First Sight (8 page)

“I won’t leave you,” he said softly, as he watched the anesthesiologist prepare to put her under. They were moving quickly, and the danger was considerable now. They needed to remove what was left of her appendix and do what they could to clean out the area. Her eyes met his as the anesthesiologist spoke to her in French, and Jean-Charles Vernier translated for her, and continued to hold her hand.

“Will you stay even after I’m asleep?” she asked, as tears poured from her eyes.

“If you would like me to.” His presence was calm, powerful, and reassuring. Everything about him told her she could rely on him. And in that single moment, she trusted him completely.

“I would … want you to stay … and please call me Timmie.” He had called her Madame O’Neill again while translating and telling her what would happen. She was glad suddenly that she had called him. His was a familiar face. At least she had seen Jean-Charles Vernier before, and he had been highly recommended by her friend in New York, as an excellent physician. She knew she was in good hands, but she was terrified anyway.

“I’m here, Timmie,” he said, with her hand in his, and his blue eyes firmly locked into hers. “Everything will be fine now. You’re safe. I won’t let anything bad happen to you. And in a minute, you’ll be asleep. I’ll see you when you wake up,” he said, smiling at her. The moment she was asleep, he was going to leave and put on surgical garb. He had every intention of staying with her for the surgery, just as he had promised. He always kept promises he made. His patients knew that he wouldn’t let them down, and Timmie sensed that now too.

A moment later the anesthesiologist put the mask over her face. Her eyes looked into Jean-Charles’s, as he continued talking to her, and a minute later, she was asleep. He left the operating room briefly then to put on a gown and mask, and scrub up, and as he did, he couldn’t help thinking about the woman they were operating on, and all that she had given up in her life, to trade her enormous success for even one person whom she could call in an emergency, and who could be there with her, to hold her hand. Before she had drifted off to sleep, he had thought he had never seen such sad eyes in his life, or someone so scared to be alone. And as he stood next to her, holding her hand, he had the impression that he was looking at a terrified, abandoned child.

Just as he promised her, he stood beside her and watched the surgery. It went well, and the surgeon was pleased. As the surgical team left the room, Jean-Charles Vernier followed her to the recovery room. He didn’t know her at all, and had found her difficult and unreasonable three days before, and now all he knew was that whoever she was, and whatever had come before in her life, he sensed to his very core that he could not leave her alone. Someone had to be there for her. And he was all she had. He had sensed the overwhelming solitude and loneliness in her soul.

She saw him standing next to her when she woke up in the recovery room. She was still woozy from the drugs they had given her, but she recognized him immediately and smiled at him.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and then closed her eyes again.

“Sleep well, Timmie,” he said softly. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he whispered, as he carefully took his hand from hers.

She was already sound asleep again, as he left the room, said good night to the nurses, and went out to his car. Everyone at the surgery was impressed that he was her attending physician and hadn’t left her side.

He didn’t know why, but he felt a deep sadness for her. Something in her eyes that night had told him that much had happened to her in her life, and none of it good. The powerful woman others saw, who ran an empire so successfully, had nothing to do with the one he had seen that night. The woman he had seen had wounds in her soul that tore at his heart. He was still thinking about her as he drove home, and watched the sun come up over Paris.

In the hospital in Neuilly, Timmie was lost in the arms of a deep, peaceful sleep. Without even knowing it, Jean-Charles Vernier had kept all the old demons of her past from engulfing her that night. And all he knew was that without knowing why, he had seen them in her eyes.

Chapter 3

Timmie was lying in her bed the day after her surgery, looking out the window, when Jean-Charles Vernier walked into the room. He was wearing his white coat, with a stethoscope around his neck. He had patients to see at his other hospital, and had visited them first, before coming to see her at the American Hospital in Neuilly. When he arrived, he had checked her chart and spoken to the nurses earlier, and knew that all was going well. They had told him she was still asleep, but had been awake that morning, was fully alert, and had taken very little pain medicine and he was pleased. She was still on heavy doses of IV antibiotics, to combat the infection from toxins released into her system, but he thought they had remedied the situation quickly after her appendix ruptured. And although it had been painful and frightening for her, she had actually been very lucky. It could have been a lot worse. After observing her closely for the next several days, he was sure they would be able to send her back to the hotel. He was anxious to check on her himself, and was smiling when he walked into the room. Since he had seen all his other patients, he could spend whatever time he needed with her without rushing. He saw that she looked tired, but far better than he anticipated after her ordeal the night before.

“Well, Timmie, how are you feeling today?” he asked in his heavily accented English, with his blue eyes observing her intently. She smiled when she heard him use her first name. She had half-expected him to revert to Madame O’Neill again, now that the crisis was over. She liked hearing him say Timmie. He made it sound very French.

“I feel a lot better than I did last night,” she said with a shy smile. She was sore, and the incision hurt, but even that was less acute than the searing pain she’d had the night before.

“You were very lucky things did not get very much worse,” he said as he sat down on the chair next to her bed, and then turned to ask her politely for permission. “May I?” He was formal, and yet at the same time warm, and she still remembered his holding her hand when she was terrified before the anesthetic. He had never let go of her hand once. And she saw the same kindness now in his eyes.

“Of course,” she said about his sitting down. “Thank you for being nice to me last night,” she said shyly, her green eyes meeting his intense blue ones. They were both remembering his holding her hand. “I get very scared sometimes,” she admitted hesitantly. “It’s a lot of old stuff from my childhood that creeps up on me, and when I feel frightened, suddenly I’m five years old again. I felt that way when I got to the hospital, and I really appreciate that you were there, and stayed with me.” Her voice drifted off as she looked at him, and then she glanced away, as he watched her quietly from the chair. She was embarrassed to admit to him how vulnerable she felt at times.

“What happened when you were five years old?” he asked cautiously. He wasn’t asking entirely as her physician, but he had seen something so raw and terrified in her that he had instantly seen an old trauma that was overwhelming her. It was hard to imagine what it was, although frightening things happened to children sometimes, which then pursued them for a lifetime, even as adults.

“My parents died when I was five,” she said quietly. She didn’t speak again for several moments, while he continued to watch her. He wondered if she would tell him what had happened after that. Although that in itself would have been enough, particularly if they had died in some traumatic way that had affected her, or if she’d seen it happen. And then slowly, she went on. “They had a car accident on New Year’s Eve. They went out and never came back. I still remember when the police came to the house and took me away. I don’t know why, but they picked me up in an ambulance. Maybe it was the only vehicle they had on hand at the time, or maybe they thought it would frighten me to ride in a police car. I’ve had a terror of ambulances ever since. Even hearing the sirens makes me feel sick.” And of course she had been brought to the hospital the night before in an ambulance, which he suddenly realized must have been hard for her. There had been no other choice, given how sick she was. He knew then that her state of panic the moment he saw her must have been heightened, or even caused by that.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I should have picked you up myself at the hotel, but I wanted to come here and get everything ready for you, and make sure the surgeon and the operating room were ready for you.” He apologized to her as she smiled at him. And he didn’t normally pick up patients at their homes.

“Don’t be silly. How could you know? And I actually felt so awful, I don’t think it bothered me as much as it might have otherwise. I was scared out of my wits about what was going to happen when I got here.” He smiled at her reassuringly, and she had the same feeling of safety being near him as she’d had the night before the moment she saw him, and then when he held her hand. He exuded solace and comfort, warmth, and something almost tender and very strong. He seemed trustworthy and reliable, and a good person. Although she hardly knew him, she felt protected by him, and totally at peace. He was a very gentle man.

“Where did they take you in the ambulance when you were a little girl after your parents died?” he asked with interest, keeping a close watch on her expression, and as he did, he could see something faraway and painful cross her mind. She almost winced at the memories that had come to life again the night before.

“They took me to an orphanage. I lived there for eleven years. At first, they said I would be adopted very quickly, and they sent me to several homes to try out.” Her eyes looked sad as she said it, and although he said nothing to her, his heart ached for her. He could almost feel the pain she had felt as a little girl, suddenly orphaned and alone, in an orphanage among strangers. To him, it seemed like a terrible fate for a child. “Some of them kept me for a while, weeks, I think. A month maybe, it seemed like a long time to me then. Some of them only kept me a few days. I guess things haven’t changed much. People want babies, newborns preferably. They don’t want scrawny five-year-olds with bony knees, freckles, and red hair.”

“That sounds adorable to me,” he said to her, and she smiled ruefully.

“I don’t think I seemed so adorable to them. I cried a lot. I was scared, probably most of the time. Maybe all the time. I missed my parents, and the people they sent me to seemed weird to me. They probably weren’t, or no more than anyone else. I wet my bed, I hid in closets, I hid under my bed once and refused to come out. They sent me back the next day and said I wasn’t friendly. The nuns scolded me and told me I had to make more effort after that. They kept sending me out to audition for the next three years, until I was eight. And by then, I really was too old. And I wasn’t very cute then. One of the families I went to said my braids were too much trouble, so they cut off all my hair. I came back nearly bald, they just took a razor to my head and gave me a crew cut. It was pretty scary stuff for a little kid. And there was always some reason why they didn’t want me and sent me back. Sometimes they were polite and lied about it, and claimed they had decided they couldn’t afford to adopt, or they were leaving town, or the dad lost his job. Stuff like that. Most of the time, they didn’t say anything. They just shook their heads, packed me up, and sent me back. I could always tell the night before, or most of the time anyway. I knew that look. It always gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. Sometimes they took me by surprise, but mostly not. They gave me five minutes to pack my things, and drove me back. Some of them gave me a present when they did, like a teddy bear or a doll or a toy, kind of a consolation prize for not making the cut. I got used to it eventually, I guess. Except I wonder now if you ever do. I think now, with the perspective of time and age, that every time they didn’t want me and sent me back, it broke my heart again. After a while, every time I went out to try out, I was scared. I knew it would happen again. It always did. How could it not?

“After I was eight, they put me in foster care, which is usually for kids who can’t be adopted for some reason. Most of the time because their parents won’t relinquish them for adoption. Mine were dead, but since no one else wanted me, I wound up in foster care. The theory behind it is excellent, because it’s supposed to keep you from being institutionalized, and there are some wonderful people who foster children. But a lot of bad ones too. Some people see it as an opportunity for child labor and slavery, they cash in on the money they get, starve you, work your fingers to the bone doing things their own kids don’t want to do, and they treat you like dirt. But eventually, I turned the tables on them. I did the worst things I could think of, to see how fast I could be sent back. I liked it better in the orphanage. I was in thirty-six homes in eight years. It became a joke. In the end, they stopped sending me out and left me alone. I didn’t bother anyone, I went to school, I did the chores I was assigned to. I was reasonably polite to the nuns and I walked out the door without looking back when I was sixteen. I got a job as a waitress and worked in several restaurants. I loved to make clothes with left-over bits of fabric in my spare time. I made them for myself, friends, co-workers. Making clothes was like making magic for me. I could transform a scrap of fabric into something beautiful, and make a waitress feel like a queen. In the last coffee shop I worked, my career started and my luck turned. I got a fabulous opportunity, and it’s been a good life ever since, even a great one, most of the time,” she said with wise, sad eyes that had seen too much in one life. “But I’ve noticed all my life, that when I get frightened, or something goes terribly wrong, or if I’m sick or upset, it all comes back to me. Suddenly I’m five years old again, I’m in the orphanage, my parents just died, and I’m being sent to strangers who don’t want me, or maybe even scare me to death. I think that happened to me last night. I was both sick and scared, and by the time I got here in the ambulance, I was so overwhelmed by panic I could hardly breathe. I had asthma as a little kid. Sometimes I’d pretend to have attacks in foster homes, so they’d send me back. They always did. No one wants a funny-looking redheaded kid on their hands with asthma on top of it. In the beginning, the attacks were real. Later they weren’t. By then I didn’t want to try anymore. I didn’t want to put myself on the line. I didn’t care about them, and I didn’t want them to care about me. They didn’t. The best thing that ever happened to me was leaving the orphanage and going to work. Then I was finally in control of my own life, my own destiny. No one could scare me anymore, or send me away. It sounds crazy to say it now,” she said as she looked at Jean-Charles openly.