‘I know, Shep, but-’ Mike looked over at Kat, finishing the thought in his head: But I don’t know how much longer my daughter can hold up.
Snowball II got into the song and dance now, swinging along, Kat kicking up the stuffed-animal legs, a Vegas revue gone polar. She was punch drunk, coming apart at the seams. She needed to run in circles until she fell down.
Shep said, ‘Cat-and-mouse games take a lotta waiting, Mike. You know that.’
Traffic had loosened; Mike had a full tank of gas and nowhere to go.
Miss Suzy’s life cycle had drawn to a close: ‘-to heh-ven, to heh-ven, Miss Suzy went to heh-ven, and this is what she said.’
He set the phone in his lap and watched the streetlights whip by overhead. All those people on the sidewalks, shopping and pushing strollers, going about their normal lives.
Seven hours until that first flight departed for St. Louis.
‘-oooo aah, lost my bra, help me, choke choke choke, tra-laaaaaa!’
A nanosecond of silence.
Mike exhaled with relief.
‘Miiiiiiiiiiiss Suzy was a bay-bee, a bay-bee, a bay-bee-’
They passed a public park with grassy hills and picnic tables and jungle gyms. Severing the third verse, Mike pulled off, and they used the bathrooms. He waited nervously outside the women’s room until Kat reappeared. They sat at one of the picnic tables, Mike wearing the rucksack and digging through the grocery bags to come up with food. He found himself checking the parking lot, the trees along the perimeter, the guy in shades walking his dog. Kat picked at her food. He couldn’t blame her; they’d had peanut butter for five straight meals, and the bread was stale.
‘That sandwich isn’t gonna eat itself,’ he said.
‘But if it did,’ Kat replied, ‘that would be really cool.’
‘Want me to get you a hot lunch somewhere?’
‘No. Really. This is fine.’ Kat took a bite, made a big show of chomping to emphasize the hardship. He soaked in the smart-ass sight of her.
Clouds moved overhead, dimming the park a few watts. Mike thought about a one-way no-companion ticket to St. Louis. 5:30 P.M. Her boarding passes crinkled in his back pocket. He fussed with his fingers. Cleared his throat. ‘Your mother and I, when we got married… Man, did we want a baby. We wanted you more than anything. Do you know that?’
Kat nodded impatiently, her eyes on the fenced jungle gym below. ‘Can I play?’
He fought his voice steady. ‘Of course, honey,’ he managed.
She bolted down the slope, leaving her sandwich behind. He cleaned up and followed, watching from outside the fence. He indulged in a brief fantasy: her on a tire swing in an expansive St. Louis backyard, Annabel’s brother waiting on the porch with his new bride and some lemonade.
He thought of that playground from his childhood, of the wail of that distant bell and how he’d emerged from the yellow tunnel to see the empty parking spaces along the curb. Can you tell me who you belong to?
His heart was racing. Needing to be closer, he circled the fence and pushed Kat on the swings. For a time there was nothing but the sand under his feet, a pleasant breeze, and his daughter rotating away and back, away and back. Her curly hair, flying up in his face, was badly tangled and smelled like fruit punch. The scene, this scene, never changed. She could have been two or five. He could have been twenty-nine or thirty-three.
He pushed her, his hands light against her back, letting her go, catching her, letting her go again.
Chapter 39
Holding Mike’s faxed transfer order, Dr Cha appeared in Annabel’s room, where she had left Shep, baffled.
‘I will need to have a conversation with the receiving doctor. Then I’ll require a signature from the critical-care transport team.’
Shep said, ‘Huh?’
Dr Cha said, ‘Do you think you could arrange that for me?’
Shep said, ‘What?’
Dr Cha said, ‘Excellent,’ and disappeared.
Shep turned to Annabel to see if she was keeping up any better than he was, but she remained still on the mattress, hair matted, eyes closed.
The bedside phone rang. And again. And again.
Shep trudged over and picked up. ‘Yeah?’
‘This is Dr Cha. And this is…?’
A very long pause.
Shep said, ‘Dr Dubronski.’
‘Dr Dubronski, have the risks of transfer been explained to the health-care proxy?’
Shep picked at his teeth with a nail. ‘They have.’
‘Are you familiar with Annabel Wingate’s case?’
‘I am.’
‘Would you like to discuss the plan of care now or once the transfer is complete?’
‘Once it’s complete.’
‘Excellent. Will you be sending your own critical-care transport team?’
‘No?’ Silence. ‘Yes.’
Click. Dial tone.
Light footsteps, a brief knock on the door, and then Dr Cha reappeared with a form on a clipboard. She tapped cheerily with a pen. ‘I’ll need a signature here.’
Shep scribbled something.
She glanced down at the page. ‘Insert doctor-handwriting joke here.’ She kicked the green foot pedal and wheeled Annabel’s bed out from the wall, guiding it into Shep’s hands. Steering the attached cart and IV pole, Dr Cha walked Shep down the hall and into the elevator, then leaned in and hit the button for the third floor.
A clerk jogged down the hall toward them. ‘Dr Cha? An attorney is holding on line three. It’s about Annabel Wingate, and he says it’s urgent.’
Dr Cha winked as the doors slid shut, wiping her from view.
Before Shep could protest, he was rising. He stared down at Annabel. Fluids moved through tubing. Equipment beeped. She breathed, the skin of her neck fragile and translucent, showing faint blue veins beneath. He wondered what the hell was going to happen next.
The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a team of folks in scrubs were waiting in a semicircle, a serious-looking young woman at the forefront.
‘I’m Dr Bhatnagar. Is this the patient Dr Dubronski wanted transferred here?’
The doors banged shut on Shep as he wheeled Annabel out into their hands.
He rubbed his shoulder. ‘Sure.’
The woman snatched the clipboard from where Dr Cha had left it across Annabel’s shins. On the medical chart beneath, the personal information had been blacked out as on a CIA document. ‘Do we have a name for this patient?’
An elderly man in a wheelchair butted Shep aside and punched at the elevator button impatiently. Shep said, ‘No.’
She scribbled “UCF 2” across the chart. At Shep’s look of incredulity, she said, ‘Unidentified Caucasian Female. Yes, we already have one. They’re falling out of the sky today.’ A quick nod to Annabel. ‘I understand she’s a victim of domestic abuse.’
Shep said, ‘Possibly.’
‘We’ll hide her in the pediatric ICU, then. Thanks so much. We got it from here.’
She nodded, dismissing him. Shep stepped back into the elevator, nearly stumbling over the man in the wheelchair. The doors closed, and they whistled down to the lobby. The entire episode had occurred in a matter of seconds.
Shep cleared his throat and said to the elderly man or the quiet confines of the elevator, ‘I will never understand smart women.’
Kat splashed in the bathtub, which Mike had rinsed out extensively before filling. The motel, a variation of the ones they’d been ping-ponging through, was in a seedy part of Van Nuys, a stone’s throw from the park where he’d smashed up that forest green Saab with a baseball bat.
He was sitting on the bed, a heavy old-school phone in his lap, his stomach all acid and dull pain. The dust that had risen when he’d sat on the rust-orange bedspread swirled and swirled, impervious to gravity. It danced along a shaft of light slanting through the sole window, which provided an alley view of plastic wrappers snared in a chain-link fence. Dusk came on in fast-forward, the shaft dimming even as Mike watched it, a flash-light losing batteries.