Читать книгу The M.D.'s Surprise Family - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 10

A little surprised at his reaction, Raven dropped her hand to her side. “You don’t like being touched, do you?”

“Not particularly.”

His tone was so frosty, a person could freeze to death. Raven began having second thoughts again. She wanted the best for Blue, but she was having trouble convincing herself that someone so removed could care more about the patient than he would gaining another cerebral rush.

“You know, I read somewhere that neurosurgeons believe they’re above God.”

Peter switched on his computer. The low hum told him it was going through its paces—just like the ones this woman was putting him through.

“Not above,” Peter corrected, “just working in tandem with.” He blew out a breath. He didn’t have time for this because he was due in surgery in an hour. “Look, I don’t think you came back here to check out my divinity, or lack thereof. Do you want me to consider taking your brother on as a patient or not?”

“No, I don’t want you to consider taking him on.” She saw the surgeon raise his eyebrows in surprise, so she drove home her point. “I want you to take him. Blue has an incredible zest for life. I’d like for him to be able to run through it, not restricted in any way.”

He was a realist, weighing the downside rather than the up. Whatever optimism he’d once possessed, the car accident had taken away from him. “That might not be possible.”

Raven refused to allow any negative thoughts to enter into this. She had to believe the surgery was going to be a success. Anything else was unthinkable.

“It will be possible, Dr. Sullivan, if you come on board.”

Just yesterday, he thought, she’d been skeptical, doubting not his ability but his heart. He wondered if he should tell her that he didn’t have one. “Despite my emotional distance?”

“After due consideration, I don’t think that’ll be a problem. You see, Blue likes you.” They’d talked about it last night and the boy seemed perfectly willing to put his fate in Sullivan’s hands. She placed a lot of stock in rapport. “If Blue likes you, you can’t help but like him back.” That, to her, was a given. She’d never met anyone who hadn’t warmed to the boy, usually instantly. “It’s a gift he got from my mother.”

“Whether I like him or not has nothing to do with the surgery.”

There was a knowing look in her eyes he found annoying. As if she was privy to some secret he wasn’t allow to know. “I disagree.”

Peter frowned as he typed in his password. She’d almost made him forget it. When was the last time that had happened? He was nothing if not organized.

“You’re free to disagree until the cows come home, that doesn’t alter the outcome.”

She laughed, a wave of nostalgia undulating over her. “Until the cows come home? I haven’t heard that expression since I was a little girl—and they really did come home.” She saw his eyebrows knit themselves together in a quizzical wavy line despite plainly visible efforts to resist curiosity. Maybe the man was a little more human than he liked to think. “We lived on a farm. My parents wanted the simple life.”

“Songbird, Inc. is a Fortune 500 company.”

“They wanted the simple life,” Raven repeated, emphasizing the crucial word, “but it kind of got complicated along the way.” Her parents had been wonderful people, taken much too soon. She wanted the whole world to know just how noble, how good they really were. Even this cynical man. “Not so they lost any of their initial values. They just had a lot bigger house to place those values in toward the end. My mother actually did sew every prototype, every new garment she created.”

He paused, trying to imagine the life the woman in his office must have led. It was probably something of a merger between latter day hippies and the captains of industry.

“What did your father add to this mix?”

“He played guitar while she sewed.” If she closed her eyes, she could almost see him. Sitting by the white stone fireplace, playing one of the songs he’d written while her mother worked on a loom, creating the fabric that would eventually find itself fashioned into a dress or a blouse or a scarf.

Nobody lived like that, he thought. Raven Songbird probably gleaned the scenario from some afternoon movie written for TV. One in which the woman worked while the man sat noodling around on some instrument or other. “Very productive.”

There was that cynical tone again. Hadn’t this man ever had a good day in his life? “Actually, it inspired her.”

Peter heard the defensive note in Raven’s voice. He realized it probably sounded as if he was criticizing her family. She had enough to deal with. “That wasn’t meant to be critical.”

“Yes it was,” she contradicted, then followed with an absolving smile. “But you can’t help that. You’re from a whole different world.” Considering what he did for a living, he probably had no idea what “mellowing out” meant. “There’s a great deal of pressure involved in working toward becoming a doctor.”

“There’s a great deal of pressure once you become one, too.” Peter stopped abruptly. He had no idea why he’d added that or why he’d shared a single feeling with this diminutive woman who somehow still managed to come across as slightly larger than life.

Needing a diversion, if only for a second, he punched in several letters on the keyboard. His schedule for the next two months appeared on the screen. He scanned it. It was more than full. Work, although not his salvation, kept him from dwelling on his loss and the way his days and evenings felt so hollow. And the times when a fourteen-hour day wasn’t enough to fill that hole, several times a year he volunteered his services to Doctors Without Borders, a nonprofit organization that provided free medical care to the poor of the world.

As it stood right now, there was hardly enough room on his schedule to fit in a breath, much less another challenging surgery. He glanced up from the monitor. By all rights, he should turn Raven Songbird away. Give her and her vivacious personality a referral.

But as he began to frame the words, he made the mistake of looking at her. Specifically, at her eyes. There was something eloquent and tender within the blue orbs, not just the humor with which she peppered her words, but something more. Something that made him feel that if he turned her and her brother away, he would be guilty of an unspeakable crime.

Peter was far more surprised than she was to hear himself say, “Why don’t you bring Blue back tomorrow morning and we’ll see about getting back on the right footing.”

He watched, mesmerized as the smile on her face blossomed until he felt as if it spread to him, as well.

“What time?”

He had consultations lined up back to back both at the hospital and in his private office across the street from Blair. The two open three-hour blocks had surgeries packed into them. There wasn’t even time for lunch. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d eaten in snatches, between patients. “How does seven in the morning sound?”

“Early.”

He sighed, thinking, looking for an alternative. His last surgery was at five. If all went well, it would end at eight. “There’s nothing open until—”

She didn’t let him finish. Her bright smile cut through his words before he could get them all out. “Early’s good,” she assured him. “I’m usually up at five. Blue doesn’t sleep in much later than that.”

“Five?”

“Five.”

“Voluntarily?” He tried not to stare at her mouth. The smile made it difficult not to.

She nodded. “It’s a holdover from living on the farm. You had to be up early to take care of chores before school started.”

He shook his head and laughed, realizing that for the first time in weeks, he was actually amused by something. “This is beginning to sound like pages from Little House on the Prairie.”

Raven’s laugh echoed in the wake of his. He found himself liking the sound a little more each time he heard it. He usually wasn’t aware of laughter, because he usually wasn’t aware of any kind of happiness, other than when he told members of a family that the patient would pull through. Ordinarily, he left that sort of thing up to whoever was assisting him. The less personal contact he had with people, the better. It was just too much of an effort otherwise.

But this bird-woman left him no choice. He didn’t like not having a choice.

“At times,” she was saying to him, “it felt a little like that, too.”

He found himself staring at her, at her mouth when she laughed, at her eyes when she looked at him. With effort, he reined himself in and focused on what they both needed him to be: Blue’s surgeon, nothing else.

And as such, there were procedures he needed to outline for her, things that had to be done before a prognosis.

“Before I see your brother tomorrow, I’m going to need those scans I mentioned yesterday.” Opening a drawer, Peter frowned. He didn’t find what he expected. Annoyed, and doing a bad job of disguising it, he played hide-and-seek with two more drawers before locating the hospital order forms in a fourth. He pulled one off the top and began writing instructions across the bottom. He signed his name with a flourish, then slowly printed the boy’s name in the space at the top.

“Take this to Imaging on the first floor,” he told her as he wrote.

“Don’t I need an appointment?”

“You’ll have one by the time you get there,” he assured her. “Ten o’clock, all right?”

She was surprised that Sullivan was actually asking rather than ordering. Blue was in school right now, but she could easily get him out. That gave her more than an hour to get back.

“Ten’ll be terrific.”

“All right.” Finished, he put down his pen. “Just present this when you get there.” He held out the form to her.

Taking it, Raven squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Doctor. You’re not going to regret this.”

He already was, he thought, as he watched her leave the office.

The boy looked smaller to him this time.

Sitting in the chair that he had occupied a little more than a day ago, Blue Songbird seemed to have mysteriously gotten smaller. Or the chair had somehow gotten larger.

Or maybe it was the gravity of what he had seen on the scan that was affecting the way he viewed the boy, Peter thought, making him seem so vulnerable.

Calling the Imaging department as soon as the boy’s sister had left his office yesterday, he’d told the woman on the other end of the line to put a rush on the procedure. Because of his standing in the medical community, not to mention Blair Memorial itself, the receptionist knew better than to offer even a single word of protest or to point to the fact that they were already overbooked, overworked and understaffed for the amount of scans and films they had to take and review.

Instead she’d offered a pleasant, “Yes, Doctor,” and promised to do her best. He’d ended the conversation by telling her he certainly hoped so.

As he’d hung up, he could almost hear the woman cowering. A tinge of guilt pricked him before he’d blocked it. He was not in the business of making friends, he was in the business of extending lives, of making them more tolerable for people who, through no fault of their own, were faced with intolerable alternatives. Everyone had a purpose in life, and healing was his.

As he looked over his shoulder at the backlit display on the wall and the CAT scan held in place with metal clips, he remembered why he didn’t, as a general rule, operate on children. Because as impervious as he tried to make his heart to the life-and-death situations he dealt with, the plight of someone so young faced with something so devastating got to him.

As if reading his mind, the small boy in the large chair smiled brightly at him. It seemed as if he was somehow trying to convey the thought that the situation was not as dire as it appeared. That everything would be all right if he just had a little faith.

It was entirely unfounded optimism. Peter knew that he lived in a world where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And, more likely than not, with heavy consequences.

Peter suppressed a sigh he felt to the very bottom of the soles of his feet. A kid of seven wasn’t supposed to be faced with things like this. He was supposed to be able to run, to laugh and to feel immortal.

Like Becky.

Peter banked down the thought before it could go any further. He shifted his eyes toward Raven. She was unusually quiet for a woman who had verbally accosted him not once but twice. What they had to talk about was not meant for a child’s ears. “Are you sure you want him here?”

Blue answered before his sister had a chance to. He answered with the voice and attitude of a young adult who had always been allowed to think freely, who felt that his thoughts mattered as much, not more, not less, than the next person’s. That person usually being Raven. “It’s my body.”

Strange, strange family, Peter thought with a resigned shrug. He looked at Raven again.

“As we’ve already determined, Dr. DuCane was right. There are tumors on your brother’s spinal column. Initially it looked like a cluster, but in actually there seem to be four. Four small tumors.”

“That doesn’t sound like so many,” Blue offered.

One was too many if it was the wrong kind or in the wrong place. And, in this case, it might be both. Tests would have to be done on the actual tissues before they could discover if the tumors were malignant or not. In his experience, Peter thought grimly, given their location, they usually turned out to be the former. If nothing was done and the tumors were left where they were, it was only a matter of time before they would grow larger and eventually paralyze this boy who had life pulsing from every pore.

Well, there you had it. He did have tumors, Raven thought. Her fingers and toes felt numb. All this time, she’d been secretly holding her breath, praying that there’d been some mistake, that the initial X ray that Dr. DuCane had authorized was erroneous, that the pains in his back were nothing more than just good, old-fashioned growing pains.

But deep down she’d known it wasn’t a mistake. That there was something very, very wrong with this perfect little boy.

Raven felt the sting of tears and instantly forced them away. She wasn’t about to cry in front of Blue. If she was anything other than upbeat, he would sense it and it would make him worry. Worse, it would make him afraid. There was no way she was going to allow that to happen. He had to feel that this was just something he had to go through and that, at the end, he would be perfect again.

Just as he’d always been.

Peter glanced toward the boy’s sister. For a second he thought he saw the shimmer of tears in her eyes. But in the next moment that smile of hers was fixed in place and she was nothing short of confidence personified.

He only wished he felt half that confident.

Raven took a deep breath. “So, Dr. Sullivan, when can you operate?”

“You understand that the operation is extremely delicate?” he said.

If successful, the boy would heal faster than an adult, but there would still probably be therapy, still a painful recovery period to face. And that was if everything went right. There were no guarantees. A great deal could go wrong that was beyond anyone’s control. He knew that better than anyone.

Raven nodded. She placed her hand over Blue’s and gave it a squeeze along with an encouraging smile. She kept her voice cheerful. “That’s why we came to you.”

“Yeah.”

Peter turned his chair around, looking at the CAT scan. Thinking. As with a great many neurological problems, time was of the essence, but they did have a little leeway. He wanted Raven to use that leeway to carefully think things over before she gave him the okay to go ahead.

This wasn’t the kind of dilemma a boy of seven should be privy to, even if it was his body. Turning his chair back around, he looked at Blue. “I’d like to talk to your sister alone.”

Rather than being upset, Blue looked resigned. “Whatever you tell Raven, she’s only going to tell me later.”

“That’s up to her.” And undoubtedly, the woman could couch this a great deal better than anything he could say to the boy. He’d lost the knack of talking to children, not that he’d really ever had it. It was just that Becky had talked to his heart and that was how he communicated with her.

“Okay.” Blue rose and crossed to the doorway.

“Wait for me in the hall,” Raven told him. After Blue let himself out and closed the door behind him, she looked at the surgeon expectantly. She supposed it was better this way, after all. Dr. Sullivan might say something to make Blue feel that the surgery wouldn’t go well. “All right, we’re alone. What is it you want to tell me?”

Without the boy to listen, Peter felt less restrained. “Are you aware of the risks involved?”

“I think I am. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on ever since Dr. DuCane told me what she suspected.”

He didn’t bother mincing words. “If I operate, he might still become paralyzed.”

“If you don’t, he definitely will.”

Like the rest of his body structure, the boy’s spinal cord would be small, delicate. Peter had the hands of a skilled surgeon, but he didn’t like taking chances if he could help it. “There’s a small chance—”

She knew what he was about to say. Raven shook her head. “Too small to take. I believe in meeting problems head-on instead of hiding from them.”

“There’s also the fact that the tumors might be malignant—”

Her eyes met his. She could feel the air backing up in her lungs again. “Yes?”

“If that’s the case, the operation might cause the malignancy to spread—”

“Let sleeping dogs lie, is that it?” She smiled, shaking her head. She wasn’t about to place her head in the sand and hope for the best. She had to tackle this and then hope for the best. “It might spread anyway—if it’s malignant and there’s no proof that it is,” she informed him with feeling.

He’d found that when emotions were involved, the right decision was not always made. It was best to make decisions after the heat had left and things had cooled off. “Ms. Songbird, I want you to think about this—”

“My name is Raven,” she told him, “And I have thought about it.”

He sincerely doubted it. He heard the passion in her voice, the urgency. He didn’t want her making a final decision like that. “Think about it some more,” he countered. “We have a small window of time. Use it.”

She blew out a breath, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. God, why weren’t her parents here? She needed someone to lean on. “How long am I supposed to look through this window?”

Now she was being rational. “At least twelve hours, twenty-four would be better.”

Raven nodded her head. “All right,” she told him even though she already knew what the decision was going to be.