tanned with a
smattering of freckles, brownish-orange like his sister’s skin. A blue vein
bulged above the middle knuckle. Suddenly I felt compelled to press my cheek
against it. And then I kissed the back of his hand before brushing it against my
cheek. A few stray tears landed on his knuckles, but I quickly wiped them away
with my thumb. “Thank you,” I whispered, my voice catching again, just as Ryan’s
Adam’s apple rose very slowly. When it finally returned to the base of his neck,
I threaded my fingers through his hand and concentrated on the windshield.

I watched the ambulance’s silver bumper all the way down the
freeway, each shiny red letter searing itself permanently into my brain. I was
afraid to blink, afraid that if I did, Dad would disappear forever.

We didn’t speak again until we reached the hospital.

Chapter 48
Ryan

THE SLIDING GLASS
DOORS TO THE
Phoenix General emergency room burst open when Fred and
I raced through, making that sharp,
swishing
airport sound the moment our feet met
the mat.

I knew hospitals well. The incessant buzzing and bells and
antiseptic smells were familiar. I’d seen this one’s pale yellow walls and
linoleum floors plenty of times and plenty of places like them. Cold,
impersonal, detached. Oddly, I felt right at home.

“Where’s my father? Where’d they take him?” Fred whispered
behind her hand as her gaze darted about the room.

“Sit here.” I motioned to a set of yellow padded chairs off
to the side of the door. Four other people were already seated in the mostly
colorless waiting room, numbly turning magazine pages in their laps, awaiting
their fates. Saturday-morning cartoons blared across a television mounted in the
corner.

Fred nodded at me and then walked to a chair, but she didn’t
sit. Instead, she paced in front of it while I walked to the admittance
window.

A gray-haired woman with a pinched face behind wire-rimmed
bifocals peered up at me through a round hole in the glass window. Her name tag
said Rita. “May I help you?”

I gripped the end of the counter and leaned forward. “A man
was just transported here from the Gila River Indian Reservation.” I lowered my
voice. “He had a heart attack.”

“Name?”

“Hank Oday.”

Rita checked her clipboard. The tip of her pen brushed down
the page before her wrinkled eyes rested on a name in the middle. She looked up,
and her mouth twisted. “Are you family?”

I swallowed and glanced over my shoulder at Fred, chewing on
her thumbnail. “No. Not exactly.”

“Your name?”

“Ryan Berenger. I’m here with Mr. Oday’s daughter, Fredricka
Oday.” I nodded over my shoulder at Fred.

The tightness around her eyes softened. “Berenger? You’re
Doctor Berenger’s son?”

I nodded.

A smile lifted her lips before she examined the clipboard
again. “Well, I can tell you that they’ve currently got him sedated in the
Coronary Care Unit. They’re locating a doctor now. He’ll need surgery.”

“Will he be...okay?” I whispered into the glass hole.

Rita’s smile faded. Her head tilted slightly as I waited.
I’d seen that look before.

Then Mrs. Oday burst through the windowless metal door next
to Admittance wearing an oversize green parka over her white nightgown. The door
crashed against the rubber stopper at the bottom.

“Fred!” Her gaze bounced frantically about the room.

Fred ran into her mother’s arms.

I left Rita and followed behind Mrs. Oday.

“Your father,” she said, each word catching as the words
struggled to leave her lips. “It’s not good. He needs some type of surgery.”

Fred grabbed her mother’s elbows. “Will he be all
right?”

Mrs. Oday’s nostrils flared, and my stomach tightened. Her
mouth pulled back in a kind of brave smile.

“Mother. Tell me,” Fred said as her shoulders began to
shake. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, around both of them.

“He’s had a heart attack, Fred. A serious one.” She paused.
“They’re trying to find a doctor now. Some kind of specialist...” Her voice
trailed off as her whole body shook. What little composure she had from earlier
vanished in an instant. “I don’t know, Fred. I don’t know.” She fell against
Fred’s shoulder and buried her face, trying to muffle her sobs.

Fred hugged her. With her face peering over her shoulder,
she looked up at me, and her eyes overflowed with more tears. The way her lower
lip quivered made my chest ache in a way that it had never done before.

I swallowed back a lump building in my throat as I pulled
out my cell phone from my front pocket. My thumb punched 1 on the speed dial. A
few moments later, a woman answered. I turned away from Fred and her mother.

“Mom?” I said into the phone. I cleared my throat and
lowered my voice. Then I said, “It’s me. I really need your help.”

Chapter 49
Fred

“SOMETIMES IT
TAKES
bad things to see the good,” Trevor said to me as we sat in the
hospital waiting room.

I nodded numbly at my brother, unsure who he was trying to
convince. Me? Or himself?

That bit of wisdom might make more sense tomorrow. Today, it
was just a string of meaningless words when all I wanted was to see Dad again,
alive.

I craved Dad’s reassuring hand squeezing mine. I wanted another
afternoon with him as he worked under our perpetually creaky van with a couple
of warm sodas beside us. I wanted him to tell me all over again how the Gila
River once flowed free like its people. I wanted to hear his stories about how
the Indian woman with hair as long as a river captured the moon and became the
mother to the stars. I wanted, I wanted...

Most of all, I wanted Dad.

Trevor nodded back at me when he thought I was listening. He’d
arrived at the E.R. soon after I’d reached him at Ruth’s on Ryan’s cell phone.
He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, rocking to hold himself
together. If he recognized Ryan as the one who’d run him off the road, his face
didn’t show it. Funny how none of that seemed important now.

Ryan sat on my other side, silent and watching the windowless
door next to Admittance. Every time someone walked through the door, his back
straightened like everyone else’s, anxious for news. I’d already told him to go
home, but he’d refused, even as half the Rez filled the waiting room.

One of the paramedics was Kelly Oliver’s uncle. After we’d
arrived at the emergency room, he’d placed a phone call home. That had led to
another phone call, then another. Within an hour, someone had brought a cooler
with sandwiches; another had brought a change of clothes for Mom. And in the
middle of the fray sat George Trueblood, his eyes closed, mumbling to himself.
Another blessing? If the hospital was bothered by the crowd, they didn’t say.
All my family’s friends were here, even all my friends from school—Kelly,
Yolanda, Sam, Peter, Martin and Vernon.

“I wish someone would tell us what’s happening,” I whispered to
Ryan for the tenth time.

“Your mom said that they’d give us an update after the
surgery,” he reminded me.

I looked up at the clock above the Admittance window. “But that
was three hours ago.”

“It’s a delicate surgery.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I told you.” He lowered his voice. “My mom’s a doctor.”

“Where’s Mom?” Trevor said, lifting his head from his hands.
He’d been drifting in and out of conversations with me since he’d arrived.

“She’s talking with one of the surgery nurses,” I said. “Back
there.” Wherever
back there
was. There apparently
was another waiting room outside of Surgery, but that room only allowed
immediate family. For now, I needed to be surrounded by my friends.

I returned to watching the door next to the glass window. Every
few minutes, the metal door clicked open as if it led to some kind of bank
vault. Everyone in the waiting room swiveled toward the sound, tracking nurses
and doctors dressed in green scrubs and hairnets who raced along the edges to
another windowless door, their rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum. They
rarely made eye contact with anyone in the waiting room either, not that it
mattered. No one would dare stop them. It would be easier to halt a moving
train.

But then, finally, one of them stopped, and my throat
tightened.

A woman in green scrubs approached the edge of the waiting
room. Short blond hair peeked from underneath her cap. Her eyes scanned the room
as she pulled the white elastic mask away from her mouth with her right hand. It
dangled loose around neck. She cleared her throat. “Oday family?” Her unwavering
voice announced to everyone in the room that she had delivered news before, the
kind that you were never totally prepared to hear.

The crowded room quieted. I felt everyone’s eyes resting on
Trevor and me.

After hours of waiting for news, I wasn’t sure that I was ready
for it.

The muscles in the woman’s cheeks barely moved in her
unreadable face.

Tentatively, Trevor and I stood and stepped forward. I felt
Ryan standing behind me, along with the weight of the crowd at our backs.

“That’s us,” I said to the woman, my voice straining to keep
the cracks together. I folded my arms across my chest, bracing for the
worst.

The woman lowered her voice. “Your mother asked me to talk to
you.” Her eyes, blue as turquoise, flickered between Trevor and me. “We were
unable to perform an angioplasty on your father. There was too much
blockage.”

I listened numbly, waiting for the only words that
mattered.

“So,” the woman continued, “I had to perform a coronary
bypass—”

“Is he all right?” Trevor interrupted.

The woman’s thin lips pressed together. “He’s resting now. He’s
heavily medicated.”

My temples began to pound harder. “Will my father get better?”
My voice caught on the last word. “When can we take him home?”

The woman blinked. Then the corners of her lips turned up into
a small, tired smile. “Yes, I think your father will be fine. With enough time
and some bed rest—”

I gasped. Then I threw my arms around her neck. “Oh, thank you.
Thank you!” I sobbed. I didn’t care that an ice-cold stethoscope jabbed my ribs.
I felt a dozen warm hands on my head and back. Relieved sighs and nervous
chuckles filled the air. The room felt suddenly lighter, the smells not as
sharp. Laughter and voices sounded familiar and comforting again.

And I couldn’t stop crying. I cried against the woman’s neck,
sinking against her. My tears soaked her shoulder.

“It’s going to be all right,” the woman said, stroking my head.
“It’s all right,” she whispered.

“Thank you.” The words choked in the back of my throat and
competed with my sobs. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, still stroking her hair. “You’re
very welcome, Fred.”

For an instant, my crying stopped. I sniffed.

Fred?

I unlocked my arms from around the woman and pulled back. I
wiped my face, still soggy wet from tears, with the back of my hand. “Wait,” I
said, blinking the cloudiness from my eyes. “You know me?”

The woman smiled, wider this time, revealing perfectly white
teeth. Then she nodded over my shoulder. “Ryan?” she said. “Isn’t it about time
you introduced us?”

Still blinking back tears, I turned to Ryan.

Ryan’s face flushed the deepest shade of red I’d ever seen when
everyone in the waiting room stared back at him, even me. But then he swallowed
and said, “Fred, I’d like you to meet my mom.” His voice was clear. “Doctor
Meredith Berenger.”