S2 Week 4 Bonus Story: Portrait of a Man in Blue

A Father's Worst Nightmare

Welcome to Trainwrecks: Season 2 (2005-2006)! If you haven’t read Season 1, please start there! Trainwrecks is a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get bonus content each month that delves further into character backgrounds or expands the current narrative. This bonus content is not needed to understand the main story. Money made from paid subscriptions gets reinvested into the series in the form of art and advertising!

For series introduction, character profiles, relationship charts, and general orientation, check out the Table of Contents!

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March 4, 2002

It was around one o’clock in the afternoon when James Hale stepped into the hospital, so bleary-eyed he kept having to blink to clear his vision. He hadn’t slept a wink on the ten-hour flight from Heathrow to SeaTac. His fear wouldn’t allow him to. His luggage rattled beside him as he walked up to the large hospital map on the wall. Somewhere in this building was his family. His son. His wife. Panic overwhelmed him; he had to take several deep breaths to calm himself down, breaths full of disinfectant and stale air. He thought he’d gotten used to the smell of hospitals, being a surgeon now for several years. But it was different when you were a visitor. Different when it was someone you loved in the hospital bed.

He made his way to the lift. Three floors up, he followed signs to the inpatient care wing, and he knew he’d gotten the right place because Leilani Hirashima sat in the waiting room, hunched over with her hands clasped to her forehead. His capable former sister-in-law looked older, grayer than a woman in her late 50s should, but he couldn’t imagine he looked much better. Her mouth moved in what he assumed was silent prayer—she’d always been the religious sort. “Leila,” he said quietly, and her head jerked up, her eyes filling with tears at the sight of him.

“James. Oh, thank God.” She stood up and staggered over to him like she was threatening to collapse at any moment. He grabbed her arms to steady her, but she shrugged out of his grasp and embraced him. “Thank God you’re here,” she whispered.

That same panic from before rose up his throat like bile. “How is he?” Dimitri. His son. His happy little genius boy.

“Weak, but stable,” Leila replied. “The paramedics administered Narcan and that got his breathing under control. But because he’s a minor, they decided to keep him overnight, run tests, make sure nothing else was affected…” She trailed off, shivering at some unseen memory.

James tried to imagine the scene Whitney Cruz had described to him on the phone the night before, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He’d seen people cut open, amputated limbs, even watched someone flatline on the operating table, but his mind refused to put his child in their place. It simply would not show him a reality in which his son had overdosed on heroin and nearly died on his friends’ couch. “And Makoto?” he asked.

Leila nodded towards the reception desk. “She’s in there with him. Hasn’t left his side.” Her shook her head. “She isn’t well, James.”