“He’s done that before. Why do you think that means he might operate?”
“Because I peeked in on him a few minutes ago, when he hadn’t made a noise in an hour. And…” Janet said in a whisper, “he was praying.”
Stafford, the young surgeon Jones helped worked his way through his own operating room crisis, had not believed it when Jones first told him that morning, but the look in his eyes had removed all his doubts. Stafford was still thinking about that look when a nurse moved up to him in the hallway and asked, “Is it true?”
“He’s gonna do it,” Stafford confirmed.
Merrill, the anesthesiologist, had just seen the operating schedule; he came around the corner, spotted Stafford and the nurse, moved up to them and said, “I don’t believe it.”
“I’m assisting. So are you,” Stafford told him.
Then another surgical resident hurried up to them. “Did you guys hear Jones is going to operate?”
Sam sat quietly as the surgical prep assistant ran an electric clipper from the nape of his neck all the way to his front hairline. His old friend Allen sat beside Sam and watched the process with particular interest. Allen squinted at Sam’s shiny dome and said, “You look kindly like one of them fellers goin’ to the ’lectric chair.” Sam tried to smile.
Jones walked in, and Sam looked up. “Why do they have to shave my head for an operation on my neck?”
Jones sat down on the side of the bed. “Remember I told you about the possibility of a clot kicking loose and lodging in your brain? We have to be ready to take the clot out.”
“I’ll be ready,” Sam said. “How about you?”
The surgical assistants had laid the instruments out with great care, but the lead surgical nurse checked them twice, and then Stafford checked them, before Jones entered and checked them all again. Then they wheeled Sam in for the surgery.
Jones—gowned, capped, and masked—appeared to Stafford more focused than ever as he checked all the connectors of the monitoring equipment, then glanced around at his whole team. The nurses adjusted the surgical draping, leaving the left side of Sam’s neck exposed. The rest of his body, except for his head, was covered. The anesthesiologist had given Sam a Valium an hour ago to be sure he was calm; Sam had already fallen asleep when they connected the IV drip to his arm and began to administer the fluids that would keep him sedated through the whole procedure. The anesthesia medications were toxins that temporarily poisoned the body into paralysis, but they would keep him still enough for the surgery; when he came around in the recovery room he would be nauseous for a while but he would remember nothing, and blood would be flowing easily to his brain. At least that was the plan.
Jones moved closer to Sam’s side and then noticed that the seats above them in the observation booth were full of his surgical students.
“Want me to get rid of them?” the head nurse asked.
“Not now,” Jones said through his mask. “Let ’em stay.”
He lifted the scalpel over the artery in Sam’s throat. He paused.
The other doctors saw him hesitate, and they willed him on.
Jones took a deep breath and slid the blade into Sam’s living tissue.
He was not surprised when the sensations first hit him; in fact it was exactly as he expected it would be, an impact in his memory as sudden and shattering as the jolt of the truck against the car on the night Faith died. What Jones had been unable to prepare himself for was the sickness in his gut, the rising impulse to vomit.
He fought to keep his mind on what he was doing, on the sights and sounds and smells directly in front of him now, especially on the feeling in his hands; that was what he most feared losing, the Touch. But it was still there. He felt himself moving fluidly, gaining momentum.
Then as he lifted another instrument and reached again to thread instruments into Sam’s carotid artery, another memory ripped through him. He felt the cold pavement under his body and the hot blood running down his face and heard voices shouting everywhere, “Get a doctor! Get a doctor!”
He almost screamed aloud, there in the operating room, “I’m a doctor!” And he fought the memories off, his hands staying steady, and in a firm voice he asked for tools one by one: “Probe… forceps… scissors…”
He worked steadily, his hands sure.
“Doing great,” Stafford said beside him, sounding remarkably like Jones had sounded when Stafford needed steadying.
Then suddenly the monitors begin to ping. “His heart rate’s dropping,” Merrill, the anesthesiologist, said. “Blood pressure’s in trouble.” He rechecked his monitors and his voice took on an anxious edge, behind his mask. “He’s having a heart attack. Get the paddles ready!”
Jones sped up, his movements doubling in speed. In the gallery above him, one of the surgical students leaned to another and whispered, “His hands are awesome.”
The monitors were flatlining. The anesthesiologist and the head nurse readied the paddles to slam Sam’s heart with the voltage that would reset his heart’s electrical patterns and get it beating again.
“Done!” Jones shouted. “He’s closed!”
“Clear!” the anesthesiologist called, and they shot voltage through Sam’s chest.
But the monitors stayed flat.
“Again!” Jones ordered.
“Clear!” They jolted Sam again.
“Got a pulse!” the anesthesiologist said. Then he looked toward the brain activity monitor.
There was no activity at all.
Jones didn’t need to look at the monitor. He already knew.
The hospital seemed empty; it was quiet, so they say, as a morgue.
Jones sat outside the Critical Care Unit. He looked up as Stafford, on Angel of Death duty, stepped out into the hallway and moved up to him, with the decisive strides that Jones had taught him to take. “Dr. Jones,” Stafford said, “we’re… at a crossroads here. We—”
Jones looked up and nodded.
Stafford sat down next to him and said, “It had nothing to do with the operation. You worked faster and better than anyone any of us has ever seen. It just…”
But there was nothing left to say.
18
Malcolm drove a Mercedes, the largest sedan they made. But it was six years old. Malcolm liked grandeur, but he was frugal too—at least that was how he saw himself. But most of all he liked the daughter of his best friend; he thought of Lara as the daughter he’d never had. He steered the car into the circle in front of the mansion, stepped out, and walked in the front door as if he owned the place. In a way he did; he had convinced Lara’s father to buy it, after he’d found it for him. Lara’s father was as driven a workaholic as she would become, and Malcolm had hoped a beautiful home outside the city would draw both of them into a life beyond work. Malcolm knew even then that he was wrong, but still he hoped.
Mrs. Beasely, the housekeeper, heard him come in and moved out into the foyer to meet him. “Where is she?” Malcolm asked quietly.
Mrs. Beasely turned her sad eyes to the dining room windows and the barn visible through them.
Lara sat in the loft, staring out the hay door toward the horizon. She heard Malcolm climbing up to join her and knew who it was without turning around. “I know you’re not sleeping, but are you eating?” he said to her back.
Lara still stared away from him and said nothing.
“We’re going out to the other surgeons again. We’re going to find somebody who can do this,” Malcolm insisted, as he had insisted so many times before, to Lara and to her father before her.