Coming In From the Cold(41)
"When you broke your leg," Willow said to Dane, "I'm sure it looked really bad from the stands."
But Dane just shook his head. "Christ. The Olympics."
From inside his jacket, the baby made a sound of protest. Dane tore his gaze away from the medical swarm and leaned inside to kiss her. Watching him, Callie's heart squeezed with some unnamed feeling of yearning.
"She's probably hungry," Willow said. "I'll take her inside and feed her."
Dane watched an ambulance thread toward the huddle on the ice, a look of unease still washing across his face. "I guess I'll come, too," he said.
Following them, Callie fingered her pager in her pocket. The odds of it going off today had just escalated. She pulled out her phone to check in.
"Busy?" she asked the triage nurse who answered the doctors' line. "If I were you, I'd pull up the call sheet for ortho and neuro. There was an injury during the snowboarding event at the ski mountain. You should be seeing them in fifteen minutes."
"Will you get called in?" Willow asked after Callie hung up. The ambulance was already threading its way out to the state road, its lights whirling.
"I'm not their first call," Callie said. "But give it an hour or two." Callie was a hospitalist-a doctor who kept track of admitted patients' medical needs.
"Okay," Willow said, her eyes on the retreating ambulance. "I guess Dane and I will go to the farmhouse now, and check things out. Then we'll swing by the hospital to try to learn what we can. We don't know him all that well, but … " She swallowed. "That looked bad, didn't it?"
"Yeah," Callie admitted. The force with which he'd hit the pipe was scary. "But bodies can be tougher than they look."
Willow shivered. "Can I call you in a couple of hours? No matter what, I want to see you tonight. Or tomorrow before we go."
"Absolutely. I need to hold that baby some more." She wanted that now more than ever, given the scary accident she'd just witnessed.
God, life was short. Maybe hers wasn't working out so badly, after all.
* * *
As it happened, Callie was not handed Hank Lazarus's chart until the following day. And even though she'd had twenty-four hours to process what she'd seen, the first sight of him in a hospital bed gutted her.
Pale and swollen from the IV fluids, he lay perfectly still. Since she'd last set eyes on him, he'd undergone an eight-hour spinal surgery. In place of the goggles and technical fabrics was a new sort of gear-tubes and monitors snaking from his body in every direction.
Even though he was sedated, Callie found herself holding her breath as she checked the tag on his IV bag. As his powerful chest rose and fell, Callie realized how limited her view of her patients usually was. Never before had she gotten such a shocking demonstration of "before" and "after." She met patients hours or days after things went sideways. But the ashen, broken man in room nineteen was such a frightening contrast to the one she'd seen drop into the half-pipe, it hurt her to look at him.
She forced herself to linger a moment longer. Though it shamed her to say it, there were times when she found herself judging the people in these beds. She might wonder why the patient had thought it was a good idea to ride that zip line so near to the trees, or drive so fast in the rain. Callie had always lived cautiously, and when she saw the results of a preventable accident, it seemed like such a waste.
But the memory of Hank Lazarus flipping effortlessly against the blue sky was burned in her brain. And in spite of the danger of it all, so cruelly proven by the sleeping figure in the bed, she didn't have to ask why he'd choose to take such a risk. She'd seen the power and the beauty of it with her own two eyes.
Beneath the sheet, he breathed. In and out. At that moment, there was nothing he needed from her. And nothing more she could do.
* * *
Dane and Willow tried to see Hank before they left again for Utah, but the first time they stopped by, he was in surgery. The second time, he was asleep. With the Olympics just weeks away, they had to go back to Dane's training. "Will you give him our love?" Willow asked, looking shaken in the waiting room.
"Of course," Callie answered, fully intending to do it.
As it happened, she never did.
In the first place, when Callie finally saw Hank conscious, he didn't seem to remember her face. And this was not at all surprising. They'd only met for a second, and the mind often forgot the events just before a trauma.
And Hank had a distracting swirl of other visitors as the days went by. His parents, Callie learned, were a sort of Vermont royalty. They were part owners of the ski mountain. And Hank's father had built half of the condos in the county. There was a daughter, too, another athlete.
Callie gleaned many of these facts from the local paper, which ran a front-page story about Hank and his accident. At age eighteen, he'd left Vermont for the Rocky Mountains, where he'd taken a job as a dishwasher to pay for his lift tickets. He was as famous for partying as he was for winning competitions.
Reading about him made Callie feel like a stalker. But there it was in black and white, on the table in the break room.
From her chair beside Hank's bed, his mother was a silver-haired force of nature, barking orders at every nurse who dared to enter her son's room. And whenever Callie saw Mr. Lazarus in the hospital corridors, he was always on his phone
"They're flying in specialists. Three of them," nurse Trina told her. The nurse's station was another excellent source of news.
"That's a lot of firepower," Callie said.
"The Lazarus family can afford it. They gave a truckload of money to the hospital," she said, cracking her gum. "The pediatric wing built ten years ago? That was all them."
"Wow, really? You'd think their name would be over the door."
Trina shrugged. "They don't do bling. Mama Lazarus has those fancy shoes that no sane person wears in Vermont, right? And pearls? But no bling."
Callie had noticed that, too, actually. Even during this time of crisis, Hank's mother paced his room in camel-colored cashmere and suede. It was expensive, but not flashy.
"Their daughter survived some kind of childhood cancer," Trina continued. "They gave the money afterward as a thank-you."
"That's generous."
"Sure. But they're also exacting. That woman was on my ass tighter than a bumper sticker while I did his blood draw. Like I haven't been doing this for thirty years."
"It's because you look so young, Trina. She probably thought it was your first day."
The woman rolled her eyes, and Callie moved on to her next patient.
* * *
On Hank's third day at the hospital, a new visitor showed up. Outside Hank's room, seated on a plastic chair, wept a very pretty girl. Callie assumed this was Hank's sister. But again the nurses had the dirt. The statuesque blonde was the girlfriend, and a slalom skier. And a model. She even had a glamorous name: Alexis. Her only obvious flaw was temporary-she'd cried raccoon eyes onto herself each time Callie glimpsed her.
As Hank's medical coordinator, Callie was in and out, checking to be sure that the prescriptions his various specialists had ordered were appropriately dosed and would not conflict. She kept tabs on his vitals and watched for signs of infection. She was just one in a sea of faces caring for him.
It wasn't until the fifth day after his accident that they had a real conversation.
Outside the door to his room, his parents were engaged in a heated conversation with a spinal specialist they'd whisked in from Cleveland. Callie slid past them to find Hank staring out the window. When he turned his head to meet her eyes, she could see that the post-surgical drug haze had lifted. In his gaze, she saw a man awake to the world, but in terrible pain. It was her job to try to figure out if that pain was something physical that she could relieve, or rather the distress of waking up to find he could not move his legs.
"Hi," Callie said softly. "I'm Doctor Anders. Or Callie, if you wish."
"Callie," he cleared his throat. "You look really familiar."
That wasn't what she had expected him to say. It would have been as good a time as any to mention that they'd met about ten minutes before his accident, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Who would want to be reminded of that afternoon? "I've been here all week," she said instead. "But we don't expect you to keep track of the dozens of people who prod you all day."