“Someone else needs to know what’s going on,” I explained. “Someone besides me, anyway. If anyone will know what to do, it’s Nick. He’s been where you are before.”
Dawn didn’t protest, just let her head flop back onto her pillow. Taking that as a form of permission, I pressed the button to place the call.
Nick answered on the third ring. “Hey, Kev… everything okay?” he asked, clearly concerned. I couldn’t blame him. It was almost four in the morning, which was late even for Las Vegas.
“Not really. Where are you right now?” I’d half-expected to hear dance music blaring on his end, but the lack of background noise told me he wasn’t at a club. I hoped he hadn’t already gone to bed. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Nah. Lo and I just got back to our room. Why, what’s wrong?”
“Dawn’s sick. I’m getting kinda worried about her. She doesn’t wanna go to the ER, but I… I dunno what to do,” I admitted. “Can you come over?”
Nick hesitated for only a second before answering. “Yeah, of course, bro. Be right there.”
“Thanks.” Ending the call, I turned my head toward Dawn. “Nick’s on his way. Do you think you can get the door?”
“Yeah.” Dawn got up again gradually, sitting on the side of the bed for a few seconds before she climbed to her feet. She clung to the wall as she trudged through our suite, turning lights on along the way.
I watched until she rounded the corner and I could no longer see her. Even then, I listened closely, worried I would hear another thump as she collapsed. I was probably just being paranoid, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the day after Brian’s Superbowl party, when Dawn had passed out in the middle of doing my morning routine. My mind kept replaying it like a scene from a movie. Over and over again, I saw her pasty white face go blank and her blue eyes roll back in her head, her knees buckling as her body slumped to the floor. I pictured her lying there, unconscious, and heard my frightened voice repeatedly calling her name. But, most of all, I remembered how helpless I had felt in that moment. I hoped I wouldn’t have to relive it.
I held my breath until I heard a knock at the door, then let it out with a huge sigh of relief. “Hey,” said Nick as Dawn opened the door to let him in. “Kevin called and said you weren’t feeling well.”
“Kevin’s just being overly cautious,” she replied, closing the door behind him. “I’m okay… just nauseous and kinda dizzy. But I think it’s just because I drank too much before taking my medication, which was dumb. Turns out, heart meds and alcohol don’t mix.”
Nick let out a low chuckle. “I could have told you that,” he said, his voice growing louder as he came around the corner, wearing a plain white t-shirt and his favorite red sweatpants. I was surprised to see Lauren with him. She had also changed out of her concert clothes and into something more comfortable – in her case, a black tank top and a baggy pair of pajama bottoms.
“Hey, Kevin,” she said, flashing me an awkward smile as she followed Nick and Dawn into the bedroom. She must have felt uncomfortable standing at the foot of my bed in her pajamas while I was lying completely naked beneath the covers, but that was nothing compared to how I felt. Lauren may not have known for sure that I was naked, but I knew, and it made me feel even more self-conscious.
“Hey,” I forced myself to reply. “Thanks for coming over. Sorry to call y’all so late, but I wanted someone else to be here, just in case something happened.” My gaze shifted to Dawn. “Dawn must have forgotten to mention the fact that she’s having heart palpitations – or that she’s been vomiting for the past two hours.”
Nick and Lauren both raised their eyebrows, exchanging concerned glances before their gazes settled on Dawn, too. “Is that true?” Lauren asked her.
Dawn nodded. “The heart palpitations are nothing new,” she said, sinking back down onto the side of the bed. “I’m been having them off and on for months now.”
“I used to have them, too, especially at night,” Nick said knowingly, sitting down next to her. “Not so much anymore, thankfully. But I remember this one time, when we were in Mexico during the Unbreakable tour, I went out with Howie and drank way too much tequila. I’m pretty sure I passed out in my hotel room that night, and when I woke up the next day, it felt like my heart was doing some kind of interpretive dance routine inside my chest. I was so dizzy and nauseous, I thought I was dying.”
I had heard a less detailed version of this story in the hospital on the day Nick got his diagnosis, but hearing him tell it again five years later was no less horrifying. You’re lucky you didn’t die, dumbass, I thought, shaking my head in disbelief.
“That’s not far off from how I’m feeling,” Dawn admitted. “But I only drank two beers and a glass of wine. I honestly didn’t think that would be enough to mess me up this much.”
“My doctor told me it doesn’t take much,” said Nick. “Especially when you’re on medication. I never had to take meds for my heart, but mixing alcohol with drugs was what damaged it in the first place. And I don’t just mean illegal drugs. At my lowest point, I was abusing painkillers, too.” He glanced back at me, giving me a guilty look.
“It’s the meds that’ll get ya,” I agreed with him. “Mine just make me feel more intoxicated than I actually am, so I can’t hold my liquor like I used to. But I don’t know much about the meds you’re taking. I’m assuming they’re different from mine.”
Dawn nodded but said nothing.
Lauren approached her hesitantly. “Do you mind if I check your pulse?” she asked. When Dawn shook her head, Lauren picked up her hand and turned it over, pressing two fingers to the inside of her wrist. “I used to be a vet tech,” she explained as I watched with astonishment. “Taking vitals on a person isn’t that different from doing it on a pet. You’re much more cooperative than most of the patients I dealt with.” Her lips twitched into a faint smile, which quickly faded as her forehead creased. “Only problem is, I’m having trouble feeling your radial pulse.”
“Try the carotid,” said Dawn, taking Lauren’s hand and guiding it to her neck. “It’s a lot stronger there.”
“Oh yeah, that’s better,” Lauren said, nodding as she dug her two fingertips into a spot just beneath Dawn’s jawbone. “Sorry… we used the femoral artery in animals. If we couldn’t find a palpable pulse there, we would just put our hand on their chest and feel their heartbeat. But I figured you wouldn’t want me feeling you up in either of those places.” She flashed Dawn another impish grin.
“Better you than some random doctor,” Dawn replied, managing a weak smile in return. “I really don’t want to go back to the hospital.”
“We don’t want that either,” Lauren reassured her. “Quiet for a second, so I can concentrate.” I watched her face as she felt Dawn’s pulse, looking down at the floor with a frown. “It feels pretty fast,” she announced after a few seconds. Lifting her head, she suddenly locked eyes with me. “You said she’s been vomiting for the past couple hours?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I lost count of how many times, but, between her stomach and her bladder, she’s been in and out of the bathroom all night.”
“Her bladder?” Lauren repeated, her eyes darting back to Dawn. “Have you been peeing a lot, too?”
Dawn nodded. “I take a diuretic twice a day to help with edema, but it’s always worse when I lie down at night.”
“You’re probably dehydrated,” said Lauren, still frowning. “That can cause dizziness, a rapid heartbeat, and changes in blood pressure.” She turned to her fiance. “Nick, go get her some Gatorade – or anything with electrolytes.”
While Nick went to find a vending machine, I looked up at Lauren. “There should be a portable blood pressure monitor in my bag, if you wanna check her BP,” I told her, wanting to be helpful, too. “Dawn’s supposed to be taking it twice a day, but she didn’t do it tonight.”
“I was tired,” Dawn muttered, turning to give me a mutinous look as Lauren left her side to search through my luggage. “I’ll take it first thing in the morning, I promise. But, right now, I just wanna lie down and try to sleep.
Lauren found the black case containing my blood pressure monitor and carried it back over to the bed. “You can lie down,” she said, patting Dawn’s pillow. “But, before you fall asleep, let’s just check your blood pressure and make sure it’s not too high or low. All right?”
Dawn gave a reluctant nod as she reclined against the pillow, pulling her legs up onto the bed. Her feet and ankles still looked puffy to me. “I guess I really am the grandma of the group,” she said grudgingly as she held out her left arm, letting Lauren wrap the cuff around it. “Sorry for causing such a fuss.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lauren replied, rubbing her shoulder reassuringly. “We just wanna make sure you’re all right.” She pushed the button on the blood pressure monitor.
“I’ll be fine, really,” Dawn insisted, closing her eyes as the cuff inflated.
When it finished taking its reading, Lauren looked at the screen. “Ninety-five over fifty-five,” she announced. “That’s definitely on the low side.”
“It’s not that low,” Dawn argued without opening her eyes. “That’s basically Kevin’s baseline. I bet if you took his blood pressure next, it would be about the same.”
“Lemme see that,” I said. When Lauren tilted the monitor toward me, I took a look at the numbers on its screen and immediately noticed the squiggly irregular heartbeat symbol next to Dawn’s high heart rate. That was more alarming to me than her low blood pressure. But when I mentioned it, Dawn didn’t seem too worried.
“It’s probably a-fib,” she muttered. “Atrial fibrillation. From what I’ve been told, it’s pretty common in people with cardiomyopathy. Mine comes and goes. I’m already taking medication to control it, so I doubt there’s much else they could do for me in the ER.”
Lauren looked more concerned. “Are you having any chest pain or shortness of breath?” she asked.
Dawn shook her head. “No… not like I did a couple months ago,” she said, glancing over at me. “This is different. I don’t feel like I’m having a heart attack this time; I just feel drunk. And I guess maybe dehydrated. I mean, we are in a desert. I probably didn’t drink enough water today.”
Before I could respond, I heard another knock on the door. Lauren rushed to get it. Nick was back with two bottles of Gatorade. “I wasn’t sure which you liked better, Lemon Lime or Cool Blue, so I got both,” he said to Dawn as he walked into the bedroom, holding up one bottle in each hand.
“Let’s go with the Lemon Lime,” said Dawn, sitting up a little straighter against the headboard. “Thanks, Nick.”
“No problem,” he replied, twisting off the cap before handing her the highlighter yellow sports drink.
“Sip it slowly now,” Lauren warned her as she raised it to her lips. “You need to keep it down for it to help.”
Dawn nodded. She swallowed a small mouthful, then made a face. “Oh man… I haven’t had Gatorade since my softball days,” she said. “I almost forgot how gross it is.” But she managed to finish most of the bottle before falling asleep.
By then, it was almost five a.m., and we were all beyond exhausted. “Go back to the room, baby,” Nick finally told Lauren, who was gazing out the window with a blank, glassy-eyed expression. “I’ll crash here in case Kev or Dawn need anything.”
“You don’t have to do that, Nick,” I said quietly, so as not to wake Dawn, who was snoring next to me. “I think the worst is over now.”
“Yeah, but Dawn needs to rest, and you need someone to turn you and do your morning routine, right?” he replied matter-of-factly.
I sighed as I realized it was already time for me to be repositioned in bed. The alarm Dawn had set earlier was due to go off in the next few minutes. “Right,” I said.
“So I might as well just stay, don’t you think? That way, Dawn can sleep in.”
“I appreciate the offer, but it’s a program day tomorrow… I mean, today,” I warned him.
“All the more reason to give Dawn a break,” Nick said with a shrug.
I couldn’t argue with that.
After Lauren left, Nick shut off Dawn’s alarm, letting her sleep while he repositioned me. He rolled me onto my left side, so I was faced away from her. “Thanks, brother,” I whispered as he adjusted my pillows. “Seriously… I can’t thank you and Lauren enough for coming over and taking care of Dawn for me.”
“No problem,” Nick replied, pulling the covers back up over my body. “I didn’t really do much. It was mostly Lauren.”
“She was a big help tonight,” I agreed. “I had no idea she had any kind of medical training.”
“Yeah… she’s got a degree in nutrition, too,” he told me. “Lo knows all kinds of stuff. Sometimes it makes me wonder what she’s doing with a guy like me, who didn’t even graduate high school. She’s a hell of a lot smarter than I’ll ever be.”
“Well, obviously, being such a smart woman, she’s with you for the same reason Nat’s with me: for the money,” I joked, winking to let him know I was kidding.
Nick laughed but said nothing, which made me wonder: Was he genuinely insecure about what he perceived to be an intellectual disparity between him and his future wife? Watching his smile fade, I felt bad for calling him a dumbass earlier, even if it was only inside my own head. It wasn’t like I had never called him that to his face before. Over the years, the other guys and I had often treated Nick like the “dumb blond” of the group, mocking him for mispronouncing words and messing up dance moves. After being teased one too many times, maybe he had come to believe it was true.
“But, seriously, education isn’t the same as intelligence,” I added. “You’re smart, too, Nick. Smarter than you know. I mean, think of all those songs you wrote for the album… and your book that’s coming out later this year! You’re turning out to be quite the talented writer, on top of being a great singer, musician, and friend.” I looked him in the eye, emphasizing the last word.
“Stop. You’re making me blush,” he mumbled, one corner of his mouth tugging into a crooked grin. “But thanks, bro.”
“Thank you. I appreciate you staying.”
“It’s the least I could do. I mean, you did give me free Def Leppard tickets,” Nick said as he connected my phone to its charging cable and set it down on the nightstand. “Need anything else before I go to bed?”
“Nah, I’m good for now. ‘Night, Nick.”
“‘Night, Kev,” he whispered back before he turned off the lamp with a click, plunging the bedroom into darkness once more.
By the faint beams of pre-dawn light filtering through the gauzy curtains, I watched his silhouette creep across the suite, carrying the comforter from Dawn’s abandoned bed out to the couch in the other room. Then I closed my eyes and let the steady sound of her snoring lull me to sleep.
***
It felt like I had barely closed my eyes when I was startled awake again, this time by a shrill beeping sound. Recognizing FaceTime’s ringtone, I realized it was my phone and forced my eyes open, only to be blinded by the bright sunlight that was streaming straight into my face through the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows on the other side of the room. I had forgotten to have Nick close the blackout curtains before he went to bed.
Blinking, I freed my right arm from the tangle of covers and rolled toward the nightstand to reach my phone, rushing to silence it before it woke anyone else. I was not surprised to see Natalie’s name at the top of its screen. We still made an effort to talk on the phone at least once a day whenever she was out of town, even if it meant working around two totally different timezones. Fumbling with my phone, I clumsily tapped the button to accept her call and waited for her face to pop up on the screen. “Hey, baby,” I croaked when it did, wincing at the way my voice sounded.
“Hi! Sorry for waking you up,” Natalie said with a sheepish smile. She was all done up for work, I noticed, wearing her navy blue Delta uniform and a full face of makeup. “I waited as long as I could to call you before my flight back to Atlanta leaves. I was hoping you would already be awake.”
I cleared my throat. “That’s okay. I would have been, if I hadn’t been up all night,” I said, glancing at the time displayed at the top of my screen: 7:09. “I just went to sleep a couple hours ago.”
“Really?” She raised her eyebrows. “You must have had a fun night.”
I laughed because that couldn’t have been further from the truth. “Well, the concert was fun,” I replied, relaxing back into a more comfortable position. “But-”
That was as far as I got before Natalie interrupted me. “Hold up. Who is that in bed with you?” she demanded, her eyes narrowing as her jaw dropped. “Is that Dawn?”
For a few moments, I had almost forgotten that I’d let Dawn fall asleep in my bed. But, looking at the small window in the bottom left corner of my screen, I could see what Natalie had noticed on my camera when I’d adjusted the angle of my phone. Dawn was lying beside me, her body close to mine, like she was spooning me from behind. But that wasn’t the worst part. As my eyes dropped to the displaced covers, I realized that her arm was draped over my bare torso. I hadn’t even felt it there because it was below my level of injury, but I could feel her warm breath tickling the back of my neck each time she exhaled. Judging by the sound of her slow, deep breathing, she was still fast asleep, completely oblivious to the fact that she had cuddled up next to me in the night.
“Yeah,” I said, reaching down to remove Dawn’s arm from around my waist. “It’s kind of a long story.” I started to tell it, but Natalie cut me off again.
“Are you kidding me?!” she cried, shaking her head in disbelief. “Is this what you and Dawn do when I’m not around?!”
“What? No, of course not, baby,” I tried to convince her, but Natalie wasn’t listening.
“Wait… don’t answer that,” she added as I spoke, holding up her hand as if to silence me. “I don’t wanna hear it. I can’t deal with this now, Kevin; I’m about to board a plane. But when I get back, you and I are going to have a conversation about this.”
“Oh, come on, Nat, it’s not what it looks like,” I sputtered, trying to gently nudge Dawn away from me without waking her. “You know Dawn and I would never… If you’d just let me explain…”
“Save it, Kevin,” Natalie hissed and ended the call before I could say anything else. I tried calling her back right away, but she rejected my call almost immediately. So I started texting her instead, painstakingly typing the entire story into the tiny textbox with my pinky knuckle.
I was still tapping out words when Nick wandered into the bedroom. “Hey, bro,” he said, stifling a yawn with the back of his hand. “Thought I heard you talking in here.”
I nodded without looking up, my eyes fixed on my phone screen. “Natalie called. Sorry if we woke you.”
“No worries. Everything all right?”
“Not really.” Sighing, I hit send and set my phone aside. “Natalie saw Dawn sleeping next to me and freaked out. First she hung up on me, and now she’s not answering my calls.”
“Oh, shit.” Nick cringed. “She doesn’t think you actually slept with Dawn, does she?”
“I dunno. I hope Natalie knows me better than that. I would never do that to her – or Dawn. But it’s not the first time we’ve fought about-”
Before I could finish, Dawn suddenly stirred. I held my breath as I looked over at her, hoping she hadn’t heard the whole conversation, although I didn’t understand how she could have slept through my phone call in the first place.
“Hey,” I said, forcing a smile onto my face as her eyes fluttered open. “How ya feeling?”
“A little better,” she answered after a few seconds, looking groggily around the room. “How long was I out?”
“Less than three hours. It’s only like seven a.m. Go back to sleep.”
“Can’t. Gotta pee again.” Groaning, she got up from the bed and padded slowly into the bathroom, closing the water closet door behind her.
While she was using the toilet, I turned to Nick. “Well, now that we’re all awake again… maybe we should just go ahead and do my bowel program now – if you don’t mind, I mean. That way, I could go back to sleep afterward without worrying about shitting the bed, and you could go back to your own room. Dawn seems to be doing all right.”
Nick nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he agreed, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “Where’s your stuff?”
I directed him to the carry-on that contained my medical supplies. As he sorted through it, setting everything he needed on the nightstand, Dawn came back out of the bathroom. “What are you doing?” she asked Nick.
“What does it look like?” He held up a box of latex gloves. “Kevin’s program.”
“Oh, Nick, you don’t have to do that,” Dawn protested. “That’s my job.”
“Yeah, well, it used to be mine. I don’t mind filling in every now and then,” Nick insisted. “You need to rest.”
“Go back to bed, Dawn,” I told her. “Nick’s got it covered.”
“Like I could even sleep with the lights on and your bare ass in my face,” Dawn grumbled, but she grudgingly let Nick do the first part of my program.
Afterward, as I sat over the toilet, waiting for the suppository he had inserted to take effect, I checked my phone for a response from Natalie. But there was nothing. The series of texts I had sent her earlier remained unread, which I took to mean one of two things: Either she had put her phone in airplane mode before she’d received them, or she was purposely ignoring them. If it was the former, I would have to wait another nine hours to hear back from her. If it was the latter, there was no telling how long she would continue to give me the silent treatment.
By the time Nick finished the second part of my program, Dawn had fallen back to sleep. Even over the sound of the toilet flushing, I could hear her snoring like a freight train as Nick pushed my travel commode out of the bathroom. I had him help me transfer back to bed, so I could try to sleep some more, too, but sleep didn’t come as easily as it had before. I lay awake long after he’d left, listening to the anxious thoughts inside my head, which were somehow even louder than Dawn’s snores.
***