by Arlene James
“You shampooed your hair.”
“Couldn’t bear it any longer.”
He clipped the stitches and tugged them free, one by one, being careful not to snag the short blond hairs already growing into the shaved section.
“Does it itch?”
“Like crazy.”
He took a small can out of a cabinet and blew a cooling powder over the incision site. Shaking her hair back into place, she gave a long sigh.
He chuckled. “Use a soft hairbrush for a while, and let me know if you have any drainage or lumps develop.”
“Will do.”
She slipped off the table and went to work. Not three hours later, he heard her in the hallway joking with a patient. An hour after that he returned a patient’s chart to the reception desk and found her there answering the telephone—and moving the copying machine. Twenty minutes further on, he tracked the entire staff to the break room, where they were sharing lunch and laughing uproariously. Here, too, she’d unleashed her organizational skills. Someone had baked cookies and found a way to decorate them on the fly and arrange them to read Welcome Eva.
He walked in and picked up all three cookies with the letters of her name. Leaning a hip against the counter, he crossed his legs at the ankle and started to munch.
“Hey, boss,” Ruby said, “Eva would make a good office manager, don’t you think?”
He glanced around, smiled, ate his cookie and said, “She would.”
“But I’m a temp,” Eva demurred, looking away. “In fact, I’m as temporary as temps get.”
“We’ll see,” Brooks told her. “Will you join me in my office after the last patient?”
“Sure.”
He finished his snack, said, “Good cookies,” and left them to their fun.
By the time Eva tapped on his office door at the end of the day, the rest of the staff had gone and he’d already looked through her mother’s records. He’d been through hers, such as they were, with a fine-tooth comb, days earlier.
“Come in,” he called.
She opened the door and stuck her head inside. “Ready to go?”
“No. Come in, sit down and listen.”
Slipping into one of a pair of chairs in front of his desk, she glanced around, folded her arms, crossed her long, lovely legs and said, “Okey-dokey, let the lecture begin.”
“No lecture,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “A confession. I talked your former doctor into sending me your records days ago.”
“Oh?”
He nodded at the computer, saying, “And there’s nothing here to tell me that you have a brain tumor. He’s based his diagnosis entirely on symptoms and family history. So I’ve gone to your mother’s records, and frankly, Eva, there’s nothing to tell us that she had a brain tumor, either, certainly not a cancerous one.”
“What? She died! That ought to tell you something.”
“Yes, but she could have died from a cyst or noncancerous tumor or an aneurysm or—”
Rocketing forward in her chair, Eva pecked the desktop with an adamant fingertip. “I was there!”
“I know that,” Brooks said calmly, “and I know that she must have suffered terribly. Can you tell me about it? It’s important that I know, Eva. I wouldn’t ask you otherwise.”
Eva took a deep breath. She obviously didn’t want to talk about it, but she did. “Mom, um, complained of headaches, just headaches. Nothing too serious. Then one day out of the blue she started talking gibberish.”
“Expressive aphasia. Go on.”
“Aunt Donna accused her of faking, but they ran their tests and found the tumor. They gave her medicine, and it got better, but the headaches and the aphasia came back, so they tried other meds. It was a roller coaster, but eventually the headaches got worse, much worse. We didn’t know if the stumbling around and blacking out was because of the tumor or the pain meds.”
He was making notes and alternately scrolling through the computer data. “Looks like she was on some pretty strong stuff.”
“Yes. When the convulsions started, they added meds for that, but they thought those might be because of the chemotherapy.”
“I didn’t see that they did a biopsy.”
“Because of where the tumor was located, they didn’t think they could. The chemo was a last-ditch effort to save her life.”
“And it did nothing but make her more ill,” he surmised.
Eva nodded. “By the end, she was a skeleton with skin, in constant pain, unable to communicate, in horrific pain and terrified. I won’t go through that.”
He turned away from the computer and faced her. “I won’t ask you to, Eva. You have my word on that. But we have to know what we’re dealing with here. We have much better diagnostic tools now. We need to run tests.” She shook her head, but he pressed her, leaning forward with his forearms on the desk blotter. “Eva, I promise you that I won’t ask anything of you that I wouldn’t ask of my wife.”
Her gaze zipped up to his at that. “Morgan told me about her.”
Brooks sat back again, unsurprised. “Did he tell you how she died?”
“Only that it was a brain tumor and that you knew she was dying before you married her.”
“And that we both loved her,” he guessed.
“Yes. And that you had the strength not to force her to take treatment that she didn’t want.”
Brooks smiled sadly. “Her options were very limited. Perhaps she would have more now, but her case was...dire. As it was, we had two good years. When she started to have vertigo, we went to a wheelchair, and that’s when Morgan finally realized there was a problem. Her hearing was affected next. It was central but manifested as sensorineural.”
Frowning, Eva translated that. “Uh, her hearing was affected by pressure on the central nervous system but it caused distortions like damage to the inner ear?”
He nodded. “Exactly. She couldn’t tell how close the source of a sound was or always identify voices. She cupped her hands over her ears a lot.”
“Got it.”
“When the hearing issue became severe, sitting up made her sick to her stomach,” he went on, “so she was pretty much bed-bound then, but we managed her pain without ‘the hard stuff,’ as she put it. Next her eyesight suffered. She lost the sight in her right eye over the course of one afternoon, but she accepted that with the same grace that she accepted all the rest.”
He noticed that Eva gripped the arms of her chair so tightly that her knuckles had turned white, but he didn’t stop. She needed to hear this for several reasons. She needed to understand that he knew what she could be facing, that he would never force her to endure more than she must, that she need not go through the worst alone. She needed to know that she could trust him.
“One morning soon after that I got an emergency call. It was my day off, but the patient asked for me specifically, and Brigitte insisted that we keep our lives as normal as possible. We treasured our privacy, so the nurse we’d hired to help out didn’t sleep in. I called Morgan to come over and sit with Brigitte until I could get back. Then I kissed my wife goodbye, promised to return soon and left.”
He leaned his head back, remembering. Morgan had come only minutes later, but it must have seemed longer to Brigitte. Perhaps she had slept, or perhaps she had lost the ability to judge time. No doubt she had been frightened because she had awakened that morning completely blind, but she hadn’t wanted to tell Brooks for fear of keeping him from fulfilling his duties as a physician. When Morgan had arrived, he’d bent and kissed her forehead before announcing himself, not realizing that she couldn’t see him. She’d mistaken him for Brooks and had asked him to come back to bed. When she’d realized her mistake, she’d been horrified, fearing that she’d hurt Morgan. Again. Morgan had teased her about it, suggesting they s
teal an ambulance and run off together. Brooks had found them there some time later, laughing about it, despite the tears that had rolled down Morgan’s face, unseen by his now completely blind wife.
“What did you do?” Eva asked in a shaky voice.
What Brooks said next surprised him as much as it must have surprised Eva, for he’d never told another soul.
“I prayed with my friend, sent him home, undressed, got into bed and made love to my wife for the last time.” He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat, adding, “By nightfall, her pain had outrun our ability to control it without intravenous medication, and she had made me promise not to resort to that at home.” He flexed his hands, remembering. “She feared people would think I’d compromised my ethics and helped her die. So I dressed, gathered her up and took her to the hospital, where they brought her ease and she died, barely sensate, four days later.”
Suddenly, Eva bent at the waist and sobbed into her hands. Shocked, Brooks shot out of his chair and around the desk.
“No!” he exclaimed, going down on his knees. “You misunderstand. I’m not saying that will happen to you. It’s a whole different circumstance, except for this one thing. I’ll never ask you to take any treatment I wouldn’t ask of her. You can trust me not to put you through needless pain, and I won’t try to make decisions for you.”
“I know that!” Eva wailed, dropping her hands. “That’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I’m such a terrible...witch.” She dropped her hands, sniffed, and muttered, “Don’t you dare say I don’t have an internal monitor.”
Brooks sat back on his heels, hiding his smile with a bowed head, and looked up at her from beneath the crag of his brow. “What makes you say such a thing about yourself?”
“I’m jealous of a dead woman,” she grumbled, wiping her eyes, “one who suffered terribly and died tragically. And was deeply loved.”
Brooks didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
“My husband loved me so much that he slept with a nineteen-year-old,” Eva groused. “In my bed.”
“Eva,” Brooks soothed, reaching up to stroke her hair back from her face.
She sniffed and admitted, “I guess I didn’t love him all that much, either. I loved the house and the fur coat and the convertible. I miss them a lot more than I miss him, too, and I don’t really miss them at all.” Brooks had to smile and shake his head. “Not that it matters,” she went on. “It’s too late for all that, anyway.”
“Before you give up on loving and being loved, let me set up the tests,” Brooks urged. “Let’s figure out what’s really going on inside that beautiful head of yours. If it’s not good, at least we’ll know for sure. Okay?”
She tapped the end of his nose with a slender fingertip. “You could talk the warts off a toad.”
He chuckled and pushed up to his feet, pulling her up with him by the arm. “In that case, I’ll schedule the tests. I’ll also assume that you’ll accompany me to prayer meeting again tomorrow evening.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, why not?”
He laughed. “My sentiments exactly.” Then he sobered, adding, “The Chatams are likely to be at the hospital in Dallas tomorrow afternoon for Hypatia’s surgery. I could use the company.”
She nodded glumly. “Me, too.”
They strolled arm in arm to the door, but just before he shut off the light, she glanced around the room and idly commented, “This place needs rearranging.”
Grinning, he spread his hands. “Do your worst. Tomorrow. It’s half day.”
“Right.”
He could see the wheels spinning behind her harlequin eyes. They were beautiful eyes, beautiful wheels, and he could hardly wait to see what they produced. Meanwhile, he’d be praying that the tests would give them good news. He wasn’t sure that he could bear anything else this time, and he seemed to be in perpetual prayer about it. Even as he helped Eva into her overcoat and traded his lab coat for his own long gray wool version, he mentally spoke to God.
Please, Lord. Oh, please. It’s asking too much, perhaps, Hypatia and Eva both, but I’m asking just the same. Please. You are the Great Healer. Nothing is beyond You. I have nothing with which to bargain. All I have is already Yours. All I am that is good, You have made of me. All I can ever be that is worthwhile, I lay at Your feet. If that counts for anything, then please heal these two women, for Your glory...
And so it went until he walked into Chatam House at Eva’s side to answer questions for the family about the next day’s coming ordeal. It seemed only natural to stay for dinner, and to sit at the table with Eva next to him. A discussion had been raging about who should go to the hospital to wait during Hypatia’s surgery, and Eva chose to voice her opinion, of course.
“You really ought to let Hilda go. She’s worked her heart out for the lot of you, and she’ll worry herself sick here waiting for word. She was a mess the day Hypatia collapsed.”
Looks spread around the dining room, some surprised, some guilty, all understanding. A consensus quickly formed.
“You’re absolutely right,” Hubner said, and Murdock agreed.
“We’ve made enough work for her,” Melinda decreed. “She needs some time off.”
A play day for the children and “cousin luncheons” suddenly organized as Hypatia’s siblings and their spouses claimed the right to wait at the hospital for news of the outcome of her surgery. A phone tree developed. Transportation arranged itself. Brooks noted how often Eva offered suggestions—and how often and easily they were accepted. Did no one but him realize that she essentially managed the whole thing? She didn’t even bother to hide it. She meddled blatantly, but her suggestions made such sense everyone just went along without a thought. She came off as such a kook at times that no one seemed to realize they were in the presence of sheer organizational genius!
When she caught him staring at her, she made a face and demanded, “What?”
He just grinned and shook his head, wondering if she even recognized her own talents. And then he prayed that she’d have the chance to do so.
* * *
“I don’t know how you do it,” Brooks said, turning a circle in the newly liberated floor space inside his office.
“It’s science,” Eva pointed out. “You ought to understand that.”
“I ought to,” he muttered, “but I don’t.”
“Look,” she said, sweeping a hand toward the desk, which now rested at an angle across the corner of the room, a computer stand behind it. “A triangle takes up less space than a rectangle because it has fewer sides. See?”
“Okay, but how did you get this bookcase to fit on this wall without covering up the light switch?” he asked, turning to the wall with the door in it.
“Easy,” she explained, walking over to the bookcase on the adjacent wall. “I just shoved those shelves up against these.”
“I thought of that, but it makes the end of that bookcase unusable.”
“No, it creates slots for file boxes. See?” She showed him the alphabetized tabs where the files slid into place. “Then we simply transfer the reference books you use the most to the top of the file cabinets, where they’re within easy reach.”
The whole thing was so amazingly simple he couldn’t conceive why he hadn’t thought of it himself and so cunningly clever he knew he’d never have thought of it.
He put his hands to his head. “Is there a place for exploding brains?”
She reached down and picked up the molded faux leather trashcan, which made him laugh.
“I love how your mind works.”
She smiled, making sweet little apples of her cheeks. “It’s just common sense.”
“No, it’s not. It’s Eva Belle brilliance.” Her smile widened, and his heart tripped, so he changed the subject. “Now that you’ve u
ncovered that window by moving the bookcase, though, I’ll have to buy curtains.”
“Shutters,” she told him. “Wood shutters with two-inch slats, stained to match the paneling and bookcases. Easily dusted, room darkening when you need them, solid, very masculine. Like you.”
He felt very masculine around her. He felt ten feet tall and as strong as the Mighty Men of the Old Testament—and as vulnerable as a newborn kitten. Clearing his throat, he nodded.
“I’ll order them before we leave.”
“Well, I guess that’s everything,” she said. “Still no word from the hospital?”
He shook his head. “Not about Hypatia. I don’t expect to hear for some time still. About you, though...”
She groaned and plopped down on the corner of his desk. He carefully pivoted his chair.
“Your tests are scheduled for Friday morning,” he told her lightly. “I thought we’d stop in and see Hypatia beforehand, if that’s all right with you.”
“Oh, I’d like that if you think it’ll be okay.”
“Sure. I thought you might be too tired to see her after the tests. We’ve got a full day scheduled in the lab.”
Eva blinked and tilted her head. “You’re going to be there during the tests?”
Yeah, he’d surprised himself with that decision, too, but he hadn’t been able to convince himself just to drop her off and go about his business.
“I, uh, don’t have a very heavy day.” That was true, now that he’d had his appointments canceled and transferred. “I want to see the pictures as they are taken.”
She clapped a hand to her chest, exclaiming, “That makes me feel so much better.”
He smiled, wishing it didn’t make him feel quite so happy to hear her say that. He lifted a hand to his chest, aware of a tingling there as if a limb too long immobile and deprived of blood supply now felt a rush of oxygen and life-giving blood. What she had awakened in him scared him half to death. Even if her prognosis should prove wrong, she could be afflicted with any number of life-ending or life-limiting conditions. Also, the matter of her faith, or lack of it, troubled him deeply. Plus, something more, something secretive about her told him that he knew too little and warned him not to rush in blind. Yet, he couldn’t seem to stop himself.