At the Scent of Water (12 page)

Ten

Sam didn’t sleep but continued to sit in the hard-backed kitchen chair. He read the divorce papers several times all the way through, as if they might yield some vital piece of information he had heretofore missed. He watched the news channels. They ran the Kelly Bright story every hour or so. There was never anything new. He signed on to the Internet and read everything he could find about the situation, somehow thinking more information might help. It did not. Around three in the morning, he got into his car and drove to Rosewood Manor. He sat in the parking lot and saw the news vans clumped around the door. Reality dawned.

There’s a court order,
he told himself roughly.
They’re not going to put the feeding tube back in because you would like them to
.

He felt he should go in anyway, that his penance should at least be to sit beside her as she died, but he knew that was a bad idea and probably more about his needs than anyone else’s. The mother would be at her daughter’s side, and Sam was the last person she wanted to see. After a while he turned around and made the drive back home.

He tried to lie down then, but as soon as he put out the light, things rushed in on him, and he couldn’t bear it, so he turned it back on and went back to the chair. His thoughts seesawed between Annie and Kelly, and both were torments. Did Annie have someone else? Is that why she wanted to divorce? Or was she just pulling the plug on a hopeless situation, much as Kelly Bright’s father had done? They had removed her feeding tube. Was she hungry? Was she thirsty? And that only led to the more horrific, more terrible thought that during all these last five years she might have been hungry, in pain, cold or wet or hot, and in her helplessness unable to even cry out.

Around five he realized he should get ready for work. Still he didn’t move. Fifteen minutes later or so a knock came at the door. He went to the peephole and peered out. His brother’s face, uncharacteristically serious, stared back. Sam opened the door.

“Hey, bro.” As casual as if he’d been sauntering by and decided on impulse to knock.

“What are you doing here, Ricky?” A less than gracious greeting, but his brother didn’t seem put off.

Ricky shrugged. “Mama got worried when you didn’t answer your phone.”

Sam nodded and stepped aside to let Ricky in. He should call Mama. He knew she would be worried sick. She went about in that perpetual state over him. It must have reached unbearable proportions if she had dispatched Ricky to check on him. Sam rubbed the stubble on his jaw. His eyes felt raw.

“You look terrible,” Ricky put in helpfully as he came into the apartment and shut the door behind him.

Sam didn’t reply. He shuffled into the kitchen and started some coffee.

“You going to work today?” Ricky asked.

“Of course. Why would you even ask?”

Ricky shrugged. “News vans are camped out in your parking garage.”

Sam closed his eyes. He hadn’t thought of that.

“I can drive your car around, and you can duck out the back,” Ricky offered, and for a moment the mischievous gleam came back into his brother’s eyes.

“Thanks,” Sam answered shortly.

Ricky sat down. Sam finished his preparations, turned on the coffee, and sat down opposite him. Ricky didn’t speak at all, just sat quietly with him. It was an uncharacteristic gesture, and Sam felt a surge of appreciation well up. Ricky asked no questions, offered no advice. Sam remembered Job’s comforters who sat with him in silence, and then he remembered why. They saw that his grief was very great. He had no right to feel grief. Over either situation, he told himself. But he supposed he did feel it, deservedly or not. That must be what this was called, this heavy, sucking torment.

He never analyzed his feelings. In the past six years he had never once sat down and asked himself how he felt or what he felt or if he felt poorly or when he would feel better. In fact, he realized, he had kept up his bone-crushing pace just so he would not have to do those things. But now he felt. He felt grief rise up like deep, dark, dangerous water. It came to his throat, and he tightened it against it. It did no good. It continued to rise and spilled out of his eyes. He covered his face and shook his head, silent even now. There was quiet for long moments, a gasp of breath, more silence. Ricky put his hand on Sam’s shoulder and left it there, warm and steady.

After a few more minutes Sam pulled his emotions back in. He took a few more deep breaths, rubbed his face, and cleared his throat. He wiped his eyes and face on a paper towel. Ricky got up and poured them each a cup of coffee, then sat back down. They sipped, and the scalding liquid felt good. Sam coughed and wiped his face again.

“I hate what happened to that little girl,” he finally said, and when he spoke his voice sounded rough and uneven.

“I know you do, Sam,” Ricky answered quietly.

Not
it wasn’t your fault
. No one could say those words, could they?

More silence. Finally Sam pulled himself together. He shoved all those dark feelings back where they belonged, but it was like trying to fit things back into the box they’d come in. They didn’t go back in as easily as they’d come out. He forced them to, at least shoved them down to where he could move and breathe. He stood up and rested his hand briefly on his brother’s shoulder. He cleared his throat. “I’ve got to go to work now. It was good of you to come.”

Ricky stood up, taking his cue. No doubt he had patients to see today, as well, and the drive from Knoxville back to Gilead Springs would take just over an hour, probably longer, considering it would soon be morning rush hour.

“I’ll tell Mama you’re all right,” Ricky promised. “You want me to bring your car around to the side?”

Sam nodded. “Thanks. Tell Mama I’ll call her tonight.” He went to shower and dress, and he didn’t let his mind go ahead of his feet. He didn’t like to think of what waited for him at the hospital.

****

The news crews were there, as he had expected. Sam saw the vans as soon as he drove up outside the hospital, but that, in itself, wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that today their faces and microphones were all pointed toward him.

“Dr. Truelove, what’s your opinion of the court’s ruling to remove Kelly Bright’s feeding tube?”

“Dr. Truelove, have you communicated with the family?”

“Dr. Truelove, Mrs. Bright says you are responsible for her daughter’s condition. Would you care to comment?”

He plowed a straight line through them, and the security guards met him at the door, allowed him in, and kept the surging tide outside the revolving doors. He could feel stares as he rode the elevator upstairs, exchanged a few tight greetings with staff he recognized. Izzy was anxiously watching for him at the office. Her face relaxed slightly when he came through the door, but the concerned look remained. He paused by her desk, and she scanned him as always. What she saw must have worried her. Her eyes grew dark and troubled.

He went into his office and sat there for a moment, staring at the stacks of papers, the charts, the telephone messages, and that was when he knew. This was his judgment. The final verdict. He thought of the surgeries he had scheduled today, and he knew he could not do them. He could not, he would not, repeat the horrific mistake he had made. He buzzed Izzy. She answered immediately.

“Is Barney in?” he asked.

“Just arrived,” she said. “Do you want to see him?”

“If he’s not busy.”

After a moment a gentle knock came at the door. His partner came into the room. Barney was a good man, Sam realized again. His partner’s face looked worn and troubled now, yet he managed a smile.

“How are you doing, Sam?”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said quietly.

Barney sighed, sat down, then took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s a mess,” he said.

Sam felt a sharp wound at the words, for the memory of that awful operating theater, covered with the little girl’s blood, came back to him. Her heart had arrested, stayed still for a few moments too long. It certainly qualified as a mess, but somehow the flippancy of Barney’s comment tipped Sam into anger. He sat silently, though, knowing his friend had meant no harm.

“The partners met early this morning, Sam,” Barney said gently.

Sam felt stunned. “Good of you to include me, Barney. I’m a partner, too.”

“We would like you to step down,” Barney said without responding to his thrust.

Sam frowned, the words not making sense at first. “Step down?” he repeated dumbly.

“From the practice, Sam. But just for a while. You shouldn’t be operating right now. You know that as well as I do. And it’s not just because of Kelly Bright,” his partner interjected. “We’ve all watched you lately, Sam. This is what I was trying to say last night. You’re tight. Tense. People are worrying about you. Comments have been made. And now that this situation has blown up, we think it would be better if you took a leave. Just until you get your confidence back.”

“My confidence back?” Sam spoke the words quietly, not able to believe Barney had actually uttered them. “I do more surgeries in a day than you do in a week. You have the gall to question my confidence?”

“I said your confidence, Sam,” Barney said quietly, undeterred, “not your competence.”

Sam stared at the man who had been his partner, his friend.

As if reading his mind, Barney continued. “Sam, listen to reason. I’m speaking as your friend. This isn’t just about the practice. Things haven’t been right with you for a long time. Go somewhere and figure things out. Get your head together and then come back. This is your practice. You’ve built it. No one’s trying to deprive you of it permanently. If we were, we would have voted you out completely, but no one wants to do that. It’s temporary, Sam. Take a break.”

Sam sat stunned, his mind picking one fact out of Barney’s entire speech. With a vote they could oust him.

Before he could speak, Izzy’s worried face appeared around the edge of his door. “Mr. Bradley called,” she said. “He would like you to come down immediately.”

Barney did not look surprised, and then Sam knew that he and the hosptial administrator had talked, as well. He shook his head, and absurdly, he wanted to laugh. Tom Bradley had wooed him. Had basically let him write his own ticket, choose his own team. And now they were turning against him, and he suddenly remembered a long-ago Sunday school lesson about David, anointed by God, but hiding in the desert, pursued by the king who wanted to kill him.

He rose and walked out of the office, leaving Barney sitting across from the empty desk. He rode the elevator down to the glassed-in administrative offices on the first floor. The receptionist waved him by, and he tapped smartly on the door of Tom Bradley’s office and was invited in.

The administrator was on the telephone, winding up by the sounds of it. “As I said, the hospital has no comment at this time. There will be a press conference this afternoon.”

Sam stared. A press conference and he didn’t have to strain to imagine Tom, in this morning’s blue pinstripe and maroon tie, his thinning blond hair combed back and gelled, excruciatingly groomed and manicured, telling the hordes of reporters that Dr. Truelove had temporarily stepped down from his position as chief of pediatric cardiac surgery. That would preserve the hospital’s credibility, and that, and only that, was what Tom Bradley was all about.

Tom hung up the phone and turned to face Sam, as businesslike and dispassionate as Barney had been agonized.

“Good of you to come, Sam,” he said in his clipped way of talking. He was Canadian, and his enunciation was precise. “As you can see, we have quite a mess here.”

The same words Barney had used, a happenstance that fed Sam’s paranoia and his anger.

“I’ll be blunt and brief,” Tom said. “The board has met and decided that it would be best for the hospital’s reputation if you took a leave of absence.”

Well, there it was. Sam took the ultimatum in and realized he should have expected it. The hospitals in this league were fiercely competitive, always jockeying with competitors for the pool of patients, for reputation. To be the best. He had catapulted them up the ranks of heart centers into the top ten, but if his presence became a liability rather than an asset, they would not hesitate to cut him loose. They had wooed him, but they would cast him off if it suited their purposes to do so.

“May I ask how long this leave would last?”

“Until the matter is satisfactorily settled.”

“Settled to whose satisfaction?”

“The board’s.”

“And what if it isn’t ever settled to their satisfaction?”

Tom leaned back in his chair and folded his hands. “Let’s not borrow trouble, Sam. Sufficient unto the day, so they say. You’ll keep your salary, of course, and your title, for the time being.”

“For the time being?”

Tom gave him a look of patient compassion. He spoke slowly, as to a dull child. “One of two things will happen here, Sam. The girl will die, in which case this will be old news the day after. It will be bumped sooner if a terrorist blows up a building or someone mails anthrax.”

“Yes, maybe we’ll get lucky,” Sam said dryly.

Tom continued on without pausing. “Or, in the second case, the courts will order the tube put back in and leave the parents slashing away at each other in court. In either case, the shelf life of a news story like this is comparatively short. You could be back at work in weeks. A month at the most.”

“Then they’ll sue,” Sam said, thinking of the malpractice case that had been hanging over his head for years.

Tom shrugged. “By then the blood will have been let. The case will drag on, depositions will go back and forth. Dull stuff for the press. They’ll lose interest. Eventually your insurance will pay, and that will be the end of it.”

“What if I refuse to leave?” Sam persisted. “What if I call my own news conference?”

Tom shrugged. “Let’s not go there, Sam. Be reasonable.”

Sam felt his blood race. His pulse pounded in his ears. He felt his hands clench, and he wanted to feel his fist against the soft flesh of Tom Bradley’s smooth-shaven face. He rose up and left without speaking. He went back to his office and passed Barney’s door without pausing. Izzy’s face was mottled and red, and sure enough, she must have gotten the word, because when he arrived in his office his desk was completely clear. No charts. No pink message slips. He was already gone, as far as all of them were concerned.