Love on Call

by Shirley Hailstock

  Jeffrey Amberson lay quiet. Moonlight streamed through the windows and slanted across the white bedsheets—the only light in the room. Mallory never turned on lights when she visited coma patients. She didn’t think the light would bother them, but it would alert security that she was present, and she didn’t want anyone to know. Not even the nurses. They wouldn’t understand what she was doing there in the middle of the night.

  “You might think there’s no one here who cares about you, and maybe that’s why you sleep so soundly. The drugs, how you got into them…whatever the reasons for you trying first one and then another, it doesn’t matter, Jeff. I care. I want you back. You are somebody and we both know it.”

  Mallory listened to his quiet breathing. She heard the machines in the room monitoring his vital signs, sending information back to the nurses’ station twenty yards away. It was regular, rhythmic and systematic. Like a machine himself, Jeff continued to breath through the use of technology. But that would end. And soon.

  “Jeff, you’ve got to wake up.” Her voice was urgent. “You know what’s coming. You’ve only been here three months, but you’ve been asleep almost a year. The law isn’t on your side. They’re going to court to have your life support turned off.”

  Mallory walked back and forth beside the bed. There were other coma sufferers in the room, which was set up as a ward. When visitors came, the patient was moved to a private room. But here several of them slept together, the only sounds were of the incessant machines alternately compressing and releasing air.

  “You know, Jeff, I’m a lot like you. No one cares for me, either.” She stopped and turned to him. “Oh, there is my sister in Atlantic City, but no one else. When Dr. Clayton seemed to be genuinely concerned about me, I felt…” She stopped. She didn’t know what she felt. A warmth settled over her, a comfortable feeling that was unfamiliar to her. “I felt somehow wanted. That maybe someday someone would care about me.”

  For a long while Mallory was quiet. The words, her words, surprised her. She’d never thought of herself as needing anyone. After her accident and recovery she’d become quite self-sufficient.

  “Brad isn’t the first man I’ve been interested in,” she murmured. “There were a few in college and one in medical school. But what I felt for them passed quickly. I’m sure I only have a crush on Brad. It will end soon. My work will replace him, just as it did all the others.”

  She stared at the moon, picturing Brad’s face in place of the silvery surface and wishing she could hold on to the feeling for just a little while longer. But she was the ice queen, destined to be alone.

  Mallory rushed into Building B the next morning. She was late. It was the third morning this week she’d overslept. She waved at the receptionist who manned the desk at the staff entrance, and headed for the stairs. Few people ever took the steps unless there was a fire drill. Mallory raced up and down them all the time. She’d begun when she’d started talking to the patients in the coma wing. It made getting in and out easier. Now it was routine. She rarely got on an elevator unless she had to go to the top floor.

  Her crepe-soled shoes made a sucking sound as she climbed upward, taking the steps two at a time. On the third floor landing she twisted to go up to the fourth, then heard other footsteps. There was no cause for alarm, yet she stopped and listened. The noise came from above her. Looking up, Mallory stared into the dark brown eyes of Dr. Clayton, who was on his way down.

  Her heart lurched. She hadn’t seen him except for the nights he stole into her bedroom and walked into her dreams. What would he think if he’d known she was dreaming of him?

  It should be a law, she thought. No man should be able to look this good with a scowl on his face.

  “Dr. Clayton,” she said in greeting.

  “You look tired,” he replied.

  “Good morning to you, too.” Mallory rolled her eyes and continued up the stairs. She had to pass him to get by. Brad reached for her arm. She felt warmth spread over her. She tried not to react, but that was like trying to stop the Texas heat in August.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, stepping away from him.

  “Do you really have a sister?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I do,” she snapped. Her voice reverberated in the hollow stairway. “She’s a kindergarten teacher in Atlantic City. I couldn’t ask her to drive up here in the middle of the night.”

  “Why didn’t you say that? We could have gotten someone to go home with you.”

  “The hospital was too busy. There was no one available.”

  “What about a friend? You could have called someone. You must know your condition could have been dangerous.”

  Mallory glanced up at his face, illuminated by filtered daylight from the skylight above. Of course she knew the danger of delayed stress.

  “Let’s just say it was too late to call anyone. And I was all right, exactly as I said.” She stared directly at him, adding the last in a rush to keep him from asking her anything else.

  “You still look tired,” he said. “Aren’t you sleeping well?”

  “I’m fine, Dr. Clayton.” She held her hand up when he would have spoken again. “I know about delayed stress—that what happened in the E.R. could result in some kind of physical manifestation, but I assure you, that is not the case.” She paused a second, calming herself. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for rounds.”

  Mallory rushed on up the stairs and through the fourth-floor doorway. Brad Clayton had the most penetrating eyes. She felt as if he were looking into her soul and seeing the lies she was telling. Well, not exactly lies, just some half-truths.

  Brad saw Mallory the moment rounds ended. They began and ended on the fourth floor. He’d just finished his morning visits to his in-hospital patients. He came out of one room as Mallory and the others stepped through the doorway. He headed for the nurses’ station.

  “Did you hear?” Dana whispered. “Another one woke up. And only three days after she was there.”

  “Who was there?” Brad asked. Three nurses, dressed in hospital blues, huddled together behind the counter. Brad walked in at the tail end of their conversation, several charts in his hands. He placed them back in the appropriate racks.

  “The ghost strikes again,” Dana said with a smile.

  Brad rolled his eyes. “There are no ghosts.”

  “Well, she was there, and he’s awake now.”

  “And not a moment too soon, either,” Renee Crandall added.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jeffrey Amberson woke up.”

  Brad hunched his shoulders. Sometimes he thought women had a code of their own and only let men in on what they knew for very short intervals.

  “Who is Jeffrey Amberson?”

  “The young man in the coma wing,” Renee answered.

  “The one she talks to,” Dana added.

  “Dr. Clayton, I swear the world could end and we would have to send a child to let you know,” Peggy Silverman, the third of the group, said. “You pay attention to nothing that goes on around here except the children.”

  That had been true in the past, but it wasn’t any longer. Since the E.R. incident and his meeting Mallory, he was very aware of things going on now, yet he didn’t think he would let these three in on it. “If I did, what would you do?”

  Dana looked at him to see if he was joking. She must have decided he was, even though he had no smile on his face.

  “It’s uncanny,” Renee said. “She picks one out and that one wakes up.”

  “Not all of them,” Peggy corrected. “Remember that woman from six months ago? She’d been in a coma since they opened that wing five years ago. The ghost talked to her, but when they pulled her plug, she slipped away within minutes.”

  “That’s not how it was with Jeffrey Amberson or any of the others she’s chosen.”

  “What do you mean, chosen?” Brad asked.

  “It’s the same M.O. every time,
” Peggy said. Brad could tell she watched too many detective shows. “The lonely, unloved, unvisited. The ones no one comes to see. She picks patients who have no one else, who never receive any visitors. They’re all alone in the world and she’s their savior. And it’s apparently working.”

  “Why is that?”

  “No one knows,” Peggy said. “No one has ever seen her face.”

  “Millie over in nuclear medicine saw her one night, but only from the back,” Renee said. “She was going through the door into the stairwell.”

  “No one knows how long she’s been doing this and no one else has ever gotten a glimpse of her.”

  “Then how do you know she exists?” Brad asked.

  “They tell us.”

  “Who?”

  “The patients. Those who wake up. They want to know who the person was who talked to them,” Dana said.

  “Since no one knew,” Peggy continued, “one of them called her a ghost and the name stuck.”

  “So you just let this unknown person roam the hospital at will?” Brad asked. “What we need to do is alert security.”

  “Calm down, Dr. Clayton. She’s not doing any harm,” Renee said.

  “In fact, she’s doing good,” Dana added. “The court order was already in hand. Jeffrey Amberson was scheduled to have his plug pulled.”

  Peggy took up the story. “This afternoon when they shut down the machines, he breathed on his own. I’d say the ghost had something to do with that.”

  “The ghost,” Brad frowned. “It sounds like good medicine and a strong survival instinct.”

  “They’d given up on him. If the ghost had nothing to do with his recovery, then neither did medicine,” Dana stated.

  Brad didn’t agree or disagree with Dana. He turned to leave. He had no patients to see, so he was headed for the doctor’s lounge and a cup of coffee. Mallory Russell was approaching the station, several charts in her hands. She didn’t look him in the eye. Brad felt a twinge of guilt for their earlier encounter on the stairs.

  “Well, Dr. Russell, what do you think of the ghost?” he asked.

  She stole a glance at Dana, ignoring Brad. “I was on my way up and told Cassie I’d drop these off.” She set the charts on the counter.

  “Excuse me, I’m scheduled for O.R.-8,” Peggy said.

  Renee checked her watch. A small panel light came on, indicating someone in one of the rooms needed assistance. “I’ll take it,” she said. She and Peggy wedged themselves past Mallory and Brad. Mallory moved, giving them room. Brad smelled the scent of her. He recognized it from that night in the E.R. A vision of them together came into his mind. Quickly, he quashed it. This was neither the time nor the place. But lately, he didn’t get to choose the time or place.

  Another signal flashed on the panel.

  “Will you cover a moment?” Dana asked. “I have to check on this one.” She left without waiting for a reply.

  He was alone with Mallory, and she was causing him all kinds of fantasies. What was wrong with him? Her hair was up again for work, but it was thick and soft, and he wanted to push his hands through it. Her eyes were wide and bright, light brown.

  “Don’t you have a patient to see?” Mallory asked. She took a seat at the nurses’ station.

  “Not at the moment. I was waiting for you to answer the question.”

  “What question?”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  She hesitated, keeping her eyes on the light panel. Then she looked at him. “No, Doctor. I don’t believe in ghosts…but that’s not to say I don’t believe in unexplained anomalies.”

  “Like a patient waking up from a coma after he’d been given up for lost?”

  She glanced around, then nodded. “Like that.”

  “This is interesting.” He pulled up a chair and straddled it. “Tell me about the ghost.”

  “Is that what you all were talking about?”

  He nodded. “They believe a ghost helped Jeffrey Amberson wake up.”

  “And you believe she had nothing to do with it, right?”

  “I believe there’s a security breach going on here and it’s with the knowledge of the staff.”

  Mallory stood up. She looked Brad directly in the eye. “I find it hard to believe that a man who can have such rapport with children, who can gain their trust in a matter of moments, has no compassion for the rest of society.” With that she left him.

  Dana came around the counter a moment later. She leaned toward Brad confidentially. “Well, I see you two are getting along just great.”

  Chapter Three

  Dana’s words were still ringing in Brad’s head later that night when he headed for his car. Mallory Russell did seem to rub him the wrong way. He couldn’t think why. She was competent, and he found himself looking for her when he was at the hospital. Yet each time he came in contact with her, the two seemed to be at opposite poles.

  Brad opened the door and hopped into the SUV. Automatically, he turned on the engine. The Luther Vandross disk he’d popped in the CD player that morning kicked in right at the place where it had stopped when he got to the hospital.

  Brad had stayed late to finish up some paperwork. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and he was wide awake. He didn’t really want to go home, but there was no place else to go. If it were earlier he could pick up a game of basketball at the public court he often went to, but at this hour the guys were either asleep or pursuing their women. Brad wasn’t friendly with any of them. They were just a collection of guys who played ball together. When they left the court they never saw each other, socially or professionally. But when he was waiting on the sidelines for a place in the game to open up, he often talked with them, and he knew that, for some of them, the pursuit of the opposite sex was high on their entertainment list.

  Brad liked them and wondered if their apparent contentment had anything to do with that attitude. He pulled out of the parking lot and headed for home. It wasn’t far to his residence, but he suddenly turned and headed toward the shelter on Thirteenth Street. The hospital maintained a clinic there, and he was one of the primary doctors. He would look in and see what was scheduled for morning.

  Brad drove through the city, watching the neighborhoods go from well-maintained, to unmaintained, to boarded-up buildings with concrete front yards. The streets were deserted and few cars patrolled the area. Behind these doors, Brad knew, thrived a drug world that wasn’t obvious from the outside. He often found himself in places like this, especially on nights he couldn’t sleep. This was where he’d thought he would find his mother. Not this exact neighborhood, but one like it. His mom had left him and his brother, Owen, when they were young, and had never returned. Brad believed the reason she hadn’t come back had to do with drugs. Yet she hadn’t been an addict. The drug story was just something a little boy could cling to for understanding. Brad wasn’t a little boy anymore, yet he still thought of her in this kind of place.

  He stopped in front of a derelict house with boarded-up windows and no door. Silently he sat looking at it, the car engine running and the lights on. Lots of people had searched for his mother. Child welfare had looked also, but she seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.

  Brad’s eye caught something moving in the beams of his headlights. He squinted in the gloom, but could no longer see whatever it was. Time to leave, he thought. This wasn’t the best section of town and he didn’t need anyone hijacking his car. Putting it into gear, he pulled away from the curb.

  That’s when he saw her, thirty feet away. A kid. She walked slowly, slinking against the buildings, trying to make herself inconspicuous. Brad pulled up beside her and got out of the car. She didn’t stop walking.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, following her on foot. “Where do you live? Do you need help?”

  She said nothing. While the buildings were all dark and deserted, one streetlight glowed brightly. In the light he could see she was about twelve. Memories flooded his mind. He�
��d been abandoned at age nine.

  The child’s pants were torn and dirty, her blouse fit poorly and her shoes were too big. One of them was missing a heel, making her limp.

  “Leave me alone,” she said in a defiant voice. Brad had heard it before.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Then go away and leave me alone.”

  “Do you have someplace to sleep?”

  “Yes,” she snapped.

  “Food?”

  She glared at him.

  “I’m a doctor. I’ll take you to a shelter.”

  “Do I look like I’ve lost my mind?”

  Brad gazed directly at her. He shook his head. “You look like someone in need of help. I’m offering it. You’re too young to be out alone, especially in a place like this.”

  He took her arm to lead her away, but she screamed. Then things got out of control. Red and blue lights whirled behind him. He looked around to see a black-and-white patrol car roll to a stop. The girl wrenched her arm free and took off as if death was chasing her. She disappeared into one of the abandoned buildings with the surefootedness of practice. Brad knew she’d been there before, but he had no time to think about it. A cop, with his gun drawn and pointing, shouted at him to put his hands in the air.

  Drinking coffee to stay awake at three o’clock in the morning was something Mallory had done many times before, but she didn’t think she would have to do it tonight. After a year her hours at the hospital had settled into a routine. Most of the time they were predictable and she had plenty of energy after a full day or even a full night on her feet. Tonight, however, she had been bone tired and looking forward to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. That had been her goal when she’d climbed into bed.

  Then the phone rang.

  It wasn’t the hospital. It was Brad Clayton. He was asking for her help. It wasn’t a medical emergency, he told her immediately, but he needed her.