Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  He had a gash on his chin and another, longer one on his arm. But it was the pain on the left side of his upper abdomen, just below his ribs, that concerned Paige. She felt a distinct rigidity there. If a rib had broken and pierced his spleen, if blood filled that spleen to the point of rupturing, he would be in bad shape.

  “I want a CAT scan done,” she told the nurse, and wrote out the order. “Let’s find out if his spleen is bleeding. The ribs need to be X-rayed, but that’s not the first priority. Is there someone who can take him to the scanner?”

  The nurse stuck her head out the door, hollered, “Bartholomew!” and returned.

  “Bartholomew?” Paige echoed with a wink for John. She took a closer look at his lacerations. The one on his chin looked worse than it was. She cleaned the movie house dust from it, then examined his arm. “This one should be stitched, but it’ll wait until after the CAT scan.” She rechecked his vital signs and made notations on his chart, then looked up when the door opened.

  Bartholomew was an orderly who was large, white-haired and bearded, and nearly seventy. His greatest problem getting John’s gurney out the door were John’s mother and two of his sisters, who had been waiting in the hall and now crowded in. In a voice aimed to calm, Paige explained what she had found and where John was headed. After sending them to follow, she turned to the patient in the second bed.

  Her name was Mary O’Reilly. She was twenty-four years old, married, and the mother of two young children who were patients of Paige’s. Mary’s husband, Jimmy, had been red-coded and taken to one of the other hospitals, and Mary was in such a panic about him that she was paying little heed to herself, which was just as well. Her thigh was a mess. It had been impaled by a shard of wood that had crashed from above. The shard had been removed at the scene and the gash temporarily bandaged, but it was deep enough to expose the bone. Paige called on every bit of her medical skill to repair layers of muscle, tendon, and skin. When she was done, she smoothed Mary’s hair back from her damp and ashen face. “You’ll have to stay off this, Mary.”

  “But I got my kids to take care of. And I gotta find Jimmy.”

  “Who’s with the kids now?”

  “My landlady.” Her voice rose to a hysterical pitch. “She was doing us a favor. We don’t go out much since the kids were born.”

  “Do your parents live nearby?”

  “There’s just my father, but he’s up in St. Johnsbury and he won’t talk with me since I married Jimmy.”

  “What about Jimmy’s parents?”

  “They’re here in Tucker.” She looked horrified. “Someone has to tell them about Jimmy.”

  And about Mary, Paige thought. She couldn’t be kept at the hospital long, what with the crowd, but she certainly couldn’t go home alone. She was going to need help with the children for some time to come.

  “I’ll have someone call them,” Paige assured her.

  “Maybe they heard. Maybe they’re looking for him already.”

  “Then your landlady will stay with the kids until they get back, and in the meantime we’ll try to get you some news on Jimmy.”

  “What if he’s dead?” she cried.

  “Don’t even think it,” Paige scolded gently, and stood back when an orderly wheeled her from the bay. She followed only long enough to stop at the desk, which was being manned by a harried charge nurse and a handful of eager volunteers, and see to contacting both Mary’s in-laws and her landlady. She returned to Room G in time to be accosted by an unhappy parent.

  “That’s my boy in there. Name’s Alex Johnson. When’s a doctor gonna see him?”

  “I’m a doctor, Mr. Johnson. I’ll see him now. If you wait here, I’ll be out as soon as I can to tell you what I find.” She backed into the room and let the door close.

  Alex had multiple lacerations and a fractured femur. Paige corraled the portable X-ray unit into the bay and had pictures made of the fracture. When it proved to be a simple one, she casted it and stitched his cuts.

  To the father she said, “Ideally, I’d keep him here overnight, but given the situation, I just can’t. He has crutches. We’ll wheel him out to the car and help you get him in. He’ll have to stay off that leg.”

  “You tell him. He don’t listen to me.”

  “It’s important, Alex. You can’t put any weight on it.” To both of them she said, “Keep it elevated to minimize the swelling. Take aspirin for the pain. If it gets terribly uncomfortable, if the cast starts feeling too tight or too loose, let us know. Okay?”

  She turned to the patient whose stretcher had replaced Mary O’Reilly’s on the other side of the bay. Tim Hightower, age twenty and strapped to an immobilizer, had been a patient of Mara’s. He had bruises and cuts and was mildly concussed, but the possibility of a cervical spine injury was the real cause for fear. Paige examined him with care, using her fingertips on the base of his skull and his neck to detect swelling or tenderness. She worked her way down his back, questioning him all the while. To her relief, he had neither paralysis nor inhibition of movement. His reflexes were as they should be, as were the sound and feel of his stomach, liver, and kidneys. But his back hurt, which was what had prompted the paramedics to immobilize him.

  “I’ll clean up your cuts and send you to the X-ray unit upstairs, but unless something shows up on the pictures, we can assume that a lower back muscle strain is the source of your pain.”

  She sent him along and turned to the next, a twenty-eight-year-old woman with enough broken facial bones for Paige to defer to a plastic surgeon. Next was another heartrendingly familiar face, a seventeen-year-old with fractures of the collarbone and the humerus, then a thirty-three-year-old with a broken rib and a questionable punctured lung, then a twenty-nine-year-old with abdominal injuries that would require surgery.

  And so it went. Over the next few hours a steady rotation of patients kept her at work without a break. When one patient left, she turned to another; when that one left, she turned to the next. Every few patients was one of her own, a teenager who had been having the time of his or her life and now lay bruised, broken, and in pain. But alive. She kept telling herself that. Some recoveries would be slow. There would be problems with school, with after-school jobs, with playing sports in a town that revered its varsity teams. But at least these children were alive.

  Adrenaline pumped through her system, masking fatigue, while she set bones, stitched lacerations, cleaned abrasions, and forwarded to the surgeons more compound fractures, internal hemorrhaging, and edemas than she had seen during her three-month ER rotation in medical school.

  There was no sign of either Jill, her parents, or her friend. During one brief coffee break, Paige found Angie, but Angie hadn’t seen Jill, either.

  Three fatalities, Paige kept hearing. Three fatalities.

  The night waned before the last of the yellow tags were seen. With the dawn came the green tags, injuries that were less serious but no less in need of attention. Paige gulped down more coffee and a candy bar from the machine in the staff lounge and delved back into the suturing, casting, and splinting.

  At midmorning, when she took a short break, she called the Stickleys’ house. There was no answer. On the chance that Jill had escaped injury entirely, she tried her own house. Nonny answered.

  “What are you doing there?” she cried in surprise.

  “We got up early and walked all around my neighborhood, then we decided to help you out and drive back here ourselves,” Nonny said, sounding chipper and no worse the wear for the trip with a child. “Are you all right?”

  “I am,” Paige said wearily, “but so many aren’t. What a nightmare.”

  “Have you gotten any sleep?”

  “Not yet. Soon. You haven’t heard from Jill, have you?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  “Ideally, yes. I can’t seem to locate her. If she calls, will you call the ER and leave me a message?”

  Nonny agreed, and Paige returned to work. It wasn’t until noon, when
she sank down wearily in the physician’s lounge to await the return of enough energy to get her home, that Peter approached with the information she wanted.

  “Jill’s upstairs. She was one of the first to be seen. She has a pelvic fracture.”

  Paige groaned in distress. “The baby?”

  He waved a hand. “It’s touch and go. She’s had some bleeding, but the baby’s still in there. For how long, no one knows. She and her friend were in the middle of the crush that came down from the balcony, but Jill got the worst of it. The other girl was bussed to Hanover.”

  Weary and heartsick, Paige closed her eyes. No matter that Jill hadn’t planned to be pregnant—no matter that she was going to give the baby up for adoption—to lose it would be a tragedy.

  “I have to go see her,” she said, and pushed herself up from the sofa, but she hadn’t taken more than two steps when an alarmed face appeared at the door.

  “We need help. They’ve pulled seven more from the rubble.”

  It seemed to go on and on and on.

  Paige shot Peter a horrified glance and set off on the run beside him.

  seventeen

  PETER HUNG HIS HEAD OVER THE SINK IN ROOM D and tossed water into his face. He was dead tired, yet he felt a sense of satisfaction that he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. He had helped. No doubt about it. He had done his share, had worked right along with the others, had held up his end even with those last difficult cases.

  If he were to go to the Tavern—which he wouldn’t, since it was two in the afternoon and he planned to go home and sleep for the next seventeen hours—he would be hailed as a hero. He had treated more than a few of his brothers’ friends’ kids. They’d be buying his beer for years.

  A fine thought. Once he got some sleep.

  He wiped his face, tossed away the paper towel, left the room, and headed for his car. When he rounded the corner, he nearly fell over a single gurney than stood there. On it, strapped to a longboard and looking as white as the sheet that covered her, was Kate Ann Murther.

  “Please help me,” she pleaded in a shadow of a voice. She was on oxygen and an IV. “Please help me please help me.”

  Her head, like the rest of her, was immobilized, so that she couldn’t see him, and either no one at the nearby nurses’ station had heard her or no one cared to respond. Kate Ann might well have been invisible, which was pretty much what she’d been all her life. She was an introvert to the extreme, a quiet creature who lacked the courage to reach out for niceties such as friendship, physical comfort, and respect.

  Peter didn’t owe her anything, certainly not compassion for having suffered through childhood as he had. The last thing in the world he wanted was to be associated with a nobody like Kate Ann Murther.

  She was seven years younger than him. She had never married. To his knowledge she had never even dated. She lived alone in a tiny house on the edge of town that always had one problem or another—frozen pipes, a leaky roof, racoons in the cellar. Same with her car, which had a way of breaking down at the most inopportune of spots. She supported herself by doing simple bookkeeping work for several of the smallest businesses in town, though none of those broadcast the fact. They dropped their books at her house and picked them up when she was done, all after dark so no one would see, and if there was snickering in the Tavern about what else happened at the time those books were exchanged, no one believed it. Kate Ann was so shy as to be pathetic, so pathetic as to be sexless. She wasn’t someone anyone in town wanted to take credit for knowing.

  What stunned Peter was that she’d been at the concert at all.

  “Please help me please help me.”

  More words than he had ever heard her say at one time.

  “Someone pleeeeeease.”

  So soft and sad and terrified that he couldn’t have turned around and taken the back way out of the hospital unless he’d been made of stone.

  He came to the side of the gurney where she could see him. “What’s the problem, Kate Ann?” he asked kindly. The generosity of the night was still in effect. He was giving of himself to the less fortunate. Mara would be pleased.

  Kate Ann looked up at him through tear-filled eyes. “I can’t move,” she said so quietly that he might have missed the words if he hadn’t heard them once too often in the hours just past.

  He took the chart from the foot of the gurney, read it, and, against his better judgment, felt a twinge of sympathy. He wondered what her doctor—according to the chart, it was Dick Bruno, though he wasn’t a neurosurgeon—had told her.

  “You can’t move,” he said gently, “because we’re trying to keep you perfectly still. There may have been some damage to your spinal chord. The CAT scan says there’s some swelling. One of these IV bottles contains Solu-Medrol to fight it. The immobilization is to prevent further damage from being done and hopefully let things start to heal.”

  “But I can’t feel anything,” she whispered with eyes large as a child’s.

  Caught by them, Peter was suddenly back in med school, starting his rotation in pediatrics, facing his first patient. The hurt, the fear, the dependence, then the absolute adoration when the hurt eased, had sold Peter on being a pediatrician.

  Kate Ann Murther wasn’t a child. She wasn’t his patient. She wasn’t any of his business. But, doctor to patient, he felt bad for her, so he said, “The trauma of the injury will have numbed things up,” which was the truth, though not the whole truth.

  She didn’t say anything immediately but continued to hold him with those large, child’s eyes. He had the sudden impression that he had told her more than anyone else had that night.

  “Have they mentioned getting you into a room?” he asked.

  “No one answers when I ask.”

  “I’ll ask for you,” he said, and forgetting his exhaustion, he marched to the nurses’ station. “What’s the story on Kate Ann?” he asked of the charge nurse, who looked up blankly.

  “Kate Ann?”

  “Murther. Kate Ann Murther.” He tossed his head toward the gurney.

  The nurse peered around him in surprise, as though she hadn’t known anyone was there, which bothered the hell out of Peter. Okay, so Kate Ann was the forgettable type, and in times of turmoil the forgettable types were forgotten. But the turmoil had tapered off. And Kate Ann had spinal damage and possible permanent paralysis. She had a right to be terrified. It wasn’t fair that she should be ignored.

  In a low but firm voice, he said, “I’d like to get her to a room stat.”

  The nurse waved a hand at the papers on her desk. “Where should I put her? We’re bulging at the seams.”

  “I want Three-B. That’s where spinal injuries are usually kept.”

  “It’s filled.”

  “Tell you what,” Peter said. “I’ll wheel her up there myself while you call and have them look around. They’ll find a place. I don’t care if they have to empty out a stockroom, but the woman is seriously injured. She needs to be monitored.” He glanced at the clock. “You have five minutes. That’s how long it’ll take me to get there.”

  He returned to Kate Ann, whose eyes begged for help.

  “I’m wheeling you upstairs. Are you warm enough?” He touched her arm. It felt like ice. “Christ, Kate Ann, you have to speak up.” He wheeled her down the hall to a supply closet, ducked inside, and emerged with the last three blankets there. He tucked two right up to her chin, left the third on her feet, and wheeled her on.

  The head nurse on 3-B was looking harried when he arrived. “We haven’t any more room. Our doubles are tripled.”

  “All we need’s a corner,” he said, then, so tired that he was punchy, added, “Hold on, Kate Ann. I’m about to get you the best view in town.”

  That was just what he did. He found a small window spot in a quad that already had a fifth and might just as well have a sixth. She couldn’t look out, but she would be able to feel the warmth of the sun on her face.

  Once she was set up there, with he
r chart firmly in place at the nurses’ station and a warning, barely veiled as a promise to the head nurse, that he would be back to see how Kate Ann was doing early the next morning, he took the elevator back down. He stopped at the front desk only long enough to write a note to Tucker’s chief of neurosurgery asking him to give Kate Ann some time. Then, with exhaustion suddenly back in a gust, he went straight to his car and drove home.

  It wasn’t until much later that he realized he should never have signed the note. If word got out that he was championing Kate Ann Murther, he’d be done for, for sure.

  Paige was later leaving the hospital than Peter. Her last case had been perhaps the worst of all, a young man who not only worked for the highway department, a physical job in itself, but was also the star of the intertown basketball league. He had been caught under an extraordinary weight of rubble that had fallen from above. To free him, emergency workers had had to amputate his leg.

  In the commotion of bringing him in, Paige had been swept into the operating room to assist the two surgeons there, and when the other doctors had left she remained with the patient’s family. They talked of recuperation from the surgery, of physical therapy and a prosthesis. They mentioned the possibility of his return to work. No one mentioned basketball.

  Paige stayed with them until she simply couldn’t a minute longer. Then she trotted up the stairs to the second floor, trotted all the way down the hall, and breathlessly singled Jill out from the four in the room at the very end.

  She went straight to the bed, took Jill’s hand, and leaned low. “How’re you doing, hon?”

  Jill struggled to open her eyes. Paige knew that it would be a while before the grogginess wore off. Beneath the sheets, a cast ran from her waist to her knees. At the head of the bed, a fetal monitor beeped steadily. On a nearby chair, looking drained, sat her mother.

  “I feel weird,” Jill mumbled.