sure you’ll be called as soon as they’re ready for you, Mr. Reiss.”
“We’re going in now,” he said, moving toward the doors. “You can either call an escort, or we’ll go find Tyler ourselves.”
“Um, just a moment.” The woman hastily picked up the receiver of the telephone on her desk. Moments later a stern-faced nurse appeared to escort them back.
Jackson Reiss had always had a way of getting what he wanted, Laurel thought with a touch of wistfulness.
Unfortunately, this seemed like the first time in almost four years that she and he had wanted the same thing.
Two
T yler burst into tears the moment he saw his parents, and held out his little arms to Laurel. She scooped him up, snuggling her face into his neck. “See?” she said, her voice bright and bracing. “I told you Mommy and Daddy would be close by.”
“Wanna go home.”
“I know, baby.” She shifted him more snugly onto her hip. His legs, bare beneath the thin, child-sized hospital gown, wrapped around her with a grip that let her know he wouldn’t release her again without a struggle. “We have to stay here now, but Mommy’s going to be right here with you, okay?”
“Wanna go home,” Tyler repeated, his lip quivering as he looked to his father for reinforcement.
Jackson reached out to ruffle Tyler’s fine, white-blond hair. “We’ll take you home as soon as the doctor says it’s okay, buddy.”
A chocolate-skinned nurse with a riot of black curls around her appealing face hovered nearby. She nodded toward a deeply cushioned chair on one side of the private hospital room. “That chair converts into a single bed. One of you is welcome to spend the night here with Tyler.”
A wooden rocker sat on the other side of the standard hospital bed on which Tyler had been sitting when Laurel and Jackson entered. Picking up the stuffed penguin Tyler had dropped on the bed, Laurel sat in the rocker with Tyler nestled in her lap. Leaving Jackson to talk with the nurse, she concentrated on cheering up her son.
“You and I are going to spend the night here, Tyler. Mommy will sleep right here beside your bed.”
Tyler sniffed. “Angus, too?”
“Of course Angus, too.” She patted the stuffed penguin’s somewhat grubby head. “And look, we have a TV and a stack of cartoon movies. There are some of your favorites here. We’ll watch one together, okay?”
Tyler nodded tentatively. Her promise that she would stay with him had reassured him somewhat, even if he was still clearly bewildered by what was going on.
Barely three, he was still too young to understand that even though he felt fine, there was something wrong with him that required medical intervention. To him, it must seem that one moment he had been playing with his toys and the next he’d been in the hospital being poked and prodded by strangers.
That was pretty much the way it felt to Laurel, too.
On the suggestion of Beverly Schrader, their nanny, Laurel had taken the morning off on this nice Thursday in early April to take Tyler for a medical checkup. Though she had tried to convince herself that Beverly was overreacting, she had mentioned to the pediatrician the symptoms Beverly had noted. The pediatrician had taken Beverly’s observations seriously enough to run a few tests—and the next thing she’d known, Laurel had been sitting in the Portland General Hospital waiting room while Tyler was rushed to specialists.
She had tracked Jackson down on a construction job he was supervising. He had dropped everything and hurried to join her. And suddenly they were facing open-heart surgery.
It had all happened so fast that Laurel’s head seemed to be spinning. No wonder little Tyler was confused.
She heard Jackson asking a string of questions of the patiently helpful nurse, but she didn’t try to monitor that conversation. She figured Jackson would tell her later what she needed to know. For now she focused on her child.
“I’ll be back at five with your dinner, Tyler,” said the nurse, whose nametag identified her as Ramona. “Do you like spaghetti and applesauce?”
Tyler nodded, then added, “Like ice cream, too.”
Ramona flashed a smile. “I’ll see what I can do about that.”
Left alone, Laurel and Jackson studied each other over Tyler’s head. More at home in the chaos of a construction site, Jackson looked restless and uncomfortable in the sterile and studiously cheery setting of a hospital pediatric room.
“I should probably go get my parents,” he said, glancing toward the door.
Laurel’s arms tightened spasmodically around her son and words of protest rose instinctively in her throat, but she swallowed them and nodded. Jackson had every right to want his parents with him, just as they had a right to be close to their grandchild. She was being selfish to want to keep Tyler all to herself until this whole ordeal was over.
It was just that once the close-knit Reiss family was together, Laurel always felt like the outsider. Changing her surname to theirs hadn’t made her one of them.
It wasn’t that they had ever treated her badly. They had been nothing but politely gracious to her, just as they were to everyone outside the family. She knew much of the problem was hers. Since she hadn’t been raised in a family like this, she had never quite known how to behave with them, resulting in her being a bit guarded around them.
Though adept at making small talk and swapping repartee with others, she’d turned stilted in the presence of Jackson’s parents. Jackson, for one, had certainly noticed. He had accused her almost from the beginning of not liking his parents, and the more he had pushed her, the more defensive she had become. Especially when it came to his paragon of a mother.
Laurel had fifteen minutes alone with her son, and she savored every one of them. Though his vocabulary was limited, he managed to tell her about the people who had looked at him and done so many things to him. Laurel and Tyler had actually been separated for just over an hour, but it had seemed much longer to both of them. Tyler admitted he had rather liked nurse Ramona, but he was glad to be with his mommy again.
Snuggled into her arms, he stuck his left thumb into his mouth and allowed himself to relax, his eyelids getting heavy. Laurel rested her cheek on his silky blond hair and closed her own eyes, desperately wishing—
“There’s my sweet baby.” Donna Reiss rushed into the room on a wave of floral perfume and grandmotherly concern. She knelt beside the rocking chair and rested a trembling hand on Tyler’s arm. “Gammy’s here, darling, and so is Gampy. We’re all going to take very good care of you.”
“Gammy,” Tyler murmured with a sleepy smile. But it was Laurel’s heart he nestled closer to as he drifted into a restless nap.
It was almost eight o’clock that evening when Jackson convinced Laurel to leave the hospital room for a short break. Reminding her that she had missed lunch, he persuaded her to join him in the hospital cafeteria for a quick dinner. Tyler was sleeping, and Donna and Carl said they would stay with him until Laurel returned. They had already eaten,
