Luanne Rice (25 page)

“You’re
right,” she said. “There are a lot of whys.”

“And
they’re not all bad,” he said.

“I know,”
Lily said, just smiling. But she looked up at the clock and saw that it was ten
o’clock—the time that surgery was going to start. Open-heart surgery never took
long. Generally sixty minutes at the most. So much could happen during that
single hour. A life and death could pass before a family’s eyes
… .
Oh God,
Lily
prayed, closing her eyes.
Help her
through this hour
… .

Liam opened
his laptop, hoping Lily would take pleasure and comfort in watching the green
light that represented MM122 tracking ever closer to Boston Harbor. But Lily
seemed unable to watch anything but the clock and the door through which the
doctors would emerge postsurgery.

It was
ten-fifteen. Liam tried to hide his own nervousness. He had sat beside Lily
through Rose’s other open-heart surgeries. Because of Rose’s aortic valve
stenosis and her ventricular defect, the very wall of the heart had to be
opened.

To keep the
blood flowing to other vital organs, Rose had to be hooked up to a heart-lung
machine. Liam had studied up on it, spoken to a friend from McGill who’d gone
into cardiac surgery in Vancouver. He knew that Rose was under deep anesthesia.
Dr. Garibaldi would have gone in through her breastbone.

Catheters
were draining blood from the veins in the right side of her heart into the
heart-lung machine—which, in a pumping rhythm, was passing the blood over a
special oxygen-containing filter, sending the oxygenated blood back into Rose’s
body through a catheter in her aorta.

Her heart
itself was now without blood—and the doctors were working fast. The operating
room was very cold, so Rose’s heart and brain would require less oxygen. Liam
tried to imagine what was going on, but he—like Lily—was now watching the
clock. Ten thirty-five.

“Her last
operation took forty minutes,” Lily said. “The doctor will be out anytime.”

“Yep,” Liam
said.
“Any minute now.”

“They’re
just going to remove the blockage and replace the patch.”

“Right,”
Liam said. “Dr. Garibaldi has done this exact surgery hundreds of times.”

“But not on
Rose,” Lily said. “He’s never operated on her before. It was Dr. Kenney before.
And then he took that position in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins. We could have
gone to Johns Hopkins.”

“Boston is
fine, Lily. It’s the best. Dr. Garibaldi is the best.”

“But we
could have gone to Baltimore
… .”

“I know.
But Boston is closer to home. You like this hospital, and Rose feels
comfortable here.”

“That’s
right,” Lily said, staring at him earnestly, as if he were telling her
something she’d never heard before. “You’re right. That’s why we chose
Boston—because it’s so good, and because Rose feels comfortable here.”

Ten-forty.

“She’s been
under for forty minutes,” Lily murmured. “I think that’s as long as she’s ever
been on the machine before. I’m not sure, but I think so.”

“It’s not
too long, Lily. The doctor will be out in a minute.”

“It’s just
…” Lily said. “They have to make sure the blood and oxygen mix properly. I
never understand how a machine can do that. But it’s been done before—lots of
times before. Rose has always been fine afterwards. Except that time she got
the bacterial infection—”

“She won’t
get one this time,” Liam said, reaching for Lily’s hand. But she wouldn’t let
him hold it. As if remembering that terrible time when Rose had contracted a
virulent staph infection—she had survived the surgery but nearly died from the
infection—Lily jumped out of her seat and began to pace. She went to the
window, rested her forehead against the glass.

Liam ached
with helplessness, so he forced himself to focus on science. He turned up the
brightness of his computer screen—it wasn’t like sitting in the dark with Lily,
in his truck by the lighthouse, with the night so black, and the screen showing
every dot, with his arm around Lily, and her skin soft against his. It wasn’t
like that here.

He peered
at the screen. There she was—Nanny, MM122—blinking off Gloucester. She had swum
her amazing journey in one and a half days—from Melbourne, slanting across the
Atlantic to the Gulf of Maine, passing Matinicus and Monhegan, Christmas Cove,
Boothbay Harbor, Yarmouth, Portland, swinging past the Isle of Shoals, down the
coast of Massachusetts.

Here she
was, right on Boston’s North Shore, speeding south. Liam wanted to call Lily
over, to show her, but something in Lily’s posture told him that she couldn’t
take hearing about Nanny just now. Liam’s own stomach dropped a little.

MM122 was
way out of her range, out of the normal geographic areas where beluga whales
were found in July. What if Nanny did have some mystical connection to Rose?
What if her coming here was some sort of harbinger—living in Cape Hawk, the
whale could certainly say hello to Rose any time she wanted to. What if Nanny
was coming to Boston to say goodbye?

Liam
refused to think that. Gazing at Lily across the room, he pushed himself up.
The clock now read ten fifty-five. Rose had been under for five minutes shy of
an hour. Liam tried to think of the things he could say to Lily: maybe the
doctors got started
late,
maybe the operating room
wasn’t ready, maybe …

This wasn’t
the time for speculation. Liam was an oceanographer, and he knew: it was a time
for science. He walked across the big space to Lily—a distance that seemed
interminable. He was reminded of the first time he saw his mother, after Connor
had died, and after Liam had had what was left of his arm amputated. His mother
had been looking out a window then. Liam had called her name, and she didn’t
turn around.

“Lily?” he
said.

When she
wheeled at the sound of his voice, he felt so much relief, he felt his eyes
fill.

“What?”
Lily asked.

“I wanted
to tell you something,” he said, blinking back the tears. He wanted to come up
with something factual, scientific, indisputable, and wise. But the thing was
,
he really had nothing to say. All he could think of was
Rose.

“You were
talking about the mix before,” he said.
“Blood and oxygen.”

“Yes …”

“I was
thinking back to grad school,” he said, struggling for something that would
comfort her. “We learned a lot about that in a marine biology class. Whales are
mammals, as you know, and our professor was teaching us about the cetacean
circulatory system.”

Lily nodded,
listening. She seemed to notice that his brow was sweating—she reached up and
brushed his damp hair back from his forehead. Her smile was very gentle, as if
encouraging him to go on.

“In the
earliest days of medicine,” Liam said, “dating back to the sixth century B.C.,
on the Greek island of Ionia, doctors had the idea that when air and blood
mingled in the lungs, the blood gained a ‘vital essence.’ But it took many
centuries until they realized that the vital essence was—”

“Oxygen,”
Lily said, and Liam smiled, knowing she probably knew more about the process
than most scientists.

“Right,” he
said. “I still remember reading William Harvey’s famous treatise—I think it’s
from 1628—on blood flow and circulation. Of course, my class was on whales, not
humans.”

“Hearts are
hearts,” Lily whispered, watching the time click to eleven o’clock.

Liam
watched the blood drain from her face. She began to tremble, and he knew she
was losing it. He put his arm around her, tried to hold her tight. She was
shaking so hard, grabbing his arm, burying her face in his chest.

“Where are
the doctors?” she asked.

“They’re
coming,” he said.

And before
they could look up, they heard Dr. Garibaldi’s voice. “Lily, Liam?” he asked.

“How’s
Rose?” Lily asked. She lurched toward the doctor. Liam looked around—as if it
was possible Dr. Garibaldi could have rolled Rose out with him, into the
waiting room. Then Liam looked at the doctor’s pale, deep-set eyes, and he knew
what he was about to say, before he even spoke.

“She’s
fine,” the doctor said.
“Went through the surgery with no
problems whatever.
We removed the obstruction and replaced the patch.
Gortex, this time—it should last her the rest of her life. She’s in recovery
now, but she’s already out of the anesthesia, and they’ll be bringing her up
here to the ICU in just a few minutes.”

“Thank
you,” Liam said. “Thank you, Doctor.”

Lily shook
Dr. Garibaldi’s hand, touched her own heart, and thanked him. After the doctor
left, she turned to Liam.

“You
thanked him even before I did,” she said.

“Oh,” he
said, suddenly embarrassed. “I did. I’m sorry—I just—”

“No, it’s
good,” she said, turning bright pink. “It’s just … it’s just something a father
would do.”

Liam stood
straight, couldn’t quite speak. If only Lily knew what was going on inside his
chest, how he had felt about Rose since the instant he’d brought her into this
world.

“I was
thinking,” Lily said. “About what you were saying just before the doctor came
up. About the
Greeks,
and the vital essence.”

“Oxygen,”
he said. As she herself had said
… .

“I was
thinking it must be something else too,” she said, staring at the elevator
doors, hearing the lift coming closer. The doctor had said that Rose would be
up in just a few minutes, and Lily was ready. She turned her gaze from the
elevator to Liam.

“What
else?” he asked.

“Well,” she
said, stopping herself.

Liam wanted
to tell her what he thought, but he couldn’t say the word out loud:
Love.
The most vital
essence of all.

And just
then the door opened, and an orderly wheeled Rose out—there on the bed,
attached to monitors, but with her eyes open. She was strapped down—the sight
of those straps tore Liam’s heart. They had to keep her from moving, at least
overnight. She looked from Lily to Liam, and then back to Lily.

“Hi, sweetheart,”
Lily said.

“It hurts,”
Rose said.

“I know,
honey. But it won’t for long.”

“It won’t,
Rose,” Liam said, hardly able to bear seeing her in pain, knowing that the
nurses would give her pain meds in a second, and knowing that she would heal
fast from the surgery. “It won’t hurt for long.”

“Promise?”
Rose whispered hoarsely.

“Yes,” Liam
said, touching her head—as his own father had done when he’d made a similar
promise after Liam’s arm surgery—knowing that that was just what a father would
say and do.

Chapter 22

R
ose was awake, opening her eyes as soon as they
wheeled her out of the operating room. The medicine they gave her made her
groggy, but she kept trying to tear the straps off her chest anyway. She wanted
to move, run, hug her mother,
go
home.

She slept a
lot.

Her mother
and Dr. Neill took turns sitting by her bed. Sometimes they were there
together, sitting so close they looked like one person. Their voices threaded
in and out of her dreams, joining her waking and sleeping hours. When she
cried, she wasn’t sure who hugged her. Her chest hurt.

And then it
didn’t. The next day, when Rose woke up, the sun was shining, and her chest
didn’t hurt at all. Well, maybe a little—the nurse helped her sit up, and then
she washed her, and then the doctor came to look at her stitches.

Her mother
and Liam stood back while the nurses got her ready to take her first walk. She
knew that it was less than a day since her surgery, but she was used to being
the wonder girl when it came to getting out of bed fast. She knew that walking
and pooping were the big events. They were like getting an A+ on a book report
or math test. Once you had them, you were on your way home.

Or at least out of ICU, to the normal floor.

“How’s the
pain, Rose?” the nurse asked.

“Not so
bad. Mom, did you tell Jessica I’m coming home in a week?”

“Yes,
honey.”

“Dr. Neill,
what’s wrong?” She looked up, and he had a funny look on his face—as if he was
frozen between wanting to stand back and trying to catch her. The nurse gave
him a teacherly smile, as if he had a lot to learn.

“Children
heal much faster than adults from open-heart surgery,” the nurse said. “They
experience much less pain in the chest wall. We’re going to get Rose up and
walking, so we can move her down to the pediatric floor.”

“Okay,” Dr.
Neill said, holding his arms out, the way Rose remembered him doing when she
was really tiny, learning to walk. The sight of him doing that made her laugh,
which made her chest hurt. “Rose? What?” he asked.

“I can do
it,” she told him.
“Watch.”

“Ready when
you are, honey,” her mother said.

All the
adults stood close by her side, and Rose inched to the edge of the bed. She
reached her toes down to the floor, in her fuzzy slippers. The ground felt so
solid. Rose hadn’t wanted to tell her mother, but it had felt tippy for a long
while, almost like the deck of the
Tecumseh
II
at her birthday party.
A boat, tilting fore and aft,
sideways, all around.
Rose had felt dizzy, and she knew it was because
she hadn’t been getting enough oxygen.

But that
had changed. Already, just half a day after her operation, she felt ten, a
hundred, a thousand times better than she had. She breathed in—and she actually
felt her lungs expand and her strength return.

“I feel
good,
” she said.

Everyone
smiled, and her mother held out her hand.

“Walk with
me?” her mother asked.

Rose
nodded, but she didn’t move her feet. She just kept waiting, staring up.

“Rose?” Dr.
Neill asked.

She just
reached out her hand, waiting for him to take it. He slid his fingers into
hers, and then Rose was ready. She, her mother, and Dr. Neill took their first
steps together.
Through the ICU, around the nurses’ station.
She realized that in all the ICUs she had been in before, Dr. Neill had been
there too.

Only family
were allowed in ICU. Rose grinned, keeping her head down, afraid to let
everyone know how happy that made her feel. Because she didn’t know what it
meant, and over the last nine years she had learned that she needed to take
care of her heart, keep it from getting broken. But he squeezed her hand, and
she decided to allow herself to hope.

Lily and
Liam had started going down to Boston Harbor after leaving the hospital. They
would cut through Faneuil Hall and end up on Long Wharf. People enjoying the
summer night strolled by, but for Lily and Liam it was much more urgent: they
were both sustained by the sea, and they needed to see it and feel the salt air
of home.

Liam
brought binoculars so they could scan the blue water, searching for Nanny. But
she never came close enough to the shore, seeming to stay out beyond the harbor
islands, just hovering in the area.

That night,
when they’d had their fill of sea breezes, they walked back toward the hotel.
Lily stared down at the cobblestones, tension building inside. There was so
much she wanted to say to him, but she felt shy and tongue-tied, as if all the
words were bound in thick rope. He hadn’t taken her hand once tonight—not once
on their whole walk.

“Life is
funny,” he said as they walked along.

“In what way?”

“You can
think you know what’s best, what’s right for you, and then all of a sudden
something happens and turns your plans upside down.”

“What do
you mean?” she asked. Was he thinking of his summer? He had given up so much of
it to be with Lily and Rose; perhaps he was starting to resent the time, and
the loss of research time.

“Just, bad
things happen, but they sometimes turn out to be … good.”

She tilted
her head, curious about what he meant, but he just walked in silence. The space
between them seemed so great, but Lily was afraid to close it; he seemed to
need some distance.

“I was
thinking of the shark,” he said after a few minutes.

“Nothing
good came of the shark, I know,” she said. “You lost Connor, and a part of
yourself. Liam, you don’t have to pretend anything about that is okay.” He
didn’t reply.

She glanced
over. His brown hair was wavy, with strands of silver in the streetlights. His
blue eyes looked sad. They got to the Charles River Hotel, just behind the
hospital, and went to the elevator. As it clicked up to their floors, Lily
wished she knew what to say. She was on the fourteenth floor, and Liam was on
the sixteenth. When the door opened at 14, he looked at her.

“Good
night,” she said.

“Good
night, Lily,” he said.

She walked
to her room, feeling upset and churned up. Not just because he hadn’t touched
her at all, not once, on their walk—but because he had looked so troubled, and
made that comment about the shark, and she hadn’t comforted him.

Lily felt
torment inside. She paced her hotel room. She had been so hurt by her husband,
her trust had been shattered. She had sacrificed everything leaving him. She
had swallowed an iceberg. It had frozen her, cell by cell, until she was
brittle and hard; she had learned, over time, how to guard herself—be tough,
never let any man get close to her. The Nanouks had been her only friends.
But Liam …

Over these
last weeks, she had felt herself melting.

“Welcome to
the thaw,” she had said to Marisa, at Rose’s birthday party. What Marisa
couldn’t know was that Lily had never really believed those words for herself.
She had thought she was too glacial, too long frozen, too trapped by winter, to
ever really experience anything like internal springtime.

She thought
of Liam—the look in his eyes when he’d mentioned the shark. After all he’d done
for her these years—and, especially, this summer—why couldn’t she have reached
up, put her arms around him? Why couldn’t she have told him she was there to
listen if he felt like talking?

Lily was
shaking inside. She grabbed her key and left the room. Not wanting to wait for
the elevator, she took the stairs. With every step, she felt more and more
afraid. What if she was making a mistake? She hadn’t reached out to a man in so
long—she had stopped believing that she ever would again. Liam’s kindness, the
way Rose adored him, Lily’s own growing feelings for him all seemed
insignificant in the face of her old, terrible, very real fears. But she pushed
through them and just kept going.

She found
his room, 1625. Took a deep breath and knocked.

Liam opened
the door. He stood there, surprise in his blue eyes. He was wearing jeans and a
blue oxford shirt. His left sleeve hung there, empty. Lily had never seen him
that way before. She gasped.

“I’m
sorry,” he said, glancing down, patting his empty sleeve as if he could will
his arm to appear there. “I should have—”

“No—don’t
be sorry,” she said. “I’m the one—I’m sorry, Liam.”

“If it
makes you uncomfortable, I can put my prosthesis back on.”

Lily smiled
and shook her head. “Uncomfortable? No. Liam, you just spent two days sitting
in the ICU with Rose. You saw her stitches, her incision
… .
I’m not uncomfortable with anything like that.”

“Most
people are.”

“I’m not
most people,” she said.

They walked
over to the small table with two chairs, right by the window. The room lights
were dim, so they could see the river, dancing with city lights. It was such a
different water view than the one they loved in Cape Hawk. But it was still
water, and Lily felt things starting to flow.

“When you
said that about the shark,” she said, “I wanted to hear more.”

“Really?
It was nothing—just some philosophizing.”

“So,
philosophize,” she said, leaning back in her chair.

“I guess,
what I was thinking was, sometimes it seems that my life ended with that
shark,” he said. “Other times, it seems it began.”

“How?”

“You don’t
know how close I was to Connor,” he said. “We were inseparable. Even though he
was three years younger, there was no one I’d rather hang around with. He was
so funny. He’d swim up to whales while they were sleeping, and climb up on
their backs. We used to dare him all the time.”

“Is that
what he was doing that day?”

“Yes,” he
said. “He was trying to get close to this one beluga. The whale was there,
feeding on krill and herring. We didn’t see the shark, until it was pulling
Connor down.”

“You saw?”

Liam
nodded. “I did. Connor reached out both arms for me. I swam as fast as I
could—I was pulling him, trying to get him away from the shark. And then he
just … wasn’t there anymore. I was there in my brother’s blood, diving and
diving for him. And the shark got me too.”

Lily was
silent, listening.

“He just—he
grabbed my arm. It didn’t hurt—I couldn’t feel his teeth or anything. Later I
learned they’re so sharp, like razors, they just slice through skin and bone.
It felt more like the most violent tug I’d ever felt. All I could think of was
Connor—I tried to beat the shark with my other arm, pounding him, gouging his
eyes. I dug my fingers into his eye socket—and that’s what got him to let go.”

Lily was so
clenched, she felt like a closed fist. She knew what it was like to fight for
her life. Liam’s description of the teeth going in—so sharp and smooth, you
almost don’t know you’re being eaten alive. She thought of the last day,
pregnant with Rose, when her husband had knocked her to the ground—and
pretended it was an accident.

“You got
away,” she whispered.

“I did,” he
said. “I was swimming on pure adrenaline—still diving for Connor, even though
my arm was gone. I don’t think I even knew. Jude was screaming—he had climbed
up on the shore. He got someone’s attention, and a boat came over. They had to
haul me out—everyone was surprised I survived. The shark had severed an
artery—I was bleeding out, right there in the spot where Connor went down.”

“Oh, Liam.”
She jumped up, unable to withstand what he was
telling her. Liam stood beside her; she was shaking so hard, she backed into
the desk. Liam reached out to steady her—he surprised her, looking so calm.
Beyond him, in the corner of the room, his artificial arm leaned against the
wall.

“How do you
do it?” she asked. “How do you go on, having lived through that?”