Page 21 of Fighting His Fate
“What’s going on?” Brett asked.
“I don’t know.”
The chopper dipped, clearly descending as the Chrysler Building appeared in the window behind Brett’s head. She lifted the pant leg of the baby in her arms, searching the skin she could see, as Brett did the same with the other child.
She’d just found a second spot on the boy’s left ankle when Brett said, “Oh, my God.” There on the second twin’s upper calf and thigh was a large, angry red urticaria just like the one on his brother’s face and leg.
“They need to see a doctor,” Grace said. “At their age, a fever can be dangerous—”
“We have a doctor at HERO Force.” He put the baby back in his seat. “Buckle up. We’re landing.”
She did as he said, first securing the baby, then herself. The chopper touched down on a rooftop as the first stirrings of true panic bored down on her, the buildings of Midtown Manhattan illuminated around them.
They made their way to an elevator. Her instinct was telling her something was very wrong. The elevator came to a stop and she bent to pick up the carrier, noting the palest red spot on the opposite side of the baby’s face. “It’s spreading.”
She followed the men through a labyrinth of an office with smoked glass walls and gleaming wood surfaces before turning sharply into a bright white medical suite. “Find Razorback, now,” ordered Brett, and Dire took off at a jog.
She and Brett each unbuckled a baby, working by tacit agreement to see as much of the infants’ skin as possible. They laid them on the examining table and undressed them, her pulse hammering at a fevered pitch when the baby’s arm was limp in her hand while she took off his shirt. “Poor muscle tone,” she said. “He wasn’t like this before.”
“Mine, too. He’s like a rag doll.”
Her mind whirled through medical conditions and symptoms, cross-checking what she was seeing with what she knew, but she was at a loss.
A deep male voice behind her made her jump out of the way. “Excuse me, coming through.” The black man who moved beside her wore a skintight blue T-shirt emphasizing his muscles. Sweat soaked the material in patches as if he’d been exercising, the stethoscope he reached for and swung around his neck conjuring a memory of a stripper at a bachelorette party.
Grace shook her head to clear it and rattled off the symptoms they’d observed, along with a summary of the infants’ feeding and sleeping patterns since they’d first been in her care. “I’m a nurse. Please, tell me what you see.”
He nodded. “Respiration is elevated. Rash consistent with an allergic reaction of some kind.”
“But the fever and the breathing—”
He cut her off. “Don’t go with an allergy. I know.” He unfastened the baby’s diaper, the inside purple where it should have been dry and white or yellow with urine.
Grace gasped. “It wasn’t like that before!”
Brett opened the other child’s diaper, an equally purple stain revealed.
“We need to get these children to a hospital, stat,” said Razorback. “I’m guessing some kind of metabolic disorder, but whatever the cause, they’re going downhill fast.”
12
Brett awokein the pediatric intensive care unit, a paper gown covering him from neck to calf and the tangy smell of the hospital air ubiquitous in the sterile space. He stared at Toby in the little acrylic bed in front of him, lines and wires draped from the little boy to a series of machines.
If you’d told him a week ago he would care for a child more than himself, he never would have believed it. But what happened to these babies was far more important than anything else in his life and completely out of his control. It was a cruel combination of caring and uncertainty that had brought him to his knees in a matter of hours.
His eyes shot to the clock, his neck objecting to the motion, and he cursed under his breath. It was five o’clock in the morning, the predawn sky beyond the window just beginning to glow. He pulled out his cell phone and checked the date. At least it was the day he thought it was, their second in the NICU.
Surreal. He didn’t know how he’d gotten here, how he’d come to be responsible for these children and had his life turned upside down so succinctly in a matter of hours. He knew the events that had transpired, but his brain had yet to catch up to recent history, his emotions topsy-turvy and wired to self-destruct.
That’s what would happen to him if anything happened to these children.
Please.
How did parents do this? How did they rest all of their hopes and dreams on the well-being of another? It was vulnerability at its extreme, a kind of desperation he’d only glimpsed before in his lifetime.
Grace slept beside Theo’s identically equipped bassinet, her head leaning awkwardly against the wall. He’d told her to go home more times than he could count, but the woman was stubborn, calling into work and insisting on staying, taking turns grabbing a coffee or forcing him to eat a tasteless snack. She cared for the boys as much as he did, and truth be told, he was glad she was here. Maybe more glad than he had any right to be.
He reached into his pocket for his cell phone, his elbow knocking over a plastic basin. Grace’s eyes popped open, locking on his. When she shifted, and it was clear she wasn’t going back to sleep, he said, “Sorry I woke you.”
