An Open Heart

by Harry Kraus

  “Just a drink. A powerful one. With a beautiful ex-model with augmented anatomy. After midnight.” She raised a finger. “And I’ll bet you were alone.”

  “There were staff everywhere.”

  Heather put on a southern drawl and said, “Nothing good ever happens after midnight.” The phrase had become a joke for Jace and Heather during their courtship. Heather’s mom, Trevor Anne, was the originator of the phrase, and Heather had imitated her whenever the hour was late and Jace wanted more than a good-night kiss. But now, Heather spoke it in all seriousness.

  Jace rolled his eyes. “Thank you, Trevor Anne.”

  “She’s right this time, Jace. And if you ever need to make a late-night trip to the governor’s mansion again, I’m coming with you.”

  Jace looked incredulous. “You? My little guardian.” He shook his head. “I’m a big boy.” He put the milk in the refrigerator. “Don’t push me away, Heather.”

  “I’m not pushing,” she said. “I’m holding on to what is mine.”

  He turned to face her. “It feels like pushing,” he said.

  With that, he plodded off to the bedroom.

  Heather didn’t follow. She slumped onto a kitchen barstool and began to cry.

  Now, Heather realized the truth behind her husband’s statements. She hadn’t meant to push him away, but to Jace it had certainly felt that way.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “How can I learn to trust?”

  Later that morning in Kijabe, Jace stopped at the small counter that made up the nursing station on the Wairegi men’s ward. “Anyone seen my stethoscope?”

  He was met with blank stares. Maybe I left it down in theater.

  A few minutes later, Jace stood beside his patient Mohamed Omar. “We need to talk,” Jace said.

  The young Somali man nodded. “I am ready.”

  “I need to have blood set up in order to do your surgery. But we’re facing significant shortages. Do you have friends or family who can donate on your behalf?”

  His patient smiled. “I am Somali.”

  Jace didn’t understand. “I know that.”

  “Just listen to my name. Mohamed Omar Abdullahi. Mohamed is my name. Omar is my father’s name. Abdullahi is my grandfather’s name.” He held up his hands to explain. “We are all connected. I can find many, many cousins willing to help.” Smiling, he added. “I can name my father’s father’s father back twenty-seven generations.” He paused. “I have friends who can name one hundred. How about you?”

  “My father’s name was Lloyd. His father was Peter.” Jace scratched his head. “I think his father was James.”

  Mohamed shook his head. “How can you know who you are if you don’t know where you came from?”

  Jace thought for a moment before mumbling, “Americans seem too caught up in their own lives to care too much about yesterday.”

  His patient scoffed. “Idiocy.”

  “Perhaps.” Jace shifted uncomfortably. “Listen, I don’t need to tell you that waiting too long could be dangerous. We can only pray that the bullet fragment doesn’t move beyond our reach.”

  “A stroke?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll get you the blood,” he said, flipping open his phone. “How many donors are needed?”

  “Ten.”

  The Somali smiled. “I’ll have twenty by dark. It will be a good deed for my Muslim brothers.”

  Jace understood. Muslims live in awareness of opportunities to put checks in the positive column. “We operate in the morning.”

  “Insha’Allah.”

  38

  That evening Jace stopped by Gabby’s little duplex apartment to discuss plans for the next day’s case. Evan Martin met Jace at the door. “Come in,” he said, his voice urgent. “We need to talk.”

  Jace stepped into the little kitchen. Two suitcases sat next to the table. “What’s up, Gabby?”

  She shook her head. “We need to leave, Jace.”

  He traded looks with Evan and raised an eyebrow, mouthing, “What’s up?”

  Evan held up his hands. “Talk to him, Gabby. I know things have gotten a little weird around here lately.”

  “A little weird?” Gabby started to pace around the apartment. “Strangely enough, when I thought someone might have been trying to kill you, it freaked me out a bit, but I told myself it was just a case of a thug trying to rob a rich American doctor. But all these weird encounters your patients are having, along with the messages—” She paused. “I had a dream last night, and I’m afraid.”

  “A dream?” Jace stepped forward. “What kind?”

  “Scary. I don’t remember it all, just that I woke up feeling terror.”

  Jace looked at Evan. “You?”

  Evan nodded. “I can’t shake a feeling of dread, Jace. Something about this place. I’m with Gabby, I think we’ve given it an adequate trial. It’s time to go home and regroup.”

  Jace pulled up his shirt. The skin over his chest was still red and blistered. “Look at this.”

  Gabby stopped pacing and frowned. “Jace, what happened?”

  “A dream last night. I saw a man I met during my first day back in Kijabe. He called himself a doctor. Simeon Okayo. In my dream, he was dressed like a witch doctor with a necklace of bone. The necklace morphed into a stethoscope that burst into flame and melted, dripping hot plastic onto my chest. When I woke, my skin looked like this.”

  “What do you know about this Simeon?” Gabby asked.

  “Only that he said he was a consultant. I haven’t seen him around Kijabe since.”

  Gabby frowned. “I don’t like this, Jace. It’s like you are the focus of some intense spiritual war.”

  “War?” Jace took a deep breath. “Now you’re sounding like Chaplain Otieno.” He moved slowly to a kitchen chair and took a seat. “When I explained what was happening to my patients during surgery, he said the same kind of thing.”

  Jace stood again and paced. “I need you guys to stay for one more case. Mohamed Omar is ready. He’s counting on us.”

  Evan shook his head. “Why is this so important, Jace? He’s connected. He could even return to the States.”

  “No. He could stroke.”

  “Is that it, Jace? Is it really about him? Or is it about you? You’ve become obsessed with the messages.”

  “I need to know the truth.”

  “So why don’t you just pray like the rest of us?” Gabby asked.

  Jace shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.” He looked down. “I can’t.”

  “Jace, everyone can—”

  “No!” he shouted, immediately regretting his volume. “No,” he repeated more quietly. “I really can’t pray. I can’t ask God for this.”

  The sound of a siren interrupted their conversation.

  Evan walked to the window. “What’s going on at the hospital?”

  Gabby pointed. “Flames!”

  Jace, Gabby, and Evan ran down the uneven sidewalk past the hospital to the gravel parking lot bordering the cemetery. Flames danced above a small building on the west end of the hospital complex. Partially blackened wooden coffins lined the edge of the lot. Hundreds of patients in pink hospital-issue pajamas shuffled over the gravel in orange shower shoes. Inside the chain-link fence bordering the pediatric play area, the able-bodied patients pasted their faces against the fence to ooh and ahh as the roof collapsed.

  “It’s the morgue!” someone shouted at Jace. “Help us, Daktari!”

  They followed, weaving between the onlookers who were either silent with mouths agape or loudly pacing about with arms flailing toward the sky, begging God for rain.

  The fire rose through the roof of the small structure, the flames dancing into the night. A man in a security uniform sprayed water from a garden hose—David versus a fiery Gol
iath. The American trio joined a line passing plastic buckets of water forward.

  Gabby struggled to pass a bucket forward without spilling the contents. “What’s that smell?” she asked.

  Burning flesh. Jace recognized it from his use of the cautery unit in the operating rooms. “Gabby,” he said.

  She looked up, her mouth twisted as if she tasted something sour.

  He shook his head to communicate the message. Don’t ask.

  They worked on, muscles aching, as shouts for water and speed rose above the prayers for rain. Heat and smoke drove the workers back. Sweat and determination drove them forward.

  At the edge of a parking lot, a woman moved from coffin to coffin, clutching at her neck and crying out above the crowd.

  In the end, all that stood were the stone walls. The roof and everything inside had been destroyed. For another hour, water doused the smoldering wood. Jace joined an elderly man, the white-haired mortuary attendant, as he picked through the remains. His eyes met Jace’s. “It was my fault,” he said slowly. “The refrigerator keeps me cold, so I came out to stand next to the barrel where I keep a small charcoal fire.”

  Jace nodded. He’d often passed the mortuary at night and smelled the kerosene used to keep the fire burning. The barrel was old, rusted, and smoldering against the stone wall.

  Mthanga continued,“The barrel tipped when I added charcoal.”

  Jace walked toward the doorway, now a blackened hole. “Did you get all the bodies out?”

  The old attendant sighed. “Only two remained. The flames were too strong for me.”

  Two hospital workers fought to keep the crowd back, shouting loudly in Kikuyu. The woman who had been checking the coffins was now the point of the spear, anxious family members pushing forward to see.

  Jace asked the morgue attendant, “Do you know who they were?”

  Joel Mthanga nodded and wiped at a blackened streak running across his forehead. “They were yours, Daktari.”

  “Mine?”

  “Your patients. Michael Kagai and the young boy.”

  “Boniface?”

  “Yes.”

  A knot tightened in Jace’s upper abdomen. The boy who sold mangos for his mother at the hospital gate, the boy who’d fallen from a tree and died from a splenic injury when no blood was available. “Why were these bodies still here?” He looked at the crowd. The crying woman. Boniface’s mother.

  “The families leave them until they are able to clear the hospital charges.”

  Jace was incredulous. “But the boy … his bill had been paid.” He knew this for a fact. He’d paid it himself, paying homage on an altar of guilt.

  “Yes, but the family had no money for a funeral. They left the body here while they worked on raising money.”

  Jace looked away, unable to meet the gaze of the crowd.

  But soon, they swarmed in around them, ignoring the few security guards imploring restraint. Men kicked away the smoldering wood and soon, the gruesome remains were exposed, two unfeeling black skulls, bone bearing teeth draped with burned flesh now barely able to cover the skeletal support.

  Jace watched the morgue attendant, a grandfather who’d aged a decade in an hour. He stood stoop-shouldered and defeated with a penance of ash on his forehead, and began to weep. The attendant touched the shoulder of the sobbing woman and spoke in hushed Kikuyu before she wailed in fresh pain.

  The grief over losing her young son was renewed as she stumbled forward to glimpse the charred remains. Her agony was loud, acute, and each cry was a stake pounded into Jace’s chest. She turned from the blackened body in front of her, reaching out to Jace. “Daktari! Daktari!” She lurched forward, swinging her fist at his chest.

  He reacted, lifting his hands in front of his face, warding off the blows of the heartbroken mother.

  Two other women in orange and purple sweaters came alongside the crying woman, pulling her back from Jace, yelling in their tribal tongue.

  Jace lowered his hands. I deserve this, he thought. He stood exposed in front of her. For a moment, beneath a waning moon, with the acrid smell still hanging thick around them, he thought her fury had quieted.

  But then, the woman broke free from the women restraining her and with a cry, carried her fist through a high arc ending in Jace’s teeth. He stumbled back, tripping, landing in the warm ash next to the charred remains. He stood and faced the woman. She clutched her arms across her chest, a futile attempt to protect her broken heart. The women at her side coaxed her into their arms, and soon, the trio moved away, their cries mingling and soon lost in the noise of the crowd.

  “Jace! Here!” It was Evan Martin.

  Jace looked toward the voice and retreated to the edge of the parking lot into the company of his friends. His eyes met Gabby’s. “I can’t watch,” he whispered. He spat and wiped his chin. Blood.

  “What’s going on, Jace? Another coincidence?” Her eyes bored into his, asking, Why your patients? Is this another message? A warning?

  Jace brushed back tears. “I don’t know.”

  “We need to leave this place,” she said.

  “One more,” Jace responded. “Please.”

  Gabby began walking away. Her posture was set as she struggled forward against an unseen wind.

  “Gabby,” he called after her.

  She turned. “One more, Jace. For the sake of our Somali patient. Then I’m gone.”

  Jace nodded, though he knew she did not see. Gabby was already moving across the parking lot, weaving her way through a sea of dark faces.

  From the crowd, a large man emerged. Chaplain Otieno passed Jace without speaking, pausing only briefly to place his large hand on Jace’s shoulder before moving on in the direction of a Kikuyu mother’s painful cry.

  Jace nodded at Evan Martin. “See you in the morning,” he mumbled. He turned up the rocky path toward his house, feeling like Jonah in the hold of the ship about to capsize. It’s my fault. I’m the one they should throw into the sea. I’m the one who has brought terror to this town.

  Because I killed my sister.

  He walked alone, away from the cacophony of African tongues that wagged in excitement over the fire.

  Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would operate again, hoping to make up for the misery that seemed to follow him.

  Is it possible to atone for all that I’ve done?

  39

  Alone in his house, Jace Rawlings missed his wife. They’d been separated for more than six weeks. Over that time, anger had given way to sorrow, and sorrow to remorse. He didn’t blame Heather for their problems. In fact, in light of his current difficulties, he felt that he was getting just what he deserved.

  He thought about Anita, how he’d been swept up in the emotional tangles of desire. She’d wanted him. It was fresh. New. Fun to be wanted in a way that Heather seemed to have lost.

  He thought back to the night he first felt he’d crossed a previously impenetrable barrier. The governor had suffered a postoperative pneumonia, then a deep venous clot led to a pulmonary embolus and need for another period of time on the ventilator. The governor had survived, and after his discharge, Jace had adopted the practice of slipping by the governor’s mansion at least once a week to check on his patient.

  It was on one of those late-night visits that Anita took his arm and led him toward the door, thanking him as they walked. She turned toward him, and in a gesture that seemed accidental, her breast brushed across his arm.

  Accidental or not, Jace was aware of every firing nerve ending. He gently pushed back, allowing the touch to linger a moment longer. An accident. Nothing more.

  “Stay for a drink.”

  He was helpless. “Of course.”

  She selected a white zinfandel for herself, allowing Jace to select his own poison. He lifted an expensive scotch. She poured three fingers�
� worth into a glass and added ice.

  They sat in leather chairs set at ninety degrees that allowed their knees to bump. Another accident of course. She slipped off a pair of red heels and crossed her legs, brushing his thigh in the process.

  He cleared his throat.

  She smiled. “I’m sick of the media,” she said. “Sometimes I just want to escape the circus.” She paused. “How about you? Do you enjoy the attention?”

  “No.” He sipped his drink, already feeling his anxiety slipping away.

  “Do you want children, Jace?”

  Her use of his first name had become a practice whenever they spoke alone.

  “I always thought so. My wife … we’ve struggled a bit in that area.”

  “Stuart always wanted children, but his sperm counts are low.”

  Jace shifted in his chair. This felt like too much information.

  “Finally, last spring, I got pregnant, but I lost the baby after three months. Stuart was devastated. I’m not sure if he told you.”

  Jace shook his head. It hadn’t come up. And evidently, if the media had heard, they’d exercised a rare bit of courtesy in not reporting it.

  “Now I’m afraid that Stuart isn’t up to the task.” She paused again, making eye contact until Jace looked down, feigning interest in his drink. “Jace,” she said, leaning forward.

  Jace diverted his eyes from her cleavage.

  “When do you think it will be safe for us to try again?” She smiled. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

  Jace tried to swallow. “The governor is a strong man. He’ll be back in the saddle soon enough.” He blushed, immediately regretting his choice of words.

  Anita giggled. “I certainly hope so,” she said.

  He sipped his drink and protested lightly as she poured a bit more.

  She talked of her modeling career, of the endless stressful hours of a life in New York City before being rescued by Stuart Franks. She told of her desire to be a background compliment to Stuart, but knew the media couldn’t resist her charm.

  “How do you deal with the pressure?” he asked.