Lucidity

by CJ Lyons

  "No. I saw you push the door open and bend over to pick up the bag. When I looked up again there were two men with her. One guy looked like a priest or something dressed all in black. The other, he hugged her, kind of looked like he was going to cry or something--" He broke off, took several shallow breaths, trying to understand what he'd seen, how to explain it.

  The priest guy looked kinda normal--almost too normal. But the other man, the one with red hair, he'd been all shimmery like--like he didn't know what. The only thing he'd ever seen that came close was those holy pictures with the golden halos glowing around people. Or the old Star Trek episodes when the transporter malfunctioned.

  "I don't get it," he continued when he got his breath back. "I swear those men didn't come in through the door."

  "They must have gotten past you while you weren't looking. Which way did they go?" Kat pushed him past the reception desk.

  "I don't know where the priest went. But the woman and the other guy went into the elevator. Seven." Alex grabbed the bag from her hands and motioned for her to turn him around. "The elevator stopped on Seven. Let's go."

  Kat hesitated. He banged his hand against the arm of the chair in frustration.

  "I don't know. I have a bad feeling about this," she said, the taste of copper and burnt ashes still tightening her throat. "Maybe we should find someone else to follow. Or go watch a DVD. We could sneak some hot cocoa from the nurses' kitchen."

  Alex turned his head to face her. He was frowning, his eyes blazing with intensity, not to be denied. "No," he insisted. "I have to meet her. I don't know who she is, but she seems so familiar. Kat, I think that woman saved my life."

  "You saw her. She's acting nuts. Probably came from the psych ward or something."

  "I'm serious." His forehead creased as he concentrated, trying to clarify his feeling. "Maybe she didn't save my life yet," he said, his voice sounding far away, "maybe she will save my life. Later."

  Kat leaned down and checked the oxygen level on Alex's tank. She hated when he said things like that, giving her this creepy nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach like grasshoppers fighting to get out.

  The tank was almost full. No answers there. She was silent as she pushed the chair over to the elevator and pressed the Up button.

  Sometimes Alex reminded her of a book she'd once read about the wizard Merlin. Alex was also living his life backwards, dying much too young but knowing more than most grownups.

  The elevator arrived and Kat wheeled Alex inside. The doors slid shut behind them and she heard a woman laughing. Her palms began to sweat as she clenched the grips of the chair's handles.

  It sounded like Eve Warden, the physician in charge of the Extended Care Unit. The biggest Freak in the Freak Show, Kat liked to joke, but she couldn't hide the truth from herself.

  Warden was the only thing in this world Kat was truly, deeply, intensely frightened of. Eve Warden controlled Kat's dreams, her seizures, her chances of living through the surgery Dr. Helman had planned for Kat.

  Eve Warden held Kat's fate in her bony fingered hands. And anything that made her laugh could not be good.

  CHAPTER 4

  Hide-n-Seek

  "Nice presentation, Vincent." Eve Warden lingered after the neurosurg conference to speak with the pediatric chief resident. It surprised her how close in age she and Vincent Emberek were: she was thirty-eight and he was thirty-five. Yet, he was only beginning his career and she was about to achieve the pinnacle of hers.

  As Eve admired Vincent's well-sculptured body and dark, Mediterranean good looks, she wondered if he realized she had been studying him since he first came to Angels of Mercy nine months ago, that she had chosen him, had been grooming him oh so carefully. She needed a new associate for her next venture, someone with experience with both adult and pediatric patients, someone who would be as enthusiastic about his work as he was about his partner.

  She brushed against Vincent's hip. He didn't shy away from the contact. His rugged good looks would be a definite asset in attracting the right kind of private patient to her clinic. And those hands--large, callused, the hands of a working man.

  Eve took in a sharp breath as she imagined those hands on her body. "You need to spend more time up in the Extended Care Unit," she told Vincent. "I know you're focusing on Pediatrics right now, but I have some very interesting adult patients as well."

  "Did you tell him we need to use Lucidine on Katherine Jellicle?" Jonas Helman interrupted her.

  Eve frowned at the neurosurgeon. She was probably the only person in the hospital who could get away with giving Helman a look like that. But she and Jonas had been partners both in and out of the operating room for years.

  Eve's specialty in neuro-anesthesia had proven invaluable to the surgeon in his development of new operative techniques. She liked to think she was the power behind the power, that she'd molded the man, shaped his career.

  Enhancing her own in the process. Her work with Jonas had led to patents on several monitoring devices and drug protocols, gaining her prestige and financial freedom.

  Although Jonas didn't know it yet, she was ready to move on. The surgeon had grown too predictable. His egocentric demands, constant need for attention was wearisome. She needed fresh blood.

  Like Vincent. He would be an invigorating change of pace.

  "We hadn't gotten there yet," Eve told the surgeon, wishing he'd leave this to her.

  Jonas didn't get the hint. He never did. "Jellicle keeps sabotaging her recording," he told Vincent, acting as if the eleven-year-old girl was insulting him personally by not following his instructions. "I need somewhere between ten to fourteen hours more to finish mapping her seizures. I want Eve to put her under with Lucidine. I can't operate until I have that information."

  Vincent looked puzzled. "Lucidine?"

  "Lucidine," Helman told him. "Haven't you been following Dr. Warden's work?"

  "Vincent's duties are keeping him on the pediatric floor, Jonas."

  "Still, the man's boarded in both medicine and pediatrics, he should be keeping current. Though I don't know why anyone would waste that much time doing both residencies. I could've made a surgeon out of you in the same time."

  A chance to cut was a chance to cure. Eve prudently held her tongue. Jonas routinely disparaged any branch of medicine that didn't involve arms plunged deep inside body cavities. He even ridiculed her own field of anesthesia, calling it 99% boredom and 1% panic, despite the fact that without Eve's help he never could have progressed to become head of the neurosurgery department.

  The two men squared off with her in the middle. "Maybe if you did more reading you wouldn't be in the midst of a malpractice suit, Emberek," Jonas added injury to insult. "One that I understand is not going favorably." He shook his head in mock dismay. "Doesn't bode well for your chance at receiving a permanent appointment here."

  Vincent bristled at that. They all knew Jonas, as chairman of the hospital's executive committee, had the final say in which physicians were allowed on staff. And Jonas could also easily use his influence to help Vincent with his malpractice case. If he were so inclined.

  She held her breath, waiting to see which way Vincent would play the encounter. Would he vent his anger at Jonas's insults or meekly take it, currying favor with the chief of neurosurgery?

  "Lucidine," Vincent began, making Eve smile as he proved the neurosurgeon wrong in the most diplomatic way possible. The lad had brains in addition to looks. "The trade name for alphamethylcyclidine, is a new striated muscle relaxant that does not cross the blood brain barrier, allowing patients to experience anesthesia and paralysis of their body without sedation," he recited Eve's research virtually verbatim. "Combined with the Farwell technique of brain stimulation, it allows the neurosurgeon," he nodded to Helman, "to operate while simultaneously assessing the surgery's effects on the patient's brain centers. What I don't understand is why you want to use it on Kat Jellicle."

  "Because I need that information," J
onas snapped.

  "I'm beginning to use Lucidine outside the confines of the OR," Eve explained, placing her hand on Vincent's arm. His muscles were rock hard, making her almost purr with delight. "I have to monitor a case in the OR now, but come up to the ECU at five o'clock. I've got a bariatric patient due for a treatment."

  "How does anesthesia treat obesity?" Vincent asked.

  Eve laughed. "You'd be surprised what I can treat with Lucidine. It's going to revolutionize medicine--for those of us with enough imagination."

  "What about my patient?" Jonas broke in, obviously feeling left out.

  "Don't worry," Eve assured him, laying her other hand on the surgeon's arm, enjoying the energy that flowed between the men, through her body. She felt Jonas tense and knew he was suspicious--but his ego was too big to allow him to imagine that she'd ever leave him for a lowly resident. "Have I ever let you down?"

  Was this what it felt like to go insane? Grace wondered as Jimmy's arms snugged her closer to his body. The elevator seemed possessed, flying to the seventh floor without stopping.

  If this was insanity, then she understood why so many psych patients refused treatment. It was intoxicating, arousing, this feeling that she was in her own universe, far away from the filth and ugliness of the real world. And to have Jimmy with her--heaven couldn't compare.

  She understood that he was here because of the tumor. Some random focus of out-of-control cells had impinged upon small folds of neurons in her hippocampus, generating Jimmy's image, his voice, the tang of Old Spice that lingered in the air when he appeared.

  Even knowing that didn't make his presence any less real. Just as the sudden clench in her gut and the rapid pounding of her heart, the absolute pang of joy she felt each and every time she saw him again was real.

  As was the desolation when he vanished.

  Because, despite the multitude of medical reasons why he could not exist, Grace still believed.

  She'd been watching, waiting four long years for something to believe in. This was the tumor's gift. Allowing her to remember Jimmy with hope instead of terror and despair. To reunite her with her love. To prepare her for death. It was a gift she was unwilling to relinquish. The tumor could have her body--she was done with it.

  The very first time Grace met Jimmy he'd rescued her. Leave it to him to find a way to return from the dead and save her once more.

  She took a deep breath, reveling in the musk of Jimmy's sweat and Old Spice deodorant. After he died, she had tried to recreate that smell, even using the men's deodorant herself. But it hadn't worked. She didn't have the right chemistry to turn the tangy perfume into Jimmy's wet, warm scent of security.

  Grace had left the stick of Old Spice open in Jimmy's closet, a sachet of loneliness. Nights when she couldn't sleep, which were most, she'd pull out one of his shirts, wrap herself in its embrace, inhaling his scent.

  It was an illusion--but what wasn't anymore?

  The elevator doors opened. She stepped out on the seventh floor. They slid shut behind her, taking Jimmy with them. Grace whirled, the sudden emptiness a knife spiraling through her gut.

  He'd be back. She was certain. Jimmy would never abandon her. Not again.

  Grace wrapped her arms around her chest, failing to recreate the warmth Jimmy had brought her--even if he was just a figment of a brain gone bad.

  God, she wished she was back at home. An errant tear slipped from her eye before she could blink it back.

  She looked around. When she'd been a resident here at Angels, the Seventh Floor Annex had been a second home, a refuge for her. Now everything had changed.

  To her left, a set of metal double doors with windows inset in them guarded the new glass-walled Skyway leading to the research tower. In front of her, the door to the roof, where the helipad had been when she was a resident, looked dingy and unused, neglected.

  She looked to her right and saw the scratched wooden door leading to the call rooms and the small kitchen and lounge where they'd had parties. Her body shook with a feeling of unbelonging.

  She needed to go home. She wasn't a doctor anymore. Here she was only a stranger in a strange yet familiar land.

  "Forgive me my trespasses," she whispered a stray bit of an old prayer Brother Leo had taught her when she was a little girl. She'd felt the Jesuit's presence ever since she'd woken in the operating room yesterday. Probably because without Leo, she never would have met Jimmy in the first place.

  Hugging her arms around her chest, she regarded the brightly colored signs directing elevator passengers to the left, to the Tower via the Skyway, as if nothing of importance remained behind the other two, older, forgotten doors.

  The two doors that once had been the most important in her life. One leading to the adrenalin rush of desperate flight to a fresh trauma scene, the other to the promise of a few moments of peace and quiet in an otherwise turbulent workday. Grace leaned her head against the window of the door leading to the roof.

  Is this why you brought me here? she asked Jimmy. She remembered her earlier fantasy of flying through the air, falling down the stairwell. The roof was a much more practical solution, guaranteed success from seven stories up.

  Despite its weight, the fire door rattled against a gust of wind and rain. No, please--let me go home, let it happen there. We'll leave jumping as a last resort, shall we, love?

  She thought the last with an overblown Irish brogue--always guaranteed to make Jimmy chuckle at how Yanks seemed unable to master the Queen's English in any proper fashion.

  "Hello." A small voice from behind her made Grace jump. She whirled around, half expecting to see another ghost.

  A much too-skinny to be healthy boy in a wheelchair emerged from the elevator, pushed by a young girl in jeans and a Godsmack T-shirt, her shaven scalp sprouting electrodes.

  "Hello," Grace replied, smiling at the unlikely duo. The boy was wearing comfortable over-large sweats with the Pittsburgh Steelers logo on them.

  "We saw you downstairs at the playroom," the boy continued. "And then in the lobby." He paused frequently to breathe. His lips were tinged blue despite the oxygen he wore. He held out his hand to her. "I'm Alex Weiss."

  Grace shook the grave young boy's hand with a firm grip. Three plus clubbing distorted his fingernails, a sure sign of chronic oxygen deprivation. Heart or lungs?

  Alex's companion stared at her with suspicion. Grace tried another smile, hoping she wasn't so out of practice that she frightened the children.

  "I'm Grace." It wasn't until Alex released her hand that she realized there'd been no panic, not even a tinge of anxiety at his touch.

  Before she could puzzle that through, the girl stepped forward and held out her hand as well. "Kat, Kat Jellicle," the girl muttered, shaking hands even as her eyes scrutinized Grace's face with the look of a well-trained cynic.

  Grace's smile widened on its own--no buzzing with Kat either. She felt normal. Was this another gift of the tumor? Curing one disease even as it killed her with another?

  "You dropped this." Kat retrieved the plastic bag with Grace's few belongings from Alex's lap and handed it to her.

  Grace glanced down at the bag, forgotten during her panic attack in the revolving doors. Maybe not so cured after all.

  "What happened downstairs?" Alex asked. "What was in there with you?"

  Grace glanced away, out the window, toward the Skyway leading to the gleaming research Tower. Kids saw entirely too much. She didn't want them to think her crazy, hated to have them disappointed in her so soon.

  She shrugged and scuffed her feet against the linoleum.

  "You can't leave, can you?" he continued relentlessly. "Is that why you came up here--to hide in the Annex?"

  Grace looked up at that. Kat's expression was one of skepticism while Alex's face held wonder and awe. Surely not for her.

  What was going on here?

  Too many questions, she heard Jimmy's chuckle echo through her. Always asking too many questions.

&nbs
p; Before Grace could say anything, Kat jerked her head, her electrodes whipping behind her. She rushed over to press her face against the glass pane inset in the door leading to the Skyway. "Jeezit, the cops. Nurse Cray, coming in fast."

  "Give me the Annex key," Alex said.

  Kat dug in the pockets of her jeans, her eyes never leaving the window. "I don't have them, you must."

  Alex began to rummage through the various bags attached to his chair. A deck of cards came and went, followed by packages of shrink wrapped pills, several quarters, a Cosmo, two inhalers, bits of string and assorted rubber bands, Kleenex both used and virginal, a water bottle, snack bars, baseball cards, and finally, a key ring.

  "Got em," he said in triumph.

  "Too late. Hide."

  Alex beckoned Grace to push him behind the second door while Kat opened the other and breezed through it onto the Skyway. Grace huddled beneath the window. Even safely anchored on the Annex, she could feel the vibrations as the wind tore at the glass-walled bridge across the abyss separating the Annex and the Tower.

  "Mrs. Cray, nice to see you." Kat met the nurse half way across the Skyway. The acoustics in the walkway were strange, creating hollow echoes, carrying voices in waves and amplifying them to a deafening volume that made Grace's teeth ache.

  "Katherine, I've been looking all over for you. Pediatrics called, wanting to know where Alexander was. It's not my job to be chasing you two all over the hospital. If you can't act responsibly, I'll have Dr. Emberek put you back on restriction."

  "Alex is with the Chemo Trio," Kat told the nurse.

  "Really, Katherine. You're much too cynical for an eleven-year-old."

  "Twelve--I'll be twelve on Thursday." Grace heard steel in the girl's voice as she corrected the nurse.

  "Then you're still eleven," Cray continued. "Go get Alexander back to his room, then I expect you resting quietly in your room for the rest of the day."

  "Yes ma'am." Grace heard the grudging surrender in Kat's voice and knew it must have cost the girl dearly to bow to the nurse's will. She promised herself she'd pay the eleven--almost twelve-year-old--back when she could.