Conflicts of the Heart (31 page)

“He's smart. He's willing to lie, cheat, and steal. Every time I turn around, something more happens. Michael disappears, and everything is going down at work. I'm only one person. I can't deal with all of this.” She scooted to the edge of the bed and dropped her feet to the floor. “I can't rest anymore. I'm too upset.”

“I should have known how important Michael was to you. I just thought Joel was such a good man. I trusted his judgment.”

“You were never around enough to see.”

Her mother drew her hand up to her mouth, shivered, and bowed her head.

“I'm sorry, Mom, but I can't sit here.” She grabbed her suit jacket from the foot of the bed and threw it over her shoulders. “Where are you going?”

“Out to look for my son. I can't lie around here feeling sorry for myself.”

“You can't go out in the dark by yourself--”

Then a bloodcurdling scream came from downstairs
.

“Michael,” Dana yelled.
“Mother! That was Michael.” Dana took the stairs two at a time. At the bottom, she ran headlong into Ruta.

“You heard him too?” Ruta
scurried around the hallway opening doors.

“Where is he?”

“I don't know. I just heard his scream.”

Michael must have found his own way. Dana called out, “Michael, where are you?”

“Mommy. I'm scared,” came his muffled voice.

“The closet,” Ruta shouted. “He's in the hall closet.”

The two women rushed down the long, narrow hall. “I thought you looked everywhere in the house.” Dana trembled at the thought of finding her son. Her hands shook, her heart pounded with gratitude.

“We did. He wasn't in there.”

Dana flung open the door.

Ruta pulled the overhead string, flooding the closet with light. Inside the large walk-in were stacks of old books along one wall and camping gear piled in a corner. No Michael.

“Mommy,” came Michael's muffled voice from under swaying camping gear.

Dana reached down, and pulled a neatly folded sleeping bag and a lightweight tent away and uncovered her son. He reached up to her, his eyes puffy from a deep sleep. Out of fear, he’d shut down, locked himself away.

She took him in her arms.

Ruta let out a nervous laugh, relief illuminating her cherubic face. “How’d he get under those sleeping bags and tents like that? Nothing was out of place when we looked in here this morning. He must have put everything back on top of himself exactly the way he removed it.”

“That's one of his talents. Oh, my baby.” Dana combed his tousled hair with her fingers, holding his head against her breast. “I love you so much.”

The search team returned a half hour later, bedraggled, and exhausted. Dana, her mother, Ruta, and Michael sat around the table drinking hot chocolate when Patrick and the others lumbered into the dining room. A broad, delighted smile crossed Patrick's face when he spotted Michael huddled next to his mother.

Michael flew from his chair to Patrick's outstretched arms. “Where was he?”

Dana laughed.
“In the hall closet under a pile of camping gear.”

Patrick coughed and lifted Michael up into his arms. “Next time
you decide to go camping, can we come?”

At four in the morning--Michael tucked into his own bed--Patrick and Dana sat at her dining room table, dog-tired, gazing into each other's eyes.

“We've been dealt a terrible hand.” He smiled through misting eyes. “If this were a movie, we could just throw caution to the wind and walk off into the sunset, arm, and arm.” He paused. “It's not. It's real life. I'll be in New York and you'll be in Ashton, somewhere around three thousand miles apart, remembering a beautiful moment from our past.”

Dana had no intentions to attempt to pull him away from his dream, or his daughter. They’d arrived at the fork in the road they knew would come.

“We could get married, commute, call each other, and write letters.”

She laughed. “No long-distance love for me, thank you very much!”

He stood and pulled her up with him. “I'm serious. Think it over.”

Her mind went dizzy thinking of all the unfinished business in her life. Joel would never allow her to leave the state unless she gave up her claim to bring him to justice. Could she marry and give up her dream job to become the first woman administrator of Templeton Hospital? When she left Joel, she vowed to raise her son alone and get on with her career. Granted, Patrick was the most remarkable man she'd ever known, and she knew she loved him, but could she trust
him with her and Michael's lives forevermore? Did she trust him enough to make the necessary changes in her life to be with him? She’d made a firm promise to Gil she wouldn’t remarry and leave the area. She’d be breaking a promise she now knew she must keep. He’d done so much for her, how could she even entertain the idea of leaving him in a lurch? It would come back to haunt her.

With her hand in his, she led him to her bedroom. “Love me, for tonight.” She giggled and paraphrased Scarlett O'Hara, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Dana gave all of herself to Patrick, and at that moment she had all of Patrick she would ever have. Holding him to her breast, she realized there was nothing more to be lost.

Twenty One

A week of newspapers lay scattered at Dana's feet. Today's headline read MISSING BOY FOUND with a picture of Michael smiling for the camera. Michael lying in front of her on the floor calmed her heart. The local evening news on TV drummed away in the background. She glanced up just in time to hear the newscaster sputtering about a riot at Templeton Hospital.

“Michael, turn up the TV.” He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees and whipped up the volume.

“Injured employees are being moved into the emergency room,” the news anchor said with a dramatic tremor in his voice. “It appears a number of people were hurt when a fight broke out just moments ago. We'll have an in-depth report on the eleven o'clock news.”

Dana's beeper sounded. “Code Green. Repeat. Code Green,” the voice on the beeper blurted.

A
disaster. Dana reached for the phone and called the emergency room supervisor's private number.

“Kelly here.”

“This is Dana Claiborne. Who's on?”

“Hubbard.”
The evening shift supervisor.

“May I speak to him?”

“I just left him. He's with the patients that were brought in from out front. You heard?”

“What's going on?”

“You better come down. It's pretty bad. A bunch from two eighty-one started a fight with the nurses picketing out front.”

“I'm on my way.” Dana hung up, called Mrs. Cheney next-door, and arranged care for Michael.

Within twenty minutes, she strode through the ER, checking the faces of people in various degrees of pain and discomfort impatiently waiting for attention. The chairs around the waiting room were full. She couldn’t find any employees among them. They must have tagged them, and moved into treatment rooms already.

“Glad you're here,” the tall, underweight ER supervisor, Bill Hubbard, said. “Six employees and a union rep have been injured. The union rep has been moved to ICU.”

Patrick. She tried to keep her heart still. “May I see a list of the injured?”

“Certainly.”
Bill spun around and led Dana into a cubicle in the back of the department. From his cluttered desk, he picked up a handwritten list. “Except for the union rep and a clerk from the third floor, they're all nurses.”

Dana scanned the names. Patrick's was on the bottom. She glanced up; her voice hitched.

“How bad is Mitchell?”

Hubbard shrugged. “He's in intensive care.”

“What happened?”

“Teal DeLuca and a pack of her followers were harassing the people picketing. They had a large group out tonight, sympathizers from the other departments.
Something to do with Monday’s election.

Someone called DeLuca a bitch. All hell broke loose. When Mitchell tried to break it up, an orderly and DeLuca pushed him down. He struck his head on the hubcap of an ambulance.”

She wanted to head upstairs to his side, but she controlled herself. “What's the status on the others?”

“A few bloody noses, a lot of bruises. One nurse, Andrea Lerner, may have a broken arm. We're waiting for x-rays.”

“God, I can't believe this.” Never, in all her years as a negotiator, had anything like this ever happened on her watch.

“All but Lerner and Mitchell are being released shortly.”

Dana's heart was on the elevator, soaring up to the intensive care unit where she pictured Patrick lying in bed, his eyes closed, and tubes medicating and feeding him, keeping him alive. Dana wanted to talk to the floor nurse assigned to Patrick's bed, to find out how he was doing, what his prognosis was.

“Where's Andrea?”
“Trauma three.”

Dana hurried down the hall littered with gurneys, all filled with patients waiting for care.

Inside the small cubicle, Dana saw Andrea, a nurse from critical care, a former girlfriend of Patrick's and now a supporter of Teal DeLuca. She looked to be about twenty-eight years old with long, ash blonde hair, piercing blue eyes and a slim, elegant figure. Even in a simple white nursing uniform, a bit disheveled from her ordeal, she could have just stepped out of a fashion magazine. No wonder Patrick had been attracted to her. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit.” The profanity didn’t suit her clean-cut appearance. “What happened out there tonight?”

“God, I'm so sorry, Mrs. Claiborne.”

Andrea's unexpected apology surprised her.
“For what?”

“For choosing the wrong side.
For letting my personal feelings interfere with my better judgment.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Dana moved closer, clasping her hands to control the slight trembling.

Andrea swung her legs from the end of the table to the side facing Dana, wincing from the pain. “Until tonight, I thought Teal would be the better person to represent the nurses. Then she came up on the floors and started drilling the employees full of nonsense, telling them that she had an inside track with you. That you'd already agreed to some of her ideas for a new contract. Knowing you, we all figured she was lying. I asked her to leave, and told her that she was breaking the rules. She turned on me. She’s desperate. I'd never seen that side of her before. Then I thought of Patrick, how calm and collected he was all the time, how much he cared for the employees. He shows it. Always. I knew I'd taken the wrong side.”

Dana pulled up a chrome chair at the foot of Andrea's bed and sat.

“Whenourshiftchanged,IfollowedTealdownstairstothe cafeteria where her groupies were waiting. I told her that she should get herself outside and talk to the nurses who were picketing. They’re ready to strike. Teal led the way. I followed. Outside, she walked up to Patrick and started yelling something about his affair with you. She was personally going to make sure everyone knew about it. The nurses laughed at her.” An understanding smile crossed Andrea's face.

“Everyone knows he's dopey about you.
Has been since he first set eyes on you.” Andrea paused, cleared her throat.

The shock of their discovery hit Dana full force.

“Anyway, Patrick reached out and pushed Teal's hand away from his face. Then she poked him in the chest with her finger, threatening some legal action…conflict of interest or something. I couldn't make out what it was. Before I knew it, it was too late. Picket signs became weapons. Both sides lined up as if they were ready to do battle. Security stepped in, and the last thing I saw was Patrick being pushed down to the ground. I heard him yell, then that awful sound when his head hit the hub cap of an ambulance parked behind him.”

Dana flinched. She imagined the sound of the metal hitting the side of his head and then the sight of him as he lost consciousness.

Andrea's voice droned on in the background. “Everyone went crazy and started running from the scene. Teal grabbed me by the arm and twisted it behind my back until she heard it snap. She pushed me toward Patrick, and then like a coward, she took off running. I can't believe she went so crazy. I actually believed in her for a while. She had a lot of us convinced we needed a change, that Patrick and PNA had an agenda.”

Dana rose. “I think you should lie down and get some rest. Just remember, Teal's the one with an agenda. I'll cancel the election. We'll have to reschedule later.”

Andrea rubbed her injured arm. “I know you and Patrick will do right by us. You're the best personnel director we've ever had here.”

“Thanks, Andrea. Get some rest. I'm going to check on Patrick.”

In front of the double doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Dana pressed the buzzer. “It’s Dana Claiborne. I’d like to see Patrick Mitchell.”