The House on Hope Street - By Danielle Steel Page 0,41
as Liz stopped to talk to her on the steps of the courthouse.
“You need to come home right away,” she said clearly, and Liz felt her spine tense. Carole only sounded like that when one of the kids got hurt, or there was a serious problem.
“What happened? Is someone hurt?” She knew before Carole told her.
“It's Peter. He had a day off from work, and some of his friends were here.” Liz interrupted her instantly in a shrill tone that was unfamiliar to her own ears, but her nerves were no longer what they once had been.
“What happened?”
“We don't know yet. He was diving and he hit his head, I think. The ambulance is here.”
“Is he bleeding?” All she could think of was Jack as he lay on their office floor with blood everywhere. If there was blood, to her now it meant disaster.
“No,” Carole said with a calm she didn't feel. She had hated to be the one to tell her, but she knew she had to. “He's unconscious.” She didn't have the heart to tell her he might have broken his neck. They weren't sure yet. “They're taking him to Marin General. You can meet him there. Liz, I'm sorry.”
“Is everyone else okay?” She was running to the car as she asked her.
“No one else was hurt. Just Peter.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
No one really knew. There were paramedics everywhere, and Liz could hear the sirens start to wail as they took off with him as she asked the question.
“I think so. I don't know much, Liz. I was watching them … I told them. …” Carole started to cry as she said it, and Liz started her car, and ended the conversation as she pulled away from the curb, praying that he'd be all right. He had to be. They couldn't live through another disaster, or God forbid, losing him. She just couldn't. She drove to the hospital as fast as she could without running lights or hitting pedestrians, and she pulled into the parking lot shortly after they rushed Peter into the emergency room. They had taken him straight to the trauma unit, and they directed Liz to it as soon as she got there.
She was running down the halls, looking for him, and as soon as she walked into the trauma unit, she saw him. He was gray and wet and they were giving him oxygen, and working on him frantically. They were too busy to talk to her, a nurse explained to her rapidly what was happening. He had a severe head injury, and a possible fracture of several vertebrae. They were going to X-ray Peter as soon as possible, and they were running IV lines into him, and putting monitors on him as Liz watched them.
“Is he going to be all right?” Liz asked without taking her eyes off her son, overwhelmed by a wave of panic. He looked like he was dying, and she wasn't sure that he wasn't.
“We don't know yet,” the nurse told her honestly. “The doctor will speak to you as soon as they assess him.”
Liz wanted to touch him, and talk to him, but she couldn't even get near him. And all she could do was stand there, and wrestle with her own panic. They were bringing an X-ray machine in, they had cut his bathing suit off, and he was lying naked on the gurney.
They X-rayed his head and his neck, and they seemed to be examining every part of him, as his mother watched them. She was crying as she looked at him, and it seemed an eternity before a doctor in green scrubs walked toward her. He had a stethoscope around his neck, and he looked stern as he explained the situation to her. He was tall, and his dark eyes looked grim, but the gray at his temples made her want to believe that he knew what he was doing.
“How is he?” she asked, sounding desperate.
“Not great at the moment. We're not sure yet how bad the head injury is, or what the implications are. There's a broad range of possibilities here. There's a fair amount of internal swelling. We're going to do an EEG, and a CT scan in a few minutes. And a lot is going to depend on how fast he comes out of it. I think he may have gotten lucky with his neck. I thought it was broken when he came in, but I don't think it is.