Just This Once by Evelyn Jeannie Hall
Twenty
Hold up, you’re in love with him? I thought he was just your tutor, your study buddy,” Benji exclaimed incredulously, gawking at Lacey. Well, he had the “buddy” part right. If the situation had been different, divulging such a revelation might’ve caused an altercation between he and Zane, or at least some heated words.
As it was, Lacey merely shrugged at her brother-in-law as the lab tech herded her away, grateful to have a few minutes of reprieve from any recriminations. She couldn’t face them right now. On a more positive note—if there was one—Benji wouldn’t be too keen to bash his best bro’s head in considering the extenuating circumstances.
Once the tech did the blood test, Lacey asked her, “When will we know if anyone’s a match?”
“About a week.”
“Does that mean Zane will be in a coma for all that time?”
“Can’t answer that. I suggest you discuss your concerns with the patient’s team of specialists.”
Did she have the right to? Lacey didn’t know how to navigate this crisis. She had no legal standing to contribute her opinion to Zane’s health, nor did she know where the two of them stood in terms of their relationship. If this was a relationship. Remorse hovered over her like a rain-filled cloud. If she could only go back and accept one of his calls—any of them—so that they could’ve reconciled, she might feel like she was on firmer footing. She might also have been given the consolation of him knowing the truth before he...
The back of her eyes burned all over again. Best not to go there.
Roberta had been generous enough to tell the medical staff that not only were she and Tasha related to him but vouched for Benji, Katrina, Elizabeth, and Lacey, as well. That way, they all could go see him if they went in one at a time. But before Lacey could make her way to his ICU accommodations, Zane’s mom pulled her aside. Lacey allowed Roberta to lead her over to the vending machines away from everyone else.
“What’s been going on with you and my son?” Apparently, the lady didn’t pull her punches. But what kind of reply could Lacey give that wouldn’t be NSFW? “I understand you two may have been experiencing some difficulties.”
Lacey swallowed. “Yes, ma’am, that’s true.”
“You should know that I won’t tolerate another woman toying with Zane. I’m not the meddlesome type, but he was hurt badly by his first wife. That means I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Lacey blinked at the woman, unsure of what to say. Part of her wanted to defend herself, to say that Zane had turned on her, that their split hadn’t been her fault. But that not only felt petty, it felt like a betrayal.
“Don’t misunderstand me, Lacey. I’m not claiming that he’s perfect. Far from it. But he is a good man.”
Feeling about an inch tall, Lacey gave her shoes a close examination. “I know. He’s been trying to contact me, trying to say he’s sorry, and I haven’t been cooperative.” All the sudden, her freshly minted brain-to-mouth filter crumbled to dust. “I feel so guilty over that now. What if I can’t make it right with him before… before…” She chest started to burn as her throat cinched up like a vise, robbing her of the ability to speak.
“Stop that,” Roberta chastised her sternly, and Lacey peered up into eyes that so resembled Zane’s that her heart clenched. “Stop that right now. He can’t afford any doubt or negativity. We need to send him all our love, all our faith, and all our trust that he’s going to get better. Anything else isn’t an option. Do you understand me?”
Mutely, Lacey nodded.
“My son has been struggling with this condition since he was a year old,” his mom went on. “I doubt he remembers a time when he didn’t have it. That diagnosis meant he had to be stuck in hospitals and doctor’s offices when other kids were outside at recess or somewhere playing video games without a care in the world. He’s had to watch the food he eats, the liquid he drinks, and maintain a healthy lifestyle. For Halloween, I allowed him one piece of candy and at Thanksgiving and Christmas, I let him have one cookie or tiny piece of a dessert. One, while everyone else he knew was able to consume as much as they wanted. Do you know how hard that is to explain to a hyperactive little boy?”
Lacey did her best to imagine it. A kindergarten aged Zane being excluded and held apart from all the other children during snack time or lunch. Having to discipline himself while everyone else indulged.
Knowing about his health issues and seeing the lifelong ramifications of them were two radically different things.
Roberta took a deep, slightly shaky inhale. “My point is that sometimes life isn’t fair. The life expectancy of a male type one diabetic is eleven years shorter than for a man who’s healthy, and men already die before we do. You and I can’t do anything to change that except support him every which way we know how. If you plan to be with Zane long term, that’s something you’re gonna have to grasp. It’s something you’re gonna have to deal with. There may come a time when he needs you to take care of him, even though I know for a fact he’s too proud to ever ask it of you. And it may not be in fifty years or even in twenty. It could be in five. It could be from this day forward. Can you handle that? Can you accept that sort of responsibility?”
“I can.” She’d had to push past the blockage in her throat to make herself heard, despite it making her voice sound like shredded cheese. This was no time to give in to her fears, though. This was the time to be brave, to be the woman who’d spent her young adulthood courageously setting out to discover every fun adventure she could. “I’m totally okay with that.”
“Then, please, do me a favor, Lacey Farrell.”
“Anything.”
“When he comes to, explain how you feel. Communicate with him. Don’t let him get away with any nonsense, either. He’s my son and I love him, but he’s still a man so he’ll mess up sometimes.” Roberta bent towards her conspiratorially. “They can’t seem to help it.”
This shocked a giggle out of Lacey, breaking the tension between them.
“My husband Darnell was a good man, too, God rest his soul. But he made mistakes. He had heart disease and high cholesterol, but he wouldn’t stay away from those high fat foods. He ate what he wanted and didn’t exercise a day in his life. He had high blood pressure to go with it, like I do now. So, he wound up having an embolism—a blood clot—in one of his coronary vessels. It caused him to have a massive heart attack when he was only forty, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.”
Lacey remembered Zane telling her he’d lost his dad when he was eight. She’d never considered it, but maybe the commonality of growing up without a father had been one of the reasons why they’d bonded so readily. “I… I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too. I’m telling you this because Zane is better than his dad when it comes to stuff like that. He likes to look like… what’s the term you girls are using now? In my day, it was ‘That man is a hunk.’ Now, from what my daughter tells me, it’s ‘he’s a hot piece of man meat.’”
Lacey snorted. Loudly. She couldn’t help it. Also, in Zane’s case, each description was accurate.
“All that mixed martial arts he does makes him seem like he’s indestructible,” his mom continued. “But as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, he’s not.”
Lacey’s brief spate of humor dissipated. “I know.”
An hour later, when she saw him at last, the reality of the situation came home to her with brutal clarity. Zane lay supine on his hospital bed, a sheet draped over him with his arms, head, and left leg exposed. His cast covered him from knee to foot and tubes seemed to be everywhere. A series of monitors beeped every few seconds, and the antiseptic sterility of the place left her feeling cold. There was a stillness about him that she’d never seen before, one that went beyond simply dozing.
And it wasn’t just that. His appearance had altered. His gorgeous mahogany skin had a gray cast to it, and his lips, typically extra full and smooth, looked ashen due to being so chapped. Despite his six-foot three height, his powerful frame seemed diminished, as if he’d been shrunken down. It broke her heart and made her eyes fill. She allowed herself a single sniffle, then shoved her emotions back as hard as she could.
“Zane,” she spoke into his ear as she clasped the hand that didn’t have an IV or other tubing attached in both of hers. “I don’t know if you can hear me or not, but I’m here. I’ve missed you, and I’m sorry for being so hard-headed about… well, everything. Also, there’s something else you should know.” Especially since everyone else already did. “I love you, so it’d be really great if you’d open your eyes for me now.”
She examined his face, but he didn’t flutter an eyelash. “Come on. Wake up for me. Please?”
He didn’t.
“All right,” she let him off the hook. “Take your time. But know that I love you, okay?”
With that, she went to retrieve her pear flavored lip balm to apply to his too still lips. As she did, her hand brushed along her keychain at the bottom of her purse. On that chain was the bright silver key Zane had given her to his building. In spite of their argument, she hadn’t removed it. In another life, maybe she would’ve had it because they’d been involved in a normal boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, something she hadn’t even known she’d wanted until after it was too late. The concept yanked at a tender spot beneath her ribcage, so she shoved that notion aside.
All that mattered was the reality of the here and now. So, she kissed him, detecting the scantest taste of her Chapstick as she did. Putting some of her lip balm on him might be a small thing, inconsequential at best, but at least it was a way to show her love for him, whether it would ever be reciprocated or not.
The next few days crawled by like an injured snail. Lacey felt like she’d entered some sort of purgatory. She and Benji had to wait to see if either of them might be a match, or if Zane would be left to the whims of a donor list where a compatible kidney might not be found for weeks or months, if ever. There was also the fear that his condition had caused other damage that couldn’t yet be determined. The seizures he’d experienced were a bad sign, and unless or until he regained consciousness, Zane’s future prognosis remained uncertain.
After day three, Benji, Katrina, and Elizabeth all returned to work, stopping by after hours or on lunch breaks. But Lacey couldn’t leave. She commenced taking brief scrub downs in the hospital restroom and depending on Elizabeth to bring her changes of clothes. It might’ve been irrational, but she had this horrible feeling that if she left, something awful would happen. Even when his mom and sister went to a hotel, she stayed. Katrina chided her over it.
“You can’t keep going like this, Lacey. You’re going to keel over.”
But she was determined to be there for Zane whenever he came to. She spent hours on her feet since the ICU didn’t have chairs, fluffing his pillows, talking to him, and kissing light pecks all over his face and hands. She watched as his goatee started to become unruly and the stubble on his cheeks and scalp grew in. The hair on his head came in thick and even, which made her wonder why he went to the trouble of shaving every day. But it was also odd seeing him like that. It almost felt as if he were some other man. A stranger.
The peculiarity of it made her want Zane to sit up and speak to her—even if he snapped at her—even more.
The nurses came in shifts to take care of all his basic bodily needs, which Lacey wished she’d be allowed to do herself, at least the non-medical ones. She disliked hanging out all the time without feeling like she’d contributed anything. By the time a full week had passed, Zane had begun to noticeably lose some of his muscle mass. The combination of all these changes and the seven-day milestone scared Lacey. What if his unconscious status became permanent?
The one bright spot was that the test results should be back that day. Everyone had returned to the hospital. While blood relatives had much better odds of being compatible than the rest of the population, Lacey clung to the hope that she or Benji would somehow be a match anyway. On her phone she’d been reading information about this and was disappointed to see that race could also play a factor. Neither she nor Benji were likely to have African American ancestry, but she prayed that wouldn’t prove to be an impediment.
What she prayed the hardest about, though, was that whatever the source, a kidney would be found for Zane.
The med tech called Benji first, and when he came back with a desolate expression, Lacey held her breath. That only left her sample. She entered the cramped lab waiting room with its wood trim and sparse décor clutching her seashell necklace with a deep sense of both hope and trepidation.
“Ms. Farrell, thank you for coming in,” a white coated man with the name Dr. Arjun Rajeesh embroidered on his chest appeared with the med tech who’d done her blood test.
“Happy to.”
There was a crinkling sound as he flipped through what Lacey assumed must be her file. “Well, fortunately, it seems all your stats are within acceptable parameters, and you have the same blood type. The numbers coming back tell us you should be a good match.”
A buoyant feeling surged inside of her. “Seriously? I’m a match?”
He favored her with a warm grin. “Yes, you are. Mazel tov. If you’re amenable, I’m going to speak to our surgical consult Dr. Schafer and put you and Mr. Morrison on the schedule.”
“When will this take place?”
“As soon as there’s an opening, which will likely be within the next twelve to sixteen hours. Ready to get prepped for surgery?”
She’d never gone under the knife before, but there was no way she would back out now.
“Absolutely.”