Garden of Lies

by Eileen Goudge

  Rachel held Ian MacDougal’s sad, bassett hound gaze for a long moment, then answered, “Please, let me try, Mac. I’ll need you for this one, but I can assist. I’m not saying we can save him, but at least let’s give him that chance.”

  Mac dropped his eyes, and seemed to be considering her plea. Rachel held her breath. Ian was in charge. He could refuse her.

  Finally he raised his gaze, fixing her with the look of an indulgent father giving in to his headstrong child against his better judgment.

  “Do what you must then,” he said and sighed.

  Rachel signaled to the orderlies to carry the patient into Pre-op. Then she looked down once again into those clear eyes, that [236] smile, and knew she could no more give up on this man than she could have turned her back on her own flesh and blood.

  Rachel glanced at his dog tag, scribbled his name and I.D. number on a clipboard.

  Pvt. Brian McClanahan.

  “Hang in there, Brian,” she whispered, “just hang in there for me, okay?”

  Rachel woke to the sound of the rain drumming on the corrugated tin roof of her concrete shack. She opened her eyes. It was dark, but she could make out the huge beetle crawling along the wall in front of her. Still half-asleep, feeling dreamy and disconnected, she followed its meandering progress. But something was tugging at her mind ... something she needed to remember.

  Then it came to her, a rush of anxiety jolting her fully awake. Brian McClanahan. Three days since his abdominal surgery, and it was still touch and go whether he’d pull through. He could be dying right now, while she lay here. ...

  Rachel pushed her thin cotton blanket aside with an impatient shove, and got up. She was halfway dressed when Kay stirred in the next cot, and sat up, rubbing her eyes. Kay yawned, and glanced at the faintly glowing dial of her wristwatch.

  “You nuts?” she muttered thickly. “It’s three o’clock in the morning! First quiet night we’ve had in weeks. What’s up?”

  She knows I wouldn’t use the latrine before first light, Rachel thought, not when it means standing in a foot of water, surrounded by bugs and snakes.

  “Sorry I woke you,” Rachel said. “I want to check on one of my patients. I’m a little worried about him. He was spiking a fever when I went off last night.”

  Now Kay was wide awake, jumping up from her cot, snapping the light on. She scowled at Rachel, her brown eyes red-rimmed and puffy, naked-looking without her glasses. She was wearing a pair of wrinkled underpants, and a bright red T-shirt that had printed across the front: WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND NOBODY CAME?

  “This patient’s name wouldn’t happen to be Brian McClanahan, would it?” Kay asked coldly. “The same Brian McClanahan you’ve [237] been hovering over like a mother hen ever since he came out of surgery? Dana came to me in tears last night, said you shouted at her for not telling you right away he was running a one-oh-four temp. As if my nurses have nothing to do all day but stand around taking temperatures.”

  “I shouldn’t have snapped at Dana that way,” Rachel apologized. “She’s a good nurse.” She was sorry, but damn it, Brian was special. A sort of miracle. Couldn’t they see that? He’d pulled through surgery just barely, by the skin of his teeth, true, but he was alive, and she damn well intended to see that he stayed that way.

  Kay’s brown eyes flashed. “Good? You bet she’s good. She’s terrific. All my nurses should get Congressional Medals of Honor. Instead, they get kicked in the butt. For years, we’ve been telling ourselves it’d be different when more women became doctors. But I’ll tell you something I’ve learned the hard way, an asshole in a white coat is an asshole, no matter what’s up front.” She paused, took a deep breath, then her anger died suddenly and she broke into a wide grin. “Another thing, you can’t go anywhere like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Those pants.”

  Rachel had finished pulling her clothes on, and now she looked down and saw she had put on Kay’s khakis by mistake. They sagged around her hips, and her ankles stuck out below the cuffs. She sank down on the bed, and started to laugh. Then found she couldn’t stop.

  “I think I’m going crazy,” she said, wiping tears away with the back of her hand.

  “Want to talk about it?” Kay flopped down on her mattress and lit a cigarette.

  Rachel stared at the Grateful Dead poster over Kay’s bed, a skeleton surrounded by flowers against a fluorescent purple background. An advertisement for a concert at the Winterland Auditorium in October of 1966.

  “It’s complicated,” she said. “I’m not sure I understand it myself. I just have this feeling ... that if I let go of him ... I just might ... I don’t know ... climb aboard the loony express once and for all.”

  “Can’t.” Rachel watched as smoke uncurled from Kay’s lips, [238] and disappeared up into the mosquito netting. “This is the end of the line. We’re all a little crazy here, Rosenthal.”

  “This is different. It’s ... not just the war. It’s me too. Everything. What happened before.”

  “You did what you had to do,” Kay said, too quickly. And Rachel was reminded of how good Kay had been during that time, a rock then as she was now.

  She remembered the night not too long ago when Kay had shanghaied her, hitching them a ride into Da Nang in an army ambulance. Her first taste of kim chee, in a back-alley restaurant consisting of one ancient woman, a cooking shed, and three rickety card tables. Then, on to a bar crammed with noisy Marines, and loud American music, where she’d gotten so drunk, listening to Otis Redding croon “Dock on the Bay” and thinking about home. God, she’d been so sick afterwards! All that kim chee and vodka declaring war on her stomach. Kay, holding her hair back while she was sick in the bushes outside, then afterwards, when the tears came, lending a sympathetic shoulder.

  “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” Rachel said, and started to laugh again. Only now it wasn’t funny. The laughter caught in her throat like a piece of food that wouldn’t go down. “Now, whenever I think about it ... well, I feel like I’m dying inside. When I was little, all I ever really wanted was a baby sister. And my mother would always tell me that someday I’d have babies of my own, as many as I wanted. It never occurred to me, not once, that I wouldn’t be able to ... to have children. Or even one child. One baby. Is that so much to ask? Is it?”

  “Hey, look at me,” Kay said. “I doubt if I’ll ever find anyone weird enough to marry me, much less have a kid.” She was trying to joke Rachel out of her misery, but Rachel could see that her eyes, squinched against the smoke, were moist. “Regrets. Shit, don’t waste your time. That and a dime will buy you a phone call.”

  Rachel forced a weak smile. “Who would I call?”

  “I don’t know. God maybe. And, listen, when you get a hold of Him, would you tell Him something for me? Tell Him to end this war so I can stop smoking these filthy cigarettes. They’re killing me.” Her voice went a little ragged, and she squashed her cigarette out in the empty sardine can on the floor beside the bed.

  [239] Rachel smiled. “I guess we’re all hooked ... one way or another.”

  “I read a story once,” Kay said, “by O. Henry. About this girl who was real sick, she had pneumonia, I think it was. All she could do was lie in bed and stare out her window at the ivy growing on the wall outside. And this friend of hers, this artist who lives downstairs, the sick girl tells him that when the last leaf falls, that’s when she’ll die. It’s winter, you see. And all the other leaves fall except this one last leaf. It just keeps hanging on. So she doesn’t die. She gets better, in fact. And when she’s well enough to get out of bed, she finds out why that last leaf never fell—it was painted on, by the artist. The irony is, he’s the one who dies in the end, from staying out in the rain and cold while painting that damned leaf on the wall.”

  “Don’t worry,” Rachel said and laughed, slipping out of Kay’s pants, then finding her own under the bed. “I won’t catch cold. Malaria, maybe. Or heatstroke. But de
finitely not pneumonia.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking. I was wondering.” Kay got up, and found a fresh pack of Salems on the dresser. Slowly, she peeled off the cellophane. “What would have happened to the girl if that last leaf had fallen.” She went over, placed her hands on Rachel’s shoulders, forcing Rachel to meet her gaze. “Give it a break, kid. That heart of yours can use one, all the mileage you put on it. Take my advice, put it away for now. It won’t do you any good in this place.”

  The rain had stopped. But the path leading to the hospital was a sea of mud.

  Rachel was picking her way along the planks that had been laid over the muddy path when she heard it: a high whistling noise cutting across the sky.

  Mortars.

  She hit the ground, slapping stomach down in warm mud, just as a defeaning WHUUUUMP rocked the air. She brought her head up, and watched a dull, poisonous orange bloom above the trees, not a quarter of a mile away. Cold panic coiled about her heart. There had been shelling before, in the jungle surrounding the village, but never this close.

  [240] What if they hit us? What if—

  She moaned softly, squeezing her eyes shut against the horrible orange glare, clamping her hands over her ringing ears as another mortar whistled overhead, then exploded, much closer this time from the sound of it.

  Strangely, she was afraid, but not for herself. She thought of Brian stretched on his bed in ICU, unconscious, thin and white, swathed in bandages to his chin. His vital signs were still so precarious. If he suffered even the slightest trauma, he would die. She had to get to him, make sure he was all right.

  Rachel, shutting out her own fear of being killed, began crawling on her hands and knees, inching her way through the mud toward the hospital. The rockets were coming one on top of another now, like a Fourth of July celebration gone berserk. The air seemed to reel, punch-drunk, with their blasts. An artificial dawn painting the sky above the tree line orange and yellow and red. She tasted something bitter on her tongue. Gunpowder. Oh Lord, they’re right on top of us.

  When she got there, the lights were out in the hospital. The generator must have blown, she realized with a sinking heart. She groped her way in darkness through the archway that led across an open tiled courtyard. The ancient tiles were broken and heaved from the constant moisture, and she nearly stumbled a few times as she made her way toward the double doors that opened onto the wards.

  Inside, a dark corridor, then sudden blinding light. Someone shining a flashlight in her face. She squinted and threw a hand up. More flashlights now, cutting in wild arcs, casting a shadowy feverish light over the ward. As her eyes adjusted, she saw Lily struggling to drag a comatose patient, a man twice her size, under the bed nearest the door. His IV line had torn loose, and a bright crimson stain was slowly spreading across the bandages that covered his chest.

  Rachel dove forward to help Lily, but Lily shook her head and pushed her aside. “No time. Get the others down. Safer under the beds if we are hit.”

  Rachel, pushing aside her worry about Brian for a moment, felt a burst of panic, as she wondered what would happen to these poor guys, all of them hers in a way, if the building sustained a direct hit. [241] Or even if they were forced to evacuate, the agony they might suffer, and possible damage to healing wounds. God, please help them ... make this stop.

  Thunder shook the building, and slashes of vermilion sky flared between the slats of the louvered windows. She heard distant screams, the squealing of pigs, and realized a shell must have hit the village on the hillside below. Would any of them be safe if this old building was hit?

  And Brian. He had been so sick last night, running that high temp. Mac had been right about the peritonitis. Regardless of how careful she’d been to clean and debride the wounds, to pick out every tiny bit of shrapnel and dirt, contamination had been inevitable. Mac, she knew, didn’t hold out much hope. In Brian’s weakened condition it was touch and go under the best of circumstances, but this ...

  Please, God, just let him be all right. Let him get through this night. I’ll take care of the rest.

  She darted down the aisle separating the row of beds on either wall, skirting nurses and orderlies who were soothing some patients and wrestling with others. Brian’s bed was the last one. She caught a glimpse of it in the thin, flickering light. Empty.

  Burning pain exploded in her chest, as if she had been struck by a mortar.

  “No!” she cried. “NO!”

  Rachel, half out of her mind, grabbed the arm of a nurse rushing past. It was Dana, her dishwater-blond hair straggling free of its bobby pins, her thin face pale and frightened. Dana held an IV bottle of Ringer’s solution, and at Rachel’s touch she jumped, and the bottle slithered from her grasp. A loud crash. Lukewarm liquid splashed Rachel’s feet. A splinter of glass stung her ankle.

  “When?” Rachel asked, gripping Dana’s arm much harder than she’d intended. She heard the shrill note of hysteria in her voice. “When did he die?”

  Dana wrenched her arm free, and took a step backwards, eyeing Rachel as if she’d gone mad. Then Rachel realized how she must look, covered in mud, her hair streaming loose and wild. Like one of the whacked-out patients on the druggie ward, the ones who had smoked too many of Mama-san’s opium-laced marijuana cigarettes.

  [242] Dana didn’t have to ask who she meant. “He’s not dead ... yet,” she said. “Doctor Mac took him into OR. He went into cardiac arrest a minute or two before the shelling started.”

  Relief pumped through Rachel, followed by an icy wave of panic. She must get to him, help him. She was the connection, the last leaf that was somehow keeping him alive. Didn’t they understand that?

  Rachel wheeled, and darted back the way she’d come. The operating theater was at the end of the corridor, not more than a few dozen yards, but it seemed as if she’d run miles by the time she got there. Her clothes were drenched in sweat, her legs trembling, rubbery. Her heart hammering crazily.

  She burst in.

  The operating room was long and narrow, with half a dozen operating tables. A flashlight shining at the far end cast huge horror-show shadows that curved up the wall and across the ceiling. Two shadowy figures crouched over an operating table. As she drew closer, she saw that it was Doctor Mac and Meredith Barnes. Meredith was holding the flashlight in her left hand and a hemostat in her right. Mac was bent over a long figure stretched on the table.

  Brian. Her Brian. Rachel’s heart lurched in terror.

  He was intubated. They were bagging him, squeezing air into his lungs. Blood was smeared over Brian’s thin, naked chest. She saw the long incision in the left fourth intercostal space just below his nipple. Mac was struggling with a pair of rib retractors.

  He was going for open cardiac massage. Thank God there was still a chance. Thank God she wasn’t too late.

  Mac glanced up, shooting her a startled glance from under the shelf of his shaggy gray eyebrows. Rachel was already snapping on a pair of gloves. No time to scrub, this would have to do.

  “Let me,” she begged. “My hand is smaller.”

  “Have you ever done this before?” Mac asked, sounding impossibly weary, too weary to argue.

  “No. But I’ve seen it done. I can handle it.” She felt oddly calm, as if somehow, deep down, she had been preparing for this moment all along.

  “Good. There’s no time for mistakes. It’s been too long already. He stopped breathing five minutes ago. I gave him CPR [243] and six shots of intracardiac epinephrine. If this doesn’t work, we’ve lost him.”

  Rachel concentrated on remembering everything she had learned about emergency thoracotomy. Peering into the open wound in the feeble glow of the flashlight, she found the pericardium, and made a longitudinal incision with her scalpel, careful to avoid the phrenic nerve. She inserted her gloved right hand through the incision, feeling her way around the pulmonary artery and vena cava. Nothing. Not even a faint flutter. Oh God. She felt utterly still, cold as death, as if her own heart had
stopped beating as well. Yet somehow, incredibly, her mind and body continued to function.

  In the instant her hand closed about the still, flaccid muscle of his heart, she felt as if everything had somehow come to a standstill, this room, this hospital, the entire world. The shelling had stopped, or had she just stopped hearing it? There was only the steady throbbing of her pulse in her ears.

  Gently, rhythmically, she began to squeeze. Live, oh please live, Brian, you’ve got to help me, I can’t do it all, oh please. ...

  Nothing.

  Beads of sweat oozed from her forehead and trickled down her temples. She struggled to keep from panicking. Keep up the rhythm, that was the way to go. Steady. God, please won’t you help me.

  Every sense became heightened. She could smell the stale odor of Mac’s sweat, and a flowery scent, the perfume Meredith was wearing. Blood seemed to float in the air like a fine mist, the taste of it on her tongue, bitter, coppery. The pressure of her hand about his flaccid heart matched by a rhythmic chanting in her head.

  Come ON. Get going. COME ON. Now. Please. NOW.

  Mac was shaking his head sorrowfully. “Enough, child. It’s no good. You did your best.”

  Rachel could feel the sobs rising in her breath, choking her. “No,” she pleaded. “Just a little while longer. Please. I want to be sure.”

  “Another minute, that’s all. Others need us now.”

  An eternity seemed to pass inside that minute. Rachel could feel it eating away at her control, threatening to swallow her. It wasn’t just Brian she was fighting for, but herself, her own sanity.

  At last, just as she had about lost all hope, a tiny spasm.

  [244] Another.

  A single faltering beat.

  Several interminable seconds passed without another, then Brian’s heart began to beat with a shallow rhythm of its own.