by C. E. Case
"About thirty. We have fifty beds."
"Wow," Natalie said.
"Wow." Wheeler answered.
A pang went through Meredith's heart as Natalie struggled to get her bearings. Meredith wanted to take her hand and explain everything. But she couldn't. This was Wheeler's burden.
He sat down beside Natalie and put papers on her bed.
Natalie raised her eyebrows. She let Meredith take the breakfast tray and set it on a side table.
"We talked to your insurance folks this morning, everything's going to be all right," Wheeler said.
Natalie's eyes flickered toward Meredith's. Meredith met her gaze and smiled. Natalie gave her a faint smile back.
Meredith pulled a second chair up to Natalie's bed, sitting beside Wheeler, down near Natalie's knees. Natalie wouldn't have to turn her head much to see either of them. They'd done this a hundred times.
Meredith looked at her hands.
"How was breakfast, Natalie?" Wheeler asked.
"Was it real?"
"It wasn't a figment of your imagination. Call me Hank if you want. Do you think you imagined it?"
"I'm not calling my doctor, Hank, and I'm not having hallucinations." Natalie said.
Meredith nearly laughed.
"Dr. Henry?" Wheeler asked.
Natalie picked up the top paper.
"It's time to give you a full assessment of your injuries and your recovery time," Wheeler said.
Natalie's face grew pale. She blinked rapidly. Merry leaned forward. She knew nausea when she saw it. She knew pain.
Wheeler waited.
"Okay," Natalie finally said.
"You were out for four days, you know that. I'm glad to see you've recovered so well from the anesthetic."
Natalie nodded.
"During that time, you had two surgeries. The first after you were med-evaced in--"
"You have a helicopter?"
"The state does. They took care of it. We put you down in the parking lot. People are still talking," he said.
Meredith was still thinking about it; how the first spotlight shined on the pavement; how small and still and bloodied Natalie had been.
Natalie didn't respond.
Wheeler's expression sobered. "The first surgery was part of your triage. We put the pins in your hip to keep your midsection from collapsing. We took out your appendix, part of your spleen, and assessed your intestines. And we tried to stabilize your crushed leg. But we couldn't devote much time to it, because we were focused on making sure you didn't have any head or neck trauma."
"My neck hurts. A good sign, right?"
Meredith nodded.
"You pulled just about every muscle in your body, and it's going to be a couple of weeks until we can see if there's any real lasting trauma on your spine. But you're mostly okay," Wheeler said.
Natalie nodded again. She swallowed.
Meredith took Natalie's hand.
Natalie exhaled, and then as the silence gathered in the room, tensed, her fingers tightening on Meredith's. "There's more?" she asked.
Wheeler took a deep breath and said, "We did a second surgery on your leg to repair tendons and make sure the blood could flow properly. The swelling was more than we would have liked. I don't know if we're going to have to do more--I'll talk to you about that in a moment. But Natalie, even though you aren't paralyzed, I don't know when you'll be able to walk again."
Natalie glanced away.
Meredith squeezed her hand.
Wheeler said, "Or how things will go. It'll be rough, whether you get full mobility back or not. We're also looking at only sixty to eighty percent recovery of motion in your right shoulder. You should still be able to write. Continue as an attorney."
"But my leg," Natalie said, in a small voice, gazing down. Meredith's heart broke. Natalie held her fingers.
Wheeler said, "Only time will tell. Beyond that, there's going to be a pain issue."
Pain was such an ugly, four-letter word.
Wheeler said, "We can't keep you on these kinds of drugs forever. There are other kinds of drugs, though, and we may be looking at lifetime treatment for chronic pain. We won't know until you start healing. It’s going to hurt."
Natalie's eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away, and turned to the wall opposite them, at a poster of a cat hanging from a tree.
Already, nurses and therapists moved Natalie's limbs, re-bandaged her, changed her clothes, and washed her and shuffled around her. Contact would only increase in Natalie's near future. By exponential factor, when they started teaching her to put weight on her legs again. Lying for nearly a week in a hospital bed hadn't done her body any good, even as broken as it was.
"What kind of pain have you been in before, in your life? Can you recall any instances?" Wheeler asked.
Natalie exhaled. She slowly turned her head back to meet Wheeler's gaze, her hand slack in Meredith's. She said, "I broke my arm one summer, when I was ten."
"Tell me about it," Wheeler said.
Natalie swallowed. "I remember--Really?"
"Yes."
Natalie said, "I remember lying in the grass, smelling the fresh summer clippings around me. I was trying to breathe--it was hard--hard to breathe through the pain. I remember my friends screaming out for my mother, and trying to breathe."
"What happened next?" Wheeler asked.
"I guess after a minute or two in the grass it got easier. My mother drove to the emergency room and they numbed the arm. I don't remember the recovery, the cast, or anything else. I'm sorry. Just the long, aching moments in the grass."
"All right. By the way, your insurance wants to transfer you up to Duke Medical Center." Wheeler said.
"I'd rather stay here," Natalie said.
Meredith's hand involuntarily tightened on Natalie's. She glanced down, her relief unprofessional, shame burning her cheeks. Her heart pounded in her ears. She prayed Natalie wouldn't notice her reaction. She prayed Natalie, too, saw some cosmic reason she'd been sent to Tarpley.
"It's just as well that you do. Transport would be painful. We're going to have one of their specialists come down and examine at your leg and your neck for you," Wheeler said.
"Thanks--Doctor Henry."
He nodded. "Sign these?"
Natalie reached for the papers, and grunted when her shoulder wouldn't let her cover the distance. Wheeler moved them closer, and then took her elbow to cushion her weight.
Meredith let go of her hand.
Natalie signed her life away to Blue Cross Blue Shield. She rubbed at her eyes.
"Are you all right?" Meredith asked.
"Just thinking about my cat. One of the maintenance workers found her in a city sewer and brought her to the government building. She was just a kitten then. Muddy and beautiful."
"She's fine," Meredith said. "I talked to--Susana?"
"My next door neighbor," Natalie said.
Wheeler took the papers. "See? Just fine. I'll come by tonight, when you've processed this all. Write down your questions as they come to you. We'll go over them."
Natalie nodded.
Wheeler patted Meredith's back and left.
Meredith sat on the edge of the bed and wiped Natalie's face with a cool cloth. "You all right? That's a lot to take in."
"I don't know."
Meredith tapped her cheek with the cloth to get her attention. Natalie met her eyes.
"We'll get through this," Meredith said.
"We will?"
"Stick with me."
She said the words the same way to Natalie as she would to a geriatric man facing a liver transplant or a little boy with a pencil up his nose, and the words had the same effect. Natalie relaxed.
Merry sat back. "You've eaten your breakfast and heard the talk. It's naptime. When you wake up, everything will be different."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
# #
Chapter Five
An attorney called ahead to
the hospital to see what was to be done about the cat. He got a hold of Wheeler, who passed him to Meredith. Meredith listened abstractly to his tale of woe about his children's allergies and Natalie's strange and distant neighbors. Susana had stopped answering her door. The rest might be cat-murderers for all he knew. It was this or the kennel. He pleaded, but his voice also held authority. He brought the cat carrier with him as he drove down to see Natalie.
Meredith met him in the lobby and received the cat, unable to make it anyone else's problem. The cat's name was Hollingsworth. The attorney, twice her age, took her hand and introduced himself as Patrick. Natalie's boss. Meredith tried to picture Natalie with him at some bland office in the city. She took the cat home and let Patrick go on his way.
She only had a cat once before. An outside cat that strayed too close to her family home. She'd fed it. She'd bought cat food with her own money for weeks until her father caught her. He told her they were a sign of the devil. The cat was trying to seduce her—already she kept secrets for it
She'd been so ashamed she never thought about cats. A dog, maybe. But Vincent was afraid of dogs. Now, God sent her a second cat, by way of a Charlotte attorney.
And a horrific accident.
She didn't know if it was good or bad, temporary or permanent, or if it would change her. She told herself she was just babysitting for a stranger. But when she knelt next to the cat and gazed into its wide, blinking blue eyes, and felt its purr under her fingers when she stroked the long, grey hairs, she figured He had a hand in it somewhere.
If the cat needed her, well, she had love to give. Her neighbors didn't much talk to her. Instead she got hard stares if anyone happened to be out in the neighborhood when she drove through. Sometimes her boys waved at the people they saw. No one waved back.
Even Mrs. Cranston, her babysitter, didn’t speak to her. Though she took Meredith's money. At least she was kind to the children.
At work no one seemed to know her anymore. There were moments with Colleen where everything felt like it was before, when Vincent was still alive, when the boys were just infants, and everything at work felt right. But Colleen would back off of those moments before Meredith would.
Aside from her children and a stranger who didn't yet condemn her, Meredith had nothing. So when the cat rubbed against her hand, seeking more, she didn't have the strength to resist.
"Where did you come from?" she asked.
The cat merely circled her ankles and stretched out for another touch.
She wished she had more faith.
#
Natalie missed her life. She missed her city. With each long, slow, pain-filled day passing, the accident felt less like a horrible inconvenience and more like her whole life was altering.
She only talked to doctors and nurses. The reality of her empty life was sinking in, and it made her feel terribly cold. She trembled and reached for nurses with icy fingers. She slept endlessly.
Since Wheeler told her about her leg, she preferred to sleep. She would float, at ease and dreamless, for hours. No pain, no past, no future. And then she would wake up, and the panic would set in--always within the first minute. She'd burned through a week of sick leave. She only had two more left.
Roland's trial restarted. The newspapers reported the defense team's argument was making inroads now that Natalie Ivans' steely, cold gaze wasn't there to thwart it.
That was how they thought of her. She wanted to dwell on it, but her head still hurt most of the time and all she could really to do was sleep again.
In this early afternoon, for the first time since waking up in her new life, she had a visitor. Theresa brought Patrick into her room. He'd driven down from Charlotte.
"How's the case?" she asked. She let him kiss her forehead, unable to reciprocate. She felt limp and useless in the hospital bed. Not even her brain worked, and she was starting to get tired again.
"Screw the case," he said.
"Give me a dollar."
"What?"
"They don't like you to cuss around here." She lowered her voice. "I think it's a like, Christian hospital."
Patrick glanced around furtively. "Eastern Carolina. Jesus. A good reason I didn't go to school down here."
"Oh, that's why?" she asked.
"And I thought Atlanta would be really exciting."
Natalie’d worried about what he'd say when he saw her like this, but he was just himself, reminding her of home. She could be herself, too. She could slip into the patterns of her life for the past year, and feel like everything was normal.
"Was it?" she asked.
"Hot."
"Patrick, tell me about the trial. I'm going crazy. I'm atrophying."
"We're hoping you'll be back before closing. It'll have an impact on the jury, to see you strong and--well, vengeful."
"I--I can't, Patrick. My recovery is going to take months."
"Months?" He paled.
She clenched her hands together. "I don't know what I'm going to do."
"It was just a car accident, Natalie. It's not the end of the world. We'll take Casey's car and let you use it as a loaner until you get all this sorted out."
"I'm not taking your kid's car."
"Nat--"
"Please. I'm not ready for much."
"Can I get you a computer?"
"Maybe soon."
"How are you?"
His be-okay tone persisted.
"They don't think I'm going to walk again." She felt like she was going to throw up.
"Oh, God. I didn't--I'm sorry, Nat."
She glanced back.
He tried not to look at her, tried to be brave and see her at the same time. If she ended up disfigured, or limping, or worse, everyone would be seeing her the same way for the rest of her life.
"Most of me will heal. They scooped out some of my insides," she said.
Patrick coughed. He'd always been too sensitive for bravado. He was a nice guy. He didn't cope well with hard edges. Even his job made him nauseous.
She changed the subject. "How's Nancy?"
"Oh." He leaned over and opened his bag, and pulled out a teddy bear wearing a beret and handed it over. "Nancy got you this."
She accepted the bear.
He pulled out a bag of M&Ms. "And the kids got you these. Not sure what you're eating."
"They cook for me."
His eyes widened.
She nodded. "Really. Homemade."
"Wow."
He glanced around, politely. She followed his gaze. No flowers, no cards, no books.
"Natalie, you know you're family." He took her hand. "You are. I just wish you had more. We're taking up a collection at the office, but I'm supposed to, uh, report back on how you're doing and tell them what you need. Everyone asks me every day. God, Natalie."
She didn't say anything, just kept staring at the bear, until her face stopped hurting, and the tears retreated.
He left her with case files, a Blackberry to replace her burned cell phone, and a promise to come back in a week. The Blackberry didn't get reception. She read the cover page of the first document, and then fell asleep.
#
Meredith opened the front door. She heard thuds--an avalanche rumbling down the hallway toward her--before she saw the boys, who yelped and then skidded to a stop. They stared at what she carried.
She shut the door behind her. "Boys, I brought something home."
"But we made lunch," Merritt said.
"I know. I can't wait to eat it."
Every day she worked, she came home for lunch. Ms. Cranston saw to it the boys prepared something for her. Ten minute drive, ten minutes to eat, ten minutes back.
"Is it a cat?" Beau asked.
"Yes. It belongs to a patient. It's not ours. We're going to take care of it for her, okay?"
Beau frowned.
Meredith sat the carrying case on the floor.
"Be gentle," she said.
Merritt nodded.
She
opened the cage.
The cat stayed inside.
Merritt knelt, and then stretched out on his stomach, peering into the cage.
Beau gave the case a little kick.
"Beau."
Merritt grinned.
The cat cautiously stepped out and sniffed at Merritt.
Beau stood perfectly still.
Meredith enjoyed the moment of silence. The cat was already a blessing.
Beau lunged.
The cat took off for the kitchen.
Merritt howled.
Meredith shook her head and went in to lunch.
#
Meredith took Natalie dinner. Natalie smiled wanly at her and the mild anxiety Meredith felt whenever she was around Natalie intensified. Natalie didn't look good. Meredith settled the tray and then at Natalie's encouragement, sat on the edge of the bed.
"Thanks." Natalie picked up her fork and then set it down again, sighing.
"You all right?"
"I'm worried."
"About your leg?"
"Not really. Wheeler explained it all. I understand. Stupid leg. I'm worried about what I'm going to do."
Meredith glanced at the briefcase next to the bed. "Seems like you got plenty to do."
"Yeah. But--I don't have the energy. I read a few pages and then have to stop. My head hurts. I'm tired all the time. Oh, hell, do I sound like a four year old?"
"I have four year olds. Twins. You sure don't sound like them. The headache'll go away in a few days. I promise."
"You promise?"
"I do."
"All right then." Natalie leaned back. "I can bear it."
"Those papers look like pretty heavy stuff. Do you want any magazines? Books?"
"I, er. Are you going to bring me Christian literature?" Natalie asked.
"What?"
"I don't--nevermind--It's something I've been wanting to ask and it just came out. No one will tell me anything about this place. I don't know where I am," Natalie said.
Meredith's eyes widened. Natalie was either reaching out or warding her off. But her eyes didn't reveal which way she meant it. Natalie hadn't come into the emergency room wearing a cross or a star. She hadn't asked about Sunday services. She didn't want a chaplain. But outward signs were not always the way to tell something about a person.
Meredith was afraid of answering wrong, and hurting this fragile connection they'd forged. "I--I suppose I could bring you whatever you want. Are you a Christian, Natalie?"