The gas hissed and Max struggled, as I knew she would. She was definitely a fighter. But then she finally went down. There were tears in my eyes and an OR nurse wiped them away. Not the time, not the place for emotions. “I’m right here, Max,” I whispered. “Trust me. I’m here, sweetie.”
“She’s a friend,” I explained to the surgical nurse on my right. “I’ll be all right.”
“I’m sure you will be,” the nurse whispered. “I’m right by your side.”
I shook off my emotions as best I could. I was in a hospital operating room as a doctor. I had a life to save—a human life—the life of someone I cared about. But I also knew that Max’s chances weren’t good.
The anesthesiologist nodded at me. We were ready. After making sure that Max was unconscious, I slowly unwrapped her myself. I examined the tears in her wings, and worse, the sucking wound in her breast. The sight of the dark, gaping hole was unnerving.
I couldn’t afford sentimentality or any other distractions as I plucked feathers from around the dangerous chest wound. I scrubbed the area and flushed out metal, wood, shards of glass, and more feathers. I was fearful that her lung might be punctured.
Using my scalpel, I began to debride the area, ridding it of ruined skin and tissue. Then I cut.
I worked on the chest wound first. I was afraid of blood leaking into the pericardial cavity. All of us were. But the lung wasn’t punctured. It hadn’t collapsed. I did what I could, then moved on to other problem areas, other serious wounds.
“I’m right here, Max. I’m still here,” I whispered. “Can you hear me? I know you can hear things better than most of us.”
The tendon that stretches from the humerus to the third wing finger of her left wing was badly lacerated, but not severed. I used a Bunnell-Mayer suture pattern for the tendons, and then closed my incision. I was pretty much working on instinct now.
Beside me a pediatric surgeon worked on a long, deep gash in Max’s cheek, and then one under her clavicle. The surgeon, a woman, was good. For long periods of time, I almost forgot she was there.
Max was fighting so bravely. I knew she would.
“You’re doing great, Max. Keep it up. You’re the best, Maximum.”
I became aware of a nurse sponging my brow. It was something I could definitely have used at the Inn-Patient.
I heard snatches of the hushed conversations of the nurses and doctors around me, but I was concentrating on the complicated operation and didn’t pay attention to what they were saying. I needed to figure out how all the unusual pieces fit together. This operation wasn’t in any anatomy books—not at the University of Colorado, not at Berkeley, or Harvard, or Chicago. Not yet, anyway.
I used a PDS suture and performed an end-to-end penorrhaphy. I quickly decided on a simple interrupted pattern, a long row of little knots.
I glanced up at the stainless-steel wall clock. I was stunned that nearly three and a half hours had gone by like an instant. I realized my body was soaking wet.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard one of the doctors softly say, “We’ve done what we can for her.”
Chapter 125
WE COULDN’T LOSE MAX. Not after what we’d been through—after what she’d been through.
I waited until she was getting amoxicillin and saline subcue, and then I placed figure-eight-shaped bandages on each of her wings. This would help protect her if she went ballistic when she came to. It was a small thing, but I had done everything else I could for her. I hoped it was enough.
I was close to tears, but I wouldn’t allow them to come. Not here, not with the hospital nurses and doctors looking on. I shed my scrubs in the surgeon’s locker room and quickly washed up. Then I found my way to the ICU.
Kit had been operated on by a second team of surgeons, the best doctors available. He was plugged in to so much monitoring equipment that it was hard to tell where the man ended and the tubes began.
His chart had him down with a broken clavicle, two broken ribs, a punctured lung, and pleurisy. He was receiving a blood transfusion and antibiotics, and all of his vitals were being monitored. His signs were all strong, the opposite of Max’s.
I pulled an armchair up to his bedside and I collapsed into it. I sat there for a long time, trancelike, just looking at him. I finally let myself cry. Tears streamed down both cheeks and I couldn’t make them stop once they had started.
I remembered the first time I saw him at the Inn-Patient, when there was an Inn-Patient. And then the magic moment when he sang so beautifully at Villa Vittoria. And our “last night on earth” in Gillian’s basement. So much had happened to us in such a very short time. We’d been through so much together.
I whispered, “I love you, Kit, Tom, whoever you are. I love you so much.”
I must have dozed off after that. I don’t know for how long. I felt Kit softly stroking my hair.
“Oh, Kit,” I said, when I saw he was conscious. I kissed him on the cheek as gently as I could, and he smiled brilliantly.
“How is she?” he asked.
“She’s extremely critical. I don’t know what will happen. There’s no precedent for the operation we did.”
I stayed in Kit’s room for what seemed a long time, several hours. I didn’t have a home to go to, anyway.
Then I slipped upstairs to see about Max. She should be coming out of the anesthetic right about now.
I said a few prayers as I climbed the stairs from the third floor to the fifth. I was lost in thought, wondering about God, and how the recent advances in medicine and science fit into the grand scheme, if there was a grand scheme, or any scheme at all. A phrase was running through my head—all God’s creatures. I wondered what it meant now.
I was thinking: Don’t let Max die. She’sagood little girl, and she’s special. Please don’t let her die. Are you listening, Lord?
Max was still asleep when I entered her room. She looked so vulnerable and innocent. Seeing Max sick like this was like watching a falling star.
I sat beside her and began a vigil.
Don’t let Max die.
Don’t let this little girl die.
It was early morning, and I was still with Max when her eyelids finally fluttered open. She looked up at me and I felt that my heart could break.
“Hi, Max. Hi there, sweetheart.”
“Hi. Where am I?” she whispered.
“Somewhere safe. A hospital in Boulder. You’re with me.”
“I heard you talking to me. During the operation, Frannie,” she said. Her voice was very low and I had to strain to hear her words.
I gently kissed her cheek, then her forehead, her other cheek.
Don’t let this little girl die, I kept repeating in my head. I was shaking with fear.
She smiled softly. “Did you miss me?” she whispered.
“We all missed you so much. Where were you, sweetheart?”
“Oh. I was really flying.”
Max was quiet again, and I could hear that her breathing was strained. She let me hold her hand, but she didn’t say anything else for several minutes. I stroked her damp forehead, her hair. I kissed her warm cheek again and again.
She whispered, “It really is like flying. It’s nice. I like it there, Frannie.”
And then Max lightly, lightly squeezed my hand.
She closed her eyes.
Max slept.
Epilogue
ANGELS
Chapter 126
SOMETIMES LATE AT NIGHT, I sit in the dark on an old-fashioned rope swing in the front yard. I push myself higher and higher, hoping I might take off and fly. I think about what’s happened, and try to make sense of it. I know that plenty of others are trying to do the same.
I’ll tell you what happened after the showdown at Gillian’s house. Weeks after the trouble, Kit and I did what we thought we had to do, what we felt was right—we disappeared with the kids: Matthew, Oz, Ic, the twins, and Max.
I won’t tell where our home is, but it�
�s safe for right now. Even though it’s temporary, it’s a good place to live. The government just didn’t know what to do with the winged children, or with Kit and me, and the things that we know. We didn’t know what to do with the government. Whom to trust? Whom to fear?
A group of conscienceless scientists, at least a couple of powerful people in Washington, and unscrupulous and greedy higherups at some important biotech companies, committed unthinkable crimes. They murdered people, including my husband, David. They experimented on humans.
Several of the outlaw group of scientists are dead. Gillian, or
rather, Dr. Susan Parkhill, is gone. So is her son, Michael, who had a life expectancy of two hundred years. He perished at four years of age. Dr. Anthony Peyser also died in the car crash near the house in Colorado.
Paranoid theories abound, but the government was involved in some way, and nobody knows exactly how yet. Maybe we never will. There were soldiers in Bear Bluff. To this day, no one has explained why they were there. A handful of FBI agents were involved. Powerful companies were prepared to bid huge sums of money for the first forbidden fruits of the biotech revolution.
Eve survived. She is at a secret army base in North Carolina. No word about the girl has been released to the public. I guess maybe the public doesn’t have the right to know.
There was a recent story in the New York Times about the offspring from the three young pregnant women at Gillian’s house. According to the report, the infants were born without faces. They were purposely designed that way by Dr. Peyser and his team. The experimental children were created for “parts.”
Meanwhile, we’re out here in the woods. We’re far, far from the civilized world. I suppose it’s like a witness protection program, only it’s much better for the witnesses, much better for us, anyway.
The kids love it, and so do Kit and I. The fresh air, the sprawling blue skies, our favorite swimming hole, the natural beauty of the land, the freedom to be ourselves without any scrutiny. You can’t beat it.
But then somebody found us, of course.
Chapter 127
IT WAS A BRIGHT, sunny, hopeful Saturday afternoon when we arrived at the army base in North Carolina where the surviving “experimental” children were being kept.
The base was located on over 40,000 acres of woods, which were perfect for army training exercises, as well as for hiding the children away from the press and others.
We got there at 1200 hours, and were due at the general’s quarters by 1400. Everyone at the military post was extremely nice, the MPs, the general’s adjutant—a lieutenant colonel named James Dwyer—the soldiers themselves.
The children were allowed to go to the affair in casual clothes, which they loved. I wore a beige cowl-neck sweater and blue jeans, while Kit had on khaki pants and a blue blazer. We were incredibly nervous and jumpy as the momentous hour approached, and so were the kids. This would be the biggest day in their lives.
At 1400, we pulled up in front of a large, plantation-style house on a tree-lined road. Up and down the neat, pretty street were magnolias and pines, as well as several large brick houses. The general’s house was the most impressive, the handsomest, the obvious choice for the upcoming event.
“We’re in the army now,” Matthew sing-sung a little ditty as we climbed out of the military base’s khaki-green van.
General Hefferon and his wife came out to meet us in the driveway. The Hefferons had warm, friendly smiles, but several of the MPs were holding M-16 rifles and that brought back bad memories.
“Flying is probably forbidden here,” Max turned and said to me. “I don’t feel so good about this place anymore. It’s creeping me out.”
“Give it a chance,” I whispered to her. “This is a good idea, Max.”
“People are already gawking,” she said.
“That’s because you’re so beautiful.”
Just then, the front door of the house opened wide. Several men and women walked out onto the porch single-file. They stood there looking stiff and uncomfortable, nervous and afraid. I couldn’t help thinking that they mirrored our own body language.
“Let’s go up to the house, children,” the general’s wife suggested.
Each of the children was given a name tag and pinned it on. I helped Peter, who was being a little pill, and Kit assisted Icarus, who seemed the most nervous of all the kids.
“Let’s go up to the porch,” I said. “Be good now.”
The children started to walk across the manicured front lawn. They were quiet and subdued. They had never met their birth parents before.
As we got closer, I could see that the men and women assembled on the porch wore name tags, too. They stood in distinct pairs inside the larger group. They fidgeted and didn’t know what to do with their hands. They were trying not to stare at the children.
“Here’s your mom and dad,” I whispered to Peter and Wendy, who were trailing close behind me. I almost started to cry, but I held the tears back somehow. I felt as if something were about to break inside of me.
“This is Peter, and this is Wendy,” I said.
“We’re Joe and Anne,” the parents introduced themselves. The woman’s lips were quivering. Then they broke down. Joe was a large, generous-looking man and he bent low and put out his arms, and choked on his own tears.
Wendy surprised me, and ran right to her dad. Then Peter did the same, flinging himself into his mother’s arms. “Mommy,” he cried.
Just about the same thing was happening with the other children and their birth mothers and fathers. The kids had been wary and even cynical as we traveled to the army base, but all that was behind them. The army, the people in Washington, had done a good job arranging the reunion.
Most everybody on the porch had tears spilling from their eyes, including General Hefferon and his wife, and even a few MPs.
Max and Matthew were wrapped in the arms of a handsome-looking couple in their late thirties. I knew their names, Art and Teresa Marshall, and that they were good people from Revere, Massachusetts.
Icarus was being hugged by a slight-looking woman who was down on her knees and had one of the brightest, biggest smiles I’ve ever seen.
Oz was in the arms of his birth mom. She was cooing softly in his ear. Oz was cooing back to her.
Something had finally gone right for the children. I stood there holding Kit, and tears streamed down both our cheeks. I was almost blind with tears, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of the children and their mothers and fathers.
“Let’s fly for them,” Peter started to chirp in his unmistakable, high-pitched voice. “C’mon, let’s show everybody. Come with me, Wendy. Let’s go, slowpoke. Let’s fly as high as we can.”
“Peter! Don’t you dare!” It was Max calling from across the porch. The crackling sound of her voice stopped Peter in his tracks. He rolled his eyes and then he grinned.
“We’ll all fly. We’ll do it together,” Max said then.
And that’s what they did.
The children ran across the front lawn together and they took to the air like an amazing flock. They whistled so that Icarus could keep up. They rose up over the rooftops of the houses, the surrounding magnolias and towering southern pines.
They floated effortlessly in the cloudless baby-blue skies.
It was so unbelievable to be there, like nothing anyone had ever seen in the history of our world, certainly like nothing the mothers and fathers had experienced before.
Just to watch the beautiful children fly like birds.
Special eBook Feature:
Excerpt from
James Patterson’s
The Lake House
IT SURPRISES SOME READERS that When the Wind Blows (featuring Max and the gang) is my most successful novel around the world. Who knows why for sure, but I suspect it’s because an awful lot of people, myself included, have a recurring fantasy in which they fly. They treasure it. On the other hand, there are plenty of folks who won’t fantasize or
play make-believe. They wouldn’t have gotten to the Neverland with Peter Pan. There is one other thing that might be interesting to those who read this book. When I researched it I interviewed dozens of scientists. All of them said that things like what happens in The Lake House will happen in our lifetime. In fact, a scientist in New England claims that he can put wings on humans right now. I’ll bet he can.
So settle in, you believers, and even you Muggles.
Let yourself fly.
IT SURPRISES SOME READERS that When the Wind Blows (featuring Max and the gang) is my most successful novel around the world. Who knows why for sure, but I suspect it’s because an awful lot of people, myself included, have a recurring fantasy in which they fly. They treasure it. On the other hand, there are plenty of folks who won’t fantasize or play make-believe. They wouldn’t have gotten to the Neverland with Peter Pan. There is one other thing that might be interesting to those who read this book. When I researched it I interviewed dozens of scientists. All of them said that things like what happens in The Lake House will happen in our lifetime. In fact, a scientist in New England claims that he can put wings on humans right now. I’ll bet he can.
So settle in, you believers, and even you Muggles.
Let yourself fly.
Prologue
Resurrection
The Hospital, somewhere in Maryland
At about eleven in the evening, Dr. Ethan Kane trudged down the gray-and-blue-painted corridor toward a private elevator. His mind was filled with images of death and suffering, but also progress, great progress that would change the world.
A young and quite homely scrub nurse rounded the corner of the passageway and nodded her head deferentially as she approached him. She had a crush on Dr. Kane, and she wasn’t the only one.
When the Wind Blows Page 28
