Page 3 of Knox
She stepped closer, lowering her voice. “You play for the Seawolves.”
I nodded. “Yes, that’s me. Do you think you can help me?”
She blinked. “Help you?”
I motioned for her to step away from the other people. “The mother of my son was in a car accident. I just need to know if she’s okay. She has no family here except me and our son. Her mom is coming from Tennessee but won’t be here for several hours.”
The nurse’s expression softened. “Let me go see what I can find out. What’s her name?”
“Thank you so much. Her name is Mallory Wade.”
The nurse turned and went back through the door, while I stayed put. When she returned a couple of minutes later, she said, “It looks like she’ll be one of my patients in ICU. She made it through the first part of surgery. Sounds like it’s a pretty severe TBI, and they may need to put her in a medically induced coma to keep things stable and manage the swelling in her brain. If that happens, it could be a few days before there’s any sign of improvement.”
My stomach turned over.
Traumatic brain injury.
A coma.
This wasn’t happening.
“Is she—will she ...”
The nurse put her hand on my arm. “They’re doing everything they can.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay, thank you.”
She bit her bottom lip and then asked with a nervous smile, “Could I maybe get an autograph?”
“Of course. Thank you again for your help.”
She handed me a pen from her pocket and a small notepad. I scribbled my name across the first page and handed it back to her.
“Is there somewhere I can wait while she’s in surgery?” I asked, not wanting to go back and sit near the lady who was clearly sick.
The nurse thought for a moment. “Well, there’s the surgery waiting room, but also, I know of a quiet spot just past the family waiting room through the main entrance. Staff sometimes use it on breaks. You can sit there for a bit.”
“Thank you.”
Once I found the room, I took the seat farthest from the door. As I sat there, my thoughts turned to Grady and how I’d explain why I took off so quickly. He probably thought I had run out for dinner or something.
If Mallory didn’t wake up, I’d be the one Grady looked to when he asked where his mom was. When he asked when she was coming back. I would be the one to help him understand she never would. It would gut me to see him waiting by the window, thinking she might pull into the driveway like always. I could picture him curling into my side at night and crying because she wasn’t there to say goodnight.
If she didn’t recover, I wasn’t sure I would know how to help him.
And I didn’t want to imagine a life without her in it.
Didn’t want to explain that world to our son.
The hours I spent waiting blurred together. I kept picturing her the last time I had seen her as she headed out for the spa weekend Knox and I had gifted her, promising she’d turn off her phone and enjoy the alone time. We had pushed her to go because she deserved the chance to breathe, to have a weekend where she wasn’t juggling everything at once. Plus, with springtraining in Arizona starting in a month, I wouldn’t be around much until the season started, and only when we were on a homestand. But even then, the season was long, and my time helping with Grady would be limited.
The more I thought about everything, the more I realized that if we hadn’t pushed her to go, she wouldn’t have been on the road. And now she was fighting to live because of something that was supposed to make her feel better.
My phone dinged with a message, and I pulled it out to see it was a text from Knox:
Any update?
I typed back:
