Everything in Between (32 page)

“Captain, are you there?” Gian asked.

Chip recognized his name and Gian’s voice, but it took him a moment to shake off the fugue of pain scrambling his brains.

“Chip!” Gian shouted. “Copy me!”

“Here,” Chip managed. “I’m here.”

“That aftershock looked bad from out here. How are you and Zae?”

“Stuck like bugs in muck.”

“Can you get to the stairwell?”

“Heading there now.” Chip braced his feet against the wall and shoved himself and Zae forward. They crashed to the bottom of the stairwell. Zae didn’t make a sound. “Take down the wall,” Chip ordered. “We got no other way out, and we can’t wait.”

Seconds later, Chip heard the battering of jackhammers echoing through the stairwell, which was blocked with heavy pieces of building material. “Zae?” In a space no wider than the average broom closet, he rolled Zae over in his arms, her head hanging over his forearm. “Professor, are you still with me?”

Her breathing came in short, shallow bursts.

“Zae!” he yelled, delivering a sharp slap to her cheek.

She stirred, her eyes lazily opening.

“Stay with me, professor,” Chip ordered. “Don’t you dare leave me.”

“I hurt so badly, I can smell it,” she whispered. “I can see it.” Fat, glistening tears cut tracks in the grime on the side of her face. “I want to rest.”

“Stay with me, Zae, baby, please,” Chip pleaded. He raised the mask of his respirator and brought his face close to hers. “Remember the rose garden, at the wedding? That was the best night of my life. I totally showed you up with the quotes.”

“D-didn’t,” Zae said. “I knew most of them.”

“ ‘If ever two were one, then surely we,’ ” Chip said. “Who’s that?”

“Anne Bradstreet,” Zae coughed. Chip wiped away the blood she sprayed in her oxygen mask. “You’ve been reading Hallmark cards.”

“That was too easy.” Chip listened harder to the sounds above, voices and footsteps at the top of the stairs. The firemen had gotten through and likely had collected Braeden.

Gian verified that a few minutes later. “The paramedics are working on Braeden,” he said. “Chief Dunlop is getting a scooper in place to dig you out.”

“Hurry,” Chip said, his voice breaking. He cradled Zae closer. He pulled off his right glove and tried to clear the dust from her face. “ ‘I will never fail you or forsake you.’ ”

“Hebrews 13:5,” Zae said. “What, you think a heathen like me doesn’t read the Bible?”

“That wasn’t just a quote. That’s my promise to you.” After shoving glass away with his foot, he gently laid her on the floor. He joined the effort to clear a space big enough to get Zae out safely through the stairwell. He rested his shoulder against a huge piece of drywall with rebar protruding from it, and shoved. Every muscle in his body screaming in pain, he managed to budge it just enough to clear an opening large enough for one of the firemen to stick his head and shoulders through.

The fireman suddenly disappeared, replaced by Sionne’s head and one arm. “Pass her to me,” he said.

Chip almost laughed aloud at the sight of the yellow hard hat on Sionne’s head. Too small to properly fit his big dome, it sat on top of his head, like part of a child’s
Bob the Builder
costume. “I’ll need a backboard,” Chip said. “I’m afraid to move her anymore without support.” He turned back to Zae while Sionne went for the backboard. “You’ll be out of here in a few more minutes,” he told her. “Eve and Dawn are waiting for you. They’ve been so worried.”

Zae blindly reached for him. He caught her hand and held it to his heart. “If you have to ch-choose,” she whispered, “choose the baby.”

“Zae,” he sighed.

“Choose the baby. Promise me.”

“Don’t talk like this.”

She cupped his face for a moment before her arm went limp and her hand fell away.

“Here’s the board!” Sionne called.

Chip took it and carefully strapped Zae to it. Turning her headfirst, he pulled her to the opening, then lifted her to it. Moving backwards underneath it to elevate it, Chip pushed her through the hole and into Sionne’s waiting arms. Chip climbed through after her, dragging his injured bad leg behind him. Sionne helped him up the stairs while paramedics in hardhats carried Zae. They climbed through the gaping hole bashed in the wall of the classroom, and Chip took deep breaths of the fresh night air as he was guided onto a gurney beside Zae’s.

Through a swarm of fireman, Chief Dolan, Gian, Sionne and the paramedics tending to him, Chip struggled to see Zae. One of the medics flung her oxygen mask and tank to the ground. “She’s not breathing,” the woman said. “We can’t transport her until she’s stabilized. Bag!”

“What’s happening?” Chip shouted. He fought to sit up.

“You’ve got a serious laceration on your head, sir,” said the paramedic overseeing Chip’s care. “You’re bleeding from bad lacs on your arms and torso as well. Please, hold still so we can take care of you.”

Chip pushed the paramedic out of his way. He rolled off the gurney, his knees giving out on his landing. He stumbled to Zae’s side. A young female paramedic had inserted a breathing tube and was squeezing a plastic bladder to keep air flowing to Zae’s lungs. “What’s happening to her?” Chip croaked. “She was breathing when I brought her out.” He tightly held onto the gurney’s railing.

“Please give us room to work on her, sir,” the young woman said.

“I’ve lost her pulse.” Her partner snatched a stethoscope from his ears. He set a compact defibrillator between Zae’s battered legs. “Charging.”

Chip watched, stunned and scared, everything transpiring quickly, but at the same time dragging endlessly. Zae’s complexion was a nauseating shade of gray beneath the white dust coating her face and hair. They ripped her blouse open, exposing her torso. The male paramedic shouted, “Clear!” and Zae’s body rose from the force of the charge meant to jumpstart her heart.

“How far along is she?” the young woman asked.

“Almost five months,” Chip heard himself answer. He felt Gian’s hands on his shoulders, trying to pull him away. Gian spoke nonsense about giving the medics room to do their jobs. But it took Sionne’s strength to pry Chip’s hands from the gurney and replace him on his own.

“Zae!” Chip cried out as she was zapped once more. “Don’t you leave me, professor! Don’t you dare!” Primal cries of grief tore from him, torturing those around him with his pain as he himself was tortured by fear of losing Zae and his baby.

“His sleeve is soaked with blood but I can’t get a look at the wound!” protested one of Chip’s paramedics.

“Clear!” called the medic, giving Zae a third shock.

“Come back to me, professor,” Chip pleaded. “Baby, don’t…”

The woman called for atropine, which her partner injected into Zae, and she asked for the time.

“Seven minutes,” her partner told her. “Keep bagging. Charge!…Clear!”

Zae’s body jumped once more.

Howling his sorrow, Chip tried to get up again. His friends held him down, Sionne with a huge arm over Chip’s chest, Gian by leaning over Chip’s legs. A paramedic took that opportunity to sedate Chip.

Chip’s world had already been turned upside down. The drug turned it inside out. He fought to remain conscious, to shake the rising fog from his head. His ability to speak deserted him, but Gian took up his cause.

“Bring her back!” Gian called out as the sedative paralyzed Chip. “Don’t let her die!” Gian pleaded, his words the last Chip heard before emptiness claimed him.

Chip’s fresh cast left his fingers free, but he still had to be careful not to get it wet. A total of forty-seven stitches closed the wound near his hairline and sixteen staples sealed the one at his nape. Steri-strips had been used to close most of the lacerations on his arms and legs, but the worst of his cuts, a slash across his lower back, had required fifty-two stitches and would likely require plastic surgery at a later date.

Nothing Chip had endured compared to the two days he’d spent at Zae’s bedside, waiting for her to awaken. The paramedics had revived her at the scene, but her head injury left her with brain swelling and she had suffered a great deal of blood loss as result of the rest of her lacerations and breaks. The doctors were sure she would awaken once the swelling went down, but no one could guess how her faculties would be affected.

Eve and Dawn had spent the first night and day with Zae, going home only when Chip convinced Sionne and Cory to take them home to rest. The girls had gone willingly only after Chip swore he’d call if Zae’s condition changed.

For hours, Chip talked to Zae and read to her, he slept with his head pillowed on her bed when exhaustion or medication prevented him from keeping his eyes open. He refused to leave her for fear that would be the moment she left him.

Gian and Cinder sat with him in shifts, Cinder leaving only when Gian convinced her that sleep deprivation would be harmful to her baby. Early on the third morning of Zae’s hospitalization, Chip asked a nurse for supplies to bathe Zae.

He raised the bed to a slight incline and drew the curtains around it. Mindful of Zae’s dislocated left shoulder and broken collarbone, he untied the back of her gown and eased it to her waist. Blotchy patches of blue and purple bruises discolored the skin visible around the bandages covering the lacerations on her ribcage and upper right arm. Chip used a package of waterless bath wipes, which the nurse had thoughtfully warmed, to gently clean Zae’s neck and arms, then her torso. His bare hands lingered over her abdomen, and he leaned down to kiss her there, wishing his love and caring into the baby nestled under her mottled skin.

He sat up and replaced her gown, and draped a blanket over her chest and shoulders to keep her warm while he undressed her from the waist down. Her right leg had been seriously damaged. A specialist had been flown in from Massachusetts to perform the necessary surgery on it, which had required twelve titanium screws to piece her shattered femur back together, but only time would determine the extent of the nerve damage she had suffered.

Chip lifted her left leg and ran a wipe over it, carefully avoiding the sixteen stitches along her calf where a large sliver of glass had been removed. After he’d bathed her and dressed her in a fresh gown, he spent a long while massaging her favorite lotion into her feet. Zae was as particular about her feet as other women were about their faces.

Her care completed, he picked up the brush the girls had brought for her. Sitting on the edge of her bed, he repositioned her pillows so they would support her neck yet give him access to her hair.

“Dawn washed your hair with one of those waterless shampoos when you got out of surgery,” Chip said softly as he brushed Zae’s hair. “She knew it was the first thing you would have done.”

The waterless shampoo had left Zae’s hair clean but lusterless and flat. With each stroke of the brush, Zae’s hair grew shinier and fuller.

“CJ wanted to bring his licorice stick and play for you,” Chip went on. “I think that might be a good idea. He’s so worried about you and his baby brother. I keep telling him that there might be a sister cooking in there, but he wants no part of another girl.”

Chip set the brush aside and hugged her, careful not to apply too much pressure even as he hoped to transfer some of his own vitality into her. “I want a healthy baby. That’s all. I don’t care if he’s a boy or if she’s a girl, all I want is a baby with everything where it’s supposed to be.”

“I want a cigarette.”

Chip sat up and cupped Zae’s face. Her eyes slowly worked their way open, but she seemed to have trouble focusing on him. “Zae, baby, oh honey…” Chip grabbed the call cord for the nurse and gave it a good tug.

“I want a cigarette,” she croaked once more, her voice rusty from disuse.

“You’re pregnant,” Chip said, relief flooding from him in the form of laughter. “Remember? You can’t smoke.”

“Then give me a comb…”

“What?” Chip pressed the call button for the nurse, hoping to hurry her along.

“I need a comb.” Zae’s right hand went to her head. “And a blow dryer. I know my hair looks a hot mess right now.”

“Your hair is gorgeous.” He took her left hand and kissed it. “I just spent a half hour brushing it.”

“I can’t trust your opinion. You’re biased.”

He held her gaze, water welling in his eyes. “I almost lost you, professor.”

“No,” Zae smiled wanly. “You found me. Braeden, too. How is he?”

“Both of his arms are broken, his pelvis is cracked and his skull is fractured. He also broke a couple of teeth. But his prognosis is good. Eve and Dawn have been visiting with him. He won the science competition, too.”

“And deservedly so. Did Elton Dye make it out of the building?”

Chip shook his head. “He was cut up pretty badly and suffered major head trauma. I don’t think there’s a plastic surgeon in the world talented enough to repair his face. If he’s lucky, he’ll learn how to tie his shoes again someday, maybe even count to ten without help.”

Zae began to weep.

“Don’t feel sorry for him,” Chip said. “That crazy bastard tried to kill you.”

“It’s not Elton.”