Once A Promising Boy
Maxwell was contemplating whether he just saw her finger move or he was hallucinating when Andrew came in.
He looked at Reyona’s still body and said “Still nothing?”
“I think I saw her finger move,” Maxwell said woodenly. Then he shook his head while still staring at the hand. “No, I think I was just…it didn’t move.”
Andrew nodded and said, “Can you step out for a bit?”
“For what?”
“It’s Allysyn.”
Maxwell’s head jerked upwards at that. “What?” How could he have forgotten that she was still in surgery?
It’s been over two hours.
Maxwell saw the doctor close to the door, and he was already walking towards the doctor even as Andrew jerked his thumb towards the doctor.
“What is going on? What happened? How is she?” He asked anxiously as he went out.
“She is fine. She is fine. I need you to know that she is fine.” the man said automatically.
Yet the way he said it made Maxwell ask, “But?”
“She sustained an injury. A nasty one from a blunt hit to her Coccyx, that is her tailbone. We had to quickly do surgery because I noticed she was in shock due to internal bleeding.”
Maxwell swore as his mind went to the discarded bat he had seen in the room.
Susan? Damn it!
“Thank God we urgently rescued the situation because the shattered coccyx had punctured the surrounding tissues, and she was bleeding badly. We were able to manage the situation, but she has lost a lot of blood. She needs a blood transfusion immediately.”
Why did he have to tell him that?
“Where is the problem?” Maxwell asked testily.
“The problem is we don’t have her blood type in our blood bank. She has a very rare blood type. Rh-Null. It is so rare that less than a hundred people carry it in the whole world. We don’t have the arrangement for it.”
That bitch must be useful for something.
“Susan. Get that bitch to do something useful for once in her life. She caused this after all.”
“Miss Rohan has lost a lot of blood as well, but it is of no use. We tested her blood just to see if there was any way we could work around their situation, but there wasn’t. She does not have the same blood type at all.”
Neither did Maxwell as well.
“How is that even possible? She is her mother.” Maxwell said in confusion.
“Yes, in some cases, a child can carry a type of blood even if the parents do not have it, but then that would mean that both parents had the recessive genes of such blood type. Both combined can cause the blood type in the child, but in this case, the mother does not have even a trace of the gene in her blood at all. And that only leaves us with one other possibility.”
Thomas “The father.” Maxwell completed.
The doctor nodded. “We need to get him here as soon as possible. She needs the transfusion urgently. We might have to temporarily use the synthetic blood for the moment because she can’t wait for long without having anything, but it is risky for a long-term solution. We need her blood type donor here, sir.”
“Okay, I…” he was already pulling out his phone to call Thomas when he remembered that his number had not been going through for a while now.
He faintly heard Andrew telling the doctor that they would get back to him as soon as possible.
He dialled Thomas’s number anyway.
The number you dialled is currently…
Damn it.
He looked back at Reyona as he thought of going to Susan’s room to shake any information he could out of her.
“What do we do now?” Andrew asked him.
“We need to get that bastard here. We need to get his ass here so he can give her the blood she needs.”
“Okay, are you able to reach him?”
“His damn number is not going through. I have no idea if he is at…” he stopped talking as he remembered who he could call to confirm that.
He dialled Mary’s number.
Mary picked on the second ring and Maxwell could barely hear her at first.
“Hello, Mary. Mary? Can you hear me?”
He heard a muffled whisper, then the sound of someone loudly blowing their nose.
He could hear another voice in the background also.
Just as he wondered if he had saved the wrong number, he heard the woman’s voice at the other end.
Still unclear but better than at first. “Hello, Max? Is that you?” Mary asked at the other end.
“Yes, yes, it is me,” Maxwell quickly answered.
As much as he wanted to just ask his burning question, the woman’s voice made him ask, “Are you fine, Mary?”
“Yes, I am fine. Life can just be so cruel, you know.”Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.
Maxwell had a feeling that asking further about that was going to take time he did not have. He simply said, “You are right. I am sorry about that. Have you seen Thomas today? I mean, do you know if he is around right now?”
“No, he is not. I just… Cliff and I came over so I could bring him some food. We talked about it, you know, me and Cliff. We thought we could convince him to shape up his life again. I mean… he was once a promising boy. Not solid in character like my Billy, but promising. Ruth was so proud of him. She would talk about him at every gathering. To see what he has become just breaks my heart. The bottle is killing him. I can’t imagine how Ruth would feel right now if she could see this place. Such a terrible mess. He stripped the whole place down! He couldn’t even be bothered to lock the door on his way out!”
She said in agitation and Maxwell heard someone telling her, “There, there,” in the background.
Old Cliff, he supposed.
Maxwell didn’t care if the bastard was about to jump off the cliff, he just needed his blood.
His possibly alcohol-free blood.
“I am sorry to hear that,” Maxwell said to comfort the woman. “Do you have his number? His new number, I mean. I need to reach him urgently.”
“Oh,” She heard him ask her husband something. The man responded in a gruff tone. Then Mary was back on the phone. “No, we don’t. Cliff saw him on a phone the day he got back, but not anymore. Maybe he sold that too?”
Damn it.
Andrew raised his brow at him as he asked “Nothing?”
“Nothing”, Maxwell answered in frustration.
Behind him, he heard a breathy call of “Max…well?”