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“Doc, lemme ask you a question: what the hell do you know? How did people know before you people come up with all this crap?”
“They didn’t.” Poor woman. She’s about to choke, trying not to laugh.
* * *
As you can imagine,the following weeks were hell. If I thought I was restricted before, nothing compared to this. As if his annoyance wasn’t enough, Joy had taken to teasing him that at least one of the twins had to be a girl, and then I had to endure his idiocy all day and night.
Right now, he’s not speaking to anyone in the house other than Grandma because she’s the only one who would put up with his nonsense. She caters to him, and he spoils her, and I’m about sick of both of them.
She’s played into his craziness, and now, every day, I’m bombarded with one of her concoctions that’s supposed to be good for me and the babies. He stands over me to make sure I drink every drop, and if I refuse, there’s hell to pay.
The funny thing is since the day we found out we were having twins, his morning sickness, which had faded by the beginning of my second trimester, was back, and it was much worse. Personally, I think it was his nerves that were making him sick, but at least I got some relief from his nagging.
With all that said, I can’t imagine going through this experience with anyone else. First, to be pregnant still seems like a miracle, and there are times, especially when the baby, no babies, kicks, I get tears in my eyes.
Grandma put it best, it happened at the right time with the right man and can only be fate. Speaking of fate, last I heard, Dan was not doing so well. Thunder had put some kind of moratorium on my family that didn’t allow them to share the news with me, so I’ve only been able to get snippets here and there, but it was all over the news these days, so there was no way for him to stop me.
He's been in a coma for more than a month, Deidre was in jail for attempted murder, and they were both facing drug charges because there was marijuana found in their home, apparently enough to sell, so they were both looking at serious time if convicted; that’s if Dan survives.
I have no idea what else is going on, but I, for one, find it hard to believe that the man I used to know could’ve sunk this low in such a short space of time. Sometimes, I wonder if things might’ve been different had I stayed. But then I remind myself that I wasn’t happy and would never have been happy in that situation, not for long anyway.
The guilt I sometimes feel for being so happy and in love with someone else, someone who has taught me what real love feels like, is beginning to fade with time. Now, he is just a fading memory of something that wasn’t meant to be.
CECILE
“What do you mean there’s nothing more you can do? You’ve got to save my boy.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’ve done all we can, and there’s no change. You need to decide about taking him off life support. We’ll give you some time to think about it.”
“No come back.” He just kept walking away, and the nightmare that started almost two months ago got worse. I was in a panic and didn’t know what to do or where to turn. I’ve never dealt with anything like this before.
How come there’s no one here to tell me what to do next? My daughters were here with their families just a few days earlier, but they had to return to their lives, and my husband was still at his office, or so he says.
I’d heard from the nurses that he’d been visiting with his sister in the evenings after I was gone. My husband doesn’t have a sister, so I was very sure who the woman who came with him was.
What was she doing here? How could he embarrass me like this after all that I’d been through? I went back into the room to look at my son, who hardly looked like himself. He’d lost almost all the weight he’d gained in the time he’d been here and looked older; even his color had changed and was no longer the robust tone it always was. But then again, he hadn’t looked healthy in a long time.
Everyone was blaming me for everything. His sisters claim that if I hadn’t forced the issue with Deidre and ran off Amanda none of this would’ve happened. It was as if they wanted me to leave my grandson out in the cold.
My oldest was even mean enough to suggest that had Junior been a girl, I wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. The other one said some awful things to me, things that she’d been holding in for a very long time from the sounds of it, and it was almost as if they’d resented me all this time for loving their brother more.
She even hinted that I had a strange attachment to my son, that was sick, as she called it. I almost slapped her for the implication, but her husband got in the way. In the end I’d sent them away because they weren’t here to help, just air their grievances and attack me at every turn.
The worst thing they did to me, though, was to have dinner with their father and his mistress the last night they were here. I don’t understand what I did that was so wrong for my family to treat me like this. They knew how much I had suffered because of their father and that woman, and still…
Dan was the only one I could count on, and now he was lying in that bed lifeless, not moving, not talking. “Dan, can you hear me? You’ve got to pull through. I need you; your son needs you. Dan, Dan.”
I shook his arm, but there was no movement, nothing, not even when I pinched him. I felt like there was a hole in my chest, a deep gaping maw that nothing would ever fill. No, there’s still Junior. Sweet little Junior who needs me.
A son to raise to replace the one I’d lost. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll give all the love I have to my little boy. My little Dan. I was about to walk out of the room when a different doctor came into the room.
“I’m sorry, but where is Amanda Stewart?”
“Why do you need her?”
“She’s listed as his next of kin on his insurance. She would have to be the one to decide where we go from here.”
I felt the world spinning and had to sit down. ‘But they’re divorced.”
