The Husband Project

Alison. was sure that under normal circumstances the pressure of his hand on her abdomen would have been no more than a firm touch. As it was, however, she felt as if a cannonball had hit her squarely where she hurt worst. She screamed, and her body instinctively folded up into a fetal position.

If she’d been lying on her side, there would have been no awkward consequences from simply pulling her knees up tight to her chest and bending her head protectively over her vulnerable midsection. Instead, she was on her back, with Logan Kavanaugh bending over her—and as she reared up off the table, her forehead collided with his jaw. Her vertebrae rattled with the impact.

He staggered back from the table, one hand pressed to his face. “I see I found the right spot.” His voice was level, but when he took his hand away from the comer of his mouth, his fingers were red. “Excuse me a moment.”

As he left the room, Alison lay back on the table. The pain in her abdomen was almost relentless, and now her head ached, too. Even breathing hurt.

“Now that was a full-speed retreat,” Susannah said admiringly. “You’re a wonder, Ali. I’d never have come up with such a novel way to get rid of a man.” She moved closer to the table and patted Alison’s hand.

Despite the pain, Alison couldn’t keep herself from laughing—though it sounded more like a sob.

In less than a minute Logan Kavanaugh was back, holding an ice cube wrapped in a piece of gauze against his lip. He stopped a full pace from the examining table. “What have you eaten today?”

Alison closed her eyes. “A light and early lunch. So if you think, Doctor, that this is nothing more than indigestion—”

“No, and I’m sure it’s not hunger pains, either. I think it’s the.hottest appendix I’ve seen in years. I’ve already called a surgeon, but we may as well get the basics out of the way while we wait. Are you allergic to any medications?”

Alison shook her head wearily.

Kit said, “But is it safe to wait, Logan? Couldn’t you—”

“What? You want me to voluntarily spend an hour in the same room with her and a scalpel? She’s dangerous enough with only her head as a weapon.” His voice was full of lazy humor, but Alison bristled anyway. “It won’t take long for the surgeon to get here,” he went on, more seriously. “By the time we’ve done the workup—”

“It’s not appendicitis,” Alison said.

A silence as clear and hard as crystal fell over the room.. From the hall came the sound of footsteps and lowered voices, but inside the examining room the only sound was the nagging hum of the clock above the door.

“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” Logan Kavanaugh said. His imitation of the ironic note in Alison’s voice was precise. “And just what is your diagnosis?”

Susannah said hastily, “She’s not herself. Really, Dr. Kavanaugh. She’s practically out of her mind with pain.”

“Ali.” Kit sounded tired. “You haven’t been reading medical books, have you?”

“What an incredibly idiotic question,” Susannah said. “The research queen of metropolitan Chicago? Of course she has—she probably keeps Gray’s Anatomy on her bedside table right next to her Dun and Bradstreet ”

The door opened, and a white-coated woman with short red hair and a sprinkling of freckles appeared, her hand already outstretched for the clipboard Logan Kavanaugh held. “Thanks a bunch, Kavanaugh,” she said absently as her gaze dropped to the chart. “You know I have a date tonight. At least, I used to have.”

Logan Kavanaugh shrugged. “You shouldn’t be hanging around with that guy anyway, Sara.”

She ignored him and smiled at Alison. “I’m Sara Williams, and I’m a staff surgeon here. If I can just take a look...”

Logan’s ice cube had melted and the piece of gauze had been thrown away, but his index finger went as if by instinct to the swollen bump on his lip. “You might want to be careful doing that,” he said under his breath.

“Go away, Logan,” Dr. Williams said briskly.

He didn’t, exactly; Alison was dimly aware that he stopped in the doorway to talk to Kit. But she wasn’t paying attention to the low-voiced conversation; a moment later one of the nurses returned to give her a shot, and within a couple of minutes her tongue wouldn’t work right and nothing seemed to matter anymore.

Alison remembered only snatches of the hours that followed. The pain wasn’t gone, but it was different—no longer knife-sharp, but a sort of dull burn that haunted her whenever she broke through to consciousness. She tried to hang on to wakefulness, because the physical ache was better than the anesthesia-induced dreams; she didn’t remember them exactly, only the feelings they left behind, and that was bad enough. But despite her efforts, she kept sinking back into the twilight like a swimmer caught in an undertow.

Finally, though, she opened her eyes to see dim lights, the standard equipment of a regular hospital room, and Susannah bending over her, talking soothing nonsense.

“What are you doing here?” Alison managed to say. “It has to be the middle of the night.”

“Just about.” Susannah sounded cheerful. “I am the night shift, standing guard.”

Alison closed her eyes, but this time she didn’t sink like a rock into unconsciousness. “Why?”

“Because Kit and I were afraid you’d try your hand at nursing—and if you’re as bad at that as you are at diagnosis, you’d be gangrenous by morning.”

“Then...” Alison swallowed hard. “It was appendicitis?”

“Of course it was. Why were you so sure it wasn’t?”

“The pain was in the wrong place. And there were a whole lot of other reasons, too.” The knot inside her stomach—the leaden lump which had settled there the day she’d first looked up her symptoms in her layman’s medical guide—slowty loosened, and once more she sank into the depths. But this time her sleep was more natural, and she wasn’t haunted by the dreams.

By morning the whole thing felt like a nightmare, except for the lingering effects of anesthesia and the fact that she could barely shuffle across the room, even if she held on to an aide with one hand and the stand which held her intravenous drip with the other. But Alison gritted her teeth and refused to quit.

At midafternoon, she paused to take a rest in the marginally-comfortable chair in her hospital room, her back propped with pillows so she could get up by herself when she was ready for her next walk down the hall. From her window she could see little but a dusty courtyard surrounded by plain brick walls, but Alison wasn’t interested in the view. She was retracing her state of mind over the last few weeks, remembering how each occurrence of pain had increased her fear and each release had allowed her to pretend it couldn’t happen again.

For an intelligent woman, she told herself, you certainly have been acting like a fool.

She didn’t even look around when she heard the knock on her half-open door, just called, “Come in.”

A moment later Logan Kavanaugh pulled a straight chair up beside her. Today the green scrubs had given way to easy-fitting charcoal trousers and a white shirt with faint gray pinstripes. “I just stopped in to see how you’re doing.”

“I’d rather be at the football game.”

He grinned, and his dark green eyes sparkled. “Wouldn’t we all?”

Alison looked at him a little more closely. Under the humor in his face, she could see the marks of tiredness; there were lines around his mouth and faint shadows under his eyes. And, she noted with a tinge of guilt, there was not only still a tiny bump on his lip, but she could see the half-inch-long red line of the cut. “I suppose you’ve been delivering a baby?”

“Now and then,” he said. “I think the count stands at seventeen since my last day off—but it’s possible I’ve forgotten a couple. It’s been a very long week.”

“You’re on duty all the time?”

“In theory, no. But—for instance—a few months from now, when Kit goes into labor, can you imagine what she’d say if she called to tell me and I said, ‘Good luck, I’m sure you’ll like the guy who’s on call, and I’ll stop in tomorrow to check on you’?”

“Point taken.”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees and hands tented together. “I also came in to apologize for my unprofessional behavior yesterday.”

Alison frowned. “I don’t quite—”

“For one thing, making that crack about not wanting to be alone in a room with you and a scalpel. Though I was only your doctor for about three minutes, and I’d technically turned you over to Sara by then, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You had reason to be provoked. I’m really sorry about your lip.” Alison took a deep breath. “Look, thanks for seeing me yesterday. You’re obviously very busy, and I know I wasn’t exactly an ideal patient.”

“You mean because you wanted to argue about the diagnosis? Just out of curiosity—what did you think it was?”