A Full House
Annie’s heart turned over. She felt breathless and turned away, wandering to the cherry highboy beside the fireplace. She trailed her fingers across the satiny finish of the old heirloom and finished her coffee. “Do you want to go?” she asked.
“I miss Dad,” she said simply.
Annie nodded. The highboy was a beautiful piece, her great-grandmother’s. It had begun its life in Cotswold, had been shipped to Australia for two generation’s worth of family history and then had come to America when Annie had married. One day it would be Sally’s. Annie pictured her mother’s kind and patient face, so very far away from her now, and her eyes stung. “Someday you’ll have children of your own,” she said softly, turning to face her daughter. “And that, young lady, will be my revenge. Now go to bed.”
Annie should have returned to work but she didn’t. She phoned Matt, who told her not to bother. Everything was quiet at the hospital and only one hour remained of her shift. “Remember, you owe me that camping trip,” he reminded her before hanging up. She sat out on the balcony and sipped another cup of coffee while Ana Lise worked through her guilt in the kitchen by baking. She brought Annie a big piece of apple strudel, fresh from the oven, and hovered over her.
“I am so sorry about all of this, madam,” she said. Ana Lise had never called her “madam” before and it startled Annie, who raised her eyebrows at her housekeeper in surprise.
“Oh, Ana Lise. Go back to bed. It’s not your fault. But from now on I think we should put a lockout on the dumbwaiter after 6:00 p.m.”
“Ja, ja.” Ana Lise nodded vigorously, relieved. “I think so, too.”
Annie watched the sun rise over the city, heard the burgeoning swell of noise gather faintly and then grow until the peace was gone, obliterated by swarms of cars, buses, trucks and people. Millions of people, all going somewhere, doing something. Alive and living for the moment…
She sighed. The camping trip with Matt suddenly appealed very strongly. She was a country girl at heart, having grown up on a big sheep station that her father managed. Her father had been a great man and a great leader of men. Quite a shock it had been to a lot of people when he had died in the Outback soon after Annie’s seventeenth birthday. He hadn’t come in one day from riding the fence line, that endless wire fence erected to deter the dingoes, the wild dogs of Australia, from the sheep. They had sent search parties out that night and more the following morning. More than a hundred men had searched for three days, but he was dead when they found him, he and his horse, both.
They found the horse first, just three miles from the fence line. Broken leg. Shot. Searchers reconstructed the scenario. The horse had spooked and thrown John Gorley, then bolted three miles before the fall that fractured its cannon bone. Gorley had followed the horse, eventually finding and destroying it. He had been hurt himself in the fall, worse than he would probably have admitted, because John Gorley was not a man to admit to any sort of weakness.
Knowing where he was, he’d cut due south to intersect the fence line near the Boranga station, but had died two miles shy of his destination. The autopsy had proved his grit. Big John Gorley had walked over fifteen miles in two days of relentless heat with no food, one pint of water, a broken arm, six broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.
The Outback had killed her father, yet it had nurtured him, too. Annie had not forgotten the harsh beauty of it, the smell and the taste and the feel and the sound of it. She was born in Australia and the land of her birth was in her blood. Sally had never seen the land down under, nor had she expressed any desire to, but that might change as she matured and became more curious about her roots. About her grandmother who lived in Melbourne now and her uncles, two of whom worked at Boranga and the third who had stayed on at Dad’s station.
“Daddy,” Annie said softly, marveling at how unreal his death still seemed, how impossibly remote the idea that she would never see him again or hear his deep, humor-filled voice or feel the intense glow of pride his words of praise could evoke in her.
Sally said she missed her father, and why wouldn’t she? Though he called her once a week, she rarely saw him. Perhaps she should spend some time with him this summer. It would be good for the both of them to get to know each other better, and it would get Sally away from those awful kids. That alone was enough to make Annie reconsider Ryan’s proposal.
CHAPTER TWO
“YOU PROMISED ME, Annie,” Matt reminded her two weeks later to the day. They were standing to one side of the door to X-ray. “I trust you’ve been packing your gear.”
Annie sighed. “I know I promised, but I can’t go right away, Matt,” she said. “Sally’s hearing is first thing Monday morning and…” She shook her head, still unable to believe she was talking about her child. “I can’t just up and leave her, Matt. I was thinking that maybe we should wait until she goes to visit her father, and even then I may not be able to get a whole week off. I’ll ask, but there’s only an outside chance. You know how Edelstein is. He hates for anyone to have a life apart from the hospital.” She gazed at Matt, then reached for his arm and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. “Come on, Matt. I said I’d go, I just can’t promise you an entire week, that’s all. We’ll have to make the best of what we can get, and in the meantime, I’ll go to court with Sally.” An unexpected laugh erupted before she could quell it.
“I don’t know how you can find the situation funny.”
“It’s not funny at all. It just sounds so strange to my ears… It’s awful, it really is…” She sighed wearily and shook her head. “My daughter would never smoke pot or hang out with a seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Tom or get arrested for possession of an illegal substance. Know what I mean?”
“I hope she’s learned her lesson.”
“Me, too. She’s been going to these special meetings on Tuesday nights that are guaranteed to put her on the straight and narrow and she seems to be taking it very seriously, which is good because I’m having a hard time with all this stuff. Court hearings, for heaven’s sake. All I can picture is Sally being hauled away in handcuffs by that scruffy cop, Lieutenant Macpherson. He could easily pass for a derelict. I understand it’s part of his job to look like the very people he’s trying to arrest, but still…”
“I take it he’s not one of your favorites?” Matt said sympathetically.
“He arrested my daughter, didn’t he?” Annie shot over her shoulder as she pushed through the doors to X-ray.
ANNIE’S SATURDAY NIGHT in ER began with a blistering flurry of activity that only intensified as the early hours of the morning brought a rising tide of traumatic injuries. By 3:00 a.m. she was up to her elbows in other people’s crises, which in a way was a blessing because she had no time to dwell on the Monday morning hearing. She was actually beginning to look forward to the camping trip with Matt, and also beginning to entertain the notion of getting out of the city once and for all. Perhaps it was time for that long-yearned-for return to the country, to a quiet, backwater place where Sally could make new friends and discover sunshine and fresh air.
“Dr. Crawford?” Rob Bellows, a surgical resident, entered the treatment room and spoke at her elbow. “I’ll take over for you here. We’ve got another incoming. Gunshot wound to the chest, EMT’s report it’s pretty dicey.”
“They’re all pretty dicey,” Annie said wearily, stepping back from the table where the victim of a car accident, young and drunk, submitted docilely to having a gash on his forehead stitched. She stripped off her gloves and threw them in the waste container as she walked out. She could already hear the muted sound of the ambulance siren as it swung into the emergency entrance. Then the siren cut off and she could picture the ambulance backing up to the door. She stopped at the nurse’s station and grabbed a fast drink of cool spring water and then a second as the emergency doors automatically opened and they wheeled the next patient in.
“Round three,” Annie muttered under her breath as the running footsteps squeaked toward her down the polished floor. She fell into step beside the stretcher, visibly assessing the victim. The EMTs were brisk, professional and slightly out of breath. “Had a hell of a time with this one…cops said it could be a .38 caliber bullet…entry wound is on his lower left chest, no exit wound, the patient’s in shock, definitely a tension pnuemo, we nearly lost him on the way in…”
There was a generous amount of blood on the victim, but Annie guessed from the EMT’s brief rundown that most of the hemorrhaging was internal and that a lung had collapsed. They wheeled him, half running, into the ER, where the skilled team quickly began cutting away the injured man’s clothing, allowing Annie to make a rapid but careful examination. A scene that might have paralyzed a less experienced physician, she dealt with perfunctorily and with minimal talk. Within minutes she had established an airway and positioned a chest tube between his ribs, while at the same time the nurses, at her direction, placed two IVs in his arms and began infusing a bag of Ringer’s solution as fast as possible. While Annie inserted a nasogastric tube to decompress the stomach, the nurses drew blood samples, placed a catheter and activated electronic monitors. All of their actions were so well orchestrated that scarcely five minutes had passed since the patient had been wheeled into ER.
Annie guided a large bore needle between the ribs just beneath the collarbone and, just as she had expected, pressurized air hissed out. “Okay, people,” she said, “this one goes straight into OR. There’s some serious abdominal bleeding going on, a collapsed lung and God only knows what else. We have a definite chest wound, but this guy’s stomach is swelling up like a hot-air balloon. I think that bullet did some bouncing around inside there.”
She picked up the phone and dialed OR. “Hey, Hanley, we’re coming down with a gunshot wound to the left chest, in shock, definitely looks like multiple organ trauma.” As she spoke, she glanced at the victim’s face. There was something familiar about the guy. She drew in a deep breath as she heard Hanley say something about a kid with a hot appendix. “Bump him,” she snapped. “This one can’t wait.”
She hung up the phone. “Who is this guy?” she asked the surgical resident, who shook his head and shrugged, but the nurse picked up the chart left behind by the EMTs.
“Macpherson,” the nurse said, scanning it quickly. “Lieutenant Jake Macpherson.” Her eyebrows raised in surprise, and she glanced at Annie. “He’s a cop.”
“Okay, let’s rock and roll, folks,” Annie said, her heart rate shifting into high gear as adrenaline surged through her. “He’s going to be a dead cop if we don’t hustle.”
FOR BREAKFAST on Sunday morning Sally always had cereal and toast and a big glass of orange juice. Her mother usually was home by 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. and Ana Lise would cook the traditional Sunday-morning breakfast of ham and eggs, but Sally was happy with her bowl of cereal. She was addicted to Cheerios. If there was a banana to slice onto it she was in heaven—except this morning. She had her Cheerios and an entire banana sliced atop, but she was about as far from heaven as she could get. She sat in the breakfast nook and watched Ana Lise bustle around the gleaming kitchen, taking a pan of pastries from the oven.
“You will have a pastry then, ja?” she asked over her shoulder.
Sally shook her head.
“No thanks. I’m not hungry.”
Ana Lise set the pan on the counter and turned, frowning. “You would not like a pastry with butter spread over it? A cinnamon bun warm from the oven? Are you ill, then?”
Sally used the tip of her spoon to submerge the slices of banana one by one. She shook her head again. “I’m too nervous to eat,” she confided miserably. “Tomorrow’s my hearing…”
“Ja, but that is tomorrow. This is today. You must eat.”
“Ana Lise, what if they put me in jail?”
“They will not put you in jail. You are only a child.”
“What if they send me to juvenile hall?”
Ana Lise shook her head in exasperation. “We have talked of this before. They will not send you to juvenile hall.”
“Mom might send me to private school. She might make me move away.”
“That would never happen,” Ana Lise said, hands on her sturdy hips. “You eat your cereal.”
“Do you think she’ll let me visit my dad this summer?”
Ana Lise turned back to her tasks with a shake of her head. “I am not paid to tell your fortune, young lady. Eat your breakfast. Your mother will be home soon and you can ask her yourself.”
But Annie did not get home until nearly noontime, and Ana Lise had switched from breakfast mode to dinner mode, it being a Sunday. A roast was baking in the oven and she was verbally contemplating a Yorkshire pudding when Annie slumped wearily into the apartment. She dropped into a kitchen chair with a soft moan. “What a night,” she said. “And what a morning.”
“A hard one, ja?” Ana Lise said sympathetically, pouring a cup of coffee and setting it, strong and black, in front of Annie.
“Hard? Oh, Ana Lise.” Annie let her head fall back and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Where’s Sally?”
“In her room listening to her music. She’s worried about tomorrow. About the hearing. She didn’t eat any breakfast and she says she is too nervous to eat lunch.”
They heard the door to Sally’s room open and her light, quick footsteps in the hall. “Mom? I thought I heard your voice.” Sally paused in the kitchen doorway, her face mirroring her mother’s, though for entirely different reasons. “Mom, I’m so nervous about tomorrow that I feel sick.”
Annie opened her eyes and inhaled another deep breath, releasing it somewhere between a sigh and a moan. “There isn’t going to be a hearing tomorrow, Sally,” she said. She raised and rotated her shoulders to ease a sudden muscle cramp. There was nothing like a long stint in surgery to trigger painful muscle spasms. “Your arresting officer was shot last night. I spent most of the night and the better part of this morning trying to keep him alive.”
Sally’s face was blank. For a moment she said nothing, just stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at her mother. “Is he…dead?” she finally blurted.
Annie raised her eyebrows. “A fine question to ask. Don’t you have any faith in your mother’s skills?”
Sally slumped against the doorjamb. “Then…he’s still going to testify against me in court?”
“Not tomorrow, he isn’t,” Annie said flatly. She picked up her coffee cup and took a sip. “I spoke to the big cheese at the station house. He was at the hospital, along with half a hundred other police officers. He told me the hearing would be rescheduled when Lieutenant Macpherson’s health permits. So, sweet little best friend of mine, it would seem that you have been granted a temporary reprieve.”
Sally’s eyes fixed gravely on her mother’s face. “For how long?”
Annie took another sip of coffee. “He’s young and strong. I expect an uncomplicated recovery. Let’s say three weeks, four at the outside. By then he’ll be able to sit in a courtroom and tell the whole world how you were out gallivanting around in the middle of the night with a bunch of pot-smoking juvenile delinquents.”
“But I wasn’t smoking pot…”
“Don’t expect much sympathy from me right now, young lady. I’m dead tired.”
Ana Lise refilled Annie’s coffee cup. “What you need right now is a long soak in a hot bath, ja? I know how that helps you after you’ve spent a long time in surgery. I will get it ready.”
Annie smiled wearily at her housekeeper. “That sounds lovely. I’ll take you up on that offer.”
Half an hour later she was immersed to her chin in deliciously hot water and lavender oil. Her eyes were blissfully closed and she was nearly asleep, her mind drifting toward that quiet, peaceful place where the wind blew all the clouds away and the horses ran free, when Ana Lise tapped on the bathroom door.
“A call for you, from the hospital,” she called apologetically.
Annie moaned. “Take a message.”
“He says it is an emergency.”
“Okay,” Annie said. The bathroom door opened and Ana Lise’s arm stretched around with the cordless phone in her hand. Annie took it. “Thank you,” she said as the door closed. “Yes?” she said into the phone. It was Matt.
“I’m sorry to call you, Annie, I know you just left here, but your patient, Macpherson, went into cardiac arrest about ten minutes ago. We jump-started him, but he’s not too stable. Blood pressure’s 90/70.”
Annie was rising out of the tub even as Matt spoke. “Where’s Palazola?” she asked tersely. “Isn’t he senior surgeon on call?”
“He’s in OR with a little boy who was run over by a bus.”
“What about Macpherson’s heart sounds? Are they muffled?”
“Yes.”
“Dammit! He was fine when I left. Okay, I’m on my way. We’ll need to aspirate the blood around the heart. Can you do it?”
“I can try.” Matt’s voice mirrored his uncertainty. “How soon can you be here?”
“Ten minutes.”
“I’d rather wait for you…”
“If you have to do it, Matt, do it,” Annie said, throwing the phone onto the vanity and reaching for a towel. “Ana Lise, call my driving service!” she shouted out the bathroom door. Fifteen minutes later, hair still dripping, she was running down the hallway to the Intensive Care Unit. Matt was inside the cubicle watching the monitors and two nurses were with him. Annie listened to Macpherson’s heart and noted the distention of his neck veins. “People, he should already be in the OR,” she snapped, her nerves on edge. “I trust you’ve cleared it?”
Matt’s face flushed. “We’re good to go.”
Aspirating the blood from around the heart was not a long procedure, but Annie blamed herself for not anticipating the complication. She had checked for cardiac tamponade several times since Macpherson had been admitted, both before, during and after the surgery. At no time did she discern a problem. Still… She exited the OR for the second time that day in a haze of exhaustion, stripping off her gloves and mask and tossing them into the disposal unit.
“I’m sorry, Annie,” Matt said, hurrying out behind her. “I should’ve spotted the warning signs sooner.”
“I shouldn’t have left,” Annie said. “I’ll check on him when they bring him into recovery. If anything changes, I’ll be in the lounge.”
“Annie.” She stopped and turned. Matt was holding his arms out at his sides in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry I messed up.”
Annie shook her head wearily. “Just come and get me if there’s any deterioration in his condition. He can’t die on me, Matt. That just can’t happen. They’d think I did something deliberately so he couldn’t testify against my daughter.”
“No one would ever think that.”
Annie didn’t answer.
“Get some rest. If there’s the slightest change in his condition, I’ll wake you.”
But in spite of her exhaustion, Annie couldn’t sleep. The hospital, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was bustling with life. Intercoms squawked nonstop, carts rattled, rubber-soled shoes squeaked, voices of patients, staff and visitors mingled in the corridors. She lay on the couch in the doctor’s lounge, her forearm shielding her eyes, and tried to relax. Her stomach cramped painfully, reminding her she hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, yet she wasn’t hungry.
She sat up and yawned. Within minutes she was in recovery, checking on Macpherson. His vital signs were good. She pulled a chair up beside his bed and sat. Matt came in quietly to adjust the IVs and returned moments later with a fresh, hot cup of coffee and a magazine for Annie. She took both with a grateful smile. The coffee was good and the magazine was a copy of Down East, a monthly publication full of beautiful pictures and articles about coastal Maine.
She sipped the coffee and turned the pages of the magazine, finding herself drawn to the evocative images of a world far removed from big-city life. How long she sat there, immersed in the mystique of rocky, timbered coastline, saltwater farms and quaint harbors filled with sturdy lobster boats, she didn’t know. But her coffee was cold and her yawns had become more frequent when a man’s voice said, “Beautiful place.”
She looked up, startled to see that Macpherson had awakened. She blinked, set aside the magazine and the coffee. She checked his vital signs, relieved that they were all as good as could be expected. The cadence of his heartbeat remained clear and strong.
“My grandparents used to have a camp in Maine,” he said as she straightened, easing a cramp in the small of her back.
“Don’t talk, Lieutenant. You’re in recovery and you’re doing just fine, but you need to keep quiet.”
She accompanied the orderlies when they rolled Macpherson back to ICU and saw that he was hooked up into the myriad of monitors again. “The police are everywhere,” she told him as she made a few notes on his chart. “The waiting room is jammed full of them.” She thought it strange that there was no significant other wringing her hands among all the badges. Surely there was a woman in his life? And what about his parents? Brothers and sisters?
“My parents sold the camp when my grandparents died,” he said, still groggy from the effects of the anesthesia. “Beautiful log cabin…”
“Lieutenant Macpherson?” Annie bent over him. “Is there anyone I can call for you? Family members, close friends?”
“Those guys in the waiting room,” he said. “Only family I have.”
“I see. Well, you won’t be able to have any visitors today. Tomorrow, perhaps.” Annie paused. “And, Lieutenant, this might not be the best time to apologize, but I’m sorry I was so rude to you the night you arrested my daughter.”
A vague frown furrowed his brow at her words, then cleared. “Bear clawed the door once, trying to get in. Big bear.”
Annie sighed. He was still pretty dopey. “Lieutenant, no more talking. I’ve taped the call button right beside your hand. Can you feel it? Good. If you need anything at all, just push that button. The nurses will keep a close eye on you, and Dr. Brink will be checking in regularly. I’ll be nearby, just down the hall.” Annie took one last critical look at Macpherson before turning to leave, but his voice stopped her as she reached the door.
“The cabin was on a pretty little pond…”
“Lieutenant, please try to get some rest.”
She turned away once again, and once again his voice halted her in her tracks. “Don’t forget your magazine, Doc,” he said. When she left Intensive Care Unit, the glossy periodical was tucked beneath her arm.
JAKE MACPHERSON was moved into a private room after three days in ICU. Time resumed its old dimensions and began to weigh heavily upon him. His visitors came and went in a steady stream, men and women from the department, the obligatory brotherhood of the badge. Some of them were friends, others he barely recognized, more than a few he didn’t know at all. All of them came bearing get-well wishes and awkward demeanors. None of them enjoyed being in hospitals because they feared that one day, they, too, might wind up in an adjustable hospital bed with bloody tubes bristling from their bodies.
Or worse, in the hospital’s morgue.
The one bright spot that moved in and out of his life was Dr. Annie Crawford, but he saw her less and less frequently as his condition improved and the regular doctors took over. And so he spent the long hours of the endless days replaying the sequence of events that had landed him in this hospital bed. Damning himself, over and over, for his carelessness. Berating himself for not listening to the skinny hooker when she’d said to Joey Mendoza, little drug runner extraordinaire, “I won’t let him arrest you, Joey, I’ll shoot him first.” A hollow threat. Surely she didn’t have a gun, and even if she did, no one would shoot a cop for Joey Mendoza.