Lauren Blakely - Every Second With You

Okay.

I have officially decided that’s the only word I ever want to hear anymore.

Okay.

“She’s going to be fine,” Debbie says, squeezing my shoulder. “And you two are going to get to work soon on naming this sweet little girl.”

“Yeah,” Robert says, chiming in from our little huddle in the corner. “Why don’t you have a name yet? We want to start cooing at Sally, Jane, Mandy, or something, instead of saying Hi Baby all the time.”

“Not Sally, Jane or Mandy. She’s definitely not a Sally, Jane or Mandy,” I say as I stroke her cheek softly. She releases a small, contented sigh as she sleeps so peacefully in my arms.

“Well, she needs to be something soon,” Robert says, and it feels so good to be having this conversation about names instead of about blood.

Two oxygen tubes snake out of her nostrils, coiling around the bed, and slinking up into a machine that sends breath to her nose. Her arms are covered with bandages, the crook of her elbow has been target practice for needles, and an IV drip pumps into her body. Her gown has slipped down her shoulder, her collarbone exposed, the arrow from her heart tattoo peeking out. A yellow blanket covers her, up to her chest that’s rising and falling slowly.

Her eyes are closed, though, and I would give anything for them to flutter open. They haven’t yet, and no one knows why. It’s been like this for the last two hours. I’m sitting next to her, holding her hand, hoping.

I’m doing so much hoping that there’s no room in me for anything else but this desperate, frayed desire for her to wake up. Every nerve in me is a piece in a mechanical clock, and a malevolent clock winder is turning the cranks, over and over, maniacally cackling as they start to break.

All as I wait for a sign that still hasn’t come. Harley is deep in some sort of post-surgery cocoon that no one expected to last this long.

“Any minute now, I’m sure,” an ICU nurse tells me as she checks on Harley’s vitals. This nurse has a long black braid down her back, and pink scrubs with dog bones on them. “She’s just taking her sweet time to wake up. But all her tests look normal. Her vitals are fine.”

“She was supposed to wake up two hours ago.”

“She’s taking a little longer than we thought,” the nurse says sweetly.

“But I don’t understand,” I say, and my voice sounds whiny, and I hate it, but I hate the lack of knowing more. I hate it so damn much. Because they keep telling me she should wake up, but she keeps lying here, breathing in and out, and that’s it. She’s been out of surgery for four hours, out of recovery for two hours, and she’s still not awake. She’s still not responding, not to light, not to voices, not to touch, not to the life going on around her.

Not a bat of the eyelids, not a wiggle of the fingers, not a cough.

The nurse says nothing, just shoots me a sympathetic smile.

I drop my head onto the mattress, and squeeze Harley’s hand. “C’mon Harley. I know you’re there. Just give me a sign. Squeeze my hand, or something,” I mutter.

She doesn’t squeeze my hand.

Trey

My daughter is six hours old and nameless.

The nurses in labor and delivery would probably tease me if we were simply that couple who hadn’t picked a name yet. But the nurses don’t tease me. They call her Baby Westin, and Baby Westin has had her second feeding already, and her diaper changed, and she’s sleeping again.

She’s doing everything she’s supposed to be doing: opening her eyes, squeezing my hand, crying, sighing, eating, living.

She’s living.

And Harley is only breathing.

It’s midnight now, and the watch continues, and nothing changes except the ICU doctor. Doctor Strickland is gone, and now Doctor Whitney enters the room, introduces himself, and says he’s on rotation now.

I launch into questions. “Why doesn’t she open her eyes? Why doesn’t she move? Why is she only breathing?”

“Let me examine her,” he says calmly, and then asks me to leave for a moment, so I do, waiting in the hallway.

Pacing again.

So much pacing.

Robert and Debbie are parked in chairs outside the room. He yawns, and Debbie does the same, but no one goes, no one leaves, no one sleeps. Debbie takes another sip of her coffee, and Robert offers to get me one.

I shake my head.

“Diet Coke then?”

“No thanks.”

Doctor Whitney pokes his head out, and invites us back in.

“We thought she’d be awake by now,” he says. “And her tests are fine, her vitals are fine, everything suggests she should have woken up, but she has slipped into a comatose state.”

And I break.

I fucking break.

I shatter into a million angry pieces.

“What?”

The doctor nods, and shifts his hand back and forth like a seesaw. “She’s been teetering between unconsciousness and coma, and she remains unresponsive to stimuli, like light.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” I shout, pushing my hands through my hair, fire exploding in my brain, torching my fucking heart.

He holds up his hands, maybe in admission, maybe for protection from me. I don’t know. I don’t care. I want to kill him for telling me this.

“It means that we’re baffled as to what’s going on.”

“Baffled?” I repeat, fuming. “How can you be baffled? You’re a fucking doctor. You’re not supposed to be baffled.”

“We will continue to monitor her. We will continue to look for answers.”

“Yeah, because a coma’s not a fucking answer,” I shout. I push my fingers hard against my temple, pushing, hurting, something, anything to make this stop. I take a step closer. “Make her wake up.” Another step and he steps back, and I beg harder, grabbing for his white lab coat. “Make her wake up. Make her wake up. Make her wake up.”

“I would appreciate it if you could leave right now,” Doctor Whitney says in a wobbly voice, as he struggles to step away from me.

“Make her fucking wake up,” I say, trying to reach for him again, pleading.

Then I feel strong arms hold me back, drag me away from the doctor I want to throttle. I’m pulled out of the room, into the hall, inside the elevator, down to the lobby.

Outside. Where it’s dark and starless, and Robert has wrapped his arms around me, and my face is buried in his shirt, and the splinter in my heart hurts so much, jagged as it expands, hollowing out my insides, until all I am is this empty ache.

“I don’t know what to do,” I sob in a voice I don’t recognize anymore, a voice I never wanted to hear coming from me. “I don’t know what to do without her.”

He’s crying too. I can hear the hitch in his throat as he speaks. “All we can do is hope. That’s all we can do. Hope.”

I imagine her words. Her laughter. Her singing Bonfire Heart. I feel her hands, her hips, and her body.

But it’s all in my mind, because I wake up quickly, snapping out of a restless few minutes of sleep here on the edge of her mattress.

I wake up because there’s noise in the room. The same nurse with the long braid is back, doing her thing, checking on my wife.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s the same, honey. Harley’s the same.”

At least she calls her by her name.

When my first brother died at birth, too young to live, my parents hadn’t named him. I was only thirteen years old, and I insisted we name him. I named him Jake.

Then came Drew. Then came Will.

They came and they went, touching down on this earth for seconds in some cases, for a few days in others. But they were named. I made sure they were named.

By all accounts, my daughter is staying. Her heart is strong, and she’s healthy, and there’s not a thing about her that baffles any doctor. But no one knows what is happening to my wife, and so no one can help her, no one can save her. She exists in the in-between. I long for her voice with every cell of my body; I’d give anything to hear a snippet of a word from her lips.

I flash back to our days and nights together, to the little moments, like playing Frogger and making her a cheesy miracle, then the bigger ones, like bringing her to the tree in New York, telling her I loved her for the first time, marrying her in the sky.

They were all amazing in their own way. All precious.

“Can I be alone with Harley?” I ask the nurse when she’s done.

“Of course, sweetie,” she says, patting me on the shoulder as she leaves.

I swallow, and the lump in my throat hurts so much, like a hard knot that will never leave. I take her right hand, and wrap my fingers around hers.

We always held hands. The night we met, I held her hand as we walked to the train station. When we were just friends, I held her hand as we walked throughout New York. Then the night I took her away from Mr. Stewart at the Parker Meridien, we practically flew out of that hotel, holding hands.

I’ve held her hands as I’ve made love to her.

I want to hold her hand for the rest of my life.

It’s such a small thing, such a simple act, but such a privilege; such a gift.

Like every single moment with her.

And I don’t know if I’ll have that luxury for much longer. So it has to matter. Every moment matters, because sometimes they are all we have.

“Harley,” I whisper, wishing this were a TV movie and she’d squeeze my fingers when she heard me say her name. But I’ve been saying her name for a long, long time tonight, and it hasn’t happened. “I don’t know if I’m going to see you again. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But you have to know that I love you more than I ever thought was possible. I have loved every second with you. You made me believe in love, you made me believe in myself, and you made me a new man. But I’m not here to talk about me, or even about you right now. Because there’s something else we need to talk about. We need to name our daughter. I can’t wait for you to meet her, Harley. She’s beautiful, and she’s so fucking healthy,” I say, my voice breaking as a salty tear hits her hand.