Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One)

by L B Gschwandtner

  “Yes. I have that here,” Shelly opened her purse. She handed over a letter of authenticity they’d given her at the casino. Back before the big celebration, the balloons and streamers and marching band. Back before Ben collapsed and the world as she knew it came to an end.

  “Are you the one who hit the slot with her last quarter? It was on the evening news last night.”

  “Yeah,” Shelly nodded as she diligently filled in all the answers. How many forms had she dealt with in the last 24 hours?

  “Well done. I used to play but when I moved out here, somehow the glamour wore off and now I never gamble on anything.”

  “I know what you mean. I think I’m through with gambling for good. It’s weird.”

  “Like a craving for some exotic food,” said the woman, whose desk nameplate said Beulah Withers. Shelly didn’t think she’d ever met anyone named Beulah before and probably never would again. She wondered what the woman’s friends called her. “One day you’ve just had enough, and that’s that.” Beulah shrugged.

  It was odd, this other Las Vegas. Like the hospital. All those poor sick people with real problems so far removed from the glitz and show of the hotels with their club acts and croupiers. But Shelly wasn’t concerned with the why of her situation anymore. She just wanted to make Ben better. The doctor had said that even if they found cancer, these days that didn’t have to be a death sentence. She had to remain hopeful. Had to. No options.

  The business concluded, Shelly paid off her credit card through the bank, called the pawn shop and wired him the money to hold her engagement ring until she returned home. Called Ben’s boss and her own to give them the news. She left the bank having settled all her financial obligations, even the taxes taken out, but the business of life with money to burn wasn’t as exciting as she’d thought it would be. Where was the feeling of freedom she’d expected, the sense of triumph? Here she was, bills all paid, with a cashier’s check for a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in her purse. Shelly should have been doing cartwheels down the sun-drenched street but instead she felt there was a blank space somewhere, as if she’d forgotten something.

  Chapter Thirty

  Back to the hospital, back to the waiting room. Funny, but it still looked exactly the same, even with money in her pocket. Shelly told the nurse to come and get her when they moved Ben and sat back down in one of the plastic seats. Over in the corner, the parents of the injured child sat huddled together. The woman worried a rosary between her fingers, counting off the beads over and over. Her face was worn from crying and her skin looked ashen. The man sat hunched over, helpless to comfort his wife although, every so often, he tried again to soothe her.

  They didn’t notice that Shelly had returned, but she couldn’t look away from them. It was as if she had become part of their family. Just as she started to move closer to them, a doctor came in and the woman looked up hopefully. Shelly could hear the doctor speaking to them. Could hear words like “sorry” and “costly operations” and “walk again” and “can’t say for sure.” The man translated what the doctor was saying. He put his arm around the woman as she sank back down onto the plastic bench. The doctor patted her shoulder but it was a small gesture that had no effect and he turned and left the room, with the woman weeping and the man looking more helpless than before.

  It was more than Shelly could bear. She wanted to go to the woman and offer something. But what could she do that the doctors could not provide? The woman was like her—holding on to hope and yet fearing the very worst. A little girl beside her sang softly to her doll, a gentle lullaby and somewhere in the song Shelly found a trickle of hope. An idea was forming. All those years when she couldn’t do anything about her own problems, much less the problems of others . . . they had taught her to be passive, to believe she could do nothing to save herself or anyone else. But was that really still the case? Had it ever been? At that moment a nurse strode purposefully into the waiting room. She walked directly to Shelly.

  “The doctor sent me to fetch you in case you want to be present when we move your fiancé out of CCU,” she said. “But of course it’s up to you. It’s not like he’s conscious, so you don’t have to be there.”

  Shelly stood up quickly. “Of course I want to be there.”

  As she followed the nurse, she glanced over at the man and woman huddled on the bench. The woman had dropped the rosary into her lap. Now she simply stared at the floor.

  “What will happen to their daughter?” she asked the nurse, nodding toward the man and woman.

  “Well, we’re not supposed to talk about the patients, but they can’t possibly afford all the operations and care their daughter needs. I suppose she’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. If she survives.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  They moved Ben from the CCU to the ICU. These medical acronyms scared Shelly. ICU, EEG. EKG, it was confusing, like she had been given a glimpse into a secret society with its own language but she hadn’t been given the usage sheet. One of the nurses had told her the BI patients all spent at least some time in ICU, that it was normal unless they were VSA. Shelly just stared at her. The nurse laughed and apologized.

  “Up here, we get so used to talking hospital code, we forget. BI is brain injury and VSA is vital signs absent. And ICU is intensive care unit. One step down from CCU, critical care unit. Your guy’s in good shape—compared to some we see.”

  Hardly comforting, but at least Shelly understood a bit more. They were going to bring him out of the coma.

  Shelly stood on one side of the hospital bed holding Ben’s hand. On the other side the doctor bent over Ben’s arm at the site of the IV that had released a barbiturate into Ben to keep him in a post surgical coma. He had also been intubated so that a ventilator could breathe for him. The nurse watched Ben’s vital signs, shown by the up and down blips on a monitor. The doctor switched off the medicine drip and pulled the tube out of the IV needle but left the needle strapped to Ben’s arm in case the medical team needed it later. He capped it off, slung the tube over the IV stand, and stood back to watch Ben and the monitor. It seemed to Shelly like some scene from a science fiction B movie. Dawn Of The Almost Living.

  “That should do it. He’ll come out of it but it won’t be for quite a few hours. Until then he’ll be in a sleep state. We’ll monitor him but I think he should do fine.”

  Shelly nodded, still a bit stunned by the whole idea of Ben like this. There hadn’t been much time to get used to the shift from Ben being the stable, solid one with no variations in behavior to the flat-on-his-back Ben who needed Shelly to carry the load. His hand hadn’t moved and she released her fingers from his.

  “Will he be able to breathe on his own after he wakes up?”

  “Yes, but we’re bringing him out slowly. A nurse will still check on him every fifteen minutes.”

  But how is he?” she asked. “I mean did you get it all?”

  The doctor nodded to the nurse who left the room quietly. “He came through the operation just fine. And we’re very hopeful. But, sorry to say, it was cancer. ”

  Shelly sank onto a padded vinyl recliner that had been placed next to Ben’s bed. She couldn’t speak. The word kept rattling around in her brain. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.

  “That’s the bad news,” the doctor continued “But the good news is that we caught it early, it was encapsulated, and we think this was the primary site.”

  “Encapsulated?” she asked weakly.

  “Well, maybe I can explain it better this way. We have a number of ways we grade cancer. Stage one cancer is the most likely curable. Stage four is least likely. We’re fairly sure Ben’s cancer is stage one. We got the whole mass out, it was small and encapsulated, which means it had not broken out of the original tumor. All good news so far. We’re just running further tests to confirm this was the primary site. Which would be more good news because it would mean the cancer hadn’t begun somewhere else and metastasized.”

 
They both looked down at Ben who looked to Shelly pretty pale and pitiful for someone on the receiving end of so much good news. “You’re lucky,” the doctor said.

  Lucky? A bitter laugh formed in her throat.

  “Very lucky,” the doctor repeated, as he picked up his clipboard to leave. “Things could have been much worse.”

  This was all the time you could expect from someone so important. Shelly suddenly remembered once Ben laughing when she asked him for help with the Sunday crossword, holding up his hands and saying “I’m not a brain surgeon.”

  Well, this man was a brain surgeon and he had places to be. Stories to tell to other people who evidently weren’t as lucky as her Ben.

  “I thought I told you to take a break,” the doctor said, gazing down at her kindly.

  “I did.”

  He shook his head. “A real break. Get out of here, take a shower and a nap, have a good meal. It will be hours before he wakes up and he’s being well-monitored, I assure you.”

  Shelly looked down at her wrinkled dress and suddenly felt as if she’d come out of a cave. How long had it been since she’d eaten? Since she’d slept?

  “I can’t leave him.”

  “There’s nothing you can do right now, I assure you. Get some rest.” He smiled at her. “Doctor’s orders. And don’t get downhearted.”

  *****

  Alanna and Joe had no idea where Shelly had gotten to but at least they’d found each other.

  They had each manifested to the hospital gift shop. Funny how they put them right as you come in, Joe thought. Like desserts come first in a cafeteria line. All the temptation right up front. He didn’t know where Alanna had been for the last hour, but she seemed a little dazed. She was holding a stuffed bunny, rubbing it against her cheek. Joe thought about buying it for her, but there was this thing about not having any money. Another of the mysteries of the Wish Granter almost life-style. If he took the bunny up to the cash register, would the money for it suddenly manifest in his hand?

  But then Alanna finally put the bunny down in a bin of other plush toys and he got a glimpse at the price tag. Forty-two dollars. Jesus. Highway robbery. That was too much to spend on a little bunny even with non-money.

  “What happened to you?” Joe asked first.

  “I was wondering the same about you. I ended up looking at babies in the preemie nursery.”

  “And I thought I saw my law partner. I was as sure of it as I am that you’re standing here right now.” Or was he really that sure? For the first time since Joe arrived in Transition, he doubted whether any of this was really happening or if it was all some dream. Who knows, any minute he might awaken in his own bed, get up, shower, dress, and go off to meet the partner who never had been shot, a man who was, at this moment, waiting for him at their office, wondering why Joe was running late.

  “Looks like we both remembered something.” Alanna broke his train of thought. “It’s almost as if they’re toying with us. Giving us bits and pieces but not enough to put together the whole story.”

  Just as Joe started to agree, he spotted Shelly out of the corner of his eye.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at her walking resolutely toward the exit doors.

  “Where’s she going?” Alanna asked.

  “I don’t know. But she has a weird expression on her face. Like she’s about to do something stupid.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Downhearted, the doctor had said. What a funny word. It wasn’t your heart that was down but your mind. He had said to go back and bathe and change clothes and rest, and she had done all those things. Now, as she stepped into the hall, closing the hotel room door behind her, she felt that she was thinking clearly again for the first time in twenty-four hours. Ben was out of danger—at least for now—and the doctor had said it would take several hours for him to come back to consciousness. There was time for her to get something to eat—something decent, since she was suddenly aware she was hungry—before returning to the hospital.

  Shelly took the elevator down to the lobby level and looked around. It was the middle of the afternoon, so the fancy restaurants were closed and she didn’t want to go to one of those awful buffets. She seemed to remember there was a little outdoor café beside the pool, and that might be pleasant, to feel the sun on her shoulders for a few minutes, to hear music and laughter and the sound of children splashing into a pool. To return for an hour to the world of the living. Spending a night in a hospital with that awful artificial light and all the beeping and sirens was enough to get anyone . . . well, downhearted actually, and that’s before you even factored in the misery and fear and pain that seemed to hang over the building like a dense fog. Yeah, the café by the pool. An hour there would get her in exactly the right frame of mind to return to Ben’s bedside and help him face whatever was waiting there.

  Shelly glanced at the lobby bar as she walked past. Hard to believe it was just yesterday that she had dropped a coin in that very slot machine and with the touch of a single button had changed everything in her life. Now that she thought about it, it seemed they also had a bar menu, that yesterday she had seen a woman sitting beside her eating a nice looking Caesar salad. And it would be so hot to sit by the pool, wouldn’t it? No need to sweat since she’d just had a bath and redone her hair and makeup. She didn’t want Ben to wake up to a melting Bride of Frankenstein.

  So she turned and walked up the three marble steps into the bar and slid onto one of the high seats. But before she could even get settled the bartender was in front of her with a broad grin on his face.

  “You’re the one, aren’t you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re the lady who won the jackpot in here yesterday, right? Man, we usually don’t see that kind of action in the lobby. Here you go . . .” He poured as he spoke and pushed a glass of champagne toward her. “Compliments of the house, of course.”

  Shelly looked down at it numbly and the bartender laughed. “Didn’t mean to make you queasy. Spent last night celebrating, huh? I know I would have.”

  Shelly gave him a quick, automatic smile and picked up the champagne. He was a young guy and he meant well. But now everyone at the bar was looking at her. Instinctively, she put her hand in her purse and felt around for the envelope there, the one that held the cashier’s check from the bank. Just a simple piece of paper and yet it had the power to change her life. In fact, it already seemed to be changing it. People were offering her free stuff. And looking her way with admiration. Life sure was weird.

  She ordered a chicken salad sandwich. In the middle of all this, she wanted something plain and solid, the sort of thing she might have eaten for lunch back home in Virginia. The bartender insisted that it too was on the house—apparently once people knew you had money, you no longer needed to actually spend that money—and after taking just a few bites, she began to feel better.

  “Excuse me, miss?”

  Shelly looked up. An older woman was standing beside her, dressed in the sort of polyester pantsuit Shelly hadn’t seen in twenty years. It reminded her of something her grandmother used to wear, as did the woman’s neat round cap of curly hair and the oversized handbag she clutched with both hands. Shelly nodded and wiped her mouth with a napkin.

  “Do you mind if we take a picture of you? I want to take it back to the girls in my garden club. They say no one ever really wins in Vegas and I want to prove them wrong.” The woman’s husband was already on his feet with the camera in his hands and a hopeful smile on his face.

  “We can take a picture here, can’t we?” he asked the bartender.

  “Sure thing,” said the bartender. “You can’t use a camera in the casino, but technically we’re still in the lobby.”

  “Can we get her over by the machine where she won?”

  “Well we aren’t supposed to allow pictures of actual gambling but . . .” the bartender took a quick, conspiratorial glance around the nearly-empty bar. “I suppose since this is the l
obby it’ll be all right.”

  “Do you mind?” asked the woman. “It would mean a lot to me to have my picture taken with a big winner.”

  Shelly nodded and slid off the barstool. She and the woman posed before the slot machine and, at the man’s instruction, Shelly put her finger on the button that had changed her life while the woman stood behind her smiling broadly and holding two thumbs up.

  “How long have you been married?” she asked the woman.

  “Forty-two years,” the woman said promptly. “Are you married, honey?”

  “I’m engaged,” Shelly said , hoping this wouldn’t lead to the typical request to see the ring.

  “I bet your fiancé was thrilled,” the woman said. “Well, look at you. Lucky in love and lucky with money, too.”

  The couple said goodbye and Shelly waved a thank you to the bartender and started off, too. She glanced at her watch as she walked across the lobby. According to the doctor, they wouldn’t even try to bring Ben out of the coma for another two hours. She had just enough time to . . .

  *****

  “There she is,” Joe said. “Jesus, I can’t believe it.”

  Joe and Alanna were back at their usual post, behind one of the gigantic marble pillars in the Bellagio casino, watching Shelly waiting in line at the cashier’s window.

  “We can’t stop her,” Alanna said. “I don’t think that’s part of our job.”

  “But look at her. She’s going right down the tubes, right in front of our eyes. We’ve got to save her from herself.”

  “Are you sure? She’s already gotten her wish. If she chooses to lose it all there’s nothing we can do to stop her.”

  Joe was so rigid with tension that it was as if he’d turned into one of the stone statues all around them.