by Olivia Gates
“Yeah, I know. Caridad can make you tear your own skin off to cover her with. But poor Alonso…”
“Poor Alonso? I may have been wrong to blast him now, but he had it coming, Savannah. I wasn’t wrong there.”
“It depends on what you consider just punishment, Javier. It was all well and good that you insisted he apologize to Caridad, but for a man with Alonso’s self-image—surely you have an idea what that’s like? Surely you realize how much of his bravado is to make up for what he considers to be his physical shortcomings? And to have a perfect, superior brute like you threatening to physically overpower him—in front of the beautiful woman that he loves? As you said to him earlier, Javier—do your math!”
“It doesn’t add up.”
Javier waited for Savannah to look at him, to seek an explanation for his out-of-the-blue remark. He had to make this quick. Alonso had stepped away from their surgery to adjust the depth of anesthesia of Elvira’s patient, who’d started coughing around her endotracheal tube. He’d be returning in a few seconds.
It seemed Savannah hadn’t heard him. He pressed on. “If Alonso loves Caridad, why is he treating her this way? Can’t he see she loves him, too?”
“No, he can’t.” She didn’t remove her eyes from her task, cutting through the last of the grossly inflamed mesentery, the sheath covering the bowels, releasing them then carefully dissecting the intricate network of supplying blood vessels. “Or won’t. Take your pick.”
“But that doesn’t make sense…”
Her widening eyes were all the warning he needed. Alonso was within earshot again.
“This is the worst case of ulcerative colitis I’ve ever seen.” Quick recovery. Good thing she had her wits about her today, to stop him making more catastrophic blunders. “I never saw such a severe inflammation of the colon, such widespread ulceration. I thought the woman was cachexic with terminal malignancy when I first saw her.”
She paused as Javier ligated the arteries she’d exposed, closing them to stop severe bleeding when they moved to the next step of the surgery, removing the diseased colon.
Savannah handed him another vascular clamp. “I still wasn’t sure if her history of severe abdominal pain and weight loss, bloody diarrhea and rectal bleeding pointed to ulcerative colitis, advanced malignancy or Crohn’s disease. Until you pointed out that it was ulcerative colitis that had associated problems such as arthritis, hepatitis and skin rashes, all of which she had!”
His heart answered her beaming glance with a thunderclap. Was she giving him credit? Was this how it felt to have her approval? Focus! “All that wasn’t conclusive until we did the colonoscopy.”
“Until you did it, you mean—thank God.” She gave a little shudder. “I hate those procedures! And thank God on another count, too, since it clinched the ulcerative colitis diagnosis, making surgical treatment a viable option.”
“And it wouldn’t have been for Crohn’s?” That was Nikki, who’d been helping Luis. “Luis had to take some time between surgeries, so can I help?”
Javier welcomed her interruption as he started cutting out the colon after stapling it shut so that the contents wouldn’t fall into the peritoneum. “Any help is appreciated, thank you, Nikki. As for your question, it’s because Crohn’s ulceration and inflammation can involve any segment of the gastrointestinal tract from mouth to anus, while ulcerative colitis affects only the colon. That’s why removing the colon removes the disease. In Crohn’s, however, if you remove the colon it usually flares up in the remaining small intestine. What usually follows is that we keep on cutting out diseased intestines until there’s none left and the patient has to be fed totally intravenously.”
Nikki made a choking noise. “How horrible!”
Javier nodded. “It is. At least Señora Olinda here doesn’t have it.”
“But what she had was bad enough…” Savannah stopped as Javier finished removing the colon and rectum down to the level of the anal muscles, helping him gain a better grip. She sighed as Javier pulled on the ileum, the very end of the small bowel, using about twenty centimeters of it to start forming the J-pouch. “Just living with ulcerative colitis in the absence of any medical attention must have been hell.”
Savannah held the intestines away, clearing the surgical field as Javier formed the J-like loop, securely stapled the end of the short limb of the J to the longer one, then opened the area in the middle of the J, communicating the insides of the intestinal segments to form a larger reservoir.
“Nikki, if you’re interested, Javier is now forming the J-pouch, which will functionally replace the colon and rectum. Then he will anastomose it—connect it to the anal ring, and, voilà, gastrointestinal continuity is restored!”
Nikki’s blue eyes widened. “So she won’t have an ileostomy?”
Javier looked up, while Savannah stapled for him. “She should have a temporary ileostomy that has food residue passing to an ileostomy bag outside the body, allowing the J-pouch to heal. Ideally, six to eight weeks later, she should have a second stage of surgery to close the ileostomy. But we can’t afford that luxury, so it has to be a one-stage procedure.”
Savannah laughed and the merry sound stabbed him with arousal, and confusion. “Don’t be so pessimistic, Javier. Some people can have this operation performed in one stage, and I believe she’s one of those.”
He finished the anastomoses then leveled his eyes on her, felt the jolt of perpetual chemistry—and anxiety! Her new ease was throwing him into chaos. “We hope she is, you mean. And I’m not pessimistic. You’re way too optimistic.”
She suctioned for him, told Nikki to increase the IV fluid delivery rate, then raised one eyebrow. “And is that a bad thing? If it’s not blind optimism, I mean? Why blacken everything more by insisting only the worst possible scenario is bound to happen?”
He waited a moment. He needed it to quell his seething frustration at her blitheness. Something had changed out there during their last conversation. As if she’d suddenly lost interest. In him. Had he finally succeeded in driving her away once and for all? If he had, shouldn’t he be grateful? So why did he feel like getting up and giving it all up, then?
He watched her turning to the other two, drawing Nikki’s chuckles and Alonso’s first unforced responses in the last five hours. So she’d ended their exchange, decided he had no answers, huh?
Well, he had answers, more like ravings. She was here on a self-discovery mission, wasn’t she? Well, it wouldn’t harm her to really see what she was looking at, all around them. To know that the worst possible scenarios she’d dismissed so casually were what always came to pass here. Just ask him. Ask Bibiana!
The list went on, and on, with Savannah’s brightness maintained all through. By the time they stepped out of the MSU he was at breaking point.
He let her walk ahead of him for a few steps then caught up with her, took her by the arms, turned her around. Feeling her flesh filling his hands blanked his mind. Get this off your chest!
“I do think any optimism in our situation is blind, Savannah, at best misguided, maybe even dangerous. Hell, you think saving the Torres’s unplanned baby was a stroke of good luck, when it will probably be the final nail in their family’s collective coffin. You’re congratulating yourself that we managed to keep Torres himself alive, when he’ll probably curse us every day of his crippled life, if he can think at all. Without our intervention, his assault would have only taken his family’s sole supporter away. But now we’ve added a bigger burden than anything they’ve ever known. There’s no welfare support system here, no rehabilitation programs that will pick up the shattered pieces we’ve left behind—”
Savannah interrupted his tirade, her voice a sharp, terrible tremor. “Then what are we doing here in the first place, Javier? Why not leave these people to suffer and die without ‘intervention’ since death will put them out of their misery?”
Her reasoning was irrefutable. So was his. How could that be? Was he losing his mind?
He dragged in a choking breath. “We do what we must, Savannah, but we mustn’t feel self-satisfied for a second, must face it when our actions cause more harm than good…”
Revisited grief and a sense of digging in the sea were suffocating him. Then another rabid feeling swelled inside him. He suddenly felt it, the ticking clock. In seven weeks maximum she’d be gone, thinking she’d done her share, passed her tests, leaving him here, alone again. And he wanted to rail against it. Against her!
“You lectured us on doing the best job we can. Well, our best job isn’t and will never be good enough. We just do it because it’s the only thing we can do!” He laughed, an ugly, bitter laugh. “And why am I saying ‘we’ and ‘our’? There’s no ‘we’ or ‘our’ here. This isn’t your calling or your country or your people. You’re just here temporarily, playing at being a philanthropist. You can afford optimism. Then you’ll go away.”
She stood before him, small, moonlight in her hair, blinding him with her beauty. Her tears welled, then flowed in a steady stream sparkling in the rays, falling off her quivering chin.
He’d hurt her—again! Why? He didn’t mean to, he never had.
Oh, never? You never wished she’d hurt as much as she hurt you?
But she never had hurt him, not really, since she’d never touched his heart and soul…
Well, if she hadn’t before, she had now. She’d touched him all the way through. But he was doomed to touching her only physically. He’d always known that. So was he looking for other ways of reaching her? Through humiliation and demoralization? That was how he settled with her for not loving him back?
No. No! He wasn’t doing that. And he didn’t love her…
Dios—madre de Dios…He did. He loved her. Loved her!
And it was new. He’d been obsessed with the wild, sensual creature who’d captured his senses and enslaved his desires. It had been overpowering, blinding, but it had left his mind free from thrall, disapproving, his heart secure and intact.
But after a week with the new her, his mind had been overwhelmed and his heart’s isolation breached. Whether she’d changed, or he’d been blind before—or, worse still, she hadn’t seen the necessity of showing him more than her bedroom persona before—all that was beside the point now. Now she was the Savannah who could—who had—extended her dominion over everything that he was.
But what was the use? She was here to work, to prove herself—and to herself. Wanting him had been incidental, just like before, and just as long as circumstances threw them together. Now it seemed she didn’t even want him any more. And being near her was fraying his mind and shooting his judgment to hell. This morning he’d committed a serious mistake which could have done their patient irreversible damage. Then he’d committed another, hurting his childhood friend. Had he hurt her, too, while he’d been at it?
He’d die before he hurt anyone else. Before he hurt her again.
He reached for her, not knowing how to make amends, how to tell her—everything. “Savannah, don’t cry, querida. I’m so sorry…”
She stumbled back out of his reach, her voice ragged and her words steady. “I may be here for a short while, but I do believe I am making a difference. What you—and everyone who cares—do does make a difference, Javier. And logic alone can’t predict who’ll be a boon in other people’s lives and who’ll be a curse. I was a wanted baby born into abundance. Ask my mother and she’ll tell you I’m why her marriage broke up. Ask my father and he’ll tell you I’m his life’s burden. The Torres baby may be the ray of hope, the wild card that will turn this nation around one day. Who knows? One thing I do know—if I can’t hope for the best, I don’t want to live at all!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“YOU call this being alive?”
Savannah tossed her cool answer over her shoulder even though she felt her eye-hand co-ordination pathways overheating. “I’m not dead yet, am I?”
“You will be in seconds!” Luis gave a perfect horror-movie laugh near her ear.
“We’ll see about that. Where there’s life, even at ten per cent life-force levels, there’s hope. And you’re not distracting me, and—and Voilà! Next level, extra life—and I topped your all-time high score! Yippee!”
“What are you doing?” He gaped at her as she snapped the cell phone shut, ending the game. “You owed it to mankind to see if this game is winnable!”
Savannah’s laugh rang out at his lament. “Nah, I owed it to womankind to shut your bragging up! Now, excuse me, I have to run to the ladies, recount the epic of how I beat you.”
A hand on her shoulder kept her sitting in her folding chair. “You beat me a long time ago, querida.”
Whoa! That sudden heat in Luis’s black eyes. That caress in his voice. That was a clear come-on. A sucker punch come-on.
She grasped for breath and for a way to handle this, wondering what had brought this on. Not any signals from her, that was for sure.
So did Luis consider the road clear for him to make advances, since Javier had made no claim in the four weeks they’d spent in Cundinamarca? Was he making them because he fancied her, or just thought her available? Easy? From her behavior with Javier, in the beginning at least, she couldn’t blame Luis if he thought so.
The only way to handle this was to put a swift and sure end to the whole thing.
Luis talked first as he bent to take her hand, enveloping it in both of his big ones. “You do know I’m yours for the taking, don’t you?”
It was the first she’d known about it. She’d never had a whiff of the fact, not once. How oblivious was she?
She looked at Luis as if for the first time. Striking, big, fit, virile, probably as much as Javier. Just not to her. A gentle tug took her hands back to her lap. “I’m not in the market, Luis. But thanks for the offer. I don’t need to tell you most women would kill for it. You know that already.”
Self-deprecation chased away a spasm of disappointment on his bronzed face, followed by benign interest, even concern. “Someone back home?”
Was he kidding? “Someone here.”
“Javier?”
“Why the stupefaction? Isn’t it ridiculously obvious?”
“Not to me. If I’d thought you wanted him, too, I would’ve never stepped forward.”
“Too? Javier doesn’t want me!” And she was more certain of that now than ever.
“Oh, yeah, he doesn’t ‘want’ you. He’s just falling apart, going crazy for you.”
Really? Then she must be even more oblivious than she’d thought, since she’d noticed the opposite.
Since ‘affronts and apologies day’ three weeks ago, Javier’s attitude towards her had changed one hundred and eighty degrees. His disapproval and reluctance had been replaced by every public and private esteem, and recognition of her effectiveness and right to be there. And then there were his warmth and tenderness, bordering on sheer indulgence. In a damned exasperating, agonizing big-brother sort of way! That was what she’d noticed, what had driven it home to her that Javier had been cured of any sexual inclinations towards her.
She sighed in resignation. “I really think you’re wrong.”
Luis’s lips twisted. “I’m not. Another man always knows. Not that Javier is any good at hiding it. I wonder why you don’t see it. But he must be under the same false impression as I was, that you’re not interested.”
“How could he not know when I all but…?” OK, so Luis didn’t need to know how she’d thrown herself at Javier.
But…could it be true? Could Javier still want her, at least physically? Was he being all affectionate and wonderful to her, waiting for her to give a new signal that she still wanted his intimacy? She hadn’t been giving any lately. She’d been too busy loving him, hurting and feeling sorry for herself.
So did he think she’d changed her mind? It made sense. Knowing his stoic chivalry and considering they’d come light years in their knowledge and understanding of one another, he might consider their new friendship warra
nted new rules and declarations of intent. This did feel like a new beginning, between two new people. And her intentions had changed. In the past she’d been anxious for anything with him. Now she loved him she was desperate for everything.
Not that it seemed a first move was coming her way. He wasn’t good at first moves, was he? She’d have to go after him again. Oh, she didn’t mind, she had plenty of things in mind, too…
“Ahem.” Luis’s deep amusement interrupted her thoughts. “I’ll leave you to your…realizations, go see if the rest are ready to leave.”
Suddenly anxious, she jumped up, stopped him. “Luis…?”
“Don’t worry about it, Savvy, or about me. I’ll live.” He winked at her. He no doubt would. Luis would always have women queuing for his favors. “I’m just glad some useful information came out of my abortive proposition. You go get your man.”
“You betcha!” She laughed, relieved, returned his teasing wave and sat down again. He was fun!
The moment she hit her chair, her mood plummeted, her elation and escalating hunger fading. Her chest squeezed until she almost cried out. What was that oppressive feeling?
She looked around. The MSU was two hundred meters away from their camp, putting a bit of space between their patients and their living quarters. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary between there and here. Everyone was coming and going, preparing for moving on in a few hours. Her head snapped to the forest. It was a few hundred meters away now they’d moved further from it after the time a jaguar had gotten too interested in Javier’s tent. Nothing there either.
So what was it? Her eyes swept around once more, searching for the cause of her foreboding, and saw nothing but their surroundings, which still fascinated her. All these variations within the same place. Tropical weather without the heat but with its spectacular fauna and flora on one side, and barren Cundinamarca with its open sewers on the other. And nothing wrong at the moment on either side.