The Choice - Nicholas Sparks [108]
“I was at the hospital next to the doctor when he got the page, and I just had to come see. . . .”
Travis barely heard her. Instead, all he could register was the sight of Gabby, his wife, propped up weakly on her hospital bed. She seemed disoriented, but her smile when she saw him told him everything he needed to know.
“I know you two have a lot of catching up to do . . . ,” Gretchen went on in the background.
“Gabby?” Travis finally whispered.
“Travis,” she croaked. Her voice sounded different, scratchy and hoarse from disuse, but somehow, it was Gabby’s voice just the same. Travis moved slowly toward the bed, his eyes never leaving hers, unaware that Gretchen was already backing out, shutting the door behind her.
“Gabby?” he repeated in near disbelief. In his dream, or what he thought was a dream, he watched as she moved her hand from the bed to her stomach, as if that took all the strength she had.
He sat on the bed beside her.
“Where were you?” she asked, the words slurry but nonetheless full of love, unmistakably full of life. Awake. “I didn’t know where you were.”
“I’m here now,” Travis said, and at that he broke down, his sobs coming out in heaving bursts. He leaned toward Gabby, aching for her to hold him, and when he felt her hand on his back, he began to cry even harder. He wasn’t dreaming. Gabby was holding him; she knew who he was and how much she meant to him. It’s real, was all he could think, this time, it’s real. . . .
With Travis unwilling to leave Gabby’s side, his dad covered for him at the clinic for the next few days. Only recently had he returned to something resembling a full-time schedule, and on weekends like this, with his daughters running and laughing in the yard and Gabby in the kitchen, he sometimes caught himself grasping for details of the past year. His memories of the days he spent in the hospital had a blurry, hazy quality to them, as if he’d been only slightly more conscious than Gabby.
Gabby hadn’t emerged from her coma unscathed, of course. She had lost a great deal of weight, her muscles had atrophied, and a numbness persisted on most of her left side. It took days before she could stand upright without support. The therapy was maddeningly slow; even now, she spent a couple of hours daily with the physical therapist, and in the beginning, she often grew frustrated that she could no longer do simple things she’d once taken for granted. She hated her gaunt appearance in the mirror and commented more than once that she looked as if she had aged fifteen years. In moments like those, Travis always told her she was beautiful, and he’d never been more sure of anything.
Christine and Lisa took a bit of time to adjust. On the afternoon that Gabby woke up, Travis asked Elliot Harris to call his mother so she could pick up the girls from school. The family was reunited an hour later, but when they stepped into the room, neither Christine nor Lisa seemed to want to get close to their mother. Instead, they clung to Travis and offered monosyllabic answers to whatever Gabby asked. It took half an hour before Lisa finally crawled onto the bed alongside her mother. Christine didn’t open up until the following day, and even then she kept her feelings at bay, as if she were meeting Gabby for the first time. That night, after Gabby had been transferred back to the hospital and Travis brought the girls home, Christine asked whether “Mommy was really back, or if she’d go back to sleep again.” Though the physicians made it clear they were fairly certain she wouldn’t, they hadn’t ruled it out completely, at least for the time being. Christine’s fears reflected his own, and whenever he found Gabby sleeping or simply resting after a grueling round of therapy, Travis’s stomach would clench. His breathing would get shallow, and he’d nudge her gently, growing increasingly panicked that she wouldn’t open her eyes. And when she finally stirred, he couldn’t mask his relief and gratitude. While Gabby accepted his anxieties in the beginning—she admitted the thought scared her