Blue Bayou

by JoAnn Ross

  “That's right. I was.”

  “Which was why,” he said patiently, “I had to arrange for you to believe the child had died. So you wouldn't ruin your life. Your entire future.”

  “Oh, God.” She dragged a hand down her face. Drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I've tried to live up to your expectations. I've tried to be the exemplary daughter, to always do what you wanted, to somehow make us into some kind of idealized Father Knows Best family—”

  “Your father did know best.”

  “No.” Dani shook her head. “You didn't know anything about me. About what I wanted, what was right for me, because you never loved me enough to get to know you.”

  “That's not true.”

  “Don't lie.” She felt the ice begin to flow over her heart, allowing her mind to cool. Her thoughts to calm. “I'm not leaving Blue Bayou, because I'm not going to let you chase me away from the home I've made for my child.

  “My children,” she said, thinking with wonder that it appeared to be true. That she did, indeed have a daughter she'd never known about, a child who'd been cruelly kept from her. And somehow, she was going to have to convince both Jack and her newly found daughter that she'd never knowingly abandoned her.

  “What you did was evil and manipulative and there is no way I'm going to let either of my children anywhere near you.”

  “Danielle—”

  “Don't.” She knocked away his outstretched hand. “I don't want you to touch me. I don't want you to speak to me.” She turned to leave. “And I don't want to ever see you again for the rest of my life.”

  He called out again, and although his weakened tone tugged familial chords and played on her conscience, Dani kept walking toward the Volvo she'd parked at the curb.

  It was the sound of glass shattering that had her turning around to see that he'd dropped the tea. Then, grabbing the edge of the table with one hand, his chest with the other, as she watched in horror, the judge collapsed to the patio, pulling the glass-topped table down on top of him.

  What if she'd killed him? As badly as her father had hurt her, as angry as she'd been, Dani knew she'd never be able to forgive herself.

  “I knew about his heart,” she said to Orèlia, who'd arrived home from grocery shopping during all the excitement. “I knew how easily he could die.”

  As soon as she'd seen her father collapse, Dani had rushed to him, frantically trying to remember the CPR course she'd taken at a Fairfax fire station while dialing 911 on her cell phone. She'd managed to get an aspirin down his throat and was on her knees, pressing on his chest, struggling to count out the rhythm over the screaming inside her head when the paramedics arrived after what seemed like a lifetime but had only been, she'd learned later, four minutes after her call.

  They'd taken over with brisk efficiency, the man setting up a portable monitor and ripping open her father's shirt to place the defibrillator paddles while the woman snapped an oxygen mask on his face and began installing a breathing tube in his throat.

  Dani's heart dived and her blood pressure spiked when she viewed her father's heartbeat wiggling all over the monitor like fluorescent green worms.

  She knew that if she lived to be a hundred, she'd never forget the sight of his body jerking upward when they zapped the electrical charge into it. The paramedics established an IV, lifted him onto the rolling gurney, and rushed him into the ambulance. Dani had gone with them, while Orèlia promised to follow in her car.

  He'd gone into fibrillation again as they'd careened through the streets, siren wailing, tires thudding joltingly against the cobblestones she had, until then, considered charmingly picturesque.

  The moment they'd reached the ER, she'd been abruptly shut out of the process; as the double doors slammed closed, cutting her off from her father, Dani was nearly overwhelmed with guilt.

  Fortunately, Orèlia, foregoing any concern about speed limits, had arrived right behind the ambulance, taking care of the admission paperwork when Dani had been too numb to answer. After promising Dani she'd be right back, she had taken off to find out what exactly was happening to the judge behind those doors.

  “He's not dead, chère,” she said now as Dani paced the nearly deserted waiting room outside the ER.

  “Not yet, maybe. But I saw his heartbeat on the monitor. It was all over the place. How can anyone survive that?”

  “People have, and worse. You're not a doctor, you. So don' go jumpin' to conclusions. And sit down. You're making me nervous with all that walkin' back and forth. Besides, you look like you're gonna pass out any minute.”

  Dani managed a weak, humorless laugh at that diagnosis. “It appears to be the day for that,” she murmured as she nevertheless sank down onto an obnoxiously orange couch. “Were you able to find out anything?”

  “They've got the judge stabilized and are movin' him up to surgery.”

  “Surgery? I thought Dr. Ancelet said he was too weak to be a good surgical candidate.”

  “I'm sure they wouldn't be operating if they didn't think it was the best thing to do,” the older woman assured her.

  “Can't I see him, just for a minute? Talk to him?” Dani couldn't bear the thought of her father dying without her having a chance to apologize. He'd caused a great deal of emotional and personal pain, but didn't deserve to die for his actions.

  “Darlin', you know I love you to pieces, but right now you'd just be in the way. Your daddy's in good hands. Seems there was a surgeon from Tulane in town to do some fishing tomorrow with the ER doctor. They called him at the Plantation Inn, where he's staying, and he came right over.” She patted Dani's hand. “Isn't that lucky?”

  “I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble finding anything about this day lucky.”

  As Dani struggled not to cry, she looked across the room and saw a little boy, running a toy truck back and forth across the green-and-white tile floor. His pregnant mother sat patiently nearby, reading a paperback romance novel. She'd told Dani she was waiting for her husband, who was in the ER getting a fish hook removed from his cheek. The pirate on the cover of the novel reminded Dani of Jack, which only increased her misery, while the sight of the boy and truck made her think of her own son.

  “Do you think I should bring Matt home from baseball camp? Just in case?”

  “I'd let him stay,” Orèlia decided. “The camp's a big deal for the boy, and it'd take at least eight hours to get him down here. He's due home tomorrow. If the judge's gonna die, it'll probably be in the next few hours, so Matt would miss sayin' goodbye anyway even we could get someone to drive him back to town. If he lives, there'll have been no point in disrupting his life.”

  “His life has been nothing but disruptions for the past two years.”

  “Non. It may have been shaken up, true enough. But you've provided a lot of stability for the child, Danielle. And it shows.” She stroked Dani's hair in a soothing, reassuring way Dani had so often, during childhood, fantasized a mother doing. “Why don't I call Jack? He can come hold your hand.”

  “Jack wouldn't walk across the street to talk to me, let alone hold my hand.”

  Orange painted eyebrows flew up nearly to the birdnest hair. “Comment sa se fait? Did you two have yourselves a little lover's quarrel?”

  “It was a lot more than a quarrel.” Dani rubbed her temple with her fingertips. “It seems our daughter showed up at Beau Soleil today. Needless to say, he was surprised.”

  “He's not the only one.” Orèlia's eyes widened and her raspberry red mouth made a little O of shock. “How could that be? Did you tell him he was mistaken?”

  “At first. But I wasn't exactly standing on very firm ground having never told him I'd been pregnant in the first place.”

  “I can see that would be a problem,” Orèlia said with a thoughtful nod. “But since the poor little bébé died—”

  “She didn't.” Dani sighed, thinking how strange it was that this should be the happiest day of her life, but was, instead, turning out to be one of
her worst. “Father lied.”

  Orèlia exhaled a slow whistle. “Well. I wish I could say that I couldn't believe such a thing, but I suppose, knowin' the judge, it's not totally out of character. Have you met her? Your daughter? What's her name? Where is she now?”

  “She's at Beau Soleil with her father and uncle, I was too shocked to ask her name, and if Jack has his way, I'll probably never meet her.”

  “Non.” Orèlia discarded that idea with a wave of her hand. “He's just angry, he. And hurt. Not to mention his male pride havin' been damaged. But Jack Callahan is a good man, Danielle. He won' try to keep your daughter from you. And it's obvious he loves you, so you'll see, all this will blow over quick enough.”

  Remembering Jack's face, as he'd walked out of her apartment and her life, Dani couldn't be nearly so optimistic.

  She moved upstairs to another waiting room outside the CCU, which is where they told her her father would be taken after surgery and discovered the room was well named. It was as if her life had been put on hold; there was nothing to do but wait and see how this cruel trick that had been played on her was going to end. The magazines were old. Over the many months recipes and coupons had been clipped out of them, which hadn't left all that many articles intact. Not that she could have concentrated anyway.

  She tried reading about the problems of the sandwich generation, stories of women tending for ill, aging parents while raising children of their own, but all that did was make her focus even more on how she could well end up discovering a daughter and losing her father all on the same day. Which she suspected, wasn't exactly the thrust of the article.

  She jumped up when Eve Ancelet appeared in the door, a tall, distinguished-looking man at her side. They were both wearing green surgical scrubs.

  “He's doing fine,” Eve assured her.

  “If he was fine, he wouldn't be here,” Dani snapped. Then immediately apologized.

  “Don't worry about it,” the doctor brushed her apology off. “This is a stressful time, and heaven knows, hospitals aren't the most calming of places.” She introduced the man as Dr. Young, who was, indeed, on the surgical staff at Tulane.

  “Your father suffered an incident of arrhythmia,” Eve explained. “Which is simply an irregular heartbeat. They're actually quite common and many are harmless, but given the fact that the judge is already suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy, Dr. Young and I both felt that he could benefit from an implantable defibrillator.”

  “I thought you said he wasn't strong enough for surgery.”

  “This surgery isn't all that intrusive, as surgeries go,” Dr. Young said. “Earlier models were about the size of a pack of cigarettes, were implanted beneath the skin of the abdomen, and required open heart surgery to attach the electrodes to the heart. The latest model, which your father received, is much smaller, can be placed beneath the skin of the chest, and only requires a single electrode that can be routed into the heart through a vein.”

  “The defibrillator has a tiny computer which uses the electrode to constantly monitor the heartbeat,” Eve picked up the explanation. “If it detects even a minor arrhythmia, it activates the built-in pacemaker to restabilize the heart's rhythm. If that fails, it delivers a jolt to the heart.”

  Dani didn't think she'd ever forget the sight of her father being violently jolted back to life by those EMTs. “Isn't that incredibly painful?”

  “Not nearly as much as the muscle-contracting jolt delivered by the more traditional defibrillators you're probably thinking of,” Dr. Young said.

  “In fact unlike first-generation models, which could only deliver a maximum jolt several times a day, this one starts out small,” Eve said. “Then, if necessary, builds, but, as Dr. Young told you, it's nothing like what you saw done to your father. In fact, patients report that the low-level charge, which often does the job, is barely noticable.”

  It was as if they were a medical tag team. Dani kept looking from one to the other, trying to see if there was anything they might not be telling her.

  “Does this mean you expect more incidences?” she asked, thinking what a mild word that was for such a horrific event.

  “There's a strong possibility,” Eve allowed. “Though this has upped your father's chances for a longer life considerably, Dani. As I told you during our meeting in my office, while medication can reduce the mortality rate of ventricular tachycardia by fifteen to twenty-five percent, the implantable defibrillator cuts it down as low as two percent.”

  Dani asked more questions, received answers that had her feeling better than she had when she'd arrived, although she was still horribly concerned.

  The doctors left. The shift changed. New nurses, their manner brisk and efficient, came on duty. Dinner trays were delivered and picked up again. More doctors arrived on the floor to put on starched white lab coats and make evening rounds. The waiting room began filling up with other patients' family members who'd come for visiting hours.

  Orèlia brought Dani cups of tea and coffee and cola from the vending machine she kept forgetting to drink, food from the cafeteria she couldn't eat since it would have been impossible to swallow with a lump that felt as solid as Captain Callahan's statue stuck in her throat.

  She heard a Code Blue announced and felt as if her own heart stopped as the team rushed by the waiting room door to the CCU.

  “Who is it?” Dani asked the gray-haired woman manning the nurse's desk.

  “Don't worry, chère,” the nurse assured her with a sympathetic smile. “It's not the judge.”

  A cooling relief rushed through Dani. A relief that was fleeting as the waiting continued.

  Watching the clock, she knew that outside the hospital, night would be beginning to settle over the bayou. Inside the walls it remained constant day, the alien world lit by a complexion-draining fluorescent light. Having grown accustomed to the restful night music of bullfrogs, owls, and crickets, Dani was intensely aware of not just the loud noises, like those disembodied voices that seemed to never stop crackling over the intercom, but the softer sounds, as well. The swoosh of rubber-soled shoes, the tap of fingers on the computer keyboard, the sound of the elevator opening and closing, the click of beads and murmured prayers of a rosary being said in French from somewhere down the hallway, the occasional soft moan drifting on the antiseptic scented air, all conspired to spark at her nerves like fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard.

  Gradually the visitors drifted away, leaving Dani alone in the waiting room with Orèlia. The shift changed again. And still she hadn't been allowed to see her father.

  A nurse came and told Dani the judge was sleeping. “Why don't you go home and do the same thing yourself?” she suggested gently. “Get some rest so you'll be fresh for your father in the morning.”

  “I'll be fine,” Dani said. “And I'm staying.”

  The nurse took one look at the determination in her eyes, exchanged a glance with Orèlia, who shrugged, then, with a resigned sigh, returned to charting meds.

  Much, much later, feeling guilty that she was subjecting Orèlia, who refused to leave while Dani remained at the hospital, to the same interminable waiting, Dani arranged with the nurse for her to be able to use one of the empty rooms.

  “I'll just take a short nap,” the older woman promised. “So long as you promise to wake me if anything happens.”

  Dani promised. And her vigil continued.

  She was standing at the window, staring out over the bayou, to where she could just barely make out the distant lights of the ships on the Gulf waterways, twinkling like fallen stars, when she realized she was no longer the only person in the waiting room. Steeling herself for bad news, she slowly turned toward the doorway, her knees nearly buckling when she saw Jack standing there.

  He looked every bit as beat up as Dani felt. His hair was loose and looked as if he'd been thrusting his hands through it, his face, heavily shadowed by a midnight dark beard, was drawn and his eyes weary. But he was still the most wonderfu
l sight she'd ever seen.

  “I just heard,” he said. “Actually Nate did. There was a news bulletin on the radio.”

  “Oh.” When she hadn't been worrying about her father, Dani had been going over what she would eventually say to Jack. She'd rejected innumerable lines, but none had been as insufficient as that single word that had just come out of her mouth.

  “Have you been alone all this time?”

  She glanced around the waiting room as if surprised by the question. Brushed at the heavy wrinkles across the front of her shorts. “No.” Determined to manage more than a stumbling monosyllable, she added, “Orèlia's been with me. I made her go take a nap.”

  He nodded, seeming as uncomfortable with this conversation as she was. “That's good. That she's been here. And that she's resting.”

  “Yes.”

  They were standing there across the room from each other. Exhausted and frightened and relieved that he'd come, all at the same time, Dani couldn't decide whether to weep or throw herself into his arms. So she did neither.

  “I brought her,” he said, breaking the silence that had stretched between them.

  “You did?” Feeling as if she were having an incident of arrhythmia herself, Dani looked past him into the hallway.

  “She's downstairs with Nate. I wanted a couple minutes to prepare you.”

  Dani opened her mouth to speak, but her throat was burning and the lump was back, blocking any words. She bit her lip, fought for composure and tried again. “Thank you.”

  He cursed. A rough, French word that needed no translation and seemed directed inward. Then, shaking his head, he opened his arms. “Viens ici, mon coeur.”

  Dani didn't need a second invitation. She flew into those strong outstretched arms like a sparrow winging toward safety in a hurricane. And when she felt them tighten around her, holding her close, she knew she'd come home.

  “I'm so sorry,” she said against the front of his shirt.