"Sir, you can't -"
But I was already sliding through the doors to the treatment area before they could close. Once inside, I saw it was another very busy night at St. Tony's. Paramedics were wheeling gurneys; doctors, nurses, and patients crisscrossed every which way around me.
A young male lay on a cot with a gash in his hairline, leaking blood onto his forehead. "Am I gonna die?" he kept asking everybody who passed.
"No, you'll be fine," I told him, since nobody else was stopping to talk to him. "You're all right, son."
Where was Kayla, though? Everything was moving way too fast. I couldn't find anyone to ask about her. Then I heard a voice call out my name.
"Alex, over here!"
Annie was waving to me from down the hall. When I reached her, she took my arm and ushered me into a trauma room – a bay with two beds partitioned by a green plastic curtain.
Several medical personnel stood in a horseshoe around the bed. Their hands were moving quickly, many of them in bloodstained gloves.
Other hospital people came and went, pushing past me as if I weren't even there.
That meant Kayla was alive. I assumed that the goal here would be to stabilize her if possible, then get her to the operating room.
I craned my neck to see as much as I could, and then I saw Kayla. She had a mask over her mouth and nose. Someone was just lifting a red-soaked compress from her belly where they had already cut her shirt away.
The head physician, a woman in her thirties, said, "Stab wound, abdomen, questionable spleen injury."
Other voices in the room blended together, and I tried to make sense of them as best I could, but everything was turning foggy on me.
"BP seventy, pulse one twenty. Respiration thirty-four."
"Give me some suction here, please."
"Is she okay?" I blurted out. I felt like I was in a nightmare where no one could hear me.
"Alex – " Annie's hand was on my shoulder. "You need to give them some room. We don't know very much yet. As soon as we do, I'll tell you."
I realized I'd been pushing forward to get closer to the bed, to Kayla. My God, I ached for her and was finding it hard to breathe.
"Call the seventh floor, tell them we're ready," said the woman doctor who seemed in charge of everyone else in the room. "She has a surgical belly."
Annie whispered to me, "That means the stomach's hard, no digestion going on."
"Let's go. Hurry up, people."
I was being pushed from behind, and not with any kindness. "Move, sir. You have to move out of the way. This patient is in trouble. She could die."
I stepped sideways to make room as they wheeled her gurney into the corridor. Kayla's eyes were still closed. Did she know I was there? Or who had done this to her? I followed the procession as near as I could get. Then just as quickly as they had done everything else, they loaded her onto an elevator, and the metal doors slid shut between us.
Annie was right there at my side. She gestured toward another elevator bank. "I can take you to the waiting room upstairs if you want. Believe me, everybody's doing the best they can. They know Kayla's a doctor. And everybody knows she's a saint."
Chapter 76
THIS PATIENT IS IN TROUBLE. She could die… Everybody knows she's a saint.
I spent the next three hours in the waiting room, alone and without any further word about Kayla. My head was filled with disturbing ironies: Two of my kids had been born at St. Anthony's. Maria had been pronounced dead here. And now Kayla.
Then Annie Falk was with me again, down on one knee, speaking in a quiet, respectful voice that scared me like nothing else could right then.
"Come with me, Alex. Come, please. Hurry. I'll take you to her. She's out of the OR."
At first, I thought Kayla was still asleep in the recovery room, but she stirred when I came near. Her eyes opened, and she saw me – recognized me an instant later.
"Alex?" she whispered.
"Hey there, you," I whispered back, and gently took her hand in both of mine.
She looked very confused and lost for a moment; then she squeezed her eyes shut. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and I almost started up myself, but I thought if Kayla saw me that way it might scare her.
"It's okay," I said. "It's over now. You're in recovery."
"I was… so scared," she said, sounding like a young girl, an endearing part of Kayla I had never seen before.
"I'll bet you were," I said, and I pulled over a chair without letting go of her hand. "Did you really drive yourself here?"
She actually smiled, though her eyes stayed slightly unfocused. "I know how long it can take to get an ambulance in this neighborhood."
"Who did this to you?" I asked then. "Do you know who it was, Kayla?"
In response to the question, she shut her eyes again. My free hand tightened into a fist. Did she know who attacked her, and was she afraid to say? Had Kayla been warned not to talk?
We sat quietly for a moment – until she felt ready to say more. I wouldn't push her on this, the way I had pushed poor Mena Sunderland.
"I was on a house call," she finally said, eyes still closed. "This guy's sister called. He's a junkie. He was trying to detox at home. When I got there, he was just about out of his mind. I don't know who he thought I was. He stabbed me…"
Her voice trailed off. I smoothed her hair and put the back of my hand against her cheek. I've seen how fragile life can be, but it's not something you ever get used to, and it's different when it's somebody you care for, when it sticks this close to home.
"Will you stay with me, Alex? Until I fall asleep? Don't go."
It was her young girl's voice again. Kayla had never seemed as vulnerable to me as she did right then, in that fleeting moment in the recovery room. My heart broke for her and what had happened when she was trying to do some good out there.
"Of course," I said. "I'll be right here. I'm not going anywhere."
Chapter 77
"I'VE BEEN DEPRESSED for a while, as you know. You of all people know this."
"More than ten years. That's a while, I guess, Alex."
I sat across from my favorite doctor, my personal shrink, Adele Finaly. Adele is also my mentor from time to time. She's the one who encouraged me to start up my practice again, and she even got me a couple of patients. "Guinea pigs," she likes to call them.
"I need to tell you a few things that are bothering me a lot, Adele. This may require several hours."
"No problem." She shrugged. Adele has light-brown hair and is in her early forties, but she doesn't seem to have aged since we met. She isn't married right now, and every so often I think about the two of us together, but then I push it out of my mind. Way too dumb, too crazy.
"As long as you can fit several hours of your bullshit into fifty minutes," she continued, ever the wise girl, which is exactly the right tone to take with me.
"I can do that."
She nodded. "Better get going, then. I have the clock on you. It's ticking."
I started by telling her what had happened to Kayla and how I felt about it, including the fact that she had gone to her parents' home in North Carolina to recuperate. "I don't think it's my fault. So I'm not feeling guilty about the attack on Kayla… not directly anyway."
Adele couldn't help it, good as she is – her eyebrows rose and betrayed her inner thoughts. "And indirectly?"
My head moved up and down. "I do feel this generalized guilt – like I could have done something to stop the attack from happening."
"For instance?"
I smiled. Then so did Adele.
"Just to use one example, eliminating all of the crime in the DC area," I said.
"You're hiding behind your sense of humor again."
"Sure I am, and here's the really bad part. Rational as I make myself out to be, I am feeling some guilt over the fact that I could have protected Kayla somehow. And yes, I know how ridiculous that is, Adele. To think. And to say it out loud. But there it is anyway."