Of Flesh and Blood (14 page)

A fragile smile crossed Kristen’s lips as Erin reached the bedside. “You got it started,” the young mother said in a croak not much louder than a whisper. “I heard it was touch-and-go for a while.”

Erin nodded. “Sometimes transplanted hearts are like cold, stubborn car batteries. They just take a few cranks.”

Kristen lifted her hand from under the covers and touched the sleeve of Erin’s lab coat. “Thank you, Dr. McGrath.”

Her gratitude delighted Erin, and she grinned widely. “Can I have a look at the incision?”

Kristen nodded.

Erin reached forward and pulled back the sheet, uncovering the woman’s chest. In the center, a broad white bandage covered the area between Kristen’s breasts. The surgeon gently peeled the top of the bandage away from the skin to have a peek at the surgical wound. Erin was satisfied with the wound’s bruised but healthy appearance. She carefully laid the bandage back into position. “Are you having much pain?” she asked.

Kristen shrugged her shoulders slightly. She nodded to the narrow white tubing by her hand that ended in a hub with a red button. “The morphine pump helps a lot.”

Erin nodded. “Hopefully you won’t need that much longer.”

“Dr. McGrath, do things . . . look . . . okay now for me?” Kristen’s voice was tentative rather than weak.

Erin studied her patient. Kristen had survived her transplant and made it off the ventilator, but even with the assistance of a pump inside her major artery and the best drugs medicine had to offer, her blood pressure was still critically low. Any reassurances she offered would be hollow and potentially misleading. “Kristen, it’s still too soon to know for sure.”

“I see.” Her face fell. “I’m not out of the woods, am I?”

Erin would never lie to a patient, but she chose her words carefully to avoid traumatizing Kristen. She patted the back of her patient’s hand. “You’ve done as well as we could have hoped up to this point. Your new
heart was ‘on ice’ for longer than we would have liked. It’s sort of stunned right now. We call that ‘posttransplant cardiomyopathy.’ But it’s beating and you’re off the life-support system.” She mustered a light smile. “All good signs.”

Kristen’s eyes reddened and tears crested over her lower eyelids. “Not good enough for my kids. I have to be there for them.” She swallowed. “There’s no one else.”

Erin felt another pang of empathy for the young mother. “Kristen, things are looking better than they did a week ago. A
lot
better than they did in the operating room. We just have to take it day by day now. But you’re a fighter. And you have something very special to fight for. That is going to be a huge help.”

Kristen nodded. She sniffed and wiped away tears with the back of her hand as her expression stiffened with resolve. “And feeling sorry for myself isn’t going to do much for Katie and Alex.”

Erin winked. “I think you’ve earned the right to a little self-pity.”

Kristen laughed weakly. “Doesn’t help to play the victim. Believe me, I tried when my husband walked out on us. Now I’m going to focus on positive things, like getting better.”

“That’s the spirit, girl.”

Kristen reached up and caught Erin’s hand again. “Whatever happens, Dr. McGrath, I want to thank you from the bottom of my . . . new . . . heart. You’ve given me another chance. That’s all I could ask for.”

The ornate millwork, high slanted ceilings, and crystal chandelier did not compensate for the pervasive musty smell in the uncomfortably warm guest bedroom. The small east-facing windows provided little in the way of breeze, and by six thirty
A.M
. the sun was already beating through the worn blinds. The brightness yanked Lorna Simpson from her first hour of decent sleep.

Fed up and restless, Lorna would have dug up some excuse to flee the house the previous evening—especially when Dot Alfredson drunkenly boasted that, fifty years before, she had held a small orgy with three of the better known Beat poets in the very same guest room—but her wily great-aunt had trapped her in the mansion with the promise of an “explosive family secret.”

However, neither the secret nor any further details regarding Evan McGrath and Marshall Alfredson had ever emerged. Citing a hoarse voice and exhaustion, Dot had napped away the afternoon. Then supper came, served by a middle-aged Hispanic maid, Juanita, who seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Eating ravenously, Dot evaded any attempts to steer the conversation back to the nineteenth century. By dinner’s end, the old woman had polished off most of the decanter of red wine that accompanied the rack of lamb, and she was in no position to share anything other than scattered rumors about her once-famous-now-forgotten social contemporaries and lewd details of seventy years of sexual disinhibition. Finally, Juanita helped the babbling Dot off to bed.

Fuming at the memory of the wasted day, Lorna showered under a weak stream of water, barely able to wash the shampoo out of her hair. She
decided that her great-aunt had already provided enough background and there were still other sources to tap into to fill in the rest of the story.

I still have a few more weeks
, she reassured herself.

When Lorna walked into the breakfast nook, she was surprised to see that Dot was already dressed—this time in a set of tiger-print leggings with a long white cardigan—and reading the newspaper as she sipped her coffee. “Darling, I do hope you slept as well as I did,” she chirped.

“Fine, thanks,” Lorna grumbled.

“Coffee?” Dot said. “Juanita has brewed a drinkable pot this morning. Then we’ll have her porridge. Juanita is an
absolute
marvel at porridge!”

“No thanks, Dot.” Lorna didn’t budge. “I’ll have a quick cup of coffee, but then I have to head off.”

“But darling, you haven’t heard anywhere
near
the best part of the story!”

Lorna rested her hands on her hips. “Will I ever?”

“So you do have a streak of the Alfredson drama in you, after all!” Dot laughed. “I’m
aching
to share the story with you. I simply ran out of steam yesterday. At my age, one never knows when the fatigue will incapacitate. But I awoke fresher than the morning dew. And I’m ready to sing like a songbird.” She punctuated the point with a comical tweeting sound as she patted the seat beside her.

What an irritating old crow
. Reluctantly, Lorna pulled back one of the chairs and sat down across from Dot. Juanita appeared with a pot of coffee, two steaming bowls of porridge, and a fresh fruit salad. The complementary morning aromas made Lorna’s stomach churn with hunger.

Dot continued to avoid the subject of the birth of the Alfredson all the way through breakfast and instead offered a surprisingly current running commentary on local and national politics. As Juanita cleared the plates, Dot loudly outlined her draconian ideas for solving the illegal alien problem, either oblivious to the Hispanic maid’s presence or—more likely, Lorna decided—to antagonize the poor woman. Finishing the last bite on her plate, Dot lowered her fork and said, “Now where were we with McGrath and my grandfather?”

Lorna relaxed in her seat. “Marshall was just dragging his daughter out of Evan’s home.”

“So he was.” Dot smiled and shook her head. “My grandfather was one
stubborn son of a bitch. You would have thought he would have shown a little more gratitude to Dr. McGrath for saving Olivia’s life.”

Lorna considered the chronology, realizing that the fall of 1895 was not that long before the Alfredson opened. “Still, I assume he soon changed his mind about funding the Alfredson?”

“
Gawd
no!” Dot threw up her small hands and a bulky charm bracelet slid noisily down her wrist. “What he did was to forbid Olivia from going anywhere near Evan or his wife ever again.”

“I take it Olivia didn’t comply?”

“Darling.” Dot’s face lit in that odd familiar lascivious smile. “The quickest way to get a randy young woman to do absolutely
anything
is to forbid her to do it. Adam and Eve taught us that, way back, didn’t they?”

Lorna stifled a sigh; her great-aunt’s sexual innuendos were wearing thin. “What did Olivia do?”

“What any resourceful person would do. She had her friends cover for her,” Dot said. “Olivia arranged a series of alibis for nonexistent card games, recitals, walks, and who knows what else!” She stopped to consider it a moment. “But my grandfather was no longer Olivia’s only problem.”

“No?”

“Olivia was being relentlessly courted by the son of a family friend.” Dot sighed. “Another heir to a lumber fortune. Arthur Grovenor. The poor boy was hopelessly in love with her.”

“Was Arthur jealous of Evan?”

“I suppose,” Dot said. “Arthur was a bit of a spineless sap. He couldn’t quite figure out how he had lost Olivia’s affection—not that he ever really
had
it—or how to win her back. He would have stood
no
chance at all, had Fate not intervened.”

“How?” Lorna demanded.

Dot smiled to herself. “I might be giving Fate more credit than
she
is due. Many people lent Arthur a big hand. Some deliberately, and others, like Virginia McGrath, inadvertently.”

“Evan’s wife?” Lorna asked, confused.

Dot nodded. “In Virginia’s weakened mental state, she had grown increasingly suspicious of the lovely young redhead who had spent so much time at her home over the past months.” She stopped to dab at a flake
lipstick at the corner of her mouth. “Of course, sometimes the paranoid are the first ones to recognize what is
really
happening, aren’t they?”

Evan held the local Seattle medical community in the highest regard. He wanted to pool that existing talent in one innovative center—his new clinic.

—
The Alfredson: The First Hundred Years
by Gerald Fenton Naylor

As they had done for numerous afternoons over the past months, Evan and Olivia sat at the undecorated dining room table, again sharing a pot of tea.

Olivia had told her father that she was attending an afternoon piano recital, so she wore an elegant green dress with a high neckline, which she knew accentuated her eyes. But Evan appeared too agitated to notice the dress or her eyes.

Though still awed by the handsome doctor, Olivia had shed most of her original shyness in his presence. As their intimacy continued to deepen, she allowed more glimpses of her feisty nature to show through. In the past week, they had even spontaneously dropped the convention of referring to one another by surnames.

“Evan, please tell me what happened at the hospital this morning,” she said, surprising herself with the firmness of her request.

“Two people died.”

“Oh, I am sorry.” Olivia nodded somberly. “But I thought such things were not unexpected in a hospital.”

“Of course people die in the hospital,” Evan snapped, but his tone quickly softened. “Death is the natural extreme of all disease, Olivia. But these two people were healthy. A twenty-year-old mother and her baby. There was no reason for either to die.”

“Childbirth?”

Evan nodded.

“What went wrong?”

“It did not go wrong. It was steered to disaster by sheer and unforgivable negligence.”

“How was it steered, Evan?”

“I do not think the details are at all appropriate to share with you. The event was most . . . unpleasant.”

She fixed him with a defiant stare. “After what I’ve been through these past months, I believe my delicate constitution will cope.”

“I suppose you might.” He showed a glimpse of a smile that was replaced by a scowl as he began to recount the event. “As soon as I arrived at the hospital, one of the Sisters rushed me to the birthing room where the women who do not have access to midwifery at home often come for childbirth.” He shook his head. “Inside, it was a most terrible scene. Dr. Andrews—the
fool
—was trying to deliver the baby. It was obvious from across the room that there was a shoulder distocia.”

She frowned. “What does ‘distocia’ mean, Evan?”

“After a baby’s head has passed the birth canal, sometimes the shoulder becomes lodged under the mother’s pelvis. The blood supply to the child is interrupted at a time when he still cannot breathe, so it is of the greatest urgency to deliver the baby’s body as quickly as possible. And there are well-documented maneuvers to help accomplish this.”

She nodded vigorously. “I see.”

“The poor child’s head was navy blue! God only knows how long he had been without oxygen.”

“What was Dr. Andrews doing?”

Evan shook his head, and his lip curled in disgust. “He was killing them, is what that quack was doing!”

Her jaw fell open. “How could he possibly do that?”

Evan held out his hands as if cupping a baby’s head. “The key to shoulder distocia is to raise the mother’s hips as high as possible to maximize the opening of the birth canal and then press down on the pubic bones of the pelvis.” He pushed his hands down against an imaginary pelvis. “To squeeze the shoulders through. Sometimes you even have to break the child’s arm. But it is a highly effective maneuver.”

“Dr. Andrews was not doing so?”

Evan’s hands fell to the table. “The poor woman was positioned no differently from a normal birth. And
Dr
.”—he snorted the term—“Andrews was cutting and slashing away at her like he was practicing his fencing skills. Granted, a well-placed incision will assist with the delivery, but this was
butchery. And it served no purpose except to cause the mother even more undue agony. Oh, and the bleeding!”