Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) (5 page)

“No, Jacques. I don’t think the Good Foods contract is more pressing than this. There is nothing more pressing than family.” I turn to look at my father, where he’s standing at the edge of the room, talking to someone through a window I hadn’t noticed before.

“Papa?”

He doesn’t seem to hear me. I take a step toward him, but he’s already gone.

It grows quiet, and I exhale. That’s when the tiny door behind me shatters into a thousand splinters. I cover my head, but nothing hits me. I look up to find the wolf standing inches away from my face, growling as ropes of saliva drip from his jaws.

I skitter away on my hands and feet, and climb up onto my father’s desk. The wolf lunges at me, and I reach toward a stack of big, leather-bound books on the shelf. My hand closes around a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a first edition. I throw it at the wolf as hard as I can. It bounces off, and he laughs in a guttural, mechanical voice.

I brace myself for him to lunge again, but he doesn’t. Instead, he howls, and then starts to sing:

“I never realized how beautiful, your eyes. Open up for me, love. Let me see you smile, love.”

The words are strange to me, but the melody seems familiar. I can’t place it, but it doesn’t matter, because now I’ve remembered I’m dreaming. He can’t hurt me, not really. It’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s real and what isn’t. I sit cross-legged on the desk and resign myself to listen to the wolf’s rather ridiculous song.

CHAPTER SIX

“Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience." –Sigmund Freud

Sam had always been a fan of Thursdays. They had all the anticipation of a weekend, without the performance anxiety of Fridays or the inevitable letdown of Sundays. Thursdays were for people who loved the feeling of accomplishment that came from a busy work week, and yearned more for the promise of freedom than they did for freedom itself.

This Thursday was starting to make Sam wish he was more of a Friday person. Or better yet, a Saturday person. Basically, he wanted to be the kind of person who could bury his head in the sand all weekend and pretend that Monday would never come again.

Brady, for example, was definitely a Friday person.

“Five-o-clock, bee-yatch! Only one hour left before we can get our drink on!”

Was it five already? Sam felt suddenly older. In this place, an hour could feel like a lifetime. Interns seldom had the luxury of a five day work week. Their typical week was more like twelve Mondays in a row, followed by a single, action-packed Friday. Then the cycle would repeat.

“Oh yes, it’s ladies’ night…and I’m feeling right. Oh yes, it’s ladies’ night, oh what a night!”

Shrugging off his colleague’s incessant call to bacchanal, Sam bent even lower over the gigantic stack of charts he was updating. For most people, the nurses’ station counter was chest or elbow high. But for him, it barely cleared his waist. He was going to develop a hunch back if he did this for much longer.

“Can’t tonight. I’m exhausted.”

“Huh-what!?” Brady asked, in his best Lil Jon voice.

“Hey!” Nurse Bouchard barked, from her spot behind the desk. “Will you two monkeys keep it down? It’s visiting hours.”

“Sorry,” Sam told her, glaring at Brady. Getting blamed for Brady’s irresponsible behavior was par for the course, as far as the day was concerned. Not for the first time, he wondered how it was possible for a person to simultaneously be your best friend and the person you most wanted to witness getting hit by a bus. Maybe he should see a psychiatrist, before his annoyance-fueled fantasies progressed to something more serious.

After signing his name to what felt like the five-hundredth chart, Sam put his finished stack into the end-of-shift box and tucked the last chart under his arm. They’d had three codes and one unplugging, and Sam had personally done the paperwork to admit seventeen new patients to various departments in the hospital. On a normal day, the average was usually closer to ten. Sometime after three, he started to notice a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since Brady’s meager offering of donuts that morning. He also realized he hadn’t been in to see Sleeping Beauty since first rounds.

Now that he’d finally caught up on his charting—for the most part—it was time to remedy those issues, in order of urgency. First, he stopped by the vending machine and got a power bar and a sugary sports drink. Then, he made his way to room 714.

When he got there, Sam wasn’t surprised to find Viola’s parents in the room. They’d been to visit her nearly every day since the crash, and each time they brought a whole crap-load of stuff with them—stuff their daughter didn’t actually need. Designer satin pajamas, endless vases full of pink and white roses, bottles of sparkling water that only the staff ended up drinking, and a diamond watch that her father insisted had to be left on Viola’s wrist at all times.

As he hovered just outside the doorway, debating with himself on whether or not to go in and disturb the family’s privacy, Viola’s father—who was standing near the doorway, talking on the phone—beckoned to him.

Pasting on a friendly yet professional smile, Sam stepped into the room. Immediately, he felt like he’d left the hospital and entered a fairy tale. The smell of roses was so strong, it overwhelmed him. Music played softly in the background as Viola’s petite, blonde mother bent over the bed, carefully painting her daughter’s nails—what else?—pink.

Sam thought back to the first time he’d ever seen Viola, and nope, he couldn’t remember her wearing a single scrap of that color. Even her toenails had been painted darkly, a shimmering, oily black. And yes, he even remembered her toenails. Dear God, he thought. Obsessive much?

Her mother, on the other hand, seemed to have been hosed down in various shades of pastel. Which wouldn’t have seemed weird, except that it was February. In New York.

 “Good evening, Mrs. Bellerose,” Sam said, because Mr. Bellerose was still on the phone.

Instead of answering, Mrs. Bellerose gave a tiny nod in his direction and then went back to what she’d been doing. He glanced at Viola, as if maybe she could interpret the gesture for him. Then again, somehow Sam got the feeling that the two women didn’t really see eye to eye, even when Viola was awake. Though both women were very pretty and very richly dressed, they didn’t appear to have much in common other than obvious genetic traits like upper lip shape and attached ear lobes. Things a normal, non-biology geek probably wouldn’t even notice.

“No, Jacques,” Viola’s father was saying. “I don’t think the Good Foods contract is more pressing than this. There is nothing more pressing than family.”

Mr. Bellerose smiled apologetically, holding up one finger in the universal sign for ‘hang on a sec.’ Though, with the man’s thick French accent, it was impossible not to imagine him saying ‘
Garcon
! Another plate of baguettes,
s’il vous plaît
.” Oh, crap. Was that racist? Sam glanced down at the chart he was holding and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. He hoped he wasn’t some kind of closet non-American racist. That would majorly suck.

“I don’t care what you tell them—” Mr. Bellerose turned toward the window, speaking in a clipped tone that made his accent sound extremely frightening. “Just handle it until we get back to Seneca Lake. No, I don’t know when. Just take care of it, Jacques. Isn’t that what I pay you for?”

With that he hung up, turning to look at Sam with a genuine, but tired looking smile.

“I am very sorry about that,” he said, with a shrug. “Business. It is no respecter of privacy or tragedy, as I’m sure you yourself are aware.”

“It’s no problem,” Sam said, even as he wondered what about his white coat and scrubs made Mr. Bellerose think he knew anything about the wine business. “I have your daughter’s lab results here. Has someone spoken to you about them yet?”

“Not as yet,” Mr. Bellerose said, gesturing for Sam to join him out in the hallway, as if this was his house and Sam was nothing more than an uninvited guest. “But I would be honored if you would enlighten me.”

Ah, Sam realized suddenly. This must be where Viola got her cooler-than-thou attitude.

“Okay, well, uh,” he glanced back at Mrs. Bellerose, but she didn’t seem even slightly interested in the results, so he followed Mr. Bellerose into the hall and shut the door behind him. “Yeah, I can definitely do that.”

“I’m sorry,” Viola’s father said again, gesturing to the closed door. “My wife is… of a very fragile disposition, and that is during the best of times. I would prefer not to burden her with the details of our daughter’s illness.”

Illness? Sam raised his eyebrows slightly. He almost made it sound like Viola had brought this on herself. But then, it wasn’t his place to judge their family dynamic. His job was simple: to keep Viola alive until she was strong enough to fend for herself. Once she was better, he had no doubt that she’d set everyone straight about what had happened that night.

“I understand,” Sam said. “And uh,” he cleared his throat, “speaking of details….”

He looked down at the chart, which was frustratingly lacking in background information. Because Viola was what the hospital considered a ‘VIP patient,’ access to her long-term medical records had been restricted to only the surgeon, the attending physician, and her primary caregiver—some fancy private practice guy from upstate who had yet to make an appearance, except to consult with Chakrabarti by phone. Sam had a feeling this guy was the kind of doctor with champagne and free massages in the waiting room.

“I was wondering if you could tell me…was this the first time Viola had an adverse reaction to anesthesia?”

Sam avoided making eye-contact as he asked the question. His poker face was for crap, always had been. And if Chakrabarti found out that he’d looked into the patient’s history without permission, there’d be hell to pay. But if this wasn’t Viola’s first surgery, then maybe it hadn’t been her first reaction. Maybe it was the surgeon who had missed something, instead of Sam.

It was a short-lived hope, which fizzled and died almost immediately.

“I’m not certain,” Mr. Bellerose said, eyeing Sam speculatively. “Surely, the information you need would be located in my daughter’s file?”

“Oh, of course,” Sam bit down on an expletive of disappointment. “I should’ve thought of that.”

The look of interest Mr. Bellerose was giving him sharpened into something much more dangerous.

“I do not think I remember us being introduced,” he said. “What is your name, Dr.…?”

Oh, shit. No. Worse than shit, Sam thought. Fuck. Definitely fuck.

“Philips,” he said. “Sam Philips. I’m one of the interns helping Dr. Chakrabarti on your daughter’s case.”

“Intern? That is something like a doctor in training, yes?”

“Yes.” But not for much longer, Sam added silently. Oh, he was so getting kicked off the case. What in the pluperfect hell had possessed him to ask Viola’s scary, French multi-millionaire father for private information that would do nothing but absolve Sam’s own guilty conscience? He was worse than selfish. He was scum. Selfish, socially awkward scum.

“Where did you attend medical school?”

The question caught Sam off guard.

“Duke,” he said. “That is, Duke University Medical school. I did my undergrad at Syracuse.”

Mr. Bellerose seemed to relax slightly. “I know of Duke. It is a good school. The Blue Devils are a good team.”

Sam smiled. “Yes they are, sir.”

“I think that is enough small talk for now, Sam,” he said, smiling back. “The results?”

“Of course, absolutely.” Sam had gone over them several times already, but he scanned them again just to be thorough. He’d already crossed the line once, and if Mr. Bellerose decided to report him to Chakrabarti, he wanted it said that at least he got the science right. “Okay, so the CBC looks good—that’s the basic blood test, to screen for signs of infection, anemia, that sort of thing,” he translated the medical jargon into basic terms, waiting for Mr. Bellerose to nod before he went on. “ABG—which checks the level of oxygen in Viola’s blood—is still a little bit low, so we’re going to increase the flow of oxygen through her nasal tubing.”

“But it is a good sign that she has been breathing by herself, no?”

“It’s a great sign, Mr. Bellerose,” Sam told him. “It means the areas of her brain that are responsible for involuntary activity—things like breathing and heart rate—are still intact.”

“Good,” Mr. Bellerose exhaled slowly. “That is good. Thank you for explaining these things to me, Sam. Not many of the hordes of doctors we’ve seen over the past week have taken the trouble to do so.”

For a brief second, Sam could’ve sworn he glimpsed a tired and scared father behind the calm, stuck up façade. But then he blinked, and the wine tycoon was back. He straightened his cuff links and turned toward Viola’s room. “If that is all for now, I should go back inside.”

“Uh, yes,” Sam teetered in place, unsure how to deal with the fact that he’d just been dismissed by a guy who wore cuff links un-ironically in the middle of the day. “That’s all for now.”

As the door swung shut behind him, Sam heard Mr. Bellerose say, “No, LeAnn, leave her alone, you silly woman. She doesn’t need to be listening to that drivel. Dr. Philips said her brain is still intact. We should keep it intact.”

Eyebrows raised, he backed up a few steps, before turning and retreating down the hallway. The power bar was burning a hole in his coat pocket, and he was about five minutes from hallucinating cartoon birds and stars around his coworkers’ heads. That, he told himself, must have been why he’d overstepped his position. Not because he was desperate, but because he was on the verge of starvation. Starving people were known to do some crazy things.

Cracking open his now lukewarm sports beverage, Sam dropped Viola’s chart back at the nurse’s station and made his way to the locker room. It was just after six, and he knew Brady would be lying in wait to drag him out to some bar. If he could change before Brady got there, he might be able to escape being dragged into a last-minute tour of the city’s loudest dive bars.