When Bear pulled in under the emergency overpass, he rushed out to open the door for us. He stayed back with Sammy as I ran through the glass doors. A nurse saw us coming and motioned for us to follow her to a room where they placed Pup on a gurney. “Sir, sir are you family?” another nurse came up to ask me as I watched a guy in a white coat cut off Pup’s clothes and push an IV needle into her vein. I didn’t know how to respond. Of course she was my family, but how the fuck could I make the nurse understand that?
“She’s pregnant. I’m the father,” I said.
She pointed a gloved finger to a chair in the corner. “Sit,” she ordered. She shouted over to the people in scrubs and informed them of Pup’s pregnancy, which erupted into a chorus of voices, all shouting special instructions over one another.
When the nurse noticed I was still standing, she placed a hand on my stomach and pushed me toward the chair. I took a few side steps toward it, but still wouldn’t sit. When the nurse noticed that her white glove was coated in red, she lifted her other hand and pointed to the bloody palms. “Where is this coming from?” she asked, looking more annoyed than concerned.
“Don’t matter,” I spat. “Just take care of her.” I craned my neck around the nurse who then stood up on the tips of her sneakered toes, waving the bloody glove in my face.
I grunted. I didn’t care if I died.
As long as she lived.
The nurse snapped off her gloves and then snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “I suggest you take a seat on the gurney right there, Mr. King. You can still see her from there while I look you over and patch you up.
She finally got my attention. “How do you know my name?” I asked leaning a little too close in an effort to make her back the fuck off but it didn’t work. The bitch tossed her hair over her shoulder and took a step toward me, trying to intimidate me with all a hundred and ten pounds of pink scrubs.
“How do you know my name?” I repeated.
She rolled her eyes and bent over at the waist. She lifted the hem on one of the legs of her scrubs, revealing a small daisy tattoo on her ankle. “This, you idiot.”
I recognized my work right away.
She released the fabric and shook the material back in place. Behind her, the chaos continued around Pup. They placed a mask over her face and plugged a tube into one of the beeping and blinking machines surrounding the gurney.
“Staring at her isn’t going to make it better. We need to fix you up.”
I shook my head.
She walked over to the glass wall on the far side of the room, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pull a fresh set of gloves out of a dispenser. When she came back up to me, she was pulling the latex over her fingers.
A guy in a white jacket, with matching colored hair, cut Pup’s clothes with a pair of scissors. My fists clenched so hard my knuckles were about to pop out of my skin.
The most annoying nurse in the world remained unfazed, refusing to accept that I was ignoring her. “What’s her name?” the nurse asked.
“Doe.” I said, then I corrected, “Ray, her name is Ray.”
“Doe. Ray,” she repeated, her eyebrows questioning the name just as much as her voice did. “Is there a ME in there somewhere? Her family big Sound of Music fans or something?”
“Or something,” I muttered.
“Tell me Mr. King, how the hell do you plan on taking care of Miss. Doe-Ray when she’s better, if you’re standing here in my O.R., riddled with bullet holes, letting yourself bleed to death all over my white linoleum?” she argued.
The annoying bitch had a point. If Pup came out of this. When she came out of this. She was going to need me more than ever. Reluctantly, I backed up and sat on the gurney as the nurse looked me over.
I tried to concentrate on the words I’d just said a few minutes earlier instead of the things they were doing to her that made me want to slam my fist through the fucking wall.
She’s pregnant. I’m the father.
I wished right then and there, with everything I had, to any god from any religion that wanted to listen, that both Pup and the baby were going to be okay.
Our baby.
That my girl was going to be okay. I wished that when this was all over, and she was hopefully stable, that I have the strength left to tear Tanner’s fucking head off with my bare hands.