Bleeding Out While He Said I Do novel · Chapter 2 of 32
Chapter 2: Two Units
The head nurse tells Reece whose name is on the chart, a stranger drives rare blood across the iced city, and Andie wakes without her uterus to find Reece at her bed with glitter in his hair, furious he's off her chart.
Nobody in the OR moved.
The anesthesiologist had a syringe halfway to my line, and it stayed there.
The scrub tech's hands froze over the tray.
On the speaker, a woman yelled, "Speech! Speech!"
Ruthann leaned in close to the wall phone.
She didn't raise her voice.
She didn't have to.
"Doctor, the patient's name is Andie Callender. Thirty years old. She gave birth to your daughter at nine forty-one tonight."
The band hit the chorus of some wedding song.
"She wrote your name on her intake at four this afternoon," Ruthann went on. "Reece Pelham, husband."
"Then she crossed it out on my clipboard. I'm holding it."
Silence on the line.
Not real silence.
The party kept going behind it, glasses and bass and somebody whooping.
Then Kaitlyn laughed, right against his ear.
"Oh my God, Reece. Is that her?"
I heard him breathe once.
He didn't say my name.
He didn't ask if I was alive.
The line clicked, and the speaker went back to dial tone.
Ruthann hung the phone up gently.
"Well," she whispered. "Son of a bitch."
Then she turned back to the table and snapped her gum.
"You heard the lady. Whatever it takes. Where's my blood?"
A man in a white coat leaned in the door, breathing hard.
"Blood center hit the rare registry at ten forty. They've got one donor in the county, and he's out on a storm job."
"So get him in."
"He's coming. He's driving a utility truck across the West End Bridge right now. The roads are glass."
A utility truck.
Somewhere under the drape, a part of my brain that never shut off started doing what it did every winter night.
Which crew.
Which yard.
How long across the river on ice.
I couldn't move my lips to say it.
Forty minutes, if he didn't stop for anything.
"How long?" the surgeon asked.
"Blood center says he told them twenty-five."
"Nobody makes that bridge in twenty-five tonight."
"He said he would."
The surgeon swore and went back to work.
I could feel them working on me without feeling anything at all.
Pulling. Pressure. A sound like a wet towel being wrung out.
The monitor kept a fast, thin beat by my ear.
I tracked each beat to stay awake.
Ruthann's face came back over the drape every few minutes.
"Still here, Mama?"
I blinked.
"Good girl. Your baby's five pounds two. Pink now. Screaming at the NICU nurses. She's got your lungs, I'd bet."
I wanted to laugh.
Nothing on me worked well enough to do it.
At some point the doctors stopped talking in sentences.
They talked in numbers instead.
The numbers kept going down.
Then the door banged open.
"Two units, crossmatched. Your guy made it in twenty-six."
Ruthann said a word I'd never heard a nurse say out loud.
They hung the first bag.
I watched it over my head, dark red and swinging a little.
Some stranger's blood, still nearly warm from his arm, sliding into mine.
The cold in my hands started to go away.
"Pressure's coming up," the anesthesiologist said. "Eighty over fifty. Ninety."
"Not fast enough," the surgeon said. "I can't stop this bleeding and keep the uterus. I'm sorry."
He said the last part to me.
He was the only one in the room who'd looked me in the eye all night, except Ruthann.
"She signed," Ruthann said again. "Do it."
I heard them do it.
I won't say more about that.
Kinley would be my only child.
The only one I would ever carry.
I knew it the second he said it, and I still couldn't move to cry.
Ruthann wiped under my eye with her knuckle anyway.
"I know," she whispered. "I know, honey. But you're going to hold her. That's the deal."
The anesthesiologist pushed something into my line.
"You've done enough listening tonight," he said. "Go to sleep."
The last thing I heard was the second bag going up.
When I woke, the window was gray.
I was in a glass room with a curtain half open.
A monitor beeped slow and steady by my head.
Two lines ran into my arm, and one of them was still running red.
The clock on the wall said 6:52.
An ICU nurse was writing on a whiteboard at the foot of my bed.
PATIENT: ANDIE CALLENDER.
EMERGENCY CONTACT: NONE.
Somebody had drawn a tiny heart next to it.
I could move my fingers.
I moved them just to prove it.
Then I heard footsteps in the hall, fast.
The glass door slid open.
Reece stood there in last night's tux pants and a hospital fleece over his dress shirt.
His bow tie was gone.
His hair was full of gold birthday glitter, and it caught the light every time he breathed.
He didn't look at the bag of blood.
He didn't ask about our daughter.
He walked straight to the foot of my bed and pointed at the whiteboard.
"Why the hell am I off your chart?"
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