by Ben Bova
Beacon Hill
LUKE SAT ALONE in the living room of his darkened top-floor apartment. Through the uncurtained window he could see the gold dome of the state capitol shining in the moonlight. He swished a tumbler of Bushmills whiskey in one hand, wondering what to do now. Maybe I should turn in my resignation after all, he thought. What the hell good am I doing anybody?
No, he told himself. I won’t give those pinheads the satisfaction. Let them carry me out feet first.
He realized that the big recliner he was sitting on had become shabby over the years. The sofa, too. All the furniture. The place needed a paint job. It had needed one for years. The only new thing in the apartment was the flat-screen television that Lenore and Del had given him last Christmas, sitting there on the lowboy, dark, dead.
So many memories. Lenore had been born in the bedroom, down the hall, four weeks premature. His wife had died in the same bed. Luke had closed her eyes. He had wanted to die himself, but then Lenore gave birth to Angie, and the gurgling, giggling little baby had captured Luke’s heart.
And now she’s dying. And those freaking idiots won’t let me even try to help her.
Well, screw them! Each and every one of them. I’ll save Angie. I will. I’ll save her or die trying.
The phone rang.
He glared at it, a flare of anger at the intrusion. Then he realized he was being stupid and picked up the handpiece before the automatic answering machine kicked in.
“Dad?” Lenore’s voice.
“Hello, Norrie.”
“Aren’t you coming over? It’s almost eight o’clock.”
Luke remembered he had agreed to have dinner with his daughter and her husband.
“I’m not very hungry, Norrie.”
“You shouldn’t be sitting all alone. Come on over. I made lasagna.”
He grinned despite himself. He heard her mother’s tone in his daughter’s voice: part insistent, part enticing.
“Del can drive over and pick you up,” Lenore added.
He bowed to the inevitable. “No, that’s okay. I’ll come. Give me a few minutes.”
Del and Lenore lived in Arlington, across the Charles River from Boston, in a big Dutch colonial house on a quiet street that ended at a two-mile-wide pond. The trip from Beacon Hill took Luke less than twenty minutes; during peak traffic hours it could take at least twice that.
Del opened the door for him and tried to smile. “We heard the committee turned you down.”
They didn’t get a chance to, Luke said to himself. I walked out on the stupid brain-dead morons.
As he took off his overcoat Lenore called from the kitchen, “Lasagna’s on the way!”
The two men sat at the dining table as Lenore toted in a steaming tray. Del poured red wine into Luke’s glass, then filled his own. Lenore sat down with nothing but water at her place.
“How’s Angie?” Luke asked.
Lenore’s dark eyes widened slightly. “She was sleeping when we left her.”
“Dr. Minteer says she’ll sleep more and more,” Del added.
“Yeah,” said Luke.
“We had a meeting with the grief counselor from Hospice,” said Lenore. “She’s very sweet.”
Luke could see that his daughter was straining to hold herself together, to keep from blubbering. Grief counselor, Luke thought. Fat lot of help a grief counselor can be. He remembered when his wife died and they sent a minister, then a grief counselor, and finally a psychologist to him. Can you bring her back to life? Luke demanded of each of them. Finally they left him alone.
“Dr. Schiavo—he’s the head of the oncology department—he wants to try nanotherapy,” Lenore said, her voice flat, empty.
“It’s a new technique,” said Del. “Experimental.”
Luke said, “Now that they’ve given up on Angie, they want to try their pet experimental ideas on her. Get another datum point for their charts. But not my idea. I’m not part of their team, their clique. I’m off their charts.” He gritted his teeth with anger.
“Isn’t that what you want to do?” Del challenged.
“No! I want to save her.”
“We told Schiavo no,” Del said. “Let her be.”
“She’s resting comfortably,” said Lenore, almost in a whisper.
Luke stared at the lasagna on his plate. He couldn’t touch it.
“She’s not in any pain,” Lenore went on. Like her father, she hadn’t even picked up her fork.
“We’re the ones in pain,” Luke muttered.
Lenore burst into tears and pushed her chair back from the table. Before Luke could say anything she got to her feet and ran out of the dining room.
“Why’d you have to say that?” Del snarled. “Can’t you see she’s holding herself together by a thread?”
Luke didn’t answer him. He got up and went after his daughter.
Lenore was sitting on the living room sofa, next to the end table that held Angela’s kindergarten graduation photo, racked with sobs, bent over, her forehead almost touching her knees. Luke sat beside her and wrapped an arm around her quaking shoulders.
“Norrie, it’s going to be all right,” he crooned to her. “I’ll fix everything. I’ll make her all better.”
“That’s a helluva thing to tell her.” Del stood in the doorway, fury radiating from his tall, broad-shouldered form.
“I can do it,” Luke insisted.
“The hell you can! The committee turned you down flat. You can’t do a thing for Angie.”
“The committee’s a collection of assholes.”
“But without their approval you can’t do a damned thing,” Del repeated, advancing into the room and standing over Luke.
Luke rose to his feet. “I know what I’m doing. I can save her.”
“Don’t!” Lenore screamed. “Don’t say it! Don’t even think it! Angie’s going to die. She’s going to die.”
Luke stared down at his daughter’s tear-streaked face. “Norrie, don’t you believe me? Don’t you believe I can save her?”
Lenore took a deep, shuddering breath before replying. “Dad, I know you want to help. You believe you can. But everybody else says you can’t. Even if they gave you permission to try, it’d never work. Angie’s going to die, and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it.”
Luke felt shocked. Norrie doesn’t believe in me? My own daughter doesn’t trust me?
Without another word, he got up and brushed past Del, went out to the front hall, and pulled his overcoat out of the closet.
Del came up behind him, still obviously simmering with anger. “Luke, I don’t want you telling Lenore any more of this crap about saving Angie. It’s tough enough for her without you telling her fairy tales.”
Luke looked up at his son-in-law’s grim face. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t bother either of you again.”
University Hospital
EITHER THIS WORKS or I end up in jail, Luke said to himself as he strode through the front entrance of the hospital. It was eight A.M., the hour when the administrative offices officially opened for business.
The door to the admitting office was open, but no one was at the counter. The desks beyond the counter were unoccupied, the computer screens dark. Luke could smell coffee brewing and heard voices chatting through the open door to the back room. Frowning, he hollered, “Is anybody here?”
He had spent the past two weeks preparing for this move. He had gutted his bank account and used part of the cash to buy a used Ford Expedition SUV, blood red. Then, in the garage beneath his Beacon Hill apartment building, he had done his best to turn the van into a makeshift ambulance.
Stocking the vehicle with the equipment and medications Angie would need wasn’t easy, but the grad students who staffed his lab were willing labor. He answered their questions with gruff half-truths.
Now came the big hurdle: springing Angie out of the hospital. I signed her in, he told himself, I ought to be able to sign her out. He hoped.
At last one of the administrative staff came into the room in answer to his call. She looked nettled to see someone there so early in the morning.
“Can I help you?” she asked, unsmiling. She was a Latina, considerably overweight, her skin the color of milk chocolate.
Three hours later, Luke realized that these paper shufflers would have allowed Godzilla to check out a patient, as long as he could fill in all the forms. They didn’t recognize Luke; they hardly looked at him. All they wanted was for him to check each and every box on the stack of papers they handed him. Consent forms. Discharge forms. Insurance forms. Lots of insurance forms.
Doesn’t matter to them who’s doing what to whom, Luke told himself as he waded through the paperwork. As long as all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed, their asses are covered.
Halfway through the papers his bladder started sending distress calls. The joys of an enlarged prostate, Luke grumbled to himself as he got up and headed for the men’s room. He urinated, washed his hands, then returned to the administrative office and sat down to finish the seemingly endless forms.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?”
Startled, Luke looked up from the papers and saw Tamara Minteer standing over him, fists on white-coated hips, her expression halfway between suspicion and anger.
Damn! he thought. I should have known these bureaucrats would contact the attending physician.
“I’m taking my granddaughter to a different facility,” he half-lied.
“You can’t do that.”
Luke saw that several of the administrators on the other side of the counter were staring at them. He pushed the papers aside and got to his feet. In a lowered voice he insisted, “I got Angie admitted to this hospital. I can get her discharged.”
“Her parents—”
He smiled grimly and pawed through the pile of papers until he found the form he wanted. “They waived their consent when we got Angie admitted. It’s all here.” He held the form under her nose.
“You can’t take her out of this hospital!” Minteer hissed. “I won’t allow it.”
Don’t get angry at her, Luke commanded himself. She’s trying to do what she thinks is best for Angie.
He grasped her elbow and said, “Let’s go down to the cafeteria and talk this over.”
Minteer looked uncertain for a moment, then nodded minimally.
Luke carried the papers back to the counter. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he told the Hispanic woman. “Would you hold these for me, please?”
The woman took the papers, the expression on her face sullen, wary.
Luke and Dr. Minteer threaded through the busy hospital corridors until they reached the cafeteria. It was crowded with doctors, nurses, visitors, relatives of patients, office workers, all grabbing coffee, sticky buns, scrambled eggs, fruit juices. Not much noise, just the buzz of low voices and the clink of flatware on dishes.
He led her to a table as far from the serving counters as possible and sat wearily, his back to the wall.
“Where do you want to take her?” Minteer demanded, sitting across the table from him.
Luke hunched forward, kept his voice down. “To a facility where she can get the treatment she needs.”
“Your telomerase inhibitors?”
“That’s right. I’m going to kill her cancer.”
“You’re going to kill her!”
“So what do you want to do? Hand her over to Hospice and watch her die?”
Minteer hesitated.
“Do you have anything better to offer?” Luke pressed. “I can save her. I know I can!” Before the doctor could reply he added, “And even if I’m wrong, what difference does it make? You’ve given up on her. You and the whole goddamned establishment.”
She slowly shook her head. “Professor, you can’t just wheel a patient out of this hospital because you want to experiment on her.”
“I want to save her!” he growled. “She’s my granddaughter, for God’s sake!”
“You can’t get her discharged without the attending physician’s approval.”
“Which is you.”
“Which is me.”
“Then you’ll have to sign off on it.”
Minteer stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then she asked, “Where is this facility you want to take her to?”
“Oregon.”
“Oregon? That’s completely across the country!”
He nodded. “There are several places along the way we can stop off, check her condition, renew her meds.”
“Several…” She blinked with confusion. “You’re not flying? You’re going to drive all the way out to Oregon?”
“That’s right.”
“But why drive? Why not fly?”
Now Luke hesitated. Hell, he thought, might as well tell her.
“Because,” he said, “once my daughter and her husband find out I’ve taken her, they’re going to go apeshit. They’ll call the cops, the FBI, God knows who else.”
“They don’t know you’re doing this?” Minteer’s voice rose a register and a half.
“No, they don’t,” he admitted.
“Then I’m not signing anything!”
“You’ve got to!”
Dr. Minteer shook her head stubbornly.
“If you don’t help me,” Luke growled, “you’ll be killing my granddaughter.”
Tamara Minteer
SHE WAS BORN on a small farm near Blue Hill, Maine, not far from Bar Harbor. The family, of French Canadian ancestry, had been there since the American Revolution. Her father was an electrician who sometimes worked in the boatyards of nearby Southwest Harbor. He was a doggedly stubborn man, a hard worker who tolerated no laziness in his children, stern and gruff. Yet he slipped quarters under their pillows while they slept and told them that the Tooth Fairy had done it.
Her mother raised their nine children, tended the family’s little vegetable garden, milked their cows, and occasionally took in laundry. Always smiling, she taught her children the songs of her own childhood.
Tamara was a bright and independent child, the next-to-last daughter in the family. She grew up strong and tall and healthy, and won a partial scholarship to the state university. She worked part-time during the school semesters, full-time during summers, and went on to medical school. Since childhood the only profession she had ever wanted was to be a physician.
It was in medical school that she fell hopelessly in love with a charming young scoundrel who had too much family money and too little sense of responsibility. He took her heart and, soon after, her virginity. Despite her mother’s warnings and her father’s misgivings, she married the young man. Tamara saw the good hidden beneath his lazy, self-centered ways, and knew that she could transform him into a wonderful, heroic healer.
She couldn’t. Love turned to bitterness. They quarreled. They fought. She couldn’t divorce him; that was unthinkable in her family. One day he sailed off alone into the calm and bright Atlantic and never returned. No word of him. Searches by the Coast Guard found nothing, not even his boat.
Tamara threw herself into her studies, feeling guilty to be free of him, wondering if he was alive or dead.
She went into oncology, determined to help cancer patients to combat their dread disease. Over the years, she learned that most of her patients died. The best that she could do was give them a few extra years. Death was her implacable enemy, and death almost always won.
She didn’t become bitter. But neither did she become resigned to watching her patients wither and fail. She held on to her faith and kept herself on the cutting edge of new therapies, new concepts, new hope.
Angela Villanueva was an especially trying case. Eight years old. Glioblastoma multiforme. A death sentence for the little girl, despite every technique of modern medicine.
Then the child’s grandfather insisted that he could cure her, with a treatment never tried on human beings. It was impossible, Tamara knew. The hospit
al’s board refused even to consider it. The FDA and other government agencies would not countenance it.
But Professor Lucas Abramson pointed his finger at Tamara and told her that unless she helped him, little Angela would die. In his stubborn black-or-white ways, he reminded her faintly of her father.
“There’s no maybes about right and wrong,” her father had often told her. “There’s right and there’s wrong. One or the other.”
One or the other. Abramson insisted that if she didn’t help him to treat Angela, she would be killing the child.
No maybes.
Decisions
LUKE STARED AT Tamara Minteer, her high-cheekboned face set in a rock-hard expression of obstinate refusal, her green eyes locked on his own.
“If you don’t sign the release forms,” he said, very softly, “you’ll be killing Angie. Not the hospital. Not the system. You.”
Minteer’s eyes wavered.
“I’m the only chance the kid has,” Luke went on. “You know that. Even if I’m completely wrong, I’m the only chance she has.”
Clasping her hands together on the tabletop, leaning closer to Luke, she said, “Professor, you can’t take a sick child across the country without a physician to attend to her. That’d be murdering her right then and there.”
Before he realized what he was saying, Luke shot back, “Then you come with us.”
“Me?”
“You’re her attending physician. You come along with us.”
“I can’t!”
“You mean you won’t.”
She looked torn. “I can’t just take a week or more off from my job. It’s just not possible.”
Luke reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “All you have to do is call your department chief and tell him you have an emergency on your hands and you’ll be gone for a while—a few weeks, at the most. He’ll find somebody to fill in for you.”
“She.”
“What?”
“My department head is a woman: Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”
Luke said, “I don’t know her.”
“She’s not a bad sort.”
He nudged the phone to her side of the table. “Call her.”
