**A special thanks to bikoukumori for editing this chapter**
Max Roberts yawned. He was dead tired and completely worn out from worrying. His ass was numb from the uncomfortable plastic chair. It didn't help that Christian had been glued to him the whole time, he'd become used to it.
The elevator dinged and the door slid open. A skinny elderly woman with electric pink hair, sporting a black spandex dress walked out of it. Max choked back a laugh.
"LouLou, over here." Hal waved at the woman.
The obscenely bright red lipstick she wore illuminated her smile from across the room. She wiggled her fingers at him and sashayed over to them.
Max looked from Hal to her, then back to Hal. He was at a loss for words. She had to be in her sixties, dressed like a teenager from the seventies.
"How is she?" She asked in an obnoxious, high pitched tone.
"Really bad." Hal filled her in on what the doctors had told him.
"Can I see Mommy now?" Christian asked, yawning and stretching.
Hal hefted himself out of the chair. "I'll go and see Buddy." He walked over and said something to the receptionist. She giggled and picked up the phone. After a short conversation, she hung up. Hal returned to the group.
"They really don't want him in there. They said if one of us takes him he can go in for a few minutes." Hal held his hand out to Christian.
He shook his head 'no'. "I want Max to go with me."
Hal shrugged. "Then go with Max. I'll sit out here and cry about it."
"Girly." Christian giggled.
Max set him on the ground, rubbing his backside. "You'll have to walk. My butt is numb."
***
"We really do not want children back here." The nurse explained as she led them back to the same room Max had been in already. "It scares them."
"He's brave enough. Plus, she's all he has." Max said, feeling guilty that he couldn't say the same of himself. He wondered if that horrible nagging feeling would ever subside.
"I will be back in five minutes. That's all we can do." She said sternly.
Before Max opened the door for them, he wanted to warn him. He knelt down to his level. "There are lots of tubes and machines. They are helping to make your mom better. It might be a little scary."
Christian nodded and went in first. Max followed him in and shut the door behind them. Christian's eyes bounced from place to place in the room. Tears welled up in his eyes.
"Talk to her. She can hear you." Max held his hand.
"Mom?" When she didn't respond he started crying. "Why isn't she waking up?"
"She's very sick right now. She can hear you. When I was in here before, she squeezed my hand when I talked to her."
Christian walked closer and reached out to put his hand on hers. "Mom?"
Her eyes opened a little.
"She can't talk yet, so you'll just have to talk to her instead." Max told him quietly.
"Papa is here. LouLou is here. Max is here beside me." He sniffled. "I'm sorry. I wish you didn't get hurt." He leaned over the bed and laid his head near her hand. Megan's hand lifted enough to rest lightly on his hair.
"See? She knows you are here." Max spoke for her.
"I want you home."
"She will as soon as she's better, won't she?" He looked at her. Her eyes were little slits but he could see she was looking at him. Her eyelids drifted shut.
Suddenly, the machine on the right of her started screaming an angry high pitched tone. Max and Christian both jumped back, startled. Before they could comprehend what it was, several nurses and doctors ran in. One of the nurses ushered them out quickly.
"Mom!" Christian screamed as the door shut. "I didn't get to say I love you." He tried to yank the door open. A nurse told him to stay out of the room. "I forgot to say I love you!" He screamed at her.
Max grabbed him, dragging him away from the door. He hadn't remembered to say it either. Christian struggled to escape Max's hold. "Let me go! I want my mom!"
Max picked him up and began walking back towards the waiting room. He began kicking and screaming at him to let him go. When that didn't work, he started to hit Max.
"Christian, stop. I know you're scared. I didn't get to say it either." He struggled to not lose his grip on the boy. Seeing a chair in the hallway, he sat down on it before he accidentally dropped him. "I'm scared too."
"I didn't say it." He cried to Max. "Mom always said to make sure to say it. I forgot."
"It's alright." He hugged the boy tight, afraid he was going to lose what little control he had on his emotions. "She knows." He looked back at the room's door with a lump in his throat. No one had come out since they had been thrown out.
"I want my mom."
"I want your mom, too." He admitted, realizing for the first time in years just how much she had meant to him.
While he was away, he thought about her every day. He cherished every letter she had sent to him. He had picked up a pen on several occasions to write Megan a letter, but when the pen touched the paper, he lost all words to explain why he had been so terrible to her. The same thing happened when he read her emails. He couldn't find the words to say to her.
He couldn't say why he had acted the way he had. Maybe it was fear that like his father, he would end up regretting being a dad to anyone. His father had never really spent one-on-one time with him as a child. With Christian clinging to him, he began to think it might not be so bad. His thoughts wandered to all he had missed in his son's life.
He'd missed the first steps his own baby had taken, the grins and giggles, even his first day of kindergarten. His first scrape or cut that needed a kiss to cure. He didn't even know his favorite color or toys. That was something every good father knew.
"I'm sorry." He said aloud without thinking.
Christian stirred in his lap. "Huh?"
Max glanced down at him. "I'm just sorry." He hugged him and lapsed back into a silence, unsure of what to say or do.
***
A few days had passed since Megan's heart had stopped while Max and Christian were in with her. The doctors had managed to successfully revive her, and she eventually became somewhat stable. She was still not out of the danger zone, but they were no longer telling them to call in her family.
The nurses helped move her into the Intensive Care Unit, where she would be monitored almost twenty-four seven. To Max, the room appeared the same as the last. There were new doctors and nurses to care for her. Some were talkative, asking how they were related, some assumed they were married. He'd corrected them, knowing she'd probably smack him if he didn't.
The ICU's rules were a bit more lax, which meant that one family member could be in there from seven in the morning until nine at night. While Max was not technically family, Hal had made it seem that way to let him stay with her.
"Why don't you want to be in with her?" Max asked Hal, after he had come back from taking a shower at the house.
Hal ran his chubby hand through his short grey hair. "It reminds me of her mother. I love my daughter, I really do, but it is still hard to be in this setting." His eyes stared sadly off in the distance, before returning to Max. "I need to go get Christian's homework from the school, and see what the damage is at the house."
Max nodded in reply. "I'll sign in and go sit with her."
He walked over to the nurses' station. They handed him a sticker with large blue print stating he was a visitor. He slapped it on his shirt, and headed towards the corridor that led to the room she was in. After a short walk he reached room 111.
Opening the door, he was semi surprised to see her almost fully awake. The last few days she awoke very few times, a few blinks of her eyes and she'd go back to sleep. Her color was slightly better, the grey tone in her skin more subtle.
"Hey beautiful." He smiled.
Megan rolled her eyes, unable to talk because the tracheotomy tube was still in place. Her oxygen levels were not high enough to satisfy the doctors. Instead, she flipped him the bird.
"Now is that any way to treat a guest." He joked, pulling a chair that sat in the room closer and sat next to the bed.
She grinned. When she did, the weight of the three days of worrying incessantly seemed to fall off his shoulders. There was hope for her after all.
She tried to say something, but it came out garbled.
"Don't talk." Max reprimanded her sternly. "You aren't supposed to talk."
She closed her eyes, clearly frustrated. Max had an idea. He searched around and found a notepad and pen. He grabbed her hand and put the pen in it and sat the pad in her lap. "Write it."
Megan opened her eyes and shakily attempted to write. It looked like a bunch of squiggles.
"I've seen your kid write better than that." He teased. After pondering the wiggly lines, he realized it said Christian.
"He's with your Dad. They are picking up his homework from the classes he's missed this week."
She wrote a few more squiggles, but before she was finished he knew what it said. Jordan. "He's still hanging out in the county jail. I haven't heard anything since they picked him up."
She looked horrified. More wiggly lines were written in haste. Max took the pad and read it.
'Bail him out.'
"Megan, you are on a million different drugs, you don't know what you are saying." Max was getting angry. How could she just want him back, for God's sake he was the reason she was shot in the neck!
She yanked the pad away from him and wrote "Fuck you". She threw it on the bed and closed her eyes, unable to look at him.
"You don't mean that." She had never in the whole time he'd known her said those words to him. Her icy silence towards him did not help ease his mind that she did not mean it. Maybe she really did mean it. After all, he had left her, not helped with their child, and treated her terribly by leaving.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry for leaving you. I never should have." He rambled. "I shouldn't have walked out. I was angry you hid the kid from me. When you said that you didn't want me to hurt him, I knew we had grown apart. I walked out and refused to come back to you two. I didn't want you to have to worry about me hurting your son, or even you." Max didn't even know if she was listening. The thought that she may not even remember what he was saying seemed to make him relax.
"I remember when we were little, the summer your aunt asked you to go to her house a whole state away for a month. I was so lonely without you to get into mischief with me. You called me up and told me how you missed me and wished you could come home." He paused. "I felt that way the whole time I was away from you."
"I lost my best friend. I lost the love of my life. I lost out on watching my own child, our child, growing up. I missed out on everything because I was stupid and ran from them. I made excuses to cover up my own cowardice."
