To Save This Child

He narrowed his gaze at her. “I can either rebuild people’s faces or keep myself all purty. Take your pick.” He gave her an engaging grin as he thrust out the other hand in a gimme gesture. “Are you gonna let me see those charts before I head back down to the O.R.?”

Kathy handed him the charts. “There’s a bunch.”

“Excellent. Now maybe we can pay the light bill.”

She eyed Dr. Bridges’s backside as he sauntered down the hallway, already absorbed in the day’s cases as he walked. Pay the light bill. Because he worked like one possessed, the man was making money hand over fist. But money wasn’t his motivation.

Kathy Martinez was one of the few people who knew the truth about The Wolf. Before he’d even arrived at Integris, her sister from Texas had told her all about the new doctor, about his sad history down in Dallas. It had been on TV, her sister said, had made all the papers, back when it happened.

“Oh.” The doctor stopped and tossed a killer smile over his broad shoulder. “Could you please get me a cup of coffee?”

When she scowled at him, he said, “Pretty please, Mother Martinez?” and blew her a kiss.

The Mother Martinez bit didn’t bother her. She was a mother, the uber-mother, and he gave everybody nicknames. But beneath the teasing, Jason Bridges exhibited more respect for and far more trust in his staff than any other doctor she’d ever worked for. And even if Kathy was old enough to be his mother, that didn’t stop her and every other female in Dr. Bridges’s orbit from appreciating his astonishing male beauty. It was sad, really, and a major waste that such a handsome specimen of a male remained so stubbornly alone.

What that young man needed was a good wife.

But Kathy suspected that the same thing that made him so driven kept him alone, too. That his past, in fact, was the cause of his loneliness.

She went into the break room and filled a foam cup with the coffee she’d put on to drip when she arrived at seven o’clock. While she stirred in the right amount of sugar, she heard some of the other staff calling out as they came in the back door. She looked at her watch. Seven-fourteen. They were getting a jump start on the day. Well, who could blame them? The week before the doctor left for Mexico was always a crazy one.

“Is Dr. Bridges here?” his scrub nurse Ruth asked as she swept into the break room.

“Back in his lair, getting ready to rev up on coffee.” Kathy held the cup aloft. “Pulled an all-nighter. No rest for the wicked today.” She headed down the hall. She hated to tell the doctor her bad news right before he went into a difficult surgery, but the sooner, the better.

She opened the door to his office. He was standing behind his desk, threading his long arms into a stiffly pressed lab coat with his name stitched above the pocket. A grudging concession to her standards, she supposed. But the crisp white garment only accentuated his bronzed skin and made his looks seem all the more rugged by contrast.

“Now do I look doctorly enough?” he taunted.

“No. Is this car accident case going to interfere with the trip to Mexico?” She handed him the coffee.

He took a sip before answering. “Hope not. I think Mike can cover for me.”

He sipped the coffee again with a concerned frown. “My main worry is the kid’s maxilla. Both sides were affected, and there was a lot of swelling before I got to her. I couldn’t really tell what she was supposed to look like. May end up with a redo. I’ll decide once I see her ‘before’ pictures. The mother’s bringing them this morning.”

Kathy nodded and stepped to the window where the morning sun was winking up over the matching Doctors’ Tower to the east. She closed her eyes against the brilliance. Their work could be so heartbreaking, but they seldom allowed themselves the luxury of dwelling on their patients’ grief. Bridges kept his team on an even keel with his own resolve, with his cool decision-making style, with his constant jokes. But it proved a delicate balancing act. Because the more his reputation spread, the more challenging the cases he attracted. His skills just kept growing, and he kept pushing the envelope while the staff scrambled to keep up. He decided what had to be done and then they all did it. They went to the wall for their patients, nothing held back, nothing spared in the fight against their enemies—disfigurement, deformity, pain.

When he had relocated to Oklahoma City three years ago, Jason Bridges had assembled an experienced, top-notch staff. He paid them well and expected them to give their jobs their utmost, just as he did. Every day they threw themselves into the fray, warriors in a never-ending battle.

But no one seemed to mind the long hours and the exhausting work. None of them had ever been involved in a practice this exciting, this dedicated. Dr. Bridges was truly a young miracle-worker, an amazing leader. He had already treated patients from a four-state area. Their work made them all fiercely proud.

And then there was this yearly mission to Mexico. The ultimate payoff—three weeks working down in the remote state of Chiapas. They had started out with the Doctors Without Borders organization, but now Jason had turned renegade, flying his own plane in, circumventing customs.

Oh, yes. Working for Dr. Jason Bridges was exciting, to say the least.

Mexico had become their ultimate proving ground, their yearly high. Every spring Jason Bridges closed his office for three weeks and headed south to continue his humanitarian work. He was welcomed with open arms by the indigenous people in the isolated mountains and jungles.

The back-to-back surgeries in the horrible conditions—dust, heat, mosquitoes, flies—always seemed to go on without end, but when their three weeks were up, nobody ever seemed to want to leave. They’d all become as hooked on the experience as the doctor himself. Every year Bridges took along his scrub nurse, Ruth Nichols. Every year he took Kathy. The rest of his staff rotated, but Kathy and Ruth were indispensable, Kathy because she was the only one in the office who spoke Mexican Spanish fluently. She’d learned it from her husband, a gentle Hispanic from south Texas.

Damn. She was going to hate missing out on the Mexico excursion this year. She so hated to tell Dr. Bridges the bad news.

He had seated himself at his desk, sipping coffee and pouring over the charts with a concentration that seemed totally undimmed by sleep deprivation. He wasn’t a wolf. He was a superhero, that’s what Kathy thought.

“Doc, I need to tell you something.” She turned from the window to face him.

He glanced up, caught her expression. “Hey. You okay?”

She sighed. “Not really.”

“Martinez?” His deep voice became quiet with concern. “What’s going on?” He stood and rounded the desk, propped his rear on it and folded his arms over his broad chest. His blue eyes fixed on her with the kind of sympathetic attention he usually reserved for his patients.

She crossed to one of the chairs facing the desk and lowered herself into it. “I’m afraid you’ll have to find a new interpreter for the Mexico trip.”

“Really? Why?” His face was intent, serious. All hints of the teasing Dr. Bridges was gone. She had to hand it too him. The man had infallible instincts.

“I’ve got to have surgery. Doc Marshall said the sooner the better.”

“Marshall? It’s a G.I. thing?”

“Gallbladder.” Kathy felt her face heat up. Fat, fifty and flatulent, that’s what she was. “He’ll do a laparoscopy, of course. No big deal. But I thought I’d better get it over with while the office is going to be shut down for three weeks. I’m sorry. I really hate to leave you without an interpreter. And on such short notice.”

“Don’t sweat it.” His gentle, compassionate tone made Kathy feel all the worse for letting him down. She wished he’d say something smart-alecky now.

But instead he crossed to her chair and squeezed her shoulder with his large, warm palm. “Your health comes first. I’ll find another interpreter. No problem.”

But it was going to be a big problem, Kathy knew. Jason Bridges understood Spanish, of course, but the Mayan cadences of the dialect spoken in the Chiapas region were tricky. Especially when the patient was a frightened peasant or when Jason started firing off fast and furious instructions to the local help. An interpreter who could put the patients at ease was critical. Finding somebody with the right combination of medical knowledge and compassion was going to be really tough. And finding somebody willing to endure the physical discomfort of the region, the daily rigors of Jason’s mission, was going to be an even bigger problem. An enormous problem. But problems didn’t stop Jason Bridges. He plowed through them like a machete through jungle growth.

Jason didn’t want to make Kathy feel any worse than she already did, but she knew he was thinking, Where? Where on earth would they find someone who could drop everything to hop on his private plane to Mexico in only one week?

“I’m sure I can find someone,” he repeated.

“I know I shouldn’t even ask,” Kathy glanced up at him, wincing. “But I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d postpone this trip? I’ll be good as new in a couple of months.”

Jason stepped around his desk to a giant topographical map of Mexico that was anchored to the wall. Just looking at the thing made him wonder what fresh atrocities Benicio Vajaras had inflicted on the people in the Tzeltal villages around San Cristóbal.

“Right here—” he tapped the area at the bottom where Mexico funneled into Central America “—we have good old Jose and his family. And their baby girl, Chiquita.”

Kathy rolled her eyes.

“Chiquita’s a sweet-tempered child,” he went on, “even if she is named after a banana. Smart, healthy in every respect. Except, of course, for that harelip splitting her face in half.”

Kathy frowned. He knew she was seeing the parade of such children they’d treated in the past three years. And others, too. Older children who had been maimed by the faceless monster named Vajaras. Parents who had been wounded in armed combat. Sometimes Jason felt like a surgeon patching up a tide of wounded on a battlefield. Only he fought this war year in, year out. Because his enemies were not only endless disease and poverty, but the cruelty and inhumanity of a ruthless overlord.

“So—” Jason focused his gaze on the map “—at this late date, Jose and Rosita have already loaded up the rental donkey and are making the arduous trip—” he ran his finger over the mountainous region on the map in a slow, twisting path north “—in the hope of getting a miracle for their baby.” He flashed a wicked smile at Kathy. “Cancel? Don’t think so.”

“Then the least I can do is help you find my replacement. I want you to know—” she glanced over at him again, this time with apology in her eyes “—that I only found out about this on Friday.”

“Maybe I can locate an interpreter in the region,” he offered. The Miami-style hotels facing the turquoise ocean in Cancún were crawling with bright young bilingual Mexicans looking for ways to improve their economic status. But even crossing the border without a Spanish-speaking cohort could be very risky, especially when you were trafficking medical supplies and drugs and sharp instruments past Mexican customs.

“Even if you can hire some bright kid to travel across the peninsula to the Chiapas clinic, if he or she doesn’t have a medical background…” Kathy left the rest unsaid—that such a person couldn’t adequately explain the strange and frightening procedures to the patients. She stood, facing her boss. “I really am sorry.”

“It can’t be helped.” Jason walked around the desk and gave her shoulder another reassuring pat. “Now get your behind back out to salt mines.” He winked at her.

“Watch it. I’ll turn you in for harassment.” Kathy quipped as she walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob. “I hate leaving you with this snafu.”

“Go drown your guilt with a cookie, Martinez.” He flapped a dismissing palm at her.

“Hold it. I do know someone who speaks fluent Spanish, who might even understand the Chiapas dialects. What was that drug rep’s name? The one who brought the cookies?”

“Kendal Collins?” He’d seen the woman around the hospital. Something about Kendal Collins had definitely snagged his interest.

“Yeah.” Seeming excited, Kathy hurried back to his desk. “Could I see that card you stuck in your pocket?”

He swiveled the desk chair to his coatrack and dug in the vest pocket of the leather jacket. “Kendal Collins speaks Spanish?”

Kathy took the card. “Yeah. Can I keep this until tomorrow? I might be too swamped to call her until this evening.”

“You’re going to ask this little drug rep to go to Mexico?”

“No. I’m offering her the open brunch slot. She’s on your waiting list. You’ll at least need to make an appearance. Maybe if we do her a favor, she’ll do us one.”

He nodded. The drug reps lined up to get his ear. There was never enough time to listen to everybody, never enough time for anything, which was why he wanted Martinez to cut the blather and split.

“It’s worth a shot. Now beat it, Martinez.”

Kathy closed the door with a quiet click and a smile.

Jason finished the charts, then sank back in his desk chair with a worried frown. He wondered how long Kathy’s gallbladder had been acting up. She never missed a day of work. Sometimes he felt guilty for pushing his staff too hard.

But he didn’t push anyone any harder than he pushed himself. It seemed the only thing that gave him any peace was healing the scarred and hurting.

He closed his eyes. He had been too young, too dumb, to save Amy. The pain had dulled with the passage of time, of course, but on some level the tragedy haunted him every day. Every scarred face was Amy’s. Every broken nose, every collapsed eye socket, every deformed palette…every burn contracture. He cut and stitched and mended as if he were trying to repair the past. It was like a giant, lifelong undo. But what had happened to Amy could never be undone. No matter how hard he worked, it would never be enough.

He placed his open palm on the stack of charts before him. Still, he could save these. And the ones in Mexico. One case at a time. One life at a time.

CHAPTER TWO

ON THE NIGHT of her thirty-first birthday, Kendal Collins sank into her giant Jetta tub until the bubbles grazed her chin. After brooding for one full, uninterrupted minute, she slowly raised a limp hand from the sudsy water and picked up one of the heart-shaped gourmet cookies she’d stashed at the side of tub. She unpeeled the cellophane wrapper, then thoughtfully nibbled the sinful treat. The second cookie went down a little faster. She washed the third down with a tall stemmed glass of very expensive merlot.

The cookies were verboten. So was the wine for that matter. Kendal always struggled with a teeny, tiny weight problem that her best friend Sarah insisted on calling “voluptuousness.” But today was her birthday, Kendal told herself. And Valentine’s Day. She reached for another cookie. She deserved a little celebration. But as she drained the last of the wine, she knew she wasn’t celebrating.

She started to cry.

At first her weeping was gentle, controlled, like a character in a soap opera trying not to wreck a mask of makeup. But before long she broke down, sobbing, hiccuping, letting the tears run down her face as she sank lower into the scented water. Finally, she had scooted so low that her lips skimmed the surface. Another inch, she thought, blubbering, and I could just go ahead and drown myself.

She rolled her eyes at such a ridiculous thought. But in this past year she had not let herself have one single pity party. And by Jove, she was going to have herself a doozie tonight.

In this past year, she had been brave, trying to show everyone that she was okay. Somehow she’d been strong this whole long, lonely year since Phillip had dumped her. Dumped was such a brutal, ugly word, but nonetheless a true one, and Kendal was all about truth these days. The ugly, unvarnished truth. She was fat. And childless. And Phillip had dumped her.

“It’s not working anymore,” Phillip had announced on the night of the fifth anniversary of their so-called relationship, which was also the date of her birthday. Which was also Valentine’s Day. Which was also this exact hateful date.

“I’m sorry. It’s just not.” His big brown eyes had looked pained as he’d said it. As if the breakup was something totally beyond his control and he was so sad, so powerless, about the whole thing.

Kendal had asked the usual questions that sputter out of the shocked and bereaved—the dumped.

What do you mean? Are you saying it’s over? Just like that? Are you moving out?

But of course he was moving out. Phillip was already packing his bags, right there in front of her eyes. And he was consulting one of his never-ending lists while he did it. He’d apparently given this considerable thought. But then, Phillip gave considerable thought to taking a poot. That’s why Kendal had never expected this kind of rash act from him.

Kendal had wanted to scream. You can’t just walk out like this! It’s our anniversary! And it’s Valentine’s Day! And it’s my thirtieth birthday, for crying out loud! Instead she forced herself to remain calm, adult, as she followed Phillip around the bedroom.

She argued that they’d built a life here. That they’d even bought this town house together.

“I’ll need my equity back,” he said flatly as he meticulously stacked underwear into his suitcase.

“You know I can’t come up with that kind of money!” Her false veneer of calm cracked as reality slammed into her. Phillip was leaving. And on the heels of that realization came another. This lifestyle they’d built had become rather expensive. “And you know I can’t come close to affording this place on my own.” The two of them had been on the rise in their careers, and Kendal had been foolish enough to assume their live-in relationship would eventually lead to marriage. Though she certainly had no intention of mentioning the M-word now, not while Phillip was packing his suitcase like some felon on the run.

Phillip carefully arranged the last of his socks in a zipper pocket. “This place was your choice, not mine. Let’s face it. We are not a good match in so many ways.”

“How did you suddenly come to that conclusion?” Kendal demanded. “Did you make another one of your damned lists or something?” Phillip was the ultimate anal-retentive pharmaceutical rep. He lived by lists. Elaborate, extensive, three-tiered lists. That was one of the things Kendal had found so comforting about him. With Phillip, nothing was ever left to chance. Once, back when their relationship had drifted into the doldrums and he couldn’t quite make up his mind to walk down the aisle, he had actually come to her with a pro and con list, suggesting that she make one of her own.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” he admitted now, “right before I made my final choice.”

“Your final choice?” Kendal echoed.

But he turned away. “Let’s face it,” he repeated. “This relationship is just not working.”

Why did he keep saying that? By the time he faced her at the front door with one last parting look of regret and one last “I’m sorry,” Kendal was reduced to mumbling, “I understand.” Though she really, really did not understand. She’d only said that because she couldn’t endure the sight of his guilt-stricken eyes for another single second.

But two weeks later, she’d wanted to scratch those big brown eyes out when she learned that dear Phillip was involved in a new relationship—one that worked, a woman who fit his list, Kendal supposed. The woman, Kendal suspected, who had been at the root of their troubles all along—Stephanie Robinson. The snotty little drug rep who pulled down stellar sales for Merrill Jackson’s chief competitor, McMayer. The woman who now had Phillip cozily moved into her condo.

Kendal had seen Phillip only once after he’d moved out, when both of them were in Dallas for a Merrill Jackson sales meeting. He was coming down an escalator at the enormous Galleria mall and there was that hated woman, glued to his side. That hideously tall stick-figure blonde had actually spotted Kendal, grabbed Phillip’s arm and steered him in the opposite direction.

Kendal had suffered a very bad moment then. Really suffered.

She’d staggered into a nearby soup shop. Sank into a booth. Blindly ordered French onion, extra cheese. Normally she would have dived into the melted topping with gusto. But that afternoon she had stared at the bowl without so much as lifting the spoon, wondering why, why, why?

All their friends, the other pharmaceutical reps at Merrill Jackson, had sided with Kendal after the breakup, labeling Phillip the L.M.B.—List-making Bastard—and labeling Stephanie Robinson an anorectic bimbo. Which seemed like a bit of an oxymoron to Kendal but she enjoyed the sound of it anyway. She tested the words out loud against the bubbles, “Anorectic bimbo.”

But her friends’ anger on her behalf hadn’t really helped. In the long run, she had ended up missing Phillip and their tidy upscale life. Missing him with a strangely hollow pain that surprised her in fresh waves every few weeks.

As the year dragged by, Kendal’s long, lonely nights seemed to only get longer, lonelier, while she watched another of her girlfriends get married and another have a baby. And when she’d heard a few months ago that Phillip and Stephanie had also gotten married, the pain had solidified into a heavy, solid thing, squeezing like a vise around her heart. Kendal thought she had succeeded in sealing away the hurt where she wouldn’t have to feel it. Except that now, on her thirty-first birthday, here she was, with her tears pouring down into her fancy bathtub.

And fast on heels of the hurt came the fear.

Kendal had to admit that she had some major fears. Her future, without Phillip, looked a little shaky, a little scary. Too scary to contemplate after a hefty glass of merlot. Thoughts of her looming mortgage payment made her wish she hadn’t wasted money on a manicure. She raised a hand out of the sudsy water and examined her perfect French nails through the haze of tears. She’d had them done in anticipation of the girls’ night out that her friends had cooked up for her birthday. Knowing this was now the worst night of her life, they’d made a big deal out of celebrating “the one-year anniversary of Kendal Collins’s emancipation.”

She supposed the whole exercise was meant to be therapeutic, and she loved her friends dearly for trying, but she found she simply didn’t have the heart for a party.

After a hard day on the road with her boss—he seemed to be insisting on spending field days in the car with Kendal more frequently—the idea of getting all fixed up and oozing false cheer in some trendy bar seemed more like drudgery than fun. She’d called Sarah and begged off. She just could not do it, she told her protesting friend. Not tonight.

The real truth was she wanted to stay home and brood about her life.

She studied her fingers, and suddenly the expensive manicure looked like a metaphor for all that was wrong with her life. It was too perfect. Perfect nails, perfect clothes, perfect car, perfect town house—her whole life looked like a magazine ad. And she hated it. Suddenly it all seemed so sterile, so false. And she hated Phillip for leaving her all alone with it. And all alone to pay for it.

Why did she persist in living a lifestyle that no longer had meaning? Because she didn’t know how to do anything else? Because she didn’t actually have anything else? And if this was all she had, how was she going to continue to pay for it?

Her district sales manager’s voice came worming up out of her memory.

“Collins?” They were in her company Taurus, on their way to a tiny hospital in western Oklahoma. What had started out as a quick road trip had been hampered by thunderstorms and road construction. Warren’s mood was as testy as the weather. To mollify him, she’d slipped him a Valentine’s cookie from her stash in the glove box. But he’d just called her by her last name. Not good.