“He was brought to the emergency room at Evanston Hospital. I don’t have all of the details. Are you related to Mr. Reed?”
“No, I’m a friend of the family.”
“Do you have a phone number where we can reach his parents?”
“Um, yes, give me a sec.” Shaking, I ran to my laptop and looked up the Reeds’ home phone number. I rarely used it, but I figured they might not answer their cell phones late at night. “It’s 847-555-1017. Can you please tell me if he’s okay?”
“I’m sorry, Miss, I don’t have any more information. Thank you for your help,” she said and hung up.
I collapsed onto the floor and sat with my hands over my nose and mouth.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God
. I repeated over and over in my head. Tyler was hurt. He was on his way to be with me, and now he was hurt. He would miss the Rose Bowl. He may never play again. He may never walk again.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God
.
I stood up and ran back to Cam’s.
“Tyler’s been in an accident; the hospital just called me!” I cried out when he opened the door.
“Holy shit, what happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know, he was on his way here, and when he never arrived, I just assumed he’d blown me off, but then he wasn’t answering his phone, and I don’t know what happened.” My eyes were blazed with panic. “They brought him to Evanston Hospital. Do you think I should go over there?”
“Why was he coming to see you?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, hugging my body with my arms.
He lifted his hand to wipe a tear from my cheek. “It’s going to be all right. What about his parents?”
“I gave the hospital their home phone number, so they must be getting the call right now. Oh my God, Cam, I hope he’s okay!?”
“I’m sure he’s going to be fine. Why don’t you go to the hospital and see for yourself. Do you want me to go with you?”
I shook my head.
“Then call me as soon as you know something.” Cam leaned in and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Try and relax.”
I got dressed and drove frantically, trying not to get in an accident myself as I sped to the hospital. When I arrived, about forty minutes after the call, the tired woman at reception directed me to the E.R. waiting room on the ground floor. The Reeds had not arrived yet. I walked up to the nurses’ station and inquired about Tyler. A nurse told me very little other than that he was in surgery and she’d let me know when he was admitted to a room. I fell asleep waiting.
At about nine thirty in the morning, the nurse woke me up and said Tyler was on the fifth floor in room 514.
“Thank you,” I said. “Has anyone else asked for him?”
“His mother.”
I took the elevator to the fifth floor and saw Mrs. Reed in the hall. She was talking to one of the hospital staff with her arms crossed in front of her. I ran up to her, poised to embrace her when she stepped backward as if I were diseased.
“Please see to it that only family members are allowed in,” she said to the male nurse standing between us.
“Of course,” he said.
“Is Tyler okay?” I asked, crazed in my desire for information.
Instead of answering, Mrs. Reed pursed her lips and looked at me as if I were a stranger. I had cared for this woman’s children, taught them how to ride a bike, bandaged their skinned knees when she was playing golf, and here she was glaring at me with such distaste. She took one step closer to me and tilted her head before speaking. “I thought I told you to stay away from him,” she said in a low, foreboding tone befitting any Disney villain.
I shook my head in dismay. There were no words to express the depth of my confusion. Apparently, her aggression was not always so passive.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
I placed my hand defensively on my chest. “I don’t know what you think is going on between Tyler and me, but before tonight I hadn’t seen him since the summer. I had no hand in this.”
“Then why on earth are you here?” she asked. A fair question.
“I…they said I was the last call on his phone. He called me and asked to come over tonight. I tried to talk him out of it.” I paused. “For God’s sake, is he okay?”
“No, he’s not okay. His arm is destroyed, and his season is over. Which means his career is
over
.”
I mourned the loss of his Rose Bowl performance for a moment, but I cared little about his football career. I had raced down there to see if he was alive. If he was in a coma. If his eyes could still light up a room through a pane of glass. If having his undivided attention could still make me feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Was he in pain? Was he scared?
“How dare you lie to me,” she snapped. “It’s no secret that you’re the cause of this disaster. You have no business here, and it’s time you leave,” she whispered angrily and then crossed her arms. The nurse looked up from his notes and made eye contact with me.
Her hostility left me stunned. I opened my mouth to speak but changed my mind. This was not the time to challenge her, so I turned and walked out through the large double doors and took the elevator to the lobby. However, I had no intention of going home. I walked out into the snow and across the street to a Starbucks, where I sat for two hours drinking peppermint lattes before heading
back to the fifth floor of the hospital. My mind was spinning. I was sick about Tyler, not knowing whether he was bruised or on his deathbed. And I was pissed at his mother for treating me like some common nuisance. My nerves shook from a toxic combination of caffeine, sugar, and stress.
Only a few people were milling around the halls when I got off the elevator. I cautiously walked toward Tyler’s room and looked around for the nurse I’d seen earlier with Mrs. Reed. Neither of them was in the hall, so I ignored her discriminatory demands and knocked gently on Tyler’s door. There was no answer. When I knocked again, the door floated open.
“Hello,” I whispered and took a microscopic step into the room.
Still no answer.
I looked over my shoulder into the brightly lit hallway before taking one more step forward and closing the door behind me. Tyler was alone and asleep. The top of his head was wrapped with white gauze, and his right arm—in a cast that extended from his shoulder to his hand—was elevated by a hanging noose.
Not the arm,
I thought. A gentle beeping noise was the only sound.
Seeing him lying there brought me to tears. His face appeared so young and childlike despite his enormous frame. I sat down tentatively on the edge of an armchair in the corner of the room and folded my hands in my lap. I stared at his arm, suspended next to him, and prayed he would recover from his injuries. Gone was the confident, invincible Adonis, and in his place was a vulnerable, beat-up boy with angry parents. I sprang to his side when I heard a muffled sound come from his mouth.
“Tyler.” I laughed with relief as his name crossed my lips. “Tyler, it’s Chloe,” I said.
The corner of his bruised lips curled into the hint of a smile. “I know who you are,” he whispered.
“You scared the hell out of me. What happened to you?” I asked.
He closed his eyes and said nothing. Just moaned.
“Should I get the nurse in here?” I asked. “Are you in pain?”
“I fucked up,” he said, his words barely audible.
“Shhhh,” I said, lightly brushing some hair off his forehead. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not.” Tyler sighed arduously. “It’s over; everything is over.”
Just then there was a knock on the door, and a nurse came in followed by two police officers.
T
hree days passed before I returned to the hospital. By then I’d learned that Tyler had been charged with driving under the influence, because he had a blood alcohol content of .09, when the legal limit was .08. One hundredth of a point kept him from returning to Notre Dame, and an unhappy triad injury kept him from ever playing football again. He spent four weeks recovering in the hospital and carried his parents’ resentment and humiliation on his shoulders like a two-hundred-pound barbell. Just like his car crash, the entire course of his life changed in an instant. His identity as a revered football hero was stripped away, and everyone who had previously adored him disappeared. Except for me.
Every other night I drove to the hospital with my books and case studies and sat in his room reading and studying while he watched TV. On the few occasions that his mother came to see him, I would make myself scarce.
Exhausted did not begin to convey the depths of my fatigue. Between caring for my mom, attending classes, and visiting Tyler, I was in a permanent fog. Cam left a note on my door one night after about three weeks of that routine asking me to stop by when I got home from the hospital.
“Hi, stranger,” he said when he opened the door. He held a cup of soup in his hands.
My mind had been pulled in so many directions, but Cam was still able to ground me, and seeing him made me feel like everything would be okay one day. He opened the door wearing an “I run with scissors” T-shirt that made me smile and relax my shoulders a notch. “Hi, Cam, I’m so sorry I missed the study group on Tuesday.”
“No worries. You look like shit though.”
“Thank you.”
He shrugged and took a slurp of his soup. “Come on in.”
Cam had the only one-bedroom apartment on our floor, and he was a neat freak. Everything had its place. No small appliances were allowed to live on the countertops; no garbage was allowed to sit in the can for more than six hours. There wasn’t so much as an errant pencil languishing on a desktop. I plopped onto his couch and put my feet up on his coffee table. A move that was discouraged yet permitted.
“I’m worried about you, girl,” he said.
“Me? I’m fine. I thrive on drama. It’s normality that really scares me. In fact, the day my mother calls me and tells me she’s on her way to Talbots before dropping off a tray of homemade seven-layer bars at a Junior League luncheon is the day I jump off a bridge.”
Cam relaxed into a beanbag chair across from me. “You look exhausted. The circles under your eyes have circles.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Okay, wait. The bags under your eyes are so big they each need their own bellman,” he said.
I pretended like I was yawning.
Cameron tilted his head, looking concerned. “Does he appreciate you?”
I knew exactly whom he meant, but before Cam asked me, I hadn’t ever really stopped to think about whether he did or he didn’t. I cared a great deal for Tyler, and I wanted to be with him. It
was that simple. After a week in the hospital, he’d thanked me for coming, and said it was the only thing he looked forward to. After two weeks, he’d asked me to lie with him in his bed.
“Climb up here,” he’d said one night about half an hour before visiting hours were over.
“I’m too big to get up there with you.”
“Please,” he said as he struggled to shift himself over to make room for me.
“Stop, you’re going to hurt yourself. I’ll scoot my chair really close to the bed.”
“I want you next to me, not on the chair. Get those gorgeous legs up here now.”
I breathed a small sigh of defeat and carefully reclined next to him. First I sat, then I rested my body on my elbow and swung my legs up until I was barely on the edge of the bed. Tyler turned his head so that there was no more than an inch of space between our faces.
“I wanted to feel you. You’re so warm,” he said.
“Are you sure this doesn’t hurt?”
“I’m sure. Give me your hand.”
We wove our fingers together and rested our cheeks on each other. His labored breathing made me sad.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” I whispered and squeezed his hand.
“Shhh, it’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated. “I know how hard this must be for you. I can’t imagine how you’re able to deal with your father through all of this. And your teammates, they must be—”
“Shhh.” Tyler let go of my hand, wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and kissed me. His lips were dry and soft, and I melted into them without moving another muscle for fear of hurting him.
From that day on, I’d climb into his hospital bed, and we’d kiss once the lights were off and the nurses had finished checking on him for the night. There was nothing awkward about it. Sometimes, as we lay there half-naked, our bodies and lips pressed tightly together, Tyler would tell me how I was healing him and beg me to stay the night.
I smiled at the thought of his needing me. “I think he does appreciate me,” I finally said to Cam.
He nodded, but his expression indicated he wasn’t convinced. I knew Cam had feelings for me that went beyond friendship, but I also knew I was in love with Tyler, and I made no secret of that.
“He’s obviously going through a rough time, but he knows how much I care about him, and it helps,” I said.
Although Tyler was recovering physically, the things that had defined him as a person were gone. He’d been sensationalized for his entire life and was struggling to figure out who he was without football. Granted, I was enamored with him, but after the accident there was a part of me that wanted to build him back up and, in the process, unearth another side of him.
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt,” Cam said.
“Thank you for that.”
“I mean it, Chloe. You didn’t have any relationship with the guy before the accident, and now you’re like his only caregiver. Or girlfriend? Or I don’t know what. What does he say about it?”
I shrugged. Cam could tell I was uneasy about his questions.
“I’m not trying to be a dick, I swear. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“I just want to make sure you’re not putting all your energy into him without getting something in return,” he said.
I averted my eyes. “Is that how you feel about me?”
He snorted with laughter. “I don’t put all my energy into you.”
I removed my feet from his table and leaned forward. “If I haven’t told you how much you mean to me, then I should be ashamed of myself. Having you in my life has been such a gift, and there’s no way I would have survived the last few months without you. However, I might not have gained five pounds if it weren’t for you and your penchant for stuffed-crust pizzas, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because I never would have survived.”