The Return of Caine O'Halloran: Hard Choices

by JoAnn Ross

  “We must’ve pumped in a ton of blood, but eventually she stabilized enough to be sent up to surgery.”

  “Did she make it?”

  “Oh, yes. But I didn’t find that out for weeks, because all day patients just kept pouring in: knife fights, bullet wounds, heart attacks, rapes...

  “The triage nurses had the patients stacked up like planes over Kennedy airport and by the time I got to stop long enough to have a cup of coffee, I’d been on the run for eighteen hours and had another eighteen to go, but—and this is hard to explain—I felt really, really good.”

  “Adrenaline tends to do that to you,” Caine agreed absently. He was trying to come to grips with the idea of cool, calm and collected Nora covered with a stranger’s blood, surrounded by the bedlam that was part and parcel of a city-hospital emergency room. Nora treating bullet wounds? Ten years ago he would have found the idea preposterous. Obviously he’d underestimated his former wife.

  “I suppose so. But it was more than adrenaline. I loved being part of a team and I loved the action. It was fantastic!”

  A smile as bright as a summer sun bloomed on her face and lighted her eyes. Caine tried to remember a time she’d smiled like that at him when they’d been married and came up blank.

  “You should do that more often.” Unable to resist touching her, he reached up and ran his palm down her hair.

  It was only a hand on her hair. An unthreatening, nonintimidating touch. So why did it make her mouth go dry and her heart skip a beat?

  “Do what?”

  “Smile. You have a lovely smile. No wonder your patients love you.”

  It was happening all over again. When she felt herself falling under Caine’s seductive spell, Nora took a step backward. Physically and emotionally. “I really do have to go.”

  “You haven’t finished the story.”

  “What story?”

  “About your first day in the emergency room.”

  “Oh. Well, as I said, the rush was amazing. I was hooked. I applied for a residency, got it, and I’ve been working in emergency departments ever since.”

  “I wish we’d been living together that day,” Caine surprised both of them by saying. “I would have liked sharing it with you.”

  “Please, Caine—”

  “I’d like to hear more about your work, your life. Could I take you to dinner tonight?”

  “I’m sorry, Caine, but I have paperwork to catch up on tonight.”

  “Tomorrow night, then.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “All right, how about lunch?”

  “I’m sorry, but the answer’s still no.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “No.”

  “I want to see you again, Nora. Just to talk. That’s all.”

  She combed her hand through her hair again and was appalled to find it trembling visibly. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea, Caine,” she said gently, but firmly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would be too painful.” She flared suddenly, causing the birds perched on the branches overhead to take flight in a loud flurry of wings.

  “Perhaps that’s all the more reason to talk about it,” Caine suggested mildly. “If we can get everything out in the open once and for all, perhaps we can put it behind us.”

  “Do you truly think that’s possible?”

  “We’ll never know if we don’t try.”

  For a brief, foolhardy moment, Nora was honestly tempted.

  “No,” she decided. “I don’t want to see you again, Caine. Not for dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, or just to talk.”

  Unaccustomed to failure, but not knowing how to salvage the situation, Caine decided he had no choice but to back away. “I guess I’ll just have to wait and see you in a couple of weeks.”

  “Really, Caine—”

  “So you can take the stitches out,” he reminded her. “Unless you’d rather have me go to a doctor in Port Angeles.”

  “No.” Her cheeks were flushed. “Of course I’ll take them out. There’s no reason for you to drive all that way.”

  “Fine. Well, I guess I’ll be seein’ you.”

  “Yes.”

  He knew it was the last thing she wanted, but some perverse impulse made him put his hand against the side of her cheek in a final, farewell caress.

  “Goodbye, Nora.”

  “Goodbye, Caine.”

  Caine gave her one long, last look, and then he turned and walked back toward the gate.

  He had only gone a few paces when she called out to him. “Caine?”

  He turned back toward her. “Change your mind about breakfast?”

  “No.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the silver ballpoint pen and a small yellow pad. “But I thought you might like the name of a doctor in Seattle who specializes in your type of injury.”

  “I’ve gone to more damn specialists than you can shake a bat at, Nora.”

  “One more opinion couldn’t hurt.” She wrote the name on a piece of paper and held it out to him. “And Dr. Fields is really very good.”

  Although he wasn’t at all eager, Caine took the paper and shoved it into his pocket. “Thanks. I appreciate your concern.”

  She searched his tone for sarcasm and found none. “You’re welcome. Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  A maniac was operating a chain saw behind his eyes and his stomach was roiling from the can of warm beer he’d tossed down for breakfast.

  Hell, Caine thought as he crossed the cemetery. Maybe I shouldn’t have come home, after all.

  In small towns, time had a habit of standing still. When he’d made the decision to return to Tribulation, that trait had seemed a plus. With his career in shambles, he’d found himself instinctively drawn back to the one place where he was still a larger-than-life hometown hero.

  But dammit, he hadn’t counted on Nora having returned home, as well.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he muttered, jamming his hands so hard into his pockets that they tore. Loose change fell to the still-brown grass underfoot and went ignored. “Not a goddamn thing.”

  Feeling more alone than he’d ever felt in his life, Caine walked back through the wrought-iron gates. Away from his son. And his wife.

  Chapter 5

  One week after her unexpected encounter with Caine in the cemetery, Nora pulled her car into her reserved parking space outside the Olympic Memorial Hospital and realized that she couldn’t remember a single mile of the just-completed drive. It was not a propitious omen for the day ahead.

  Ever since Caine’s return, her mind had been mired in the past, rerunning old scenes from her marriage like some late-night cable-television movie.

  Marrying Caine when she’d discovered she was pregnant had seemed a logical, practical solution. The problem was, she’d never planned on falling in love with the only man who had ever had the power to break her heart.

  The sun had risen, the sky was as bright as a washtub of the Mrs. Stewart’s bluing her grandmother had always favored. Walking toward the hospital, she waved at a gardener who was energetically clipping away at the rhododendron bushes flanking the sidewalk. He grinned and waved back, his own enjoyment of the perfect spring weather obvious. The double glass doors of the emergency department opened automatically at her approach. Nora took a judicial glance around the well-lighted waiting room. The only persons there this morning appeared to belong to the same family.

  An exhausted-looking woman rocked a cranky baby in a stroller; at her feet, a young boy ran a toy car across the green vinyl tile while making loud roaring sounds meant to emulate a Formula race car. Beside the woman, a red-haired girl sat reading a children’s book of fairy tales.

 
The woman and the girl didn’t bother to look up as Nora passed; the boy glanced at her with a decided lack of interest, then began running the plastic car noisily up the wall.

  After exchanging brief greetings with Mabel

  Erickson, the emergency room clerk, Nora went into the doctors’ locker room, changed into a pair of unattractive but practical unpressed green scrubs, and clipped on her ID.

  “You’re starting out slow,” Dr. Jeffrey Greene, the doctor going off the night shift, said, flipping through the aluminum clipboards. “We had a relatively quiet night. Some hotshot took a corner too fast on his Kawasaki and I spent two hours picking pieces of asphalt and gravel out of his arms and chest. His girlfriend took him home.

  “EMS brought in a drug overdose.” He frowned at this latest problem to have worked its way to the peninsula from the Puget Sound cities. “We stabilized him and sent him upstairs to ICU. The only patient currently in the place is a kid with night asthma who should be off the breathing machine any time. His mother’s in the waiting room, waiting to take him home.

  “And, for comic relief, just when the pizza guy showed up with dinner, a frantic mother brought in a three-month-old with spots. She swore he had measles.” He shook his head with disgust. “I’ll never figure out why people bring their kids to the emergency room at three in the morning with diaper rash.”

  “She was probably scared.” Nora certainly remembered her own middle-of-the-night parenthood fears.

  In medical school she’d been constantly reading about life-threatening diseases, then fearing that Dylan had contracted one of them whenever he became ill. One of the more embarrassing incidents had been when he’d come down with a high fever and wouldn’t stop crying.

  Positive that her son had meningitis, Nora had driven alone—Caine had been out of town on a road trip—through the dark streets to the hospital at two o’clock in the morning.

  The doctor on call had examined the three-month-old baby, patted Nora paternalistically on the head and diagnosed an ear infection. An hour later, Nora had returned home with a bottle of antibiotic and a sense of relief mingled with an enormous dose of professional embarrassment.

  “The pizza was cold by the time we got around to it,” Dr. Greene complained. “At the next staff meeting I’m asking Administration about that microwave they’ve been promising us. What kind of E.R. doesn’t have a microwave oven, this day and age?”

  When Nora didn’t answer what she took to be a rhetorical question, he continued. “So, there you go, Doctor. So far you’re looking at a long boring day.” He gathered up the pizza box and pop cans and tossed them into a nearby wastebasket. “But of course, the morning’s still young so that’ll undoubtedly change.”

  Nora knew that, only too well. For some reason no one had ever been able to figure out, emergencies invariably came in waves; things would be so quiet the medical staff would be in danger of falling asleep, then suddenly all hell would break loose.

  After confirming that the asthma patient had been released, Nora returned to the office, sipped a cup of coffee and waited.

  The peace was shattered twenty minutes later when the hospital speaker came to life. At the same time, the beeper in her pocket went off with the high-pitched squeal of the trauma stat code.

  “All emergency personnel, trauma stat!” the wall speaker blared. “Helipad, ETA two minutes. Helipad. Two minutes.”

  Nora was waiting on the roof, along with a nurse and an E.R. technician, when the EVAC helicopter arrived. In order to avoid wasting critical time, the pilot brought the craft straight in, circling and descending at the same time. The moment the skids touched the ground, the pilot unpitched his rotor blades, flattening them so they no longer bit into the air.

  Bending her head, Nora and the rest of the crew grabbed hold of the gurney and raced toward the side of the helicopter. The helicopter medic threw open the door, then undid the heavy web straps holding the passenger—a little boy—in place.

  Four sets of hands lifted the boy, who was strapped to a fracture board, a pink plastic collar immobilizing his neck, onto the gurney. Telling him not to be afraid, the nurse put a green plastic oxygen mask over his face, then the crew pulled the gurney back across the roof at a dead run. The state police helicopter medic followed, service revolver bouncing awkwardly against his navy blue flight suit.

  “This is Jason Winters,” the medic informed the team as they entered the code room. “He’s a four-year-old male who did a double gainer out of his two-story bedroom window and landed on a wooden deck.

  “Was unconscious no more than two, maybe three minutes. He’s alert, he can move all extremities, his pulse is one fifty-five, respiration twenty plus, blood pressure one ten over seventy and solid as a rock.

  “His mother says there’s nothing unusual in his medical history, no known allergies. She was the one who found Jason. A neighbor’s driving her here. ETA twenty, thirty minutes.

  “The father’s a city cop. The police station was notified, but he hadn’t arrived there from home yet. The desk sergeant promised to give him the message the minute he came in.”

  After thanking the medic for his concise report, Nora bent over the gurney and brushed the boy’s hair away from his forehead with a gentle, maternal touch.

  “Hello, Jason. I’m Dr. Anderson. Do you know where you are?”

  “In the hospital?”

  “That’s right.” Nora smiled. “And we’re going to take very good care of you.”

  “I wanna go home,” Jason wailed.

  “I know. But first we need to check you out and make certain nothing’s broken. Can you help us do that?”

  “Why can’t I just go home?” His face was so pale his freckles stood out in stark relief.

  “You will. I promise. But not quite yet, sweetie. First we have to take a blood sample.”

  “I don’t want no shots!” he screamed as the nurse began swabbing the crook of his slender arm.

  “It’ll only sting for a minute, honey,” the nurse promised.

  The scream escalated into high-pitched shrieks as the boy watched his blood filling the syringe.

  “No-o-o! I want my mommy. I wanna go ho-o-ome!”

  Another nurse hooked him up to the monitor and Nora watched as the line jumped wildly on the monitor, then settled down to a rapid beat normal for a frightened child.

  “If you don’t untie me, I’m gonna tell my daddy on you! He’s a policeman and he’ll come with his gun and arrest you!”

  The shrieks slid back down the scale and became racking sobs that gave Nora confidence. Every wail, every cry, said that Jason’s airway was unobstructed.

  “We’ll take the straps off real soon, Jason,” Nora promised, “but first we need to take some pictures to make certain that you didn’t hurt anything when you fell.”

  “I didn’t fall,” he corrected with four-year-old pride. “I was swinging on my web.”

  “Your web?”

  The first nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm and hooked it to a monitor programmed to automatically inflate the cuff and read the patient’s blood pressure every two minutes.

  “My Spider-Man web... Hey, what are you doing now?” Jason yelled when the nurse began cutting away at his superhero pajamas. “You can’t do that! My mommy just bought me these pajamas. She’ll be really mad at me!”

  “We need to examine you, Jason,” Nora soothed. “I promise to tell your mommy that we’re the ones who tore your pajamas, but first, can you be a very big boy and tell me where it hurts?”

  Fifteen minutes later, when her examination uncovered merely a sprained wrist and a nasty bump on the head, and the X-rays showed no spinal damage, Nora decided that Jason was not only a very loud little boy, he was also a very lucky one. Although children’s bodies were amazingly resilient, they definitely weren
’t designed for two-story falls onto a solid-wood deck.

  The nurse was writing his name on a plastic wristband when the E.R. clerk appeared at the door of the trauma room. “The boy’s mother is here.”

  Through the door, Nora could see a pretty, obviously distraught young woman. She was pacing in front of the reception desk, tracks of tears staining her cheeks while her hands mangled a tissue. The stark fear and dread Nora recalled all too well were written all over her face.

  Nora remembered prayers, learned in childhood, tumbling through her head on that day nine years ago. Desperate, she had made deal after deal with God: If He’d only let Dylan live, she’d never raise her voice at him again; if He’d only allow her son to survive, she’d figure out some way to take enough time from her studies to watch cartoons with him. If only God would keep her baby from dying, she’d do anything. Anything!

  Nora remembered desperately trying not to cry and strangely, succeeding. And then she remembered trying not to scream, when they’d told her that her baby had died, and failing.

  After instructing Mabel to inform Mrs. Winters that she’d be right there, Nora slipped out the door and walked to the stainless-steel fountain. Water arced up in a shimmering silver stream; Nora took a long drink and an even longer breath. Then she walked back down the hall to the waiting room.

  “Hello, Mrs. Winters.” She offered a reassuring smile. “I’m Dr. Anderson. Jason’s doctor.”

  “Where’s Jason?” the haggard woman asked immediately. “Where’s my boy?”

  “He’s still in the trauma room,” Nora said. “With the nurses and other support staff. But he’s awake and doing fine.”

  On cue, another scream came from the trauma room. “He’s hurting! I need to be with him.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll be a few more minutes before you can see him, Mrs. Winters.”

  “They wouldn’t let me go in the helicopter with him, they took him away and now no one will let me see my son and I want to know why!”

  Mrs. Winters’s voice had the quiver and staccato rush that told Nora, who’d faced too many parents in similar circumstances, that she was on the verge of becoming hysterical.