Too Close to the Sun

by Dempsey, Diana

  Applause followed that line and Gabby dutifully clapped along. She tried to catch her father's eye down the long table, but he had his head bent and was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. Gabby's heart ached for him. At least she had Will Henley to distract her from the sickening truth that Max Winsted, no-show or not, was taking over Suncrest. Her father had nothing else to focus on. On either side of him sat Will and Camella, both of whom had their gazes trained on their hostess.

  "When tomorrow dawns," Mrs. W continued, "Max will be here at Suncrest, bursting with ideas and excitement. I only wish his father were here to witness his enthusiasm, for it was Porter's fondest hope that his son take over the winery and continue to lavish it with the loving care that has made it the success we enjoy tonight."

  Clapping followed that line, too, along with a few bravos, and a man far down the table to Gabby's right called out a hearty Hear! Hear! Gabby was just about to raise her grappa to her lips for a sustaining sip when all of a sudden she glimpsed a movement far up and across the table, not far from where Mrs. W stood. Then, almost disbelieving, she realized that the motion had come from her father, who was half rising from his chair with a stricken look on his face and both hands clutching his chest.

  Then he toppled to the floor, slamming into Will Henley on the way down.

  She heard a woman cry "My God!" then understood with some shock that the words had erupted from her own mouth. She was out of her chair then—in fact, she realized it had toppled backwards behind her—and was scrambling around the table toward her father. She was vaguely aware of men and women rising to their feet, their voices raised in confusion. Thunder pounded in her ears and two childish syllables beat in her head. Daddy. Daddy.

  He was on the ground, panting for breath, Will crouched next to him, trying to loosen the collar of his dress shirt, leaning his ear close to her father's chest.

  "Does anybody have an aspirin?" he yelled out. "You . . ." and he pointed to a man next to him. "Call 911 and run down to the gate to tell the paramedics where to come."

  Somebody found an aspirin, somebody else a glass of water. Motion, bustle—to Gabby all of it was a blur. She saw only one thing in that horrible pandemonium: her father on the stone cold cellar floor, a grotesquely weak reflection of the man she'd always known him to be.

  Chapter 3

  Will stood outside the emergency room of St. Helena Hospital with Gabby and her mother and sisters knotted all around him. They made an incongruous group, he knew, he and Gabby and Cam in black tie and cocktail dresses, clearly ripped from a gala and thrust into this antiseptic, fluorescent-lit corridor where people hungered for news they often didn't really want to hear.

  Will feared this news wouldn't be good. When Cosimo DeLuca had been strapped onto the gurney and rolled toward the ambulance, its strobe lights painting red stripes on his face, he had looked ravaged, a shadow of the hale and tanned figure he'd been earlier in the evening.

  Now, an hour later, Will tried to keep his own manner quietly confident, tried not to let his worry channel into Gabby's makeup-smudged, fearful eyes. But it was difficult. Her gaze seemed to bore into him, to demand answers to questions he hoped she wouldn't actually ask. How is he doing? Why is it taking so long to hear something? And, when her eyes were most frightened, Is he still alive?

  Oh, those eyes. Hazel, long-lashed, wide—very wide. Eyes a man could drown in. Set in a lovely tanned face. Her hair was wavy and the color of wheat, and was tied in a knot that was getting looser every hour.

  He tore his eyes away from her, with some effort. He was about to give her body an even more in-depth analysis than he'd already conducted, and this was hardly the appropriate hour for such a perusal. He forced himself to stare instead at the swinging doors of the ER, and eventually he saw a doctor emerge.

  He was black and maybe thirty—a little young for comfort in a situation like this one—but fast moving and clear-eyed and somehow reassuring. He spied their little group even before Will could signal him, as though in residency he'd trained in how to match patient and family with no wasted motion. He held out his hand to Will. "Dr. John Hearst. Are you the son-in-law?"

  The words tripped off Will's tongue. "Friend of the family."

  Dr. Hearst switched his gaze to Sofia DeLuca, a small, plump brunette who from the moment she arrived at the hospital had looked every frightened inch the wife of the patient. "Mr. DeLuca is having a large heart attack," he told her, and Will's own heart clenched as he watched Gabby's face crumple and her arm tighten around her mother's shoulders. "We're doing everything we can to stabilize him."

  Gabby spoke, her voice almost inaudible under the sudden blare of the PA system calling some other hapless family member to the nurse's station. "Is he going to make it?"

  The doctor seemed to dodge that. "Everything we know about a heart attack like this one tells us that his best chance of survival is if we can get the blocked artery in his heart open. What we'd like to do is give him thrombolytic therapy."

  "What is that?" Gabby asked.

  "Essentially it's a clot-buster drug. We would administer it through an IV." The doctor turned again to Sofia DeLuca. "Let me add that normally we would seek the patient's consent. But though your husband is conscious, Mrs. DeLuca, he's groggy, and I'm not convinced that he's competent right now to make an informed decision."

  "So you need my mother to give that consent," Gabby said. "Is that right?"

  Dr. Hearst nodded. "Yes, it is."

  This part of the drama Will understood. This was the cold, hard, make-a-tough-decision part. "What are the risks of this therapy?" he asked.

  "It's a powerful medication. There are potentially serious side effects." Dr. Hearst turned his gaze to Gabby. "For example, serious internal bleeding. A fatal bleeding. Or a bleeding stroke."

  In other words, Will thought, he could die.

  Clearly Gabby also understood the implications. She blanched, though she made no move and no sound. Her mother whimpered the word stroke and shuddered. One of the two sisters—Will had forgotten her name—started crying in earnest, sobbing and choking and clutching her mother's hand.

  "We want to administer the drug sooner rather than later," the doctor added.

  So there was time pressure, too. Of course. Emergencies didn't allow the luxury of considering life-and-death questions from every angle.

  Will watched Gabby murmur to her mother and sisters, the four of them a tableau of a family in trauma. He couldn't make out her words, but it was obvious that she was discussing the drug. Or trying to discuss it, because it was just as obvious that no one else was saying a thing. Her mother and sisters all seemed in too much of a state to weigh in.

  She's going to have to push her mom to give the go-ahead, he realized, and his heart went out to her. She would have to take responsibility for the decision that could save, or end, her father's life.

  He could see the weight of that burden etched on her face. He shook his head, his worry now tinged with frustration. He'd come to the hospital to help this woman and her father, yet was stymied at her moment of greatest need. It would be presumptuous of him, essentially a stranger here, to declare what the right course of action was, though it seemed fairly clear. Then again, right and wrong were easy for him in this situation, he knew. It wasn't his father behind those swinging doors.

  "Dr. Hearst, what are the risks if you don't give Mr. DeLuca the drug?" he asked.

  The answer was immediate. "The risks of doing nothing are much greater. At best Mr. DeLuca will be left with a severely weakened heart. At worst we won't be able to stabilize him at all."

  "And if his heart is weakened," Will said, "there's a greater danger of more of these episodes down the road?"

  "Absolutely. And the next episode may be even more serious than this one."

  In other words, the next heart attack might well kill him. If this one doesn't.

  Gabby bent her head toward her mother. "Mom?"

  Silence. No one spok
e. No other DeLuca seemed to have what it took to say yes or no.

  "Mom, we've got to do this," Gabby said. "You've got to give the doctor your consent. I really think it's the right thing to do."

  Finally, her mother gave a barely perceptible nod. That was all it took. "We'll know more within the hour," Dr. Hearst said, and he went back the way he had come, the emergency room's swinging doors slapping back and forth behind him.

  Good for you, Gabby, Will thought. He watched her lead her mother to a wooden bench against the wall, beneath a poster with pastel flowers that tried to strike a cheerful note in this otherwise grim setting. The sisters followed, then sat on either side of their mother and leaned in close. It looked as if they were setting up a human cordon around her, though the sad fact was that the danger they all feared couldn't be guarded against. It would appear silently, suddenly, as a shadow in Dr. Hearst's eyes, or in a grim set of his mouth, when next he emerged from the ER to hunt down the DeLuca family.

  Gabby broke away from her family and approached him, high heels clicking on the highly polished linoleum floor. Funny how affecting he found this woman. And it wasn't just the sex appeal. In this short while, he felt he'd learned a fair amount about her character. And found it damned impressive.

  She halted in front of him. "I really appreciate your coming to the hospital and staying all this time, Will, but you should go. It's getting so late, and we don't know how long it'll be before we hear something more. And besides . . ." She stopped.

  Will finished her sentence. "You feel weird about my being here when I really don't know your family."

  She seemed relieved that he'd gone ahead and said it. "I feel like I'm imposing."

  "You're not imposing. I'm here because I want to be." He realized he must truly be exhausted, because he was saying what popped into his head without thinking it through first. He tried another tack. "I just want to help if I can." Even though you don't know me from Adam. Even though we just met. "I don't know, call me a Boy Scout."

  That brought a smile, wan and weak but a smile nonetheless. "Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

  God, yes. He had back-to-back meetings, starting with a breakfast—seventy miles south in San Francisco—at 7 AM. He had two sets of deal papers to redline and a dozen phone calls to make. And about a dozen more he really should make.

  Including one to Stella Monaco, who probably didn't understand why Cosimo DeLuca's cardiac arrest had taken precedence over her party plans.

  "It's manageable," he told Gabby, then tried to gauge what he read in those eyes of hers. "Would you rather I went?" He felt compelled to ask the question, though he wanted only one answer. "I would understand if you wanted to be alone with your family. But I'd rather stay . . ." His words petered out. "Help if I can."

  What he didn't say hung in the air. He could almost see it under the too-bright hospital lights, like the words in a bubble in a strip cartoon. I want to make sure your dad's okay. Be here if the clot-busting drug doesn't work. Be here if he starts bleeding, like the doctor warned us. Be here if . . .

  Gabby looked at him and he could see those same doomsday scenarios spin out in her mind. Watching her, scared and sad and worried, a good part of him wanted to bundle her body into his arms, make his own strong, even heartbeat convince her that she'd done the right thing, the brave thing, for her father.

  "All right," she said. "Please stay."

  *

  Gabby watched Will and wondered what to make of him. His behavior went well beyond Boy Scout, to a level of gentlemanliness she hadn't thought existed anymore.

  "How about," he said, "we go down to the Starbucks on the first floor and get everybody coffee? It seems to be open all night. It was open when we got here."

  She shook her head. "I don't think I should go anywhere."

  "We won't be gone long." He cocked his chin at her family. "And I think at this point everybody could use a pick-me-up."

  "That's probably true." And it did sound good, doing something normal and everyday, something not filled with life-and-death questions.

  Her feet led her back to her family. "Will and I are going down to the Starbucks. Does anybody want anything? Mom?" She realized she didn't ask, Does anybody want to come with us?

  And no one did, not Cam or her youngest sister Lucia or her mom. Gabby took their orders, then she and Will headed for the elevators. When they arrived at the first floor, he directed her toward a short hallway to the right.

  "It's next to the Burger King," he said, then chuckled.

  "Can you believe they have fast food in hospitals?"

  "Too bad the gift shop's closed. We could see if they sell cigarettes."

  "They probably do."

  Amazingly at this hour, Starbucks had a line. Gabby wrapped her pashmina a little tighter around her naked shoulders.

  "Cold?"

  "I'm okay."

  A beat of silence. Then, "Really?"

  She turned to look at him. He stared back at her, unblinking, as steady and silent as a buddha. She had the sudden thought that she could tell him anything and he wouldn't be shocked. "No, I'm not all right." She was almost surprised to hear herself say it. Goodbye, social facade. Hello, reality. "It really upset me to have to push my mom to give the go-ahead for that drug."

  He seemed unfazed. "I can understand that."

  "I wish one of my sisters had said something to back me up. I'm scared that giving it to him was the wrong thing to do."

  He shook his head. "It was the right thing to do, Gabby. And for what it's worth, I think you were brave to make the decision."

  She wished she felt brave. That would be a lot better than petrified. "But he could have a stroke from it." She almost couldn't speak the words. "He could even die." And then it would be all on me. How could I live with that?

  "There are risks on both sides. The bottom line is how strong his heart is going forward."

  It almost made her angry, him being so cool and logical and sure. "How do you know?" Her voice came out snappish, loud. "Don't try to tell me what the 'bottom line' is. Even Dr. Hearst admitted it's risky."

  Immediately she felt guilty. Here Will was being more considerate than God and she was berating him for trying to reassure her. He looked away and said nothing. The line inched forward. They were next, after a dark-haired man in a droopy sweater carrying a sleeping toddler on his shoulder. The child was only inches from Gabby's face, his thumb planted firmly in his mouth. She focused on his dewy skin, his soft little baby snore, the long, long lashes draped on his sleep-flushed cheeks.

  Once, many years ago, she had been a child like that, and the man lying upstairs fighting for his life had held her on his shoulder in exactly that way.

  Tears stung her eyes, for reasons she couldn't name. Fear. Exhaustion. Anger, at her family and at God and at who else she wasn't sure. She had an enormous desire to be shot back in time to before this nightmare had begun, so she could have spirited her father away to some refuge where he would have been safe, though she wasn't sure anymore that such a place existed. She castigated herself for missing Vittorio, for loving him, for giving a damn about him at all. What was losing him compared to this? It was nothing. Nothing.

  The man with the child moved forward to the counter and ordered. Gabby bit her lip, hung her head, caught the sob that rose in her throat. Will was silent, but she could sense his gaze on her face, could almost hear the gears of his mind turning.

  Then she felt the gentle pressure of his hand on her back, moving her up to the counter. But she didn't want to raise her head, she couldn't make herself speak, her tears were a hairbreadth away. After a moment she heard Will start to order, what he wanted, what everybody in her family wanted, getting it all right when she hadn't even known he'd been listening, then throwing in a cappuccino and a brownie for her.

  He pressed a few paper napkins in her hand. "Go sit down," he murmured when the clerk had moved off. But by now she knew she couldn't check her tears; she could no longer hol
d them back. She backed away from him and pitched blindly past the people behind her in the line, her pashmina flying off her shoulders to land somewhere on the coffee-stained floor. Then out into the corridor, where she pushed open the first escape hatch she could find, a metal exit door which led into a stairwell where finally she could let the agony flow.

  Her body was racked with sobs, which came thick and fast and loud, echoing in the chilly industrial stairwell. Some caught in her throat, some shrieked to the upper floors of the hospital, some choked in little pops that tore at her soul. She collapsed onto a stair, deathly cold through the thin fabric of her dress, and rubbed her hands down her naked legs, shod in strappy little silver slingbacks that looked obscenely out of place on the concrete floor, another sour note in a thankless night.

  Minutes later the door opened. Will stood outlined in its rectangular frame, concern grafted onto his all-American face. Behind him and across the corridor she glimpsed yet another ragtag crew of strangers lined up for Starbucks coffee. The door clanged shut, and he came to sit beside her on the stair, which required her to shuffle toward the railing to make room. He leaned forward, linked his hands, and let them rest between his knees.

  No platitudes or baseless reassurances came out of him, no Are you okay? or Everything will be fine. He said not a word, just sat and studied his fingers. Around them fluorescent lights buzzed. People got into the stairwell floors above, went up or down a level, chatting and laughing, then exiting with a metallic finality. Neither of them moved or spoke. She started to calm down. Somehow Will's stalwartness, his silent comfort was an enormous counterweight to the freakishness of the occasion.

  She stopped crying, and realized that she had crumpled paper napkins in her hand that she could use as makeshift tissues. She flattened one out and blew her nose into it and was about to wipe her cheeks with another when Will took it out of her hand.