Stoney Beck

by Jean Houghton-Beatty

  “How’s it going, Sarah? We don’t see many people in here with a smile as big as yours.”

  She gave him an even bigger one. “It’s just a pretend smile. I’m not very nervous though. Mr. Sidney said I’ll be a million dollar baby when I wake up. Think he means because my father’s a priest, his kidney’s as good as gold.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Dr. Stardust said. “It’ll be one of the best kidneys anyone could possibly get.”

  She glanced again around the room then back at him. “Where is my father? I thought you’d have put him here next to me. Wouldn’t it be easier? You know, less steps when you take his kidney out and put it in me?”

  “You’ve got a good point there. I’ll discuss it with the others after you go to sleep.”

  “Please take care of him, Dr. Stardust,” she said, a sudden unexpected tremble coming into her voice. “He’s a very extra special sort of man.”

  Dr. Stardust had lovely kind eyes and one of the sweetest smiles she’d ever seen. She felt very safe with this man. He gave her hand a little comforting squeeze.

  “And you’re a very extra special sort of woman, Sarah.”

  She felt her eyes fill up and there was a thick feeling in her throat. He’d called her an extra special sort of woman. A woman, mind you. Nobody had ever called her that, not once in her whole life.

  He leaned toward her left arm, ran his hand over the veins in the middle. “God Bless, Sarah. Sweet dreams.”

  “God Bless, Dr. Stardust. And the same to you.”

  ***

  In the half full waiting room, Andy and Jenny sat side by side on the sofa in the corner. He was getting a cramp in his shoulder but didn’t dare move for fear of waking Jenny as she leaned against him. He looked down at her fingers, interlaced with his, and rubbed his chin gently across her silken hair while he let his mind wander. Just a few months ago she’d been thousands of miles away, without him even knowing she existed. As soon as she had stepped off that train and looked around, he knew. How had his life been before Jenny entered? He could hardly remember. Amazing.

  Every now and then a doctor or nurse came to the waiting room doorway and beckoned to somebody or called out a name. The medical staff was always poker faced and it was hard to tell what the news was. Slowly the room emptied until Andy and Jenny were the only two left. Eventually, Mr. Sidney in a wrinkled hospital gown appeared in the doorway.

  “Is it over?” Jenny asked.

  He nodded and smiled a weary smile as he flopped down opposite to them, then scanned the sheets on his clipboard. The kidney had started kicking in right away and was already producing urine. Sarah was hooked up to a drip with an anti-rejection drug. If that one didn’t work, there were others they could try. She’d have the catheter for a couple of days and then, if she continued to improve, it would be removed.

  Jenny held on tight to Andy’s hand and let out her breath in a long slow sigh. Maybe everything was going to be all right after all. “You mean she came through OK? No hitches?”

  “None so far.” He looked down at his notes, ran his pen along the lines. “Remember though, it’s early days. Our main concern is will the body accept the kidney or reject it. So far it looks like a perfect match. The next few days are crucial though. If we can make it past the first fortnight, I’ll have a better feel.”

  When the surgeon stood up to go, Andy and Jenny got up too.

  “What about our father? How is he?”

  “Somebody will be along soon to give you a report on him. As far as I know, everything went according to plan.”

  After he’d left the room, Jenny flung her arms round Andy’s neck. “Can you believe it? Can you honestly believe it.”

  He nodded. “The success rate for kidney transplants these days is high. These guys know what they’re doing.”

  When Mr. Valseaton, the priest’s surgeon, arrived ten minutes later and said her father was also in recovery and doing well, relief slammed into Jenny and raced down her body, even to her toes.

  “They’ll both be in recovery for some time,” the surgeon said. “I’d suggest you stretch your legs and come back in a couple of hours.”

  They thanked him and watched him march off down the hall. Jenny felt Andy’s arms go round her, holding her tight like he never wanted to let her go.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s give Uncle Angus a ring. Then we’ll ring your Uncle Tim. After that, well there’s a deli round the corner where we can probably get a beer and a decent sandwich.”

  ***

  Sarah opened her eyes and looked at the drip going into her arm. She ran a hand gently over the bandages across her tummy. They’d gone ahead and done it all right.

  She didn’t know how long she slept but when a couple of nurses came into the room, it was already dark outside. One was tall and blonde, the other short with red hair. They each went to opposite sides of her bed and put their hands gently behind her back. “Sit up for us Sarah, there’s a good girl.”

  “Did everything go OK?” Sarah asked as they eased her to a sitting position.

  “Did it ever.” The blonde nurse pointed to a bottle of liquid the color of apple juice on the little table. “That’s all from you. A couple of litres already, and that’s just for starters.” She lifted up the plastic bag. “This is a catheter and it’s inserted in your bladder. As long as you have this, all your urine goes into here. We’ll probably be able to take it out in a couple of days. Then you can go to the toilet on your own.”

  The red-haired nurse reached for one of Sarah’s pillows. “Do you think you could hold this against your stomach for us? Ah, that’s a good girl. Now, could you cough?”

  Sarah winced as the cough shot right down to the spot where her new kidney was. “Do it again, love, the nurse said. “We know it hurts but your lungs have to be kept clear. You don’t want to get pneumonia do you?”

  “No, but I don’t want to hurt the kidney either.”

  “You won’t. Now, just a couple more coughs, then you can go back to sleep.”

  After Sarah coughed twice, both the nurses fluffed her two pillows.

  “How’s my father?” she asked.

  “Somebody will be here to speak to you. They’ll tell you. You father’s on the floor above. His room’s just about over this one.”

  “I hope they make him cough too. Don’t want him getting pneumonia.”

  The red-headed one straightened the bedspread. “He’s in good hands, same as you. We’re very pleased with you, Sarah. You’re a wonderful patient, a good brave girl. If you keep this up, you’ll be on solid food in a day or two, probably soup and crackers.”

  The blonde nurse winked. “Maybe even some ice cream.”

  ***

  After Jenny had left a message for Bishop Vincent Fitzpatrick at the retreat giving him the good news, and after a visit to the hospital to see Sarah and Charles, she and Andy went back to Trudy’s bed and breakfast. Walter had told Andy that his sister Trudy was as straight-laced as they come. But she didn’t seem that way to Andy. She had given him and Jenny rooms next door to each other, with a connecting door between them. It was locked for sure, but the keys were in the locks. But Trudy was a talker and she cornered Andy, bombarding him with questions. What did he think about Walter planning to marry Ada Malone and was Andy going to their wedding? Trudy had heard they were going on their honeymoon to Provence, where that doctor friend of theirs had a house. Oh, the doctor was Andy’s uncle. Well, fancy that.

  By the time Andy got a chance to look around, Jenny had disappeared. Half an hour later, when he entered his own room, he immediately looked toward the connecting door but it was locked. He stood against it, knuckles poised to knock, then lowered his arm. She was worn out and needed the sleep. But it wasn’t only that. Jenny was not the sort who took sex lightly. She was under enormous pressure and his heart ached for her. Even though she tried to hide it, sometimes he felt the tension radiating from her. When this was all over and things finally
settled down, he would let her know he had loved her since that first moment he’d set eyes on her, looking all lost and worried at the railway station.

  The next day, Andy went with Jenny to the hospital. When he saw that Sarah’s second floor room looked down on the hospital’s loading dock, he asked and was given permission for Jenny to come and go that way. Because their father’s room was almost directly over Sarah’s, all Jenny had to do was enter the back door, go up one flight of stairs, without having to navigate what to her was still a scary maze of corridors.

  She went with him to his car. “I’ll miss you, Andy,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t been with me.”

  “I’ll come when I can,” he said. “They’re both doing great. This will all be behind you before you know it. Still, if there’s the slightest hitch, I’m just as close as the phone. I can be here in a couple of hours.”

  The first person Jenny called was the bishop. “The prayers worked,” she said, hesitating on her form of address. Was a bishop called Father or perhaps something more exalted? To be on the safe side and trying hard not to offend, she called him Reverend. He asked her if she’d called Father Doyle at St. Mary’s and when she said she hadn’t, he said he would do it.

  Ten days after the operation, as Jenny headed up the back stairs, she remembered Andy’s words. And he had been so right. There had not been one single hitch. Their father was already walking up and down the halls. He was in and out of Sarah’s room, and had even taught Jenny how to play chess. Andy said it was as though they had taken out his appendix instead of something as vital as his kidney. Andy had stayed at Trudy’s a couple of nights. Unable to get the room next to Jenny’s, he’d stayed in the floor above.

  Mr. Sidney told Jenny, in the presence of Sarah, that Sarah’s body had accepted the transplanted kidney like a welcome relative come to stay. And why shouldn’t it, Sarah had said. Wasn’t her father’s kidney just about the best relative you could have. Mr. Sidney agreed and said you couldn’t get much closer than that. Her temperature was normal, she ate everything on her plate, and the yellow pallor had almost gone from her face. If she kept this up, Mr. Sidney said, she would be discharged any day.

  Jenny spent less time at the hospital and once had even gone for lunch and a movie with Andy. Sometimes she wandered around Manchester’s shopping district. On the day she bought Sarah a new blouse, she carried it into the hospital, longing to show it to her. She took the stairs two at a time to the second floor, which the English insisted was the first. She fingered Sarah’s earrings in her pocket. She’d had a jeweler change the metal inserts for 14-carat gold as a safeguard against infection. Lottie need never know and Sarah was sure to be pleased.

  Jenny peeped around Sarah’s half-open door and saw she was asleep, Paddy clutched to her chest. Jenny placed the blouse on the chair in the corner, and then scampered up the stairs to her father’s room. She came to a full stop outside his door and stared at the sign hanging there. In big bold three-inch letters, it said NO VISITORS.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Jenny dug her nails into her palms, as she stared at the two words. At the starched swish of a nurse’s uniform, she whirled around. It was Nurse Ramirez, from Jamaica whom Jenny thought beautiful and the friendliest of all the staff.

  She tapped the sign with the knuckle of her index finger. “What does this mean? No Visitors. Is everything OK?”

  The usual twinkle wasn’t in the nurse’s eyes and Jenny didn’t like the serious set of her mouth. “We phoned you but nobody answered,” she said in her Calypso accent, usually so upbeat, but saturated now with apprehension. “Mr. Valseaton’s on his way.” She looked toward the lift as the door slid open. “Here he comes now.”

  Jenny and the nurse stood back as the surgeon, with barely a look at them, swept past and strode to the nurses’ station.

  “If you’ll take a seat in the waiting room, we’ll get back with you,” the nurse said before hurrying after him.

  But Jenny leaned against the wall outside her father’s door and stared as the nurse and surgeon talked in hushed whispers just a few yards away. Had her father had a heart attack? A stroke? As the surgeon stuck his pen in his breast pocket, he marched toward her. She opened her mouth to speak, but his raised hand stopped her.

  “Not now,” he said, in a voice used to being obeyed.

  He pushed the door open and went in, followed by the nurse. Jenny craned her neck to catch a glimpse of her father, but the door swished closed behind them. She tottered into the waiting room and flopped in a chair nearest the door. About ten other people sat around the room. One man, asleep in the corner, snored softly, some read magazines, others stared at the walls or the floor. A man and woman in the corner talked in whispers. The woman was crying.

  When the dizziness finally eased, Jenny folded her arms and stared through the open door, desperate to talk to the doctor, yet dreading what he might say. There was a clock on the wall opposite and she stared at the second hand as it jerked itself around. One minute, five, fifteen, then half an hour. People left the waiting room and others came, some looked as worried as she obviously did, while others seemed ready to drop from fatigue. Then there were the lucky few with big smiles all over their faces. Jenny pulled out a tissue and wiped the perspiration from her upper lip as she looked back over the last couple of weeks. Even with all the euphoria, somewhere deep down inside her, there’d always been a trace of unease. And now she knew why. It had all been too easy, just too damn easy. As pins and needles raced up and down her arms, she got to her feet and walked to the window. There was the blue Ford just below, ready for a fast retreat. She went into the hall, walked to the top of the stairs, hand on the rail, looking down to the door, to the way out. How easy it would be to tear down the stairs, jump in the car and drive away. She paced up and down the hall, until Mr.Valseaton finally came out of her father’s room and beckoned to her.

  He opened a door across the hall and ushered her in. It was a small conference room, with a table in the center and eight or ten chairs around. On the wall opposite was a picture at least forty years old of the queen and Prince Phillip. The queen was young and pretty, and Phillip, good-looking and knowing it in his naval officer’s uniform, stood beside her chair. Both were smiling, so sure of themselves, so plainly unaware of the hard road up ahead.

  The surgeon motioned to her to sit as he pulled out a chair for himself on the opposite side of the table. He opened the file in front of him, put on his glasses, and scratched the side of his nose. “During the night your father developed an infection.” He didn’t meet her eyes. Instead he stared at the notes in the file.

  A thud started deep in Jenny’s chest. “An infection?”

  “His temperature’s risen to thirty-seven.”

  “I don’t know centigrade. What’s that in Fahrenheit?”

  The doctor didn’t even have to work it out. “One hundred and four.”

  Jenny kept her hands clasped together under the table to keep herself from grabbing hold of the man’s sleeve, or maybe even his throat. “How could he have gotten an infection?” she said, in a strange high-pitched voice, not like her own voice at all. “He passed all the tests and his health was good. He told me so himself, said he’s never had a sick day in his life.”

  The man doodled rectangles and circles on the file’s inside cover, then looked up, his nervous fingers clicking away at his pen. “Even though every precaution is taken during an operation, there’s always the danger something can go wrong. We’re moving him into intensive care.”

  All he had to offer was the usual stuff. Everything possible was being done. But Jenny wasn’t fooled. Intensive care was for the critically ill. The surgeon closed the file, checking his watch as he got to his feet. He was saying as little as possible, the same as the doctors in Charlotte, probably the world over. She could almost hear Uncle Tim’s voice. This man was covering his ass.

  Jenny held onto the banister as she made h
er way down the stairs, past Sarah’s floor, down to the floor below, to the way out. Forty-five minutes ago, she had bounced up these same stairs. Hard to believe. In less than an hour she had aged twenty years. She pushed open the exit door and leaned against the outside wall before heading for her car. She opened the door and collapsed on the seat, her car keys in her hand, then leaned her head on the steering wheel. Finally she fastened her seat belt, put the car in gear, and was about to back out when she looked up at Sarah’s window. Her sister’s stricken face looked down at her, while she motioned for Jenny to come back. Jenny wanted to stick her head out the window and scream no way. Instead she looked behind her as she backed out and headed for the street.

  She drove for a half hour before pulling into a tea shop. The waitress led her to a seat by the window. Coffee, just coffee, Jenny said, then watched the dowdy people bundled up in the chill late summer rain as they hurried along the dreary Manchester Street. Just a couple of days ago, she and Sarah had sat in their father’s room, playing Snap, a children’s card game which Sarah loved, and because she was having fun, Jenny and their father enjoyed it too. From all his get-well cards, he had singled out Uncle Tim’s and shown it to them. Sarah had laughed and said she’d got one too. All those who came to visit said wasn’t it amazing how smoothly everything had gone without a single hitch.

  How quickly the breeze had shifted. Sarah had a new kidney all right, but at what expense? Her father’s life? And where was the guarantee Sarah would make it? She hadn’t rejected the kidney yet but what about next week, next month, next year even? What if they both died?