The Dirty Secrets Club (31 page)

The wave retreated, bringing the stench of jet fuel and a tide of medical supplies. The door was a mouth, the interior dark, and her brain hissed,
Small spaces collapse.

She stared in, breathing hard, looking for her husband.

Small spaces will eat you.

"Daniel."

She got down on her hands and knees and crawled in. The roof gave her only eighteen inches of space. She dropped to her stomach and crawled on her elbows. Blood rushed in her ears. Her skin was goose bumped, her breath racing. She knew she had to slow it down or she'd hyperventilate.

Emily whimpered again. It wasn't a cry of discomfort or fear. It was a base animal moan. It was the sound of dying.

"I'm coming." She crawled through the mess and wet and cold and stink. "Daniel. Where are you?"

And she saw his hand. The stretcher and half the chopper's medical supplies were dumped on top of him. She began throwing debris aside, digging for him.

"Danny." She couldn't make her voice say anything else.

She dug out his arm, tossed aside some wrecked equipment, looked back and saw Emily. The girl's eyes were barely open. "Jo."

His voice was little more than a whisper, and the most thrilling sound she'd ever heard.

"I'm here," she said. "Can you move?"

"Banged up, but yeah."

He was facedown, smashed against the side of the chopper, covered with junk. He turned his head, looked at her, and squeezed her hand.

"The girl," he said.

"She's bad. I'm going."

Triage is a system that helps medics decide who to treat first in multiple-casualty situations. When the injured outnumber the doctors, triage rates patients to give medics the best chance of saving the most lives.

Jo crawled through the mess toward little Emily, repeating the triage criteria in her head.

Sort patients into three groups: immediate care, delayed care, and unsalvageable. Red tag for immediate care, those who will die if not treated now. Yellow tag for delayed care, those who will survive even without treatment—the walking wounded, those with stable vital signs, people who are conscious and aware of their surroundings. Black tag for the unsalvageable, those who will die no matter what the medics do.

Daniel was talking and moving, conscious and coherent, had no obvious head or spinal injuries. But from five feet away, Jo knew Emily was a red tag. Hell if she was going to let that become black.

"Emily, I'm coming." Her hands were throbbing from the cold. She shoved aside more debris. The stink of aviation fuel was almost enough to make her gag. "Danny, you still with me?"

"Babe. The radio."

"I got through to 911 on my cell before I came down the cliff. Rescue's on its way."

Not fast enough for the copilot. But it had now been twenty-five minutes, and somebody was outbound to help them.

Belly-crawling through the crumpled chopper, Jo edged the last couple of feet to Emily. She grabbed her hand. The girl's skin was cold, her soft hair tossed over her face. Jo found her pulse. It was weak and thready.

She saw blood in the child's mouth and cuts on her pale little legs. When kids lose blood, it's easy for them to get into trouble because they have less volume than an adult. Emily was freezing. She was undoubtedly in hypovolemic shock. She may have been bleeding internally. Jo had to stabilize her long enough for rescue to arrive.

Jo heard that awful wounded moan again.

"Hang on, honey," she said. "Hang on, Emily."

The waves rushed in again. Freezing water ran up her legs like a molesting hand. The fuselage seemed to shrink. She tried to breathe deep and felt her chest constrict.

She scrambled to grab the thermal blanket to warm Emily up. She looked for anything with which to brace her head and neck.

She heard, behind the crash of the waves, the rhythmic thud of helicopter rotors. Tears sprang back into her eyes.

"Daniel, they're coming," she said. "Can you see them?"

The jet fuel and cold briny water sloshed around her legs. She checked Emily's eyes. Her pupils were unreactive.

She wasn't breathing. Shit.

We'll take care of her,
she had promised Emily's mother. She had pledged it.

This is not going to happen, she thought. I will not let you slip away. She put two fingers against the child's neck and checked for a carotid pulse.

The sound of the helicopter outside grew louder. It was close and it was big. She pulled Emily away from the wall and fought to get her into a position where she could administer CPR. In the smashed interior, she didn't have room to kneel above the girl and extend her arms to give chest compressions.

Jesus, girl, don't die. Do not die. The child's face was the color of paper, with blue veins showing underneath. Her eyes were glassy.

No. "Stay with me, Emily."

She turned her flat on her back, checked that her airway was clear, and began CPR. Breathed into her mouth. Gave chest compressions, struggling with the angle. Heard a big chopper hovering outside, its engines a drone, a brilliance, deliverance.

Another two breaths into her soft little mouth. Thirty compressions. Two more breaths.

Again.

Come on, Emily.

Outside, the air-ambulance pilot shouted, "Here."

Jo breathed for Emily. Again and again. No response. She heard men outside. She turned her head and hollered, "In here."

Back to chest compressions. Come on, baby. Come on. She could do this for as long as it took. Stay with us, Emily.

"I'll get you a Tickle Me Elmo helicopter, Emily. Come on, honey."

Twenty-five compressions, thirty. She breathed into Emily's cold mouth. Footsteps clattered outside, somebody pounded on the fuselage, a man called, "Are you all right?"

"Get in here." She kept up compressions. "Two injured survivors. Child in cardiac arrest. Help me."

Behind her, men shouted instructions back and forth. The chopper rocked as one of the rescue crew crawled inside. She heard him sloshing his way through the debris. He appeared at her side.

"How long have you been going?" he said.

"Two minutes."

He had on a green flight suit. He reached out and took Emily's pulse while Jo continued compressions.

"Are you injured?" he asked.

"No."

"Let me take over."

Jo scooted aside. The man crawled forward to take her place. He had an Air Force insignia and chevrons on his sleeve.

"You a PJ?" she said.

He nodded and went to work on Emily. Jo's heart soared. This was the child's one, only, best chance. The man was serious, looked seriously competent, unperturbed and focused.

For a moment, tears of relief obscured her vision. She crabbed her way backward, trying not to break down, to hold her cool a while longer. The 129th being here meant they had trained professionals, medical supplies, equipment to extricate all of them from this hell, and what was undoubtedly a beautiful motherfucking Pave Hawk helicopter holding on station above them.

She turned and crawled back to Daniel. "PJs. We're getting out of here."

She took his hand and looked out the crushed door of the chopper. The surf seemed at eye level. A second pararescueman appeared, sliding down a rope from the sky.

"Jo," Daniel said.

His hand was icy. She pressed herself against him to warm him with her body heat. "We're going, ASAP. Just hang on."

He looked at her. He was wheezing. A trickle of adrenaline ran down her chest. He hadn't been wheezing before.

"Daniel, can you breathe?" she said.

He whispered something. She leaned closer. All her fear returned, black and huge, like the big bad wolf.

His lips moved. No sound. He mouthed, "Jo. Love."

"Danny."

He grabbed for breath. She saw his chest catch. Saw his nails. Blue in the nail beds. Shit. She leaned away and yelled out the door at the second PJ.

"Patient in respiratory distress."

Daniel squeezed her hand.

"Come on, Danny," she said. "Hold on."

He gulped with pain. She squeezed his hand. "Dammit, Beckett, we're almost out of here."

He touched her face and looked at her with green eyes.

"We're going home, Beckett. You and me," she said.

He squeezed her hand. His eyes told her he was going, but not home.

She went frozen with understanding. With the clarity that absolute zero bestows. His eyes were clear, and for a second he fought the pain, to tell her he knew the truth, and she needed to know it, too. He was a doctor. He knew he was already gone. His spirit was just holding on for a few final seconds, looking out at her from the wreckage of his body, telling her good-bye.

And then he was across the border.

Everything after that was swallowed in the unbridgeable gulf that had just torn open. All noise, all light. The waves, the turbines of the Pave Hawk, her grief. She lost it. Not crying, but shouting at him, and then she was being pulled out of the chopper, wet and trembling, fighting every inch of the way, and who the
fuck
was the man dragging her away from Danny?

"Doctor, the surf's swamping the chopper. You'll drown," he said.

Let go. Let me go. That's my husband in there. Let me go. We have to get him out.

Strong arms went around her, clutched her tight. She smelled his flight suit, saw a name tag reading Quintana, refused to hear what he was saying.

He held her hard and wouldn't let go. When he put his lips against her ear, his voice was gentle.

"I'm sorry. They're dead."

29

T
he blue October sky hurt her eyes. Church bells were ringing.

They seemed to reverberate in her chest.

Gabe leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. "Jo, you didn't kill Daniel."

"Don't humor me. I know what people said behind my back."

He looked perplexed. "What are you talking about?"

She felt a catch in her throat. "That day. Back at Moffett."

The 129th had flown her back in the Pave Hawk to Moffett Field. On the flight, pitching through the sky, Quintana sat beside her. Nobody spoke. When they landed, she climbed out in a daze. She wanted never to approach another aircraft again. Not a helicopter, a jetliner, a paper airplane. She shucked off the Pave Hawk like a snake shedding its skin and walked away from it.

She now knew that she was already in shock, which hits the grieving and turns the world dim and glassy when a spouse dies. She learned that in the bereavement group, when Tina finally dragged her there, physically, and sat with her through the first meeting.

She walked with the rescue crew to their HQ building. They wrapped her in a blanket, got her coffee, sat her down on a plastic chair under fluorescent lighting. They walked down the corridor and talked to the unit's commanding officer. She stared at the wall. She heard subdued voices.
Survivor,
she heard.
The guy's wife.

Triage,
she heard. And, under his breath, the second PJ talking about Daniel.

Now, under the shimmering Halloween sunshine, she looked Gabe Quintana in the eye. "He said, 'Even a paramedic should have caught it.'"

Gabe gazed at her for a long, breathless moment. She kept herself from looking away. She felt like she was going to splinter.

"I made a mistake. And it killed him," she said.

Gabe looked at her for another second. Still grasping her hand, he stood up and led her across the plaza. "You had nothing to do with Daniel dying."

"Where are you taking me?"

"I don't know. Someplace where you can get this outrageous notion out of your head."

Her face felt hot. "I heard him, Gabe. The other PJ talking to your CO. He said that Emily was a black tag."

Unsalvageable. And that was the verdict of the medical examiner. Emily Leigh had been critically ill, physically frail, and the injuries sustained in the crash of the air ambulance were too severe to treat. Jo could not have saved her.

But Daniel had not been a black tag. He was desperately injured, but quick action could have saved him. He had internal bleeding, a collapsed lung, and cardiac tamponade. The pericardium, the sac surrounding the heart, was damaged during the crash. It filled with blood, which prevented his heart from beating. That killed him.

Gabe led her away from the plaza. "The letter was delivered to your house?"

"Via UCSF. They sent it to my office, and the med center forwarded it. So maybe they don't know where I live."

"Good." His hand was hot. "Who do you need to talk to?"

"About the note?" She tried to think, but her mind remained stuck on the moment that her life, her plans, her understanding of herself and her role in the world had screeched to a stop in the face of staggering failure.

"Mother of God." Gabe stared straight ahead. "You've been carrying this for two years?"