Shattered & Mended (18 page)

“He did what, Allie?”  

“He used his fingers,” I mumble, both ashamed and embarrassed. He falls to his knees and hangs his head in his hands. Cautiously, I reach down and tilt his head up to me. “I’m sorry,” I apologize sincerely. He takes my wrists and tugs me down to him. His eyes skim my body as he contemplates his next move. He places his hands to the sides of my swollen belly, rests his forehead on top of it, and weeps. I run my fingers through his hair and join him, drowning in sorrow. 

He caresses my stomach in silence for what seems like hours. Finally, Blake stands and helps me to my feet. “Come on, I’ll take you home,” he mutters hoarsely.

“Home?” I ask. “That’s it? You don’t want me anymore?” Why am I surprised? I’m not worth fighting for, never have been.

“You know I want you. Dammit, Allie, when I asked you to spend forever with me
, I meant it. I want you, always. Just … I can’t deal with this right now. I’m this close to beating the life out of that bastard and going to prison for the rest of my life. Is it worth it? Fuck yeah, but I have a family to think of. I love you, and that won’t change. You broke my trust, shattered that shit to pieces, but trust can be earned again,” he expresses. He takes my hand and leads us through the house and out to the car.

Once we’re in the car, I have to ask a question I’m nervous to know the answer to
. “You still want to marry me?” I ask, holding my breath as I wait for his response.

“One day, yes. But now, I just need some time to process this shit, alone. I’m going to take you back to the condo, and I’ll come back here.” He turns the music up and begins to drive me home. As he watches the road, I watch him, thanking God that Blake’s not giving up on me. He needs space, and I understand that. I won’t break his trust, never again. He’s my happy ending, and I’ll prove that I’m his. 

Twenty-One

~Wyatt~

The home phone rings just past ten o’clock, and I answer it in hopes of hearing Allie’s angelic voice. Unfortunately, the voice that fills my ears is anything but heavenly. “Ugh! Where’s Allie?” she screeches, causing my ears to bleed. 

“Not here,” I snap, hanging up the phone. The phone rings again. Fucking really? I pick it up, but I don’t say anything.

“Please, tell her I’m ssso sssorry … I miss her. I miss her real bad,” she slurs. 

I hear wind and the sound of passing cars. “Are you driving?” I don’t give a shit what she does with her life; she can poison herself with alcohol if she damn well pleases. However, I’m concerned about other lives she’s putting at stake.

“Maybe, maybe not,” she giggles.

“Pull over, and tell me where you’re at. I’ll call a cab to come get you,” I insist.

“NOOOOOO! I need to find Allie. I miss her,” she repeats. I’m not going to get anywhere with this girl, not while she’s sloppy drunk.

“Listen, don’t call here again. Just get to where you’re going, and stay there.” I end the call and unplug the line, preventing her call from coming through if she decides to call back. 

Going back into the living room, I fire up my laptop and search for vacant homes within the area. I want to stay as close to Lucille as possible. After all, she’s Lacy’s grandmother, and I’m sure I’m going to need some help. Lacy won’t always be this sweet blue-eyed angel she is now, and Lucille has experience with a smart-mouthed teenage daughter.  

After hours of searching, I find the perfect house. It’s a three-bedroom home with two full bathrooms. There’s a garage and bonus room that’s perfect for a home gym, or maybe even a play area for Lacy. I jot down the information so I can give it to my realtor next week. I shut the power off and set my computer aside. I’m tired, but there’s a million things floating around in my mind. I toss and turn for what seems like hours. Just as I’m able to relax and drift off, something hits the floor upstairs and jars the ceiling. Knowing that Lucille’s upstairs, I get up and two-step it up to her room, hoping to find her unharmed.

I barge into her room without knocking and see her clutching her cell phone to her chest, petrified and pale as a ghost. I try to help her stand, but her legs are like noodles. They wobble, and I have to hold her so she doesn’t collapse. She fists my shirt and attempts to stand on her own. With her legs weak like a fawn, she makes her way into her closet and fights with her jacket. I go over and help her slip her arms inside, wondering where she’s off to in the middle of the night. 

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“To Al-Allie,” she stutters. I look over to her alarm clock and see it’s later than I thought, rounding 1:30am.

“At 1:30 in the morning?” She nods and lowers herself to the floor. She stretches her arm under her bed and sweeps blindly for a pair of shoes, pulling out a mismatched pair. Despite the fact that she’s pulled out a flat dress shoe and a boot, she puts them on and sprints down to the door. I swoop down, grab the matching boot and follow her down the steps.

“Here,” I say, handing her the boot. “Where are you going, Lucille? Honestly, I don’t mind going to get Al if she needs someone to come get her.” I still can’t figure out why she looks terrified.

“You can’t get her. Wyatt, Allie’s been in a terrible accident. That was the hospital. They said they’re taking her back for surgery, to deliver the babies. I-I have to get to her.” Her entire body shakes from fear. My heart contracts and doesn’t release. I grab the keys and run to my Jeep. Lucille climbs in beside me, and FUCK! My windshield’s fucking frozen. “Motherfucker!” I jump out and run inside to fill a pot with hot water. I run out to the Jeep and toss the water on my windshield to break up the ice. Tossing the pot into my backseat, I jump in, turn on the wipers, and set the heat on defrost. As soon as I have a visual on my side of the window, I back out of the drive and do one-hundred miles per hour the entire way to Onslow.  

When we arrive, Lucille and I dart into the emergency room. Thank Heavens she works here. The staff don’t ask questions when we burst through the triage doors, and Lucille begins searching for Allie’s chart. “Shit!” She slams the chart down and heads for the stairwell. I don’t know where we’re heading, but I follow behind her. Eight flights later, we’re running down a hall and stop at a nurse’s station, but it’s empty. This isn’t Lucille’s department, but you wouldn’t guess it by the way she goes around to the computer and pecks on the keyboard, searching the system for Allie Anderson. After a few clicks, she finds the information she’s looking for and dashes off. 

We take a turn down a hall and approach double doors that have a big red sign that reads ‘Authorized Personnel Only’. She pays it no attention and tries to enter, but she needs a badge—the badge she left at home. “No! No, no, no,” she wails, banging her fists against the door. “I have to get in there, Wyatt. I need to be by her side,” she chokes.

I pull her into my arms and swallow my fear of what’s happening to Allie in order to ease hers. “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.” I’ll do whatever it takes to get her to Allie.

“I need you to—” She stops talking soon as someone of ‘authority’ swipes their badge and opens the doors. She knocks the man in surgery attire out of the way and runs down the hall, but she doesn’t get far. 

Before I’m at her side, a man and woman have Lucille pinned against the wall, but she’s resisting them with all her might. “Get your hands off her,” I snarl.

“Sir, we can’t allow her in there.”

Lucille slides down the wall, pulls her knees into her chest, drops her head, and she cries out
, “I just want to be with my daughter. She needs me.” 

“Listen, she just wants to be with her daughter. There has to be something you can do to get her in there,” I plead.

“I wish we could, honestly. But, we can’t. There’s a patient in there who’s having emergency surgery. Letting her in could be harmful to the patient, infections and such. We just can’t. I’m sorry.” The duo ushers us out the doors, making sure they’re securely shut before turning back and disappearing behind another set of doors that lead into the OR.

“Are you sure that’s Allie in there? You said she was having surgery? For what?” Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if she’s positive that it’s Allie on that operating table, I’ll find a way to get to her.

“They didn’t tell me all the details. They called me because I’m her emergency contact. They said she’d been in a car wreck, and they were delivering the babies, but they didn’t tell me why.”

There’s only one person I know who can help me get to her, and I hate to ask him for a damn thing, but I know he’ll help me if it has anything to do with Allie. The last time he called Allie; I took down his number and saved it in my contacts. I scroll down until I see ‘Douche Dick’ and hit send. My call goes directly to voicemail. I try several times, but it happens with each call. 

“Well, we obviously aren’t getting through those doors. Let’s go back down to the ER and see if I can’t find out some more information,” Lucille advises. I help her off the floor; she leads and I follow. When we emerge from the elevator, Lucille gets attacked by a weeping woman. The waiting room’s empty except for this woman, who’s squeezing the life out of Lucille, the middle-aged man standing behind her, and a guy I had to do a double-take on—he freakishly resembles Blake. The women hold each other and sob uncontrollably. “Where’s Blake?” Lucille heaves. The woman covers her mouth and shakes her head. 

The man behind her pipes up. “He’s having some sort of scan on his brain.” His voice is strangled. As I examine them, I see the resemblance; they’re his family, which explains his twin on steroids. “When they brought him in
, he was unconscious. Where’s Allie? Please, tell me they’re okay?”

Lucille sucks in a breath and attempts to dry her tears. “She’s alive. They’re doing the Caesarean, right now. She’s by herself, Aken,” she sobs. The woman I assume to be Blake’s mother almost crashes to the floor
, but her husband catches her before she collides with the concrete tiles. 

We all take a seat and just wait, something I became accustomed to several months ago when Allie was here the first time. As Lucille reads, I pace the floor and begin to feel myself on the verge of losing control. I listen to her retell the story of how the accident happened. The officers assumed Blake was driving the speed limit, somewhere around sixty miles per hour, and slammed into a drunk driver who ran a red light. Allie’s car T-boned the other car. The impact was so hard, Allie’s car flipped over the other one, rolling several times before it was stopped by a guardrail. By this point, my blood is boiling. I listen as she reads how Blake was found unconscious with traumatic head injuries. And Allie, my butterfly, lost a lot of blood due to a piece of her window breaking and piercing her side. I can’t hold it in any longer; I explode. I begin flipping chairs and punching walls. I jab the cement blocks over and over again, trying to take my mind off Allie; off the pain she must have experienced, and the fact that she’s giving birth alone. Sharp pain radiates up my arm into my collarbone area, but it’s not enough to stop me. Why Allie? Why! Why were they out so late anyway? Nothing in this area’s open except bars, and I know Al wasn’t getting in the middle of drunken crowds in her condition. And why weren’t they driving in his truck? If they’d been in the truck, they wouldn’t be here. I have to get to her. She can’t do this on her own. She’s done it alone before, but not this time; I won’t allow it. 

Blake’s brother, Brody, tries to pin me down to keep me from getting banned from the hospital, but his strength isn’t enough to hold me down. He’s strong, but not strong enough. All he does is fuel my anger by struggling with me. I don’t want to hurt him, but he won’t back the fuck off. “Get off!” I hiss.

“Calm down,” he insists. Just before I slam my elbow into his nose, Lucille appears before my face with tears streaming down her water-chafed cheeks. “Wyatt, please … I need you here. Calm down, please,” she beseeches. Knowing that she’s right, I swallow my pride and force my body to relax so this jackass will release my wrists.

When I see that everyone’s taken their seats and is lost in conversation, I sneak off into the stairwell. I’ll get to my butterfly, or I’ll die trying. And death’s what it’ll take to keep me out of that damn room, because no one in this vicinity is strong enough to keep me away. 

When I get upstairs, I cross my fingers and pray my plan works. I tell the staff at the desk a lie I severely wish was true, that I’m the father of the twins Allie’s delivering. They eye me suspiciously, but thankfully, they don’t investigate much further. They take down my name as one of the techs demonstrates how I scrub in and what to expect. They tell me Allie isn’t conscious, and why they administered general anesthesia instead of regional. They save the most important information for last, explaining that a large piece of the windshield pierced her stomach and punctured baby B’s amniotic sac, and the babies have to be delivered due to risk of infection.

Entering the OR, I see Allie on the table with her arms spread out to the side, oxygen cannula in her nose, and a tube inserted into her throat. There’s a teal curtain separating Allie from the doctors, and at least seven medical personal surrounding the room—which seems a little extreme. As the nurse guides me to a stool beside Allie’s head, I catch a glimpse of all the blood she’s losing. Her stomach’s sliced open with a tube transferring blood. There’s one doctor separating her stomach and another one elbow-deep inside her abdomen. When I get to the stool, I lean down to kiss her cool forehead and whisper in her ear. I tell her I’m here and she’s not alone, reminding her how deep my love is for her. I’ll walk through the deepest and darkest pits of hell to get to this beautiful woman.

“Okay, Daddy, take a peek over the curtain.” I do as the doctor instructs and see him flipping a baby. “Baby A, a brown-haired baby boy,” he announces. He’s covered in white and is extremely small. The staff takes a bulb-like contraption and sucks his nose and mouth; then he finally lets out a weak whimper. After his first cry
, the doctor quickly hands him to a nurse, maybe a doctor? Hell, there’s so many people in here, I don’t know who’s who. 

Although these babies aren’t mine, I watch them handle this baby boy as if it’s my blood that flows through his veins. They clean him, weigh him, put him in an incubator, and make their way out of the OR. “He’s small and needs more attention. They’re transporting him to the NICU. They’ll run some tests and take great care of him.” She must have seen the confusion in my face, because she answers all my questions without me speaking a single word. 

“Baby B, a girl,” he announces once again. I look over the curtain and sneak a peek at a tiny and beautiful bald beauty. Suddenly, shoes scuff the floor as everyone but the doctor and two assistants scurry. They listen to the baby’s chest, insert tubes into her nose, wrap her up, and place her in the incubator. Unlike her brother, they bolt out the doors. There’s something wrong, and I’m torn on what to do. Do I stay here for Allie? She’s my world, but these babies are hers. And since they’re her world, they’re now mine.

I make a choice to run after the nurses taking her baby girl away, and I silently vow to protect them any way I can. I follow the team down to the NICU, but they don’t allow me back. They tell me I have to wait until the babies are stable and the paperwork’s filled out. Stable? “Wait! What do you mean, stable? They’re small, but they’ll be okay, right?” They continue behind closed doors, ignoring me as if I haven’t spoken.