by Lexy Timms
“Here, Doctor!” Elena called, and indicated the young man nearest the door. “Eyes are non-responsive and his breathing’s shallow.
Somewhere Brant heard a child crying. It was hard-going, bent over, debris scattered on the floor. There had probably only been one or two actual patients on this bus. The rest was likely extended family, journeying with their loved ones to the clinic. He wondered briefly who the original patients had been. What had brought them out? In the dim lighting inside the bus, it was hard to see. Someone handed him a small flashlight as he knelt by the man…no, boy. He couldn’t be more than fourteen or fifteen. Brant bent to pry the young man’s eyelids open. It didn’t take years of training to recognize a concussion. The boy was dazed; he would likely be all right, but he’d need a scan to be sure.
“Keep an eye on his vitals; someone’s bringing the Jeep here,” Brant said. “Oh, and congratulations.”
“For what, Doctor?”
“Learning English overnight,” Brant said, and moved on to the next person.
It wasn’t the Jeep that ended up acting as a replacement ambulance. Three of the cabana trucks from the resort appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere. Considering they were built to go about the speed of a golf cart, someone must have called them immediately. His estimation of the clinic staff rose quickly.
There was a back brace in the bus; it was the one thing they’d hadn’t grabbed, as it was too cumbersome to be dragged through the jungle. Brent climbed in with the patient with the back injury, and instructed the driver to go as smoothly as possible. Dr. Bell followed in another cart with the head injury and two of the more critically injured people. She was still shouting orders to the nurses left behind.
The clinic’s Jeep passed them about halfway back, and Mel sent him on his way to get the rest of the clinic’s staff. That left the cabana driver on one end of the back board and Brant on the other. The driver was surprisingly gentle. The drive, no matter how smooth he tried to manage it, was over rough roads and the woman was regaining consciousness.
That she was in pain was obvious, but whether that was a good sign or not wasn’t clear. They brought her into the clinic and set her down on a gurney. Brant belatedly realized it was the same one he’d spent the night on.
He took off the woman’s shoes and pulled a tongue depressor from a nearby jar. He snapped it in half and used the jagged end to draw a small welt up her sole.
“Doctor?” the driver said, his eyes large.
“Trying to get her to react,” Brant explained, and grabbed her toes. They were warm, so circulation was still good. He leaned over and took a deep breath. There was a mix of body odor and perfume, and even a little of the jungle about her smell, but no smell of loosened body fluids. That was a very good sign. But her feet still took the pain without moving.
He ran the ragged wood over her sole again and stared. He might have seen a twitch, maybe not. He tried once more. There. Her foot recoiled from the stimulus. Brant breathed a sigh of relief.
Thank goodness.
The Jeep returned, and Joseph and Elena took the woman to get X-Rays. Mel came in as Brant was scrubbing his hands.
“How is she?” she asked.
“I think she’ll be okay.” Brant wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Depending on the images we get. I don’t suppose you have a CT scan machine here?”
“You have any idea how hard it was to get an X-Ray machine in the middle of the jungle?” She snorted. “Tell me, Doctor...” She lifted her eyes to meet his. It was a hard look. Angry. Calculating. “Isn’t a head trauma more immediate than a back injury stabilized with a board? Or do you prefer to work on cute girls?”
Brant leveled her a look. Of all the idiotic things he’d ever heard, this was the worst. “I assumed your patient already had a competent doctor in charge of his case.” His voice shook with barely suppressed fury. “What the hell happened out there?”
“What do you mean?” she twitched slightly.
“You know exactly what I mean, Doctor,” he hissed. “You froze.”
She glared at him. He gave her that much: she didn’t flinch or duck away. She faced him. Whatever it was he’d expected her to say, her reply wasn’t it.
“Dr. Layton,” she said stiffly, “when these patients are settled, I’ll ensure that you’re released from your obligation here.” She didn’t move as she stared at him. “You’ll be on the next flight back to your…world.”
Brant opened his mouth and closed it again, realizing he had nothing to say. Isn’t that what I wanted? Hell, he’d been trying to leave since he arrived. He thought back to the snake around his toilet, the jungle, and the beasts and the bugs. He thought of his practice, the people who depended on him, counted on him. Not just the patients, but the nurses and the office staff.
He’d achieved the one thing he’d fought for since landing here. Except, now it seemed like a banishment. A rejection.
He opened his mouth again, but Mel was gone. There were patients to see, X-rays to examine. Things to do.
He turned. Elena was heading toward him with an iPad showing an X-ray. Joseph signaled him over to Room 7.
That’s when he saw Maria. She stood, half-framed in shadow, the half of her face not swathed in bandages a picture of confusion and barely-suppressed tears.
Odd, Brant thought, surprising himself. That’s just how I feel.
Then he turned, diving into the fray, getting things done. Saving lives. The next three hours were too busy for thinking about anything except the people who needed him here.
Chapter 8
What the hell’s wrong with me?
Mel strode from the clinic. The patients had been stabilized, and she’d even assisted Dr. Layton in surgery. The injured woman on the back board had crushed a disk. Nothing life-threatening, but it was pressing against the spinal column and Brant—Dr. Layton—had needed to go in and remove the pressure. It was a fairly simple procedure, all things considered, but it was far beyond her skills. She just wasn’t that kind of surgeon. She was a GP by trade. Good and thorough, but a general physician.
“Lucky he was here,” Joseph had summed up the surgery, and Mel had to agree. That pressure was shutting off the feeling to the poor woman’s legs. It could’ve been bad. Getting her to a qualified surgeon would’ve taken too much precious time, and getting a surgeon to the clinic, under most conditions, would have taken so long it would have been too late.
But Dr. Layton was here. Despite his whining, his complaining and…drunkenness, he was here just when he was needed. And though Mel wasn’t a surgeon herself, it was obvious he was a good one. A great one.
Damn him. And damn her for being a fool. She clenched her fists and threw her arms down in a gesture of frustration and futility. She actually bounced from the suppressed energy of her anger. Damn it. Damn it! DAMN IT!
She froze. Right when she was most needed, in the moment where people needed her skills… NEEDED her. And she froze in front of him. She buried her head in her hands. She’d frozen right in front of him.
It never occurred to her to wonder why, specifically, that mattered. People froze all the time. The accident had been horrific to see. Even people without her history would have had qualms about approaching that overturned bus. Except, that wasn’t what ticked her off. She’d frozen in front of the fancy High-Powered California Surgeon. In his scrubs and fancy-ass stupid shoes. She became the little jungle doctor he had to think she was.
That was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it?
She’d heard it before, so many times. “If she was a good doctor she’d have a practice in the States and make a ton of money.” It was always there, always mentioned in whispers when they thought she couldn’t hear. Doctors, nurses, patients…even her own family. They didn’t understand that she wanted this life, that there was something better—no—greater than money.
Mel turned to look back at the scattered buildings. None of them had been there when she’d arrived. None of the staff.
None of the aid. When the locals needed medical help before she came, they’d travel for two days to find it. Even then, most of the locals had still been depending on roots and herbs to cure their ills. And what a few old women sold out of huts tucked back in the jungle. Love potions. Healing poultices.
It was Mel who’d changed all that. She’d made the deal with the resort. She’d made the deals with the organizations to fund her. She was the one who traveled to every village and convinced them that modern medicine was better than getting a shot of mayonnaise disguised as penicillin from some local quack.
She was proud of what she’d created. It was hard work and draining as hell, but she’d done it and she’d done it alone.
Right up until today when she’d froze.
His second day there.
What must he think of me?
Mel felt tears backing up behind her eyes. Damn it, she wasn’t going to cry over this. Why did it matter? Who cared what big-city surgeons thought?
Yet the tears still trickled down her cheeks. She tasted them on her lips and angrily dashed them away, rubbing her eyes with the back of one hand. “Great, now he can see me cry, too, like a little girl!” she spat, cursing herself. Cursing him. I’m tougher than this. She reminded herself of all that she’d done. Back in the early days, back before the supplies came in on the resort plane, they had come through government channels…meaning most of them never arrived. She’d faced down corrupt officials, black marketers, and even a drug boss to get the much-needed supplies to the clinic. And not once, NOT ONCE in all that time did she break down into tears.
Not once had she frozen either.
If it had been anything else…
The whole thing had been too much like another time. Another place. One minute she’d been standing in the jungle. The next…seeing the bus on its side, wheels still spinning slowly. It was like being back there.
A night black as sin. Rain-swept pavement.
“DAMN YOU!” She stomped her foot to get back some control. She clamped her mouth shut, wondering who was around to listen. Thankfully no one, she realized as she gave a furtive look around the clearing. For once, not a single person was in sight.
Of course that didn’t mean they weren’t all lined up at the windows, observing her little temper tantrum.
Forget this.
There was only one place she could go to get some privacy. She cut through the jungle in search of clear, clean water. She needed to go soak her head.
In the jungle, there were hundreds of small tributaries and run-offs that channeled the waters through the foliage. Sometimes they ran underground, sometimes they were buried under thick, dense foliage that never saw the light of day. Occasionally, they became stagnant and filled with mosquito larva. But on the rare occasion, the jungle allowed a stream of water to run deep and fast and clean.
Behind the clinic was one such miracle of the jungle. It was why she had chosen this location. Here, a small, rapid-flowing stream opened up under a large gap in the canopy and baked in the afternoon sun. The water moved too fast to be worth laying eggs in, so the insects were few. And on a breezy day like this, the wind kept the rest from bothering anyone there. You needed to be aware of predators coming for a drink, but even a slender woman was still a large animal; most of what prowled the undergrowth avoided humans.
Snakes were the exception, but by and large the local snakes preferred calmer waters. With a little caution, it became a perfect swimming hole and the sole source of natural recreation in the area.
There was a boulder there, a large piece of basalt that jutted up from the forest floor, keeping that area at least free of undergrowth. It stood proudly as the biggest reason for the break in the canopy. It was on this rock that Mel perched and took a deep breath. For the first time since she’d woken up that day she felt her shoulders relax, the tension draining out of her body.
She looked around perfunctorily, and slid out of her scrubs. The white panties were large enough to act as a swim suit, and her sports bra covered her adequately enough for modesty’s sake. The deep scars that ran down under her left cup were nearly covered as well.
The water was perversely warm. There was no place in a jungle to hide from the heat, but the evaporation would cool her when she climbed out. For a time without measure, she floated, soaked, and luxuriated in the water.
She couldn’t close her eyes and drift as she longed to do; vigilance was key, and the strong current would take her back into the darkness of the canopy. She was able to stretch, kick, and tread water, though, until her anger cooled—even if her body couldn’t. Climbing back onto the rock was always a trick. She’d left her sneakers on, as the rock had some sharp edges and there was always the possibility of stepping down in the pool and impaling a foot on buried twigs. But it did add a slippery interface between her and the rock. It took a moment of breathless scrambling to finally attain her perch, seated safely on the height of the rock.
The stone had absorbed the heat of the day. Almost blissfully, she stretched out for a moment to let the sun dry her off.
She’d barely closed her eyes when a noise from behind sent her scrambling for her scrubs. She about killed herself trying to put both legs into the same space before she somehow managed to untwist the fabric enough to get the pants back on. In the meantime, a raging elephant came tripping through the underbrush, or at least that’s what it sounded like.
She reached down and grabbed her shirt just as Dr. Layton pushed his way through the last of the leaves, sputtering and waving his arms like a spastic windmill, trying to clear the last of the plants from his path.
“There you are!” He jumped onto the rock, but the ridiculous fancy shoes he wore were not meant for mounting large slippery boulders, and his right leg shot out from under him.
Instinctively, Mel reached out and pulled. Instead of dropping backward back into the bushes, he landed on his left knee and both hands.
“…Thank you.”
Mel opened her mouth to speak, but what could she possibly say? Obviously, he was upset. His face was flushed, set in stern lines of anger.
Great, he came all the way out here to complain again. Mel suddenly felt weary. It was just too much. She’d just gotten calmed down again and feeling like maybe she wasn’t the world’s worst doctor after all, and here he showed up, spoiling for a fight. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, readying herself for his harangue.
Only, she was met with silence.
She opened her eyes again, and realized that whatever had driven him all the way out here had dissipated as quickly as the water had evaporated from her skin. He clearly wasn’t angry anymore. In fact, he was staring at her. Specifically, he was staring at her breasts. The left one. The one that wasn’t entirely there.
She caught her breath as she realized that her shirt was still in her hand, dangling loosely. She felt like a deer in the headlights, unable to move.
Inside, she was screaming.
No! No, no, no…
But this wasn’t the annoying man who left her angry and breathless in turns. No, this was the doctor His interest was clinical. Analyzing. She could see it in his eyes, on his face.
But he was staring.
“Those scars were made by metal,” he murmured, tilting his head to one side to assess where the puckered skin disappeared under the wet fabric of her sports bra.
Don’t you think I know that? The words died on her lips. She remembered the way it felt, how the ragged steel felt as it tore through her skin, how it felt to have her ribs scraped clean. She wanted to move, to cover herself, but for the second time that day she froze.
He reached out and touched a scar. It was the hand of a surgeon examining an old wound.
NO!
She finally reacted. Moving without thinking. The sound of her hand meeting flesh cracked in the clearing, sending birds from their roost. GO TO HELL! In her mind, she screamed it. But her jaw wouldn’t open. The words came out blurred and ragged, muff
led behind years of pain. Her breath caught on a sob. “Just, please…go to hell.”
Chapter 9
This was not where Brant had expected to end up.
It had started…well…truth be told, he’d been pissed off. And why shouldn’t he have been? Not only had the high and mighty jungle doctor frozen when she was needed most, but now she’d had the audacity to disappear.
“Where the hell is Dr. Bell?” Brant was too angry to acknowledge the rhyme. Tina and Elena took one look at his face, and any pretense of a language barrier was immediately forgotten. Joseph spoke from behind him, causing Brant to swing around to face him.
“Dr. Bell worked very hard today.” His features were schooled and his voice somber. “She’s not a surgeon, as you are. But she did very well.”
“Joseph,” Brant said slowly, struggling to get the words out. Simple ones you’d use to explain to a child. One that was maybe not as sharp as his peers. “I understand your loyalty to the resident doctor, but I need to see her. Now. Do you know where she is?”
Joseph took on the look of a man hunted. His eyes darted toward the two nurses, who very clearly switched loyalties in an instant by avoiding his gaze studiously. Flustered, he mopped his brow, and finally shrugged in the direction of Dr. Bell’s office. Brant glanced that way, but the light was off and there was nothing in the glass to see.
“Soaking,” Joseph said finally, as if the single word had been wrenched from him under extreme duress. Then, with great dignity and a certain finality, he turned and busied himself with re-sorting the supplies in a hall cabinet. They had been carefully put away upon their return to the clinic, but he methodically took out each and every box and bag and put them all right back in the very same spots they had been in, the picture of a man hard at work.
Fine. If that’s the way you want it…
Brant turned to the nurses. It was more than likely that he had just alienated the single friend he’d made in the country, but his steam was up and the indignation that fueled him certainly seemed righteous enough. “What does that mean?” he asked them. “‘Soaking’?”
