At the Scent of Water

by Linda Nichols

  Ricky stood up, taking his cue. No doubt he had patients to see today, as well, and the drive from Knoxville back to Gilead Springs would take just over an hour, probably longer, considering it would soon be morning rush hour.

  “I’ll tell Mama you’re all right,” Ricky promised. “You want me to bring your car around to the side?”

  Sam nodded. “Thanks. Tell Mama I’ll call her tonight.” He went to shower and dress, and he didn’t let his mind go ahead of his feet. He didn’t like to think of what waited for him at the hospital.

  ****

  The news crews were there, as he had expected. Sam saw the vans as soon as he drove up outside the hospital, but that, in itself, wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that today their faces and microphones were all pointed toward him.

  “Dr. Truelove, what’s your opinion of the court’s ruling to remove Kelly Bright’s feeding tube?”

  “Dr. Truelove, have you communicated with the family?”

  “Dr. Truelove, Mrs. Bright says you are responsible for her daughter’s condition. Would you care to comment?”

  He plowed a straight line through them, and the security guards met him at the door, allowed him in, and kept the surging tide outside the revolving doors. He could feel stares as he rode the elevator upstairs, exchanged a few tight greetings with staff he recognized. Izzy was anxiously watching for him at the office. Her face relaxed slightly when he came through the door, but the concerned look remained. He paused by her desk, and she scanned him as always. What she saw must have worried her. Her eyes grew dark and troubled.

  He went into his office and sat there for a moment, staring at the stacks of papers, the charts, the telephone messages, and that was when he knew. This was his judgment. The final verdict. He thought of the surgeries he had scheduled today, and he knew he could not do them. He could not, he would not, repeat the horrific mistake he had made. He buzzed Izzy. She answered immediately.

  “Is Barney in?” he asked.

  “Just arrived,” she said. “Do you want to see him?”

  “If he’s not busy.”

  After a moment a gentle knock came at the door. His partner came into the room. Barney was a good man, Sam realized again. His partner’s face looked worn and troubled now, yet he managed a smile.

  “How are you doing, Sam?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said quietly.

  Barney sighed, sat down, then took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s a mess,” he said.

  Sam felt a sharp wound at the words, for the memory of that awful operating theater, covered with the little girl’s blood, came back to him. Her heart had arrested, stayed still for a few moments too long. It certainly qualified as a mess, but somehow the flippancy of Barney’s comment tipped Sam into anger. He sat silently, though, knowing his friend had meant no harm.

  “The partners met early this morning, Sam,” Barney said gently.

  Sam felt stunned. “Good of you to include me, Barney. I’m a partner, too.”

  “We would like you to step down,” Barney said without responding to his thrust.

  Sam frowned, the words not making sense at first. “Step down?” he repeated dumbly.

  “From the practice, Sam. But just for a while. You shouldn’t be operating right now. You know that as well as I do. And it’s not just because of Kelly Bright,” his partner interjected. “We’ve all watched you lately, Sam. This is what I was trying to say last night. You’re tight. Tense. People are worrying about you. Comments have been made. And now that this situation has blown up, we think it would be better if you took a leave. Just until you get your confidence back.”

  “My confidence back?” Sam spoke the words quietly, not able to believe Barney had actually uttered them. “I do more surgeries in a day than you do in a week. You have the gall to question my confidence?”

  “I said your confidence, Sam,” Barney said quietly, undeterred, “not your competence.”

  Sam stared at the man who had been his partner, his friend.

  As if reading his mind, Barney continued. “Sam, listen to reason. I’m speaking as your friend. This isn’t just about the practice. Things haven’t been right with you for a long time. Go somewhere and figure things out. Get your head together and then come back. This is your practice. You’ve built it. No one’s trying to deprive you of it permanently. If we were, we would have voted you out completely, but no one wants to do that. It’s temporary, Sam. Take a break.”

  Sam sat stunned, his mind picking one fact out of Barney’s entire speech. With a vote they could oust him.

  Before he could speak, Izzy’s worried face appeared around the edge of his door. “Mr. Bradley called,” she said. “He would like you to come down immediately.”

  Barney did not look surprised, and then Sam knew that he and the hosptial administrator had talked, as well. He shook his head, and absurdly, he wanted to laugh. Tom Bradley had wooed him. Had basically let him write his own ticket, choose his own team. And now they were turning against him, and he suddenly remembered a long-ago Sunday school lesson about David, anointed by God, but hiding in the desert, pursued by the king who wanted to kill him.

  He rose and walked out of the office, leaving Barney sitting across from the empty desk. He rode the elevator down to the glassed-in administrative offices on the first floor. The receptionist waved him by, and he tapped smartly on the door of Tom Bradley’s office and was invited in.

  The administrator was on the telephone, winding up by the sounds of it. “As I said, the hospital has no comment at this time. There will be a press conference this afternoon.”

  Sam stared. A press conference and he didn’t have to strain to imagine Tom, in this morning’s blue pinstripe and maroon tie, his thinning blond hair combed back and gelled, excruciatingly groomed and manicured, telling the hordes of reporters that Dr. Truelove had temporarily stepped down from his position as chief of pediatric cardiac surgery. That would preserve the hospital’s credibility, and that, and only that, was what Tom Bradley was all about.

  Tom hung up the phone and turned to face Sam, as businesslike and dispassionate as Barney had been agonized.

  “Good of you to come, Sam,” he said in his clipped way of talking. He was Canadian, and his enunciation was precise. “As you can see, we have quite a mess here.”

  The same words Barney had used, a happenstance that fed Sam’s paranoia and his anger.

  “I’ll be blunt and brief,” Tom said. “The board has met and decided that it would be best for the hospital’s reputation if you took a leave of absence.”

  Well, there it was. Sam took the ultimatum in and realized he should have expected it. The hospitals in this league were fiercely competitive, always jockeying with competitors for the pool of patients, for reputation. To be the best. He had catapulted them up the ranks of heart centers into the top ten, but if his presence became a liability rather than an asset, they would not hesitate to cut him loose. They had wooed him, but they would cast him off if it suited their purposes to do so.

  “May I ask how long this leave would last?”

  “Until the matter is satisfactorily settled.”

  “Settled to whose satisfaction?”

  “The board’s.”

  “And what if it isn’t ever settled to their satisfaction?”

  Tom leaned back in his chair and folded his hands. “Let’s not borrow trouble, Sam. Sufficient unto the day, so they say. You’ll keep your salary, of course, and your title, for the time being.”

  “For the time being?”

  Tom gave him a look of patient compassion. He spoke slowly, as to a dull child. “One of two things will happen here, Sam. The girl will die, in which case this will be old news the day after. It will be bumped sooner if a terrorist blows up a building or someone mails anthrax.”

  “Yes, maybe we’ll get lucky,” Sam said dryly.

  Tom continued on without pausing. “Or, in the second case, the courts wi
ll order the tube put back in and leave the parents slashing away at each other in court. In either case, the shelf life of a news story like this is comparatively short. You could be back at work in weeks. A month at the most.”

  “Then they’ll sue,” Sam said, thinking of the malpractice case that had been hanging over his head for years.

  Tom shrugged. “By then the blood will have been let. The case will drag on, depositions will go back and forth. Dull stuff for the press. They’ll lose interest. Eventually your insurance will pay, and that will be the end of it.”

  “What if I refuse to leave?” Sam persisted. “What if I call my own news conference?”

  Tom shrugged. “Let’s not go there, Sam. Be reasonable.”

  Sam felt his blood race. His pulse pounded in his ears. He felt his hands clench, and he wanted to feel his fist against the soft flesh of Tom Bradley’s smooth-shaven face. He rose up and left without speaking. He went back to his office and passed Barney’s door without pausing. Izzy’s face was mottled and red, and sure enough, she must have gotten the word, because when he arrived in his office his desk was completely clear. No charts. No pink message slips. He was already gone, as far as all of them were concerned.

  He left the picture on the desk. He left his diplomas and certificates on the wall. He stopped on his way out at the front desk, came around the back, and embraced Izzy. She was weeping and hugged him fiercely.

  “It’ll be all right,” he consoled her. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  “This is not right,” she said. “I just want you to know I support you whatever you decide to do. If you go somewhere else, I’ll go with you.”

  “You’ll be the first to know if I do,” he promised. “Now you take care of yourself.” She nodded mutely and gave him another hug before she released him.

  He made his way home, then turned into his building. There were no news vans, and for that, at least, he was thankful.

  He went into his apartment, sat down on the couch, and there were those hateful papers still on the table. He didn’t touch them, but he had read them so many times, he swore he knew them by heart. He left them there, then turned and walked out of his apartment, got into his car, and left Knoxville. He drove eastward out of town, merged onto Highway 40, and then, not knowing what else to do, he headed toward the mountains.

  Eleven

  Annie finished packing the last box, said good-bye to Mrs. Larsen, then glanced around the apartment for stray belongings. Her Rand McNally Road Atlas was spread out on the front seat of the truck, along with a thermos of coffee and two veggie-loaf sandwiches Shirley had donated, which Annie planned to jettison as soon as she was out of sight. The apartment was clean. Last night, after returning from Kirby’s, she had vacuumed and cleaned the bathroom and kitchen. The furniture stayed, of course. Everything that was hers was loaded in the back of the truck under the canopy. She had packed her important things into her suitcase and purse. Her laptop, her journal, the picture she had bought that had moved her so deeply. She had a reservation for two nights hence at the Residence Inn in El Segundo. It would be home until she found a new place. She felt a flush of embarrassment that she had chosen that town, but really, there were no Residence Inns in downtown Los Angeles. Besides, it would be nice to know someone, and she thought of Delia and the fat white rabbit and smiled. She looked around one last time, picked up the last box, and headed out the door.

  She stepped over her neighbor’s Seattle Times lying in the middle of the hallway, and something drew her eye. A photograph, in color, of a young girl with tangled blond hair and a wide joyful smile. It was familiar in a horrible, grief-filled way. Annie stared. Her mouth opened slightly, and she forgot to breathe.

  She put down the box slowly, opened her neighbor’s paper, and read the headline. Oh. Oh no. No. But it was true, and then she read the story, forgetting all about Max Kroll and the Times, and Jason Niles and Los Angeles. She felt numb. Sick. Torn. Oh, Lord. She sat down on the steps outside her apartment and reread the article. “Parents Feud Over Girl’s Right to Die.” There were quotes from right-to-lifers and right-to-deathers. She turned inside for the sidebar, and there was Sam’s smooth smiling face and under it the headline: “Prominent Heart Surgeon Accused of Malpractice.”

  She stared at the picture and felt a flare of anger. It was cruel of them to use this one, for she remembered when it had been taken. He had just finished his fellowship. They were living in Gilead Springs, and everything seemed right. Everything was good. The picture had been taken for the practice’s Web site, and she had kept one herself. He was smiling, his face creased into deep lines of joy. His eyes were confident, bright, clear. His face was tanned from the work they’d done outside. She touched the newsprint now but felt only dry paper beneath her hand.

  They should have taken another picture for this day, and she knew what it would have looked like. She could see how his face would look today in her mind’s eye, could remember staring into it during those long hours before she had finally left. His mouth would be a straight grim dash, deep lines from nose to mouth, eyes heavy and dark with grief and something else that smoldered underneath, a barely controlled anger. And that had been the thing that had finally ended it, that anger, for it even seemed to burn toward her. Not directly, of course, but in a cold silence that was unyielding to her touch, to her pleas.

  She read the article again. It recounted the facts she knew all too well. That Dr. Samuel Truelove had, on the night of his own personal tragedy, foolishly or bravely carried out a surgery already planned, the repair of an aortic dissection, a small tear in the aorta of a child who had sustained the injury in an automobile accident. A difficult surgery, but one he could have done in his sleep ordinarily, but this time something had gone wrong. Mistakes had been made. By the time they were corrected, the child’s brain had suffered irreparable damage, and Annie still remembered Sam’s face, so deadly white as he arrived at the small hospital’s emergency room where she had waited for him, unwilling to leave lest they take her daughter away and make her a body instead of her baby.

  She had waited, holding her child, stroking the soft, damp hair and wondering where he was. Where were you? she had accused him when he finally came, but he had had no answer. She set down the newspaper now and recalled that he still had not answered her. Where were you? she had asked. If you had been here my daughter would not have died. My daughter, she became in death, his right of fatherhood relinquished by this last neglect. It all came back to her now, those scenes and memories she had tried so hard to outrun.

  Suddenly it seemed ridiculous that she had ever thought she could leave them all behind, and Los Angeles and Jason Niles and even Delia evaporated like a foggy morning.

  She sat on the step and held her head in her hands and realized the truth. It had finally caught up to her, that life she’d thought to leave behind. A life of graveled roads and patchwork fields, of towering smoky mountains, of iced tea in sweating glasses and soft voices, and she realized then that she had never finished with it, and that’s why it haunted her so. That’s why she had never been able to buy a home, a table, or a couch, even to have a real friend.

  She went down to the truck and rifled through boxes until she found the telephone. She brought it back inside and plugged it in. She raised it to her ear and heard the broken dial tone that signaled messages on the voice mail. She pushed the button to play the first one.

  She caught her breath at the familiar voice. She didn’t need to be told who it belonged to. “Annie Ruth, it’s Mary,” her mother-in-law said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you might, well, I was wondering if you might come home. Just for a few days. I never wanted to interfere between you and Sam, but . . .” Her voice broke. “I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have called.” A soft click and she was gone.

  She stared, and because she did not know what to do, she played the next one and recognized the dramatic, slightly bossy tones of Sam’s sister, Laurie. “Now list
en,” Laurie began without introduction, knowing that on her deathbed Annie would recognize the voice that had exchanged confidences and whispers throughout their childhoods. “I know you and Sam have your situation or whatever, and I don’t intend to get in the middle of that.”

  Annie could see her, eyebrows raised, one hand on her hip, a cloud of fuzzy dark hair around her head.

  “But they’re after him now, and no matter what’s gone on between the two of you, I should think you’d have a little human kindness. Besides, between the two of y’all, you’ve very nearly broken Mama’s heart.”

  A stab of pain. Mary, who had spent her life caring for others, did not deserve this grief. She did not deserve the way Annie had treated her, but what could she say that she had not already said? There was no way she could remove Mary’s suffering any more than she could remove her own.

  “I think the least you can do is come home, if not for Sam’s sake, at least for hers. Besides, that house of y’alls is about falling down. If you’re going to sell it, you’d best do it now.”

  A pause.

  “I’d like to see you, too,” Laurie said in softer tones. Then a sigh. “Good-bye.”

  Click. Silence. The next message played, left within fifteen minutes of Laurie’s.

  “Hey, Sissy, I know you’re probably out gadding around the country, but some of us have to work for a living.” Infectious, machine-gun laugh, and Annie couldn’t help but smile as Ricky’s face appeared in her mind. She could picture her brother-in-law leaning back in his chair grinning, looking like an alien with his blond hair and freckles amid all the dark-skinned, dark-haired, intense Trueloves. He had inherited his coloring from Mary’s side of the family, but she didn’t know where he’d gotten his disposition.

  “Seriously, though—”

  As if Ricky was ever serious about anything.