Garden of Lies (40 page)

Rachel had an odd sensation. It was as if something buried deep inside her were cracking open,

and feeling its way toward the light, like a blade of grass pushing up through a sidewalk.

It was a moment before she realized what it was. It had been a long time since she had felt this.

Hope.

Hot tears flooded her eyes, spilled down her cheeks.

The wounded soldier brought his hand up, and brushed it across her cheek, his fingertips soft as

leaves. “Rose,” he murmured. “Don’t cry, Rosie. I’m coming back. Rose ...”

One of the medics, a burly black man, shook his head. “Been calling that name ever since we

fished him out of the river. Damnedest thing you ever saw. Stomach all shot to shit, and he’s

swimming [235] out to meet us like he’s Jesus Christ or somepin’. Dragging his dead buddy

along for the ride.” He shook his head again. “Looks like this one’s for the GRs too.”

GR. Graves Registration. Where men were labeled, bagged, sent home to their grieving

families. The coldness inside her turned fiery at the thought of this one, too, being trundled out

like one more piece of luggage, dumped into a cargo hold.

“Not if I can help it,” Rachel said, galvanized by a determination so fierce all her muscles, her

bones seemed to vibrate like taut wires.

She flew into action, clamping off arteries, debriding the wound, and digging out the largest

pieces of shrapnel. Disinfecting with sterile gauze soaked in petrolatum.

“Mind if I have a look?” A deep voice startled her. She looked up. Doctor MacDougal was

frowning, his shaggy reddish-gray brows drooping over his huge, sad, brown eyes.

His examination was quick but thorough. Afterwards, he drew Rachel aside. “He’s lost a lot of

blood. And it looks like that right kidney will have to go. I see a lot of peritoneal leakage. And

extensive damage to both small and large bowels. Lord, girl, this boy will need more than your

hands to pull him through surgery. He’ll need a bloody miracle. And even if he does pull through,

with shock and peritonitis I don’t have to tell you what his chances of recovery are.” He placed a

broad fatherly hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “I know you hate to lose, Rachel. I never seen one so

much for fightin’ the odds, but the best you can do for this one is make him comfortable, let him

go in peace.”

Rachel held Ian MacDougal’s sad, bassett hound gaze for a long moment, then answered,

“Please, let me try, Mac. I’ll need you for this one, but I can assist. I’m not saying we can save

him, but at least let’s give him that chance.”

Mac dropped his eyes, and seemed to be considering her plea. Rachel held her breath. Ian was

in charge. He could refuse her.

Finally he raised his gaze, fixing her with the look of an indulgent father giving in to his

headstrong child against his better judgment.

“Do what you must then,” he said and sighed.

Rachel signaled to the orderlies to carry the patient into Pre-op. Then she looked down once

again into those clear eyes, that [236] smile, and knew she could no more give up on this man

than she could have turned her back on her own flesh and blood.

Rachel glanced at his dog tag, scribbled his name and I.D. number on a clipboard.

Pvt. Brian McClanahan.

“Hang in there, Brian,” she whispered, “just hang in there for me, okay?”

Rachel woke to the sound of the rain drumming on the corrugated tin roof of her concrete

shack. She opened her eyes. It was dark, but she could make out the huge beetle crawling along

the wall in front of her. Still half-asleep, feeling dreamy and disconnected, she followed its

meandering progress. But something was tugging at her mind ... something she needed to

remember.

Then it came to her, a rush of anxiety jolting her fully awake. Brian McClanahan. Three days

since his abdominal surgery, and it was still touch and go whether he’d pull through. He could be

dying right now, while she lay here. ...

Rachel pushed her thin cotton blanket aside with an impatient shove, and got up. She was

halfway dressed when Kay stirred in the next cot, and sat up, rubbing her eyes. Kay yawned, and

glanced at the faintly glowing dial of her wristwatch.

“You nuts?” she muttered thickly. “It’s three o’clock in the morning! First quiet night we’ve

had in weeks. What’s up?”

She knows I wouldn’t use the latrine before first light,
Rachel thought,
not when it means

standing in a foot of water, surrounded by bugs and snakes.

“Sorry I woke you,” Rachel said. “I want to check on one of my patients. I’m a little worried

about him. He was spiking a fever when I went off last night.”

Now Kay was wide awake, jumping up from her cot, snapping the light on. She scowled at

Rachel, her brown eyes red-rimmed and puffy, naked-looking without her glasses. She was

wearing a pair of wrinkled underpants, and a bright red T-shirt that had printed across the front:

WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND NOBODY CAME?

“This patient’s name wouldn’t happen to be Brian McClanahan, would it?” Kay asked coldly.

“The same Brian McClanahan you’ve [237] been hovering over like a mother hen ever since he

came out of surgery? Dana came to me in tears last night, said you shouted at her for not telling

you right away he was running a one-oh-four temp. As if my nurses have nothing to do all day

but stand around taking temperatures.”

“I shouldn’t have snapped at Dana that way,” Rachel apologized. “She’s a good nurse.” She

was
sorry, but damn it, Brian was special. A sort of miracle. Couldn’t they see that? He’d pulled

through surgery just barely, by the skin of his teeth, true, but he was alive, and she damn well

intended to see that he stayed that way.

Kay’s brown eyes flashed. “Good? You bet she’s good. She’s terrific. All my nurses should get

Congressional Medals of Honor. Instead, they get kicked in the butt. For years, we’ve been telling

ourselves it’d be different when more women became doctors. But I’ll tell you something I’ve

learned the hard way, an asshole in a white coat is an asshole, no matter what’s up front.” She

paused, took a deep breath, then her anger died suddenly and she broke into a wide grin.

“Another thing, you can’t go anywhere like that.”

“Like what?”

“Those pants.”

Rachel had finished pulling her clothes on, and now she looked down and saw she had put on

Kay’s khakis by mistake. They sagged around her hips, and her ankles stuck out below the cuffs.

She sank down on the bed, and started to laugh. Then found she couldn’t stop.

“I think I’m going crazy,” she said, wiping tears away with the back of her hand.

“Want to talk about it?” Kay flopped down on her mattress and lit a cigarette.

Rachel stared at the Grateful Dead poster over Kay’s bed, a skeleton surrounded by flowers

against a fluorescent purple background. An advertisement for a concert at the Winterland

Auditorium in October of 1966.

“It’s complicated,” she said. “I’m not sure I understand it myself. I just have this feeling ... that

if I let go of him ... I just might ... I don’t know ... climb aboard the loony express once and for

all.”

“Can’t.” Rachel watched as smoke uncurled from Kay’s lips, [238] and disappeared up into the

mosquito netting. “This is the end of the line. We’re
all
a little crazy here, Rosenthal.”

“This is different. It’s ... not just the war. It’s me too. Everything. What happened before.”

“You did what you had to do,” Kay said, too quickly. And Rachel was reminded of how good

Kay had been during that time, a rock then as she was now.

She remembered the night not too long ago when Kay had shanghaied her, hitching them a ride

into Da Nang in an army ambulance. Her first taste of kim chee, in a back-alley restaurant

consisting of one ancient woman, a cooking shed, and three rickety card tables. Then, on to a bar

crammed with noisy Marines, and loud American music, where she’d gotten so drunk, listening

to Otis Redding croon “Dock on the Bay” and thinking about home. God, she’d been so sick

afterwards! All that kim chee and vodka declaring war on her stomach. Kay, holding her hair

back while she was sick in the bushes outside, then afterwards, when the tears came, lending a

sympathetic shoulder.

“It seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” Rachel said, and started to laugh again. Only

now it wasn’t funny. The laughter caught in her throat like a piece of food that wouldn’t go down.

“Now, whenever I think about it ... well, I feel like I’m dying inside. When I was little, all I ever

really wanted was a baby sister. And my mother would always tell me that someday I’d have

babies of my own, as many as I wanted. It never occurred to me, not once, that I wouldn’t be able

to ... to have children. Or even one child. One baby. Is that so much to ask? Is it?”

“Hey, look at me,” Kay said. “I doubt if I’ll ever find anyone weird enough to marry me, much

less have a kid.” She was trying to joke Rachel out of her misery, but Rachel could see that her

eyes, squinched against the smoke, were moist. “Regrets. Shit, don’t waste your time. That and a

dime will buy you a phone call.”

Rachel forced a weak smile. “Who would I call?”

“I don’t know. God maybe. And, listen, when you get a hold of Him, would you tell Him

something for me? Tell Him to end this war so I can stop smoking these filthy cigarettes. They’re

killing me.” Her voice went a little ragged, and she squashed her cigarette out in the empty

sardine can on the floor beside the bed.

[239] Rachel smiled. “I guess we’re all hooked ... one way or another.”

“I read a story once,” Kay said, “by O. Henry. About this girl who was real sick, she had

pneumonia, I think it was. All she could do was lie in bed and stare out her window at the ivy

growing on the wall outside. And this friend of hers, this artist who lives downstairs, the sick girl

tells him that when the last leaf falls, that’s when she’ll die. It’s winter, you see. And all the other

leaves fall except this one last leaf. It just keeps hanging on. So she doesn’t die. She gets better, in

fact. And when she’s well enough to get out of bed, she finds out why that last leaf never fell—it

was painted on, by the artist. The irony is, he’s the one who dies in the end, from staying out in

the rain and cold while painting that damned leaf on the wall.”

“Don’t worry,” Rachel said and laughed, slipping out of Kay’s pants, then finding her own

under the bed. “I won’t catch cold. Malaria, maybe. Or heatstroke. But definitely not

pneumonia.”

“That’s not what I was thinking. I was wondering.” Kay got up, and found a fresh pack of

Salems on the dresser. Slowly, she peeled off the cellophane. “What would have happened to the

girl if that last leaf
had
fallen.” She went over, placed her hands on Rachel’s shoulders, forcing

Rachel to meet her gaze. “Give it a break, kid. That heart of yours can use one, all the mileage

you put on it. Take my advice, put it away for now. It won’t do you any good in this place.”

The rain had stopped. But the path leading to the hospital was a sea of mud.

Rachel was picking her way along the planks that had been laid over the muddy path when she

heard it: a high whistling noise cutting across the sky.

Mortars.

She hit the ground, slapping stomach down in warm mud, just as a defeaning WHUUUUMP

rocked the air. She brought her head up, and watched a dull, poisonous orange bloom above the

trees, not a quarter of a mile away. Cold panic coiled about her heart. There had been shelling

before, in the jungle surrounding the village, but never this close.

[240]
What if they hit us? What if—

She moaned softly, squeezing her eyes shut against the horrible orange glare, clamping her

hands over her ringing ears as another mortar whistled overhead, then exploded, much closer this

time from the sound of it.

Strangely, she was afraid, but not for herself. She thought of Brian stretched on his bed in ICU,

unconscious, thin and white, swathed in bandages to his chin. His vital signs were still so

precarious. If he suffered even the slightest trauma, he would die. She had to get to him, make

sure he was all right.

Rachel, shutting out her own fear of being killed, began crawling on her hands and knees,

inching her way through the mud toward the hospital. The rockets were coming one on top of

another now, like a Fourth of July celebration gone berserk. The air seemed to reel, punch-drunk,

with their blasts. An artificial dawn painting the sky above the tree line orange and yellow and

red. She tasted something bitter on her tongue. Gunpowder.
Oh Lord, they’re right on top of us.

When she got there, the lights were out in the hospital. The generator must have blown, she

realized with a sinking heart. She groped her way in darkness through the archway that led across

an open tiled courtyard. The ancient tiles were broken and heaved from the constant moisture,

and she nearly stumbled a few times as she made her way toward the double doors that opened

onto the wards.

Inside, a dark corridor, then sudden blinding light. Someone shining a flashlight in her face.