by LaQuette
“No sense in worrying yet, I suppose.” It sounded good; it was what she’d tell one of her patient’s parents if she were the healthcare provider in this situation. But she was the parent, and that niggling ability to always sense when trouble was close to her only son began beeping in the distant recesses of her mind. Yeah, Becca’s words sounded good. But they surely didn’t feel good, not as far as Sanai was concerned.
The vibrating motion coming from her jacket pocket pulled her out of her head and gave her something else to focus on. Grateful for the distraction, she pulled her cell from her pocket and saw that familiar 918 central code and groaned. At six-thirty in the evening, there was only one reason someone from her office would be calling.
“Work?” Becca asked.
Sanai nodded as she connected the call. “Hello,” Sanai answered, her tone flat and unwelcoming.
“’Nai, what’s going on, baby girl?” She rolled her eyes as the nightshift supervisor Jessie Mercado greeted her.
“Jessie, stop calling me that. What do you want?”
“Come on, Sanai, why I gotta want something? Why can’t I just call to find out how my favorite nightshift therapist is doing?”
Sanai couldn’t help the smile that broke out across her lips. The fact that she could hear Jessie laughing too didn’t help her maintain her composure.
“I think we both know what this call is about, Jessie. The answer is no.”
“But Sanai, I’m short. I need you.”
“Jessie, I did three twelves back to back. I’m tired, and I don’t have a sitter.”
“Sanai, come on. I’ll give you the PICU. There’s only one vent there and like five treatments on PEDs.”
“Jessie…”
“And I’ll give you Saturday off. That’ll give you an eight-day stretch.”
Damn if that man didn’t know her sweet spot. Eight days off without touching one single vacation or personal day. That was one of the upsides to working swing shifts. She glanced at the blood sample requisition form in Becca’s hand, Naz’s information printed across it like a gloomy omen. Sanai touched the mute symbol on the screen and turned to her friend.
“You feel like sitting with Naz tonight?”
* * * *
Sanai walked into the pediatric ICU and straight into a large wall of man. She nearly lost her balance save for the quick set of hands that reached out and steadied her.
“I’m so sorry,” the stranger said as he bent slightly to get clear sight of her face once she was standing upright.
Sanai looked up into the same tired eyes she’d seen the night before when his son had been brought into the ER. “Mr. Giordano, thanks for the save,” she replied.
“Thanks for taking care of my son when he came into the emergency room.”
Sanai nodded. She didn’t bother asking how the teenager was doing. Taking shift report thirty minutes ago told her exactly how Anthony Jr. was doing. Not well.
“I’m actually on my way in to do my first round with him now. This is a great time for you to go get a cup of coffee or stretch your legs for a bit.”
The man shook his head. His shoulders and neck were slumped by the pressure of worry and grief, dark circles under his eyes. “I’m actually heading to the family room to try to get some sleep. My best friend is stayin’ with Anthony Jr. tonight in his room,” he answered. “It will give me a chance to rest. Going down to the café to meet him now. I’ve already given written consent for him to be kept abreast of my son’s condition, so if he asks questions, it’s okay if you answer.”
“No worries.” She spoke softly as she gave him a weak smile. “We’ll take care of your son. If anything changes, we’ll call you immediately.”
He nodded and continued down the hall, and Sanai ached inside for him. In school they taught you to try to maintain a certain level of detachment from your patients and their families. But when you worked with kids…that line between consummate professional and human being usually blurred.
She stepped in front of the infection control station and donned the requisite gear: gown, booties, cap, and face shield. She took a brief moment to sanitize her hands and then put on her latex-free gloves.
She was quick and efficient about her work, checking his vitals with practiced ease. She kept to her tasks, too afraid to stop and really look at the boy. If she stopped, she might just think about the fact that in a mere ten years this could be her son instead of someone else’s.
She turned to the ventilator at the side of the bed, documenting the values, making adjustments where necessary, when she heard the high-pitched shrill of the cardiac monitor. She looked up and saw the erratic rhythm on the screen. Her fingers instinctively pressed down, searching for the pulse that should have been on the side of his neck.
“I need a crash cart in here now,” she screamed from the room. In seconds, the medical staff scurried from all corners of the unit and converged on Anthony Jr.’s room. She took her place quickly at the head of the bed, disconnected the ventilator tubing, and connected a resuscitation bag to the end of the endotracheal tube sticking out of the boy’s mouth.
The room buzzed with a controlled chaos that was typical of moments like this. Everyone knew their places and roles. Everyone did their part. If they were lucky, the outcome would be bringing this boy’s body back to life.
She stood there at the head of that bed looking down at that man-child, a tiny fissure in her heart breaking each time another compression flattened his chest. Dear God, please don’t let this ever be Naz.
She tore her eyes away from the chaos for just a second, and her gaze collided with an onyx stare she knew better than her own. It was nothing but sheer instinct and practiced professionalism that kept her fingers squeezing that bag at the appropriate intervals.
By absolute force she pulled her eyes from that powerful ebony gaze and focused on the events in front of her.
“Stop compressions. Check for a pulse,” the attending called out. Several sets of hands checked for pulses in varying limbs, and an equal number of fixed eyes looked up at the cardiac rhythm. She didn’t need to be a mind reader to know everyone in the room was praying for the same thing: this child’s life.
“We’ve got normal sinus rhythm, strong pulses.” When the attending ended the code, a rush of relief settled in Sanai’s tense muscles just long enough for her to say a silent prayer of thanks. Then she realized she was stuck in a room where the reality of a past she’d run from was standing outside glass doors waiting to confront her.
She performed another patient-ventilator check, walked to the garbage can, and removed her gown, booties, and gloves. She pumped the alcohol-based hand sanitizer device on the wall and made a beeline through the sliding glass doors of the room and headed directly for the double exit doors of the unit.
“Hey.”
She ignored the voice traveling behind her. She knew it. It poured over her, making her nerve endings tingle.
“Wait.”
She sped up toward the door, refusing to look back. If she did, he’d know it was her, and everything would be lost.
“Stop!”
She heard the tail end of the command as she pushed through the doors and headed for the staircase at the end of the hall. It was hard to breathe as she made her way into the stairwell. She ripped the infuriating mask and face shield from her face as she continued to run down the stairs. She made it down two flights before she dared to take a look behind her. Wrong move. It was just long enough for their gazes to lock, for him to catch an unobstructed view of her face.
That scrutinizing glare locked her in place momentarily until she noticed recognition in it.
“Stop. Don’t go!”
That voice, so familiar yet so foreign, pierced through her soul, the pain real and tangible. It was only his forward motion that spurred her feet into moving again. She struggled to make it to the next floor. She quickly scanned her ID. As soon as the red light turned green she squeezed through the half-op
ened door and closed it soundly behind her before jumping between a set of closing elevator doors.
Just as the doors sealed she watched those eyes again. They were staring through the small square window in the locked door. His eyes were full of fire and questions she couldn’t answer. She could see them moving frantically back and forth as he watched the heavy metal doors of the elevator close, finally breaking their visual connection.
It wasn’t until the metal car began to move downward that she allowed herself to relax enough to breathe. When her brain finally escaped fight-or-flight mode, she was able to put two thoughts together that weren’t run and hide.
“Six fucking years,” she whispered. “How the fuck did he find me after six fucking years?”
Chapter Two
Dante had to walk all the way down to the first floor from the sixth to find an exit from the stairwell that didn’t require keycard access. He stepped out of the staircase, quickly scanning the open area of the lobby, trying desperately to find the subject of his chase.
His heart thumped feverishly against his ribcage as his mind attempted to process what he knew couldn’t be true.
Sanai Ward.
He’d know those chocolate-brown eyes anywhere. He’d spent too many years gazing into them to not know when he’d stumbled upon them again. Even behind that surgical mask with the plastic shield she’d worn, he’d known those eyes once he’d seen them.
But it couldn’t be. No matter how he’d prayed and begged, it could not possibly be her. Sanai was dead. He’d witnessed her apartment going up in flames. He’d been standing there when they’d dragged her cindered skeleton out of what remained of that building in a body bag. He’d gone to the morgue to identify her, but there’d been nothing left to identify except the locket he’d given her for her birthday.
His chest hurt with the effort to breathe as his senses recalled the smell of burned flesh that clung to the locket when the medical examiner had returned it to him. It was the only thing that allowed him to accept that Sanai, the woman he’d loved more than his own life, was dead and gone.
“What the hell are you doing, DeLuca?” he asked himself. This was insane. There was no way Sanai had been alive all this time. “You saw the evidence. You buried the body. She’s gone. This is just a weird case of a look-alike.”
He dragged rough fingers through his curly strands and pulled tight enough to cause a wince of pain. He needed that. Pain was real. Pain was something he could count on to keep him grounded. His eyes were playing tricks on him. There was no other plausible explanation. Sanai couldn’t be alive. No, she would have called him, contacted him somehow. She would never have allowed him to suffer, to ache, to mourn her so completely if she were still alive.
He took a few calming breaths to get himself under control before he stepped on a waiting elevator and traveled back to the sixth floor. If he walked back into that unit looking like a crazed maniac, he was certain someone was going to call security or, worse yet, the cops.
* * * *
“What a fucking night,” Sinai growled as she slapped the palm of her hand against her steering wheel. After all this time, life just placed her in Dante DeLuca’s path.
She’d fled from him, running directly into the locked Neonatal ICU. Home would have been her preferred hiding place. But leaving her post without permission could result in her losing her job and her license to practice.
She could lose a job, but she couldn’t lose her license to practice, not as a single mother. She’d told her shift colleague she was bored in the PICU and asked to switch assignments. With ten ventilators running and a set of twins who’d just made the twenty-eight-week gestational mark waiting to be born, her shiftmate had no troubles handing over his beeper and quickly taking hers.
Relief flooded her senses once he’d agreed. The workload might have been heavier, but the “parents and grandparents only” visitation rule and the monitored locked doors kept her safe from Dante for the duration of her shift.
Twenty-five minutes. That was how long it had taken Sanai to cross a bridge, dip, and dive on the Van Wyck Expressway and the Jackie Robinson Parkway, through local streets like Atlantic and Liberty Avenues before she came to a screeching halt on Crescent Street.
She almost fell out of her car trying to get out. She finally balanced herself and stepped away from the vehicle. She headed straight for the doors of her home. She didn’t even take a minute to look at the alternate-street parking signs to see if she was on the right side of the street. Getting a ticket was the least of her worries right now. She had to get inside, get to her son, and make a phone call. Those were the only things on the agenda. Everything else could wait.
She bypassed Mrs. Rossi’s door and took the steps leading to her apartment quickly. When she opened the door, she almost trampled over Becca in the hall.
“Damn, girl, where’s the code?” Becca asked. Sanai ignored her, walking straight into the living room.
“Where’s Naz?” she asked.
“Still asleep,” Becca answered. “Look, I need to talk to you for a minute. Come, sit down. Let’s have a cup of coffee.”
Sanai shook her head. She didn’t have time to sit and drink anything. She had to get her damn kid and make a phone call, then she was out the door.
“I can’t right now, Becca. I gotta go.”
“Sanai, you have to,” her friend pleaded, a hint of caution attached to her tone. “It’s Naz’s test results. I got them back last night.”
“From the clinic’s lab?”
Becca shook her head. “No, I sent them to the lab in the hospital. It’s open twenty-four hours, and the tech there owes me a favor.”
“Becca, I really gotta go, so just tell me what vitamins I need to give him and let me get out of here.”
Becca shook her head and reached out to Sanai, touching a hand to her shoulder to stop her forward motion. “I wish it were as simple as taking a supplement,” Becca soothed. “It’s leukemia, Sanai. Nazario has leukemia.”
* * * *
“Man, if you don’t get some sleep soon, you’re gonna fall over.”
Big Tony’s voice pulled Dante out of the haze of memories clouding his mind. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“Dante, Lil’ T is out of the woods. The cardiac thing happened a couple days ago. He’s been fine since. He’s awake; he’s with it… He’s even breathing on his own now. Dante, he’ll understand if you go to my place and get some sleep before you come back to sit with him.”
Dante couldn’t bring himself to look his friend in the eye. Who was he fooling? Yeah, he was here because his godson was in the hospital. But he hadn’t left the boy’s bedside in two days because he wanted to be there just in case Sanai’s look-alike returned.
“I need to be here, man,” Dante groaned as he tried to get comfortable in the lumpy chair.
Big Tony made a follow-me motion with his hand as he stepped out of his son’s room and headed for the exit doors of the unit. He led Dante to the bank of elevators and didn’t make a sound until they were sipping coffee in the hospital café.
“All right. What the hell is going on?”
Dante sipped the bitter brew and let it permeate his chilled bones. He didn’t even pretend he didn’t know what Big Tony was talking about. They’d been friends since they were kids growing up in Brooklyn together. There wasn’t much Big Tony didn’t know about Dante—a rare find in Dante’s circles, considering the profound need for secrecy in his life.
“Do you remember my last year of college?”
Big Tony nodded as he took a large bite of the bagel sitting in front of him. “I remember you being a mess because your girlfriend was killed in a fire.”
“The respiratory therapist who was taking care of Lil’ Tony the night his heart stopped. Do you know her?” Dante asked.
Big Tony shook his head. “No. I saw her in the ER taking care of my boy when he first arrived. Then two nights later she was taking care of him up
stairs in the ICU. We literally ran into each other when I was coming downstairs to get you that night. I don’t recall her name, though. Why?”
“She’s a dead ringer for Sanai. If I didn’t know for a fact Sanai is dead, I’d think it was her.”
Big Tony rested his cup on the table and returned his gaze to Dante’s. “You and I both grew up in a world where death isn’t as permanent as it’s supposed to be. You have a necklace and a death certificate, Dante. What you never had was a recognizable body to identify.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you should maybe talk to this woman, make certain she just has the face of a ghost and nothing more.”
* * * *
Sanai sat at the shift report table watching the second hand tick away to her freedom. That heavenly hour of 7:40 in the morning was three minutes away. One of her colleagues was wrapping up, and Sanai was almost in the clear.
It’d been a blessedly easy night—only one or two calls for minor things, and she’d had enough free time that she should’ve been able to get some rest in the on-call room. But rest never came. She’d honestly have preferred to be busy. At least then she wouldn’t have had time to worry about the upcoming events that could change her little family’s life.
Nazario was scheduled for his first round of chemotherapy tomorrow morning, a fact that weighed on her chest like a giant boulder. The medical professional in her knew the fact that they’d caught the leukemia in its early stages was a blessing. Aggressive treatment in the preliminary stages was likely to yield the best result—her son healthy, healed, and thriving. However, knowing the kind of discomfort and pain her baby was about to experience made her soul ache.
She needed to get to her son. Just needed this night to be officially over so she could drive the few blocks to Becca’s house, run inside, and hold her baby for as long as he’d let her.
Her shift was finally dismissed and she was off the clock. She grabbed her things and had made it downstairs to the lobby when her cellphone began vibrating in her pocket.
