Waiting for Patrick (11 page)

DANIEL ARRIVED
in ten minutes. Either he happened to be relatively close by instead of at his house, or he had broken land speed records to get there.

Elliot answered the door and immediately took charge. “What took you so long, Darrell?”

“Really?” Daniel raised an eyebrow but was smiling ear to ear. “You call me at five in the morning and get my name wrong?”

Elliot knew he was teasing. Daniel had said he liked it.

“Says Darrell in my cell phone.” Elliot smiled but then adopted a stern persona. “Besides, my house, my rules.” Daniel shivered in response to the commanding words and tone, and Elliot leered. “Strip.”

AS ELLIOT
kissed Daniel good-bye, he felt rejuvenated and ready for the day, the shaky start all but forgotten. Since he was feeling better, he decided to get right to work.

He spent the morning sawing wood for the front porch railing, stopping only for a light lunch before rejoining the project. The afternoon didn’t go by as quickly as the morning had, however. As it dragged by, Elliot started feeling the pull of fatigue again. His arms were becoming leaden and his back started hurting badly.

Great, I pulled a muscle.

When he couldn’t stand the pain anymore, he went inside to get some liniment, leaving the tools where they were. Barely inside the door, his heart started racing and he gasped for breath. His chest was in a vise, pressing his lungs flat, not letting them expand.

He fumbled his phone out of his pocket but it dropped on the floor. Reaching for it, he fell on his hands and knees, desperately trying to draw in air. This wasn’t a muscle pull. It wasn’t overexertion, and it wasn’t a response to a bad dream. He needed help, and his cell phone was a foot and a half out of reach.

He collapsed to the floor, partly on purpose, trying to reach the phone, partly because his arms and legs wouldn’t hold him anymore, but the phone was still well beyond his grasp.

Stretching as far as he could, he still came up eight inches short. It was maddening, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do.

Suddenly the phone lurched toward him a couple inches. He felt himself tense in surprise, not believing what he saw. It inched forward again, and again. Elliot’s body jerked each time the phone moved. He was in so much pain and needed to call for help, but he couldn’t understand how this was happening. Finally it was close enough that Elliot could scrabble his fingers over the surface and pull it closer still.

After bringing up Sheri’s name, he pressed Call. When she answered he could barely breathe. “Cher, help.”

“Ellie?” Sheri’s panicked voice came over the phone. “Where are you?” When Elliot didn’t answer, she screamed. “I’m on my way to your house. Is that where you are?”

It took all the breath Elliot could muster to answer, “Yeah.”

He couldn’t breathe or move. Remaining conscious was a constant battle that he wasn’t sure he was going to win. There was no way to know how long he lay on the floor before Sheri finally arrived.

“Ellie.” She knelt by his head. “The ambulance I called pulled in right after me. They’re bringing the stretcher in now. Hang on.”

Elliot was only vaguely aware of faces and questions and lights and sirens. Of flickering lights in the hospital corridors and of more faces. There were tests and IVs and vials of blood. Mostly there was blessed oxygen. He could finally breathe again.

He didn’t know if they gave him something to make him go to sleep or if he lost his battle for consciousness on his own, but he didn’t feel the pain anymore, so he didn’t really care.

Time passed without his knowledge. His world became flashes of awareness.

Sheri sitting by his bed, slumped in an uncomfortable-looking chair, sound asleep but still clutching his hand…

Sunlight changing angles in the window…

A nurse changing the IV bag…

Another injecting something into his IV tube…

Daniel walking alongside Elliot’s moving bed, holding his hand…

Being wheeled down the hall for some test or another…

Doctors giving grim details that Elliot couldn’t quite grasp…

The one constant seemed to be falling back to sleep after each brief glimpse of life.

“Hey, Elle.” Sheri was sitting by his bed again, as he’d remembered her from one of the flashes. “Well, you don’t look quite as stoned this time.” She chuckled as she slipped her hand under his where it lay on the white sheets, concern heavy in her voice.

“I was stoned?” He couldn’t understand that. He’d never done drugs.

“Well, it seems you reacted a little, um, strongly, to the morphine they had you on for pain.” She let out a nervous chuckle. “You were pretty entertaining the few times you were awake.” She stroked his hair off his forehead. “They thought effective pain management was important enough to keep you on it, though. It wasn’t adversely affecting your vitals. It just made you act really drunk, or sleep.”

“So, what’s going on?” Elliot took in the heart monitor, the nasal cannula, the call button near Sheri’s hand. He was in a semiprivate room, but there was no one in the other bed.

Thank God.

“The doctor will come in soon and tell you all about it.” She ran her hand down his cheek, avoiding the oxygen tubing but apparently needing to touch him.

Elliot lolled his head toward her and slurred, “Not asking for a medical dissertation. I only want a general summary.”

It appeared as if she wasn’t going to answer, as though she was struggling to contain emotion that threatened to tear from her against her will. Then she lost the battle and her voice became frantic. “Scaring the hell out of me. That’s what’s going on.” Elliot fought the impulse to recoil but vowed to lie still and hear her out. He did ask, after all. The raw terror in her voice almost undid Elliot’s tentative control of his own emotions. “God, Ellie, I found you on the floor. I’ve heard enough from conversations the doctor and nurses don’t think I hear to get that you had a heart attack. They won’t tell me anything directly. I’m not next of kin. I don’t have a medical proxy. I’m nothing really, as far as the hospital is concerned. I couldn’t even see you in the ICU. You’re in a step-down unit now, and they still didn’t want to let me in, but by now I’ve finally convinced them that you don’t have anyone else. So, here I am.”

Elliot tried to take all this in. He had been in the ICU before being here? He didn’t remember anything but this room in his fevered flashes of consciousness. “Do I remember seeing Daniel?”

Sheri wiped her suddenly wet eyes with the back of her hand and tried to smile. “See, that proves you know his name.” Then she answered, “They wouldn’t let him in, but I knew when they were going to move you, and he was in the hall as you passed. He spoke to you, grabbed your hand for a second, but you were out of it.” She got serious and grasped his hand in both of hers, careful of the IV tubing, and held it to her lips. “He really cares about you, you know.”

“I don’t do relationships,” Elliot spoke automatically. He hadn’t asked anyone to care about him. He wasn’t sure where this thinly veiled anger came from.

“I know,” Sheri muttered, kissing his hand. “And he knows. He only wants to be your friend.”

“With benefits,” Elliot sneered, still saying anything that came into his head, showing any emotion that wanted to appear, without any kind of filter or explanation.

“What’s wrong with that?” She chuckled and returned his hand to the bed. “Hell,
I’d
be friends with benefits if you swung that way.” She gave his hand a little pat.

Elliot smiled, finally banishing the unwarranted ire. “Nothing wrong with it, I guess. I’m actually more okay with the benefits part than with the friends part.” That, at least, he could understand. He’d always been almost allergic to commitment on any level, hence the bare handful of people he actually considered friends.

“He knows that too. But he likes you. He says he’s even willing to put up with your ghost.” She chuckled, laughing it off. She sat back into the ugly institutional chair as though the conversation had turned toward a more lighthearted topic.

“I really do have one, you know,” Elliot said seriously, flexing his fingers against the wrinkled sheets as if in remembrance of trying to grasp the cell phone.

“Ellie—” She sat up straight again, leaning toward him.

“No. I do.” He grabbed on to the sheet, making as much of a fist as the IV in the back of his hand would allow. “He’s the only reason I’m still alive.”

Sheri screwed up her face but caressed his hand, trying to calm him. “How do you figure that?”

“I dropped the phone, Cher.” His voice held such a tone of awe that Sheri actually seemed to be listening to what he had to say. “It was too far away. I couldn’t reach it. The ghost moved it closer to me.” He was lost in his thoughts. “It almost has to be Ben… from the dreams.” He let his gaze roam the white walls, trying to figure out what had happened. “I mean, according to the dreams, Patrick left. Ben stayed in the house. In
my
house. I recognized the bedroom in the dream. It has to be Ben.” Elliot looked Sheri in the eye. “Ben died in my bedroom, and he’s still in that house. He moved the phone to me so I could call for help.”

Sheri didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so she took Elliot’s hand and looked him in the eye. “If that’s true, Ellie, then we all owe Ben a huge debt of gratitude.”

Elliot simply nodded. What else could he say?

THE DOCTOR
came in to talk to Elliot later that day. Sheri was still sitting in that god-awful contraption that the hospital called a chair while Elliot tried to shake himself awake enough to understand anything the doctor might have to say.

“Hello, Mr. Graham.” The older man extended his hand, and Elliot shook it as best he could with the IV in one hand and the pulse oximeter on the other. “I’m Dr. Proust. I took over your case once they brought you up from the ER.” The doctor looked in Sheri’s direction. “If you could ask your friend to step out, I’d like to discuss your condition with you.”

Sheri moved her chair closer to the bed as if to protest, but Elliot spoke first. “You can say whatever you need to in front of Sheri.” Elliot spared his friend a small smile and then looked back to the doctor. “I’d just tell her all about it later anyway.”

Dr. Proust nodded and launched into his recitation of Elliot’s diagnosis. “Very well, Mr. Graham.” He glanced at Sheri as she took Elliot’s hand, and then he regained Elliot’s gaze. “I’ve looked at your blood tests, chest X-rays, and echocardiogram. We’ll want to do more tests in the coming days, but the short answer is you have coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure. A fairly advanced case. We’d call it Stage C at this point. Mostly what all of that means is that your heart is enlarged and working harder than it should have to. Because it’s not working at peak efficiency, other organs are feeling the strain. That’s often the case with congestive heart failure. Fluid backs up in the lungs, not enough oxygen gets to the other organs, so the kidneys can’t get rid of the fluid. Judging from the edema—the swelling—in your extremities and some of the blood work that’s come back, I’m betting we’ll find that the kidneys have already been affected. The liver could be damaged too. It’s not just heart involvement that we have to worry about. That’s why we’ll do more tests to check the other organs.”

Elliot wasn’t as surprised as he thought he should have been, but Sheri seemed crushed. She sank against the bed and grabbed hold of Elliot’s hand in both of hers. He turned it over as best he could and tried to take one of her hands in his.

The doctor continued. “I imagine you’ve been experiencing extreme fatigue for a while now, probably shortness of breath, racing heartbeat?”

“Yeah,” Elliot confirmed, gripping Sheri’s slender fingers but trying to stay focused on the doctor’s face. He didn’t think he could look her in the eye right then. “For several months at least. Getting worse and worse.”

Sheri squeezed his hand and her voice was rough with emotion. “Why didn’t you see a doctor about it sooner?”

He forced himself to look her in the eye. “I thought it was just old age. You and Daniel both like to tell me how old I’m getting.” When Elliot saw the stricken look on her face, he knew trying to use levity right then wasn’t the way to go. “No, seriously, Cher, I thought I’d been working too hard and was getting out of shape. I was thinking of going to a gym or something.”

The doctor watched the exchange and nodded as he shifted his weight, still standing at the foot of the bed, holding his clipboard. “It might not have been noticeable at first. I often get patients who have probably been experiencing symptoms for years but not severe enough to notice or to act upon until they actually have a heart attack.”

“So that’s what happened for sure, then?” Elliot asked, not sure why he was shocked by that. “I had a heart attack?”

“Yes,” Dr. Proust confirmed, and all of a sudden, he dropped the hand holding the clipboard as if to appear more accessible. “A fairly severe one. We’ll treat your symptoms with medication and a controlled diet for now. Since you also have coronary artery disease, we’re going to need to insert a stent in your heart to open the most severely affected artery and increase the blood flow. We’ll do this before you leave here. There are more intrusive treatments we may have to consider down the road as your symptoms progress, but there are risks to any invasive procedure, so we want to try the less invasive ones first.”

“And that will fix everything? The meds and diet and the stent?” Sheri sat up straighter in her chair, looking hopeful, but still clutching Elliot’s hand for dear life.

“Well….” The doctor hedged his bets. “It will open the artery. There is already some pretty extensive damage to the heart. From this heart attack, but also from congestion over time. And of course it will do nothing to help the other organs, though the increased blood flow may help minimize further damage. We’ll wait for the test results, then formulate a plan of treatment, which, of course, will change as symptoms progress.”