“Oh my God, Dan.” For the past twenty minutes. . . had it really only been less than half an hour? Nora had hardly been able to say anything else. “Oh my God.”
“I’m going to kill her.” Dan was pacing the length of the locker-lined doctor’s lounge, his fists clenched and his eyes stony. “I am going to kill her!” There was an edge in his voice that told Nora he wouldn’t hesitate to do it, either, if he could get his hands on Kathleen. “I am going to kill her!”
“I know,” Nora murmured. “Honey, I know.” She hadn’t wanted to tell Dan what had happened in front of Taylor and Zac. She’d pulled him into this little room as soon as he got to the hospital so he could have a few minutes to collect himself after she told him the news.
Dan bit his upper lip. “They haven’t found her?”
Nora shook her head. She rested her forehead on the heel of her hand and squeezed her eyes shut against tears, her dark curls forming a curtain around her face. Dan paused mid-step, watching her struggle against her emotions. He swallowed, sliding into the chair across from her.
“Nor,” he whispered, “is he going to make it?” Dan reached across the table and put his hand on hers, looking deep into her eyes for assurance. “He’s going to be okay, right?”
Nora looked away. Tears slid down her cheeks. They dripped off the end of her chin and formed small puddles on the tabletop. She exhaled slowly. “Dan. . . Dan, I don’t know.”
“My God.” Dan stiffened, his entire body tense. “My God.”
“He has four stab wounds to his stomach,” Nora took a deep breath. “Not to mention a few that are more superficial. . .” The words caught in her throat. “Superficial is a relative term, though. . .”
Dan wanted to stop her. He didn’t know if he wanted to know all of this. Still, he could feel that Nora needed to tell someone this. He didn’t think she’d be able to stop now that she’d started.
“Dan. . . he has these huge slashes across his hands where he was trying to protect himself,” Nora was trying to get the story out, but it became more and more overwhelming with each passing second. “He was trying to get the knife away from her...”
Dan put his arms around Nora. “Honey, you don’t have to tell me all this if you don’t want to. . .”
“He’s in hypovolemic shock, from blood loss,” Nora’s voice was suddenly stronger; she did want to tell this story. She did need to tell it. “His blood level was. . . he lost fifty percent of his total blood volume, Dan. Fifty percent. He was bleeding out everywhere, but he hardly had strong enough blood pressure to. . . to. . .” She swallowed. “Dan, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay there and work on him. I couldn’t do it.” Nora felt herself dissolving; the tears were stronger now. “I thought he was unconscious, I didn’t think he’d hear me say that I was going to leave.” Nora was shaking. “I didn’t think he’d know. . .”
And Isaac probably shouldn’t have known. He felt as if he were receding further and further into the darkness of a big, black tunnel, the round spot of light that was the world outside of him getting smaller and smaller. He could hardly hear individual voices anymore, just the hum of a lot of different people talking, shouting, all at once. “Stay with us!” they’d been ordering him, ever since they’d started working. “Stay with us! Concentrate!”
“I can’t,” Isaac wanted to tell them. “I really can’t.”
“I can’t do this.” Isaac had heard Nora’s voice clearly, maybe because her words were echoing his thoughts. “I’m sorry. I really can’t. . .”
Isaac hadn’t known he was going to sit up until he actually found himself doing it. The rush of adrenalin that gushed through his body provided him with one last burst of energy. A multitude of arms sprang out of nowhere, trying to hold him down, but Isaac struggled against them. He thought Nora was giving up. He thought she didn’t think he was going to make it through this, and wasn’t going to stick around to see. “Don’t!” Isaac begged. “Please? I promise I’ll. . .”
He started coughing. He really couldn’t breathe. “We’re going to intubate you,” someone said. “God, if he tore any tubes out. . .”
“Ike,” Nora said, “Don’t promise anything. Just stay with us, honey. Just focus on that.”
Isaac nodded, unable to resist against the arms that were holding him down any longer. Someone asked him to open his mouth; they were sticking a tube down his throat. Isaac didn’t have the energy to wonder why. He couldn’t stay with anybody anymore. . . he had to let go. . . he felt himself letting go. . . and he did.
Nora had stumbled into the hallway, leaning against the wall in hopes she’d be able to gather herself back together. She still had to call Dan, she had to go talk to Taylor and Zac. She couldn’t let herself think. She just had to act, to occupy her mind. She wanted to pray, but she had too many immediate tasks.
Nora turned the rhythm of her footfalls into a prayer as she walked down the hall. Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee. . . The words melted into Spanish the closer she came to the phone. Dios de salve Maria. . .
She’d talked to Dan for about five seconds. “Honey, get to the hospital. Now.” Dan hadn’t questioned this. He’d run out the door and into the car as soon as he hung up. Nora had taken a moment to finish her prayer before she went to find Taylor and Zac.
They were perched on a gurney in an examining room partition, left unattended by an overworked nurse. “We were supposed to stay here,” Taylor whispered. He was shivering violently, his hands clenched between his knees.
“Didn’t you take a jacket with you?” Nora asked, climbing onto the gurney between the two of them.
“No,” Taylor explained. “I forgot.” His teeth were chattering.
“Oh, honey. . .” Nora put her arm around Taylor and pulled Zac into her lap. “Honey. . .” She froze. Taylor’s fingers were stained with Isaac’s blood, his white t-shirt and jeans smudged with dark handprints. What did she say to two little boys who had just watched their mother stab their brother?
“I just can’t get warm,” Taylor shivered. He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. “It was too cold out there.”
Nora stepped off the gurney and grabbed a blanket off of a supply shelf near by. She wrapped Taylor up in it and turned to unzip Zac’s jacket.
He winced. “Don’t touch me!”
At first, Nora wondered if she might have scared him, then she realized he was hurt. “What’s wrong, baby?”
“My arm,” Zac murmured. He looked away as Nora examined it. “Ow. . .”
Nora swallowed. Her words came out slowly. “It’s dislocated, honey. Did your mommy do that?”
Zac nodded. “Yeah.”
Nora closed her eyes for a second, willing herself not to blurt out what she was thinking about Kathleen at that moment. “Okay. Okay, baby. How long ago did that happen?” Maybe she could just pop it back in, she thought, if the surrounding tissues hadn’t swollen too much already.
“A long time ago,” Zac told her. “Seventy seconds.” His voice was curiously emotionless, as if some mechanical part of him were doing the talking. “Maybe even twenty seconds.”
“Seventy seconds,” Nora repeated. “We need to do an x-ray on it.”
Taylor coughed. His nose was running, he realized, and he didn’t have a tissue. Nora had told him before he should always use a tissue, because tissues were more sanitary than the back of your arm.
“Did anything happen to you?” Nora asked him. She would have to examine both Taylor and Zac, she realized. She’d have to document the bruises, burns and lacerations to use as proof that Kathleen had been abusing all three boys. Proof of abuse, Nora thought, wryly. All the proof she needed was right in front of her. Nora shook her head. She knew what the procedures were and she’d have to follow them.
“He was knocked out,” Zac supplied.
Nora’s mouth dropped open. “You were?”
Taylor sighed. “For a little while. And then I woke up, and Ike hit me again. Just like my mommy did. I don’t know why.”
“Because Mommy was going to stick you with the knife,” Zac said suddenly. “Just like she sticked Ike with it.”
Taylor paused for a moment. “She was?” he quavered.
“I saw it,” Zac said, his voice level. “I was sitting on the bed.” He swallowed. “I only closed my eyes a little bit. . .”
“You saw it?” Nora repeated, in disbelief.
Zac turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t have to,” Nora assured him. Upraised voices, combined with a clattering and banging in the hallway, had caught her attention and she was terrified as to what they might mean. “Hold on for a minute. . .” Nora debated leaving the curtain open as she dashed out into the hallway, but she decided to close it.
Trauma room three was abuzz with doctors, nurses and orderlies. People were running back and forth, functioning within the bubble of organized chaos that Nora had always felt so comfortable in. When a room full of people focused solely on saving one life, an almost magical sense of focus and purpose tended to melt over everyone.
When your best efforts failed, Nora thought, when you had done all you could do and it hadn’t worked, the sense of desolation was paralyzing. Sometimes you’d be too busy to dwell on the death of a patient right after it happened, but the loss would always hit you later, right in the pit of the stomach, when you had to pass by the person’s family members or when you got home that night and saw your own.
Nora had been working in the emergency room for years now, as an intern, as a resident and, for the past year, as a full-fledged, bona fide doctor. As a pediatrician, she’d seen more cases of child abuse than she wanted to think about, more tragic accidents and inexplicably fatal illnesses than she could count anymore. She’d seen a case of a child being stabbed by a parent only once.
The little girl had been rushed in on a gurney, her tiny fingers clenched around those of the paramedic who had taken her from the dirty kitchen floor where her father had attacked her. She was four years old, a delicate, pretty little girl with a headful of dark, curly hair, whimpering in pain from the three stab wounds that sliced across her stomach. She was brave. She was trying to hold on.
Nora couldn’t forget the look in that little girl’s eyes as they struggled to save her. Lily, her name was. They’d been calling it, attempting to keep her conscious. “Lily, Lily, hang on! Stay with us, Lily, stay with us.”
Lily had tried. She hadn’t been able to. Her injuries were too extensive, her blood loss too great. Her chance of survival had been slim to nil ever since she was brought in, but no one had wanted to give up hope, not on such a little girl, not on someone who so obviously wanted to live. A silence settled over the trauma team as the heart monitor registered it’s slow, unbroken beep. “There’s nothing we can do,” someone had whispered. “Time of death?”
“12:27 AM.”
Nora had been an intern then, fresh out of medical school and almost constantly in the hospital, slaving away through brutal hours and exhaustion that was mental, as well as physical. There were days she could scarcely drag herself out of bed and out the door to work. She still had hope though, she still believed that the human spirit could overcome anything. She remembered sinking into a chair outside of the trauma room where Lily had been pronounced dead, unable to keep herself from crying. Why couldn’t the little girl have gotten better? Why wasn’t their justice in the world? How could she face the fact that she lived in on a planet where people did such horrible things to each other? Nora had wandered around in a haze of doubt for weeks. Was this the right decision? Should she have become an ER doctor? It had taken a long time for her to resign herself to Lily’s death, to the hundreds of other senseless deaths Nora came to see. Even now, she was still haunted by faces, by situations, by the thought that if she’d had a chance to do one thing differently a person might be alive today. Nora had become to believe in the human spirit again, though. She’d seen it first hand, indomitable in the face of some of the most tragic experiences human beings could suffer. People were amazing.
Nora couldn’t enter the trauma room. She leaned in the doorway for a minute, watching the hum of activity, assuring herself that Isaac was holding his own. You can make it, Nora thought. Honey, I know you can. She told herself that she was right, not allowing her mind to jump to other conclusions. Nora was about to turn away, unable to watch any longer, when she paused, sucking in her breath
Isaac’s arm had slipped over the edge of the gurney, but his hand wasn’t dangling limply, as Nora would have expected. Isaac was holding his hand steady. It looked as if he were trying to make a fist.
The only thing that was preventing him, Nora thought, was the thick gauze bandage, already saturated with blood, that was wrapped around his palm and over his fingers. Other than that, his actions were deliberate; he knew what he wanted to do and he was trying to do it. Isaac was still coherent enough to react against the pain. He was still in there, and Nora hoped he would be able to keep fighting back.
Nora didn’t let herself stand outside the trauma room too long; she couldn’t bear to watch. She couldn’t bear to admit to herself that this situation was critical; she wanted to open her eyes and wake up. In a daze, Nora went to the front desk and asked a nurse to call radiology to make an x-ray appointment. She’d do her job, focusing on what was in front of her so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed. For Taylor and Zac’s sake, it was important to keep up appearances.
Nora went back to the partition and pulled open the curtain. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry about that. . .”
Nora paused, her eyes widening. “Zac,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, “Where’s Taylor?”
Zac looked up at her, his gaze level, almost surmising. “He left,” he said, so softly it was almost a whisper.
“Oh, shoot,” Nora muttered. “Stay here a second, honey. . . don’t go anywhere.”
Frantically, Nora raced down the corridor. She knew where Taylor had gone, but she didn’t want to think about him being there. Maybe he’s in the bathroom, she told herself. Maybe I’m wrong.
She knew she wasn’t, though.
Taylor, the folds of the blanket trailing behind him, had gone off down the hall in search of his brother. He thought Isaac might be alone, and he wondered if his brother was scared. For some reason Taylor imagined Isaac in a wheelchair, if only because he tended to associate wheelchairs with being unable to walk, and being unable to walk with being sick or hurt. It hadn’t even occurred to Taylor yet that perhaps his brother was so badly injured that he might need more than a few stitches, or maybe a Band-Aid or two.
Or maybe a lot of Band-Aids, Taylor reflected, on second thought. Maybe great big Band-Aids. Maybe a whole box of Band-Aids. Taylor passed the bustling trauma room and stopped to peer inside the door. What was going on in there? Someone must be really hurt.
Taylor paused in front of the clear glass door of the trauma room, unable to pull himself away from the scene unfolding in front of him. That person must really be hurt, he thought. Maybe they were in a car accident.
He watched the doctors and nurses, but was unable to see the person on the gurney from his eye level. This was rather frustrating; Taylor tried standing on tiptoe but it didn’t work at all.
“Taylor!” The next thing he knew, Nora’s arms were around him. She lifted him onto her hip and started down the hall as quickly as she could. Taylor tried to look over her shoulder to get a better view of the trauma room, but Nora wouldn’t let him. “Honey, look at me. Why didn’t you stay with Zac?”
“I was looking for Ike.” Taylor craned his neck and tried to see over Nora’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with that person?”
“Honey. . . we won’t worry about that right now,” Nora told him. “We have to do some tests and things, okay?”
“But I want to know-” Taylor began.
“Baby, we don’t know,” Nora shook her head. She wasn’t quite sure what she meant, exactly. “We really don’t know.”
“We don’t know,” Taylor repeated. “Where’s Ike?”
Nora took a deep breath. She shouldn’t avoid the question, she knew, but she didn’t want to answer it. They were back at the partition; she pulled open the curtain and put Taylor down next to Zac. “Zac, sorry it took so long, honey.”
Zac took his thumb out of his mouth. “S’okay.” He put his thumb back into his mouth and went back to staring vacantly, lost in his own thoughts.
Nora took her penlight out of her pocket. “Taylor, you did black out when you got hit on the head?”
Taylor shrugged. “I think I did. I don’t ‘member anything for awhile.”
Nora nodded, closing her eyes in a silent prayer for all three of them. “Well, me and you are going to play a little game, okay? I want you to follow the light with your eyes. Can you do that for me?”
“I don’t want to play a game,” Taylor said. “I want to find Ike.” He was feeling dizzy again, and he remembered how much he wanted to lie down and close his eyes.
“Taylor,” Nora began, “I really wish. . .”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Zac asked, suddenly. He raised his voice. “Isn’t he?”
Nora shook her head. “No, sweetie. No way.” She climbed back onto the gurney and put her arms around both of them. “The doctors are still. . . are still working on him.”
“What are they doing?” Taylor asked, concerned.
Nora took a deep breath. “They’re trying to stop the bleeding so they can fix what’s wrong inside of him. He’ll have to have surgery for that.”
“What’s sugary?” Zac asked.
“A operation,” Taylor told him.
Nora winced. If Isaac made it that far. He will, she told herself. He will.
“Will it hurt?” Taylor wondered.
Nora nodded. “Yeah, Taylor. It’ll help him, but it will probably hurt, too.”
Taylor let out a long, shaky sigh. “I don’t want him to get hurt.”
“What if they can’t fix it?” Zac asked, suddenly.
“Don’t worry.” Nora bit her lip, hoping she was right. “They will.”
As soon as Dan had arrived, Nora had lost any semblance of confidence, however. She had to tell the truth to someone. The situation was grave, Isaac’s chances of survival slim. She couldn’t pretend everything was going to be fine. She didn’t think that it was.
“My God,” Dan murmured, slamming his fist against the smooth laminate tabletop. It was a gesture of frustration; he wanted to take his rage out on something, but he didn’t know what to do. “My God, Nora.”
Nora shook her head, biting her lip in an attempt to hold back her tears. “I don’t know whether or not he’ll make it,” she whispered. “Dan, how can he?”
Dan took a deep breath. “The only thing I know,” he admitted, “is that he’s managed to survive so far, and if that’s any indication of his will to live, it’s kind of reassuring.”
“That’s true,” Nora agreed. She broke down. “I can’t believe this happened. I should have seen it coming.”
“No one could have,” Dan murmured, gently, but he was thinking the exact same thing. Why couldn’t I have foreseen it? he asked himself. There had to have been some kind of warning sign that this was coming.
But when Dan and Nora found out what that warning sign had been, both of them would wish that they had never known.