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“Well, it was great catching up,” I said.
I walked away without waiting for Brandon to say anything else. I moved through a few tables and briefly chatted with various people and couples that I knew, mostly just making the rounds so I could say that I was there and I did my part. I hoped to leave soon, but I didn’t want to upset anyone who might take it as some strange sign of disrespect, especially when so many of these people had helped me make a lot of money by investing in my companies. And of course, they had all become filthy rich off those deals as well.
I was heading towards the bar to get another scotch when I felt my phone vibrating. I checked and it was Maria, the nanny. This didn’t feel right. Why would she be calling? Jack. It had to be.
I headed out of the ballroom to a fairly quiet hallway and answered the phone. “Maria? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Jack. He is having trouble breathing. I can’t get him to snap out of it. It’s some sort of a seizure. I have the ambulance on the way.”
“Shit! How did it happen?”
“He was putting together a puzzle and he just fell over and started convulsing.”
“Ok, I’ll meet you at the hospital. Make sure they take him to St. Joseph’s. Call me when you are in the ambulance.”
I knew that I would never make it home before they took him to the hospital. I had to get to there as fast as possible. What the fuck? Poor Jack… he had so many health issues. My poor little man had been born very premature and spent the first many weeks of his life under glass. He was lucky to have made it. But this had all left battle scars on him and now he was one sickly kid. It was something new every other day it seemed.
I made it to the hospital about twenty minutes later. Jack had just been brought in and they were working on him. “The paramedics were able to get him conscious,” Maria said. “But he is still having trouble breathing and no matter how much of his inhaler he tried nothing worked.”
“Ok,” I said. I stepped to the front desk and explained the situation. “My son was just brought in. Can I go back there with him? I need to be there.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the receptionist said. “You will have to wait. The doctors are working on getting him breathing on his own. Right now, he keeps sliding in and out of consciousness.”
“Shit.”
I waited there in the lobby for about a half hour before a doctor finally came out to speak with me. “How’s Jack?”
“He is fine now,” the doctor said. “He is stable.”
The doctor was about fifty years old, tall with a gaunt expression on his face that was covered up with a thick moustache.
“What happened to him?”
“Has he ever had seizures like that before?”
“Um… no. Not the seizures, but he’s always had severe asthma.”
“Ok,” he said. “Well, the seizure today, we aren’t really sure what brought it on. But we will keep him overnight to run some more tests and see what we find out.”
“Alright,” I said “Can I see him?”
“Sure.”
I followed the doctor back just then.
When I went back, Jack was there looking up at me with his sweet, smiling face. He looked so innocent and kind of content, even after all he’d been through. He always held his head up so high.
“Hey, buddy,” I said.
“Hi, daddy,” he replied.
It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears. But I didn’t want him to see how sad I was.
Chapter 6
Laney
Mason came into the bar a little after seven and he was looking more down than I’d ever seen him. Typically, he had a sweet, but confident, almost cocky smile on his handsome face, but tonight he seemed like something awful had happened to him. I wasn’t sure he was going to be all about the chit chat tonight.
I grabbed a glass and poured about two shots of scotch into it and then I opened up a beer and sat both on the bar. Mason slid onto his stool. He grabbed the whiskey and downed it fast. “Thanks,” he said. “Another please.”
I poured the drink and he sipped it.
“You alright?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “I was in the ER last night until six this morning with my son.”
I gasped. “Oh, no. What’s wrong?”
He explained to me about the seizures and the asthma attack. “He is doing fine now. The doctors can’t explain what caused the seizure but they are suspecting he may be epileptic.”
“Wow, that’s so hard. The poor little guy. How is he dealing?”
“He is doing fine, better than me,” he said. “He is dealing with all of it like a trooper. I feel like I’m falling apart sometimes.”
