“I’ll have the doctor in shortly to talk to you,” she says, stepping back to her screen. “In the meantime, how’s the pain?”
“Oh, uh…” I take a second to think it over. “Not bad.”
“Good. You’re due for another dose of pain meds in about a half hour, but let me know if it gets worse before then. Would you like some juice? Grape? Apple?”
“Grape, please,” I say, feeling a little numb.
She nods, giving me another soft smile. “I’ll be right back then.”
As she exits the room, I catch part of a conversation happening in the hall. I recognize one of the voices, even though I only heard it for a few minutes. Caspian sounds as if he’srecounting what happened at the park. Talking to the police, perhaps? The door hits the jamb and stops short of shutting fully, allowing me to hear the exchange.
“And you had the defibrillator in your bag?” the unknown person asks.
Caspian’s gentle voice follows. “I did.”
“Why? Seems like an odd item to carry while hiking.”
“Well…” There’s a pause before Caspian says, “I know Lee has a heart condition. So I wanted to be prepared.”
Said heart beats like a drum.
The other person makes a short sound of acknowledgement. “And how do you know Lee Donovan?”
Another brief pause. “We’re friends.”
He lied. Why did he lie?
“Can you tell me what happened after you used the defibrillator?”
Caspian goes on to explain that as soon as I had a pulse, he called emergency services. He talks about staying with me in the time it took for the paramedics to arrive at our spot four miles up the trails. He mentions walking back with them as I was carried away on a stretcher. I wasn’t awake for any of it.
The nurse walks back through the door as Caspian recounts the ambulance ride. The door shuts fully this time, blocking any more of his story from my ears.
“Your juice,” the nurse says, setting a cup on the table beside my bed. “Is there anything else I can do while you’re waiting for the doctor?”
“No,” I tell her, my voice sounding as if it’s being dragged along sandpaper. “Thank you.”
She nods before leaving the room, the soft beeps I heard earlier still echoing through the walls from somewhere unseen. I take a sip of the grape juice, the cold soothing on mythroat and the sugar a welcome hit that has my eyes slipping shut.
My pacemaker failed. It malfunctioned when it shouldn’t have.
How did he know?
A soft knock precedes the door opening again. Caspian peeks his head inside, an almost shy smile on his face. “Hi. Can I come in?”
I find myself nodding, and he steps fully into the room, fidgeting with the band around his wrist. I noticed it before. Back in the woods. Was that earlier today? Yesterday? The wristband looks like some sort of medical alert bracelet. I can just make out the word “seizures” on the side now that I’m looking.
Caspian seems unable to tear his eyes off me as he stops near the bed, even as he looks guilty for staring. He opens his mouth once and then twice. “Feeling okay?”
I clear my throat. “I feel like I got hit in the chest by a truck.”
He nods, wincing some. “Right. Uh…”
“I would have died,” I cut in. Caspian’s eyes snap back to mine. “I did die. I would have…stayed dead. If you weren’t there.”
He licks his lips once, nodding slowly. He appears nervous, his gaze skittering around now, even though it never leaves me entirely.
“You said you’d explain.”
