Richard Paul Evans is the #1 bestselling author of
The Christmas Box. Each of his more than twenty novels has appeared on the
New York Times bestseller list, and there are more than seventeen million copies of his books in print. His books have been translated into more than twenty-four languages and several have been international bestsellers. He is the winner of the American Mothers Book Award, two first place
Storytelling World Awards for his children’s books, and the Romantic Times Best Women’s Novel of the Year Award. Evans received the Washington Times Humanitarian of the Century Award and the Volunteers of America National Empathy Award for his work helping abused children. Evans lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, Keri, and their five children.
Miles to Go
CHAPTER
Two
I’ve gone from a schedule of hours and minutes to not being able to tell you what day of the month it is.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
My second night in the hospital was rough. I was wet and hot with fever and somewhere in the night I started coughing. Each expulsion felt like another blade plunging into my stomach. The nurse checked my bandages, then told me not to cough, which wasn’t at all helpful. In spite of the medications they gave me to help me sleep, for most of the night I just lay there, lonely and aching. I wanted McKale more than life. Definitely more than life. Of course, if she were with me, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Exhaustion finally overcame me and I fell asleep around 4 or 5 A.M.
The next day I woke to a young nurse walking around my bed looking at monitors and writing on a clipboard. Since I’d been admitted to the hospital, a bevy of nurses and doctors had been swarming around me in my delirium, flashing in and out of my consciousness like dancers in a music video. But I didn’t remember any of them. This was the first nurse I was cognizant of. She was small, petite, and barely the height of a floor lamp. I watched her for a few minutes then said, “Morning.”
She looked up from her clipboard. “Good afternoon.”
“What time is it?” I asked. It was kind of a funny question since I didn’t even know what day, or week, it was. The last two weeks had run together like eggs in a blender.
“It’s almost twelve-thirty,” she said, then added, “Friday.”
Friday. I had left Seattle on a Friday. I’d been gone for just fourteen days. Fourteen days and a lifetime.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Norma,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
“How about an Egg McMuffin?” I said.
She grinned. “Not unless you can find one made of Jell-O. How about some pudding? The butterscotch is edible.”
“Butterscotch pudding for breakfast?”
“Lunch,” she corrected. “Also, in a couple hours we’re sending you in for a CT scan.”
“When can I take the catheter out?”
“When you can walk to the bathroom on your own—which we’ll attempt after we get the results back from your scan. Are you claustrophobic?”
“No.”
“Sometimes people get claustrophobic in the scanner. I can give you something for anxiety if you are. A Valium.”
“I don’t need anything,” I said. I didn’t care about the scan; I wanted the catheter out of me. In the haze of the last forty-eight hours, I vaguely remembered pulling the catheter out and making a real mess of things.
I had two good reasons for wanting it out; first, because it hurt. No one should stick anything up that part of the male anatomy. Second, an infection from a catheter is what killed my wife. The sooner the thing was out, the better.
A hospital orderly, a husky young freckled man wearing bright purple scrubs, came for me around two in the afternoon. He unhooked some wires and tubes from my body, then wheeled my entire bed down the linoleum corridor to radiology. I didn’t know it was my second visit until the technician operating the equipment said, “Welcome back.”
“Have I been here before?”
“You were out the first time,” she replied.
The scan was tedious, surprisingly loud, and took about an hour. When it was through, the orderly wheeled me back to my room and I fell asleep. When I woke, Angel was back.