Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) (16 page)

“Home?” Shelly asked blankly.

“Back to your hotel,” the
doctor amended. “Take a nap, have a meal. Makes some calls if you need to,
perhaps run a few errands. There’s nothing you can do here.”

*****

As soon as Shelly and the
woman had gone, Alanna moved to the front of the chapel. Within minutes, she’d
forgotten that she was only here because of Shelly or that this place was only
a room in a hospital.

The quiet whooshing sound of
water calmed her mind and soon she began to see pictures of her life as if she
were watching a slide show. Herself in a ruffled dress at a birthday part, a
fancy cake decorated with dozens of sugary flowers in pastel colors. A gracious
lawn and sun drenched table with white linen cloth. Her mother leaning down and
cutting pieces for all the little girls, serving staff in stiff white uniforms
hovering nearby.

Then a scene that made her
feel confined as if she’d been put in a box. Now the servants were sentries and
she was a prisoner, trapped in a life where she was expected to behave in a
certain way, live a future that had been pre molded for her to fit into, with
no more control over her fate than a pampered pet. Alanna realized that she had
spent her whole life struggling to become her own person. And something—or
someone—had stood in her way.

The man again. Still holding
a suitcase and standing at a door with his hand on the knob. He turned and
looked back and his face was familiar, handsome, but the expression was angry. He
was saying something but she couldn’t make out the words. Then he turned the
knob and walked out the door, leaving it open behind him. But who was he? And
why was he leaving? The memories began to recede as quickly as they’d come.

Alanna pushed herself to her
feet and left the chapel. Still a little dazed with the flood of memories which
had swept her up in the chapel, Alanna fell in behind a family on its way to
the post delivery maternity wing. At least they were laughing and smiling,
their arms filled with flowers and balloons. They seemed to be the only people
in the hospital who were happy.

They pressed the big red
button to be allowed in and a nurse at the station buzzed back. The doors swung
open and Alanna followed close behind them. When they went left, she turned
right and found herself at the window of the neonatal nursery where the preemie
babies were hooked up to monitors and feeding tubes in their little plastic
hospital cribs. They all had caps on heads and some of them were naked except
for a tiny diaper. Each was enclosed in an incubator for temperature
control—plastic-domed hospital beds designed just for them. Alanna gazed
through the window. Did these newborns have memories? Did they miss their time
in the womb? Did they resent being pushed out of that life too early, just as
she and Joe were struggling to learn why they had been torn away from the
safety of their time on earth? I’m a preemie, too, Alanna thought, forced into
a world I’m not prepared to inhabit.

Alanna stood and stared at
them all, from baby to baby, each so small she felt she could reach in and lift
any of them with one hand. How tenacious life was, she thought. These babies
wanted their chance. Everyone wants that. It’s born into each human, as
hardwired as the need to breathe. Alanna felt an overwhelming urge to enter
this room and hold each one of these tiny, helpless infants in her arms, cuddle
and coo to them, assure them Earth wasn’t so bad, that life would be good to
them later on, after they’d struggled so hard to meet it halfway.

Alanna pressed her palms to the glass of the window. The
world was still swimming around her, and she was still very close to the
swirling vortex of memories.

Her thoughts kept going back to an image of a table
stretched before her, a table filled with beautiful jewelry. Some of it was
made from shells and bits of found objects, the sort of things most people
might overlook. The sort of things Alanna used to pick up from her favorite beach
in Florida. And some of the jewelry was heavy and gold, encrusted with
gemstones, the sort of things her mother had worn. Her mother and all the other
ladies from the country club.

Alanna saw herself pouring molten gold into a small mold,
setting gemstones into the gold, cutting shells into partial pieces, combining
these elements into the jewelry that covered the table. She saw herself
struggling to release a piece of jewelry from its mold and, in the process, the
whole thing broke into many pieces and she saw herself weep.

It’s not easy to break out of the role you’re born into, she
thought, and she wished she had been able to explain to Shelly what being born
rich really meant. It meant either pouring your life into a mold or accepting
that if you rejected the mold you risked having your whole life come apart in
your hands.

She should have told Shelly that. She should have told Joe.
Being born rich wasn’t just about jewels and designer clothes and flying first
class. It was also about fitting in or not fitting in, and for the first time
Alanna had a clear idea of what she was running away from, why she wasn’t more
eager to return to earthly life.

She was running away from the mold. And the handsome, angry
man, who had tried to keep her inside it.

Chapter Thirty

Shelly slid her cashier’s
check across the bank officer’s desk.

“She told me at the window
over there,” Shelly turned and pointed to one of the tellers, “that you had to
approve this before she could do anything with it. Because of the amount, she
said.”

“Wow, that is a nice little
pay out, isn’t it? But we get a lot of these casino checks. It’s not the
biggest one I’ve ever seen.” The gray-haired woman who looked decidedly un-Vegas
opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a form, which she handed to
Shelly. She tilted her chin down to look over her reading glasses and pointed
to a place at the top of the paper. “You sign here and fill out everything
where there’s a line. I’ll need to see a photo ID. Usually the casino gives you
a name of someone we can call to verify that this is your check.”

“Yes. I have that here,”
Shelly opened her purse. She handed over a letter of authenticity they’d given
her at the casino. Back before the big celebration, the balloons and streamers
and marching band. Back before Ben collapsed and the world as she knew it came
to an end.

“Are you the one who hit the
slot with her last quarter? It was on the evening news last night.”

“Yeah,” Shelly nodded as she
diligently filled in all the answers. How many forms had she dealt with in the
last 24 hours?

“Well done. I used to play
but when I moved out here, somehow the glamour wore off and now I never gamble
on anything.”

“I know what you mean. I
think I’m through with gambling for good. It’s weird.”

“Like a craving for some
exotic food,” said the woman, whose desk nameplate said Beulah Withers. Shelly
didn’t think she’d ever met anyone named Beulah before and probably never would
again. She wondered what the woman’s friends called her. “One day you’ve just
had enough, and that’s that.” Beulah shrugged.

It was odd, this other Las Vegas. Like the hospital. All those poor sick people with real problems so far removed
from the glitz and show of the hotels with their club acts and croupiers. But
Shelly wasn’t concerned with the why of her situation anymore. She just wanted
to make Ben better. The doctor had said that even if they found cancer, these
days that didn’t have to be a death sentence. She had to remain hopeful. Had
to. No options.

The business concluded,
Shelly paid off her credit card through the bank, called the pawn shop and
wired him the money to hold her engagement ring until she returned home. Called
Ben’s boss and her own to give them the news. She left the bank having settled
all her financial obligations, even the taxes taken out, but the business of
life with money to burn wasn’t as exciting as she’d thought it would be. Where
was the feeling of freedom she’d expected, the sense of triumph? Here she was,
bills all paid, with a cashier’s check for a hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars in her purse. Shelly should have been doing cartwheels down the
sun-drenched street but instead she felt there was a blank space somewhere, as
if she’d forgotten something.

Chapter Thirty

Back to the hospital, back to
the waiting room. Funny, but it still looked exactly the same, even with money
in her pocket. Shelly told the nurse to come and get her when they moved Ben
and sat back down in one of the plastic seats. Over in the corner, the parents
of the injured child sat huddled together. The woman worried a rosary between
her fingers, counting off the beads over and over. Her face was worn from
crying and her skin looked ashen. The man sat hunched over, helpless to comfort
his wife although, every so often, he tried again to soothe her.

They didn’t notice that
Shelly had returned, but she couldn’t look away from them. It was as if she had
become part of their family. Just as she started to move closer to them, a
doctor came in and the woman looked up hopefully. Shelly could hear the doctor
speaking to them. Could hear words like “sorry” and “costly operations” and
“walk again” and “can’t say for sure.” The man translated what the doctor was
saying. He put his arm around the woman as she sank back down onto the plastic
bench. The doctor patted her shoulder but it was a small gesture that had no
effect and he turned and left the room, with the woman weeping and the man
looking more helpless than before.

It was more than Shelly could
bear. She wanted to go to the woman and offer something. But what could she do
that the doctors could not provide? The woman was like her—holding on to hope
and yet fearing the very worst. A little girl beside her sang softly to her
doll, a gentle lullaby and somewhere in the song Shelly found a trickle of
hope. An idea was forming. All those years when she couldn’t do anything about
her own problems, much less the problems of others . . . they had taught her to
be passive, to believe she could do nothing to save herself or anyone else. But
was that really still the case? Had it ever been? At that moment a nurse strode
purposefully into the waiting room. She walked directly to Shelly.

“The doctor sent me to fetch
you in case you want to be present when we move your fiancé out of CCU,” she
said. “But of course it’s up to you. It’s not like he’s conscious, so you don’t
have to be there.”

Shelly stood up quickly. “Of
course I want to be there.”

As she followed the nurse,
she glanced over at the man and woman huddled on the bench. The woman had
dropped the rosary into her lap. Now she simply stared at the floor.

“What will happen to their
daughter?” she asked the nurse, nodding toward the man and woman.

“Well, we’re not supposed to
talk about the patients, but they can’t possibly afford all the operations and
care their daughter needs. I suppose she’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of
her life. If she survives.”

Chapter Thirty-One

They moved Ben from the CCU
to the ICU. These medical acronyms scared Shelly. ICU, EEG. EKG, it was
confusing, like she had been given a glimpse into a secret society with its own
language but she hadn’t been given the usage sheet. One of the nurses had told
her the BI patients all spent at least some time in ICU, that it was normal
unless they were VSA. Shelly just stared at her. The nurse laughed and
apologized.

“Up here, we get so used to
talking hospital code, we forget. BI is brain injury and VSA is vital signs
absent. And ICU is intensive care unit. One step down from CCU, critical care
unit. Your guy’s in good shape—compared to some we see.”

Hardly comforting, but at
least Shelly understood a bit more. They were going to bring him out of the
coma.

Shelly stood on one side of
the hospital bed holding Ben’s hand. On the other side the doctor bent over
Ben’s arm at the site of the IV that had released a barbiturate into Ben to
keep him in a post surgical coma. He had also been intubated so that a
ventilator could breathe for him. The nurse watched Ben’s vital signs, shown by
the up and down blips on a monitor. The doctor switched off the medicine drip
and pulled the tube out of the IV needle but left the needle strapped to Ben’s
arm in case the medical team needed it later. He capped it off, slung the tube
over the IV stand, and stood back to watch Ben and the monitor. It seemed to
Shelly like some scene from a science fiction B movie. Dawn Of The Almost
Living.

“That should do it. He’ll
come out of it but it won’t be for quite a few hours. Until then he’ll be in a
sleep state. We’ll monitor him but I think he should do fine.”

Shelly nodded, still a bit
stunned by the whole idea of Ben like this. There hadn’t been much time to get
used to the shift from Ben being the stable, solid one with no variations in
behavior to the flat-on-his-back Ben who needed Shelly to carry the load. His
hand hadn’t moved and she released her fingers from his.

“Will he be able to breathe
on his own after he wakes up?”

“Yes, but we’re bringing him
out slowly. A nurse will still check on him every fifteen minutes.”