Chapter Text
October 2019
John Dutton closed his eyes, the rhythmic hum of the ventilator lulling him into a half-sleep. Beside him, Evelyn stirred, her head on his chest. He adjusted his arm, holding her close and opened his eyes again to look at Jamie, fast asleep in the hospital bed beside them. He studied his son’s features, features that bore no resemblance to his: the thick, black hair still, somehow, perfectly coiffed; the sharp cheekbones hinting at his Native American ancestry; the thin lips, partially separated by a tube snaking its way down his throat; the thick eyelashes covering those piercing grey-blue eyes.
How did we get here? John thought, not for the first time that night. He thought back to the evening before, to Jamie calling him, his short, raspy breaths and stifled sobs. His father had known immediately what was wrong, his stomach twisting into a knot and dropping, his heart suddenly in his throat and pounding. He’d managed to keep Jamie on the phone and worked out where he was on the ranch, a place called The Point that the kids, but especially Jamie, had all loved growing up. The views were stunning: the Absarokas rose up on either side, a magnificent, narrow valley cutting between their granite faces, as it washed out to the west and into the greater Paradise Valley. The Point always promised the best sunsets on the ranch, as the sun sank below the Gallatin Range, enveloping the earth in a glow of oranges, pinks, and purples. John had been so grateful, so relieved to see Jamie, sitting there, alive, the beam of John’s headlights illuminating his son’s back from behind ---
John was suddenly pulled back to the present, as Jamie sat bolt upright, struggling to pull out the ventilator tube with his right, while his father in one swift motion sought to push his hand back and force him back onto the bed. But Jamie’s strength was surprising, unrelenting even, and he pushed back, his left hand instead ripping out the needles in his right forearm, blood suddenly all over his skin and the sheets.
“Jamie! Jamie!” John shouted, trying to force his attention towards him as he simultaneously shouted for help from the staff. Evelyn had awoken when John had jumped up trying to hold his son’s hands back, shrieking at Jamie’s sudden outburst. “Jamie!” she pleaded. “Shh! Shh! It’s okay, we’re here.” Jamie’s eyes were wild, looking off into the distance, lost in some place that neither John nor Evelyn nor the hospital staff could get to. Three large male nurses held Jamie down, two on his right side, one on the left, which led to further struggle on Jamie’s part as he kicked and kept flailing his arms about.
“Please don’t hurt him,” Evelyn begged. John, not wanting to see a repeat of what had happened that morning when he’d been admitted to the hospital, pushed past the orderly to his right and put his head beside Jamie’s, laying his right hand on Jamie’s chest and draping his left around the side of his head, cradling it. “Shhh, shhh,” he soothed, into Jamie’s right ear, looking out as a fourth nurse, on instructions from a physician who had rushed into the room, injected something into Jamie’s left bicep. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be alright.”
Tears streaked down Evelyn’s face as she watched the four nurses hold Jamie down. He slowly stopped struggling, his eyes beginning to droop shut even though he kept fighting to keep them open. “Is he okay? What happened?” she asked a young female nurse at the foot of the bed. “He’ll be okay,” the nurse reassured her, “sometimes people come to like that as the sedatives begin to wear off.”
“What about his arm?” Evelyn asked, looking at the blood and needles, as another nurse worked to bandage it.
“He’ll be fine. It looks worse than it is. People rip needles out all the time. He may have torn a vein given the amount of blood, but it will clot,” the woman reassured Evelyn again.
The doctor looked at Jamie, who had calmed down and fallen back into a deep sleep as if nothing had ever happened, and then back towards his parents. “We are going to have to restrain him,” he said, “to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
John nodded and Evelyn just looked down silently, crying softly. The doctor walked over to her and touched her shoulder. “I know this is really tough but I do promise you he is going to come through this and he will be okay,” he said quietly. She patted his hand – this doctor was young enough to be one of her kids, for god’s sake – and smiled up at him sadly and whispered a “thank you.”
The four nurses strapped Jamie’s ankles and wrists to the bed, giving just enough room for movement but not enough for Jamie to attempt to dislodge the ventilator or pull at the cannulas in his arms or hands again. John watched quietly from the head of the bed, his head still beside Jamie’s, patting his left shoulder reassuringly, his right hand firmly on Jamie’s right shoulder. He let out a heavy sigh. How did we get here? he thought again.