Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [91]
“What do you mean?” he finally asked.
“If I get the transfer, I’ll introduce you to my boss, you can interview with him, and I bet he’ll hire you.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
He thought about it overnight and called me the next morning.
“Nick,” he said. “I think I want to be a pharmaceutical rep.”
And lo and behold, after I received a new territory centered in New Bern, North Carolina, my brother was hired, took over my old territory in Sacramento, and I handed him the keys to my company car.
Meanwhile, Cat and I began the process of getting ready for a new life on the other side of the country.
In early November, less than a week after Micah accepted the job, I was at home and beginning the slow process of packing up our things when I got a frantic call from my father.
“You’ve got to get to the hospital right now,” my father suddenly said. He was breathless and scattered, a reprise of that fateful call three years ago. “She’s at Methodist. Do you know where that is? Bob just brought her in a couple of minutes ago.”
Bob, I knew, was Dana’s boyfriend, but my dad’s garbled message didn’t make sense.
“Who? Are you talking about Dana? Is she okay?”
“Dana . . . she’s in the hospital . . .”
“Is she okay?” I repeated.
“I don’t know . . . I’ve got to get down there . . .”
My head suddenly began spinning with a sense of déjà vu.
“Do you know what happened? Was she in an accident?”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t think so . . . Bob said she had a seizure of some sort . . . I don’t know anything else . . . Micah’s on his way . . . I’m heading there now.”
At the hospital, Bob told us what had happened. Bob lived on a ranch in Elk Grove and worked as a local trucker delivering feed for horses and cattle. Taller and heavier than Micah or me, he wore cowboy boots and had competed in bareback rodeo riding. I’d never seem him look as frightened as he did at that moment.
“She woke up and she couldn’t talk right,” he said. “Her words were all mixed up, and she didn’t make any sense. So I loaded her in the car, and we started for the hospital. On the way, her eyes rolled back, and she started to convulse. She was still having the seizure when we got here. They took her back, and I haven’t seen her since.”
Though a different hospital, it was eerily reminiscent of the one where my mother had died. So were our feelings as we paced the small corridor, waiting to hear what was going on. And so was the room where we eventually saw my sister.
Dana was tired when we saw her; she’d been given medication for the seizure, and her eyes drooped. She, like us, was frightened, and she knew no more of what had happened to her than we did. But other than exhaustion, she seemed fine. She could tap the tips of her fingers against her thumb, she could remember everything from the night before. And she remembered realizing that something was wrong when she woke up earlier that morning.
“I remember trying to talk,” she said, somewhat groggily. “I can even remember hearing the words coming out, but they were the wrong words. So I’d try to repeat myself, and the same thing happened again. And the smell. I kept smelling something really bad. That’s when Bob put me in the car. I don’t remember anything after that, though.”
Later, the doctor said she had had a grand mal seizure, though when pressed, he wouldn’t speculate as to the reason until further tests came in. He did suggest that it was probably best if she rested for a while.
I was the last one to get up to leave; once the others had left the room, Dana asked me to stay.
“Nick,” she said, “tell me the truth. I want to know what’s going on. Why did I have a seizure?”
“There are lots of possible causes,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry too much.”
“Like what?”
She searched my face, trusting me, wanting to know. My sister knew that I would always tell her the truth.
“Anything, really. A sudden allergy. Stress.