One Day, Maybe. #NewAdult

Ch.32: Emergency

James Darcy:

        Rose's call finally came through just as I was pulling on the street near the building Charlotte and I resided in. My thoughts far too invaded by what could be happening to her to dwell on the fact that we had happily  spent many beautiful years of our life as a family together in this place.

          I immediately answered the call after the first ring, stopping at the traffic signal light that had just turned red. There was an anxious, dreadful feeling that took over as I picked up the call.

         "Hey, James. I'm sorry I've had my phone on silence this whole time, hence why I missed your call." Rose said, a heaviness to her words that she even couldn't hide. She sounded tired but beyond that, there was worry. In the background, I could, though faintly, make out a voice coming from an intercom calling upon a certain doctor. My heart dropped.

       "Where is she?" I was barely able to let the words out, my voice sounding strange to my own ears. I looked up when a car behind me started honking their horns that the light had turned green. Yet I couldn't move. My body, I realized, was trembling from emotions I hadn't felt in awhile. Panic, dread and my fear of losing her rose instantly in me, my knuckles turning white as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel.

        So many thoughts and images going through my mind. The car behind me blared their horns again, that startled me back to consciousness. If it weren't for the fact that I was so completely out of it, I would have wondered why, instead of moving to the empty lane next to me, the car behind me had been so focus on making me move. I let it go and started driving.

        "James, did you hear me?" Came a voice through my car's speakers. I had forgotten that Rose was on the other line. "I said we are at Tisch Hospital, we got here over thirty minutes ago. She was admitted as soon as we arrived...." she was saying. But all I could think of at that moment was the fact that Charlotte was admitted to an emergency room and I needed to get to her as soon as possible.

      "I'll see you soon." I said and hung up, making an illegal U-turn that I couldn't care less about as soon as I could and headed toward the hospital which was, thankfully not too far away from where I currently was.

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        Emergency rooms made me antsy. And by the time I got there, I was just about ready to crawl out of my skin. That anxious feeling that I carried with me from the moment I had missed Rose's first call, had built up to the point of making me physically sick. To say that I hated hospital emergency rooms was an understatement, nothing good was ever happening for you to be there.

       This took me back to the many times I had to bring my mother there so that she wouldn't overdose and die. Throughout my whole life, I had to be that person who shouldered that weight because my father did not care enough or maybe simply stopped carrying after the first few times of the same cycle.

       I remember so vividly how frightened I was the first time it had happened. I was barely thirteen years old, though bigger for my age as my father had often said. I had been the one to find her in the living room, no one home but her, lying on the couch unresponsive. I thought she had died. I had phone my dad but he didn't answer so I lifted her up as much I could, dragged her to her beat up Chevrolet that she had let me drive occasionally since I was eleven years old, and drove her to the nearest emergency room.

       I wondered then, as I sat and waited for the doctors to come back with an update on my mother's health, what would have happened if I hadn't skipped class and gone home that day. I wondered how long she had been there unconscious with the syringe still in her arm. What a hell of a way to live. Better yet. What a hell of a way to see your mother die. What was I going to tell my siblings?