Disguised Blessing

by Georgia Bockoven

  “The answering machine tape is full every time I go home, even if I’ve only been gone a couple of hours.” Tom had suggested they put medical updates in place of a message and it seemed to be working. Last night there had been as many hangups as requests for a return call, some from friends she hadn’t heard from in years.

  Again she heard a sound in the outer office. Even though Catherine knew it wasn’t Tom—she still looked toward the door. This time it opened. It wasn’t Tom but Gene, her brother, who appeared. She let out a welcoming cry and jumped up to greet him.

  “What are you doing here? I told Mom not to call you.” She was ecstatic that her mother hadn’t listened.

  Gene was six-foot-four to her five-foot-seven. When he hugged her and she put her cheek against his chest, she could feel his strong, steady heartbeat and knew a familial security that was a balm to her own wounded heart.

  “She knew I’d never forgive her if she waited until I got home to tell me. I’m just sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. I snagged the first empty seat on the first flight I could find out of Tokyo.” He let her go and studied her. “You look like hell. Where’s Tom? Someone needs to tell him that he should be taking better care of you.”

  She sidestepped the question, using Rick to divert him. “Gene, I’d like you to meet—”

  “Rick Sawyer. Well, I’ll be damned. What has it been—fifteen, twenty years?”

  Rick shook Gene’s hand. “At least twenty.”

  Catherine looked from Gene to Rick and then back again. “You know each other?”

  “We were in the same fraternity at USC.” To Rick he said, “I had no idea you went into medicine.”

  “Not even close,” Rick said. “I’m a firefighter.”

  “Oh…” He was plainly embarrassed by the mistake. “I assumed Catherine was in here with one of Lynda’s doctors.”

  “He’s here to help me—” She tried but couldn’t remember what Rick was supposed to help her with. “To answer questions.”

  “What kind of questions?” Gene asked.

  “Anything and everything that isn’t medical,” Rick answered for her.

  “And you do this because…?”

  Rick liked this protective streak in Gene. He’d been a champion for the underdog in college, too. “Firefighters are traditionally involved with helping burn survivors and in the support of burn units in hospitals. In Sacramento we take it a step further and assign volunteers to burn-survivor families. We stay in contact with them for the first year of recovery, doing whatever we can to make the process easier.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Gene said.

  “Yes—it does,” Catherine agreed, politely.

  Rick knew it would take several more contacts before Catherine was ready to think about anything but the immediate future and that he’d done what he could for that day. “I’m going to leave now,” he told Catherine. “If you need me for anything, you have my number.” He nodded to Gene. “Good seeing you again. Catch you later.”

  “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  Rick left and went downstairs to the intensive care unit to check in with the nurses before going home. The nurses dealt with the kids and their parents on a more intimate basis than the doctors, and he often got a better feel for the nuances of a case from them.

  As much as he liked Catherine Miller and felt he could work with her, he still wasn’t convinced he was the right person for her daughter—from all accounts a girl accustomed to being the center of attention. Rick’s sister, Cindy, had been a cheerleader in high school. A bad hair day was tantamount to going out on a date with the class geek. Rick hadn’t understood her then and—with her trips to Los Angeles every three years to have something lifted or tucked by her favorite plastic surgeon—didn’t understand her any better now.

  He’d seen too many kids without ears or noses, too many mouths that couldn’t form a smile, too many hands without fingers to feel sympathy for a woman whose mirror reflected mere wrinkles.

  The intensive care unit was formed like a half wheel with the nurses’ station as the hub. The rooms were large and filled with light. Each had brightly colored curtains and matching bedspreads, televisions, VCRs, video games, and whatever else might be requested to engage the mind in something other than pain and loss.

  A nurse in her midfifties with hair the shade of red that only came from bottles looked up and smiled when she saw Rick. “Hey, long time no see. You here for the boy they just brought in?” She rolled her chair back and reached for a chart.

  “I didn’t hear about the boy.” He leaned over the counter, saw an open box of See’s chocolates, and took a caramel. “I’m with Lynda Miller.”

  “Going to work that special magic you do with a girl this time, huh?”

  “Going to try.” The caramel stuck to his tooth. He pried it off with his tongue, making a sucking sound.

  “Well, keep that up and you’re a shoo-in. Nothing gets to us girls like slurping sounds.”

  Rick laughed. “If that’s true, I think I need a little more practice.” He took another candy.

  The phone rang. She picked it up, put her hand over the receiver and mouthed to Rick, “She’s in C unit.”

  He nodded and waved his thanks.

  He wasn’t there to introduce himself to Lynda. He doubted she’d remember the meeting anyway. Even if she hadn’t just had her dressing changed, at this point in her recovery the pain medication was still strong enough that only odd moments would be permanently imprinted.

  The curtain to Unit C hung half-closed, and Rick had to pass the door to see inside. Lynda looked as he’d expected—terrifyingly wounded to a parent, perfectly normal to an objective, knowledgeable observer. The machines and monitors were standard stuff, as were the tubes that put things in and took others out. His only surprise was the teenage boy sitting in the corner of the room, his head propped against the wall, sleeping.

  “Who’s the kid in the chair?” Rick asked the nurse when she hung up the phone.

  “His name’s Brian Winslow.”

  The name registered, but it took a second to connect. And then he remembered Lyn mentioning him that morning when he’d called her to make sure the appointment was still on. “Isn’t he the boy who was with her when she was burned?”

  She nodded. “He’s been here every day and most of the nights.”

  “Boyfriend?” Catherine had said Lynda didn’t have one, but mothers had been known to be a step or two behind their kids when it came to things like that.

  “I don’t think so. At least that’s not the impression I’ve gotten.”

  Rick looked at him again. He’d slept on the tailboards and hose beds of fire engines during forest fires, but he’d never been able to fall asleep in a hospital chair. You had to be bone-deep tired and young enough not to worry about a stiff neck to do something like that.

  “Has she had a lot of friends come to see her?”

  “She told her mother she didn’t want anyone here—including Brian. He sat out in the lobby until Catherine talked Lynda into letting him come back in her room.”

  Rick admired loyalty in a friend, and hoped that was all it was. Guilt was a heavy and futile burden for someone Brian’s age. Without the years and wisdom to know that sometimes shit just happens, the long-term consequences were devastating. Someone needed to be looking out for Brian, too.

  And that someone might as well be him.

  6

  “Should we go downstairs?” Gene asked. “We have to talk first.” Catherine couldn’t let him see Lynda without preparing him. She would still be drugged and unlikely to remember Gene coming in to see her, but Catherine didn’t want to take any chances. With Lynda’s face pink and swollen, her body wrapped in bandages, a feeding tube taped to her nose, her hair a crude shag on the sides and missing in the back, and her eyes wary and frightened, even Catherine had to look hard to find the old Lynda. Gene would be devastated no matter how well she prepared him; Catherine just di
dn’t want it to show. Lynda already had enough to deal with without worrying about upsetting her uncle.

  “How about some coffee? Have you had breakfast?” He glanced at his watch. “Make that an early lunch.”

  She wasn’t hungry but knew Gene needed something to do, something he believed would help her. They were alike that way. Inactivity was her enemy. It left her too much time to think. Before her divorce, she’d spent a year agonizing over what it would be like to live without Jack and the next three years living what she’d imagined. At first the loneliness had been like a knife in her chest, reminding her with every breath that she slept alone, woke alone, and went out alone. Eventually the pain became as familiar as two place settings at the table instead of three; so familiar, she failed to realize the moment it wasn’t there anymore.

  “A cup of coffee would be nice,” she said. “There’s a cafeteria downstairs.”

  He picked up her purse and handed it to her. “I know I’m repeating myself, but I really am going to have to talk to Tom about taking better care of you.”

  “If you can find him.” She was sorry the minute she said it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. I’m just a little out of sorts today. Tom went up to the lake yesterday to close the cabin. I haven’t heard from him since. At least not directly. He left a message on the machine saying he wasn’t going to make it home last night. But I expected him long before now. He was here when I made the appointment to meet Rick and he knew I wanted him to be with me. At least I thought he did.”

  “Did you try his cell phone?”

  She nodded. “And his pager—at least a dozen times. He’s not answering either of them.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Tom.”

  “He’s not taking this very well,” she admitted. “He’s disappeared on me a couple of times since we’ve been here. Turns out he’s one of those people who doesn’t like hospitals.”

  “Please tell me he’s not using that as an excuse.”

  “Of course not.” At least not in those exact words. Tom had found ways to keep himself busy, all of them away from the hospital and always in the guise of helping. She’d gone from being grateful to confused to hurt. She wasn’t sure what she felt anymore.

  “Do you want me to talk to him?”

  Confined in the sanctuary of the cherry woodlined elevator, Catherine was tempted to dump her frustration and fear on her brother as she had during her divorce. Only the promise she’d made to Gene and herself never to do that to him again stopped her. “I can take care of it,” she said.

  They picked up coffee and, at Gene’s insistence, sandwiches, and took them into the atrium, settling into a window seat that faced west.

  “So tell me how she’s doing,” Gene said. “I assume that’s why we’re here instead of in her room.”

  Catherine took a sip of coffee and put the cup aside. Even a swallow was too much for her stomach to handle. “She has what the doctors call a twenty-percent burn. They calculate these things to figure the medications and treatment and something else I can’t remember.

  “The second degree burns will heal on their own, but the third degree areas have to be grafted. The worst places are where her camisole melted and stuck to her skin.” Catherine remembered the day Lynda bought the bright red camisole. They’d been at Sunrise Shopping Center looking for a birthday present for Lynda’s best friend, Wendy. After wandering the mall for four hours, they’d left with a new pair of pants for Catherine, the camisole for Lynda, and nothing for Wendy.

  “You can actually see the outline of her bra across her back where it protected her for awhile.”

  “Does she know what happened?”

  “She remembers everything up to being put in the ambulance. After that it’s bits and pieces. Now she’s drowsy and sick to her stomach from the pain medication, and drifts in and out of sleep so I never know what she’s seeing or hearing.”

  Gene took a bite from the corner of his sandwich and then set it aside, too. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “How long do the doctors think she’ll be in the hospital?”

  “Three to four weeks. She’s scheduled for her first grafting operation in a couple of days. They want to see how much of her back is going to heal on its own before they go in.”

  “Where will they get the grafts?”

  “Her head and her buttocks. She’ll have to put up with being bald for awhile and having her backside sore, but this way they won’t be creating scars by taking tissue from more exposed places.” At Gene’s encouragement, Catherine tried a bite of sandwich and almost gagged.

  He gave up and put her sandwich with his. “Her beautiful hair…”

  “It’s not so beautiful anymore,” Catherine said softly. “She lost most of it in the fire.”

  “Will it grow back all right after the grafting?”

  “Eventually. They don’t take the skin deep enough to affect the hair follicles. If she were a boy and went bald as a man you’d be able to see the scars from the surgery, but it won’t affect her.”

  “Does Lynda know?”

  “I know she’s heard me talking to the doctors, but I don’t know how much of it registered.” Catherine didn’t mind the barrage of questions. It was Gene’s way of coping with stress.

  “How is Mom taking all of this?”

  “She’s getting through it, but I’m worried about her. I finally had to ask a friend to come and get her last night. She was so tired she couldn’t walk straight.”

  “At least you weren’t alone,” he said cryptically.

  Gene took his big brother role seriously. He’d been her protector from the time she was six months old and a neighborhood dog tried to steal her bottle.

  “Tom’s been here, Gene. He didn’t completely abandon us.”

  “It just looks that way, huh?”

  She would have to be more careful. Gene might be slow to anger, but he was slower still to forgive. “Actually, I’ve had more people wanting to help than I have things for them to do. I had Mom answer the messages on the machine at home and tell everyone that Lynda couldn’t have flowers or visitors but cards were okay. Brian volunteered to call some friends and have them call everyone they thought would want to know.”

  “Brian?”

  “Brian Winslow. The accident happened at his parents’ house at the lake. If it weren’t for him, Lynda would have been burned a lot worse.”

  “All right, you’ve warned me about what to expect. When can I see her?”

  “Now, if you want. She should be back in her room.”

  “Is there anything else I should know? Anything I shouldn’t say or do?”

  “Don’t try to con her. She knows how badly she’s burned.”

  “She must be scared out of her mind.”

  Catherine leaned into his shoulder. “Just like her mom.” Her cell phone interrupted them. “I’d better get that,” she said, and reached inside her purse. “It could be Tom.”

  He stood and picked up their plates and coffee cups. “I’ll get rid of this stuff.”

  “Would you mind going downstairs and seeing if Lynda really is back in her room?” She didn’t want him listening if it was Tom on the phone.

  “And if she is?”

  “Come and get me.” The phone rang again, intrusive, promising, annoying. “Oh, I almost forgot. You have to put on a gown before you go in,” she called to him. “Ask one of the nurses to help you.”

  She pressed the Send button on the phone.

  “I’m at your house,” Tom answered cheerfully at her hello. “Is there anything you want me to bring when I come down?”

  “What are you doing there?” She made no effort to hide her irritation.

  “What did you think I was going to do with all the stuff I brought back?”

  “Where have you been all this time? And why haven’t you been answering your pager? Jesus, Tom, you had to know that I’d be worried sick about you. You promised you’d be here
this morning for the meeting.”

  “I must have left my pager in the car.”

  He was lying. She could tell by the tone in his voice. But why? “That’s a first. What about your cell phone?”

  “What about it?”

  “Why didn’t you have it with you?”

  “I did. Don’t tell me it’s not working again.”

  “Funny, it was working when you called about the golf tournament at the club before you left.”

  “There’s been a lot going on outside that hospital, Catherine,” he said defensively. “It may seem the world stopped turning to you, but the rest of us have had to keep going despite Lynda being burned.”

  “I’m aware of that.” The last thing she needed or wanted was a fight. She didn’t have the energy for the battle, let alone the reconciliation.

  “You’re obviously mad at me about something. Why don’t you just tell me what it is?”

  “I’m not mad, Tom. I’m worn out.”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “All right, maybe I am a little upset.” She walked to the window and stood in the sunlight, closing her eyes against the brightness. She wished she’d known Tom longer. She needed him to be more than her lover; she needed him to be her best friend, the kind it took years to become. “Can you blame me? When you left for the cabin yesterday you said you’d be back by ten, no later. You should have at least called to let me know you were tied up—or whatever it was that kept you from being here this morning.”

  “You’re right. I’ll try to be more considerate from now on. It’s just that I’m not used to reporting my comings and goings to anyone. Until I met you, my time was my own.”

  It was such an odd thing for him to say she didn’t know how to answer. Was she supposed to forgive him or apologize for being a burden? “It’s been so long since I had that kind of freedom I guess I’ve forgotten what it was like.”

  “Don’t worry about it—I understand how that can happen.”

  “You asked if I needed anything. I could use a change of clothes.”

  “You’re not doing Lynda or yourself any good spending every single minute in that hospital. Why don’t you take some time off and come home for a couple of hours?”