Heart

Twenty-Five

The hospital was pretty busy that night and well into the next morning. Gabriella was taken immediately to the infirmary, her parents were contacted, and they all were eventually reunited in her room. She only had minor cuts, some bruises, and a sprained wrist. No broken bones or head injuries. The doctors wanted to keep her overnight to nourish her, but then they found that she didn’t need it. She was perfectly healthy, so she got to go home around midnight. She told the police what had happened during her kidnapping, and regrettably, another part of her hadn't been as lucky as her well-fed stomach.

I, on the other hand, had a stab wound in my right shoulder that had to be sewed up. I wanted to be put under some strong anesthetic when I got my stitches, and they complied. The stab was the worst blow that I’d taken, and the rest were like Gabriella’s--cuts, bruises, the works. I had to stay overnight since I’d passed out in the parking lot; they wanted to make sure everything would be alright. Needless to say, my parents were freaking out and my mom was crying when she got a call from the cops saying I was being sent to the hospital. But the plus side was that my phone had survived everything I’d went through, which meant that we had everything on tape. Novak was busted, arrested, and thrown behind bars.

Ah, Detective Charles Novak. A police officer had taken it upon himself to tell me about him after he’d gotten my statement. It turned out that Novak wasn’t even his real name; his real name was Theodore Nye, a notorious serial killer/rapist in the late fifties and early sixties. He had killed a total of fifteen women and two men. (He only targeted women, but the men had been witnesses, so he had to kill them.) On his fifteenth kill, he had finally been caught and sent to prison, but he had escaped only a few months afterwards. To keep a low-key profile, he had taken over the identity of a deceased detective--Charles Novak--and had also changed his appearance up a little bit.

Knowing all of that, it made me appreciate what Alan had done for me ten times more.

Alan. . .

He was alive and well--sort of. He had to undergo surgery for his leg, for that was where he had been shot. He had several knife wounds, but they weren’t fatal; when he’d fallen, he hadn’t exactly broken his arm, but it had been cracked a little. He had to get a cast for that, stitches for most of his cuts, and then that surgery. I knew he had wanted to clear his name too, but he hadn’t seemed to care about that towards the end. My personal opinion was that he had went through all of that . . . pain for me. Maybe that sounded conceited, but I thought it was true.

I had been released a couple of hours ago, and it about took me that long to convince my parents to let me see Alan alone. I wasn’t sure how I would react to seeing him in a hospital bed, so just in case I would be a bit dramatic, I forced them to stay out in the waiting room until I got back.

So, in the present time, that’s where I was: at Alan’s door, taking a deep breath to steel myself, and then grasping the handle.

It was very quiet, minus the beeping of the heart monitor. The room was dim, for the blinds were drawn. The only light came from a muted television hanging from the ceiling and a low-watt lamp across the room. There were two chairs, one on either side of the bed, and a window seat. Alan’s mom lay there, her face drawn and pale, asleep.

I closed the door silently behind me, and forced myself to look at the hospital bed. The thin covers were pulled all the way up to Alan’s chest, which was rising and falling in the methodic breathing of sleep. And although all the wires coming from his arms sort of made me agitated, it helped that his face was relaxed in a pain-free slumber. This was the first time I’d seen him since he forced me to leave him in the abandoned apartment building, and I had to admit, I was overwhelmed at the sight of him.