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Chapter 15

Once the Carter's had arrived, they were asked to sit with the guys in the private waiting room that they had been moved to so they wouldn't be bothered. Brians eyes went to the door when he saw Nicks mother walked in. He felt so guilty about not telling her. It had been bothering him since AJ had called. He didn't want them to blame him. He wasn't thinking otherwise they would have been the first people that he called. They needed to know first, they were his family.

"Mrs. Carter," Brian said when she walked in, she looked at him but didn't say anything, "I just want to say that I was sorry for not calling. I know I should have it was just I wasn't thinking. I was so scared, I didn't know what to do."

"Brian," she replied and then paused as everyone looked on, "it's okay. I understand. I'm just glad that someone did call us."

"Again, I'm sorry. Sorry that that call hadn't come sooner," he told her.

"We're here now, that's all that matters," she said as she took a seat on the other end of the room, "have you guys heard anything?"

"No," Kevin said, "the last time we talked to anyone was when they moved us in here. They said that they didn't know anything about his condition, they were just asked to move us."

"So that means he's alive right?" Aaron, Nicks little brother, said, "I mean if they moved you and all. If he wasn't alive they would have told you to leave right?"

"We don't know," Kevin replied, "we've been waiting for word for a long time now."

"Could someone please tell me everything about what happened," Nicks father asked.

"Well," Brian started, "Leighanne and myself had been staying with Nick. It was only for the past few days. Anyway, last night, he just got so depressed. I called a doctor for him and made an appointment for him for today. Tyler was there so we took him to the park so that he wouldn't think anything was wrong. When we got back to his house, somethings were out of place in the living room."

"Like what?" his mother asked.

"He'd knocked over this table with a lamp on it. That stuff was alll over the room. I found a medicine bottle on the floor too. It was medicine that the doctor had percribed to Nick. The pills were all over the place. I'm sure he had thrown the bottle. My first reaction was that someone had tried to break in or something. I didn't know," Brian said, beginning to become emotional. Leighanne put her arm around his shoulder, "I called for Nick but I didn't get an answer so I started to walk through the house. More stuff was out of place in the kitchen. That's when I saw Nick on the floor in a pool of blood. There was a knife by him, he'd slit his wrist. Leighanne came down and was about to tell me something about Tyler then she saw it. I told her to keep Tyler out of the kitchen. I grabbed a wash cloth and the phone. I wrapped the cloth around his wrist to hopefully slow down the loss of blood and I called 911. I've been here since."

"Why? Why would he do such a thing?" his mother asked once Brian was finished talking.

"He's been really depressed lately. Erika's always on his mind. He had a flashback to the night it happened a few nights ago. He just can't seem to get over it."

"It's been six months though. You would have thought that he would have at least accepted it by now," his mother responded.

"Well he hasn't," AJ said, "the boy was in love with her. It's not easy letting go of someone you love. Think about it, do you think it would be easy for you or any of us to say good-bye to Nick if he didn't make it?"

"No," she answered, shaking her head. Trying to hold back her emotion, "but they weren't even married...."

"He was going to ask her that night," Brian interupted.

"How do you know that?" Howie asked.

"He told me and he showed me the ring the other night. He still has it. It took everything he had to tell me about it. He wanted to have a real family," Brian answered.

"Why didn't he at least say something to us about it?" his mother asked again.

"He wanted to ask her first I guess and he never told us about it because it probably hurt him to talk about it. I didn't want to force anything out of him."

"How did you get him to tell you?"

"He just told me. He must have been keeping it in for so long that he couldn't do it anymore. I don't know," he replied.

"Excuse me," came a voice, they all looked in the direction in which it came from. It was a doctor, "good evening, I know you all have been here for some time now and I apologise for that. I'm DR. Madison."

"Is he alive?" Mrs. Carter asked as she jumped from her seat.

"Barely," he answered, "he lost a tremendous amount of blood and did some serious damage to one of the vains in his wrist. We repaired the vain to the best of our ability. He also needed a blood transfussion to replace the blood. His heart wouldn't have been able to do it on its own. We did as much as we could. He's in a private room right now and you can go in and talk to him in a little while. He was just let out of surgery and he needs some time to recover."

"Thank you doctor, you saved my son," Mrs. Carter said overcome with joy.

"I have to tell you something before you get too happy. I'm not sure if you're aware of this but it's against the law to attempt suicide. Once he's better and we can release him from the hospital, he's going to have to go to a mental hospital for at least 72 hours. In that time he's going to be evaluated to see if he is going to remain a threat to himself and to others. If in that time, the doctors come to the conclusion that he still needs help, they're going to keep him even longer."

"So they think that my son's crazy?"

"No but we do think that he needs help. That's obvious considering that he was at a point that he wanted and attempted to take his own life."

"What if I don't want him to go to some hospital?" she said, angrly.

"Not to sound rude, but that's really not your decision. Maybe if he was a minor, maybe, just maybe you would have some say in it. But that fact is, since he's not, you have no say. It's the law."

"What if he doesn't want to go?"

"Again, it's the law ma'am. He has to go. It's only for three days if everything's okay and most people do leave after that time period but some don't. It's really about the individual case. Personally ma'am, even if you or your son had a say in determining weather or not he goes for this help, I would have to highly recommend that he does. There is obviously something wrong with your son and if you don't treat it now, it will get worse and next time, we might not be able to save him. Now, I have more work to do. So think about that and I'll send someone in for you when your son is well enough to have visitors," the doctor replied as he walked out of the waiting room.

"Who gave these people the right to tell me what I have to do with my son," Mrs. Carter said, angry with what the doctor had told her.

"Mrs. Carter," Howie said, "Nick needs the help. I love that kid, he's like my little brother, so I, like you, only want him to be happy and healthy. He needs this help so that he can be both happy and healthy. I know this is a lot, trust me I know, but don't get angry about this. The people who made this law obviously wanted to help people and that's all that's coming out of this. Nick is going to get the help that he needs."

"I know," she replied, "I just don't like the fact that they're telling me how to raise my son."

"They aren't," Kevin replied, "The fact is though, Nick's already been raised, though Mrs. Carter. He's an adult and though we at times forget it or act like we don't notice it, he's grown up. He has his own son to take care of now. And I know that you would like to keep him your baby forever, what mother doesn't?, you just can't do that anymore. He's an adult and he has problems and he needs to get help for those problems so that they don't get any worse for himself, and for us, the people that care about him most."

"Yeah," Howie added, "I remember when we first started traveling, you pulled Kevin and I aside and told us to look after him and we did. We did the best we could. I can't think of anything that we could have or even should have, done differently, to tell you the truth. I think we did a pretty good job of looking after him, if you ask me."

"We all looked after him," AJ added next, "I never had any brothers or sisters so having these guys around was the best thing for me. Nick was always that little brother that I never had to me. There wasn't anything that any of us could have done to fix this. We can't go back and tell Nick that he could talk to us because he already knew that he could. He knew that he could talk to you guys to, but he didn't. We aren't the problem. What happened has nothing to do with any of us because we all did our part in helping Nick as best we could. This happened because Nick lost the one woman that he loved. She had his god damn baby. That's what caused this. It wasn't any of us, it was that god damn ass hole who killed Erika."

"And we can't change that either," Brian continued, "it happened and as much as we want to make things all better again, we can't. So we're just going to have to accept the new Nick. The good, the bad, all of him. It's either that, or none of him at all."

"I don't want to push my son out of my life," she told them.

"We're not asking you to do that," AJ told her, "hell, you're the most important person in here. If there was no you, there would be no Nick. Nick knows that and I doubt that he would let you even try to push him out of your life."

"When do you think that they're going to let us in to talk to him?" she asking, changing the subject.

"I have no idea. The doc said whenever he was well enough," AJ replied, "we're just going to have to wait and see just how long it is."

"I don't know how much longer I can wait," she added, "I'm so nervous, I just want to talk to him and know that he's okay."

"When the time is here, we'll be able to talk to him," Kevin replied, "but for now, like AJ said, we're just going to have to wait and see. There really isn't anything else that we can do right now."