Hoping her father would answer her after all this time was probably another reason she was stupid. She’d been sending weekly emails to entreat him to contact her, reassure him things were fine, not putting any pressure to bear on him to explain himself, but still no word. It didn’t really surprise her. She wished it did.
As she worked on the one email, a mass exodus of the galley happened. The people who’d been there all summer with daylight skies and no canvas for the aurora australis might not get another chance. They didn’t start and stop with the flip of a switch, and the skies trended toward twilight now, with darkness far out into the wide, flat, fairly creepy distance—so different from her mountainous Douro River homeland.
As soon as she hit Send, she zipped into the light indoor jacket she wore all the time, returned her tray and hurried outside. Everyone’s hurry to get out there had informed her decision not to go back to her cabin for warmer attire. She’d be fine for a quick pop out, and if she got too cold, she’d visit the saunas she’d only discovered yesterday.
When she finally made it outside, she found herself at the back of a crowd, all heads turned toward the flat horizon.
She stepped to one side and another, weaseling her way to a spot where she could best view the looming dark.
“You didn’t miss it,” West said from beside her, her first indication he was nearby.
“Did you make it out in time to see some?”
“I wasn’t bent over my mobile phone.” He smiled a little.
So there had been some, but he felt confident there would be more?
She tugged her ever-present hat down more firmly on her ears and shoved her hands into her pockets. “How do you know they’ll recur?”
He turned back to the horizon. She actually felt him look away from her, because she’d determined not to watch him. She’d also determined not to interact much, and yet...here she was, interacting.
“I’m only staying a bit. It’s too cold to watch nothing happening except the approaching dark, which is neat in a different way.”
“It is,” he agreed, then added, “Usually when aurora happen, they happen for a little while. It’s not a one-off. Comes in waves.”
“You’ve seen them before?”
“Not here. In Scotland. Years ago.”
Something else she hadn’t known about him. His accent and name gave away his homeland, but she’d not known he’d been far enough north to view the aurora borealis.
“On holiday or at home?”
As privileged an upbringing as she’d had, with money and travel, Lia had never traveled north far enough to see the northern lights. When she skied, she went to the Alps. The rest of the time, she went to warmer places.
“Where I lived.”
Where he’d lived...not at home?
“Where was that?” she asked, unable to stop herself.
“Hmm?” He glanced sideways at her, and she was watching him again, not the sky. “Inverness, mostly. Kinlochleven for a while.”
“Where’s that?”
“North.” He looked back at the sky, then touched her insulated arm. “You want to haver on about nothin’ important, or see the aurora?”
A murmur rose from the crowd just after his words, drawing her gaze back to the horizon, which now glowed a strange, unearthly green in a general, diffuse and...disappointing manner.
Not the light show she’d expected.
She’d watched videos in preparation for her trip, documentaries. She’d looked at photos and read blogs about viewing the aurora australis.
“Is that it?” she asked, truly beginning to feel the cold. Excitement had kept it a background buzzing before that, but a bit of green sky in the far distance?
“Might repeat like that. Dunno.” He frowned as she pulled her hands from the thin pockets and began rubbing them together, then stuffed them back into the pockets in the vain hope of not contracting some dreaded Frozen Antarctic Finger syndrome. Or frostbite. That one was a real thing. “But if it is, you’ll have plenty of time to see them again, catalog the colors and whatever, over the winter. If you’re stayin’.”
“I’m staying,” she repeated. The man wasn’t going to stop poking her to go. Until he went. When the lot of them were finally forever gone.
Ugh, she was wasting her time.
More important things to do than watch a whole lot of nothing spectacular happen. “I’m going in.”
“Give it another minute,” West said, and it should’ve sounded like an order, but the softness of his voice was all velvet suggestion, coaxing.
Two more days until the transport bus began driving people the short distance to the coast where boats waited to spirit them back to the world. Two days and then she wouldn’t see him anymore. Maybe never again after.
It was more that thought than anything that had her pausing, looking back to the sky.
People kept shifting and blocking her view, so she edged into West’s space to see the horizon.
The glow was there, rippling a bit or pulsing. She wasn’t sure what to call it. Not something to fill her with wonder, as she’d hoped. But just when disappointment began to settle over her, the green grew brighter, and then rippled out, glowing fingers reaching from the dark horizon toward the twilight sky under which they stood.
It moved slowly at first, and then faster in undulating waves that almost looked alive.
She wasn’t aware of having made any decisions, just the cold all around her, the dancing sky above her and one warmer hand. Because she’d grabbed his.
Not breathing. The murmuring that had taken hold of the crowd faded to reverent silence. All around them, the wind that continuously blew across the barren landscape whispered and whistled. Her own ragged breathing brought something low and deep into it, and the rapid beat of her heart. The music of a desolate, majestic landscape. Life and beauty where there should be none, deepened by the large, strong hand in her own.
The hand he wouldn’t want to be holding.
Because this was something she felt. Not him. Not for her. Never for her.
It didn’t take long for the truth of her situation to come swimming back to her mind, and with it, she found the strength and self-respect to unfold her fingers from his.
Under the glow of the green and yellow aurora, she felt his gaze on her instead of the sky, and balled her hands at her sides to keep from performing another round of self-destructive stupid.
One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten.
She counted heartbeats pounding so fast that she wouldn’t have been able to breathe at all had she been saying the numbers aloud. Too fast. Too hard.
She closed her eyes.
Go in.
Go back in and take care of what was expected of her. Emails. Work. Sleep. Repeat.
She hadn’t started moving—the thoughts had appeared in her mind, chiding her, shaming her into action—when she felt West’s hand enfold her tight, cold fist again.
He didn’t stop there, just gave a little tug until she was standing in front of him, and then repeated with her other hand, wrapping both in warmth.
“West?”
“You’re cold,” he said softly over her shoulder, holding her hands and keeping close, but somehow managing not to put his arms fully around her to do it.
She was cold. She should wish to be colder on the inside, to grow a callus around her still-smarting heart, to be as cold inside as she was outside. If it would help, she’d strip herself bare and pack her body in the snow like a kid packed himself in sand at the beach.
Coldhearted, less prone to emotion, more to reason. Then she could reason her way through how stupid it was to let him warm her hands when it also warmed her heart and a hollow she’d been babying for months.
The forking fingers of the green light show in the sky retreated, and ev
en if the next round was guaranteed to be more spectacular than that, she’d still have gone inside. It was too confusing with West, and while she’d pretended she was only angry until she’d seen him, since then the wound had been ripped fresh open. It had never closed, never had the chance to scar. And if she knew anything about wounds and scarring, she knew the scar got thicker, grizzlier and harder to ignore the more times it was reopened.
A few words said, and she extracted her hands from his to put some distance between them, and hurried inside to her emails and responsibilities.
Two days couldn’t come fast enough.
CHAPTER SIX
ALTHOUGH TONY BRADSHAW had taken them to winter hours only a couple days prior, after a day of nonstop injuries while maintenance crews worked to prepare the station to overwinter he had decided to keep the clinic and hospital open for a second shift. And, because he’d felt ill, had asked Lia to stay on and pull a double shift.
She’d said yes—not just because he was ill, but because it kept her busy and not obsessing over the final email that had arrived last night while she was holding hands with Weston MacIntyre under the aurora. The one that said her father had turned up at a Barcelona hospital. The one she hadn’t seen or responded to until there was no signal, leaving her to only queue it up for the next moment her device could catch some bandwidth.
“All right, Mr. Hansen,” she said to the man who’d most recently entered, wheeling the breathing machine into one treatment area and getting the liquid medicine dispensed into the breathing apparatus. “Have you done this before?”
He nodded, his breathing still labored. “More...and...more...frequently.” He breathed shallow and fast, his speech broken as she started the vaporizer and held it over his mouth.
“In deep. If you can, try to tuck your tongue to the side or press to the roof of your mouth and breathe around it. This stuff is dreadfully bitter, but it works like magic on swollen airways.”
He took over holding the mouthpiece, and she watched as, over no more than half a minute, his breathing became deeper, less labored.
Mr. Hansen wasn’t a complicated patient, so she might even be able to pop out and get some dinner to bring back and eat here once he was hooked up.
The station had gone into some kind of carnival atmosphere, a party in the galley with nonstop food rolling, drinks and music. There were two bars at the station that had their own farewell parties going. The coffeehouse was full of folk music and desserts, or so she’d heard. Made sense. Buffet your way through dinner, then finish up in the coffeehouse with cake and pastries. Not her, she couldn’t be gone that long, but the galley wasn’t terribly far way.
And West would probably be there.
Okay, maybe she wouldn’t go. Although, with twenty minutes before her emails might finally get a response, a trip might keep her from obsessing and worrying about the email that had arrived while she was outside, holding hands with West under the aurora.
Her father had turned up in a hospital in Barcelona.
Hospital.
Now she couldn’t stop herself running through possible scenarios to turn him up in a hospital. Accidents. Illnesses. Things just bad enough that a normal person would seek the comfort of family over... Then she felt guilty for almost hoping his hospital visit was serious enough to make him reach out, while still being recoverable.
Hansen didn’t need her. The crews must also be on dinner break, or they were all injured and the work was no longer getting done, because her steady supply of distractions just dried up in the eleventh hour.
She went to tell him she was going to dash to the galley, when a man’s alarmed voice sounded from the entry, and got her moving that direction.
Two men carried a woman who had a massive slice open down the side of her calf. They tried to hold a compress and stop the bleeding as they carried her, but it still dripped rapidly enough to switch off every other thought in her head.
“In here.” Lia flipped on the lights in the trauma room, and they carried in her patient, placing her on the table while Lia washed her hands and shoved them into gloves. “Someone tell me what happened.”
“Fan blade,” one man said. “Came off. We were trying to fix one of the in-loaders.”
In-loader? No clue. But fan-blade accident made sense. She grabbed several packets of gauze pads, ripped them open and wheeled them on a tray with other implements toward the woman. “What’s your name?”
“Gossen,” her patient said, pale around the mouth, her brows a deep, angry red that could’ve been from crying, or just the ferocity with which her brows crammed together. “Eileen Gossen.”
“Okay, Eileen. I’m going to need to look at this.” She took over holding the compress. “I want you to lie back and relax as much as you can. The harder your heart beats, the more blood pumps, the more comes out the wound, okay? Lie back.”
She didn’t take time to warn, just grabbed the fresh compresses, and got a quick peek at the wound as she switched them out. Not spurting. But deep. “Do you want me to tell you what I saw, or do you just want me to fix it?”
“Both,” Eileen said, voice strained.
“All right. The blade hit veins, that’s why you’re bleeding so freely. It did not hit an artery—there was no spurting. That’s good news.” She pointed to the one man who’d continued lingering after the other who’d helped carry in Eileen had left. “I need some help. I want you to go to the galley and look for either Dr. Flynn or Dr. MacIntyre. MacIntyre will probably be easiest to find—he’s the tall, broad-shouldered Scot with the black beard. Always wears a navy knit cap.”
“You can’t do it alone?” Eileen asked, sounding more worried that she needed backup.
“I’m a trained surgeon, Eileen. I can stitch this up so beautifully that, in a couple years, people will have a hard time believing you were ever injured. But I don’t want to remove my hands from where I’m placing pressure in order to do the other things I want done to make sure you’re as well taken care of as possible.”
“What things?”
“Monitoring your blood pressure. Setting an IV and getting saline hung just in case you’ve lost more blood than I can see from this. I don’t want you losing more while I try to make sure you didn’t lose too much. Okay?”
Eileen nodded, and when Lia looked back to the man, he was already gone. She should’ve asked if he even knew Jordan or West. If worse came to worst, she could call for Tony. The medical director’s cabin abutted the clinic, but with the way that man had shuffled around and slurred his speech, she didn’t want to take a chance on him. It might even be better to go for it alone if Jordan or West failed to materialize. Was this how things would be over the winter? She might have to do a survey of all who remained behind and see if there was any medical training at all among them. CPR, firefighting, anything. Or make some learn. For emergency situations. Something about Tony’s manner tonight unsettled her.
But she didn’t have time for that. She needed to keep Eileen calm, so Lia kept talking. Asking questions. Where was she from? What was her job in the station? Was this her first tour in Antarctica?
It didn’t take long for the man to fetch West, but her gentle, friendly, nonemergency questions helped Eileen relax. Her breathing leveled out. Her pulse, which Lia kept monitoring with one hand on the woman’s ankle while she maintained pressure with the other, had slowed.
“What’ve we got?” West asked before his feet even crossed the threshold into the trauma room.
“This is Eileen. She has an overachieving slice on the right side of her right calf, and it’s bleeding freely. Can you get a cuff on her and then a line in? We’re also going to need anesthetic—that’s the third thing.”
“BP. IV. Anesthetic. Can do.”
She kept pressure on until he’d given her a BP reading that let her know her blood loss wasn’t yet to threatening levels, but th
at didn’t mean she was going to change her mind on the IV.
“Do you want me to hang saline?” he asked, setting and flushing the line to make sure it was clear before taping it down.
“Yes.” Lia and West never really worked together in a trauma situation. She’d assisted him in surgeries when her fellowship surgeries got light and he was in regular rotation as a general surgeon at their hospital, but they’d been more the usual surgeries than something dialed to emergency levels.
They fell into a kind of unspoken coordination. He monitored everything—blood pressure, pain management, the patient’s emotional state—and she cleaned the wound and stitched, starting with the nicked vein, then moving on up. Eileen was lucky—the cut was remarkably clean. Fan blade sounded scary, but did less damage than she’d seen in some knife-wound repairs. Or, God help anyone, what bullets did once they entered the body and began weaponizing bone fragments.
In the middle of all that, she heard her phone go off, but had to ignore it. And not hurry just because she didn’t want to miss the window, even though missing the window would mean she’d have another twenty-four hours to sweat out a response.
By the time it was over and she’d bandaged everything, Eileen had actually dozed off from the pain medication.
“We should move her into one of the patient beds,” she said to West. “And let her sleep it off.”
Her phone chirped again and she winced. “Actually, can you just put the railing up on her bed and let her sleep here for a few minutes while I go? I have to get this. I’ve been waiting for an email—kind of an emergency, too.”
“Emergency at home?” West asked, doing as she asked and putting the rail up before following her out.
“Yeah...” she answered, then flipped on her phone. The three-word subject line hit like a truck.
Vitor Monterrosa located
“If you can, maybe peek in on Tony? He’s... He’s unwell. But only if Eileen is well and truly out. I’ll hurry. I just... I...”
Reunited in the Snow Page 6