Rescued by a Stranger

by Lizbeth Selvig

  “I’ve ridden a few horses like that.” She cupped his jaw in both hands and ran her thumbs across his lips. “You just have to be more stubborn than they are.”

  “Oh, you’re stubborn.”

  For the first time in nearly two weeks, fresh hope flooded him. Maybe she was—

  Sharp, gunshot-like pounding on the door split them apart, and he looked up in alarm when the door popped open. Julia didn’t apologize.

  “OD. They dumped him in the waiting room.”

  Adrenaline replaced his hope. Damn it.

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “Go,” she said, and pushed him toward the door.

  JILL FOLLOWED AT a timid distance, shutting the door on Angel, her bravado subdued to uselessness. The only way to describe the scene in the waiting room was surreal. A large boy, certainly over two hundred and fifty pounds, perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, lay supine on the thin carpet, his olive complexion the sickly color of a dying plant. Brody huddled over him with a stethoscope against his chest.

  “What do we have?” Chase stepped to the victim’s far side and knelt.

  “Probably meth. Possibly Ecstasy. Pupils are dilated, he’s hyperthermic and tachycardic. Pulse is one-sixty. He was barely conscious when two guys brought him in, dumped him, and ran.”

  Julia arrived with a blood pressure cuff and handed it to Chase, but before he could wrap the boy’s arm the patient thrashed and moaned.

  “Todo está bien. No te preocupes,” Chase intoned. “Can you understand me? Everything’s fine. Don’t worry. Can you hear me? ¿Puedes oírme?”

  Jill’s mouth gaped. Spanish? Would the surprises from this man never cease?”

  The kid struggling on the floor babbled and moaned in agitated Spanish before he cried out in pain.

  “Cálmate, hijo,” Brody said. “Calm down.”

  It took long minutes for the two doctors to calm the distressed boy enough to get the cuff on him and take his pressure.

  “One-eighty over a hundred,” Chase said. “And I’m guessing his temp is at least a hundred and two.”

  “I’ve got Regional Hospital coming,” Julia said.

  “He’s too out of it to go anywhere under his own power. He’s heavy enough that I think we’ll take longer to get him moved than he might have. Let’s pack him in the cooling towels and hang fluids right here,” Chase said. “Get him on Ativan, work on getting that pressure down, and the ride should be here by then.”

  Brody and Julia shot past Jill. Chase continued talking to the kid in a mix of English and Spanish, holding him firmly as his twitches grew to near convulsions. He met her eyes, but his grim features allowed only the briefest of acknowledgment.

  The main door opened, and a wide-eyed mother with two children entered, took a terrified look, and turned around. That’s when Jill focused on the six people—four of them children—huddled quietly in the toy corner. They, too, stared wide-eyed at the scary scene, and she knew what she could do to help.

  Stepping past the boy, she reached the little group and squatted. “How about if we get out of the way?” she asked, her eyes on the children. “We can go back to one of the rooms, and I have a surprise. Have you ever seen a dog in a doctor’s office?”

  The kids’ eyes widened further for this new, and far more enticing, reason. A woman, ostensibly their parent, breathed with relief. The sixth person, an elderly gentleman, nodded. “Can I come, too?” he teased.

  “Depends.” She winked. “Do you charge for babysitting?”

  He laughed and stood. “No, ma’am.”

  Julia bustled back into the room, loaded with supplies. She cracked two chemical cold packs and stuffed one under each of the boy’s armpits. Chase snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Brody appeared with two bags of liquid—the kind that would be hung from a stand in a normal hospital. Jill gathered her newly minted flock and led them quietly past the intensity.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Chase opened the door to the little exam room where the kids were deep in concentration giving Angel a thorough checkup, complete with pilfered tongue depressors, paper towel wrapped around her front legs, and a paper gown Jill had snooped around to find. When she looked up from her conversation with the now-relaxed mother and her new friend Mr. Thomas, she met a pair of blue-sparkling, awe-struck eyes.

  “How is he?” Jill asked.

  “Stable for now. On the way to the hospital.” He gathered himself and stepped fully into the crowded room. He squatted next to the knot of children around Angel, who thumped her tail pathetically. “So, doctors, what’s happening on this case?” he asked.

  Once it was explained that Angel had a broken leg, a fever, a tummy ache, and an ear infection, Chase shook his head in concern.

  “We op-a-rated-ed on her,” said the oldest of the four.

  “Excellent,” Chase said. “And I brought her some medicine. I think it might do the trick.” From his lab coat pocket he pulled a piece of what looked like a hunk of bologna. “Fancy lunches,” he said to Jill. She laughed. “Okay, Angel, take your pill like a good girl.”

  Angel was an amazing dog, but even she couldn’t resist lunch meat. She shook off her leg wraps and stood, still wearing the gown and causing hysterics in the little ones. She took the treat.

  “It’s a miracle cure! Well done.” Chase high-fived them, and they cheered. “Okay, now who’s here to see Dr. Brody?” Two of the siblings raised hands. “Then you all best get out to Miss Julia. She’ll fix you up. Mr. Thomas, you’re here for that bandage change if I remember. Julia will get to you now, too.”

  “Yessir,” he replied. “Must say, Doc, this here’s the most fun I ever had in your clinic.”

  “We do aim to please.” Chase patted the man’s shoulder as he left.

  When the room had emptied, and Angel had been divested of her embarrassing getup, Chase stared silently into Jill’s eyes. Her belly fluttered like a schoolgirl’s.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” he said. “You were amazing, Miz Carpenter.”

  “Oh, look who’s talking,” she replied. “I have the worst case of hero worship going on here.”

  A weary resignation wiped his features free of all other emotion. Taking her hand, he steered her toward the door. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something you need to see.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  CHASE WENT LEFT out of the exam room, away from the lobby, and Jill followed, her hand still in his.

  “C’mon, Angel,” he called to the dog. She obeyed, her doggy brows in a furrow.

  Chase led them through an open door to what would have been another bedroom when the building had been a home. The moment she stepped past the jamb, a finished picture of Chase with every puzzle piece in place spread before her. His office.

  She could barely take it all in. The walls were a deep ocean blue. A scarred oak desk against the left wall held piles of thick books and a stack of folders. Three heavy wooden bookcases stood against the walls crammed with more books—medical and non—and countless keepsakes overflowing in a sexy, masculine clutter. Two basketballs, a Louisville Slugger, and a pyramid of baseballs sat straight ahead of her. Several intricate model sports cars sat scattered among the books. On one wall hung a poster-sized photo of a middle-aged man with eerily familiar features standing beside the motorcycle Jill knew almost as well as she knew The Creature. This Preston, for he undoubtedly was one, could have been Chase in fifteen years. His face held Chase’s sculpted handsomeness, his eyes the same piercing-but-gentle blue. Only the silver shots in his hair and the jowls and crow’s-feet of age marked him as a family elder.

  She looked from the picture to Chase and suddenly she knew.

  “Poppa?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Taken in Minnesota.”

  Warmth and hope spread through her chest. She’d been hearing about this man all summer—Chase’s obvious hero. Now the picture connected her with both of them.

  Reluctantly, she looked away to s
can the walls. She stopped once more on a framed diploma. Stepping closer, she read the scrolled script across the top of the certificate: the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Charles Angus Preston.

  Johns Hopkins? Another remarkable accomplishment to knock her off her paddock boots.

  Swallowing, she quit roaming the room with her eyes and faced him. “All right. Since you don’t seem to want to hear whenever I’m impressed, what am I doing here?”

  He walked to a shelf filled with pictures and from the middle of the collection picked up an eight-by-ten portrait. She took it and got drawn into the most animated young face she’d ever seen. The girl’s rich skin looked like kissable chocolate, and her two missing front teeth certainly hadn’t embarrassed her, since the grin was so wide and pure it could have stopped a war with its sheer friendliness.

  “This is Tiana Washington. She’s the only girl who’s ever proposed to me.”

  His cracked voice twisted her heart.

  “She’s the one, isn’t she? The one who died?”

  “The one I might as well have killed with my own hands.”

  Her stomach gave a disbelieving lurch at the blunt words. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t know what happened, and I know that’s not true.”

  “That’s just it. You don’t know what happened.”

  “I saw what you did out front not five minutes ago.”

  He shook his head vehemently. “What happened out front happens fifteen times a week around here. If it’s not an overdose, it’s a stabbing, or a gunshot wound, or an infected gang tattoo, or a fourteen-year-old beat to within an inch of his life because he tried to escape the gang initiation he’d once desperately begged to go through. We barely do community medicine here anymore. We’re Memphis Gang-Central urgent care. We’re no longer what I started this clinic to be.”

  She shuddered inwardly. While Angel sniffed the room’s perimeter, Jill set Tiana’s photo carefully on Chase’s chair. She put a hand on each of his cheeks and made him look squarely in her eyes. “Tell me.”

  He took her into a bear hug and rocked her for a few seconds. Then he drew a deep breath and released it in resignation. “I guess I have to go back to the beginning.”

  She nodded firmly.

  “When I was kid, ten maybe, I begged my mama and daddy to let me join an association basketball league in Lexington. One I could get to after school. They didn’t like it much. I was supposed to be coming home and helping on the farm. But Poppa said sports built character and talked them into it.

  “That’s when I met LeBron Claiborne. He played on my team, and I believed he was the best basketball player in the whole state. He became my best friend.

  “My folks were as liberated as people could be in the South back in the dark ages, but the Claiborne family was not only black, they were poor. One step above dirt-poor. Sure, they had a house and clothes and food, but that was about it. And for me to be hanging around a neighborhood like theirs in the heart of the city was not something that pleased my mama much. But I loved the Claibornes’ house. They were always laughing and playing games and singing. I don’t think they were ever mad or even sad.”

  “They sound wonderful.”

  “Mama realized over time she couldn’t change our friendship. But three years later, LeBron’s daddy fell off their roof fixing a leak and ended up losing a leg. Mr. Claiborne, Oliver, had no insurance, and neither did his wife. She tried to make her housecleaning wages go far enough, but she couldn’t afford the medical bills or money for anything like rehab. LeBron’s daddy got so depressed he committed suicide a year later.”

  “Oh, Chase!” Jill’s stomach rolled in horror at what that must have been like for two young boys.

  “The thing that still angers me most is Oliver Claiborne’s death was totally preventable, if he’d only had a place to go and get help and care he could afford. In the end, LeBron, his younger brother, and his sister went to live with an aunt in Louisville. I think their mother stayed to try and earn money, but she finally left, too. Louisville wasn’t that far away by today’s standards, but back then it might as well have been the moon. Thirteen-year-old boys don’t exactly write letters.”

  “I don’t know what to say. It’s awful.”

  “I did find LeBron later. He still lives in Louisville, and he’s miraculously okay. But he has no idea where his siblings are. I vowed I would do something to make sure families didn’t have to get split up and suffer like that.”

  “So you started the clinic.”

  “Yes—my pie-in-the-sky notion that we could fix the world. Let me tell you, I would give my own leg if I could spend the time I wanted helping families like LeBron’s. For a while I thought we actually might be doing good work. But now, because of the violence, because we’re more trauma clinic than anything, my family practice has dwindled to a quarter of what it once was. Most are afraid to come here except for emergencies.”

  Frustration had seeped through his sadness, and his voice squeezed tight with anger.

  “This has to be about the hardest kind of place in the world to make a change,” Jill said. “You can’t blame yourself for gangs and violence.”

  “Remember what you said about riding tough horses? Well, this place is a herd of nightmares, and I was naïve enough to think I could bridle and gentle them.”

  “You only have to gentle one to be a success.”

  Chase walked slowly across the room and picked one basketball from its spot on the shelf. “Tiana was the first baby I delivered after I got here. Her mama was an addict who went into labor a full two months early. I couldn’t save her. Tiana’s daddy tried to take care of her, but he died a year later in a car accident involving two rival gangs. All she had left was her grandmother Clara, one of the kindest, most faithful women I know. Clara turned that skinny, sickly preemie into a spitfire, crackerjack of a kid, and through the years they kept coming back. You aren’t supposed to have favorites but, by God, they were mine.”

  He shifted the ball from one hand to the other.

  “What happened?” She urged him gently but firmly toward the end of the story.

  “Tiana and Clara represented everything I wanted to achieve here. When Brody joined me with his specialty in ER and trauma medicine, we made the perfect team. I got the touchy-feely cases—in his words—and he got the ugly truth cases. For four years we worked on community building. When I told you I’d worked with teens and centers and nonprofits, I wasn’t lying. I just withheld some of the truth. But those centers, which we support with volunteer time, are tough, hard-core places. This is the core of Memphis gang territory.”

  He bounced the basketball, smiled wistfully, and tossed the bumpy-surfaced sphere to her. She caught it, searched it for some significance, found nothing, and sent it back to him.

  “Basketball comes closest to soothing savage beasts around here. It’s popular with kids after school and kids who are lucky enough to have avoided the gangs. Most gang members stay away—organized sports are for losers. But once in a while we talk one into giving it a try, and I managed to get my hands on one of the higher-ups in our biggest Latino gang. Eric Spinoza.

  “He was reluctant. Big-time. But I was arrogant enough to think I’d help him and get an inside track to the gang leaders if I could just wine and dine him into the fold.”

  “It sounds like a noble cause to me—”

  He shook his head. “Nobody thought this was a good idea. Not Brody, not the staff at the center. And certainly not Eric’s buddies. But I met him one afternoon at a bar a block from the center. Good place for a meeting, right? Eric was already two illegal beers down when I got to him, but they were giving him confidence. He wanted to play, he said. He even admitted wanting to get free from the gang. I was thrilled. He was nervous. I kept him talking.

  “What I’d forgotten was my promise to Clara that I’d pick Tiana up at the clinic after school. I did that once in a great while when Clara worked overtime. It was pretty rare—but
I was always happy to take her. We’d go get ice cream or something to pass the time until her grandma was home. She called it our date.”

  “And you forgot her this time?”

  “I remembered fifteen minutes late. I’d been so busy trying to turn the gangs into my own personal charity that I let her sit alone on the clinic steps waiting. I drove eight blocks in about thirty seconds when I got my head out of my ass. And I drove smack into a horror show.”

  For the first time Chase’s voice cracked. Jill took the ball from him, placed it on the shelf.

  “Tiana was already gone when you got to her.”

  “No. Brody had taken her into the clinic after hearing shots outside and finding her. He was doing his best. He is the best. If anyone could have saved her, he was the one. I missed her by five minutes. Five damn minutes, Jill.”

  “Why did they do it? Why a little girl?”

  “They weren’t after her. They didn’t know she was there, I’m sure. They were trying to teach me a lesson. Mess with our boy, we’ll shoot up your place. They were sticking it to the white man. If Tiana had gone into the clinic she would have been fine, but she was on the steps. She was waiting for me.”

  Jill understood it all. Chase’s horror, his guilt, and the need to keep this a secret.

  “I know you won’t believe me when I tell you this isn’t your fault. But it’s not. Still, I know why you left here this summer.”

  “Tiana died because my egotistic desire has always been more important than dealing the hand I was dealt.”

  “No! Tiana died because the world can be a truly awful place. You aren’t egotistical. You were and are idealistic. That’s not a weakness; it’s a superpower. Most people don’t have the guts to be idealists. It’s scary. ”

  Chase ran his hand over her head and sifted her hair through his fingers.

  “God in heaven, Jill, I wish I could believe that. When you say it, I almost do. But tell that to Clara. You see, I lost two people that day. Clara’s face is very nearly the worst memory of all. She doesn’t think I have superpowers. That much was clear her eyes and in her face. Her trust in me was simply erased.”