Before Us... There Was Him by Lou Stock

Author:Lou Stock [Stock, Lou]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

Hayley Benson had been transported from the small facility in Willapa Harbor to a larger hospital in Olympia. The fact that she was so far away from Raymond seemed to ease some of the tension from Lucas's shoulders when we pulled up. His father was in jail, awaiting arraignment for what he'd done. Scott's girlfriend Samantha, who was also wearing bruises for trying to stop him, was a face and situation Lucas hadn't wanted to find himself confronted with.

Hayley looked small and frail in her bed with wires falling from her body. She was tucked into a room in the intensive care unit, the bruises that mottled her flesh finally showing the nightmare that she'd lived. The life she hadn't been capable of letting go of.

I didn't go inside with Lucas. He'd needed those moments alone with her, so I sat in the waiting room, my knees pulled up under my chin while I watched him sitting in the seat next to her bed, his forehead resting where he held her hand.

My heart broke into a thousand pieces for him. After we'd left Raymond and stayed with Meadow in those weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, he and I had shared a couple of intimate moments as we'd hiked the surrounding areas. We'd spoken at length about the choices his mom had made. Lucas relived some of his more awful memories, as though justifying his need to walk away from the situation.

There was no doubt in my mind he cared about his mom. Watching him whisper to her was enough to tell me that. So many of his memories were shrouded by her being drunk or fighting with his dad. He'd held onto memories where his dad had been arrested for some infraction, and she'd had time to sober up and be the mom he'd needed her to be. I wondered if those were the memories he pulled up now while he sat beside her bruised form.

I only rose to join him when the doctors stepped inside the room. Much the same as Meadow had described, they gave him many technical terms and syndromes I would never be able to repeat. The breakdown was that she was gone. The tests they'd run on her showed no brain activity. The machine was the only thing keeping her alive. The doctor was then joined by a hospital administrator who wanted to talk to Lucas about the financial aspect of his mother's care.

Lucas left with her and asked me to stay with Hayley so he could deal with it. I didn't have to know the ins and outs of their lives to understand that Hayley Benson didn't have health insurance. I was also old enough to remember the hospital bills my gran had to deal with after my parents had died. The ‘before insurance’ section seemingly unattainable when I'd come across the file full of the information she'd kept.

For hours, I sat in that chair, watching the woman sleep. The sound of the machines

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