A Full House

Sally said she missed her father, and why wouldn’t she? Though he called her once a week, she rarely saw him. Perhaps she should spend some time with him this summer. It would be good for the both of them to get to know each other better, and it would get Sally away from those awful kids. That alone was enough to make Annie reconsider Ryan’s proposal.

CHAPTER TWO

“YOU PROMISED ME, Annie,” Matt reminded her two weeks later to the day. They were standing to one side of the door to X-ray. “I trust you’ve been packing your gear.”

Annie sighed. “I know I promised, but I can’t go right away, Matt,” she said. “Sally’s hearing is first thing Monday morning and…” She shook her head, still unable to believe she was talking about her child. “I can’t just up and leave her, Matt. I was thinking that maybe we should wait until she goes to visit her father, and even then I may not be able to get a whole week off. I’ll ask, but there’s only an outside chance. You know how Edelstein is. He hates for anyone to have a life apart from the hospital.” She gazed at Matt, then reached for his arm and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. “Come on, Matt. I said I’d go, I just can’t promise you an entire week, that’s all. We’ll have to make the best of what we can get, and in the meantime, I’ll go to court with Sally.” An unexpected laugh erupted before she could quell it.

“I don’t know how you can find the situation funny.”

“It’s not funny at all. It just sounds so strange to my ears… It’s awful, it really is…” She sighed wearily and shook her head. “My daughter would never smoke pot or hang out with a seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Tom or get arrested for possession of an illegal substance. Know what I mean?”

“I hope she’s learned her lesson.”

“Me, too. She’s been going to these special meetings on Tuesday nights that are guaranteed to put her on the straight and narrow and she seems to be taking it very seriously, which is good because I’m having a hard time with all this stuff. Court hearings, for heaven’s sake. All I can picture is Sally being hauled away in handcuffs by that scruffy cop, Lieutenant Macpherson. He could easily pass for a derelict. I understand it’s part of his job to look like the very people he’s trying to arrest, but still…”

“I take it he’s not one of your favorites?” Matt said sympathetically.

“He arrested my daughter, didn’t he?” Annie shot over her shoulder as she pushed through the doors to X-ray.

ANNIE’S SATURDAY NIGHT in ER began with a blistering flurry of activity that only intensified as the early hours of the morning brought a rising tide of traumatic injuries. By 3:00 a.m. she was up to her elbows in other people’s crises, which in a way was a blessing because she had no time to dwell on the Monday morning hearing. She was actually beginning to look forward to the camping trip with Matt, and also beginning to entertain the notion of getting out of the city once and for all. Perhaps it was time for that long-yearned-for return to the country, to a quiet, backwater place where Sally could make new friends and discover sunshine and fresh air.

“Dr. Crawford?” Rob Bellows, a surgical resident, entered the treatment room and spoke at her elbow. “I’ll take over for you here. We’ve got another incoming. Gunshot wound to the chest, EMT’s report it’s pretty dicey.”

“They’re all pretty dicey,” Annie said wearily, stepping back from the table where the victim of a car accident, young and drunk, submitted docilely to having a gash on his forehead stitched. She stripped off her gloves and threw them in the waste container as she walked out. She could already hear the muted sound of the ambulance siren as it swung into the emergency entrance. Then the siren cut off and she could picture the ambulance backing up to the door. She stopped at the nurse’s station and grabbed a fast drink of cool spring water and then a second as the emergency doors automatically opened and they wheeled the next patient in.

“Round three,” Annie muttered under her breath as the running footsteps squeaked toward her down the polished floor. She fell into step beside the stretcher, visibly assessing the victim. The EMTs were brisk, professional and slightly out of breath. “Had a hell of a time with this one…cops said it could be a .38 caliber bullet…entry wound is on his lower left chest, no exit wound, the patient’s in shock, definitely a tension pnuemo, we nearly lost him on the way in…”

There was a generous amount of blood on the victim, but Annie guessed from the EMT’s brief rundown that most of the hemorrhaging was internal and that a lung had collapsed. They wheeled him, half running, into the ER, where the skilled team quickly began cutting away the injured man’s clothing, allowing Annie to make a rapid but careful examination. A scene that might have paralyzed a less experienced physician, she dealt with perfunctorily and with minimal talk. Within minutes she had established an airway and positioned a chest tube between his ribs, while at the same time the nurses, at her direction, placed two IVs in his arms and began infusing a bag of Ringer’s solution as fast as possible. While Annie inserted a nasogastric tube to decompress the stomach, the nurses drew blood samples, placed a catheter and activated electronic monitors. All of their actions were so well orchestrated that scarcely five minutes had passed since the patient had been wheeled into ER.

Annie guided a large bore needle between the ribs just beneath the collarbone and, just as she had expected, pressurized air hissed out. “Okay, people,” she said, “this one goes straight into OR. There’s some serious abdominal bleeding going on, a collapsed lung and God only knows what else. We have a definite chest wound, but this guy’s stomach is swelling up like a hot-air balloon. I think that bullet did some bouncing around inside there.”

She picked up the phone and dialed OR. “Hey, Hanley, we’re coming down with a gunshot wound to the left chest, in shock, definitely looks like multiple organ trauma.” As she spoke, she glanced at the victim’s face. There was something familiar about the guy. She drew in a deep breath as she heard Hanley say something about a kid with a hot appendix. “Bump him,” she snapped. “This one can’t wait.”

She hung up the phone. “Who is this guy?” she asked the surgical resident, who shook his head and shrugged, but the nurse picked up the chart left behind by the EMTs.

“Macpherson,” the nurse said, scanning it quickly. “Lieutenant Jake Macpherson.” Her eyebrows raised in surprise, and she glanced at Annie. “He’s a cop.”

“Okay, let’s rock and roll, folks,” Annie said, her heart rate shifting into high gear as adrenaline surged through her. “He’s going to be a dead cop if we don’t hustle.”

FOR BREAKFAST on Sunday morning Sally always had cereal and toast and a big glass of orange juice. Her mother usually was home by 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. and Ana Lise would cook the traditional Sunday-morning breakfast of ham and eggs, but Sally was happy with her bowl of cereal. She was addicted to Cheerios. If there was a banana to slice onto it she was in heaven—except this morning. She had her Cheerios and an entire banana sliced atop, but she was about as far from heaven as she could get. She sat in the breakfast nook and watched Ana Lise bustle around the gleaming kitchen, taking a pan of pastries from the oven.

“You will have a pastry then, ja?” she asked over her shoulder.

Sally shook her head.

“No thanks. I’m not hungry.”

Ana Lise set the pan on the counter and turned, frowning. “You would not like a pastry with butter spread over it? A cinnamon bun warm from the oven? Are you ill, then?”

Sally used the tip of her spoon to submerge the slices of banana one by one. She shook her head again. “I’m too nervous to eat,” she confided miserably. “Tomorrow’s my hearing…”

“Ja, but that is tomorrow. This is today. You must eat.”

“Ana Lise, what if they put me in jail?”

“They will not put you in jail. You are only a child.”

“What if they send me to juvenile hall?”

Ana Lise shook her head in exasperation. “We have talked of this before. They will not send you to juvenile hall.”

“Mom might send me to private school. She might make me move away.”

“That would never happen,” Ana Lise said, hands on her sturdy hips. “You eat your cereal.”

“Do you think she’ll let me visit my dad this summer?”

Ana Lise turned back to her tasks with a shake of her head. “I am not paid to tell your fortune, young lady. Eat your breakfast. Your mother will be home soon and you can ask her yourself.”

But Annie did not get home until nearly noontime, and Ana Lise had switched from breakfast mode to dinner mode, it being a Sunday. A roast was baking in the oven and she was verbally contemplating a Yorkshire pudding when Annie slumped wearily into the apartment. She dropped into a kitchen chair with a soft moan. “What a night,” she said. “And what a morning.”

“A hard one, ja?” Ana Lise said sympathetically, pouring a cup of coffee and setting it, strong and black, in front of Annie.

“Hard? Oh, Ana Lise.” Annie let her head fall back and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Where’s Sally?”

“In her room listening to her music. She’s worried about tomorrow. About the hearing. She didn’t eat any breakfast and she says she is too nervous to eat lunch.”

They heard the door to Sally’s room open and her light, quick footsteps in the hall. “Mom? I thought I heard your voice.” Sally paused in the kitchen doorway, her face mirroring her mother’s, though for entirely different reasons. “Mom, I’m so nervous about tomorrow that I feel sick.”

Annie opened her eyes and inhaled another deep breath, releasing it somewhere between a sigh and a moan. “There isn’t going to be a hearing tomorrow, Sally,” she said. She raised and rotated her shoulders to ease a sudden muscle cramp. There was nothing like a long stint in surgery to trigger painful muscle spasms. “Your arresting officer was shot last night. I spent most of the night and the better part of this morning trying to keep him alive.”

Sally’s face was blank. For a moment she said nothing, just stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at her mother. “Is he…dead?” she finally blurted.

Annie raised her eyebrows. “A fine question to ask. Don’t you have any faith in your mother’s skills?”

Sally slumped against the doorjamb. “Then…he’s still going to testify against me in court?”

“Not tomorrow, he isn’t,” Annie said flatly. She picked up her coffee cup and took a sip. “I spoke to the big cheese at the station house. He was at the hospital, along with half a hundred other police officers. He told me the hearing would be rescheduled when Lieutenant Macpherson’s health permits. So, sweet little best friend of mine, it would seem that you have been granted a temporary reprieve.”

Sally’s eyes fixed gravely on her mother’s face. “For how long?”

Annie took another sip of coffee. “He’s young and strong. I expect an uncomplicated recovery. Let’s say three weeks, four at the outside. By then he’ll be able to sit in a courtroom and tell the whole world how you were out gallivanting around in the middle of the night with a bunch of pot-smoking juvenile delinquents.”

“But I wasn’t smoking pot…”

“Don’t expect much sympathy from me right now, young lady. I’m dead tired.”

Ana Lise refilled Annie’s coffee cup. “What you need right now is a long soak in a hot bath, ja? I know how that helps you after you’ve spent a long time in surgery. I will get it ready.”