The impact of what she saw inside was enough to freeze Kate momentarily where she stood. Her quiet, routinely run little clinic was now an anergency room that would have rivaled that of any big-city hospital. The reception room and the hallways were filled with people, all of them injured, some of them badly hurt. Many of them had been laid on the floor, others on makeshift beds of tables and chairs. Every available sitting place was filled, and several persons rested against the walls, submitting to first aid by volunteers. The presence of so much pain—and not a small amount of blood—was enough to affect even a seasoned professional, and when Kate felt Kevin lightly touch her back, she knew that his brief stint with heroism had completely faded.
In this light his face had a greenish tint; his eyes were dark and shadowed with shock. He looked as though he were desperately trying to will himself anywhere else. He said, "Katie, I think I'd better—"
"Dr. Larimer!"
It was Iris, Kate's nurse, and Kate whirled gratefully toward the voice. But there was no time for the amenities. Iris called, "You'd better get over here. I need some help with this man!"
The patient to whom she referred was thrashing about and yelling wildly, fighting Iris's attempts to hold him down on the sofa, which was his makeshift bed. Kate made an instantaneous search of the room and found no available volunteers, then grabbed Kevin's hand and dragged him behind her as she quickly crossed toward Iris.
"Fractured ribs and collarbone, some bad lacerations, no artery damage," Iris recited rapidly, struggling to hold her patient still.
"Kevin, hold him down," Kate snapped, opening her bag.
"Katie, I don't think—"
"What have you given him?" Kate took out a syringe and broke open an ampoule. "Kevin, for goodness' sake, hold his arms!"
Iris looked horrified. "You know I wouldn't dispense medications without your permission, Doctor!"
Iris Davison was twenty years Kate's senior; she had been her father's nurse, and Kate couldn't have asked for a stronger, cooler, more competent assistant. But she realized in the brief moment she stared at the other woman that even Iris did not fully realize what they were facing. She was trying to run this disaster the way she ran the office, pretending that all the rules still applied.
Iris was trying to wind a rubber catheter around the man's wildly flailing arm while Kate drew up the medication. Kevin stood by helplessly, watching in transfixed horror at the huge amount of blood that was staining the bandages on the injured man's leg. He said weakly, "Katie, I'm not kidding. I don't feel—"
"Hold him down, damn it!"
The man tried to rise, frantically waving his arms, and the back of his hand caught Iris on the side of her face, knocking her glasses askew. That, at last, galvanized Kevin into action, and he caught the man's arms, making an ineffectual attempt to keep him still.
In other circumstances, Kate's natural compassion for her fellow beings would have allowed her to understand, to sympathize. Kevin had narrowly escaped death twice in the space of an hour; he had witnessed more horror and destruction tonight than he had envisioned in a life-time of acting out drama for television, and he, of all people, was least prepared to cope with this. Shock was normal. Confusion, disorientation, even hysteria, would not have been unusual. Under normal circumstances, Kate would have expected nothing more of him.
But these were not normal circumstances, and Kate had no sympathy, and little understanding, to spare. Kevin looked as though he might be sick at any moment—he was white and shaky and perspiring profusely—and though Kate had felt the same way more than once tonight, she simply couldn't afford to have him fold up on her now.
As she struggled to fight off the excited patient while holding on to her syringe, she warned Kevin sharply, "If you pass out on me now, I'll leave you where you fall. I swear to God I will! You're going to see worse than this tonight—people might die here tonight—so you'd better get a hold on yourself and hold this man down!"
Kevin's dark, stunned eyes met hers for a moment, and then he seemed to focus his energy. His tightly compressed lips went a shade whiter as he applied his strength to bringing the patient under control.
The injection took effect almost immediately, and that was the last thought Kate gave to Kevin Dawson for the next fifteen minutes. People were calling for her, tugging at her clothes, demanding her attention, and each one needed her more than the last. She tried to set up a rough form of triage on this first quick tour of inspection, removing the more serious cases to the examining rooms for treatment, dispensing analgesics and first aid to the rest. And all the while she could feel the panic rising in her, low and certain. One doctor could not cope with all these casualties. Where was her father?
"This looks bad," she told Iris tautly, examining a compound fracture, the most urgent case she had seen so far. The broken bone was exerting pressure on the femoral artery, and if the fracture was not reduced soon, permanent damage could result. But reduction of the fracture required major surgery, the kind she was neither equipped nor qualified to perform. "Get me a hematocrit,'' she commanded Iris. "I need to know how much blood he's losing."
"Katie..." It was Kevin's voice, sounding very weak and rather hesitant behind her. She had almost forgotten about him; she thought surely he had left for safer ground by now. "Have you got a minute?"
"No, I don't have a minute," she said without turning. She quickly examined her patient's pupils. He was unconscious and beginning to show signs of shock. She didn't know how much longer she could wait.
"I just needed—"
Iris rushed off with the blood sample for the hematocrit, and someone called, "Dr. Larimer, I couldn't find those towels—"
"Dr. Larimer, the mayor is here; he needs to see you."
"Katie..."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Kevin, what is it?" She turned sharply and almost bumped into a tall blond man in a raincoat. She didn't know him, and he didn't look hurt, so she started to push past him. Someone else was calling her, and she forgot about Kevin again.
The man said, "Excuse me. Dr. Larimer?"
She looked past him impatiently. "Yes, what is it?"
He extended his hand. "I'm Dr. Brandon. I just got in tonight and—"
The name meant nothing to her, but the title was an answer to a prayer. She said quickly, "You wouldn't be a surgeon, would you?"
"As a matter of fact, yes."
"Are you licensed to practice in the state of Mississippi?"
He looked at her with calm gray eyes. "At this point, would it matter?"
Once again she was reminded of a world gone mad, of the shattered rules of predictability and permanence, and did not think about it twice. She said curtly, decisively, "You'd better scrub. I've got a case here—"
And then she saw Kevin. He was leaning against the wall; his face, which had once been merely pale, was now deathly white. He was cradling his arm against his chest, and his fingers were dripping blood.
Of all that she had seen tonight, of all that she had endured, this was the worst. She felt her veins go cold; something tight closed about her chest and squeezed away her breath. She pushed past Dr. Brandon and caught Kevin's shoulders. He looked as though he might collapse at any moment. "Kevin, my God! What—"
"I don't know," he answered simply. And the weakness in his voice, the faint attempt to smile through stiff white hps, went through Kate like a knife.
She cast a frantic look over her shoulder. "Dr. Brandon, can you handle that?"
He was ahready examining the patient, not even having taken time to remove his coat, and he answered her with a quick, dismissive gesture of his hand. "I'll call you when I need you. What have you got for anesthesia?"
"Ether."
He grimaced. "Not good, but it'll have to do. Okay, I'll cross-match him and round up some donors. Are you in this by yourself?"
"Yes," Kate breathed, and she missed the doctor's incredulous glance of disbelief. She wrapped her arm around Kevin's waist and led him out
into the hall, toward her office.
The room was empty; narcotics were stored here, and Iris would not consider even the present shortage of bed space adequate cause to leave patients unattended in Kate's office. Kate helped Kevin to the sofa, where he sat down heavily. "Did you ever have one of those days," he murmured with a gallant attempt at humor, "where nothing seemed to go your way?"
"Oh, Kevin, why didn't you tell me you were hurt?" She couldn't keep the despair out of her voice as she grabbed a suture tray from the storage shelf and came back to him.
He tried to shrug and then grimaced. "It didn't really hurt until I saw all the blood. I thought it was just bruised."
Kate snatched a pair of scissors from the tray and cut away his sweater at the shoulder as he protested jokingly, "Hey, watch it! This sweater is handmade—and imported!'' Kate pushed aside the material and caught her breath.
A shard—it looked like glass—had entered Kevin's shoulder just below the collarbone, proximal to his shoulder. It had apparently been embedded quite deeply and only began to work loose as he moved, which explained his unusual pallor and weakness. A stab of remorse, so deep it was physically painful, went through Kate as she remembered how she had berated him and pushed him throughout the night, making him the victim of her temper and her impatience, and all the while he had been hurting and bleeding, and she hadn't even noticed.
Her eyes were filled with pain and regret, and her voice was a little shaky as she looked up at him. "Oh, Kevin, I'm so sorry."
He looked genuinely puzzled. "For what?"
Oh, Kevin, she thought, and the surge of emotion that engulfed her was so great that she couldn't even define it. She could only think again. Oh, Kevin...
And because Kevin was sure to begin to read things in her expression she didn't want to reveal—nor did she even understand what it was she felt—she quickly averted her gaze, beginning to swab off his arm.
"So what's the verdict?" Kevin asked after a moment. "Am I going to live?" He kept his face averted, for which Kate was grateful. She had seen patients who had been perfectly calm and composed collapse at the first glimpse of their own torn flesh, and Kevin's wound was not a pretty one. Though his tone was deliberately casual, she could see the tension working in the muscles of his jaw, and she hastened to reassure him.
"Only if you give up sex, alcohol and cholesterol."
"One out of three isn't bad."
She was relieved to notice, as she hastily cleaned off the wound, that her immediate assessment had not been too accurate. The injury was clean and not nearly as bad as it looked. She covered the wound with a gauze pad and went quickly to the narcotics cabinet. "It must have happened when the storm first struck," she explained, wanting to keep him distracted. "You were so hyped up with adrenaline you didn't even feel it. It's not unusual. We would have noticed the bleeding much sooner if you hadn't worn that stupid red sweater."
"Next time I'll know," he murmured dryly, and Kate smiled at him as she filled the syringe.
"What's that?" he asked as she knelt beside him and pushed up the other sleeve of his sweater.
"Morphine." She swabbed his muscled arm with alcohol. "It might make you a little woozy."
"Great. Could you wrap some up for me to take home? I could make a fortune selling it at parties. Ouch!"
Kate managed a smirk for him as she withdrew the needle, and he pretended to glare. "What are you planning here, major surgery?"
"Just a few stitches. I don't know how to tell you this, hotshot, but you may have to keep your shirt on for a few episodes. You're going to have a nasty little scar."
"Maybe I can tell them it's a bullet wound. They can work it right into the script."
"Never at a loss, are you? You can lie down if you feel dizzy. Or just lean your head back and relax. This is going to take a while." As she spoke, she was using the forceps to remove the glass carefully, and she felt a little catch in her throat as she saw how large it was. A few inches lower and it might have penetrated the lung; a few inches higher, the carotid artery...
Kevin said, "No, I'm okay." Until this point her distraction technique had worked. He didn't seem to notice what she was doing until he heard the clink of the glass as it hit the basin into which she tossed it. He winced but did not look around. "I'm not even going to ask what that was."
"Good for you."
"You have a really gory job, Kate. And to think I used to be jealous of you."
She looked up at him in surprise. "You were jealous of me?"
"Sure. You were always so smart, so on top of things. There was nothing you couldn't do."
She laughed a little and turned back to her work. "That's funny. I was always jealous of you."
Now it was his turn to look surprised. "What for? You had the brains, the talent, the grades—"
"And you had everything else."
His eyes took on a distant, slightly sad expression. "We've come a long way since then, haven't we, Katie?"
Yes, she thought, and felt that little catch in her throat again. A long way... together. And because that sentiment was making her feel strangely weak and vulnerable, she quickly concentrated her attention on her task, not on the man who was the cause of her confusion.
As she began to suture the fascia, he grew tense and lost his inclination to talk. She asked once, gently, "Are you okay?"
He gathered himself enough to reply, "I've had more fun dates in my time, darlin'. Are you sure that wasn't water you put in that hypo?"
"You wouldn't feel a thing if you didn't think about what I was doing."
"Small comfort."
He fell silent again, and she finished as quickly as she could. "There you go," she pronounced at last, the relief more evident in her voice than she would have liked. "None of your fancy Beverly Hills surgeons could have done a better job."
She applied the last piece of tape to his bandage, and he smiled crookedly, relaxing visibly now that it was over.
"I'll give you this: none of them would be half as pretty to look at while they were doing it," he said.
"Fie, Mr. Dawson, that's just the morphine talking." But she felt a surge of happiness so sweet it made her feel guilty just to hear him use that old teasing tone of voice again, just to know he was going to be all right. And she couldn't help smiling back as she knelt beside him on the couch, using a gauze pad to blot the faint dampness from his face.
He watched her with eyes that were unnervingly alert for the amount of morphine she had given him, thoughtful and perceptive and for some strange reason, unsettling. She found herself growing nervous under the gentle intensity of his quiet gaze, and she said, "I'll try to find you a sling for that arm. You should keep it immobile for a few days, and right now I want you to just rest. You can lie down here, in my office."
He surprised her by reaching up and lightly smoothing away the damp bangs from her forehead. His touch lingered against her face; her own hand fell slowly away from his. And she couldn't seem to move her eyes away from the gentle caress of his gaze.
"Do you remember when you asked me why I kept coming back here?" he said.
She nodded. It seemed like a lifetime ago that they had sat in front of his fireplace surrounded by shrouded furniture and tossed half-serious banter back and forth. And in a way it was a lifetime, for both of them had grown and changed in the past few hours in ways they had yet to realize, and there was still more to come.
His fingertips lightly traced the curve of her eye, and he was looking at her in the deep, abstracted way of a man who has just made a discovery he doesn't fully understand yet. "I always used to think it was because this was the only place I knew where I could escape from the insanity. But now, when the whole world has gone crazy and there's no place to escape anymore, now I realize that it had nothing to do, really, with this place, this town. It was you. The one thing I could depend on, my lifeline to the real world, never changing, never wavering. You're my sanity."
She felt a soft, warm chokin
g sensation in the center of her throat; she didn't know what she would have answered even if she could have made herself speak. His fingers brushed lightly down her face, to the comer of her lips, so warm, so gentle. His eyes followed the course of his fmgers, and her breath quickened; she turned her face a little to his touch. She knew he was going to kiss her, and she wanted it, she welcomed it, this little fragment of tenderness in the midst of suffering and chaos. She lifted her face as his hand spread against the side of her throat; she felt his breath brush across her skin. She could almost taste his softness and his warmth.
Kate was to wonder later, in odd, brief moments, what had come over her, and him, and whether she had imagined the entire episode or whether it was all some stress-induced dream. Whether he would have really kissed her, whether she would have responded, or whether one or both of them would have broken away in embarrassment and confusion... and if he had kissed her, what it would have been like. But she was not to know. The door burst open, and the precious moment of half fantasy was completely shattered.
"Kate, I've been looking all over this place for you!"
Kate got quickly to her feet and turned to meet the mayor, whose expression of harried impatience was quickly replaced by a look of alarm. "Kevin! Kevin, my boy, what happened to you?'' He came forward quickly. "You're not hurt? Nobody told me you were here. I hadn't heard..."
Kevin smiled, though it was a rather strained smile, very different from the one he had given Kate only a minute ago. "You've got to admit, though," he responded with forced humor, "it took a tornado to upstage me." Then, gesturing to the bandage on his arm, he said, "It's just a scratch. The doc here fixed me right up."
Mayor Brackin looked distractedly from Kevin to Kate, obviously torn between his solicitous duty to the town's most famous—and most benevolent—citizen and the urgency of grander crisis. The mayor was a good politician, a competent administrator and a fairly conscientious servant of the town, but he was no more prepared to deal with disaster than anyone else. He, like everyone else, was rising to the occasion as best he could.
After The Storm (Men Made in America-- Mississippi) Page 6
