The Heart of It All (HeartSick Series Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Newsletter

  Luckwell, Texas

  Chicago, Illinois

  Phoenix, Arizona

  The Great Bumrush Incident

  Starbuck's

  First Class

  Austin Falls

  Day After

  Flyer Find

  1st ABC meeting

  K prize

  Paying for Dates

  Brian's Type Test

  Chicago Part 2

  Phoenix Part 2

  Luckwell Part 2

  1st Donation

  Waiting on Girls

  Putt Putt

  Izzy's Initial Findings

  The Bloodshed

  The Call

  Austin's Escape Plan

  Uber Back

  Izzy's 2nd tests

  The Doctor is Human After All

  Austin's Type Test

  Type Test Results

  Double Chocolate Goodness

  Walk to Party

  Delta Phi Drama

  More of the Good Doctor

  Austin @ Hospital

  Mia's Ride

  Researching Austin

  Hurricane Mia

  EavesDropping Izzy

  Mia's Re-emergence

  Good Doctor Running Out of Time

  Thanksgiving Road-trip

  Thanksgiving Day in Luckwell, Tx

  Dinner at the Kyle House

  @ the LD

  Say it Already

  Good Doctor's Research

  The Fallout

  Flying Home and Flying High

  Cab Ride Home

  Doctor's Two Pint Theory

  Home Again, Home Again Jiggidy Jig

  Chow Time

  J'accuse!

  Door to Door Service

  No-Tell Motel

  The Not So Good Doctor

  The Name Game

  Izzy Comes Home

  Izzy Has a Tail

  Thanks GPS

  Worst Ever Wake Up

  Dreadlocks of Entanglement

  Blue Sparky

  Female Bond Villain

  Moving Pile of Clothes

  Gag a Maggot

  Cap That Ass

  X-ray Tech to the Rescue

  Bring Him Back

  Epilogue

  Author's notes

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help spread the word.

  Kindle Edition.

  Copyright © 2016 Weston Mitchel

  All rights reserved.

  To my Wife, my Son, and my Daughters… Without their encouragement and faith in me not only would this book never have been finished, but I never would have written the first word. So you can blame them.

  Newsletter

  Check out WestonMitchel.com for all things awesome.

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  Luckwell, Texas

  Summer, 2 Years Ago

  Austin Kyle could see a car out of the corner of his eye about to enter the intersection he was now racing through. His heart quickened, and his vision narrowed and time weirdly began to slow down. As he sees this car encroaching into his view more and more he realizes, too late, that he is about to ram straight into the front left tire of the other vehicle.

  He didn’t have time to tap the brake, much less slam his foot down onto it. He only had time to tighten his grip on the steering wheel and prepare for the hit. His bowels turned to liquid as he saw an older lady looking out of the driver side window of her car, right into his eyes. In the instant their eyes locked Austin’s car collided into hers like a battering ram breaking down a fortress gate.

  Austin is suddenly aware that he is no longer in the car. He’s standing on the curb just next to the yellow crosswalk button attached to the base of the streetlight. He is just standing there, watching the entire scene play out before him. It was as if he was an on-looker, watching the accident in real time.

  He couldn’t feel any pain, he couldn’t feel anything. Austin wasn’t scared, or shocked, but he wasn’t calm either, he wasn’t much of anything right now, he was just watching.

  Austin saw the front end of his beat-to-shit, decade old Pontiac crumpling like a balled up piece of paper. He could see his own face being thrown back violently by the exploding air bag, as the other car pirouettes away from the wreckage. Her older, heavier boat of a car was able to sustain the collision without too much damage.

  His car was now just a chunk of metal of an indeterminate shape, like an asteroid that hit the ground leaving a small debris field in its wake. But instead of swaths of earth thrown up, all around it were pieces of metal, plastic, and glass, along with personal items strewn about that were ejected from the floorboards they were once rolling around.

  Austin, still standing/floating, at the corner could no longer see himself in the car. He stared at the ruins of the accident for what must have only been minutes, but felt like hours. He stood there watching random people run toward both cars. An older couple checking on the lady, while a younger man was at the driver side of Austin’s car.

  The man kept ducking from Austin’s field of view, popping up every now and then to yell something to the people gathering around. Austin couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but he looked adamant about whatever it was.

  He could see another man wearing light blue coveralls stained in oil and mud sprinting toward the chaos with a fire extinguisher in hand. Another woman was talking to someone on her cell phone, only able to look at the scene for a second or two at a time before turning her head away in disgust. Thankfully this was a smallish town so help wouldn’t be that far away.

  Austin Kyle couldn’t tell exactly how long it had been since the light changed red and his life changed for eternity, but it seemed it only took a few minutes for the ambulance, fire truck, and police to show up and take over for the Samaritans doing what they could. It was minimal, but their work might have been just enough though to keep him standing there watching, instead of possibly floating away into the sky, either that or just turning into nothingness and disappearing altogether.

  There.

  There he was again, Austin could finally see himself, or what he imagined to be himself. It was hard to tell with all of the braces, bandages, and blankets covering him on the rolling stretcher as the medics pushed him towards the mobile hospital.

  They shoved the gurney into the back of the ambulance. The taller medic then ran to the front and hopped in behind the wheel, while the shorter one jumped in back with this other Austin and slammed the door closed behind him.

  When the door clanged shut, Austin was startled awake, but instead of jolting upright in bed, like one does waking from a hellish nightmare, his eyes simply and slowly quivered open.

  The bright fluorescent light filled every square millimeter of his cornea with the light of a thousand suns, flooding his head with a stabbing relentless pain. The stabbing quickly moved over his entire body. Austin slammed his eye lids back shut, which sent another shockwave reverberating through his brain.

  This migraine from hell poked and prodde
d his mind with every move of his head, and small breath he sucked in, no matter how slight. With every rise and fall of his chest, his ribs felt like they were getting kicked by Connor McGregor trying to get the TKO.

  “What happened, where am I?” is what Austin was trying to say, but what actually came out between his swollen and cracked lips was “Whappend…whermy?”

  “It’s okay, son. You’re okay. I’m right here,” his dad said rising out of the half-slumber, half-awake purgatory he’d been in at Austin’s bedside since the moment he got the call from the hospital.

  Chicago, Illinois

  Jessica Monroe made all of her friends and family pronounce her name Jah-seek-ah, because she thought this made her name sound French. Jessica was standing with a small group of other girls casually chatting about homework, and how they all think they did on the pop quiz in History class.

  At times it seemed as if they were the only ones their age that gave a damn about school. Everyone else was too busy acting out, trying to impress other kids who would then do something to top whatever they had just seen. She thought about the movie Dangerous Minds, and wished she had a class that was that calm. Even before the white lady showed her martial arts moves and quieted the class down.

  Jessica and her friends were passing time waiting for the school bus to pull up and take them home. Her house was actually within walking distance, but her mom thought it was safer to take the bus. She told her that on the bus there would be less opportunities for her to be harassed, mugged, or worse. If her mom knew how raucous the bus could actually get she might have changed her mind on that front.

  Surely things couldn’t have been too much different when her mom went to high school, which wasn’t all that long ago since her mom was about to turn 30 next week. The streets of south Chicago were a gamble for anyone to walk, even at 3:30 in the afternoon. Couple that with the fact that her mom couldn’t afford to take off work just to come pick her up from school every day, compounded by the fact that none of her friends’ parents could either, the bus indeed was the only option.

  At the age of fifteen, you would think she was looking forward to next year when she would be able to drive herself and her closest friend Nicole, who went by Nicki not caring if it sounded French, but if you did think that you would be wrong.

  She was a dreamer, but she was also a realist. Most of the cash her mom earned from the two jobs she was working, a cashier at a convenience store during the day and waitress at a barbecue joint at night, went to making sure they had electricity, running water, groceries, and rent. Some months she would splurge and get things like Netflix, but more often than not it would just redirect you to the payment page.

  Jessica had been embarrassed the last time Nicki was over spending the night and they wanted to binge on One Tree Hill so they could float away aimlessly on white people’s problems for a few hours. That had been their plan anyway, until the payment screen came up instead.

  She slammed her small Chromebook shut and wanted nothing more than to just hurl it at the wall. It had been a Christmas gift three years ago from her grandma, and knowing she was almost as bad off as they were, living on a fixed income from her savings she decided against doing anything to harm it.

  She still needed to let out some steam so she kicked the bedroom door closed, knocking a piece of the trim that bordered the jamb. This just embarrassed her more in front of Nicki. That was nearly two months ago and she still hadn’t gathered the nerve to open that particular app since.

  How pathetic is that?

  She thought back on that night in a huff, standing there waiting with her binder that was coming apart at the edges with doodled Eiffel towers all over the cover.

  If we can’t even afford a lousy $10 a month for Netflix, how am I ever going to make it all the way across the Atlantic?

  If Jessica hadn’t been smart enough to figure out her neighbor’s password for WiFi, Netflix wouldn’t have been an option in the first place. She had hoped they were the type to use the same password for everything, sadly they weren’t.

  She was standing there in la-la land, while her friends talked about question five and what a stumper it was. Her thoughts turning from frustration to an uneasy calm thinking again of the cafes in Paris, where one day, come hell or high water, she was going to be sitting at. Her eyes would be locked on the Eiffel Tower hovering over the horizon, poking above the roofs of museums and culture.

  This is always where her thoughts turned when she needed a mood lifter, to Paris. Sometimes Paris would turn to London with Big Ben or the Eye reflecting off the Thames River. In every mental escape though she was always sitting in an open patio just outside a café somewhere in Europe.

  She was so lost in thought, trying to not think about her situation, that she barely heard the commotion coming from behind her. She came back from her daydream, mere seconds too late.

  Jessica saw her group of friends, ducking and running for cover, an instinct everyone in this area grew up with since the time they could walk. This part of Chicago had become known as Chi-Raq, because more people here were killed by guns on a daily basis than at any point in Operation Desert Storm. She knew she needed to be ducking and running herself when she heard the sound of fireworks popping off not too far behind her.

  Before she could turn around to see exactly where it was coming from so she knew which direction to run in, she felt a bee sting her on the right side of her abdomen, and another on her left ankle.

  Nope, it’s not a bee, she thought, unless it’s a bee that has one of those giant Scottish swords for a stinger like the one from that movie Braveheart. One of the umpteen-hundred boyfriends her mom had since her Daddy left them both ten years ago, used to watch it over and over again like something was going to change at the end, but of course it never did. That blue-faced-dude died every time.

  As she fell to the hot concrete of the sidewalk in front of her school, she let out a small laugh in pain as she thought of a tiny bee with a huge sword sticking right out of it’s ass. When she let out this half-laugh, half-scream, blood began to flow out of her mouth. She could hear her best friend Nicki crying out for help, and others sobbing and screaming just as loud, but couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying.

  Her vision became narrow and dim like she was looking through a broken kaleidoscope. A light dizziness flooded over her and quickly became so powerful she was unable to keep her head off of the ground, or her eyes open for that matter. She could feel that she was about to pass out, but just before she did, in her peripheral she could see her bus pulling in to the curb as she glanced up from the sidewalk.

  Jessica wasn’t sure, but she would have sworn she could see the Eiffel Tower stretching up and out of the top of that yellow and black school bus. Seeing this made her chuckle, again thinking about a bee with a sword for a stinger.

  Phoenix, Arizona

  Samuel Ybarra used to love the day his kids went back to school. The full-time craziness of the three always being home was welcomed at the first of summer, but by Independence Day he was ready to be fitted for a straight jacket and committed. Come mid-July he began marking days off on the calendar in big black slashes, counting down to the 22nd of August that was circled with a bright red sharpie, longing for the days when he had the house to himself again.

  Working from home assuredly had its benefits but the crazy dog days of summer with a tween-ager and two ten year olds was not one of them. But this year, he dreaded the first day of school like it was a certain doctor’s exam he would be forced to get next year when he turned 40. This was going be the first year he would have to get the kids ready for school without his high school sweetheart, Nora, by his side helping, if not doing the majority of it.

  This was always her favorite time of the year, not because the house became theirs again, but because it gave her hope of things to come. New wardrobes, new supplies, a new outlook on life that this year would be different. This year everything would be seamless, easier th
an last year, whether it was financially speaking or just all around life. Although it never seemed to come to fruition, in fact it always seemed to get harder every year, looking back at it amazed they survived it somehow.

  The first week of the school year had always been difficult, and that was when he had her as his rock to lean on. How in the hell was he ever going to get through this without her? That was a question he began asking himself almost on a second by second basis, ever since they left the doctor’s office last winter. It was a visit that you go in to knowing everything was going to be okay, the tests would come back clear this time, they had to.

  Both of them completely certain that the chemotherapy had to have killed off every cell of cancer in her body. How could it not when it seemed to almost do her in on its own? The visit you walk in to hand in hand, hopes high. Only to walk out with your hopes dashed, hands still entwined but now the grip is tighter, ringed in a dried layer of salt from rubbing away the tears.

  If not for these three kids, Sammy would have crawled under the first rock he came across and never returned. Whether that rock was in the shape of a flophouse, a noose or an open road was the only thing he wasn’t completely sure of at the time. Although after she passed he didn’t know if he could bring himself to find a rock. Hell he could barely raise himself out of bed that first week, and brush his teeth and put clean clothes on, but he did. He had to.

  He still had to be there for Layla, who was going into her freshman year of high school. His daughter looked so much like Nora when they first met that tears would well up at a moments notice while looking at her across the dinner table. It was a weird hurt that simultaneously made him so overcome with joy and happiness to see her again that he would have to get up from the table, and leave the room so his kids wouldn’t be forced to see him break down sobbing, again.

  He had to be there for the twins, Christopher and Sammy Jr., too. Who although were barely about to join the ranks of the fifth graders were already becoming men before his very eyes. Their own eyes hardened by the events of this past year, but still had that faint glint of silly boyish adventures lying in wait, softening that stern hardness.