Three Wishes

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Yeah? Funny that you would. Most guys would be clamming up around now.”

  “Only if they have something to hide. I don’t. That guy hit me. You studied the scene. You know that. There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could have done differently.”

  “Still, you’re city. I’d have thought you’d be yelling and screaming for a lawyer.”

  “I am a lawyer.” He hadn’t intended to say it, but there it was.

  Bonner sent him a guarded look. “I thought you said you were a writer.”

  “I am. I write about law.”

  “Ah, jeez.” His head went back with the oath. “Another one lookin’ to be the next Grisham.”

  “Actually,” Tom said, because he figured Bonner would run a check on him and find out anyway, and then, of course, there was his damnable pride, which survived despite months of trying to kill it, “I was writing before Grisham ever did.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “I was published before Grisham ever was.”

  The chief paused. “That so?” Cautious interest. “Have I read anything of yours?”

  “While the Jury Was Out.” One look at the chief and he had his answer. “Lucky I have a common name, huh? I’ve been here seven months, and no one’s figured it out. Christ, they will now,” he muttered, refocusing on the road. “How much longer?”

  “Not much. Why the secret?”

  “It’s been a rough few years. I needed downtime. I needed to be someplace where people didn’t know who I was.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Taking aim at that damnable pride, he said, “I ran into trouble.”

  “Legal trouble?”

  “Ego trouble.”

  He stared out the window at the outskirts of Ashmont. Small frame houses came closer together now, lights on here and there. The Blazer fell in behind a plow that was spewing sand and slowed to give it space.

  Tom felt a surge of impatience. “Pass him.”

  “Not me. I’d rather be safe than sorry. I’d think you would, too. You don’t need two accidents in one night. So. You got famous and bought into the hype.”

  Tom lifted the gauze from his cheek, glanced at it, put it back. “Something like that.”

  “Weren’t there movies, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you loaded?”

  “Not now.”

  “Poor?”

  “No.” Tom looked at Bonner. “If she doesn’t have insurance, I’ll cover her bills.”

  “That’s nice and generous, thank you, but Bree won’t have any part of it. She’s an independent sort. Besides, don’t feel guilty. If you hadn’t been where you were, that truck would’ve hit her directly, and it was bigger than you.”

  “So if she dies, she’ll be less dead?” Tom asked. “Besides, it isn’t guilt.”

  “Then what?”

  Redemption was the word that came to mind, and it didn’t sound right. But he did know, for all he was worth, that this time he couldn’t turn his back.

  The Ashmont Medical Center was small and relatively new, a two-story brick building at the end of a long drive curving back behind the old stone town hall. Tom remembered the parking lot as being neatly landscaped, but the peaceful feeling he remembered, from things green and flowered, was gone. Halogen lights on the snow turned the scene a garish yellow.

  There was a small emergency entrance at the side of the building. The ambulance stood there, empty. Within seconds of the Blazer’s pulling up behind it, Tom was out. He pushed through the door and approached the nurse at the desk.

  “Bree Miller?” he asked, though he knew at a glance that she wasn’t there. The emergency area was negligible. Each of three cubicles was open and quiet. That meant she was either upstairs or in the morgue.

  He was tied in knots envisioning the latter scenario, when the nurse rounded the desk. She was a competent-looking sort, less laid-back than the typical local. “You must be the other injured party. I was told to watch for you.”

  “His name’s Tom Gates,” Bonner said. “He needs stitching. Check his ribs. And his hands.”

  Tom wasn’t being touched until he had some news. “How is Bree?”

  “She’s upstairs.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “Yes.”

  He released a small breath. “Is the surgeon here yet?”

  “No, but he’s close.”

  Ignoring protests by both the nurse and his body, he strode toward the elevator, spotted the stairs on the near side, and slipped through the door. Minutes later, he approached the second-floor nurses’ station. “I’m looking for Bree Miller,” he said. He saw a slew of patients’ rooms, what looked to be a kitchen, a supply area, an open lounge, and a lot of closed doors.

  This nurse was younger and gentler, but focused. Rising to meet him, she reached for the gauze he still held to his cheek. “Were you in the accident, too?”

  “Yes, but I’m fine.”

  She was studying the gash on his cheek. “This has to be stitched. How’d you get past Margo?”

  “I just went. Tell me more about Bree, and I’ll go back. Where is she?”

  “If I tell you, you might head that way, and if you do, you’ll contaminate everything they’re trying to keep sterile.”

  Tom backed off. “Okay. Just give me an update. Has she regained consciousness?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “The paramedic at the scene said she was bleeding internally. Did the EMTs find anything else?”

  “Bruises, but bleeding’s the first worry.”

  “My blood type is A. Will that help?”

  “No. She’s B. We have some here, and a list of donors. We’ve already called in a few.”

  Things were bad, then. Tom felt weak. “How many doctors are here?”

  “Normally, one. We called in another of our own. The surgeon coming from St. Johnsbury makes three.”

  “Have your two ever done anything like this?” He knew he sounded snobbish, but refused to take back the question even when the nurse looked vaguely annoyed.

  “Yes,” she said. “Doctors here know everything and do everything. They’re better rounded than city doctors. They have to be.” She took his arm. “I think you should go back downstairs.”

  He held his ground. “Where can I wait afterward? I want to know how she is the minute they’re done. I want to talk to the surgeon.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  He had been trying to ignore that, but he kept hearing that thud again and was feeling sick. “Wouldn’t you be shaking if it was your car that hit someone?”

  “Yes, but there’s nothing you can do for her right now,” she said, pleading now. “The doctors are working on her, and you can’t be there. So let Margo patch you up. Please?”

  What with cleaning, stitching, and X-raying, Tom was downstairs for an hour. During that time, the doctor from St. Johnsbury arrived and Bree’s surgery began.

  When Tom finally made it back upstairs, Flash O’Neil was in the waiting room. The police chief must have filled him in on the details of the accident, because other than a quiet “You okay?” he didn’t ask questions.

  It was nearly midnight. Tom lowered himself onto a vinyl sofa and sat, first, with his head low against dizziness, then, as time passed, with his eyes closed and his legs sprawled stiffly. Any movement in the region of the operating room brought him up straight, but news was scarce. He sat forward again, then back, shifted gingerly, stretched out. Had he been a religious man, he might have prayed, but it had been years since he’d done that. After his mother died, he hadn’t felt worthy, and before, well, he hadn’t felt the need. He had been his own greatest source of strength, his own inspiration, his own most blind, devoted, and bullheaded fan.

  So here he was.

  Somewhere around one, Flash began to talk. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging between, and was studying the floor, looking lost. “Bree was the first person I ever met in Panam
a. I heard the diner was for sale and came to see it. She waited on me and my wife, sold us on the town with that friendly way she has. After we bought the place, we had to close down a month for renovations. Bree was the only one who said she’d wait out the month and work for us when we reopened. She did more than wait. She was right there with us, making suggestions during the renovations—you know, things that people around here would like that we didn’t know, not being from here. She and Francie—my wife—they got along fine.”

  Tom had never seen a wife. “What happened to Francie?”

  “She left. Proved to be a real flash in the pan,” he muttered. “Not Bree, though. She’s worked for me for fourteen years now. I oughta make her a partner.”

  A nurse ran down the hall from the operating room. Tom came to his feet.

  She held up a hand, shook her head as she passed, and disappeared. A minute later, she returned carrying an armload of supplies, but she had no more time for him then. It was the young nurse from the station who came to report, “It’s going slow. She lost a lot of blood.”

  Again Tom felt the frustration of not being in New York, and while part of him knew that the going might have been just as slow there, it was small solace.

  “I started to drive her home,” Flash said, with more emotion now, “but the hill was so bad I gave up. If I’d stuck with it, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Tom made a disparaging sound. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “So whose fault was it?”

  “Whoever drove that truck.”

  “So who drove it?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “You were there. It was your car that hit Bree. What were you, asleep at the wheel?” The words were barely out before Flash held up a hand. “Sorry. I’m scared.”

  Tom knew how that was. “Are you and Bree together?”

  Flash made a sputtering sound. “Nah. She won’t have me. She likes going home alone. Says she needs it after a day at work. But, man”—he gave a slow head shake—“she’s my right hand at the diner. If anything happens . . .”

  “It won’t,” Tom said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “How?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, and closed it again. One part of him feared Bree’s dying as much as Flash feared it, but there was another part, a part that said the accident had happened for a reason and that her dying right now wasn’t it.

  True, that kind of thinking wasn’t logical, and he was a logical guy—cold, calculating, and shrewd, his father had accused him of being, before turning his back on him for good. Maybe his father was right. With regard to family and friends, Tom had been cold, calculating, and shrewd.

  Not so professionally. He had been creative and caring in his defense of clients, creative and caring in the construction of a plot. And he definitely had an imaginative streak. Something had to explain the eeriness he had felt when passing through the tunnel of light that the Blazer had carved in the snow. He felt that eeriness still, felt it deep in his tired bones.

  While Tom waited for news with his eyes closed, his legs braced, and his arms cradling his bruised ribs, down the hall in the operating room, Bree watched with fascination as five skilled professionals tried to restart her heart.

  Chapter

  3

  Wake up, Bree. Time to wake up.”

  Bree struggled to open her eyes. It was a minute of starts and stops, and what seemed a great expenditure of energy, before she succeeded.

  “That’s it. You can hear me, can’t you?”

  She nodded, more a thought than an act, and tried to look around. The woman who had spoken was pale green. Beyond was a room that was dimly lit, cool, and sterile, totally different from where she had been seconds before. That place had been bright and warm. The memory of it brought a wisp of calm.

  “She’s awake?” asked another voice, this one male, and for a minute she thought it was his. But this face had features. The other had been too bright to see.

  So how had she known it was male? And how had it smiled? Or had she only imagined a smile?

  “Hi there, Bree,” came this new one again. “Welcome back.” The voice was familiar, but nothing else.

  “Do I know you?” she asked in a whispery croak.

  “I’m Paul Sealy, one of the ones who’ve been working on you for the last five hours.”

  She tried to moisten her tongue, but her whole mouth was dry. “Where am I?”

  “In the recovery room. How do you feel?”

  She felt confused. Sad, like she’d been someplace nicer and didn’t want to be back. But happy to be here, too.

  “Any pain?”

  Maybe, in her midsection, but it was more dull than excruciating. The thoughts that came and went were harder to handle. She kept picturing herself on the operating table, kept seeing herself there, as if she had left her body behind and was rising to a gentler place. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought she had died and gone to heaven. But this clearly wasn’t heaven. So she’d been sent back down to earth. Which was a really weird idea.

  Far easier to stop thinking and just drift off to sleep.

  That first day passed in groggy spurts. She dozed and woke, dozed and woke. There were questions about comfort and pain, much poking and prodding, an overall jostling when she was wheeled down the hall to her room. Doctors and nurses hovered. More than once, she fought through a private fog to tell them that she would be fine, because she knew that she would be. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did.

  That was the only certainty she had. Between the lingering anesthesia and the drugs they gave her for pain, she was confused about where she was and why she hurt. She was confused about who was with her, seeing familiar faces one minute and new faces another, and each time she remembered what had happened in the operating room, she was confused about what was real and what was dream.

  Sleep continued to be a lovely escape.

  By the second morning, the effects of the anesthesia had worn off and she was awake enough to respond to the nurses attending her. Yes, her stomach hurt. No, she wasn’t dizzy. No, she wasn’t nauseated. Yes, she was thirsty.

  None mentioned the surgery. She guessed that they were leaving that to Paul Sealy. By the time he showed up, it was late morning, snow was dripping past her window from the roof under a repentant October sun, her mind was clearing, and she needed feedback.

  Standing by her bedside, with his hand in the pocket of his lab coat, he told of the tearing in her abdomen. “There was extensive bleeding. We had to find its source and stop it, then piece you back together again. It was touch-and-go for a while.”

  In a scratchy voice, she asked, “ ‘Touch-and-go’?”

  He softened the words with a smile. “We lost your pulse for a bit.”

  “I died?”

  “Not exactly. We kept you going until your heart started back up on its own.”

  “You used electric shock.” It wasn’t a question, but the doctor didn’t realize that.

  “Actually, we did. It’s the most effective thing in situations like yours.”

  “How long was my heart not beating?”

  He waved a hand. “Not long enough to cause any damage.”

  But Bree wanted to know. It had seemed an eternity that she had watched them work on her, and then there was the upward floating, and the bright light, and the sense of total and utter well-being. “Seconds? Minutes?”

  “Your brain was never without oxygen,” he said, which didn’t answer the question, so she tried a different angle.

  “How many of you were working on me?” She had seen five.

  “There were seven—three doctors and four nurses.”

  “At the time when my heart stopped?”

  He thought back. “No. There were five in the room then—Jack Warren and I, two nurses, and Simon Meade, up from St. Johnsbury.”

  Simon Meade. The tall one in the da
rk-blue scrubs. The one who had applied the paddles that shocked her back to life. It had taken more than one application.

  “I felt those shocks,” she murmured. It had been at the very end. She had been at peace with herself and the world, totally happy, then, whap!

  The doctor smiled. “Patients often say that, but it’s actually only the thought of the procedure that hurts. You were completely anesthetized.”

  “I felt them,” Bree insisted, but softly, because there was a chance he was right. What she thought she had seen didn’t make sense. Maybe it was her imagination. She was heavily medicated. Maybe she was pulling images from the past. After all, she had watched ER. She knew what went on in operating rooms.

  She also knew about near-death experiences—hard for an avid reader not to, what with so many books and magazine articles on the subject. So maybe what she had thought was real was nothing more than the power of suggestion. Maybe she had dreamed it up, after all.

  But the dream wouldn’t be dispelled. It penetrated her discomfort in bits and snatches, in ever greater detail as the day progressed. Friends stopped by to say hello, only to be hurried along by the nurses. Flash was one of the few who were allowed to stay.

  He arrived late in the afternoon, with a platter of goodies from the diner. Bree was awake, but a long way from eating anything solid. Her stomach hurt. Her whole body hurt—cheek, arm, hip, legs. The last thing she felt was hungry. Thirsty, yes. Hungry, no.

  “Not even one little cookie?” Flash pleaded. “I brought the shortbreads just for you. You love them.”

  “You love them,” she said, in a raspy voice, and grimaced against the pain of movement when she reached toward the cup on the bed table. “I’m so dry. Help me, Flash. I can’t reach that cup.” When he moved it closer, she fished out several ice chips and put them in her mouth.

  “What have we here?” Flash asked on his way to the window. A bubble bowl on the sill was filled with flowers, exquisitely arranged. “Pink geraniums, purple somethings, white crocuses. And lots of local ornamental grass. From Julia Dean. That’s so nice.” He returned to the bed. “I talked with the doctors. Another five days here, they said, and you’ll be home. A couple of weeks at home, and you’ll be back at the diner. Jillie’s filling in while you’re gone, and if you don’t feel like waitressing after that, she’ll stay on. You can just sit in the office and manage the place. I’m paying you either way. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”