One week after her unexpected encounter with Caine in the cemetery, Nora pulled her car into her reserved parking space outside the Olympic Memorial Hospital and realized that she couldn’t remember a single mile of the just-completed drive. It was not a propitious omen for the day ahead.
Ever since Caine’s return, her mind had been mired in the past, rerunning old scenes from her marriage like some late-night cable-television movie.
Marrying Caine when she’d discovered she was pregnant had seemed a logical, practical solution. The problem was, she’d never planned on falling in love with the only man who had ever had the power to break her heart.
The sun had risen, the sky was as bright as a washtub of the Mrs. Stewart’s bluing her grandmother had always favored. Walking toward the hospital, she waved at a gardener who was energetically clipping away at the rhododendron bushes flanking the sidewalk. He grinned and waved back, his own enjoyment of the perfect spring weather obvious. The double glass doors of the emergency department opened automatically at her approach. Nora took a judicial glance around the well-lighted waiting room. The only persons there this morning appeared to belong to the same family.
An exhausted-looking woman rocked a cranky baby in a stroller; at her feet, a young boy ran a toy car across the green vinyl tile while making loud roaring sounds meant to emulate a Formula race car. Beside the woman, a red-haired girl sat reading a children’s book of fairy tales.
The woman and the girl didn’t bother to look up as Nora passed; the boy glanced at her with a decided lack of interest, then began running the plastic car noisily up the wall.
After exchanging brief greetings with Mabel Erickson, the emergency room clerk, Nora went into the doctors’ locker room, changed into a pair of unattractive but practical unpressed green scrubs, and clipped on her ID.
“You’re starting out slow,” Dr. Jeffrey Greene, the doctor going off the night shift, said, flipping through the aluminum clipboards. “We had a relatively quiet night. Some hotshot took a corner too fast on his Kawasaki and I spent two hours picking pieces of asphalt and gravel out of his arms and chest. His girlfriend took him home.
“EMS brought in a drug overdose.” He frowned at this latest problem to have worked its way to the peninsula from the Puget Sound cities. “We stabilized him and sent him upstairs to ICU. The only patient currently in the place is a kid with night asthma who should be off the breathing machine any time. His mother’s in the waiting room, waiting to take him home.
“And, for comic relief, just when the pizza guy showed up with dinner, a frantic mother brought in a three-month-old with spots. She swore he had measles.” He shook his head with disgust. “I’ll never figure out why people bring their kids to the emergency room at three in the morning with diaper rash.”
“She was probably scared.” Nora certainly remembered her own middle-of-the-night parenthood fears.
In medical school she’d been constantly reading about life-threatening diseases, then fearing that Dylan had contracted one of them whenever he became ill. One of the more embarrassing incidents had been when he’d come down with a high fever and wouldn’t stop crying.
Positive that her son had meningitis, Nora had driven alone—Caine had been out of town on a road trip—through the dark streets to the hospital at two o’clock in the morning.
The doctor on call had examined the three-month-old baby, patted Nora paternalistically on the head and diagnosed an ear infection. An hour later, Nora had returned home with a bottle of antibiotic and a sense of relief mingled with an enormous dose of professional embarrassment.
“The pizza was cold by the time we got around to it,” Dr. Greene complained. “At the next staff meeting I’m asking Administration about that microwave they’ve been promising us. What kind of E.R. doesn’t have a microwave oven, this day and age?”
When Nora didn’t answer what she took to be a rhetorical question, he continued. “So, there you go, Doctor. So far you’re looking at a long boring day.” He gathered up the pizza box and pop cans and tossed them into a nearby wastebasket. “But of course, the morning’s still young so that’ll undoubtedly change.”
Nora knew that, only too well. For some reason no one had ever been able to figure out, emergencies invariably came in waves; things would be so quiet the medical staff would be in danger of falling asleep, then suddenly all hell would break loose.
After confirming that the asthma patient had been released, Nora returned to the office, sipped a cup of coffee and waited.
The peace was shattered twenty minutes later when the hospital speaker came to life. At the same time, the beeper in her pocket went off with the high-pitched squeal of the trauma stat code.
“All emergency personnel, trauma stat!” the wall speaker blared. “Helipad, ETA two minutes. Helipad. Two minutes.”
Nora was waiting on the roof, along with a nurse and an E.R. technician, when the EVAC helicopter arrived. In order to avoid wasting critical time, the pilot brought the craft straight in, circling and descending at the same time. The moment the skids touched the ground, the pilot unpitched his rotor blades, flattening them so they no longer bit into the air.
Bending her head, Nora and the rest of the crew grabbed hold of the gurney and raced toward the side of the helicopter. The helicopter medic threw open the door, then undid the heavy web straps holding the passenger—a little boy—in place.
Four sets of hands lifted the boy, who was strapped to a fracture board, a pink plastic collar immobilizing his neck, onto the gurney. Telling him not to be afraid, the nurse put a green plastic oxygen mask over his face, then the crew pulled the gurney back across the roof at a dead run. The state police helicopter medic followed, service revolver bouncing awkwardly against his navy blue flight suit.
“This is Jason Winters,” the medic informed the team as they entered the code room. “He’s a four-year-old male who did a double gainer out of his two-story bedroom window and landed on a wooden deck.
“Was unconscious no more than two, maybe three minutes. He’s alert, he can move all extremities, his pulse is one fifty-five, respiration twenty plus, blood pressure one ten over seventy and solid as a rock.
“His mother says there’s nothing unusual in his medical history, no known allergies. She was the one who found Jason. A neighbor’s driving her here. ETA twenty, thirty minutes.
“The father’s a city cop. The police station was notified, but he hadn’t arrived there from home yet. The desk sergeant promised to give him the message the minute he came in.”
After thanking the medic for his concise report, Nora bent over the gurney and brushed the boy’s hair away from his forehead with a gentle, maternal touch.
“Hello, Jason. I’m Dr. Anderson. Do you know where you are?”
“In the hospital?”
“That’s right.” Nora smiled. “And we’re going to take very good care of you.”
“I wanna go home,” Jason wailed.
“I know. But first we need to check you out and make certain nothing’s broken. Can you help us do that?”
“Why can’t I just go home?” His face was so pale his freckles stood out in stark relief.
“You will. I promise. But not quite yet, sweetie. First we have to take a blood sample.”
“I don’t want no shots!” he screamed as the nurse began swabbing the crook of his slender arm.
“It’ll only sting for a minute, honey,” the nurse promised.
The scream escalated into high-pitched shrieks as the boy watched his blood filling the syringe. “No-o-o! I want my mommy. I wanna go ho-o-ome!”
Another nurse hooked him up to the monitor and Nora watched as the line jumped wildly on the monitor, then settled down to a rapid beat normal for a frightened child.
“If you don’t untie me, I’m gonna tell my daddy on you! He’s a policeman and he’ll come with his gun and arrest you!”
The shrieks slid back down the scale and became racking sobs that gave Nora confidence. Every wail, every cry, said that Jason’s airway was unobstructed.
“We’ll take the straps off real soon, Jason,” Nora promised, “but first we need to take some pictures to make certain that you didn’t hurt anything when you fell.”
“I didn’t fall,” he corrected with four-year-old pride. “I was swinging on my web.”
The first nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm and hooked it to a monitor programmed to automatically inflate the cuff and read the patient’s blood pressure every two minutes.
“My Spider-Man web… Hey, what are you doing now?” Jason yelled when the nurse began cutting away at his superhero pajamas. “You can’t do that! My mommy just bought me these pajamas. She’ll be really mad at me!”
“We need to examine you, Jason,” Nora soothed. “I promise to tell your mommy that we’re the ones who tore your pajamas, but first, can you be a very big boy and tell me where it hurts?”
Fifteen minutes later, when her examination uncovered merely a sprained wrist and a nasty bump on the head, and the X-rays showed no spinal damage, Nora decided that Jason was not only a very loud little boy, he was also a very lucky one. Although children’s bodies were amazingly resilient, they definitely weren’t designed for two-story falls onto a solid-wood deck.
The nurse was writing his name on a plastic wristband when the E.R. clerk appeared at the door of the trauma room. “The boy’s mother is here.”
Through the door, Nora could see a pretty, obviously distraught young woman. She was pacing in front of the reception desk, tracks of tears staining her cheeks while her hands mangled a tissue. The stark fear and dread Nora recalled all too well were written all over her face.
Nora remembered prayers, learned in childhood, tumbling through her head on that day nine years ago. Desperate, she had made deal after deal with God: If He’d only let Dylan live, she’d never raise her voice at him again; if He’d only allow her son to survive, she’d figure out some way to take enough time from her studies to watch cartoons with him. If only God would keep her baby from dying, she’d do anything. Anything!
Nora remembered desperately trying not to cry and strangely, succeeding. And then she remembered trying not to scream, when they’d told her that her baby had died, and failing.
After instructing Mabel to inform Mrs. Winters that she’d be right there, Nora slipped out the door and walked to the stainless-steel fountain. Water arced up in a shimmering silver stream; Nora took a long drink and an even longer breath. Then she walked back down the hall to the waiting room.
“Hello, Mrs. Winters.” She offered a reassuring smile. “I’m Dr. Anderson. Jason’s doctor.”
“Where’s Jason?” the haggard woman asked immediately. “Where’s my boy?”
“He’s still in the trauma room,” Nora said. “With the nurses and other support staff. But he’s awake and doing fine.”
On cue, another scream came from the trauma room. “He’s hurting! I need to be with him.”
“I’m afraid it’ll be a few more minutes before you can see him, Mrs. Winters.”
“They wouldn’t let me go in the helicopter with him, they took him away and now no one will let me see my son and I want to know why!”
Mrs. Winters’s voice had the quiver and staccato rush that told Nora, who’d faced too many parents in similar circumstances, that she was on the verge of becoming hysterical.
Nora leaned forward and put her hand on the woman’s arm. “I know you want the best care for Jason and that’s what he’s getting.
“Your son is being taken downstairs for a CT scan. It’s not painful, it’s merely a three-dimensional X ray that’ll tell us if Jason suffered any head or internal injuries from the fall.” Another wail echoed down the hall.
“Oh, God.” The woman’s face mirrored the anguish that Nora knew must have been on her own that day nine years ago. “Why is he screaming like that?”
“Because he’s angry and frightened. And although I know how difficult it is to believe, Jason’s crying is a very good sign. We’ve been reassured by every shriek.”
Mrs. Winters dabbed her red-rimmed eyes with the shredded tissue. “Really?”
“Really. The fact that he’s been talking a blue streak means that he probably didn’t suffer any brain damage. He’s alert and oriented and mad as hell. Which, for now, is just the way we like him.”
Nora smiled reassuringly and received a wobbly one in return. “He does have a nasty bump on his head, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering him and in a few days he’ll probably be the star of his preschool.
“While we’re waiting for your son to return from the tests, I’d like to get a bit more information. Why don’t we go to my office?” she suggested. “The chairs are more comfortable than these hard plastic ones. And we’ll have privacy.”
The mother, appearing somewhat mollified, followed Nora meekly down the hallway.
Rather than place herself in the power spot behind her desk, Nora sat down on the suede chair adjacent to the matching sofa. “Does Jason have a regular pediatrician?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Winters perched nervously on the edge of the sofa, looking prepared to bolt at any second. “Dr. Kline. His office is on Pine Street, but I can’t remember the address.” The tissue all but disintegrated, she began worrying the clasp of her brown suede purse with her fingers.
“No problem. We can look it up.” Nora dutifully noted the information on the chart. “Is he currently taking any medication?”
“No.” The purse popped open; Mrs. Winters absentmindedly snapped it shut again. As Nora questioned her about Jason’s medical history, her fingers kept snapping and unsnapping, snapping and unsnapping.
Someone knocked on the door, then pushed it open. “Mr. Winters is here,” Mabel informed Nora.
At that announcement, Mrs. Winters jumped. The opened purse slid off her lap; its contents scattered over the floor. The woman dropped to her knees and began frantically scooping up the collection of coins, grocery-store coupons and other items.
A man wearing the dark blue uniform of a police officer and the flushed look of a man terrified, but unable to admit it, entered the office.
“What happened?” he demanded of Nora, who noticed that he hadn’t even bothered to glance at his wife. “Where’s my son?”
“Your son fell out of his bedroom window. He’s downstairs getting some tests done,” Nora said. She held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Nora Anderson, Jason’s admitting physician.
“As I was telling your wife, Jason’s injuries appear to be amazingly minor, but I ordered a CT scan to make certain that he doesn’t have internal injuries my examination failed to detect.”
“He fell out the window?” He turned and looked down at his wife, who’d gone the color of library paste. “The window?” Furious red spots stained his weather-roughened cheeks. “How the hell did you let that happen?”
Their eyes locked. Nora couldn’t detect a hint of compassion in either gaze.
“I’ve been begging you to put some kind of lock on that window for weeks,” Mrs. Winters said, pushing herself to her feet with more energy than she’d displayed thus far. “But you’re always too busy to help around the house.”
“If I’m busy it’s because I’m trying to keep a roof over our heads. You think I like working two jobs so you can quit work to stay home and neglect our kid?”
Her expression turned as hostile as her husband’s. “I wasn’t neglecting him! I was taking a shower. If you’d only gotten around to fixing that window—”
“If you were doing your damn job—”
Nora decided the time had come to intervene. “Mrs. Winters. Officer Winters. Please, sit down. I think we need to talk about your son. And what we all can do to help him recover.”
That, apparently, was the magic word. The boy’s parents exchanged a long look, then in unison, they sat down, each claiming a separate corner of the couch.
“Thank you.” Nora took her own seat behind the desk and folded her hands atop the clipboard. “As I said, I don’t believe Jason’s injuries are going to turn out to be very severe. He is obviously a very lucky boy. Not only because it looks as if he’s going to survive what could have been a fatal fall, but because he has two parents who care for him—deeply.”
Mr. and Mrs. Winters nodded. “I do,” they said together. It was Nora’s turn to nod. “Good. Now, even if he escapes this with nothing more than a lump on his head, the entire experience, which would be frightening for you or me, is bound to be terrifying for a four-year-old child.
“And even if the CT scan shows no further injuries, I’ll want Jason to stay here for observation, which means that he’ll be spending the night in a strange place.
“That being the case, your son will need your reassurance and support. He also needs to know that you don’t blame him for his accident. If there’s tension between you, he’s liable to think that it’s his fault.”
She paused, allowing her words to sink in. “Believe me,” she said quietly, “I understand how you’re feeling.”
Officer Winters shot her a withering look. “Don’t patronize us, Dr. Anderson. No one knows what I’m feeling.”
“I do,” Nora argued. “Because I’ve been in your shoes.”
She had never told the story to anyone before, and was shocked to hear the words coming from her lips. As she viewed their startled expressions, Nora decided that having finally captured their attention, she might as well continue.
“I’m ashamed to say that I reacted with emotion rather than logic, which only succeeded in making an already horrific situation even worse,” she admitted, remembering how she’d railed at Caine and blamed him for the accident that had caused their son’s death.
At the time, Caine hadn’t even tried to defend himself. And later, when she’d learned that the driver of the other car had been drunk and had crossed the centerline without giving Caine time to respond, she’d been too deeply immersed in her own pain to apologize.
“So,” she said, “I would suggest that whatever your problems are, you manage to put them aside for now. For Jason’s sake.”
She paused again. The couple exchanged another long glance. “If you can’t do that,” Nora said quietly but firmly, “I’m going to have to ask that you visit your son separately.”
Jason’s father was looking down at the floor. His mother was dabbing ineffectually at her tears with the shredded, useless tissue. When the patrolman reached into a trouser pocket, took out a wide white handkerchief and began wiping at the moisture streaming down his wife’s cheeks, Nora knew they’d made their decision.
She was also relieved when, caught up in their concern for their son, neither thought to ask her what the outcome of her own situation had been. Because as heartbreaking as Dylan’s death had been, the still-vivid memory of how coldly she’d treated Caine, who’d been hurting himself, left Nora feeling confused. And guilty.
* * *
While Nora struggled to sort out old and painful feelings, the object of all her discomfort was sitting at a table in a weather-beaten shack on the windswept Washington coast. In contrast to the sun that had been shining in Tribulation, the sky was low and gray, the rain streaking down the window matching Caine’s gloomy mood.
The bar had been dubbed The No Name by locals after the sign had blown away during a typhoon more than two decades ago. The scent of fried food, spilled beer and mildew hung over the room like an oppressive cloud.
A lone woman, wearing a rhinestone-studded T-shirt, a skin-tight denim miniskirt and black, over-the-knee suede boots, put some coins in the jukebox and pressed B7.
As Garth Brooks began singing about the damn old rodeo, the woman sauntered over to Caine’s table. “Hiya, handsome. How about a little Texas two-step?” she asked, swaying enticingly to the beat.
Caine signaled the bartender for another beer. “Sorry, sweetheart, but I’m just not in the mood for dancing today.”
He nodded his thanks to the bartender who placed another can of beer on the table without stopping to take away the empties. “Maybe some other time.”
“That’s okay. I can think of lots better things to do on a rainy afternoon.” She gave him a bold, suggestive smile. “My name’s Micki. What’s yours?”
“Caine.” He opened the can and took a long drink.
“I’ve always liked biblical names.” She sat down and crossed her long legs. “You know, Caine—” she leaned forward and placed her hand on his thigh “—perhaps if you stopped brooding over whoever or whatever it is that put that scowl on your face, you might find that you could have some fun, after all.”
She had hit just a little too close to home for comfort. “You know, Micki, you may be on to something.”
Caine tossed back the rest of the beer, tossed some bills on the table and with his arm around the woman’s waist, walked out of the dark bar into the slanting silver rain.
A motel was conveniently located across the gravel parking lot. Caine wasn’t particularly surprised when the manager greeted the woman like an old friend. Neither was he surprised by the lecherous wink the guy gave him.
They’d no sooner entered the room when she turned, twined her bare arms around his neck and kissed him. As she pressed her mouth against his, Caine waited, with a certain fatalistic curiosity, for his body to respond. He wanted to see if this woman’s scarlet lips could make him forget himself.
They couldn’t.
Undeterred by his lack of response, Micki plopped down on the bed. Outside the window, a steady stream of logging trucks passed, hissing wetly down the highway.
“You know, Caine, I knew the minute you walked into The No Name that you were the kind of guy who knew how to have a good time,” she said, unzipping her high-heeled suede boots.
She and Caine had gotten soaked in their dash across the parking lot and the T-shirt clung to her like a second skin. Shivering, she tugged it over her head. Her bra was black and sheer, revealing nipples that had pebbled from the chill. For some inexplicable reason, Caine found himself comparing that overtly sexy bra with a utilitarian white maternity one he remembered Nora wearing. Irritated that the seemingly safe memory made him hard, he lipped a cigarette from the pack he’d managed to keep dry.
“Those things’ll kill you,” Micki said with a friendly smile.
Caine shrugged. “We all gotta go some time.” He lighted the cigarette and inhaled the acrid smoke into his lungs.
“True enough.”
She was down to a pair of black bikini panties. Rising from the bed, she walked over to the window, drew the smoke-stained orange drapes, then stopped in front of him. Plucking the cigarette from his lips, she took a long drag.
“But why do you want to waste time smoking when we could be setting that bed on fire?”
Telling himself it was what he wanted, Caine jabbed the cigarette out in a nearby ceramic ashtray shaped like a fish and pulled her down onto the mattress.
Micki was eager and talented, and everything a man could want in a bed partner.
So why the hell did his mutinous body betray him?
Caine’s erection had softened like a deflated balloon and no amount of feminine coaxing could achieve success.
“That’s okay,” she assured him with what Caine considered inordinately good cheer a long time later. “It happens to everyone.”
“Not to me.” Frustrated, Caine muttered a low, pungent curse.
He told himself that it was the depressing diagnosis he’d received from that Seattle doctor Nora had referred him to that had him in such a funk. Or the fact that the baseball season was in full swing without him on the mound. The beer he’d drunk, perhaps. Or the dreary weather.
Even as he made his way through the litany of possible excuses, Caine had a nagging feeling that the reason for his uncharacteristic inability to perform was that the woman stretched out so invitingly beside him on the bed wasn’t his ex-wife.
What the hell was Nora doing to his mind?