Читать книгу A Full House - Nadia Nichols - Страница 8

“YOU PROMISED ME, Annie,” Matt reminded her two weeks later to the day. They were standing to one side of the door to X-ray. “I trust you’ve been packing your gear.”

Annie sighed. “I know I promised, but I can’t go right away, Matt,” she said. “Sally’s hearing is first thing Monday morning and…” She shook her head, still unable to believe she was talking about her child. “I can’t just up and leave her, Matt. I was thinking that maybe we should wait until she goes to visit her father, and even then I may not be able to get a whole week off. I’ll ask, but there’s only an outside chance. You know how Edelstein is. He hates for anyone to have a life apart from the hospital.” She gazed at Matt, then reached for his arm and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. “Come on, Matt. I said I’d go, I just can’t promise you an entire week, that’s all. We’ll have to make the best of what we can get, and in the meantime, I’ll go to court with Sally.” An unexpected laugh erupted before she could quell it.

“I don’t know how you can find the situation funny.”

“It’s not funny at all. It just sounds so strange to my ears… It’s awful, it really is…” She sighed wearily and shook her head. “My daughter would never smoke pot or hang out with a seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Tom or get arrested for possession of an illegal substance. Know what I mean?”

“I hope she’s learned her lesson.”

“Me, too. She’s been going to these special meetings on Tuesday nights that are guaranteed to put her on the straight and narrow and she seems to be taking it very seriously, which is good because I’m having a hard time with all this stuff. Court hearings, for heaven’s sake. All I can picture is Sally being hauled away in handcuffs by that scruffy cop, Lieutenant Macpherson. He could easily pass for a derelict. I understand it’s part of his job to look like the very people he’s trying to arrest, but still…”

“I take it he’s not one of your favorites?” Matt said sympathetically.

“He arrested my daughter, didn’t he?” Annie shot over her shoulder as she pushed through the doors to X-ray.

ANNIE’S SATURDAY NIGHT in ER began with a blistering flurry of activity that only intensified as the early hours of the morning brought a rising tide of traumatic injuries. By 3:00 a.m. she was up to her elbows in other people’s crises, which in a way was a blessing because she had no time to dwell on the Monday morning hearing. She was actually beginning to look forward to the camping trip with Matt, and also beginning to entertain the notion of getting out of the city once and for all. Perhaps it was time for that long-yearned-for return to the country, to a quiet, backwater place where Sally could make new friends and discover sunshine and fresh air.

“Dr. Crawford?” Rob Bellows, a surgical resident, entered the treatment room and spoke at her elbow. “I’ll take over for you here. We’ve got another incoming. Gunshot wound to the chest, EMT’s report it’s pretty dicey.”

“They’re all pretty dicey,” Annie said wearily, stepping back from the table where the victim of a car accident, young and drunk, submitted docilely to having a gash on his forehead stitched. She stripped off her gloves and threw them in the waste container as she walked out. She could already hear the muted sound of the ambulance siren as it swung into the emergency entrance. Then the siren cut off and she could picture the ambulance backing up to the door. She stopped at the nurse’s station and grabbed a fast drink of cool spring water and then a second as the emergency doors automatically opened and they wheeled the next patient in.

“Round three,” Annie muttered under her breath as the running footsteps squeaked toward her down the polished floor. She fell into step beside the stretcher, visibly assessing the victim. The EMTs were brisk, professional and slightly out of breath. “Had a hell of a time with this one…cops said it could be a .38 caliber bullet…entry wound is on his lower left chest, no exit wound, the patient’s in shock, definitely a tension pnuemo, we nearly lost him on the way in…”

There was a generous amount of blood on the victim, but Annie guessed from the EMT’s brief rundown that most of the hemorrhaging was internal and that a lung had collapsed. They wheeled him, half running, into the ER, where the skilled team quickly began cutting away the injured man’s clothing, allowing Annie to make a rapid but careful examination. A scene that might have paralyzed a less experienced physician, she dealt with perfunctorily and with minimal talk. Within minutes she had established an airway and positioned a chest tube between his ribs, while at the same time the nurses, at her direction, placed two IVs in his arms and began infusing a bag of Ringer’s solution as fast as possible. While Annie inserted a nasogastric tube to decompress the stomach, the nurses drew blood samples, placed a catheter and activated electronic monitors. All of their actions were so well orchestrated that scarcely five minutes had passed since the patient had been wheeled into ER.

Annie guided a large bore needle between the ribs just beneath the collarbone and, just as she had expected, pressurized air hissed out. “Okay, people,” she said, “this one goes straight into OR. There’s some serious abdominal bleeding going on, a collapsed lung and God only knows what else. We have a definite chest wound, but this guy’s stomach is swelling up like a hot-air balloon. I think that bullet did some bouncing around inside there.”

She picked up the phone and dialed OR. “Hey, Hanley, we’re coming down with a gunshot wound to the left chest, in shock, definitely looks like multiple organ trauma.” As she spoke, she glanced at the victim’s face. There was something familiar about the guy. She drew in a deep breath as she heard Hanley say something about a kid with a hot appendix. “Bump him,” she snapped. “This one can’t wait.”

She hung up the phone. “Who is this guy?” she asked the surgical resident, who shook his head and shrugged, but the nurse picked up the chart left behind by the EMTs.

“Macpherson,” the nurse said, scanning it quickly. “Lieutenant Jake Macpherson.” Her eyebrows raised in surprise, and she glanced at Annie. “He’s a cop.”

“Okay, let’s rock and roll, folks,” Annie said, her heart rate shifting into high gear as adrenaline surged through her. “He’s going to be a dead cop if we don’t hustle.”

FOR BREAKFAST on Sunday morning Sally always had cereal and toast and a big glass of orange juice. Her mother usually was home by 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. and Ana Lise would cook the traditional Sunday-morning breakfast of ham and eggs, but Sally was happy with her bowl of cereal. She was addicted to Cheerios. If there was a banana to slice onto it she was in heaven—except this morning. She had her Cheerios and an entire banana sliced atop, but she was about as far from heaven as she could get. She sat in the breakfast nook and watched Ana Lise bustle around the gleaming kitchen, taking a pan of pastries from the oven.

“You will have a pastry then, ja?” she asked over her shoulder.

Sally shook her head.

“No thanks. I’m not hungry.”

Ana Lise set the pan on the counter and turned, frowning. “You would not like a pastry with butter spread over it? A cinnamon bun warm from the oven? Are you ill, then?”

Sally used the tip of her spoon to submerge the slices of banana one by one. She shook her head again. “I’m too nervous to eat,” she confided miserably. “Tomorrow’s my hearing…”

“Ja, but that is tomorrow. This is today. You must eat.”

“Ana Lise, what if they put me in jail?”

“They will not put you in jail. You are only a child.”

“What if they send me to juvenile hall?”

Ana Lise shook her head in exasperation. “We have talked of this before. They will not send you to juvenile hall.”

“Mom might send me to private school. She might make me move away.”

“That would never happen,” Ana Lise said, hands on her sturdy hips. “You eat your cereal.”

“Do you think she’ll let me visit my dad this summer?”

Ana Lise turned back to her tasks with a shake of her head. “I am not paid to tell your fortune, young lady. Eat your breakfast. Your mother will be home soon and you can ask her yourself.”

But Annie did not get home until nearly noontime, and Ana Lise had switched from breakfast mode to dinner mode, it being a Sunday. A roast was baking in the oven and she was verbally contemplating a Yorkshire pudding when Annie slumped wearily into the apartment. She dropped into a kitchen chair with a soft moan. “What a night,” she said. “And what a morning.”

“A hard one, ja?” Ana Lise said sympathetically, pouring a cup of coffee and setting it, strong and black, in front of Annie.

“Hard? Oh, Ana Lise.” Annie let her head fall back and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Where’s Sally?”

“In her room listening to her music. She’s worried about tomorrow. About the hearing. She didn’t eat any breakfast and she says she is too nervous to eat lunch.”

They heard the door to Sally’s room open and her light, quick footsteps in the hall. “Mom? I thought I heard your voice.” Sally paused in the kitchen doorway, her face mirroring her mother’s, though for entirely different reasons. “Mom, I’m so nervous about tomorrow that I feel sick.”

Annie opened her eyes and inhaled another deep breath, releasing it somewhere between a sigh and a moan. “There isn’t going to be a hearing tomorrow, Sally,” she said. She raised and rotated her shoulders to ease a sudden muscle cramp. There was nothing like a long stint in surgery to trigger painful muscle spasms. “Your arresting officer was shot last night. I spent most of the night and the better part of this morning trying to keep him alive.”

Sally’s face was blank. For a moment she said nothing, just stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at her mother. “Is he…dead?” she finally blurted.

Annie raised her eyebrows. “A fine question to ask. Don’t you have any faith in your mother’s skills?”

Sally slumped against the doorjamb. “Then…he’s still going to testify against me in court?”

“Not tomorrow, he isn’t,” Annie said flatly. She picked up her coffee cup and took a sip. “I spoke to the big cheese at the station house. He was at the hospital, along with half a hundred other police officers. He told me the hearing would be rescheduled when Lieutenant Macpherson’s health permits. So, sweet little best friend of mine, it would seem that you have been granted a temporary reprieve.”

Sally’s eyes fixed gravely on her mother’s face. “For how long?”

Annie took another sip of coffee. “He’s young and strong. I expect an uncomplicated recovery. Let’s say three weeks, four at the outside. By then he’ll be able to sit in a courtroom and tell the whole world how you were out gallivanting around in the middle of the night with a bunch of pot-smoking juvenile delinquents.”

“But I wasn’t smoking pot…”

“Don’t expect much sympathy from me right now, young lady. I’m dead tired.”

Ana Lise refilled Annie’s coffee cup. “What you need right now is a long soak in a hot bath, ja? I know how that helps you after you’ve spent a long time in surgery. I will get it ready.”

Annie smiled wearily at her housekeeper. “That sounds lovely. I’ll take you up on that offer.”

Half an hour later she was immersed to her chin in deliciously hot water and lavender oil. Her eyes were blissfully closed and she was nearly asleep, her mind drifting toward that quiet, peaceful place where the wind blew all the clouds away and the horses ran free, when Ana Lise tapped on the bathroom door.

“A call for you, from the hospital,” she called apologetically.

Annie moaned. “Take a message.”

“He says it is an emergency.”

“Okay,” Annie said. The bathroom door opened and Ana Lise’s arm stretched around with the cordless phone in her hand. Annie took it. “Thank you,” she said as the door closed. “Yes?” she said into the phone. It was Matt.

“I’m sorry to call you, Annie, I know you just left here, but your patient, Macpherson, went into cardiac arrest about ten minutes ago. We jump-started him, but he’s not too stable. Blood pressure’s 90/70.”

Annie was rising out of the tub even as Matt spoke. “Where’s Palazola?” she asked tersely. “Isn’t he senior surgeon on call?”

“He’s in OR with a little boy who was run over by a bus.”

“What about Macpherson’s heart sounds? Are they muffled?”

“Yes.”

“Dammit! He was fine when I left. Okay, I’m on my way. We’ll need to aspirate the blood around the heart. Can you do it?”

“I can try.” Matt’s voice mirrored his uncertainty. “How soon can you be here?”

“Ten minutes.”

“I’d rather wait for you…”

“If you have to do it, Matt, do it,” Annie said, throwing the phone onto the vanity and reaching for a towel. “Ana Lise, call my driving service!” she shouted out the bathroom door. Fifteen minutes later, hair still dripping, she was running down the hallway to the Intensive Care Unit. Matt was inside the cubicle watching the monitors and two nurses were with him. Annie listened to Macpherson’s heart and noted the distention of his neck veins. “People, he should already be in the OR,” she snapped, her nerves on edge. “I trust you’ve cleared it?”

Matt’s face flushed. “We’re good to go.”

Aspirating the blood from around the heart was not a long procedure, but Annie blamed herself for not anticipating the complication. She had checked for cardiac tamponade several times since Macpherson had been admitted, both before, during and after the surgery. At no time did she discern a problem. Still… She exited the OR for the second time that day in a haze of exhaustion, stripping off her gloves and mask and tossing them into the disposal unit.

“I’m sorry, Annie,” Matt said, hurrying out behind her. “I should’ve spotted the warning signs sooner.”

“I shouldn’t have left,” Annie said. “I’ll check on him when they bring him into recovery. If anything changes, I’ll be in the lounge.”

“Annie.” She stopped and turned. Matt was holding his arms out at his sides in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry I messed up.”

Annie shook her head wearily. “Just come and get me if there’s any deterioration in his condition. He can’t die on me, Matt. That just can’t happen. They’d think I did something deliberately so he couldn’t testify against my daughter.”

“No one would ever think that.”

Annie didn’t answer.

“Get some rest. If there’s the slightest change in his condition, I’ll wake you.”

But in spite of her exhaustion, Annie couldn’t sleep. The hospital, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was bustling with life. Intercoms squawked nonstop, carts rattled, rubber-soled shoes squeaked, voices of patients, staff and visitors mingled in the corridors. She lay on the couch in the doctor’s lounge, her forearm shielding her eyes, and tried to relax. Her stomach cramped painfully, reminding her she hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, yet she wasn’t hungry.

She sat up and yawned. Within minutes she was in recovery, checking on Macpherson. His vital signs were good. She pulled a chair up beside his bed and sat. Matt came in quietly to adjust the IVs and returned moments later with a fresh, hot cup of coffee and a magazine for Annie. She took both with a grateful smile. The coffee was good and the magazine was a copy of Down East, a monthly publication full of beautiful pictures and articles about coastal Maine.

She sipped the coffee and turned the pages of the magazine, finding herself drawn to the evocative images of a world far removed from big-city life. How long she sat there, immersed in the mystique of rocky, timbered coastline, saltwater farms and quaint harbors filled with sturdy lobster boats, she didn’t know. But her coffee was cold and her yawns had become more frequent when a man’s voice said, “Beautiful place.”

She looked up, startled to see that Macpherson had awakened. She blinked, set aside the magazine and the coffee. She checked his vital signs, relieved that they were all as good as could be expected. The cadence of his heartbeat remained clear and strong.

“My grandparents used to have a camp in Maine,” he said as she straightened, easing a cramp in the small of her back.

“Don’t talk, Lieutenant. You’re in recovery and you’re doing just fine, but you need to keep quiet.”

She accompanied the orderlies when they rolled Macpherson back to ICU and saw that he was hooked up into the myriad of monitors again. “The police are everywhere,” she told him as she made a few notes on his chart. “The waiting room is jammed full of them.” She thought it strange that there was no significant other wringing her hands among all the badges. Surely there was a woman in his life? And what about his parents? Brothers and sisters?

“My parents sold the camp when my grandparents died,” he said, still groggy from the effects of the anesthesia. “Beautiful log cabin…”

“Lieutenant Macpherson?” Annie bent over him. “Is there anyone I can call for you? Family members, close friends?”

“Those guys in the waiting room,” he said. “Only family I have.”

“I see. Well, you won’t be able to have any visitors today. Tomorrow, perhaps.” Annie paused. “And, Lieutenant, this might not be the best time to apologize, but I’m sorry I was so rude to you the night you arrested my daughter.”

A vague frown furrowed his brow at her words, then cleared. “Bear clawed the door once, trying to get in. Big bear.”

Annie sighed. He was still pretty dopey. “Lieutenant, no more talking. I’ve taped the call button right beside your hand. Can you feel it? Good. If you need anything at all, just push that button. The nurses will keep a close eye on you, and Dr. Brink will be checking in regularly. I’ll be nearby, just down the hall.” Annie took one last critical look at Macpherson before turning to leave, but his voice stopped her as she reached the door.

“The cabin was on a pretty little pond…”

“Lieutenant, please try to get some rest.”

She turned away once again, and once again his voice halted her in her tracks. “Don’t forget your magazine, Doc,” he said. When she left Intensive Care Unit, the glossy periodical was tucked beneath her arm.

JAKE MACPHERSON was moved into a private room after three days in ICU. Time resumed its old dimensions and began to weigh heavily upon him. His visitors came and went in a steady stream, men and women from the department, the obligatory brotherhood of the badge. Some of them were friends, others he barely recognized, more than a few he didn’t know at all. All of them came bearing get-well wishes and awkward demeanors. None of them enjoyed being in hospitals because they feared that one day, they, too, might wind up in an adjustable hospital bed with bloody tubes bristling from their bodies.

Or worse, in the hospital’s morgue.

The one bright spot that moved in and out of his life was Dr. Annie Crawford, but he saw her less and less frequently as his condition improved and the regular doctors took over. And so he spent the long hours of the endless days replaying the sequence of events that had landed him in this hospital bed. Damning himself, over and over, for his carelessness. Berating himself for not listening to the skinny hooker when she’d said to Joey Mendoza, little drug runner extraordinaire, “I won’t let him arrest you, Joey, I’ll shoot him first.” A hollow threat. Surely she didn’t have a gun, and even if she did, no one would shoot a cop for Joey Mendoza.

But surprise, surprise, when he’d started to cuff Joey, she’d pulled this tiny pistol out of her purse. He’d had time to defend himself. He’d seen her move, seen the little pistol in her hand, and was pulling his own gun even as he pushed Joey away from him, out of the line of fire. He could have shot her but didn’t. Couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger on a woman.

And so he lay on his back in the hospital bed, hour after hour, counting the tiny holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles, finding geometric patterns in random chaos, endlessly defining the perimeters of his life and waiting for the early mornings when Annie Crawford would walk into his room at the end of her shift, give him one of her quizzical little smiles and say, “Hey, Lieutenant. How are you feeling?”

Whenever she came he tried to engage her in conversation about her daughter. About her life. About the hospital. About the weather. About the dog-eared Down East magazine she’d been reading. About the camp his grandparents had owned. Anything to extend her visit. Eventually she showed him a classified ad in the real estate section, an old saltwater farm for rent for the summer in a place called Blue Harbor. “It’s a wild, crazy dream, spending a summer in Maine,” she admitted. “But, oh, so tempting.”

He advised her to call the listing Realtor. “Live dangerously,” he said. “Take the summer off and be wild.”

She’d laughed at the absurdity of such a notion, but the next time she came into his room she confessed that she’d called about the rental. “It’s still available and sounds wonderful, but there’s just no way I can take the whole summer off, and they won’t rent it by the week.” Still, she was thinking about it, he could tell. She was thinking about it enough that he called the Realtor himself, remembering the name from the ad she’d shown him. An elderly sounding man answered. “I’m wondering if you carry any summer rentals in the Blue Harbor area,” Jake began.

“Sure do. What exactly are you looking for, and in what price range?”

Jake told him, and after a brief pause the voice said politely, “I’m afraid you won’t find anything that cheap in this area. The closest thing I have listed in your price range is a very primitive camp about twenty miles inland.” Twenty miles wasn’t that far to drive to see a woman like Annie Crawford. He logged the information, thanked the Realtor, and hung up.

Annie’s visits became less and less frequent. She was always busy, whisking in and out, cheerful but impersonal, shining—like the sun—on all things equally. Nonetheless, he was secretly smitten with her, and he supposed that just about every red-blooded man she met fell under the same spell. How could they help themselves? Annie Crawford was smart, warm, compassionate and highly skilled in a very challenging profession. As if those attributes weren’t enough, her eyes were a shade of marine blue that made him think of some exotic tropical paradise. Her hair was a thick, glossy mahogany, shoulder-length and pulled back in a simple twist. Annie and her daughter looked enough alike to pass as sisters, but Sally didn’t have her mother’s Australian accent or the bone-deep beauty that only spiritual maturity could give a woman—and Annie Crawford was a deeply beautiful woman.