After a while, the nurse who helped me find Phillip gently relocates us to a waiting room.
Phillip’s parents are here.
“How is she?” Mrs. Mac asks, but Phillip’s body language says everything as he plops down into a chair, taking up the same position he had in the other one.
“She had a placental abruption. Lost too much blood,” I say quietly, repeating one of the few shreds of information Phillip was muttering but knowing the look on our faces says more than my words could convey.
Mrs. Mac’s hand immediately goes to her face, sadness washing over the concern that was there before. Mr. Mac, who was standing, sits down very slowly, grief written all over his face.
“Oh my God,” Mrs. Mac slowly says, dropping to a chair next to him as the reality of Jadyn’s death sinks in.
The sounds of the busy hospital blur around me as I sit next to Phillip, not knowing what to do.
My phone buzzes with a text from Lori, asking where I am and if I’ll stop and pick up milk on the way home. I realize that she has no idea what’s happened.
I start to send her a text to let her know Jadyn was in an accident.
But I can’t bring myself to do it.
Part of me keeps thinking that this can’t really be happening.
Can’t possibly be real.
“Phillip Mackenzie?” a nurse announces to the waiting room.
Phillip doesn’t even look up.
I stand and point to him. “Uh, he’s right here.”
“Sir, could you come with me?” she says to him. “The doctor would like to speak with you.”
Phillip tightly shuts his eyes and shakes his head. “I can’t,” he mutters. “I can’t.”
I squeeze his shoulder. “Come on, Mac. We’ll do it together.”
His eyes fill with tears again. “That’s what I said to her at her parents’ funeral. When she didn’t want to drop the roses in their graves.”
He stands up, and together, we numbly follow the nurse to a small room.
We sit in the little white cubicle for at least fifteen minutes.
Waiting.
For what, I have no idea.
What happens when someone dies like this?
Dies.
The word grips my heart and squeezes, the pain intense.
I want to say something to comfort Phillip, but I know nothing will.
So, we just sit together in silence.
I jump when the door opens, and a doctor wearing clean blue scrubs enters the room.
“I’m Dr. Evans,” he says, shaking both our hands and smiling at us.
I want to punch the freaking smile off his face. How can he be smiling at a time like this?
But then he says three miraculous words. “We revived her.”
“What? Really?” Phillip says, hope flooding him as he stands up, hugs me, hugs him, and starts crying again.
“We’ve been working on her since she flatlined. She’s not out of the woods yet, but we were able to bring her back and get her stabilized.”
“Can I see her?” Phillip asks. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s in critical but stable condition. She lost a lot of blood, but I did want to let you know that we were able to stop the bleeding without doing a hysterectomy. She’s so young. I figured, if she survived, she’d probably want to have more children.”
As soon as the doctor mentions more children, Phillip takes in a sharp breath. He hasn’t said a word about the baby, and I’ve been too afraid to ask.
“What about the baby?” Phillip says in a tone barely above a whisper.
“I don’t know about the baby. I was only responsible for your wife,” he replies. “And, to answer your other question, she’s being moved to the ICU now. Once she’s set up there, you can go see her. She’s heavily sedated, and we’re giving her multiple blood products. She’s also intubated, and we’ll need to keep her that way until she’s hemodynamically stable. The ICU staff will be monitoring her overnight, checking her blood levels, blood pressure, and heart rate.”
“So, she’s going to be okay?” I ask, mostly because I have no freaking idea what hemody—whatever means.
“Like I said, she’s in critical condition, so the next twenty-four hours are crucial. We kept her oxygenated while we worked on her, but we never know how a patient’s internal organs and brain will react to that stress. We’ll know more tomorrow.”
When the doctor leaves, Phillip puts his arm around me, his hand in a fist.
The man hug.
“Screw that,” I say, wrapping both my arms around him, giving him the girliest hug ever.
But I don’t care.
Because she’s not dead.
“They revived her,” he cries over and over again. “They revived her.”
