Dr. Martin’s been working every night, and I’ve learned she’s a fourth-year internal medicine resident who reports directly to Dr. K. She speaks decent English, and I speak broken French. Between that and Google Translate, we get by. She makes a point to find me in the stairwell every night, usually well past midnight. Once, she comes by around nine to tell me Jacob’s family has stepped out. It’s the only time I get with him that whole day, and while I’m in there, I make another unexpected ally.
It’s the obnoxious-looking male nurse, the one who glared at me when I messed up Jacob’s IV. I want to throttle him for interrupting. I barely got two seconds with Jacob before he barged in. He’s got a pile of blankets in his arms, and he waves me out of the way to spread them over Jacob’s frame. One of them getscaught on Jacob’s cast. Without thinking, I step forward to fix it. The blankets are nice and warm, even if they are made of scratchy hospital cotton. I tuck the edges carefully around Jacob’s feet, and when I’m done, I look up and find the nurse staring at me.
“Sorry,” I mutter, certain I’ve pissed him off again somehow. But instead, he just studies me a moment longer and then leaves. Two minutes later, he returns with a cup of coffee. He sets it on the bedside table next to me, without a word, and then leaves again.
From that point on, whenever Jacob’s family leaves, either Dr. Martin or the nurse, Jean, come and find me. I stay in the hospital about twenty hours a day and barely get to spend a tenth of that time with Jacob, but now, at least, I’m getting a tiny stream of information, and short stretches of time when I get to sit with him and hold his hand.
I visit Antony Costa and his family a few more times, secretly enjoying his family’s care and attention, but on my third visit, Antony asks me again if I shouldn’t be training, and the puzzled look on his face lingers long after I lie. After that, I stay away, too frightened he’ll put it together somehow.
But none of that really matters, because on the seventh day that Jacob’s in hospital, Dr. Martin gives me the first scrap of good news.
“His blood pressure is very good all day,” she says, an hour after she’s started her night shift. She hands me a cup of tea and a granola bar with a smile. “They have turned down the pressor. Tomorrow, if it is still good, we will turn off.”
After she leaves, I put my head in my hands and force myself to take several deep, steadying breaths. I don’t want to get too hopeful, but for the first time, I let myself imagine him waking up. I haven’t let myself think about it, not even once since the first drive here. I didn’t want to jinx it. But now, for five full minutes, Iimagine him sitting up in his hospital bed, pale and weary but just as conscious as Antony, smiling at me and reaching for my hand.
It keeps me going through the rest of the day, even though I don’t get to see Jacob at all. His sister, Lily, has arrived, and between her, Paul, and his parents, he isn’t left alone for even a minute.
I hunt down the nurse Jean around three in the afternoon. I have to meet with the team doctor at three thirty at my hotel room.
“Family is still here,” he says, in his heavy accent, as I approach him by the nurse’s station.
My heart sinks. “I know. I... have to go soon. Maybe for a whole week.”
He watches me a moment. “They are looking for his laptop,” he says. “They cannot find it in his things.”
My blood runs cold. Of course his parents can’t find his laptop. It’s still sitting in my hotel room.
“I’ll bring it by before I leave,” I say. “You can tell them...” I trail off uselessly. I don’t know what he should tell them.
“I will say it has turned up,” Jean says with a shrug. “Some of his other items are in storage,” he continues, in leading tones. “I happen to go there now.”
I follow him to a small room at the end of the hall filled with a bunch of lockers. He unlocks the one labeled “924” and pulls out a big plastic bag with “JACOB NICHOLS” written on it.
“I will come back in five minutes,” Jean says.
He closes the door behind him and I’m left alone with Jacob’s things. His parents would’ve gotten all his things from his own hotel room. This must be the stuff he came to the hospital with. His racing suit is long gone, probably cut off in the back of the ambulance, but his racing shoes and gloves are here, and his wallet. He wouldn’t have had that with him in his car, but someonemust’ve thought to bring it in. The hospital might have needed his health card, or something.
I take the wallet out and turn it over in my hands. It’s such a small, trivial piece of him, but I’m stupidly grateful for it. I open it up and thumb through the cards. I think Jean brought me here thinking there might be evidence of my relationship with Jacob in his things, but it’s not like there will be a card in his wallet that says “Hey, Mom and Dad, I’m bisexual—oh and by the way, I’m dating Travis Keeping!” Still, there’s a strange comfort in touching things that belong to him, like little bits of proof he’s still alive.
His debit card, credit card, license, and health card are there, along with an international license he must’ve picked up on his travels. My heart twists painfully as I pull out the card behind it. It’s a coffee card from the café near my house in London. Jacob went there all the time to get this massive cappuccino that he loved. He never let me go with him. He was worried that people might recognize me, or him, and wonder why we were together.
I wish I’d gone with him anyway. I regret every stupid moment that I wasn’t at his side.
There’s a sharp pain in the back of my throat. I swallow hard and keep flipping through cards, until my fingers reach a stack of tiny pictures shoved in a slot behind his money.
The first few are soft and creased, as though they’ve been in there a long time. There’s a picture of him as a kid with his karting friends, a picture of him in F3 with his friend Nate, and a picture of him with a pretty blonde I recognize as his high school girlfriend.
The last three photos are newer, their laminated edges still sharp. My breathing changes as I look at them. The first is a picture from his hotel party in Austria, the first night we spent together.Josh Fry and his girlfriend, Becca, are caught mid-laugh, and Jacob is grinning at them while I sit nearby, holding a red plastic cup. I don’t even remember the picture being taken.
Next is a picture of the cabin we stayed at in Scotland, the building silhouetted in a pale purple sky, then a picture of two pairs of feet hanging over the edge of a cliff. I recognize it immediately. It’s from a hike we did a couple months ago. I almost told him I loved him that day, sitting up on the edge of a mountainside. I knew he took a picture of our feet hanging over the edge. I didn’t know he printed it off and kept it in his wallet.
Gritting my teeth against the awful searing pain in my throat, I take all three photos out and put them in my pocket. They’re ours, and I know he wouldn’t want his family to see them. Then I drop his wallet back into the plastic bag, put it back in his locker, and make my way alone out of the hospital.
I double back to the hospital to give Jacob’s laptop to Jean, then I return to the hotel to meet with Harper’s doctor. He clears me, like I was afraid he would. I don’t look as bad as I did last week, though I’m still running on about four hours of broken sleep a day. The doctor is more thorough this time, asking me question after question about my “migraine,” even talking a bit about ordering an MRI. I bluff poorly through it all, and finally he frowns and gives me a prescription for something to take if I get a migraine again. I’m thinking he’s a bit of an idiot—not a very nice thing to think, but like I said, running on four hours of sleep—when he pauses at the door and looks at me for a long moment.
“It isn’t uncommon for drivers to get... overwhelmed.” His gaze flicks around the room. I still haven’t let housekeeping in, and the garbage is overflowing with mostly-full takeout containers,my pathetic attempts at meals from the last week. “Would you like me to make you an appointment with a psychologist?”
Will a psychologist let me stay here in France with Jacob?I want to ask.
