by Tracy Wolff
“He was heading straight for you and your magic syringe. Should I have let him take you down on his way to the back to beat up on his wife and daughter?”
Jack held up his hands. “By all means, taunt away.”
Lucas smiled a little grimly. “Somehow, that’s what I thought you’d say.” He rubbed a hand over his aching chest. He hoped the bastard hadn’t cracked his sternum with that punch.
Fifteen seconds later, he forgot his discomfort as three armed policemen burst through the doors, guns drawn.
Fifteen seconds after that, Maria called from the back, “Hey, Lucas. Your mom’s on the phone. She wants to know if you’re still on for dinner tonight. Oh, and Amanda’s water just broke.”
For long moments, her words didn’t sink in. When they finally did, he threw his head back and laughed. A couple heartbeats later, Jack joined in. Who needed war-torn Africa? They had their own crisis center right here in the middle of Atlanta. Though he wasn’t sure what it said about him that of everything he’d faced that day, dinner with his mother was what scared him the most.
CHAPTER EIGHT
June
Kara,
Glad you’re back from Sudan. The news is reporting that conditions there are worsening. Then again, I don’t suppose things are much better in Eritrea. How is everything going? I was talking to Steve up at Johns Hopkins the other day. I guess he’s been following what’s going on down there pretty closely, and he says you and the team from the WHO are making great strides containing the epidemic. I’m really glad to hear that. I assume, no word from the CDC on when they’re going to bring you home? Maybe they’ll actually let you finish this one out.
Not much is going on here. I’m starting to use the money from the benefit for upgrades at the clinic. Better X-ray machine, new nebulizers and a bunch of other stuff I won’t bore you with. Amanda and the baby are doing well, though the clinic is pretty crazed without her. Nothing compared to what you’re going through, but it keeps me busy.
Take care of yourself and I’ll see you soon.
Lucas
P.S. I’ve attached a picture of John Matthew.
Hey Lucas,
Glad to hear Amanda is doing well! Congratulate her for me—you look great holding little John Matthew. Very natural—especially the spit-up on your shirt.
Yeah, we’re finally seeing results here. The rate of infection has dropped about four percent in the last week but we’re hoping for a much bigger drop in the month to come. And yes, I’m going to be here a while longer. The CDC and WHO are too scared of a worldwide epidemic to pull us out now. Just between you and me, they’re right to worry. This bug is really nasty.
I’ve got to go—my rounds start in a few. I’ll write again soon.
Kara
* * *
KARA’S FINGER HOVERED over the mouse as she contemplated sending her latest email to Lucas. She wasn’t sure what the point was—there was almost nothing in it he couldn’t get from watching the news. Part of her wanted to erase the whole thing, to start over and tell him about what was really going on with her. To tell him that she thought about him more than she should, especially late at night when she lay in the dark and remembered what it had felt like to be loved by Lucas.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? She hadn’t actually been loved by Lucas—they’d only slept together. And the fact that she was feeling all these weird things for him, that she was missing him more this time than she ever had before, was completely on her. He hadn’t promised her anything—had in fact bent over backward not to. Which was fine, really.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t known going in how things were going to be. She’d spent the past seventeen years watching Lucas date woman after woman and then move on as soon as it looked like his girlfriend was going to fall for him. Which meant he was constantly moving on, because they all fell for him. How could they not? He was gorgeous, funny, smart, kind, rich and a doctor who helped the underprivileged. Landing him was like winning the lottery. The only problem was, Lucas didn’t want to be landed.
He said it was because he had enough on his plate with work and family, but she knew the truth. He was scared. Scared of committing to a woman and finding out that she wanted him only so that he could take care of her. And it wasn’t that Kara blamed him. She’d been around long enough to see Lucas bail his mother and sister out of jam after jam. She knew it exhausted him, just as she knew he was never going to stop. Not as long as they needed him.
Kara would wonder how she’d managed to stick around this long, except that she’d always been careful. Always made sure not to think about him as anything but a friend. Always made sure not to cross the very definite boundaries that lay between them.
She could cry on his shoulder, but not actually expect him to make things better.
She could listen to his problems, but not actually do anything to make them better, either.
And, most importantly, she could hang out with him as long as he never suspected things might turn sexual between them. In Lucas’s world there were friends and then there were women he dated and never the twain shall meet.
She’d always done a pretty good job of walking the line until that last night in Atlanta when she’d totally blown it with a trifecta of rule breaking. And now… She sighed and fought the urge to bang her head on the desk. Now they were forced to communicate in these absurd, stilted emails that didn’t say anything about anything. It was driving her mad.
There was so much she wanted to tell him, about what she’d seen and what she’d learned. About what was going on down here and why she thought these months were going to end up being the most important of her career. Instead, she wrote to him about the infection rate dropping. With such scintillating news she couldn’t imagine how he’d manage to keep himself awake until the end.
She wished she could turn back the clock, wished that she could go back to that moment in her house when she’d shoved him onto the bed and ripped his clothes off. If none of that had happened, things would still be okay between them. She needed things to be okay. Lucas was the only person she really had in the whole world. Sure, she had friends at the CDC and at WHO, but that was different. They weren’t who she went to when she wanted to talk through a problem and they weren’t who she thought about at strange times during the day, just because she saw something or heard something she thought they might like.
No, that position had been reserved for Lucas for as long as she could remember and she didn’t like that things were changing.
She glanced back at the screen and thought about changing the whole email. She could erase the drivel and tell him the joke she’d heard the day before. Then she could write about Samira, the young village girl who had stood by, stoic, as Ebola wiped out her entire family. She could tell him about—
Her thought was cut off by an explosion, followed by a series of high-pitched screams. Her whole body froze at the sound, long seconds ticking by as she tried to assimilate what she’d heard. And then she was dropping the computer’s mouse, running straight out the door of her makeshift research tent and into the street. She tripped on rocks and broken asphalt as she scrambled toward the main clinic.
“Julian!” She screamed the name of her team’s top doctor as she crashed through the door. They didn’t have time to stand on ceremony, not if what she thought had just happened really had.
He was already on his way down the hall, his small, black medical bag cl
utched in his hand. “Land mine?” he asked her as they headed outside as one.
“That’s my guess.”
He swore bitterly as they ran. “I can’t believe this is still happening.”
She didn’t answer, but then she didn’t have to. They’d had this same discussion numerous times since coming to Teseney. The war was over, but some of the cities—Teseney being the most notable, because of its location—were still surrounded by land mines that had never been disarmed, never been recovered. And still people walked through the areas where the land mines were. Still they let their children scamper through the minefield like it was nothing. And neither the government, nor the organizations that had come here to help through the months and years, had ever bothered to bring in a tank to sweep for the damn things.
Just another type of injury that could be prevented if anyone actually gave a damn.
They’d only been in Teseney three weeks and this was the second land mine that had been detonated. The first one had killed the child who had stepped on it, ripping him into so many pieces that there’d been nothing she and her team could do for him. As she ran, Kara prayed that this wasn’t going to be a repeat of that first experience, prayed that whoever had set it off had managed to survive with only the loss of a limb or—
She paused when she caught sight of a woman running toward them, her long Eritrean-style dress flowing around her legs as she carried a small child in her arms. She was crying and covered in blood but she was moving fast. Kara laid on the speed, but she was exhausted from working twenty-hour days and just wasn’t as fast as Julian. By the time she caught up to him, he had the unconscious child in his arms and he was working on stemming the blood coming from where her leg used to be.
“Please,” the woman gasped in broken English, clutching at Julian’s arm. “Please, save my daughter.”
He shrugged her off even as he applied a tourniquet to what was left of the girl’s leg. “We’re trying. But you need to leave us alone to do our job.” His voice was harsh, his face determined, as he worked to stanch the bleeding.
The woman didn’t seem to understand what he was saying, her eyes filled with fear as she continued to grasp at him. Kara pulled her gently away and handed her off to Freida, who—like the rest of her team—had come running at the sound of the explosion.
Then she dropped to the ground next to Julian. “What can I do?” she asked the other doctor. He might specialize in infectious disease instead of trauma, but he was still one of the best doctors she’d ever met. If the little girl in front of them had a chance at survival, Julian would grab on to it with both hands and keep her safe. Or at least as safe as a small child allowed to run through fields of landmines could be.
“I’ve just about got the leg under control,” he told her grimly. “But check those gashes on her arm. Make sure none of them are too deep. Then check her vitals—I think she’s going into shock. We’ve got to get her into surgery in the next few minutes or we’re going to lose her.”
Kara sprang into action, checking the little girl’s wounds, two of which needed stitches. The little girl screamed when she touched her, but then fell quiet. Too quiet. Kara started to talk to her, only to find that she had passed out. Which was as much a blessing as it was a horror.
After wrapping gauze around the wounds to stanch the bleeding, Kara checked the girl’s vitals. “We need to get her to the clinic now!” she told Julian, who nodded but didn’t move as he shoved the little girl’s shirt up to check out a huge tear in her side. The blood oozing from it was dark red, nearly black.
Kara closed her eyes as nausea welled inside of her. She swallowed quickly, fought it back. Exhausted or not, she was absolutely not going to fall apart now. “Can you pack it?” she asked, keeping her voice deliberately low as the mother wailed a few feet away.
“No time. We’ve got to get her on the table.”
Kara waved Van, another one of her team members, forward. The woman had a stretcher under her arm, and within seconds they had the little girl laid out on it. Then she and Julian each grabbed a side and ran toward the clinic as fast as they could. The little girl was still out of it, though her mother was running next to them, sobbing. Begging them to help her daughter.
Terror rippled through Kara as she thought of what waited for her, for them, in the operating room. Neither she nor Julian were surgeons. Though they had both done a surgical rotation in medical school, that was a long time ago and far away from here. She needed Pierre, from the WHO team, but he was hundreds of miles away in Nakfa. Or Lucas or, barring that, his partner, Jack Alexander. Any of them would know what to do here, how to help this girl.
But none of them were here, she acknowledged grimly, her eyes meeting Julian’s forbidding ones. It was obvious that the same doubts running through her head were also running in his.
The knowledge gave her strength. They might not be the best shot this little girl had of surviving, but at the moment they were her only shot. It was going to have to be enough, because there was no way Kara was going to let her die. She’d already lost too many Eritrean children in the time she’d been here. She refused to lose this one, too.
“Get the mother out of here,” she shouted to Van, who’d come in right behind them. As her team member hustled the woman outside, she called after her, “And get us a nurse in here, pronto.”
Then she was at the portable sink, scrubbing up at lightning speed while Julian prepped to go in. As soon as she was done, they switched places. Then the nurse was there, helping her thread the needle and prepare the instruments they would need to repair the girl’s torn artery.
“I want to check out her side first,” Julian told her. “I can’t tell what damage has been done.”
“Sure.” She wished longingly for an X-ray machine, was certain Julian did the same.
And then everything faded—all the background noise, all the fear clanging around inside of her, all the wishes for better equipment, better conditions, better surgeons. It all faded away, even the little voice deep inside that told her a three-month surgical rotation wasn’t enough to tackle something like this. And all that was left was the patient and the slow and steady rhythm she and Julian established between them.
He started by cutting into the girl’s side, and her first look at the child’s ribs had Kara unsure if she wanted to cry or celebrate. Two of the ribs were shattered beyond the ability to fix, but they had slowed the shrapnel down so much that it looked like her
organs were still intact. Her spleen was bleeding a little, but Julian was able to get in there and stitch it up. One of the ribs they ended up removing, while the other Kara pinned as best she could. Then, together, they got started working on her shorn femoral artery.
All together, they spent six hours operating on the girl. Two skilled surgeons could probably have done things in half the time, but both she and Julian were amateurs, though absolutely concerned with getting things right—or as right as they possibly could. It wasn’t until it was all over and Julian had ordered an aggressive round of antibiotics as well as heavy-duty painkillers, that Kara let herself sag. Let herself give in to the fear and horror that had plagued her since she’d heard the land mine detonate.
“Good job,” Julian told her, clapping her on the back.
“I think that’s my line,” she answered. “I’m glad you were here.”
“I’m glad we both were. You’ve got the steadiest hands I’ve seen outside of a surgeon.”
; “I didn’t feel steady.”
“Yeah, but you were steady. Sometimes that’s all we can hope for.” He glanced through the door behind him, shrugged out of his bloody shirt. “You want me to talk to the mother?”
Since she knew he’d rather eat slugs than deal with their patient’s mother—even to tell her the cautiously optimistic diagnosis—she told him, “Go take a shower. I’ve got it.”
The fact that he didn’t even feign reluctance as he shot out the door told her everything she needed to know about his state of mind. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who’d been faking steadiness in there.
After pausing a minute to change out of her own blood-spattered shirt, Kara headed down the hallway toward the mother. There was no reason to keep the woman in agony one second longer than she had to be.
She snagged Linda on the way, a nurse who could translate. They found the girl’s mother huddled on the floor of the ill-equipped waiting room, her arms wrapped around her knees as she rocked back and forth. Her face was ravaged by pain, tears falling unchecked down her cheeks.
Kara rushed across the room, crouching down on the floor next to her. “Your daughter made it through the surgery well,” she said, trying to infuse her voice with confidence. “We will be monitoring her closely over the next few days and it will be a long road back, but we think she will recover.”
She waited as the nurse translated her message. Then continued, “It will be hard for her. She’s lost a leg and one rib, has numerous other injuries. But if we can control the infection and keep her from succumbing to shock, we’ll be able to tell you more in a couple of days.”
Which wasn’t to say that the little girl wasn’t in for a terrible time. Losing a leg was horrible in a place like America, where there was good medical care and advancements to help with lost limbs, as well as physical and occupational therapy. Here in Eritrea, there was none of that. The little girl’s life was going to be very tough for a very long time. But Kara refrained from telling the mother that. One, because she figured the woman already knew. And two, because at least the little girl still had a life.
