Her father looked up from the far side of Shane’s bed as she entered the room. To her surprise he was gloved, gowned, and masked as he had been in surgery.
“Swap out that contaminated gown, glove up, and put on a mask if you’re coming in here,” he warned her. “It was one hell of a bad prep. I don’t want to expose him to any further risk of infection—not that it’s probably going to matter much in the long run.” Jenny nodded. A nurse helped her with a fresh gown and a mask. By John Weston’s order, a box of gloves also stood on a chair. She took out a pair and put them on, even though they were much too large on her narrow hands. She went to Shane’s side, leaned her elbows on the bed rail, and looked down at him for a long interval. He seemed to be clinging to life by the barest fingernail. Whoever washed his face preoperatively did a hasty job, she thought, noting the dried blood crusted around the rims of his nostrils. Silently she went to the sink, found a washcloth and dampened it with alcohol, and gently cleansed his face. Her father said nothing for a very long time.
“Just how close were you?” he asked, looking down at the unconscious man.
“Does it matter?” she responded icily.
“No. Probably not.” She let the matter drop. Oh, Shane, I wish I could tell everyone that I compromised myself with you, but I don’t imagine Phillip would let that stand between him and the Weston money. He’d almost certainly marry me even if I were eight months gone with your child. Shane, please live. Please don’t give up. I still have one big trump card up my sleeve, and I’ll play it when the time is right. Please trust me, and fight to live. Please. Then her unspoken plea turned into a desperate prayer.
Outside, night fell while Shane continued to lie comatose. To Jenny that was not unexpected, although she would have jumped up and shouted hallelujah if he had moved in the slightest. She did notice a bruise beginning to highlight his cheekbone, and, if anything, his heart action was growing weaker.
“I know,” her father said, watching her count Shane’s pulse. “He’s going downhill quickly now. I don’t think it’ll be too long.”
She gave him a dirty look and pointedly took the patient’s hand. “I needn’t remind you, of all people, not to talk in the presence of a patient. You were the one who stressed to me that comatose patients may be unconscious, but they’re certainly not deaf. Shane, you can live. You can make it through this. Just, please, don’t give up.” She remembered how much he had made of the scent of her hand cream. She also knew that smell is the last sense to leave and the first to return. Hoping enough of her Honey Almond Cream would escape around her glove for him to sense it, she stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. “I’m here, Shane. I’m right next to you. I won’t leave you. Just, please, try to wake up for me? Please, Shane?” He did not respond, nor did she really expect him to. Her father’s expression was a mixture of pity and disdain.
“Well, Jen, I’m going to the cafeteria for supper. Will you accompany me?”
She shook her head. “No, thank you. I’ll stay a while longer. I’m not hungry.” Ignoring the nurse, she pulled up a straight chair and sat next to the bed, merely watching her patient breathe. The rise and fall of his chest was almost imperceptible.
She only napped that night, hoping for the change that did not happen. Instead, her father’s prediction seemed to be coming true. No matter how hard she willed him to live, Shane was in a slow but steady decline. His blood pressure dropped and his heart, trying to compensate, beat faster but more weakly. The only positive sign was that his temperature seemed to be stable.
The next morning, the blood on her clothes necessitated a trip to the nearest dress shop, where she hastily purchased a black traveling outfit and wore it from the store, then left her other garments at a laundry. She was back within the hour, gowned and gloved, at Shane’s bedside.
The afternoon train delivered Angus MacBride. She had wondered all along if Angus could be the slightest bit deaf, because he habitually spoke louder than necessary. But when he paused in the doorway, his voice came out a basso profundo whisper.
“Jenny, lass…” His voice broke, and had her father not been present she would have run into his embrace.
“Who is that?” John Weston asked.
“Doctor Angus MacBride from Elk Gap. He was Shane’s mentor, and he’s been mine. Angus, may I present my father, Doctor John Weston.”
“Doctor,” John acknowledged with a nod. “If you are going to come in here, use a gown, mask, and gloves, please. The patient had a hasty preoperative prep, and I’m a little concerned about the chances of infection.”
“Understandable, Doctor Weston.” Angus parked his cane by the door and complied without protest. It surprised her. The older man could be irascible. Then he took up his cane again and stumped over to stand next to her.
“He’s about twenty hours postoperative for a subdural hematoma secondary to a fracture of the right temporal bone. At first I made it a depressed fracture, but when I got in surgically, I was fortunately wrong. However, he did have a big brain bleed, and I’m not ruling out contracoup injury to the left temporal lobe. As you can see by his chart, his condition is steadily worsening. I’m picking up a little pulmonary edema now. His heart just can’t keep up. I was just considering raising the head of the bed to ease his breathing.” John Weston’s tone was detached and coldly clinical. Angus picked up the chart and read through it, his face expressionless. He replaced the chart, then fished beneath the surgical gown and took his new stethoscope from his coat pocket. It was identical to Jenny’s. He had finally purchased one after she laughingly chided him for repeatedly borrowing hers.
“May I, Doctor Weston?” he asked.
“Be my guest,” John responded with an airy gesture. Angus looked at him coldly. He listened carefully to Shane’s lungs, swapped out the diaphragm head, and listened to his heart. Then he noticed Jenny was not carrying a stethoscope at all. He held his out to her.
“Lass? For all the times I appropriated yours.”
“Thank you very much,” she said with a shy half-smile. Defying her father, she repeated Angus’s examination and nearly wished she had not. Her father had been right, in spades. John moved to the foot of the bed and patiently cranked up the frame until Shane was raised to something less than half sitting. The unconscious man did not react. Then Angus’s faded blue eyes sought Jenny’s.
“What a sorry mess this is,” he said quietly.
“You talked to Paul?”
“Aye, I did. He explained everything.” Angus glared at her father, who affected a mild detachment that made him look very much like Richard. Once again she marveled at the resemblance that ran no more than skin deep.
Driven by exhaustion, she spent part of the night on a sofa in the nurses’ lounge. When she awoke in the early morning hours, she went back to Shane’s room to find Angus in the chair John had vacated.
“Hello, lass. Your father went to rest a bit, too.”
“How is he, then?”
“Aboot the same.” His Scots burr always deepened with stress.
Automatically she drew on a gown and gloves, then came to the opposite side of the bed and leaned on the rail. After watching for a few moments, she lifted Shane’s hand, counted his pulse, and merely held his limp hand for a long time.
“I love him so,” she sighed. “I’d not tell anyone else this, but if he had asked me to marry him I intended to say yes, until Father came along and started all this ruckus. He’s still adamant that I marry Phillip, even though Phillip let something slip to Paul that leads me to believe his father faces financial ruin unless he marries me.”
“Paul explained the whole rotten mess. You have to stand up to him.”
“I can’t, at least not right now. If I do, it will bring down Northtown Surgical Clinic. Phillip’s father, all questions of solvency aside, is the Chairman of the Board.”
“Is it worth your life, then?”
“It will cost lives if it happens.”
“Nae,
lass. There may be a rousing grand catfight, but hospitals survive, and so do patients.” At that moment their attention was wrenched back to Shane. His breath seemed to stop for a moment, then he caught up, gasping. Her heart seized with a pang, but to her relief, his breathing evened out.
“I don’t like that apnea at all.”
“Me either.”
“Father is probably right. He said forty-eight hours.” And as they watched, he quit breathing again. Jenny was expecting the onset of Cheyne-Stokes respiration, the so-called “death rattle” that signaled the shutdown of the brain, but once again Shane fought his way through it and started to breathe regularly again. She checked his pupils, and to her relief they were unchanged, if still uneven.
Eventually her father returned. This time, to her surprise, he entered the room without the gown he had ordered everyone else to don.
“How is the patient, then, Doctor MacBride?” he asked.
“You’re not observing sterile procedures, Doctor Weston?”
“No. I don’t think there’s any more need. If he were going to catch something we’d have seen it by now. Instead…” As if Shane heard him, he went through another apneic spell. John checked him over. Then he draped his stethoscope around his neck and shook his head. The gesture said it all. He raised the head of the bed a fraction more and they settled in to wait.
“Jenny, I am going to order you and Doctor MacBride to go to the cafeteria and eat,” John said, consulting his pocket watch. “It’s already four o’clock. I don’t think you’ve had a bite since the accident. You’re not going to help my patient by making yourself sick. Oh, don’t worry. He’ll hold his own for the next few hours. Low tide here won’t be until about midnight.” It was on the tip of her tongue to refuse, but Angus stepped in.
“Please come with me, lass. He’s right. I’m a tired, hungry old man, and I need the company.”
“All right, Angus.” She dragged herself to the doorway and peeled off her gown and gloves. Her father took in the black traveling outfit and gave her a disapproving look but, mindful of Angus’s presence, said nothing.
“What did he mean by low tide?” Angus asked as they walked down the antiseptic-smelling hallway.
“People like Shane, who are…who are declining slowly, almost always seem to pass away at low tide. If you’ve never lived around the ocean, you probably never had reason to make that connection. I’ve lived on the Atlantic coast all my life, and I’ve seen it time and again.”
“Well, well. Learn something new every day, they say. And no, I’ve never lived near the sea. I’m strictly a Highlander.” He opened the cafeteria door for her and stepped back to let her precede him.
“Angus, I’m actually sorry I didn’t compromise myself with Shane and force us to elope. Then there wouldn’t have been any question.”
“I’ve always prided myself on being a broad-minded man, but that is a little too forward-thinking, even for me.” He pulled out a chair and seated her at a small table. “But things will come right yet, you’ll see.”
Half a bowl of vegetable soup and two soda crackers later, she was back in Shane’s room, counting down the hours as the afternoon grew long.
Evening came, though it was hard to believe that it arrived with the same rapidity as every other evening in her life. She noted there had been no change in Shane for several hours. Outside the night quieted, save for the usual city sounds: an occasional horse on the street, the cry of an insectivorous hawk, the yapping of a bored dog in the distance. Finally she grew tired of gazing out the window. She walked past her father, who sat primly with his knees crossed European fashion, reading an AMA journal. A glance over his shoulder turned up nothing interesting. She leaned against the bed rail and studied Shane’s face. His complexion had become so pale that for the first time she noticed the merest track of an ancient scar parallel to the top of his left eyebrow. She found his right hand beneath the cover, counted his pulse, then simply held his hand.
“Oh, Shane, I wish you’d wake up,” she whispered. “You’ve come this far. It’s not like you to quit. I know you’ll not stop fighting as long as there’s any strength left in your body, but you have to win this battle soon, or you won’t win it at all. Please, darling. Just a little more effort. Live, Shane. I know you can. I’m right beside you. I promise I won’t desert you when you need me.”
She entered the second night at his bedside, wondering if he would see another morning. He rested all too quietly, still teetering on the edge between life and death. It seemed that he struggled as Jacob was said to have wrestled with the angel, until he won by degrees. It was nothing dramatic, but as midnight came and went, his breathing and his heartbeat stabilized until even her father relented and allowed he had a chance.
She grabbed another few fitful hours of sleep, and in the early afternoon she was back in his room again. She walked up to his bedside and took his hand, and to her surprise, she felt return pressure on her fingers.
“Shane, did you do that on purpose?” she asked. “Do it again, Shane. Squeeze my hand.”
His fingers tightened again. Angus looked at her with a question on his face.
“He did it, Angus,” she whispered. “He did it!”
“He’s obeying commands, then?” her father asked.
“Watch. Shane. Shane, squeeze my hand. Now, Shane. Squeeze my hand like you did before.” They watched as his fingers contracted obediently.
“See if you can get him to open his eyes,” John said. “He’ll probably do it for you quicker than for either of us.”
Chapter Seventeen
Shane was dreaming. He was in some sort of maelstrom where colors without names and languages not yet invented swirled around him. The hot, pebbled earth beneath his feet alone seemed real. He looked up to see the sky crawling with fire. A burning desert wind tore at his hair and seared his eyes. He rubbed them, and when he opened them, he stood in a barren, burned-over forest where the hot wind stirred clouds of dust and ash. He glimpsed his grandfather across a clearing, but when he tried to run after him, his legs were leaden. He drew breath to shout, and immediately his lungs were choked by burning dust. He fell to his knees, and then footsteps next to him made him look up. A doe stood on nearby rocks, regarding him thoughtfully. He reached toward her, and a voice speaking Iroquois told him to close his eyes.
“You will be well now, but do not follow me,” the doe said, speaking in Jenny’s voice. There was a touch against his forehead, and he opened his eyes again to see Jenny running away through the dusty fog, following his grandfather.
“Jenny! Come back!” he shouted as she disappeared into the mist.
The dream became physical, and by degrees he realized the voice he heard through the forest was real. Additionally, it was not leaving him alone.
“Shane, can you wake up for me, please? Shane, it’s Jenny. Open your eyes for me? Come on. Wake up. I know you can do it. Open your eyes, Shane.” Through growing awareness he heard her words and felt the hand that rubbed his shoulder. The effort of waking up was a physical struggle. He tried to speak, hearing his own slurred whisper echoing painfully through his brain.
“Shane, speak English, please. English or French, Shane. Nobody here speaks Iroquois.” Oddly enough, it was having to choose among the layers of language in his mind that woke him completely. He opened his eyes just a crack, then just as quickly closed them again, squinting against the afternoon brightness in the room.
“That’s good, Shane. Now do it again. Look at me, please?” The hand that caressed his naked shoulder smelled of the wonderfully familiar Honey Almond Cream. He could not deny her presence. In his fogged mind he was back in the North Village schoolhouse, where once she’d covered him against the cold and touched his shoulder in much the same way. She needs me, he thought. No matter how tired I am, I have to help.
“Jenny,” he breathed.
“Open your eyes, Shane. Look at me.” He forced his eyes open again. They would not exactly focus, s
o he saw her outlined in a blur of green light. She wore the black of deepest mourning, she had combed her hair back severely, and a look of concern puckered her forehead.
“Jenny? Who died?” He turned his head toward her, trying to bring his eyes into line, and was rewarded by a blaze of pain that started at his right temple.
“Nobody died, Shane.” Her tone sounded puzzled. “How do you feel?” He could dredge up no answer for her. Instead he looked around, trying to fathom his unfamiliar surroundings. “You had an accident. Do you remember?”
“Accident? No. I…don’t.” His left hand wavered in the air, and Angus restrained it.
“Don’t touch your head, lad. You’ve had a bad concussion.” Shane looked toward him, realizing for the first time that the right side of his head hurt.
“Angus?”
“It’s all right, Shane, lad. Everything’s going to be fine now. Dinna’ worry.” As he looked up at Angus, his eyes escaped his control and closed of their own accord. It took some effort to force them open again. This time he noticed the man standing next to his friend.
“Richard? What are you doing here?”
“That’s not Uncle Richard, Shane. That’s my father, Doctor John Weston. How do you feel? Does your head ache?”
He looked toward Jenny, seeing her more clearly this time. “It’s… Yes. What happened?” He reached back into his memory to dredge up the last image he could find, but it was too much effort, and he did not have the strength for it.
“A horse kicked you. Father had to operate. You’re going to be all right. Now do something for me, please? Squeeze both my hands? She lifted his hands in hers and he tried his best to cooperate. “Good. Now move your toes.” Obediently he moved his feet beneath the light cover. “Thank you, Shane. That was exactly what I was hoping for. Now, do you know what day it is?”
“Christmas.” The word came from somewhere out in the remote reaches of the ether.
“Well, not really. You were unconscious for a while. Do you know where you are?”
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