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CHARLI KEPT RUNNING out of wrap, and Neil Bailey wouldn’t hold still. Every time she’d get his arm splinted, he’d move or the spool of bandage would be inexplicably empty. Finally, she snapped at him, “Just what is your problem?”
And he grinned at her. “I’m taking up money for Toys for Tots, and I’ll ride Rudolph to deliver the cash.”
And there was Rudolph, nosing in behind her, his red nose blinking and buzzing—
No. She shook herself awake. It wasn’t Rudolph. It was her cell phone. What now? She pushed herself up out of her warm snuggly covers and saw—very clearly in the bright-as-daylight glow of her neighbor’s Christmas extravaganza—her phone buzzing away on her nightstand.
Caller ID registered the hospital’s number as she hit the answer button. “This better be good,” she griped into the speaker. The bedside clock told her she’d been asleep only a couple of hours.
“Charli.”
Lainey’s voice sounded all wrong. Somber.
“What is it?” Charli asked, already reaching for the slacks she’d dumped on the bench at the end of the bed. “I’m on my way, whatever it is. Knife Guy?”
“No...Charli, your dad...”
An icy chill shot through her. She froze on the bed. “What’s wrong?” She was surprised she could even verbalize the question, as scared as she was.
“He’s had an MI. At home. Your mom called 9-1-1, and the EMTs responded. They’re inbound. She’s with them and, well, Charli—from the way it sounds from the EMTs, you’d better come right away.”
* * *
NEIL WAS BUSILY rigging up a plastic bread bag over his bad arm in order to take a shower when first his front doorbell rang, long and loud, followed by someone doing a good impression of the Gestapo on the heavy oak.
He dropped the bread bag on the kitchen counter and made his way through the living room to the foyer. When he threw open the door, Charli Prescott nearly beaned him on the head, apparently ready to pound on the door again.
He caught her fist in his good hand. “Whoa! I’m here.” He released the pink-tipped fingers. For a long moment, all she could do was gulp in air. Maybe she was still ticked about his Christmas lights? He tried a smile to defuse the situation. “Can’t sleep?”
“My keys... I gave you my keys!” she got out.
“Yeah. I put them under the flower pot by your back door.”
“Oh! Sorry! I didn’t look there!” She whirled around, purse flying, no coat on despite temps hovering around a chilly forty degrees, and her hair even worse for wear than it had been earlier.
“Wait! What’s wrong?” Neil followed her as she stumbled down his steps and down the walkway.
“My dad! He’s had an MI—I’ve got to get to the hospital.” She wobbled unsteadily as she shouted this over her shoulder and backed past his Christmas lights.
“A what?”
“An MI... A heart attack.” As she turned to head for her own driveway, her purse got caught in Neil’s trio of wired angels by the front walk. She snatched at the strap, making the whole chorus of angels rock back and forth.
“Let me drive you. I have my keys, right here in my pocket.” Neil held them up and was gratified to see her extricate the strap from the offending angel’s halo without doing any damage and without falling herself. “My car’s here.”
Charli stopped again. Her expression revealed indecision. Neil could literally see her body jerking first one way and then the other.
So he didn’t wait for her reply. Instead, he dipped back into the little foyer, grabbed two jackets and shut the door behind him. He loped over the short distance between him and Charli and took her arm gently in his.
“Come on. Let’s get you to the hospital.” He steered her to his car and assisted her in with a fumbling one-handed approach, though she didn’t seem to notice. He wrapped the spare coat around her slim frame. She didn’t protest, just folded her long legs into his little Corolla and seemed to withdraw into herself.
Once he’d negotiated closing the door with his right hand, he started the car and backed carefully out of his drive. It seemed to trigger something in her. “I’m never like this,” she said. “I’m always cool in a crisis.”
“Hey. It’s your dad. You’re thinking like a daughter, not a doctor.” Gravel that had collected in the dip between the street and the drive crunched under his tires as he backed out onto the street and started for the hospital. “What happened? Do you know?”
She jerked her head in the negative. “Lainey—a nurse—”
“I know Lainey. She called?”
“After they got a call in from the EMTs. It’s bad.”
She would know. She’d probably handled lots of these in her work, Neil figured. At the stop sign, he hung a left and made the subsequent turns to the main road in town.
“Do you want to call your mother?” Neil asked her as they stopped for the last red light between their neighborhood and the hospital. “I didn’t think to ask if your mom needed a lift.”
In the crimson glow of the light, he could see Charli’s swallow. “Should I go back?” he asked.
“No. Lainey—Lainey said Mom was riding with the ambulance.”
The light turned green and he took his foot off the brake, trying not to gun it, but still going a little faster than the speed limit.
Charli seemed calmer now, but he could tell from her drawn face in the glow of the streetlights she was anxious.
“You said it was bad. How bad?”
“I don’t— What if he dies?” She put her hand to her face. “Listen to me. I don’t have any information. I’m just freaking out, and I tell my patients’ families to wait, to see, that we’re doing all we can. They’re doing all they can. They are. I know.”
Neil understood why she’d blurted out her what-if. Did he ever know that desperate thought. He’d never forget the night they’d taken his mother to the hospital. A terrified six-year-old, all he could think was, What if she dies? And she had died.
Now wasn’t the time to tell Charli that life was survivable, if far poorer, after the death of a parent. Honestly, there was never a time when anybody should say that, but Neil knew it for the truth it was. Instead, he reached over, squeezed her hand and said gently, “You are a doctor. You know way too much about, well, about everything medical. But I think you’ve just given yourself some excellent advice.”
The reminder of who she was seemed to fortify her. She straightened up and leaned against the gray fabric of the car seat. “Well, we don’t have enough information. We have to wait and see.”
“And we will. We will wait and see.” Now they were in the parking lot of the emergency room. The small, low 1960s building seemed perfectly preserved in the lights of the vapor lamps, but Neil knew that the morning sun would not be kind to it. It would reveal the overdue paint job, the scraggly bushes that the understaffed and overtaxed maintenance guys never got around to hedging. But for a town this size and this poor, simply keeping the doors open on a twenty-five-bed county-run hospital was an achievement. Across the street lay the town’s doctors’ offices—the offices where Dr. Chuck Prescott had spent much of his professional career.
Beyond Neil’s car, bathed in vapor lights and the Corolla’s headlight beams, lay the big circle with the H in it, ready for the helicopter that would certainly come for Chuck Prescott, to take him to a larger trauma hospital. If, that is, the E.R. could stabilize him.
Charli didn’t budge. For a moment, Neil let her sit there, collect herself. He saw the last vestiges of her earlier emotion hidden behind a mask that covered all the pain and fear and confusion.
“Okay. Let’s do this.” She flung herself out of the car and strode toward the hospital, back straight, head high. Even without the lab coat and the stethoscope, Charli looked every inch the doctor he’d seen earlier that evening.
Neil shook off his amazement. Scrambling to follow her, he caught up with her halfway to the entry. The doors whisked open in front of them, a belch of hospital air their greeting.
Lainey dashed toward them and wrapped Charli in a quick, tight embrace. “Charli, I am so sorry. He’s here, they’re working on him....”
For a moment, Neil saw Charli’s mask slip. “Who’s working on him?”
“Shafer—well, everybody, except me. They’re running the full code. Your dad...he didn’t have a DNR in place.”
Neil noticed Charli’s face blanch. “Where’s Mom?” she asked.
“Around here.... Come on.” Lainey guided her around the corner toward a private family room.
As soon as she saw the door, Charli balked. “Why...why there? That’s where we do notifications.”
“I had to. She needed some...space. You’ve got to be strong, Charli. She’s in a complete meltdown.”
Those pink-tipped fingers were by her sides, and Neil saw her try to stuff her fists into lab-coat pockets that weren’t there. She looked long and hard at Lainey and brushed past the nurse.
The door shut behind her with a soft thud. Neil stood there, unsure what to do.
“You didn’t want to go with her?” Lainey asked.
“Uh, no.” How could Neil explain that their acquaintance, such as it was, had existed for only a few hours.
“She might—”
Neil shook his head. “I’m her neighbor. I don’t really know her that well—and, see, she needs the time with her mom.”
“Oh. I thought you two knew each other.” Lainey shook her head. “It’s hard to remember that you haven’t always been here. I’ve known Charli all my life—we went to school together. We were best friends. I guess I thought you’d already talked to her. You know, to do an article on her for the paper.”
“I’d called, but her dad said to give her a bit—”
He shook his head. Any minute now, he expected Dr. Chuck Prescott to come blasting out of the double doors and tell them the patient was fine.
But the patient was Dr. Prescott. Who would fight to save the town’s hospital now? Who would keep the doors open on the little community clinic?
Lainey cast an anxious glance at the closed door. “Violet wouldn’t let go of him when they brought him in. We had to peel her off him. She kept saying that if he’d come home, he wouldn’t have gotten sick.”
Neil fiddled with the coat in his hands. “Maybe I should have gone in with her,” he murmured. “But I figured they needed their space.”
“You could peek in, see if Charli needs some help? You know how high-strung her mother is.” A noise behind them attracted Lainey’s attention to some people coming in the E.R.’s main doors. “I’ve got to—”
Neil waved her away. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for her.” And as Lainey shot him a grateful look, for the second time that night, he dropped down into one of the E.R.’s uncomfortable chairs to wait. Despite Lainey’s suggestion, he didn’t think Charli would appreciate him intruding on her private moment.
* * *
CHARLI MARVELED AT the fragile quality her mom exuded. A petite woman who’d never come to more than midchest to Charli’s dad, Violet felt tiny and almost birdlike in Charli’s embrace.
There was nothing petite about Violet’s outflow of emotion, though. Sobs racked her mother’s slender shoulders, and Violet seemed mindless about the stained carpet as she knelt against an equally stained love seat. Charli understood all too well why Lainey had tucked her mom in the notification room.
“Mom, Mom...” Charli stroked her mother’s golden hair, the only thing she’d inherited from Violet. She was tall and gangly where her mother was petite. She had her father’s big hands, where her mother’s hands were barely big enough to wrap around a liter of soft drink. She was pragmatic and strived for a cool facade...and her mother?
“You have to save him, Charli! You have to!”
“They’re doing everything—” She halted before she tried that path again. “Tell me,” she said, trying her best to distract her mother and get her to focus on something besides her own emotions. “What happened?”
Her mother hiccupped, ignored the tissue Charli had extended her and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her turquoise blue cashmere cardigan. “He was tired....” Here her mother shot her an accusatory glare. Charli chose to overlook it.
“So he came home tired?”
“Yes, and I asked him what he wanted to eat. I’d made him some supper, but of course he was late. And...he didn’t touch the coconut cake.” Violet drew her brows together. A spasm of guilt coursed through her features. “I don’t care if he’s late every night if he’ll just be okay!”
I’ll send him home early every day if he’ll just be okay. Charli’s mental bargain echoed not only her mother’s but every patient’s distraught family member she’d ever talked with. This is what they feel like. I thought I knew what they felt like, but I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue.
“He didn’t eat a thing...said his stomach felt iffy, some indigestion.” Violet blinked. “Oh, no. Indigestion. It was his heart all the time. Why didn’t I—” But she got nothing more out beyond a torrent of tears.
Charli gave up on soothing her mother. She dropped down on the floor and twisted to lean against the love seat. Beside her, her mother shook with grief and recrimination.
Thankfully, though, her mother ran out of steam a few moments later. She sniffled loudly. “They’re not telling us anything!”
“I could go and find out....” Charli hesitated. Should she leave her mother alone in the state she was in? “Why don’t we see if Lainey—”
Her mother was on her feet in an instant and headed for the door. “You go! They said I couldn’t see him, but they have to let you because you’re a doctor!”
Inexplicably Charli’s feet felt nailed to the ground. Did she want to see her father as sick and weak as she’d seen other patients?
Violet threw open the door to reveal Neil Bailey still in the waiting room. He’d sat down in a chair in front of the door. Now he and Charli stared at each other.
She was embarrassed that he’d caught sight of her on the floor, as though she’d collapsed from emotion. Scrambling to her feet, she joined her mother. “You’ll wait here?”
“I can’t take that room a minute longer,” Violet insisted. “The walls are closing in on me.”
Charli agreed, but still was uncertain what to do with her wreck of a mother. She craned her neck to find Lainey, but didn’t see her.
“Hey, if you like, Mrs. Prescott, you can wait here with me,” Neil offered.
Violet swooped through the door and dropped into the chair beside Neil. A flicker of irritation poked through the welter of Charli’s emotions. Why did her mother insist on latching on to men for support? She’d done it all her life with Charli’s father, and here she was now, already gripping Neil Bailey’s arm with her neat little hands and gazing up into the man’s face as though he were her knight in shining armor.
Honestly, her mother might as well have been a character off Madmen or a 1960s sitcom. Women’s Lib had completely passed her by.
No need to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. At least her mother was calmer with Neil than she had been with either Charli or Lainey. Charli shook off the irritation and murmured a thanks to Neil. Gathering her courage, she walked toward the doors to the E.R. treatment areas.
She heard it before she even got to the nurses’ station. It was a full code, expertly run, and she could predict the orders of the attending as he got feedback from each of his desperate attempts to restart her father’s heart.
“Clear—shock him again!” came the latest order.
“Rhythm still in v-fib!” a nurse called out.
“Come on! Come on, old man!” the doctor shouted. “Don’t you give up on me now! Another push of epi!”
“We’ve lost rhythm!”
Again with the defibrillator. Again with more meds. Again with more compressions. Again with no sustainable rhythm.
And over and over again, until the doctor choked out, “How long without a rhythm?”
Charli couldn’t hear the nurse’s answer.
