It was all a blur; the phone call, stuffing her books back into her backpack. The drive to the hospital was a blank, nothing but hues of grays and white flashing in front of her eyes and the muffled blasts of horns as she weaved erratically through traffic. Emily couldn't begin to explain how she'd arrived at the hospital in one piece. Luckily for her, she didn't have to. Her parents were halfway across the world, soaking up the sights and sounds of Paris for their twenty fifth wedding anniversary; or at least they had been before the phone call. In the blink of an eye, life had changed for her entire family, the world turning upside down and knocking them all off kilter. Edward McAdams' voice still echoed in her ears, his silky, near-monotone voice usually a comfort to her now distorted and distant, drowned out by the echoes of her mother's wordless sobs in the background. Accident. It was the one word that rang clear as a bell, the one word that played out over and over again inside her head. Joey. Her only brother. The man she adored most in the world second to her father. The two words did not belong in the same sentence together, but there they were, delivered in the shaken voice of her father.
The details were sketchy, spoken through second and third-hand accounts of witnesses and police officers. Her brother was at no fault, of course, the lawyer in her father had gathered that information shortly after learning the fate of his son. By all accounts, Joey had been following the law, stopped at a stop sign and waiting his turn to pass through the intersection when his car had been hit from behind by a woman going too much over the speed limit, her eyes glued to the phone in her hand rather than the road ahead of her. The impact of the rear hit had been enough to send her brother crashing against the steering wheel, rendering him unconscious in an instant. His car drifted into the path of the car in the intersection, thankfully the vehicle going well below the speed limit to do any real damage to her brother. In the end, it didn't matter. It had taken firefighters over a half an hour to pull her brother free from the wreckage, and when they finally pulled him onto the awaiting stretcher, he had yet to regain consciousness.
However she accomplished it, Emily made it to the hospital with only the mental trauma of her own darkened thoughts to show for it. Her mind circled around the possibilities of what she would find once she got to the hospital, thinking of paralysis and limited brain activity, talk of pulling the plug and funeral arrangements. She worried herself into a frenzy, unable to think beyond the worst possible scenarios. She pushed through the throngs of people shuffling their way into the hospital, elbowing anyone who got in the way of her and the entrance. The normally patient teenager was on a mission, and nothing was going to get in between her and finding out her brother's fate; at what was under her control. As she rushed breathless and clammy to the counter, blurting out her brother's name in a winded pant, Emily had to hold back an outraged scream as the woman on the opposite side simply pointed to a chair and told her to wait. Wait? She had no idea what condition her brother was in, and this woman was asking her to wait? Had she lost her mind?!?
The nurse was a sour looking woman in her forties, with a pinched face and a scowl permanently etched in lines across her brow. The bright yellow scrubs she wore didn't little to brighten her appearance, or perhaps that was Emily unflattering opinion of the woman based off her less than forthcoming comments as she addressed the teenager. "Take a seat and the doctor will be out to see you." That was all she said before waving Emily off with one hand and motioning the person behind her to step forward with the other. The younger sister in her wanted to shove the person who was obviously going through any serious trauma out of the way, scruff the woman up by scrubs and force the nurse to answer her questions. The future nurse in her held her back, remembering that just because someone looked healthy did not always mean that they were. Deflated, she slunk back to the closest seat to the swinging doors of the E.R her dark green eyes burning holes through the plastic windows that only gave her a glimpse of the doctors and nurses' heads as they walked past.
Emily didn't know how long she sat there; her time spent reminiscing about the days when she and her brother were younger, the waiting room feeling more and more like a funeral home than a hospital. The atmosphere grew heavier as her mind became filled with the tragic news that the doctors were holding back from her. He was paralyzed, missing a limb, or worse, in a coma that he would never wake up from. That was all that Emily could think as she sat there, one leg bouncing nervously while the other supported her wringing hands. The situation became dire the longer the doctors kept her waiting, and by the time the man finally did emerge from the swinging doors to call out her last name, the teenager was certain they were going to have to admit her for having a nervous breakdown.
She held onto her sanity, climbing onto weak legs to walk toward the middle-aged male dressed in immaculate scrubs and still wearing the booties and cap needed in the operating room. Attentive ears hung on every word, a sharp mind picking through each syllable spoken to analyze over and over until she had a clear understanding of what was being said. Her brother had swelling in the brain, which left him in what they believed was a temporary comatose state, the certainty of that depending on the results of an MRI. There was some internal bleeding which had been stopped through surgery, and a punctured lung thanks to three broken ribs. The minor breaks and bruises were the least of Emily's worries; it was the head trauma that had her concerned. The redhead began to bombard the doctor with questions, her tone as sharp as her mind and her demeanor one that refused to be spoken down to like a child. The answers she received were vague, with a ill-humored attitude that drew the young woman's ire. "We're still waiting for the MRI results. For now, he's being cleaned up and moved to the ICU." The doctor left her growling after him moments later, not bothering to respond to the rest of her unanswered questions.
Left once again to wait in the dismal waiting room with its horrible, tacky floral print wallpaper and glaring fluorescent lighting, Emily dropped down into the chair she had previously occupied, her mind racing with thoughts moved too fast for her to scrutinize. Pale, trembling hands once again pulled her phone free from the confines of her pockets, lithe digits sliding along the screen wanting to send a message to someone, anyone who would be able to sit with her, draw her mind away from her fretting and help her focus on what was important. There was Mark, her best friend since third grade, but like her, he was a senior and most likely sitting in class bored out of his skull. The thought calling her boyfriend Ray made her want to clench the phone in her fist until the device shattered into tiny splinters of plastic, his accented voice popping into her mind with the callous words that would be spewed out of his mouth. 'So? What do I care that your fucker of a brother's in the hospital? Serves the bitch right.' The imagined words incensed her to the core, her anger at her boyfriend's attitude making him the worst possible option to call. There was no one that she knew who would not be otherwise occupied, but she knew she had to call someone. Joey would need to hear friendly voices encouraging him to return to the land of the living, people who would want a speedy recovery for him and who would penetrate the damage to his skull to reach her brother.
Emily's fingers gracefully danced over the screen, skimming over dozens of contacts on her list until she reached the one she was loathed to touch. The tip of her finger hovered over the name 'Douche' her teeth worrying against her lower lip in a silent debate whether she should call the man her brother considered his best friend or not. The thought of it alone made her nauseous. The redhead would have preferred dealing with her asshole of a boyfriend rather than her brother's friends. 'But this isn't for you. It's for Joey.' Her mind insisted, the tiny voice of reason doing its job to motivate her into pushing the send button. The phone was pushed against her ear, soon greeted with the ringing of the line once it finally went through. She didn't know whether he would answer, didn't really care whether he did or not. She made the effort to reach out to him, and to Emily that was all the courtesy, she would afford him. She was doing this for her brother who was currently laid up in a hospital bed in pain, and unaware that there was anyone out there worrying after him. Emily could at least tell him she tried when he woke up, and if she succeeded, she would deal with the man for as long as it took for her brother to recover. She could only hope that time would be short, or else she might end up going to jail for murder.
She waited until the phone stopped ringing, barely acknowledging whether she was greeted by a mechanical voice of voicemail, or her brother's friend. For a moment she couldn't speak, even saying the words out loud, telling someone else that her brother was in the hospital brought it all home for her. Right now she could pretend that Joey would be wide awake with a few casts and some bruises when she finally reached his hospital room, but once she spat the words out, finally gave his condition there was no taking them back. Emily finally found her voice, tense and thick, but still hers. "Joey was in a car accident. He's at Mercy Hospital. They're getting ready to move him up to ICU….I don't know what room yet, you'll have to ask if you come. I thought you would want to know." She ended the call as quickly as she made it, stuffing her phone back into her pocket without another thought. She didn't want to talk to anyone, especially not him, and she would have gladly avoided it entirely if she could have. But it was too late now. The call had been made and now it would only be a matter of time before she was stuck dealing with his loathsome presence.