Yours to Keep (33 page)

“Did he get hit in the head?” Ethan demanded. “Did he black out at all? Lose consciousness?”

“I don’t think so.” She hesitated. “He was slow to get up one time.”

His heart sped up. “Can you ask him if he blacked out?”

She called out to someone nearby. He heard silence, then a flood of Spanish.

When Ana spoke again, her voice shook. “Cara says he’s not making any sense.”

“You need to call an ambulance. Right now,” Ethan said urgently. “Hang up with me. Call an ambulance. Tell them he had a bad injury in a football game this morning and you’re afraid he has a subdural hematoma. Subdural hematoma,” he repeated. “Will you remember that? It means bleeding near his brain.”

“Subdural hematoma.”

“Don’t let them put you off. If they’re not paying attention to you, you call me. Right away. You hear me? Now go!” And he hung up on her.

The paramedics argued between them about whether to put Marco on a backboard or whether, because of the vomiting, he should be on his side. In the end, he struggled so much when they tried to help him onto the stretcher that they decided he’d be better off restrained. “It’s good that he’s conscious,” a short, fat paramedic with a mustache said to Ana. Marco had yelled obscenities at the paramedics but was now silent, his eyes darting from side to side, panicky, as he fought against the straps.

Ana and Cara rode in the ambulance with him, Cara in the back and Ana up front with the driver. Ernie and Ricky followed in Ernie’s car. The cars pulled over to let them by. The driver pressed the button that paralyzed the traffic light, and the siren spun up to blare their approach. Ana felt stunned and dizzy.

She expected the paramedics to rush Marco on his stretcher through the doors of the ER and down hallways, the way they did on TV, but when the ambulance arrived they unloaded Marco and parked him in a big room with a center desk. Triage nurses bustled all around them but paid no attention to the black kid spouting nonsense on the backboard. Ana looked around; there was a burly biker holding a blood-soaked T-shirt to his arm, a mother weeping over a feverish child, a skinny blue-black man with two swollen eyes and a nose dripping blood. None of them looked as if they were in serious trouble. She couldn’t imagine Ethan using the voice he’d used on the phone with her about any of them. He’d been stern, his tone steely.
“Don’t let them put you off. If they’re not paying attention to you, you call me.”
She found her phone and dialed his number.

Theo answered. “He’s already on his way. He told me to tell you to call his cell.”

She called his cell, and he picked up before she heard the ring.

“We’re here, but they’re not seeing us,” she said.

He swore. “Go grab a nurse’s arm and tell her that Dr. Hansen told you it was a subdural hematoma. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She interrupted a nurse who was pulling supplies off a cart. “My nephew’s over there. Dr. Hansen says it’s a subdural hematoma.”

The nurse looked at her in brief shock. Then she snapped into action, moving swiftly around the cart to Marco’s side, checking his pupils and reflexes and asking him questions. He answered now as if he were drugged, slowly, slurrily.

“Page Dr. Emmelin,” the nurse called out, and things happened much faster. Nurses yelped urgent orders. A gray-haired white-coated woman swept in and took over. Before Ana could ask a question, Marco was surrounded by people, a release form on a clipboard was shoved into Ana’s hands, and her nephew was wheeled away.

“What’s happening?” Ana asked the nurse.

“They’re taking him to surgery,” the nurse said. “Sign that form.”

She signed.

She felt Ethan arrive before she saw him, sensed his pull on the individual molecules of her body, smelled his anxiety in the acridness of his sweat. He touched her hair briefly and she turned to look up at him, and for a split second she saw the light and heat in his eyes before his lids lowered, shuttering his emotion. “I’m here. I’m going to go check on him, okay?”

He took off at a trot, lean and athletic, beautiful in motion.

“You should be in the waiting room,” a nurse said sharply, taking the clipboard back. Ana took Cara’s arm—Cara was obviously in shock, as still as a statue, expressionless—and guided her into the waiting room. Ricky and Ernie were there, and as soon as she and Cara appeared in the doorway Ricky crossed the room with long strides and demanded to know what the hell was going on. Ernie was right behind him.

She told them what she knew.

Cara began to cry, and Ricky put his arms around her. She couldn’t make sense of the look on Ernie’s face; it was panicky, fixated on a spot behind her. She turned to look and saw that Ethan had come back.

“It’s good that you got him here so quickly,” he told her.

Then his gaze shifted—and grew harder—as it took in Ernie and Ricky and Cara. His
mouth was set in a straight line, and his fists were clenched at his sides.

Was he surprised, even after she’d warned him, by how black they were? She ought to have known that, no matter how liberal and open-minded he imagined himself, it would be different to be confronted with the reality. She turned away.

“Ana.”

She turned to look at him, saw something like despair in his eyes, and panicked. “Oh, no!”

“No, Marco’s going to be fine. He really is.”

Cara broke free from Ricky’s grasp and came close. Her face was tear-streaked, but she watched Ethan alertly.

“He was bleeding, but he’s in surgery, and he never lost consciousness or seized. As long as the surgery goes well, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, he’ll be fine.”

“Gracias a dios,”
Ana murmured.

Cara was now doing what Ana wanted desperately to do—she’d thrown herself into Ethan’s arms and was crying and thanking him over and over. Ethan gave Ana a brief glance over her sister’s head. “He’s still not out of danger,” he said quietly, and Cara, with visible effort, calmed herself.

Ethan gently removed himself from Cara’s grasp.

“Thank you,” Ana told Ethan. “I think you saved his life.” She knew that everything she felt for him was in her eyes, but she couldn’t help herself.

For a moment, she saw it all reflected at her. Then his gaze flickered past her to her family, and the shutters came down again. “I’d better go,” he said.

Ethan pressed the button to release the locks on his car.

“Wait!” a voice behind him called.

He turned to see Ricky.

Fury gripped Ethan. “Really?” he demanded. “Because I’m getting a little tired of being accosted in parking lots.”

Ricky’s hands were fisted at his sides. He opened and closed his mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about that.”

“I should have you arrested. You threatened my kid.”

Ricky had drawn himself up to his full height at the mention of arrest, and his posture and expression were menacing. But Ethan didn’t give a fuck. He knew this guy wasn’t going to beat the crap out of him in a hospital parking lot while his nephew bled into his skull a couple of hundred feet away. He knew—maybe because of the way Ricky had held Cara, or the way the agony had lifted from his face when he heard that Marco was going to be okay—that Ricky would never lay a finger on him or Theo.

“I came out here to say thank you.” Ricky’s shoulders slumped, his head, capped by a black-and-white-patterned do-rag, hung.

“It’s what I do,” Ethan said coldly. “I’m a doctor.” He opened his car door. He wanted to get the hell away from here, from Ricky and his apologies and thank-yous, this disturbing show of abjectness.

“You didn’t have to come out here on a holiday to help a random kid.” Ricky lifted his head but didn’t meet Ethan’s eyes.

Ethan hesitated, on the brink of sliding into the car. “I did it for Ana.”

“I know. Look—” Ricky examined his hands as if he’d never seen them before and had no idea what to do with them. “I saw her face when she looked at you.”

Ethan had seen it, too, and it had slugged him in the belly.

All the grief, the fear, the rage that Ethan had been carrying around since Friday suddenly saw a target. “You asshole. You selfish, greedy, motherfucking”—this last slipped out before Ethan could think better of it—“loser. How dare you threaten me and my kid and then try to talk to me about Ana’s feelings?”

His heart pounded in his chest, and his vision was narrow, a black tunnel. He caught his breath. “You had your chance to worry about her feelings.”

He didn’t want to go out of here yelling. He wanted to walk away with some dignity. He took a breath.

“Please don’t break her heart because of me,” Ricky said.

He said it gravely, sincerely, and for the first time his eyes locked on Ethan’s. They were wide and pleading. Ethan knew that it was the closest Ricky Travares ever came to begging.

He waited to feel a softening in his heart, but none came. This guy had scared the hell out of him. Threatened him and his son. Taken Ana away. And now he wanted Ethan’s
mercy. Fuck him.

“You had my ear Friday. I was listening. Now? I’m done listening.” And Ethan slid into his seat, started the engine, and drove away, leaving Ricky standing in the middle of the hospital parking lot with his arms hanging at his sides.

Theo was waiting for him when he got home. He was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug in his hands.

“Be glad you weren’t there,” Ethan said. “Be glad I left you here.” Theo had wanted to come along, but Ethan didn’t want a fifteen-year-old to spend any more time in a hospital ER than life made necessary.

Theo shrugged. “It was hard, waiting. Is he okay?”

“He’s going to be. He had a subdural hematoma, like I thought.”

“You’re good with diagnosis stuff, aren’t you? They could give you your own show. Like
House.
”

Ethan laughed. “I don’t necessarily do much more than any other good doctor,” he said. “I’m good at asking questions, and I’m slow to judge.…”

But he thought of Mary Freyer and wondered if that was true. He’d gotten himself stuck in that case, mired in a particular interpretation—of Nicole and who she was, of himself and who he was. On the surface, it seemed that it shouldn’t matter what labels he’d slapped on himself and Nicole. But it did. Diagnosing an illness was all about not being misdirected, and he’d let the obvious keep him from seeing the truth.

“Do you want me to make you some hot chocolate?” Theo asked.

“Sure.”

Theo went to the refrigerator and took out the milk, crossed to the cabinet with the mugs, and poured some in. “Does he have to stay at the hospital?”

“Oh, definitely. Probably for a week. He wasn’t even out of surgery when I left.”

“You left Ana at the hospital alone?” Theo asked, disappointment pricking his voice. He’d crossed the kitchen again to put the mug in the microwave, so Ethan couldn’t see his face.

Ethan sighed. He took a deep breath. “Theo, the reason Ana and I broke up—or one of the reasons, anyway, is that on Friday Ana’s brother came to the parking lot at work and
threatened to hurt you if I didn’t break up with her.”

Theo frowned. “You broke up with her to make sure no one hurt me.” It wasn’t a question.

“Well.”
“Our worlds are so different. I don’t belong in yours. And you don’t belong in mine.”
“I didn’t exactly break up with her.”

“She broke up with you?”

“It was mutual. There were too many forces working against us. But it wasn’t that I didn’t love her.”

Because he did love her—painfully, ridiculously, permanently.

“That sucks. But it makes a lot more sense.” Theo thought for a moment. “You kinda broke up with her to make sure no one hurt me,” he said again, sounding as if he were trying it out.

“I could never do anything that might get you hurt.”

“Wow. I can’t believe you did that for me.” Theo bit his lip. “I didn’t even want you to do that for me.”

“I know. I didn’t want to do it, either. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Her brother’s a jerk,” Theo said. The microwave dinged, and he took out the mug and handed it to Ethan.

“Yeah,” Ethan agreed. And yet—he felt a tiny urge to defend Ricky to Theo. He thought again of the tangible signs he’d seen today of Ricky’s love for his family. Not an evil man. Misguided. Frightened. Clinging to the very few things he could take for granted. Taking them, perhaps, too much for granted.

“He apologized. And thanked me for saving Marco. And—” he hesitated. “He asked me not to break Ana’s heart because of him.”

“Oh!” Theo said, and then, “Wow,” again.

“I saw her face when she looked at you.”

Very slowly, very slightly, Ethan began to feel hopeful. “I was so angry at him, I shouted at him. I did the adult equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and yelling, ‘I’m not listening, I’m not listening!’ ”

He put his cocoa mug down on the kitchen table.

He pulled out a chair and sat down.

He covered his face with his hands.

“I saw her face when she looked at you.”

“Please don’t break her heart because of me.”

Ricky hadn’t said the words out loud, but Ethan heard them in his head now, as if they’d been uttered in Ricky’s rough, Dominican-inflected English.
She loves you.

He sat up straight, lowered his hands, and looked at his son, who was staring at him as if he’d gone totally stark raving mad. Only it was the exact opposite. He’d suddenly gotten sane.

“Theo, I’m an idiot.”

“Am I supposed to agree or disagree?”

“I gotta go,” Ethan said, lunging for his coat hanging over one of the kitchen chairs.

“Where are you going this time?”

A huge, warm conviction buoyed him. It wasn’t too late. He’d gotten a second chance. And he wasn’t going to let it go, wasn’t going to let another minute pass before he made her promise to spend the rest of her life with him, no matter what country they had to spend it in. “I’m going to propose to Ana. Again.”

Theo grabbed his arm. “No, you’re not.”

“I’m not?” Ethan demanded.

“Nope. I told you you were doing it all wrong last time, and you didn’t listen. You’re going to do it right this time.”