Blood Work - Страница 2

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“Yes. And her son.”

“Which one?”

“What?”

“Which one is dead?”

The question was his second mistake, compounding the first by drawing him further in. He knew the moment he asked it that he should have just insisted that she take the names of the two private detectives and been done with it.

“My sister. Gloria Torres. We called her Glory. That’s her son, Raymond.”

He nodded and handed the photo back but she didn’t take it. He knew she wanted him to ask what had happened but he was finally putting on the brakes.

“Look, this isn’t going to work,” he finally said. “I know what you’re doing. It doesn’t work on me.”

“You mean you have no sympathy?”

He hesitated as the anger boiled up in his throat.

“I have sympathy. You read the newspaper story, you know what happened to me. Sympathy was my problem all along.”

He swallowed it back and tried to clear away any ill feeling. He knew she was consumed by horrible frustrations. McCaleb had known hundreds of people like her. Loved ones taken from them without reason. No arrests, no convictions, no closure. Some of them were left zombies, their lives irrevocably changed. Lost souls. Graciela Rivers was one of them now. She had to be or she wouldn’t have tracked him down. He knew that no matter what she said to him or how angry he got, she didn’t deserve to be hit with his own frustrations as well.

“Look,” he said. “I just can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

He put a hand on her arm to lead her back to the dock step. Her skin was warm. He felt the strong muscle beneath the softness. He offered the photo again but she still refused to take it.

“Look at it again. Please. Just one more time and then I’ll leave you alone. Tell me if you feel anything else?”

He shook his head and made a feeble hand gesture as if to say it made no difference to him.

“I was an FBI agent, not a psychic.”

But he made a show of holding the photo up and looking at it anyway. The woman and the boy seemed happy. It was a celebration. Seven candles. McCaleb remembered that his parents were still together when he turned seven. But not much longer. His eyes were drawn to the boy more than the woman. He wondered how the boy would get along now without his mother.

“I’m sorry, Miss Rivers. I really am. But there is nothing I can do for you. Do you want this back or not?”

“I have a double of it. You know, two for the price of one. I thought you’d want to keep that one.”

For the first time he felt the undertow in the emotional current. There was something else at play but he didn’t know what. He looked closely at Graciela Rivers and had the sense that if he took another step, asked the obvious question, he would be pulled under.

He couldn’t help himself.

“Why would I want to keep it if I’m not going to be able to help you?”

She smiled in a sad sort of way.

“Because she’s the woman who saved your life. I thought from time to time you might want to remind yourself of what she looked like, who she was.”

He stared at her for a long moment but he wasn’t really looking at Graciela Rivers. He was looking inward, running what she had just said through memory and knowledge and coming up short of its meaning.

“What are you talking about?”

It was all he could manage to ask. He had the sense that control of the conversation and everything else was tilting away from him and sliding across the deck to her. The undertow had him now. It was carrying him out.

She raised her hand but reached past the photo he was still holding out to her. She placed her palm on his chest and ran it down the front of his shirt, her fingers tracing the thick rope of the scar beneath. He let her do it. He stood there frozen and let her do it.

“Your heart,” she said. “It was my sister’s. She was the one who saved your life.”

OUT OF THE CORNER of his eye he could just see the monitor. The screen was grainy silver and black, the heart like an undulating ghost, the rivets and staples that closed off blood vessels showing like black buckshot in his chest.

“Almost there,” a voice said.

It came from behind his right ear. Bonnie Fox. Always calm and comforting, professional. Soon he saw the snaking line of the scope move into the monitor’s X-ray field, following the path of the artery and entering the heart. He closed his eyes. He hated the tug, the one they say you won’t feel but you always do.

“Okay, you shouldn’t feel this,” she said.

“Right.”

“Don’t talk.”

Then, there it was. Like the slightest tug on the end of a fishing line, a scrap fish stealing your bait. He opened his eyes and saw the line of the scope, as thin as a fishing line, still deep in the heart.

“Okay, we got it,” she said. “Coming out now. You did good, Terry.”

He felt her pat his shoulder, though he couldn’t turn his head to look at her. The scope was removed and she taped a gauze compress against the incision in his neck. The brace that had held his head at such an uncomfortable angle was unstrapped and he slowly straightened his neck, bringing his hand up to work the stiff muscles. Dr. Bonnie Fox’s smiling face then hovered above his.

“How you feeling?”

“Can’t complain. Now that it’s over.”

“I’ll see you in a little while. I want to check the blood work and get the tissue over to the lab.”

“I want to talk to you about something.”

“You got it. See you in a bit.”

A few minutes later two nurses wheeled McCaleb’s bed out of the cath lab and into an elevator. He hated being treated as an invalid. He could have walked but it was against the rules. After a heart biopsy the patient must be kept horizontal. Hospitals always have rules. Cedars-Sinai seemed to have more than most.

He was taken down to the cardiology unit on the sixth floor. While being wheeled down the east hallway, he passed the rooms of the lucky and the waiting-patients who had received new hearts or were still waiting. They passed one room where McCaleb glanced through the open door and saw a young boy on the bed, his body tied by tubes to a heart-lung machine. A man in a suit sat in the chair on the other side of the bed, his eyes staring at the boy but seeing something else. McCaleb looked away. He knew the score. The kid was running out of time. The machine would only hold him up for so long. Then the man in the suit-the father, McCaleb assumed-would be staring at a casket with the same look.

They were at his room now. He was moved from the gurney onto the bed and left alone. He settled in for the wait. He knew from experience that it could be as long as six hours before Fox showed up, depending on how quickly the blood work was run through the lab and how soon she came by to pick up the report.

He had come prepared. The old leather bag in which he had once carried his computer and the countless case files he had worked on was now stuffed with back issues of magazines he saved for biopsy days.

Two and a half hours later, Bonnie Fox came through the door. McCaleb put down the copy of Boat Restoration he had been reading.

“Wow, that was fast.”

“It’s slow in the lab. How are you feeling?”

“My neck feels like it had somebody’s foot on it for a couple hours. You’ve already been to the lab?”

“Yup.”

“How’d everything come out?”

“It all looks good. No rejection, all the levels look good. I’m very pleased. We might lower your prednisone in another week.”

She spoke as she spread the lab report out on the bed’s food table and double-checked the good results. She was referring to the carefully orchestrated mix of drugs that McCaleb took every morning and night. Last he’d counted, he was swallowing eighteen pills in the morning and another sixteen at night. The medicine cabinet on the boat wasn’t big enough for all the containers. He had to use one of the storage compartments in the forward berth.

“Good,” he said. “I’m tired of shaving three times a day.”

Fox folded the report closed and picked the clipboard up off the bed table. Her eyes quickly scanned the checklist of questions he had to answer every time he came in.

“No fever at all?”

“No, I’m clean.”

“And no diarrhea.”

“Nope.”

He knew from her constant drilling and double-checking that fever and diarrhea were the twin harbingers of organ rejection. He took his temperature a minimum of twice a day, along with readings of blood pressure and pulse.

“The vitals look good. Why don’t you lean forward?”

She put the clipboard down. With a stethoscope she first warmed with her breath, she listened to his heart at three different spots on his back. Then he lay back and she listened through his chest. She took her own measure of his pulse with two fingers on his neck while she looked at her watch. She was very close to him as she did this. She wore a perfume of orange blossoms, which McCaleb had always associated with older women. And Bonnie Fox was not one of them. He looked up at her, studying her face while she studied her watch.

“Do you ever wonder if we should be doing this?” he asked.

“Don’t talk.”

Eventually, she moved her fingers to his wrist and measured the pulse there. After that she pulled the pressure collar off the wall, put it on his arm and took a blood pressure reading, maintaining her silence all the time. “Good,” she said when she was done.

“Good,” he said.

“Whether we should be doing what?”

It was like her to suddenly continue an interrupted or forgotten bit of conversation. She rarely forgot anything McCaleb said to her. Bonnie Fox was a small woman about McCaleb’s age with short hair gone prematurely gray. Her white lab coat hung almost to her ankles because it had been designed for a taller person. Embroidered on the breast pocket was an outline of the cardiopulmonary system, her specialty as a surgeon. She was all business when it came to their meetings. She had an air of confidence and caring, a combination McCaleb had always found rare in physicians-and in the last years there had been many. He returned the confidence and caring. He liked her and trusted her. In his most secret thoughts there had once been a hesitation when he considered he would one day put his life in the hands of this woman. But the hesitation quickly left and caused him only a feeling of guilt. When the time came for the transplant, it had been her smiling face that was the last he had seen as he was put to sleep in pre-op. There had been no hesitation in him by then. And it was her smiling face that welcomed him back to the world with a new heart and new life.