The Last Hour (2 page)

“M
a’am, I’m the triage nurse
, we’re going to check you over real quick, all right?” The nurse was younger than I was, but she exuded calm. The emergency room was crowded, and the gurney I lay on had been shoved up against a wall in the hallway. The cream-colored walls and abstract art were designed to soothe, but the equipment up and down the hall, the various beeping and alarms I could hear, and the efficient and hurried motion of nurses and doctors overrode that.

“I need to know where Ray and my sisters are.”

“I promise, we’ll find out. For right now, I need you to stay calm while I get your blood pressure and vitals, okay?”

I nodded, and she slipped a blood pressure cuff up my arm and tightened the Velcro around it.

“I need to ask you a couple of questions.” She pressed a button on a monitor and the blood pressure cuff began to expand, squeezing my arm. “Do you know what happened?”

“Car accident.”

“Okay, can you tell me what year it is?”

I blinked then said, “2013.”

“Okay, good. Do you know who the President is?” She met my eyes as she asked the question.

I was getting impatient. “Barack Obama.”

“Did you hit your head, or lose consciousness?”
 

“I don’t know.”

“Little bit of bruising on the side of your face, it’s not bad,” she said. “Nausea?”

I grimaced. I vomited in the ambulance, but that wasn’t even the first time today. “Yeah.”

“Okay, we may need to send you up for a CT scan, the doctor will decide when he examines you. Let me get a look at your eyes.”

My stomach twisted when she mentioned the CT scan.

She shone a light in my left eye, then my right. “You look like you’re doing fine.”

That was followed by listening to my chest with a stethoscope, then checking to make sure I could move my arms and legs and if my neck or back was sore. I seemed to be okay.

“Can you sit up?”

Slowly, I did, coming upright on the gurney, bracing myself for pain. There wasn’t any.
 

“All right. The doctor will examine you, but it may be quite a while, they’ll want to examine more urgent cases first. Can I have your husband and sisters’ names? And in the meantime, we need to get you registered.”

I gave her the information. My stomach was twisted in knots and my head was swimming. If I didn’t get some news about Ray and the girls soon I was going to scream. I didn’t even know if they were being brought to the same hospital. For that matter ... I didn’t even know where I was. What hospital is this?

That was answered a moment later when someone from the emergency department came over with a clipboard full of paperwork for me to fill out. While I started the paperwork, my eyes kept going to a couple down the hall. They were sitting together on a gurney, leaning on each other, and the woman had blood on her forehead as they spoke with a nurse. Both of them looked panicked, exhausted. Devastated.
 

I looked back down at my own paperwork, but my ears kept picking up words that sent chills up my spine.
 

Accident.

Daniel wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.

Eight years old.

Thrown from the car.
 

I shuddered.

I barely started on the paperwork before I stopped, because the doors to the emergency room slid open, and my heart rate jumped through the roof.
 

What seemed like a small crowd of doctors, nurses and paramedics came running through the door, crowded around a gurney, they were racing down the hall toward the trauma unit. One look, and I was on my feet, suddenly lightheaded. Ray. I followed, racing down the hall behind them.

At the door to the trauma unit a nurse blocked my way. “You can’t come in here.”
 

“That’s my
husband
!” She relented, pushing me back against the wall. “You’ll need to stay right here, out of the way.” She turned back to her work.

They moved urgently, first transferring Ray to the exam bed, then hooking him to a bewildering assortment of machines and tubes. Monitors to check his heart rate and blood pressure and a hundred other things, all of them hanging on wheeled equipment.
 

“He’ll need a central line,” one of the doctors said. A nurse cut away his shirt, and then spread antiseptic at the base of his neck near his clavicle. Seconds later two of them inserted a long white catheter into his neck.
 

One of the doctors started spitting out rapid fire instructions to a nurse, and I didn’t understand any of it. But it was clear enough when one of the doctors said, “Call Doctor Peterson in neurosurgery.”
 

A monitor started screeching, and a nurse said, in a loud calm voice, “Asystole!”

My throat closed up with fear as they started to do CPR on Ray. I was paralyzed, unable to watch, unable to look away. Dread filled my throat, and I had to force back the need to vomit.
 

“Epinephrine,” one of the doctors said, again calmly, even as they were rushing around him.
 

I winced and looked away, and crossed my arms across my stomach, shaking.
Please. Let Ray be okay.

I held my breath, trying not to watch, but I couldn’t stop myself. My eyes kept going back to his ravaged body, blood everywhere. His face was caked with blood, swollen and almost black, and his hair was thick with clotting blood. The left side of his body, from his legs up to his arm, looked askew, wrong, as if the bones had been crushed.

Please don’t let him die. Not now. Not like this.
I watched, and I waited, every fiber of my being wanting to just take him in my arms.
 

The monitor beeped, then beeped again. The doctors and nurses paused, a visible sigh of relief passing between them. His heart was beating again. I sagged against the wall, my mind nothing but a void.

The door slid open, and then a woman was standing next to me. She was about five four, black, wearing the same hospital greens as everyone else.

“Mrs. Sherman?” she spoke quietly. “I’m Michelle Bilmes, with social work.”

I blinked at her, still shaking, and unable to answer. I couldn’t force myself to look away from the doctors and Ray.

She spoke again, “I’m the family witnessed resuscitation coordinator for the emergency unit. Perhaps you’d like to step outside with me?”

I shook my head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She gave me a weak smile. “I understand, that’s fine. You understand you need to stay next to the door and out of the way? Your husband is in very serious condition, and they’re doing everything they can for him.”

“I’ll stay out of the way. Have you heard anything about my sisters?”

“Your sister Jessica is right next door, staying with Sarah.” She frowned, then said, “Sarah’s also badly injured.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “How bad?”

“It’s too soon to say. But they’re doing everything they can.”

I nodded my head. “And Jessica’s with her?”

“Yes, ma’am. She’s doing well ... some bruises, but nothing serious. A doctor will examine her soon, too, but she rode in the ambulance with Sarah.”

My eyes darted back to Ray. They were still working, still trying to stabilize him. “I ... I lost my phone,” I said. “I need to call ... family….”

“I spoke with your sister Alexandra on the phone and told her what’s happening. She told me she would alert the rest of your family. And she asked me to let you know that she and Dylan will be on their way here as soon as they can get a flight.”

I closed my eyes, relief flooding through me. Alexandra and Dylan were coming. Oh, dear God. I’d always been the one who went to my sisters when they needed help. I never realized how much I might need them.

And then I felt confused, torn because my sister was next door, in just as much danger, but Ray was right here in front of me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go.

I couldn’t leave Jessica alone to deal with that on her own.

I turned towards the social worker. “I’m sorry ... I forgot your name.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “Michelle. Perfectly understandable.”

“Would it be all right if I checked in on Sarah and Jessica?”

“Of course ... come with me.”

At that moment the door slid open, and a man strode into the room. He wore surgical garb and had the arrogant look I’d learned to associate with the heads of academic departments. He marched over to the table and basically pushed his way in, starting at Ray’s feet, then working his way up to his head. Clearly he was someone in authority ... the doctors and nurses went quiet on his entry, continuing their work. He leaned close, shining a light at the top of Ray’s skull, peering in close.
 

“CT scan,” he ordered. “Then prep him for surgery, immediately. Head, and his left arm and leg.”

I swallowed. The man stood, then walked away from Ray toward the door. His examination had lasted maybe sixty seconds.

He paused as I stepped closer to the door, my arms crossed over my stomach.

“Are you the wife?” he asked, tonelessly.

I blinked. His tone was imperious, utterly sure of himself, and his wording was brusque. Any other time, I might have cared, but right now, I just wanted him to help Ray. He could be as rude as he wanted.

“Yes. I’m Carrie Sherman.”

He glanced over his shoulder, then back at me. “Your husband is in serious condition. If we don’t operate now, he’ll die. Do you understand?”

It was as if he’d walked up and punched me in the gut. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think really, so I just nodded, trying to keep from crying.
 

“All right ... I want you to stay out of the way, let them prep him for surgery. Ms. Bilmes here will brief you in more detail about what’s going on, and you’ll need to sign some consent forms. Your husband is stabilized now, but he’s not out of danger, and we don’t know yet if he has any intracranial bleeding. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Hang in there. We’ll do our best for your husband.”

I nodded, trying to keep myself sane, and whispered, “Thank you.”

I watched Carrie as she talked to the surgeon, as the other doctors labored over my wasted body, and I’ve never felt so helpless in my life.

That’s not true. There were other times.

I felt this helpless the day Carrie walked out of the National Institute of Health, rage and shock and grief mixed on her face because of the accusations which had been laid against her, accusations which threatened everything she’d worked for. The rage had won out, her knuckles white against the steering wheel as she drove us home, her entire body shaking.

I felt that way about a year and a half ago, February of 2012. We’d been out on patrol all night, a nightmare patrol. Not because the insurgents were shooting at us, but because they weren’t. Is that crazy? Yeah, it’s crazy. But it was scary, too. Because the rule, in our little corner of hell, was that if you went outside the wire, the bad guys were going to hit us. Every time. Sometimes it was just a single sniper shot, or a roadside bomb. Sometimes it was hideous, like the grenade that killed Kowalski. But I couldn’t remember a single night we’d gone on patrol when we didn’t get hit. Not once.

But that night, we’d gone unnoticed, unchallenged, unrested. We were on our way back to the forward operating base when it happened. The irony is, we were only a quarter of a mile from the base, which meant someone hadn’t been paying attention, because the hajis were able to bury a big ass bomb in the dirt road without interference or observation. We didn’t even realize it, because the first three hummers rolled right over the bomb. Then the fourth hummer, with Dylan and Roberts ... that was the one that got hit.

The explosion hit under the driver’s side. We were right behind them, and I saw the hummer bounce into the air. Voices exploded over the radio, calling in the contact, and then I heard a loud crack, then another. Bullets hitting the side of my hummer, on the driver’s side.

This was normal routine. We all piled out of the hummers, took cover, and shot back. Once the heavy machine guns got trained on the bad guys, the fire was suppressed, the bad guys tried to move out, and our air assets went after them. I don’t know what happened after that with the insurgents, because I saw Dylan then, next to what was left of Roberts’ body, and his leg was ... destroyed. Blood leaking out everywhere. I yelled for a medic and started to wrap his leg with bandages, which were inadequate for the job, so I broke out the tourniquet and tied it off at his thigh. Dylan wasn’t screaming, but he was awake, staring at the sky.
 

“You’re gonna be all right,” I said, over and over again. He didn’t respond. And there we were, stuck, waiting for the medevac, which took forever. There was nothing I could do to help him other than stick him with morphine and hope the damn chopper got there.
 

It was weeks before I heard from him again. We got word that he lived, but that was it ... everybody knew he was likely to lose the leg, if he even survived. So it was kind of a minor miracle when I got an email out of the blue from Dylan later that spring.

Dylan didn’t know it, but his emails had been a lifeline for me. I guess nobody knew it. I’d isolated myself, intentionally, after losing friends to injuries and death, and then losing even more friends to pure savagery. By that time I was taking notes, and keeping pictures, and documenting. Just in case.

I was grateful he was able to leave before things got bad.

Before that, I’d never felt so helpless, but since then, I’d had it in spades. When I got called back into the Army, during the trial, and especially now, I hated it that I was helpless to do anything for Carrie.

I wanted to reach out, I wanted to fold her in my arms and protect her. I wanted to tell her it was going to be fine, even if it was a lie. But it was obvious I couldn’t do anything. No one responded when I spoke, and it was clear enough my body was just lying there on the table wired and tubed up. The nurses were preparing to shave my head. Brain surgery? Christ, I hoped not.