Conflicts of the Heart

by Julie Michele Gettys

  When Dana stepped out on the porch, bulbs flashed. A TV camera with its single spotlight lit Dana's ashen face. As torn up as she was, she tried to speak with decorum and dignity. She held her own with those news hounds fishing out a story for the late news and the morning paper. If they didn’t find Michael by morning, the story would go national. An Amber Alert would go into effect.

  “All I want in this whole world is my son back. I can't believe he's out in the wilderness all by himself.” She raised her head and gazed vacantly into the camera's eye. “He's autistic, you know.” Her voice became whispery soft. “He can't take care of himself. There are snakes and coyotes that come out at night.” She swallowed hard.

  Her mother stepped up and looped her arm through Dana's. “This is very hard on my daughter.” She dismissed the press with her usual aplomb. “We know the sheriff's department is doing everything in its power to find my grandson. They'll share anything with you as soon as we hear. Thank you.”

  Astonished by her mother's concern for them, Dana looked at her, bewildered. With a strong arm, her mother shepherded her out of the spotlight, away from the crowd, back into the quiet dining room.

  “Now what?” Dana sat at the long table, staring up at her mother for direction.

  Patrick wended his way into the dining room. “I found ten volunteers who live around these parts willing to go out with me tonight and continue the search. I won't stop until I've found him.”

  Dana rose from her chair. “You mean it? You'd do that for us?”

  “I'll stay here with her,” her mother squeezed Dana’s shoulder. “You must be the Patrick Mitchell I saw on the news today with the nurses.”

  “I am. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Moran.” He shook her hand.

  “It seems strange…you and my daughter scrapping over the negotiating table and all, then out here--”

  “We're friends, Mother. We don't scrap.” She hadn’t meant to sound so defensive.

  The crowd thinned when the press and TV crew left. A few women from the neighborhood brought food to feed the remaining search party before they went back out.

  “Would you like me to call my doctor and have him come by to give you something to help you rest?” Ruta asked.

  “No. I'm going out with them.”

  “No,” Patrick ordered gently. “You stay here with your mother and Ruta. Wait until we get back. You need rest. It’d be a terrific idea if the doctor did come by and give you something to calm you down.” He took her by the shoulders. “Let me do this for you.” He gave a slight grin. “You've got circles under your eyes big enough to land that helicopter on.” He managed to pull a reluctant smile from her.

  “Thank you, but I must go.” She tugged away from his grip, swayed a bit. Her fatigue level

  was higher than she realized. He reached out and took hold of her.

  “Okay.” She caved in. “I'd just slow you down. The main thing is not who's searching but that Michael’s found.”

  “You can use the spare room upstairs to rest.” Ruta sounded as motherly as she appeared. “First you need something to eat.”

  “I couldn't.” Dana crinkled her nose at the sound of food. Her mother rummaged through her oversized carpetbag and pulled out a prescription bottle. “I have some sedatives you can take to relax. I don't think she needs a doctor.” Her mother paused, her stern, unapproachable manner thawing before Dana's eyes. “I'll stay with you, honey.”

  The warmth in her mother's voice confused Dana. Did it take a disaster to bring her around?

  After the remaining volunteers devoured the sandwiches and snacks, they gathered out front. At the door, Patrick turned and nodded. “Get some rest. Maybe when you awaken I'll have good news for you.”

  Dana didn’t hold out much hope. She still believed Joel had taken Michael. Resigned to wait it out, she went upstairs to the spare room to lie down. The large room might have been an attic at one time with its steepled ceiling. The furnishings were sparse with a double bed, a tall, old chiffonier, and a bentwood rocking chair next to the bed on a large, well-worn hook rug.

  A brisk northern wind from the Sierras whipped up, jostling a tree branch against the house. Icy fear twisted around her heart. All she could see in her mind's eye was Michael, out there somewhere, alone, scared, huddling in some crevice, shielding himself from the cold night air. The weather was unpredictable this time of year--hot days, cold nights, sometimes rain, wild winds like the one blowing now. What would she do if they didn’t find him?

  “Take this. It'll calm you down.” Her mother held out a pill and a glass of water from the antique vessel on the dresser. “You'll relax.”

  “No thanks. I must be alert in case they find Michael.”

  Her mother leaned over and propped Dana's pillows. “Lie down. I'll take your shoes off. If you'd like, we can sit and talk until you get sleepy.”

  Dana couldn’t remember when her mother had treated her with so much tenderness.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “It feels good having you here.” Dana shot up, grabbed her mother, and held on to her. “I'm so glad you were here when we came in this evening. I needed you more than ever, Mother.”

  “Oh, honey. I'm so afraid for you and Michael.”

  Her mother drew back and gazed into Dana's eyes with more love and understanding than Dana had seen since she was a child.

  “Don't you think we should go downstairs and call Joel?”

  Dana jerked away. “Let the police handle him. I'm so frightened. If he didn't have anything to do with this, he'll use it against me.”

  She took deep breaths and tried to let her muscles relax. “I can't talk right now. I'm getting sleepy. Let's talk tomorrow….” Her voice trailed off. The last words she heard her mother say were, “Don't you worry.” Dana fell asleep.

  An hour later, she awoke, sitting up with a start from a bad dream about Michael, running, calling to her. She wanted to chase him, but it was as if her legs were hardened by cement, preventing her from moving.

  In the darkened room, she stared up at the beams, her eyes filled with tears. “Please, dear God, let them find him, all safe and sound.”

  The wind had died down. The room fell silent. Her mother sat in the bentwood, sleeping, and her hair down on her shoulders. A softness Dana had never seen etched composure onto her face.

  She stirred. “You're awake?”

  “Yes.” She reached out and took her hand. “I love you, Mom.” Margaret smiled.

  Dana let go of her mother's hand. “Why’d you come out here?”

  “When I heard that lost sound in your voice on the answering machine, I knew you needed me.” She glanced down to her lap. “Michael needed me. I’m a hardened old woman who needs her head examined before it’s too late.”

  “We've always needed you.” Dana checked her watch. The search party had not come in. She froze.

  “What's wrong?” Her mother took Dana's hand in hers.

  “What kind of chance do I have winning with Joel?”

  “What on earth are you babbling about?”

  “He's smart. He's willing to lie, cheat, and steal. Every time I turn around, something more happens. Michael disappears, and everything is going down at work. I'm only one person. I can't deal with all of this.” She scooted to the edge of the bed and dropped her feet to the floor. “I can't rest anymore. I'm too upset.”

  “I should have known how important Michael was to you. I just thought Joel was such a good man. I trusted his judgment.”

  “You were never around enough to see.”

  Her mother drew her hand up to her mouth, shivered, and bowed her head.

  “I'm sorry, Mom, but I can't sit here.” She grabbed her suit jacket from the foot of the bed and threw it over her shoulders. “Where are you going?”

  “Out to look for my son. I can't lie around here feeling sorry for myself.”

  “You can't go out in the dark by yourself--”

  Then a
bloodcurdling scream came from downstairs.

  “Michael,” Dana yelled. “Mother! That was Michael.” Dana took the stairs two at a time. At the bottom, she ran headlong into Ruta.

  “You heard him too?” Ruta scurried around the hallway opening doors.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don't know. I just heard his scream.”

  Michael must have found his own way. Dana called out, “Michael, where are you?”

  “Mommy. I'm scared,” came his muffled voice.

  “The closet,” Ruta shouted. “He's in the hall closet.”

  The two women rushed down the long, narrow hall. “I thought you looked everywhere in the house.” Dana trembled at the thought of finding her son. Her hands shook, her heart pounded with gratitude.

  “We did. He wasn't in there.”

  Dana flung open the door.

  Ruta pulled the overhead string, flooding the closet with light. Inside the large walk-in were stacks of old books along one wall and camping gear piled in a corner. No Michael.

  “Mommy,” came Michael's muffled voice from under swaying camping gear.

  Dana reached down, and pulled a neatly folded sleeping bag and a lightweight tent away and uncovered her son. He reached up to her, his eyes puffy from a deep sleep. Out of fear, he’d shut down, locked himself away.

  She took him in her arms.

  Ruta let out a nervous laugh, relief illuminating her cherubic face. “How’d he get under those sleeping bags and tents like that? Nothing was out of place when we looked in here this morning. He must have put everything back on top of himself exactly the way he removed it.”

  “That's one of his talents. Oh, my baby.” Dana combed his tousled hair with her fingers, holding his head against her breast. “I love you so much.”

  The search team returned a half hour later, bedraggled, and exhausted. Dana, her mother, Ruta, and Michael sat around the table drinking hot chocolate when Patrick and the others lumbered into the dining room. A broad, delighted smile crossed Patrick's face when he spotted Michael huddled next to his mother.

  Michael flew from his chair to Patrick's outstretched arms. “Where was he?”

  Dana laughed. “In the hall closet under a pile of camping gear.”

  Patrick coughed and lifted Michael up into his arms. “Next time you decide to go camping, can we come?”

  At four in the morning--Michael tucked into his own bed--Patrick and Dana sat at her dining room table, dog-tired, gazing into each other's eyes.

  “We've been dealt a terrible hand.” He smiled through misting eyes. “If this were a movie, we could just throw caution to the wind and walk off into the sunset, arm, and arm.” He paused. “It's not. It's real life. I'll be in New York and you'll be in Ashton, somewhere around three thousand miles apart, remembering a beautiful moment from our past.”

  Dana had no intentions to attempt to pull him away from his dream, or his daughter. They’d arrived at the fork in the road they knew would come.

  “We could get married, commute, call each other, and write letters.”

  She laughed. “No long-distance love for me, thank you very much!”

  He stood and pulled her up with him. “I'm serious. Think it over.”

  Her mind went dizzy thinking of all the unfinished business in her life. Joel would never allow her to leave the state unless she gave up her claim to bring him to justice. Could she marry and give up her dream job to become the first woman administrator of Templeton Hospital? When she left Joel, she vowed to raise her son alone and get on with her career. Granted, Patrick was the most remarkable man she'd ever known, and she knew she loved him, but could she trust him with her and Michael's lives forevermore? Did she trust him enough to make the necessary changes in her life to be with him? She’d made a firm promise to Gil she wouldn’t remarry and leave the area. She’d be breaking a promise she now knew she must keep. He’d done so much for her, how could she even entertain the idea of leaving him in a lurch? It would come back to haunt her.

  With her hand in his, she led him to her bedroom. “Love me, for tonight.” She giggled and paraphrased Scarlett O'Hara, “Tomorrow is another day.”

  Dana gave all of herself to Patrick, and at that moment she had all of Patrick she would ever have. Holding him to her breast, she realized there was nothing more to be lost.

  Twenty One

  A week of newspapers lay scattered at Dana's feet. Today's headline read MISSING BOY FOUND with a picture of Michael smiling for the camera. Michael lying in front of her on the floor calmed her heart. The local evening news on TV drummed away in the background. She glanced up just in time to hear the newscaster sputtering about a riot at Templeton Hospital.

  “Michael, turn up the TV.” He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees and whipped up the volume.

  “Injured employees are being moved into the emergency room,” the news anchor said with a dramatic tremor in his voice. “It appears a number of people were hurt when a fight broke out just moments ago. We'll have an in-depth report on the eleven o'clock news.”

  Dana's beeper sounded. “Code Green. Repeat. Code Green,” the voice on the beeper blurted.

  A disaster. Dana reached for the phone and called the emergency room supervisor's private number.

  “Kelly here.”

  “This is Dana Claiborne. Who's on?”

  “Hubbard.” The evening shift supervisor.

  “May I speak to him?”

  “I just left him. He's with the patients that were brought in from out front. You heard?”

  “What's going on?”

  “You better come down. It's pretty bad. A bunch from two eighty-one started a fight with the nurses picketing out front.”

  “I'm on my way.” Dana hung up, called Mrs. Cheney next-door, and arranged care for Michael.

  Within twenty minutes, she strode through the ER, checking the faces of people in various degrees of pain and discomfort impatiently waiting for attention. The chairs around the waiting room were full. She couldn’t find any employees among them. They must have tagged them, and moved into treatment rooms already.

  “Glad you're here,” the tall, underweight ER supervisor, Bill Hubbard, said. “Six employees and a union rep have been injured. The union rep has been moved to ICU.”

  Patrick. She tried to keep her heart still. “May I see a list of the injured?”

  “Certainly.” Bill spun around and led Dana into a cubicle in the back of the department. From his cluttered desk, he picked up a handwritten list. “Except for the union rep and a clerk from the third floor, they're all nurses.”

  Dana scanned the names. Patrick's was on the bottom. She glanced up; her voice hitched.

  “How bad is Mitchell?”

  Hubbard shrugged. “He's in intensive care.”

  “What happened?”

  “Teal DeLuca and a pack of her followers were harassing the people picketing. They had a large group out tonight, sympathizers from the other departments. Something to do with Monday’s election.

  Someone called DeLuca a bitch. All hell broke loose. When Mitchell tried to break it up, an orderly and DeLuca pushed him down. He struck his head on the hubcap of an ambulance.”

  She wanted to head upstairs to his side, but she controlled herself. “What's the status on the others?”

  “A few bloody noses, a lot of bruises. One nurse, Andrea Lerner, may have a broken arm. We're waiting for x-rays.”

  “God, I can't believe this.” Never, in all her years as a negotiator, had anything like this ever happened on her watch.

  “All but Lerner and Mitchell are being released shortly.”

  Dana's heart was on the elevator, soaring up to the intensive care unit where she pictured Patrick lying in bed, his eyes closed, and tubes medicating and feeding him, keeping him alive. Dana wanted to talk to the floor nurse assigned to Patrick's bed, to find out how he was doing, what his prognosis was.

  “Where's Andrea?” “Trauma thre
e.”

  Dana hurried down the hall littered with gurneys, all filled with patients waiting for care.

  Inside the small cubicle, Dana saw Andrea, a nurse from critical care, a former girlfriend of Patrick's and now a supporter of Teal DeLuca. She looked to be about twenty-eight years old with long, ash blonde hair, piercing blue eyes and a slim, elegant figure. Even in a simple white nursing uniform, a bit disheveled from her ordeal, she could have just stepped out of a fashion magazine. No wonder Patrick had been attracted to her. “How do you feel?”

  “Like shit.” The profanity didn’t suit her clean-cut appearance. “What happened out there tonight?”

  “God, I'm so sorry, Mrs. Claiborne.”

  Andrea's unexpected apology surprised her. “For what?”

  “For choosing the wrong side. For letting my personal feelings interfere with my better judgment.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” Dana moved closer, clasping her hands to control the slight trembling.

  Andrea swung her legs from the end of the table to the side facing Dana, wincing from the pain. “Until tonight, I thought Teal would be the better person to represent the nurses. Then she came up on the floors and started drilling the employees full of nonsense, telling them that she had an inside track with you. That you'd already agreed to some of her ideas for a new contract. Knowing you, we all figured she was lying. I asked her to leave, and told her that she was breaking the rules. She turned on me. She’s desperate. I'd never seen that side of her before. Then I thought of Patrick, how calm and collected he was all the time, how much he cared for the employees. He shows it. Always. I knew I'd taken the wrong side.”

  Dana pulled up a chrome chair at the foot of Andrea's bed and sat.

  “Whenourshiftchanged,IfollowedTealdownstairstothe cafeteria where her groupies were waiting. I told her that she should get herself outside and talk to the nurses who were picketing. They’re ready to strike. Teal led the way. I followed. Outside, she walked up to Patrick and started yelling something about his affair with you. She was personally going to make sure everyone knew about it. The nurses laughed at her.” An understanding smile crossed Andrea's face.