A Time to Run Read online

  I have no idea how long the testing lasted, but I was tired from the fussing by the time it was all done. My parents stayed with me. Then I was wheeled out of the ICU and down to another room. Once I was transferred onto another bed, I settled back into the starchy pillow.

  "Do you have my phone?" I asked

  "Elma have it," said my mom.

  "I want to sit up."

  My mother fiddled with the remote beside my bed and it was all I could do not to just snatch it from her hand and do it myself. But I didn't. I guess I was just too tired. I wore a blue hospital gown and it felt awkward and all wrong and I didn't want my junk hanging out and that's what I felt would happen if I dared to move. Anyway, I didn't even think I could move. My feet felt like rocks were attached to them.

  Once my bed was raised, I tried to sit up, but I was so dizzy. I flopped back into the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

  Questions spun through my head, but I didn't have the energy to ask them. No energy at all.

  The nurse checked my blood pressure, then she stuck the thermometer in my mouth. After it beeped, she took it out.

  "98.6. Normal," she said.

  "What you need?" my mother asked, fussing around the bed. There were too many people doing stuff around me.

  "To get out of here," I replied.

  "I happy you talk. This good thing."

  Good? I was in the hospital. None of this was good. I didn't reply.

  "They save you."

  "Saved?" My mind wasn't thinking fast enough to remember being saved.

  "They have AED in gymnasium," she said with almost an air of authority. "And they get your heart start, right in gym."

  A defibrillator? I knew we had one in the gym because we'd all been shown it during class, and I'd done a CPR course in the past.

  Since the nurse was still hovering around me, I asked, "What did those tests say is wrong with me?" I croaked out the words, directing them at her. A defibrillator meant my heart had done something not normal. Not normal at all.

  "Your vitals are good," said the nurse, "but I'm going to let the doctor give you the complete assessment and answer all the important questions you may have."

  "Can you tell me anything?"

  She looked me square in the eyes. "Your heart stopped, and you're a lucky boy that it restarted." Then she picked up her clipboard and left the room.

  This news that I didn't die should have made me happy, I get that. But it didn't. My head grew heavy and I sank back into the sterile pillow. My heart had stopped? Seriously? I was fit, young, an athlete. This heart-stopping stuff was for old people, smokers, and fat guys with big beer bellies. I was a kid who could run for hours.

  "I wanna go home," I said.

  "What I get you?" my mother asked. Even though she was standing right beside my bed, her voice sounded as if it was coming out of a tin can. "You hungry?"

  "No."

  "He need good food," said my mother, and I guessed she was speaking to my father, whose accent was almost thicker than hers. They both had a hard time with pronouns and saying the "th" sound. They often slipped back into Bosnian, which was natural for them but not so much for me.

  "Ostavi ga," said my dad, telling my mother to leave me alone. "Pusti ga da jede kasnije."

  He was right. I would eat when I wanted to.

  The conversation about me eating continued across my bed. "Mora ke je gladen," said my mother.

  "I'm not hungry, Mom," I said.

  They nattered back and forth over my bed for a few more minutes, while I lay with my eyes closed. My mother was going on and on about food. My father kept telling her to shush and he needed to phone my sister and let her know I had finished the tests and was out of ICU and in a room. Wasn't she waiting in the hallway? What time was it anyway?

  Fatigue seemed to cover me, squeeze me, but it wasn't like being tired after playing basketball. This was a heaviness, a load. I felt as if my body was detached from my mind. Was I going to be "that kid" with a heart problem? Could it be fixed?

  What if it couldn't be? Fixed, that is.

  My mother continued fussing around me. I opened my eyes and stared at her. She saw me and said, "You need food. Food make you feel better."

  My mother had this thing about food, after being in a refugee camp for five years to escape the war in Bosnia. My sister had been born in Bosnia and spent her early years, from age three to eight, in the camp located in Berlin, Germany, but I'd been born in Canada. My mother liked to tell me they had me as soon as they got settled in Canada. She said she didn't want to give birth in the refugee camp. So, I became the lucky one born on Canadian soil, in a hospital. That would have been the last time I'd been in a hospital: the day I was born.

  Had my luck just changed? Gone from good to bad?

  "I told you, I'm not hungry," I said. Again, I closed my eyes. I couldn't keep them open.

  I think I might have been falling asleep when I heard the voice of my sister. "Hiya, little brother."

  "Shhhh," said my mother. "He sleep."

  I opened my eyes. Elma smiled at me as if she knew my parents were driving me crazy. She held up my phone. "Thought you might want this piece of reality."

  She leaned over and kissed my forehead. "Happy to hear you've come back to the land of the living."

  "Thanks," I said.

  She put the phone on the table beside my bed. "I mean that, you know." She spoke softly, joking put aside.

  "Okay."

  Elma was nine years older than me and was eight when she came to Canada. She had lived in the refugee camp with my parents, with the scarcity of food, in a room that was similar to a dorm room. She says all it had was bunk beds and a sink and toilet. No kitchen. All their meals were made in a communal kitchen with all the other refugees.

  Elma spoke three languages: German, English and Bosnian. You'd never know she'd had to suffer at all. Long dark hair, perfect white teeth. I was the guy at school with the hot, older sister.

  "You gave us quite a scare," she said.

  "So I heard."

  "But I knew you'd pull through."

  "Thanks."

  "You have another visitor who wants to see you."

  "One of the guys?" I wasn't sure I wanted any of them to see me like this.

  "Well, them too. No, this is someone who has been waiting for you to get out of ICU. Stuart."

  Stuart. My Best Buddy. He's also our water boy for the basketball team and I think he's great. The kid has spunk and determination and likes to laugh. He'd convinced me to join the Best Buddies club at school. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

  I closed my eyes. Did I have the energy for Stuart right now, though? I really liked him but he was chaotic, like a hurricane, running away all the time, doing stuff without thinking of any consequences. I knew it was part of his FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) but he had moments where he was most definitely a challenge.

  "He's been texting me non-stop," she said.

  I looked down at the white sheet and the tube running out of my hand, the opaque tape stuck to my skin. "He doesn't have a phone," I said.

  "Well, he's got someone else's phone then. Honestly. Same message every time." She pulled out her phone and showed me his text message.

  hi elma when i see sam. im stuart.

  I cracked a smile. That was so Stuart. Then I inhaled and ran my hand through my hair. "I don't know. I feel kinda tired. Maybe tomorrow." I wanted to see the doctor first. Figure out what was wrong with me. Stuart would ask a million questions that I couldn't answer.

  "Yeah, yeah," said Elma softly. "They knew not tonight. But I'll let them know maybe tomorrow?"

  "He's not…outside the door, is he?" I didn't want to hurt his feelings if he was waiting for me.

  She shook her head. "No, no. He's just been texting me, asking when he can come. It's way too late now." She pointed to my phone. "It's been blowing up." She gave me a little smirk. "Lots of girls. One named Ginny sent a couple."
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br />   "You went through my messages?" I tried to glare at her.

  "I didn't actually read the messages, but I saw her name a couple of times. You holding out on me? You got some new girl?"

  I picked up my phone and scanned through it. Elma was right, I had a ton of messages, and Ginny, this girl from school, had sent a couple. I hardly knew her. I had heard she was on a mission to get me to ask her to grad. She said she got my number from another girl at school, a friend.

  "Nah," I said, answering Elma's question. "No new girl." I shook my head. "Man, I'm hoping I can go home. Have you heard anything?"

  Elma shrugged. "I think you're in for what's left of the night. Maybe even the week, little brother."

  A night was bad enough…but a week? Not what I wanted to hear.

  CHAPTER THREE STUART

  Darkness came and I was in the quiet of my bedroom, all by myself, on my bed, which was in the middle of my room to keep me away from the walls. I was trying to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes I saw Sam on the floor. I rolled one way, then the other way, back and forth. I hate the dark. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. When I was little and still living with my biological mom I had to sometimes go in the closet when she drank too much or had a man over, and it was so dark in there. I always curled up in a small ball in the corner.

  Now, my body was doing the same thing it did then, vibrating like a phone going off and it was like the person just kept phoning and phoning. I bolted up, ran to the walls, made a fist and punched. I didn't punch hard enough to make a hole, but then I fired another punch and cracked the plaster, making a little hole. My hand ached, so I held it for a second.

  My bedroom door flung open and light shot in from the hallway like a bright laser beam.

  "Stuart, that's enough," said my mother.

  "I wanted to see Sam!" I punched again, making the crack a little bigger.

  "I know you did. But it wasn't possible. You know the consequences of hitting your wall," she said.

  "I don't care." She was always talking about stupid, stupid, stupid consequences. Didn't she know I didn't care? That's why my bed was in the middle of the room—so I couldn't stand up and punch the wall or draw on it from my bed. I had to get out of bed to get to the wall.

  Well, I'd gotten out of bed.

  She walked over to me and gently touched my arm. "How about we go downstairs for a few minutes? Have a snack?"

  My body stopped vibrating and I didn't have any more energy to punch the wall. "Okay. Pizza."

  "I can manage that," she said. She put her arm around me and guided me toward the door. "What happened to your night light?"

  "I dunno."

  "I'll make sure Dad fixes it while you eat."

  We went downstairs to the kitchen. My older brother, Declan, was still up and he was sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal. He's my biological brother and is three years older than me. We were adopted together, when I was five and he was eight. Now I'm fourteen and he's seventeen. Soon he's going to graduate from high school and get a job or go to school again. We both suck at school, although he does better than me. My parents want him to go to a school that will teach him how to be a mechanic because he loves cars.

  We also have a brother, Randy, and a sister, Mary, but they aren't biological and are older and don't live in our house but in their own places. Randy works for some company and wears a suit to work, and Mary is a lawyer and married to a lawyer. Soon, she was going to have a baby, so I'd be Uncle Stuart.

  Declan slurped at his cereal. I sat down across from him.

  "You used my phone," he said.

  "So?" I mumbled.

  "You have to ask." He wiped his mouth off. Then he got up and took his bowl to the sink. "You wanna play Madden NFL?"

  "Yeah," I said. Declan loved any video game with sports, but I liked ones with killing, shooting guns. I wasn't allowed to play those games though.

  "Stuart," said my mother. "That's not an option for you tonight."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "You need to get some sleep because I'm going to wake you up early to fix the cracks in your wall."

  "Did you punch again?" Declan asked.

  I shrugged. "I dunno."

  "He did," said my mother. "And he will have to fix it with putty and sand it down like he always does." My mother looked at me. "It's consequences. Now, what kind of pizza would you like?"

  "Pepperoni," I said. "Why can't we just leave the walls? It's my room."

  "Because they don't look very good." My mother stuck a piece of pizza in the microwave and pressed the buttons. "You need to respect where you live."

  "Whatever," I said. "But not tonight, right?"

  "No. I won't make you do it tonight. I know you've had a hard night." She put her hand on my shoulder and it felt good.

  I slouched in my seat. "Is Sam gonna be okay?"

  "I hope so." She spoke quietly. "He's in the hospital now and the doctors are taking care of him."

  "That was so weird," said Declan. "He just collapsed."

  "He's not weird!" I yelled.

  "I didn't say he was weird," said Declan. "I said it was weird." Declan shook his head at me. "The way he fell was weird."

  "Shut up!"

  The microwave started beeping.

  "Declan," said my mother. "Why don't you go to your room? Stuart has had a rough evening. We all have. I want to spend some quiet time with him."

  "Okay," he said. "But I'm playing video games and he can't come in."

  My mother put up her hand. "Thirty minutes max. Then I want you to get some sleep too."

  Declan left, and my mother put my pizza in front of me. Then she sat down across from me. "I do understand, Stuart, how hard this is for you. We all have to hope that Sam will be okay. I promise, I'll call the hospital in the morning to find out how he is."

  "I want to see him. Dad won't let me go to the hospital."

  "Right now, only his family can see him, and they might not even see him until later. The doctors are working on him because his heart stopped for a little while. This is really serious. Even if Dad did let you go to the hospital, you would just sit in the hallway in a chair. The doctors wouldn't allow you in his room because they will have to run tests on him. It's better to stay here, but I promise if I hear anything I will tell you."

  "Even if it's the middle of the night?"

  "Yes, I promise." She held up her hand, and I tapped it. That meant she would wake me up, even though I normally hated to be woken. Sometimes I didn't fall asleep until 3 or 4 in the morning.

  I stared at my pizza. "They hurt his heart by pounding on him."

  "No, they didn't. If anything, by doing what they did with the defibrillator, they helped him." She squeezed my shoulder. "Do you understand that?"

  I looked up at her. "A what?"

  "It's called a defibrillator. I think Sam's trainer called it an AED, which is just a short-form name. Sam went into cardiac arrest—that means his heart stopped—so it was necessary to use the machine to get his heart started again. Would you like to look at this on the internet?"

  "Sure."

  As we scanned through information on the internet about what had happened to Sam, I ate my pizza. My mother talked to me and showed me things like she always did. The AED was actually short form for words that were way too long. It did help me to see that it was something that would help Sam's heart start again.

  After I'd finished my pizza, she closed the lid on the computer. "Time for bed."

  This time when I went to bed, my room was a bit lighter because my dad had fixed my night light. Plus, my mother put a door stopper in my door, so it didn't close shut on me. It helped a little. Both of them came in and said good night to me.

  Lying on my bed, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to sleep but everything bounced and bounced.

  ****

  I must have slept because when I opened my eyes again it was morning, and my mother was shaking my shoulders.

  "Time to get up,
" she said.

  "No." I rolled over.

  "You need to do a little work in your room after last night."

  "Last night?"

  For ten minutes (my mother put a timer on), I had to putty the cracks I had made on my bedroom wall. My dad came in to see how I was doing before he went to work and we talked about Sam still being in the hospital. My dad was a lawyer too, just like my sister Mary, so he went to work every morning. And sometimes he worked late. I wanted to see Sam, but both my mom and dad said they would let me know when I could go.

  My mother dropped me and Declan off at school, and we walked in together. The first person I saw was Justin, the leader of the Best Buddies program. He organized all our events, even the dodgeball in the gym, which was my favourite because I love running and I'm faster than everyone, except for Sam.

  "Hey, Stuart," said Justin.

  "Hey," I mumbled. Nothing about the morning made me smile.

  "How you doing this morning?" he asked.

  I looked up at Justin. "Sam's hurt."