A Full House

Annie smiled wearily at her housekeeper. “That sounds lovely. I’ll take you up on that offer.”

Half an hour later she was immersed to her chin in deliciously hot water and lavender oil. Her eyes were blissfully closed and she was nearly asleep, her mind drifting toward that quiet, peaceful place where the wind blew all the clouds away and the horses ran free, when Ana Lise tapped on the bathroom door.

“A call for you, from the hospital,” she called apologetically.

Annie moaned. “Take a message.”

“He says it is an emergency.”

“Okay,” Annie said. The bathroom door opened and Ana Lise’s arm stretched around with the cordless phone in her hand. Annie took it. “Thank you,” she said as the door closed. “Yes?” she said into the phone. It was Matt.

“I’m sorry to call you, Annie, I know you just left here, but your patient, Macpherson, went into cardiac arrest about ten minutes ago. We jump-started him, but he’s not too stable. Blood pressure’s 90/70.”

Annie was rising out of the tub even as Matt spoke. “Where’s Palazola?” she asked tersely. “Isn’t he senior surgeon on call?”

“He’s in OR with a little boy who was run over by a bus.”

“What about Macpherson’s heart sounds? Are they muffled?”

“Yes.”

“Dammit! He was fine when I left. Okay, I’m on my way. We’ll need to aspirate the blood around the heart. Can you do it?”

“I can try.” Matt’s voice mirrored his uncertainty. “How soon can you be here?”

“Ten minutes.”

“I’d rather wait for you…”

“If you have to do it, Matt, do it,” Annie said, throwing the phone onto the vanity and reaching for a towel. “Ana Lise, call my driving service!” she shouted out the bathroom door. Fifteen minutes later, hair still dripping, she was running down the hallway to the Intensive Care Unit. Matt was inside the cubicle watching the monitors and two nurses were with him. Annie listened to Macpherson’s heart and noted the distention of his neck veins. “People, he should already be in the OR,” she snapped, her nerves on edge. “I trust you’ve cleared it?”

Matt’s face flushed. “We’re good to go.”

Aspirating the blood from around the heart was not a long procedure, but Annie blamed herself for not anticipating the complication. She had checked for cardiac tamponade several times since Macpherson had been admitted, both before, during and after the surgery. At no time did she discern a problem. Still… She exited the OR for the second time that day in a haze of exhaustion, stripping off her gloves and mask and tossing them into the disposal unit.

“I’m sorry, Annie,” Matt said, hurrying out behind her. “I should’ve spotted the warning signs sooner.”

“I shouldn’t have left,” Annie said. “I’ll check on him when they bring him into recovery. If anything changes, I’ll be in the lounge.”

“Annie.” She stopped and turned. Matt was holding his arms out at his sides in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry I messed up.”

Annie shook her head wearily. “Just come and get me if there’s any deterioration in his condition. He can’t die on me, Matt. That just can’t happen. They’d think I did something deliberately so he couldn’t testify against my daughter.”

“No one would ever think that.”

Annie didn’t answer.

“Get some rest. If there’s the slightest change in his condition, I’ll wake you.”

But in spite of her exhaustion, Annie couldn’t sleep. The hospital, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was bustling with life. Intercoms squawked nonstop, carts rattled, rubber-soled shoes squeaked, voices of patients, staff and visitors mingled in the corridors. She lay on the couch in the doctor’s lounge, her forearm shielding her eyes, and tried to relax. Her stomach cramped painfully, reminding her she hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, yet she wasn’t hungry.

She sat up and yawned. Within minutes she was in recovery, checking on Macpherson. His vital signs were good. She pulled a chair up beside his bed and sat. Matt came in quietly to adjust the IVs and returned moments later with a fresh, hot cup of coffee and a magazine for Annie. She took both with a grateful smile. The coffee was good and the magazine was a copy of Down East, a monthly publication full of beautiful pictures and articles about coastal Maine.

She sipped the coffee and turned the pages of the magazine, finding herself drawn to the evocative images of a world far removed from big-city life. How long she sat there, immersed in the mystique of rocky, timbered coastline, saltwater farms and quaint harbors filled with sturdy lobster boats, she didn’t know. But her coffee was cold and her yawns had become more frequent when a man’s voice said, “Beautiful place.”

She looked up, startled to see that Macpherson had awakened. She blinked, set aside the magazine and the coffee. She checked his vital signs, relieved that they were all as good as could be expected. The cadence of his heartbeat remained clear and strong.

“My grandparents used to have a camp in Maine,” he said as she straightened, easing a cramp in the small of her back.

“Don’t talk, Lieutenant. You’re in recovery and you’re doing just fine, but you need to keep quiet.”

She accompanied the orderlies when they rolled Macpherson back to ICU and saw that he was hooked up into the myriad of monitors again. “The police are everywhere,” she told him as she made a few notes on his chart. “The waiting room is jammed full of them.” She thought it strange that there was no significant other wringing her hands among all the badges. Surely there was a woman in his life? And what about his parents? Brothers and sisters?

“My parents sold the camp when my grandparents died,” he said, still groggy from the effects of the anesthesia. “Beautiful log cabin…”

“Lieutenant Macpherson?” Annie bent over him. “Is there anyone I can call for you? Family members, close friends?”

“Those guys in the waiting room,” he said. “Only family I have.”

“I see. Well, you won’t be able to have any visitors today. Tomorrow, perhaps.” Annie paused. “And, Lieutenant, this might not be the best time to apologize, but I’m sorry I was so rude to you the night you arrested my daughter.”

A vague frown furrowed his brow at her words, then cleared. “Bear clawed the door once, trying to get in. Big bear.”

Annie sighed. He was still pretty dopey. “Lieutenant, no more talking. I’ve taped the call button right beside your hand. Can you feel it? Good. If you need anything at all, just push that button. The nurses will keep a close eye on you, and Dr. Brink will be checking in regularly. I’ll be nearby, just down the hall.” Annie took one last critical look at Macpherson before turning to leave, but his voice stopped her as she reached the door.

“The cabin was on a pretty little pond…”

“Lieutenant, please try to get some rest.”

She turned away once again, and once again his voice halted her in her tracks. “Don’t forget your magazine, Doc,” he said. When she left Intensive Care Unit, the glossy periodical was tucked beneath her arm.

JAKE MACPHERSON was moved into a private room after three days in ICU. Time resumed its old dimensions and began to weigh heavily upon him. His visitors came and went in a steady stream, men and women from the department, the obligatory brotherhood of the badge. Some of them were friends, others he barely recognized, more than a few he didn’t know at all. All of them came bearing get-well wishes and awkward demeanors. None of them enjoyed being in hospitals because they feared that one day, they, too, might wind up in an adjustable hospital bed with bloody tubes bristling from their bodies.

Or worse, in the hospital’s morgue.

The one bright spot that moved in and out of his life was Dr. Annie Crawford, but he saw her less and less frequently as his condition improved and the regular doctors took over. And so he spent the long hours of the endless days replaying the sequence of events that had landed him in this hospital bed. Damning himself, over and over, for his carelessness. Berating himself for not listening to the skinny hooker when she’d said to Joey Mendoza, little drug runner extraordinaire, “I won’t let him arrest you, Joey, I’ll shoot him first.” A hollow threat. Surely she didn’t have a gun, and even if she did, no one would shoot a cop for Joey Mendoza.

But surprise, surprise, when he’d started to cuff Joey, she’d pulled this tiny pistol out of her purse. He’d had time to defend himself. He’d seen her move, seen the little pistol in her hand, and was pulling his own gun even as he pushed Joey away from him, out of the line of fire. He could have shot her but didn’t. Couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger on a woman.

And so he lay on his back in the hospital bed, hour after hour, counting the tiny holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles, finding geometric patterns in random chaos, endlessly defining the perimeters of his life and waiting for the early mornings when Annie Crawford would walk into his room at the end of her shift, give him one of her quizzical little smiles and say, “Hey, Lieutenant. How are you feeling?”

Whenever she came he tried to engage her in conversation about her daughter. About her life. About the hospital. About the weather. About the dog-eared Down East magazine she’d been reading. About the camp his grandparents had owned. Anything to extend her visit. Eventually she showed him a classified ad in the real estate section, an old saltwater farm for rent for the summer in a place called Blue Harbor. “It’s a wild, crazy dream, spending a summer in Maine,” she admitted. “But, oh, so tempting.”

He advised her to call the listing Realtor. “Live dangerously,” he said. “Take the summer off and be wild.”

She’d laughed at the absurdity of such a notion, but the next time she came into his room she confessed that she’d called about the rental. “It’s still available and sounds wonderful, but there’s just no way I can take the whole summer off, and they won’t rent it by the week.” Still, she was thinking about it, he could tell. She was thinking about it enough that he called the Realtor himself, remembering the name from the ad she’d shown him. An elderly sounding man answered. “I’m wondering if you carry any summer rentals in the Blue Harbor area,” Jake began.

“Sure do. What exactly are you looking for, and in what price range?”