Three Wishes (6 page)

 

While Tom waited for news with his eyes closed, his legs braced, and his arms cradling his bruised ribs, down the hall in the operating room, Bree watched with fascination as five skilled professionals tried to restart her heart.

3

W
ake up, Bree. Time to wake up.”

Bree struggled to open her eyes. It was a minute of starts and stops, and what seemed a great expenditure of energy, before she succeeded.

“That's it. You can hear me, can't you?”

She nodded, more a thought than an act, and tried to look around. The woman who had spoken was pale green. Beyond was a room that was dimly lit, cool, and sterile, totally different from where she had been seconds before. That place had been bright and warm. The memory of it brought a wisp of calm.

“She's awake?” asked another voice, this one male, and for a minute she thought it was
his.
But this face had features. The other had been too bright to see.

So how had she known it was male? And how had it smiled? Or had she only imagined a smile?

“Hi there, Bree,” came this new one again. “Welcome back.” The voice was familiar, but nothing else.

“Do I know you?” she asked in a whispery croak.

“I'm Paul Sealy, one of the ones who've been working on you for the last five hours.”

She tried to moisten her tongue, but her whole mouth was dry. “Where am I?”

“In the recovery room. How do you feel?”

She felt confused. Sad, like she'd been someplace nicer and didn't want to be back. But happy to be here, too.

“Any pain?”

Maybe, in her midsection, but it was more dull than excruciating. The thoughts that came and went were harder to handle. She kept picturing herself on the operating table, kept
seeing
herself there, as if she had left her body behind and was rising to a gentler place. If she didn't know better, she would have thought she had died and gone to heaven. But this clearly wasn't heaven. So she'd been sent back down to earth. Which was a
really
weird idea.

Far easier to stop thinking and just drift off to sleep.

 

That first day passed in groggy spurts. She dozed and woke, dozed and woke. There were questions about comfort and pain, much poking and prodding, an overall jostling when she was wheeled down the hall to her room. Doctors and nurses hovered. More than once, she fought through a private fog to tell them that she would be fine, because she knew that she would be. She wasn't sure how she knew, but she did.

That was the only certainty she had. Between the lingering anesthesia and the drugs they gave her for pain, she was confused about where she was and why she hurt. She was confused about who was with her, seeing familiar faces one minute and new faces another, and each time she remembered what had happened in the operating room, she was confused about what was real and what was dream.

Sleep continued to be a lovely escape.

 

By the second morning, the effects of the anesthesia had worn off and she was awake enough to respond to the nurses attending her. Yes, her stomach hurt. No, she wasn't dizzy. No, she wasn't nauseated. Yes, she was thirsty.

None mentioned the surgery. She guessed that they were leaving that to Paul Sealy. By the time he showed up, it was late morning, snow was dripping past her window from the roof under a repentant October sun, her mind was clearing, and she needed feedback.

Standing by her bedside, with his hand in the pocket of his lab coat, he told of the tearing in her abdomen. “There was extensive bleeding. We had to find its source and stop it, then piece you back together again. It was touch-and-go for a while.”

In a scratchy voice, she asked, “ ‘Touch-and-go'?”

He softened the words with a smile. “We lost your pulse for a bit.”

“I died?”

“Not exactly. We kept you going until your heart started back up on its own.”

“You used electric shock.” It wasn't a question, but the doctor didn't realize that.

“Actually, we did. It's the most effective thing in situations like yours.”

“How long was my heart not beating?”

He waved a hand. “Not long enough to cause any damage.”

But Bree wanted to know. It had seemed an eternity that she had watched them work on her, and then there was the upward floating, and the bright light, and the sense of total and utter well-being. “Seconds? Minutes?”

“Your brain was never without oxygen,” he said, which didn't answer the question, so she tried a different angle.

“How many of you were working on me?” She had seen five.

“There were seven—three doctors and four nurses.”

“At the time when my heart stopped?”

He thought back. “No. There were five in the room then—Jack Warren and I, two nurses, and Simon Meade, up from St. Johnsbury.”

Simon Meade. The tall one in the dark-blue scrubs. The one who had applied the paddles that shocked her back to life. It had taken more than one application.

“I felt those shocks,” she murmured. It had been at the very end. She had been at peace with herself and the world, totally happy, then,
whap!

The doctor smiled. “Patients often say that, but it's actually only the thought of the procedure that hurts. You were completely anesthetized.”

“I felt them,” Bree insisted, but softly, because there was a chance he was right. What she thought she had seen didn't make sense. Maybe it was her imagination. She was heavily medicated. Maybe she was pulling images from the past. After all, she had watched
ER.
She knew what went on in operating rooms.

She also knew about near-death experiences—hard for an avid reader not to, what with so many books and magazine articles on the subject. So maybe what she had thought was real was nothing more than the power of suggestion. Maybe she had dreamed it up, after all.

 

But the dream wouldn't be dispelled. It penetrated her discomfort in bits and snatches, in ever greater detail as the day progressed. Friends stopped by to say hello, only to be hurried along by the nurses. Flash was one of the few who were allowed to stay.

He arrived late in the afternoon, with a platter of goodies from the diner. Bree was awake, but a long way from eating anything solid. Her stomach hurt. Her whole body hurt—cheek, arm, hip, legs. The last thing she felt was hungry. Thirsty, yes. Hungry, no.

“Not even one little cookie?” Flash pleaded. “I brought the shortbreads just for you. You love them.”

“You
love them,” she said, in a raspy voice, and grimaced against the pain of movement when she reached toward the cup on the bed table. “I'm so dry. Help me, Flash. I can't reach that cup.” When he moved it closer, she fished out several ice chips and put them in her mouth.

“What have we here?” Flash asked on his way to the window. A bubble bowl on the sill was filled with flowers, exquisitely arranged. “Pink geraniums, purple somethings, white crocuses. And lots of local ornamental grass. From Julia Dean. That's so nice.” He returned to the bed. “I talked with the doctors. Another five days here, they said, and you'll be home. A couple of weeks at home, and you'll be back at the diner. Jillie's filling in while you're gone, and if you don't feel like waitressing after that, she'll stay on. You can just sit in the office and manage the place. I'm paying you either way. You don't have to worry about a thing.”

Bree wasn't worried. She hadn't thought about what would come after, was still trying to figure out what had come before. “I died on the operating table.”

“No, you didn't. Your heart stopped for a few beats before they started it up again. That's not dying.”

But she wasn't being put off. Flash was one of her best friends. She needed to tell him what had happened. “I knew when it stopped. I felt things.”

He looked skeptical. “What kinds of things?”

“Lightness. Out-of-my-body kinds of things. I went through the ceiling.”

“So did I when Eliot told me about the accident. I knew I should have driven you all the way home. If I had, you wouldn't be lying here now. Whoever was driving that truck is in deep shit.”

He wasn't listening. Frustrated, Bree closed her eyes. But a greater need forced them open again. “What do you know about near-death experiences?”

“As much as I want,” he said, with a snort that said he didn't think they were real. “When we die, we die. I don't believe in heaven or hell.”

He didn't believe in God, either. He had told her that more than once, and while she didn't agree with him, she respected his feelings. She also respected the fact that he had a graduate degree in art history from Columbia. He wasn't dumb.

“What if I said I'd had a look at heaven?” she asked.

“I'd say it's the medication talking. They have you on morphine. That's strong stuff.”

She gave a tiny head shake. “It's not the medication.”

“No? Listen to you. Your words are slurred. It's the medication.”

Possibly. Still, she saw that scene and felt that light, felt the
benevolence
of it. “I don't usually believe in things like this.”

“Damn right you don't,” Flash scolded. “Verity does. Do you want people laughing at you the way they laugh at her?”

“But I see this so
clearly,”
she pleaded.

“I'm telling you, it's the morphine and, if not that, the anesthesia. It'll pass.” With more fear than humor, he added, “It better. I need you with your feet on the ground. You're the sane one, Bree. Don't flip out on me, huh?”

Bree wasn't flipping out. He was right. She
was
the sane one.

But each time she closed her eyes, she was back in the operating room, hovering over the table, then rising, rising, and then there was that light. As confused as she was about what was real and what wasn't, she couldn't deny the calm that flowed through her each time she thought of that light. And there was more to the experience. She hadn't told Flash the half of it. More returned with each wakeful stretch, much of it sketchy still, but exciting, baffling, even scary, if what she thought she had heard was true.

 

Dusk fell. Bree dreamed about the operating room again, dreamed of hovering above it and looking down. This time she saw a mole on the nape of the neck of one of the nurses.

She awoke convinced that it wasn't a dream at all. She
had
seen a mole in the operating room that night. But how, if she had been unconscious? There was only one way.

Shaken, she forced her eyes open. The only light in the room was the dim glow of a corner lamp. It was a gentle light, less harsh than the overheads, but reassuring. She wouldn't have wanted to wake up to total darkness and wonder which world she was in.

She lay without moving for a while, trying to separate pain from other needs, deciding whether she wanted to act on any and, if so, how. First priority, easiest to meet, was water. Her mouth was still abominably dry.

She had barely reached for the overhead bar, in an attempt to sit up, when the chair in the corner came alive. Her eyes widened on the man who approached. Uncommon height, tapering body, light-brown hair long grown out of a stylist's cut—no mistaking his identity.

He poured fresh water into the cup from the pitcher beside it, flexed the straw so that she could drink more easily, and slipped an arm behind her. “Don't use your stomach muscles. Let me do the work.”

She stared at him, wondering why he was there but too dry to ask. And he was right. She felt less pain when she let him take her weight. With her upper body raised just enough, she drank, paused, drank again, then whispered, “Why am I so dry?”

“It's from the anesthesia. The IV pumps in fluids, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.”

“Actually, it does,” she remarked, because the bathroom was second on her list.