Luanne Rice (12 page)

“Jesus,
Liam,” she said. “I’ve got to go!”

“I know,
Lily,” he said, climbing into the car, reaching across his body to close the
door behind him with his good arm. Now he turned the key, starting the car.

“
You’re
taking me to the car place?” she
asked, not understanding.

“To the
hospital,” he said.

“But it’s
in Melbourne,” she said, still not getting it, still envisioning the time it
would take to rent a car, wondering why Liam didn’t understand that she had one
more step in the process of driving south to Rose.

“I know.”

“Liam—”

“The
commander is a friend of mine,” Liam said. “This is his personal car—he’s
loaning it to us so I can drive you to the hospital.”

Lily was
too numb to argue, but it did begin to sink in as he pulled out onto the
lighthouse road, accelerated as soon as he could,
sped
to the main highway that led south to Melbourne. The car was sporty, with
four-wheel drive and roof racks, and the back seat was filled with buoys, nylon
line encrusted with dried seaweed and mussel colonies, and an enormous
flashlight.

“What will
the commander do without his car?” Lily asked.

“He said
he’ll use the truck.”

“Why are
you doing this?” Lily asked.

“Because you need to get to Melbourne.”

“I know,
but I could have driven myself.”

“You need
to get to Melbourne fast. And honestly—I wasn’t sure you were in any shape to
drive.”

“It’s not
your responsibility,” Lily said.

Liam was
quiet, pushing the pedal down. She cringed, hoping that she hadn’t just sounded
as ungrateful as she felt. Miles sped by—roadway lined with pines and oaks on
one side, open water on the other. Even from shore, whale spouts were visible
in the bay. Lily thought of Rose’s face, the look in her green eyes when she
had first spotted Nanny. Lily squeezed her eyes shut to preserve the moment of
amazement.

When she
opened them again, she glanced across the seat at Liam.

“I’m
sorry,” she said.

“You’re
forgiven,” he said. He looked intent on the road, as if he barely cared about
conversation at all. His eyes were totally focused, dark gray-blue. Patches of
sunlight came through boughs overhanging the
road,
flashes of light making his eyes look bright, then dark, then bright again.

“Seriously,”
she said. “I was wrong to say it. I didn’t mean to be mean.”

“Haven’t we
been down this road before?” he asked.

She knew he
didn’t mean the highway.

“Yes,” she
said. “And I’ve been sorry ever since.”

He threw
her a look across the seat.

“Not for
the reasons you think,” she said. “But because I don’t like to be beholden to
you. Or anyone.”

“You’re not
beholden to me,” he said.
“In any way.”

Lily stared
out at the bay as they flew down the coast road. She knew he was telling her
the truth. He had never expected anything from her—never, not once. But after
what Lily had been through, before Rose was born, before arriving in Cape Hawk,
she had lost the power to trust. She had once believed that people were good at
heart, that
they meant to help each other. That was
how she had been raised.

But by the
time she arrived in Cape Hawk, those beliefs had been shattered. It was Liam’s
misfortune, she thought, that he had been one of the first people she’d
encountered after arriving in the small fishing village at the back-of-beyond
on Nova Scotia’s northernmost coastline.

She closed
her eyes, went inward, back nine years. So pregnant she could hardly move. Just
out to
there
—in a new place, in a
house she was sure she couldn’t afford, with a rattletrap car that needed a
tune-up and four new tires after her long drive north, with not even enough
money for an oil change. As she sat beside Liam in the commander’s car now, she
let her hands drift to her belly. She could remember carrying Rose as if it
were yesterday.

“There’s
another reason, okay?” she asked, opening her eyes to look at him.

“Another reason for what?”

“That I’ve
felt sorry ever since.” She stopped herself, to think of how to phrase it.
“Ever since we first met, and you did what you did.”

“And why
would that be?
You feeling
sorry?”

“It’s just
that I don’t …” she said, no longer looking at him, but out the window
instead—at the wide expanse of blue ocean, and the wheeling and circling white
seabirds, and the occasional ripple that might or might not be the back of a
whale. “I don’t treat you very well. Not well enough, anyway.”

“You treat
me fine,” he said.

“No,” she
said. “I know I don’t.”

They rode
in silence for a few minutes. She was glad that he didn’t try to contradict
her. One thing she could count on about Liam was that he was very true to
situations. He didn’t sugarcoat things. He wouldn’t try to make her feel better
about something if it meant telling her a lie.

She glanced
over at him. Why was she so tongue-tied today? What she wanted to say was,
I might treat you “fine,” but it’s not what
you deserve. You’ve been nothing but wonderful since the day you met me, met
us. Rose loves you
. She couldn’t, and wouldn’t, say such things.

So instead,
she said, “Thanks for driving me, Liam.”

And he
didn’t reply, but she saw him smile.

As he drove ever faster.

Chapter 11

T
he old brick hospital was on the crest of a hill
overlooking Melbourne Harbor. The World War I memorial rose beside it, a single
block of granite, quarried from Queensport. Liam and his brother had both been
born here; so had most of their cousins. Liam remembered coming here to pick up
Connor when he was three days old, the day they brought him home.

While waiting for his mother and the baby to be ready, his father had taken
him to the reflecting pool, under the tall monument, and told him that his
great-grandfather had fought in World War I. Liam still remembered holding his
father’s hand, listening to the story.
His
great-grandfather had been badly wounded in battle, and seen many soldiers
killed.

The idea of
his great-grandfather being so injured in a war made the three-year-old Liam
cry—
in spite of the happy fact that he had a new brother and
his mother was coming home.

“Some
things are worth fighting for,” his father had told him, picking him up.

Liam
remembered that now, parking the car and walking with Lily into the building.
He had been here for many other reasons over the years. The first surgery on
his arm had been done here; this was where they had brought Connor’s body. He
had also been here to visit Rose more than once. Both he and Lily were old
hands at Melbourne General, so they bypassed the front desk and went straight
up to the third-floor Pediatric ICU.

Lily seemed
to be tightly wound, in control. He watched as she pushed the elevator
button—purposeful yet calm. Doctors and visitors came on, pushing Lily and Liam
to the back. She was just about five foot one.
Maybe five one
and a half in her sneakers.
She wore jeans, a yellow T-shirt, and a dark
blue Cape Hawk Elementary sweatshirt that zipped up the front and had a hood in
back. Liam towered over her. He tried not to look down at her silky dark hair.

When the
doors opened, she jostled through the crowd, with Liam right behind her. He
registered people on the elevator looking at them with pity—getting off at
Pediatric ICU. Lily didn’t even notice. She went straight to the speaker box,
mounted on the wall beside the locked ICU doors, and announced herself.

“I’m here
to see my daughter, Rose Malone,” she said.

“Someone
will be right out to get you,” the disembodied voice crackled.

The waiting
room had one single window, facing the monument and reflecting pool. Several
green chairs facing a television set, tuned to a talk show. Whatever was
happening must have been hilarious, because the laugh track was deafening. Liam
turned it down.

Lily
remained standing right in front of the ICU doors, waiting for them to swing
open.

“Why don’t
you sit down?” he asked.

“That’s
okay,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Do you think she’s up here yet? I
just realized
,
they probably brought her in through
the ER. Maybe we should have stopped there first.”

“The nurse
probably would have told you when you buzzed just now,” Liam said. She was
still looking at him—hadn’t turned back to the door yet. Her eyes were
somewhere between gray-green and gray-blue. Their color made him think of the
great blue heron that lived in his pond. He watched the bird every morning,
from the minute the sun rose. Lily’s eyes were as still and grave and calm as
the blue heron, and as beautiful, and he tried to smile with confident
reassurance because they also looked so worried.

“You don’t
have to wait,” she said. “I mean, I know you want to make sure she’s okay.
But after that.
You have to get the commander’s car back to
him.”

“I know,”
he said. “I do. But I’ll wait for now. Just to see how she is.”

“Okay.
Right,” Lily said. “Why aren’t they coming to the door?”

“It’s just
been a minute.”

“A minute’s
too long!”

It was the
first sign that she wasn’t as calm as she looked. Her voice rose, and she
grimaced.

Liam went
to the wall and pressed the buzzer.

“Yes?” came
the voice.

“We’re here
to see Rose Malone.”

“Yes, I
know. Someone will be right—”

“Look,” he
said, using his shark researcher voice, the one that scared people, the one he
used to get classified data out of Ottawa and Washington, and to get Harvard
and Woods Hole to give him access to their mainframes. “We need someone right
now. Rose’s mother is out here, and Rose was airlifted out of her ninth
birthday party, and her mother needs to see her
now
—okay?”

When he
turned to Lily, he saw her chin wobbling, and her blue-heron eyes were creased
with even more worry, and he just stood there instead of pulling her against
his chest, the way he wanted to.

“They’re
coming,” he said.

“Thank
you.”

Two seconds
later the door opened. A tall, young nurse stood there with a clipboard. She
smiled gently, as if completely unperturbed by Liam’s shark voice.

“Mrs.
Malone?” she asked.

“I have to
see Rose,” Lily said.

“Come with
me,” the nurse said.

Lily rushed
past her, through the doors, which closed behind them. Liam stood in the green
waiting room, his heart in his throat. He hadn’t actually expected to go
inside. That’s what he told himself.

He went to
stand by the window, gazing out at the monument. It was tall and narrow,
elliptical, carved with deep grooves and topped with a peak. When he was three,
it had seemed massive and austere. It still did.
A monument
to those who had served and those who had died.
He could almost see
himself and his father standing in its shadow; he could almost feel his
three-year-old sorrow, for a great-grandfather he’d never known.

Two doctors
stepped out of the elevator, both wearing white coats over green scrubs. They
pressed the buzzer and were admitted to the ICU. Liam’s stomach flipped,
wondering whether they were here to see Rose, to talk to Lily.

When he
turned back to the window, he noticed leaves on the trees, a bed of marigolds
planted at the base of the monument. It was summertime. The monument’s shadow
was lengthening, like the day. He checked his watch—it was already seven
o’clock—and as he did, he remembered another part of his great-grandfather’s
story, the part that involved the family left at home.
The
part about them waiting, about his great-grandmother not knowing whether he
would ever come home again.

He thought
of Lily inside the Pediatric ICU, waiting to learn what would come next for
Rose. Sometimes waiting was the hardest thing of all.

The nurse,
whose name was Bonnie McBeth, led Lily through the unit. There were infants and
children hooked up to all kinds of machines, but Lily had eyes for no one but
the girl in the second bed on the left: Rose.

The sight
of her caught Lily’s heart like a fishhook. Before she even saw her face, she
knew it was Rose in that bed: the size of her body under the white honeycomb
blanket, the funny way she always liked to hold on to the guardrail with her
right hand. There were her small fingers now, holding the stainless steel rail.
Lily came around the curtain and held that hand and leaned down to kiss Rose’s
face.

“Mommy,”
Rose said.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

Her green
eyes looked sharp at first as they looked Lily up and down, drinking her in,
making sure she was really there. But then the lids flickered, up-down, and her
eyes rolled back, and then focused again, and then closed. Lily knew then they
were giving her morphine. She held Rose’s hand a little tighter.

The
machines clicked reassuringly. The IV was set. Lily examined Rose’s arm, to
make sure they hadn’t bruised her inserting the needle. Her veins were
sometimes thin and brittle, but since it had been a long time since her last
IV, they were quite healthy. There were no bruises, no signs of false
insertions. Lily had once gone nuts, truly insane, watching an IV technician
stick
Rose four times in a row without getting a vein.

While Rose
slept and Lily held her hand, Bonnie McBeth stood close by. Lily glanced over
at her. She had seen Bonnie on other visits, but she’d never been Rose’s nurse
before. Rose’s main cardiologist was in Boston, so Melbourne was really only
for emergencies—which, thankfully, Rose hadn’t had many of recently.

“She’s
resting comfortably,” Bonnie said in a low voice. “We gave her morphine to keep
her calm. She was very agitated when she first arrived.”

“Thank
you,” Lily said. “She had to fly by helicopter.”

“That would
agitate anyone,” Bonnie said, smiling.

Lily
nodded, still holding Rose’s hand.

“Would you
like to step over here, to the desk, where we can talk? I know she seems to be
asleep, but …”

Lily
hesitated. She didn’t want to let go of Rose’s hand. In fact, she couldn’t.
“It’s okay,” Lily said, but she was nearly whispering. “Rose is the captain of
her own ship. She knows what’s going on. You can tell me here.”

Bonnie
didn’t really seem surprised. Mothers of cardiac peds patients were a tough
bunch—but only half as tough as the patients themselves. Still, she pivoted
away, and so did Lily, still holding Rose’s hand.

“There’s a
note in her
chart, that
she’s going to Boston for VSD
surgery.”

“Yes, she’s
scheduled for next week. The old patch is weakening.”

“It is. We
ran tests as soon as she arrived, of course. Her heart is enlarged, and her
lungs are under pressure, which is why she’s been cyanotic. She was able to
tell us she’s had some blue spells lately, and this is why.”

Just then,
two doctors walked over to say hello. Paul Colvin, whom Lily knew, and John
Cyr, whom she didn’t, explained that they were just doing rounds, and would
Lily mind stepping outside the curtain.

“I’d like
to stay,” Lily said.

“I appreciate
that,” said Paul Colvin, the older doctor, a cardiac surgeon who had built a
very respectable department here at Melbourne. “But we really need to ask you
to step aside.
Just for a few minutes.”
With silver
hair and a steady stare, he might have intimidated a different mother. Lily
shook her head, unable to let go of Rose’s hand.

“Please,
Doctor,” she said. She didn’t want to fight, and she didn’t have to. He had
encountered Lily before; he knew what he was up against, and let her stay.

The doctors
listened with stethoscopes, checked machines, read the chart. Lily was glad it
was just the two of them, and that Melbourne wasn’t a teaching hospital. She
thought back to when Rose was ten months old and they were in the Boston
hospital, waiting for decisions to be made about surgery. Students were
constantly stopping by to examine her—prodding and poking her, listening to her
heart, surrounding her in their green scrubs—making her cry.
Which
made her turn blue.

It didn’t
take long for Lily—inexperienced though she was in the ways of hospital
procedure—to complain to the cardiologist and put a stop to the student visits.
She had learned right at the beginning how to be a mama bear, and she’d only
gotten fiercer over the years.

Now,
holding Rose’s hand, she watched her daughter wake up, gaze at the two doctors
working on her, and then
look
over at Lily for
support. Lily squeezed her hand. Rose pressed back.

They were
getting their fill of each other.
The simple things.
Just knowing the other was there; holding hands; smiling at each other; Rose
drifting off, then waking up to see her mom at her side; Lily brushing her hair
off her forehead. Soon it would be time for sleep, and Lily planned to sit in a
chair beside Rose’s bed.

When the
doctors were done, Bonnie returned to Rose’s bedside. She had the tray of
medications, ready to administer. Lily felt better about leaving Rose for one
minute with Bonnie than with the two doctors. While Bonnie measured out
dosages, Lily walked to the desk with Drs. Colvin and Cyr.