Brass Ring (17 page)

“No.” Vanessa popped the pills into her mouth and swallowed them dry. “I mean, I doubt I’ll be able to get away from the hospital anytime soon.”

Terri was quiet for another second or two. “Are you okay, Vanessa?”

“Oh, yeah. Just battling migraines this week.” She glanced up as Lauren Schenk, one of the nurses on the unit, appeared in her open doorway.

Terri continued talking. “You poor thing,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Well, listen, give me a call when you’re feeling more like yourself, all right?”

Lauren was motioning to Vanessa that she needed to talk. It looked like something that couldn’t wait.

“I’ve got to go, Terri.” Vanessa stood up. “Thanks for taking care of everything.”

“It’s Jordan Wiley,” Lauren said before Vanessa had even set the receiver back in its cradle.

“What’s wrong?” Vanessa followed Lauren out of the office, and they walked rapidly down the long hallway of the adolescent unit.

“Not sure. He’s having trouble breathing. Chest pain. He’s in a lot of distress. Pete Aldrich thinks he’s fine. He thinks it’s anxiety.” Lauren tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, then glanced at Vanessa. “Pete doesn’t know I came to get you,” she said. “But you know Jordy. He’s not the type of kid who complains unless something’s really wrong.”

Pete Aldrich was standing in his green scrubs, leaning over the counter of the nurses’ station, writing in a chart. He looked up as she and Lauren approached, and Vanessa could almost hear him groan. He gave Lauren a look of betrayal before speaking to Vanessa.

“The kid’s fine,” he said. “Nail beds are pink, lips are pink. He’s had a normal blood study. I even did a rhythm strip.”

He turned the chart so that she could read the results of the studies. Normal, as he had said.

“I think he should have a chest X ray,” Lauren said, and Vanessa admired her courage for standing up to the resident.

Pete ran freckled hands through his red hair. “He’s got a vicious cycle going,” he said. “He has some trouble breathing, gets scared, the breathing gets worse, he gets more scared, and on and on.” His tone was singsong; he nodded his head from side to side as he spoke.

Vanessa didn’t utter a word. She closed the chart and walked across the hall to Jordy’s room, Lauren following close behind.

Jordy was hunched over his pillow, breathing rapidly, obviously pulling for air. He looked up when she walked into the room.

“Dr. Gray! Something’s wrong,” he said. “I can’t breathe.”

“Let me take a listen.” Vanessa pulled the stethoscope from the pocket of her white coat and leaned over the boy, setting the disk on his back. She was vaguely aware of Pete appearing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, but she kept her attention on Jordy. At first his breath sounds didn’t strike her as unusual for him, but as she continued to listen, she thought she detected a subtle difference between his left lung and his right. The left was not aerating well.

Above Jordy’s head, she tried to convey her concern to Lauren, who nodded. Pete Aldrich’s arms were folded across his chest and he looked smug, as if he was waiting for her to reach the same conclusion he had.

Vanessa stepped away from her patient. “Well, I can see you’re having a genuine problem here, Jordan,” she said. She didn’t want to alarm him, and so kept her suspicion to herself. After all, she might be wrong. “Let’s get an X ray and see what’s going on, all right?”

Within seconds, Lauren had procured a gurney, and she and Vanessa transferred Jordy onto it.

“Don’t make me lie down,” the boy said, panicked.

“No, sweetie, you can sit up,” Lauren said. “Here’s your pillow.”

Jordy clutched his pillow to his chest as they wheeled the gurney out into the hall, past Pete, whose pale eyebrows were knitted together above his blue eyes.

“You come with us, Dr. Aldrich,” Vanessa said as she passed him. If her hunch about this patient was right, she wanted Pete Aldrich to see what he’d missed in his cavalier dismissal of Jordy’s complaints.

Pete fell in next to her, protesting, arms flailing. “I don’t have time to humor this kid when there are—”

Vanessa stopped walking and stared at him. “You’re coming with us.” She kept her voice calm, but it was a major struggle. She walked toward the elevator without looking back.

Pete followed them into the elevator, angry smudges of red on his cheeks. He kept his eyes riveted on the door in a furious glare while Jordy gasped and wheezed on the gurney next to him. Lauren held an oxygen mask to the boy’s face and uttered words of comfort.

“We’ll be there in just a second.” Vanessa leaned close to Jordy. “And in a matter of minutes, we’ll know what’s going on.”

Jordy didn’t acknowledge her in any way. All of his effort was focused on his breathing, and she felt increasingly certain of her diagnosis. She had never seen Jordan Wiley in this sort of distress.

After the X rays had been taken, Vanessa, Lauren, Pete, and the technician stared at the image of Jordan Wiley’s lungs.

“Shit,” Pete said. The X ray clearly showed that Jordy’s left lung was 30 percent collapsed.

“Let’s go.” Vanessa pushed past him into the room where Jordy sat fighting for breath. No time to deal with Aldrich. They had a real emergency on their hands. She told Pete to call the cardiothoracic resident and have him meet them in the adolescent unit.

“We know what’s wrong, Jordan,” she said, motioning for Lauren to help her move the boy onto the gurney again. “We’re going to take you back upstairs and fix it.”

“What is it?” Jordy struggled to get the words out.

“I’ll tell you as we’re moving.”

In the elevator, Jordy started to cry. “Suffocating,” he said. A film of sweat covered his face, and his lips were now clearly blue.

Vanessa had never seen him cry. She put her arm lightly around his shoulders. “You have a pneumothorax,” she said calmly. “That means your left lung is partly collapsed. A bubble in the wall of your lung broke, and the air is leaking out.”

He looked at her with new panic in his eyes. “God, does that mean I—”

“It’s treatable,” she said quickly. “It’s not all that uncommon. It can even happen to a healthy person, sometimes. We’ll work fast and get you feeling better very soon.”

He nodded, the overhead light winking in his little gold earring as he moved his head. She could see him struggling to pull himself together and stop the flow of tears, and she was touched by his bravery and his trust in her.

Back on the sixth floor, they wheeled him into the treatment room of the adolescent unit. If circumstances had been different, she would have used the opportunity to teach Pete Aldrich how to perform this procedure, but her fury with the resident hadn’t yet subsided enough to even acknowledge his presence in the room. Quickly and carefully, she inserted the large-bore needle into Jordy’s chest, attached a syringe, and pulled back on the stopper. The relief in Jordy’s face was immediate, but his comfort was short-lived. By the time Vanessa had finished the procedure, the cardiothoracic surgery resident was next to her, ready to insert the wide, metal- tipped chest tube. Vanessa held Jordy’s hand while the surgeon did his job, and the boy cried out in pain.

Only when Jordy was finally sedated, breathing more easily and, at least to some small extent, free of pain, did Vanessa become aware again of the throbbing in her head.

She walked out into the hall and saw Pete Aldrich at the nurses’ station, and she marched toward him, her rage building with each step. She stopped at the counter and put her hands on her hips.

“Don’t you ever make unilateral decisions like that again,” she said. There were others around—nurses, medical students, a couple of patients. A few of them continued with their work, as if they hadn’t heard her. Others turned to stare, startled by the irate tone of her voice. “Tests and studies are only part of medicine, Dr. Aldrich. You need to learn to listen to the patient as well, something you seem incapable of doing. And you need to listen to the nurses, who are with these kids twenty-four hours a day and know them better than you ever will. You have a nice little rhythm strip, nice blood work.” She gestured toward the chart. “So nothing can be wrong. Meanwhile your patient is dying, and when he does finally succumb, you can take your lab reports with you to bed at night to comfort you.”

Vanessa turned on her heel and walked down the hall, not slowing her pace until she’d reached her office. Inside, she shut the door and sat down at her desk. She felt sick to her stomach and her skull was splitting in two. She couldn’t recall another time when she’d publicly lambasted a colleague. She’d come close, but she’d always been able to summon the last-minute control she’d needed to bite her tongue, at least until she could get him or her behind closed doors. This time, though, the thought of control hadn’t even passed through her mind. Not until now. She’d really lost it out there.

Her eyes suddenly stung with tears that took her by surprise, and she fought them with a vengeance. Just two more hours to survive in the hospital, she told herself. Then she’d be home with Brian. Then she could let her defenses down.

Her tears didn’t start in earnest until she pulled into the driveway and saw Brian in the garage, tinkering with one of his tennis rackets. They were tears of relief this time. Between her nightmares and agonizing over how to handle the Zed Patterson situation, the past five days had seemed like five months.

She blotted her eyes in her rearview mirror before getting out of the car, but Brian knew. His smile faded the second he saw her.

“Oh, baby,” he said, pulling her into his arms. “What’s the matter?”

For a moment, she didn’t speak. She sank gratefully into the softness of his sweater.

“Just a shitty day,” she said finally, her lips against his neck.

He drew back from her and looked hard into her eyes. “Forgive me, Van, but it looks like it’s been a shitty five days.”

She nodded. “I’ve missed you,” she said huskily. “And my head hurts. And my stomach’s upset. And Terri Roos spent half an hour on the phone with me this afternoon, telling me how godlike Zed Patterson is. And one of my kids got really sick. And I chewed out a resident in front of the world.”

He was leaning against the painted garage wall, holding her, stroking her hair. “What can I do to make it better?”

She sighed. “Can we just sit for a while? Let me unwind?”

“Of course. I’ve already built a fire in the den.”

He walked ahead of her into the house. She took a minute to wash her face in the powder room off the kitchen. By the time she reached the den, Brian was playing a Kenny G. disc on the stereo, and the sultry strains of a clarinet filled the room.

“The roses you sent were beautiful.” She stopped to pick up the stack of mail resting on the chair by the doorway, then sat next to him on the sofa.

He put his arm around her shoulders as she began sifting through the envelopes.

“Why don’t you look at the mail later?” He tried to extract the stack from her hands, but she held tight.

“I need a good, mindless activity right now.” She came to a postcard picturing a spectacular white castle and turned it over, smiling. “J.T.,” she said. “In Germany.”

“What does she say?”

Vanessa read the card out loud.

“’Frank and I are settling in. I’m very happy, although I don’t think I’ll ever get used to being a military wife. I’m not quite used to being a wife, period. The down comforter is great—a super wedding present. Thanks! We use it every night and it makes me miss you, ‘Nessa. You and Brian have to visit us here. Pleeze! I love you, J.T.’”

Vanessa bit her lip. J.T. Only twenty-one. Born around the same time as Anna, and probably the closest thing she would ever have to a daughter she could know and love. “She’s too young to be married and living so far from her family,” she said.

“Frank’s her family now,” Brian pointed out.

Vanessa stroked her fingers over the picture of the castle. J.T. Gray had long ago changed Vanessa’s life. Vanessa had even stolen the little girl’s surname—with the blessing of J.T. and her parents, of course. What a relief it had been to rid herself of the name ‘Harte’.

“When can we visit them?” she asked.

“Summer?”

She nodded, tears welling once more in her eyes, and Brian hugged her with a laugh. “You really are in a misty mood tonight,” he said. Once more he reached for the stack of mail on her lap, and once more she resisted him, suspicious now.

She sorted through the remaining pieces of mail until her hands froze on a lavender envelope with a silver return address sticker. Claire Harte-Mathias. Two forwarding addresses were pasted to the front of the envelope.

“Oh, crap,” she said. “Just what I need.” She stood up, struggling vainly to tear the envelope in two as she walked toward the fireplace. She pulled open the screen, but Brian was next to her in a few quick strides, and he caught her arm in his hand.

“Don’t burn it,” he said.

“Yes.” She pulled free of him and reached again for the screen, but he grabbed the envelope from her hand.

“I won’t let you, Van. You—”

“You don’t have any right to tell me what I can or can’t do with her damn letter.” She reached again for the envelope, but he held it behind his back.

“Please, Van. Just put it away somewhere. Or let me keep it in my office if you don’t want it around. Someday you might change your mind.”

She held her hand out, palm up, and said coldly, “Give it to me.”

He resisted another few seconds before handing it over. She drew back the screen, slipping the envelope into the fire, and together they watched the lavender paper blacken and disappear behind the tongues of flame.

The clarinet music filled the room, soft and bittersweet.

“Do you remember what Marianne said when you quit therapy?” Brian asked quietly.

“No,” she said, although she remembered very well. She wished now, though, that she had never shared Marianne’s parting words with Brian.

“She said that—”

“I know what she said.” Vanessa took her seat on the sofa again. Leaning back, she closed her eyes, remembering.

“You’re not ready to terminate therapy.” Marianne had spoken calmly, but she’d sat on the edge of her large brown leather chair, as she always did when she wanted to make a point.