At that point, he summoned her out into the hall.
“Is this the graft-versus-host thing you were talking about?” she asked before he could speak.
Heartsore, Stephen nodded in the affirmative. “She has all the symptoms, I’m afraid. There are three sites the donor immune system usually chooses to attack…the skin, the liver, and the gastrointestinal tract. She’s already having skin problems. I suspect her digestive system will be involved, too, irritated as it was by her chemotherapy. Though there’s no sign of jaundice yet, I’ve ordered a liver-function test.”
“I was hoping that, with five of six antigens matching, she wouldn’t have to worry about this,” Jess protested.
“Five out of six is very good…far better than we could reasonably have expected to find, given that the donor wasn’t an identical twin. Unfortunately, the unmatched antigen set is the one doctors refer to as D, for want of a better label. It determines the level of immune response and rejection of foreign tissue.”
She didn’t want a scientific explanation. What she craved was some form of reassurance and comfort from him. “You said some people die from this kind of thing, if the reaction is severe enough,” she reminded him, silently begging him to contradict himself.
He had to be honest with her, no matter how much he’d have preferred to deliver the promises she wanted to hear. “Some do,” he agreed, his heart breaking. “Annie has her youth and the five matched antigen sets going for her. If it’s any comfort, studies have shown that patients who survive this kind of episode have the strongest remissions.”
The way he was talking scared her to death.
“Stephen!” she cried. “I don’t want to lose her….”
It’s here. It’s happened, he thought in anguish. Annie could die in my care, though I’ll do my damnedest not to let her, with every imperfect treatment currently available to us. He couldn’t help it if seeing her so gravely ill beneath her sterile hospital coverlet with seven or eight plastic-packs hooked to her IV stand, dripping fluid into her catheter, brought David’s battle back to him and made him want to retreat to save himself.
“Nearly half of all allogeneic transplant patients get graft-versus-host complications, and most of them don’t die,” he said, retreating a little farther behind the mask he’d donned to avoid spreading germs to his young patient. “We’re giving her a battery of drugs to prevent it, and I’ve asked that the dosage be increased. Why don’t you walk down to the family lounge area and stretch out for a while, Jess? One of the orderlies can get you a blanket.”
“I want to be with Annie!”
His husky, Minnesota-inflected voice, which had whispered so many love words to her, took on a gentle but almost impersonal note. “I’ve asked one of the nurses to bathe her every ten minutes to bring down her fever,” he said. “You’d only be in the way.”
Aware that he was withdrawing from her emotionally, and unwilling to do anything that would be detrimental to Annie’s care, Jess followed his suggestion with great reluctance. Emerging half an hour later, she asked the head nurse where Dr. Hunter had gone.
“Back home to get some more sleep, I imagine,” the middle-aged woman answered. “Try to do the same if you can, Mrs. Holmes. We’ll take good care of your daughter.”
Short of checking the physicians’ parking lot, or paging him, Jess was forced to accept the woman’s response. Stephen’s the man I love—the man I thought loved me—and he’s left me in the lurch just when I need him most, she thought. It’s as if we’d never dated, never been intimate. He seemed warmer, friendlier, the day I brought Annie to the emergency room.
Neither she nor the head nurse on the hematology floor had any idea that Stephen was still in the building, stretched out in the doctor’s lounge, with his beeper at his elbow.
When she overheard her parents discussing the news about Annie, Chelsea was distraught. “I thought what I did would help her, not hurt her,” she protested tearfully, scrambling onto her father’s lap.
It was all Frank could do to comfort her, explaining that what had happened to Annie happened to quite a few transplant recipients—nearly half of those who didn’t have an identical twin to donate. “Once she gets better, this graft-versus-host thing could turn out to be a blessing,” he said, hoping he wasn’t sugarcoating the situation too much. “That’s because it usually gets rid of any remaining cancer cells the chemotherapy didn’t wipe away.”
A few miles away, having heard via the family grapevine about Jake’s more reasonable attitude toward Nate, Erica was paying another visit to the jail. In a tender, unguarded moment, she told her estranged husband that she’d always be there for him, whether they returned to their marriage or not.
“After five children and nearly thirty-three years together, we ought to remain good friends, at least,” she said.
The pressure he’d felt for years to live up to some idealized notion of him that she carried around in her head seemed to fall away, and suddenly Jake felt tenderness. If she could see him sunk so low, yet still care about him, there might be hope for them.
“Maybe even more than that, huh?” he asked, wishing he could kiss her pretty mouth. The see-through barrier that separated them was in the way. “The way you’ve stood by me, come to see me…I’ve really appreciated it.”
After she’d gone, matching her palms to his in a parody of touch that was a substitute for the embrace they both coveted, he sat quietly, thinking over his life and future more calmly than he had in years. If I can prove my innocence and get out of this mess, he promised himself, I’m going to make some changes. I’ll appreciate my family more. And do what I can to realize the dreams I had as a boy—at least those aspects of them that are still open to a man of my age.
Frantic when Annie didn’t seem to be getting any better and Stephen seemed to be avoiding her, Jess unburdened herself to Lindsay one afternoon. “He acts as if he’d prefer to forget that we were ever intimate,” she said miserably. “Whenever I try to talk to him about Annie, his answers are highly technical. I feel more awkward talking to him than I would to a physician I barely knew. What on earth did I do to make him treat me this way?”
To her surprise, a look of understanding appeared in Lindsay’s sympathetic brown eyes. “It seems to me that the way Stephen’s behaving is only natural,” she responded, “given the fact that he lost his eight-year-old son, David, to an inoperable brain tumor two years ago, then suffered through a divorce over conflicts that resulted from his death. Letting you and Annie past the wall he built around his heart at that time must have seemed a tremendous risk to him. Yet he took it for your sake. The fact that Annie’s so sick and he’s responsible for helping her get better… Well, you see what I mean.”
Stunned, Jess couldn’t hide the fact that she’d known nothing whatever about Stephen’s loss. “He never breathed a word to me about it,” she confessed. “And I never guessed. My God, Lindsay. Imagine how difficult this must be for him…like losing his son all over again! I’ve got to find him…let him know that I understand.”
Scouring the halls for Stephen, Jess came up empty-handed. She’d decided to seek out one of the hospital chaplains instead, for advice, when she spotted him on one of the curving benches in Minn-Gen’s small nondenominational chapel. His head was bent as if he were praying. Courage helped her walk softly to him and place a gentle hand on his shoulder.
His pain was evident as he turned to her. “I’ve done all I can, Jess,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Maybe someone else will agree to take a hand.”
The chapel was empty except for them, and she slid onto the bench beside him, facing the artist-designed brass basin, with a bubbling fountain, that was the chapel’s centerpiece. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to rest one hand on his knee, establishing a bridge of touch.
“Lindsay told me everything…about David, the way he died, and the reasons Brenda gave for divorcing you,” she whispered. “It’s helped me understand a lot
of things. Whatever happens, I want you to know that I realize you’ve done everything possible for Annie. And that I’ll always care about you just as much.”
Murmuring something about being grateful for friends like Lindsay, Stephen couldn’t seem to overcome his reluctance to bare his feelings to her. He hated to confess what he still regarded as his failure to be there for Brenda when she’d needed him. He didn’t want to seek Jess’s sympathy for his own unresolved loss, when she already had so much to deal with.
Yet he didn’t want to lose her, either. Or to push her away emotionally, as Brenda had claimed he’d pushed her. Succumbing to instinct, he put his arms around her in a bone-crushing hug.
“I want you, Jess,” he confessed. “I want to make a life with you and Annie. You’ll never know how much. I’m just not sure I can be a good husband to you and the kind of father Annie needs. I doubt if my ex-wife would think so. There’s no guarantee I won’t clam up…pull away from you whenever the going gets rough. Or that you’ll be able to put up with the demands of my profession.”
A little knowledge can make for an awful lot of wisdom, Jess thought. Instead of pushing him to make a commitment he wasn’t ready to make, she told him that, for the time being, his arms around her would be enough. “I’m going to need them as I continue to hold my breath and pray for Annie’s recovery,” she said.
Stephen tightened his embrace, grateful for her restraint and open-mindedness. “That doesn’t seem like much to ask.”
They rode the elevator up to the hematology floor together a short time later. In light of what she’d learned, Jess hung back, giving the professional man in him sufficient space to conduct his examination of her daughter.
His blue eyes seemed lighter, freer of torment, than they had in quite a while when he finished and turned to her. “The change in her condition is slight,” he said with cautious elation. “But I think I see some improvement.”
By morning, that improvement was even more evident. Propped up slightly in her bed, Annie was asking one of the nurses for something to drink when Jess awoke after another restless night spent in the chair beside her bed. My baby’s going to be all right! she exulted, getting to her feet and bending over to place a relieved kiss through her mask on Annie’s rapidly balding head. For the first time in what seems an eternity, her prognosis is close to that of an ordinary child.
Afraid to let herself relax and believe at an emotional level that Annie was really out of danger—that she’d grow up to be a strong, healthy woman someday—despite her obvious progress, Jess refused to be pried from her bedside, even for sleep.
With other patients to care for, some of them quite ill, Stephen couldn’t be with her as much as he wanted to. Nor did he feel free to suggest that she spend a night with him at his house. At the moment, Annie had to be her first priority.
It was a perfect example of the tug-of-war that had existed in his marriage—between his responsibility for his patients and his personal life. It had been a serious problem even before David became ill, and only worsened thereafter. Though he’d told her a little more about how it had been since their talk in the chapel, he didn’t know how she really felt.
After everything she’d been through, including Annie’s illness and her unhappy first marriage, which she’d finally discussed with him in one of the few private moments they’d had together, was it fair to ask her understanding of his predicament—to hold meals and cancel plans, do most of the parenting herself, in deference to his work?
I’d like to have a child with her, a little brother or sister for Annie, he thought. But it might add to the already heavy burden she’d have to shoulder.
Kate was prowling the confines of her penthouse that evening, after her maid went to bed, when Sterling paid her an unexpected call.
“Turn on your TV,” he directed without preamble. “We’ve just had another break in the Monica Malone murder case…one you’ll definitely want to hear about.”
Breathless with anticipation in her red silk oriental pajamas and matching satin mules, she switched on the set with the remote control while he poured them each a Scotch from her liquor cabinet. The local news came on a minute or two later. To her amazement, the top story concerned the vial of Secret Youth Formula that had been stolen from Fortune Cosmetics in one of a series of mysterious break-ins at the lab many months earlier.
The missing vial, still tagged with a Fortune Cosmetics label that bore several scrawled notations in the all-but-illegible handwriting of the company’s chief chemist and director of research, Nick Valkov, her granddaughter Caroline’s husband, had been found in the late Monica Malone’s residence by none other than the police. Apparently thrown for a loop by the random bits of evidence that continued to surface in the case, pointing to the possibility that they might have arrested the wrong man, they’d secured a search warrant and given the mansion another thorough going-over.
Exchanging a split-second look of incredulity with Sterling, Kate returned her gaze to the screen.
“The vial, reported stolen last year, was jumbled in a shoe box with various other bottles of brand-name perfumes and skin lotions,” the TV news anchor was saying. “It had been shoved under a bathroom sink. Police won’t say what, if any, bearing its recovery might have on the trial of Jacob Fortune, CEO of the cosmetics firm’s parent company, Fortune Industries, for Miss Malone’s murder.”
“Amazing!” Kate exclaimed with a little shudder, pressing the mute button as the newscast moved on to a wrangle over zoning. “Monica was behind those break-ins! Obviously she wanted to stop us from succeeding with the formula. Maybe she was behind my plane crash, too. If she’d commit burglary, why should she stop at murder?”
“I shouldn’t wonder if you’re right,” Sterling agreed, “though we can’t be sure without a thorough investigation. The other big question is—”
“What this will mean to Jake.” Having remained standing throughout the news segment on the vial’s recovery, Kate came over and perched on the edge of an easy chair, facing him. “Does it give him another motive for killing Monica?” she asked. “Or point in another direction?”
In Sterling’s opinion, the effect of this latest discovery was still up for grabs. Identifying Monica as the thief would go a long way toward establishing her as a determined enemy who wanted to ruin the Fortunes and bring down Fortune Industries. Unfortunately, that didn’t exculpate Jake from killing her—perhaps in retaliation for blackmailing him.
“I plan to initiate a civil suit to recover the vial, which the police will almost certainly want to retain as evidence,” he added. “If nothing else, it’ll help establish our side as the aggrieved party.”
Day by day, Annie was improving as, outside her hospital room window, the brilliant foliage that was Minneapolis’s annual glory reached its peak and began to drift downward, to rustle on the sidewalk. Sitting up in bed for short periods of time, she graduated from intravenous nourishment to soup and gelatin and then to a regular diet, which to her delight, one sunny day, included a cheeseburger. She began to show a renewed interest in coloring books, the plastic toys Stephen had given her and her favorite cartoons on television, and to nag Jess about returning to the cottage, which had become a second home to her.
The results of her aspiration tests were everything they could have hoped. After causing her so much risk and discomfort, her new immune system had settled down to allow a solid graft to form. Her chances for a complete and permanent remission were excellent.
Compelled by her elation to give Stephen a grateful hug when he outlined Annie’s prognosis and said that, if her progress continued, she could go home by Halloween, Jess kept the embrace light. Though they’d reached an understanding the day she discovered him agonizing over Annie and their situation in the hospital chapel, she realized it was a tentative one. He’d confessed to wanting a life with them. Yet instinct told her he was still grappling with his concern that he wouldn’t measure up as a stepfather and husband.
Since Annie’s admission to the hospital, they hadn’t made love or spent much private time together, despite the fact that, once her daughter was on the mend, Jess had begun driving home to the cottage each night for a shower and a good night’s sleep. In part, that was because she’d decided to give Stephen as much room as he needed. Annie’s recovery from leukemia and her bout with graft-versus-host disease had restored a place of calm that usually existed in her soul. If Stephen’s love and trust could grow organically, in a similar place, things might work out for them the way she wanted.
She’d come to another decision, as well. Having insisted she didn’t want anything from the Fortunes but bone marrow for her daughter, she’d traded on their hospitality long enough. Though she’d remain in Minneapolis until Annie’s follow-up care was complete and she knew where she and Stephen were headed, she’d rent a place of her own. A charming two-bedroom apartment had just become available for sublease near the hospital, where, for the next six months, at least, Annie would be going for tests on a regular basis. Putting down a deposit of one month’s rent, she told the landlord they’d move in by the eighth of November.
Except for the pin oaks, which would retain their brown, withered leaves for most of the winter, the trees were bare, and the weather had turned decidedly nippy by Halloween. Walking on air because her little girl would be coming home with her later that morning, Jess had planned a quiet dinner celebration to take place that evening, when Annie had settled in and taken a lengthy nap. Just the Todds, Stephen and Rebecca had been invited. Chelsea and Carter would have ample time for after-school trick-or-treating first.
Before driving to the hospital to collect Annie, Jess hung the cottage’s living room with crepe-paper streamers, balloons and a giant Welcome Home! sign she’d had made at a local print shop. The theme was orange and black, as befitted the American holiday.
Tears prickled her eyelids when Stephen came to Annie’s room to do her final inpatient assessment. “You’re as good as new, sweetheart,” he told the five-year-old finally, smiling as he lowered his stethoscope.
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