The biggest, gnarliest guy responded quickly because he was, in fact, a surgical assistant. He handed Jones the scissors from his medical bag—the one he always brought to the games because stitches on the field were as regular as cold beer afterwards—and Jones clipped the stitches and was returning the tools to his medical bag when he saw his cell phone flashing as he had programmed it to do when the hospital called him in an emergency.
Still in his muddy uniform, Jones walked into the hospital and called to Nancy, the Emergency Room nurse, “What’s up?”
“We’ve got a newborn who’s not breathing right, and the new resident in the ER doesn’t have any pediatric experience.”
With the hurried focus of emergency, Jones washed his hands as she slipped a hospital gown over his rugby clothes. Nancy was forty-five and had raised two daughters alone and was now raising two grandsons because one of her daughters was in rehab; Nancy was a natural caregiver but was also so tough that the joke around the Emergency Room was that if Hitler had had Nancy we’d all be speaking German. When Jones had started doing shifts in the ER as a resident eight years ago, she had treated him in the same way a general might treat a private, as if he knew absolutely nothing. Sometimes she still treated him that way. But when Nancy was on duty, no one ever died due to neglect, or because of a misdiagnosis by a rookie doctor. Jones preferred her over all the other nurses. “Is that your blood?” she snapped at him.
“I don’t think so.”
Twenty seconds later he was examining the baby, a trembling, boney mass that resembled a fetal bird more than a human child. “Looks like poor prenatal nutrition,” Jones told Nancy. “How’s her mother’s health?”
“We didn’t get blood work on her,” Nancy said. “The baby was born on the gurney in the ER last night, while you were sewing up the drunk. The mother walked in out of the snowstorm and didn’t even have a coat. She walked out this morning.”
“Her daughter’s frail, but she’s hanging on. If she sleeps, she just might turn the corner. I’ll watch her.”
Jones pulled up a chair and settled down into it. Nancy looked down at his muddy, bloody knees, and he covered them with the surgical robe. “Did you sleep any?” she demanded, folding her arms across her chest and staring at him over the close-work glasses resting on the end of her nose. “You worked the last shift, you—”
“I’ll be okay. Thanks.”
She pushed the glasses up to the bridge of her nose with one finger, as if pointing to the spot where she would like to put a bullet between his eyes, and she left him.
Lara worked alone, hour after hour in the lab, poring over the video of the operation they did that day. She replayed the move she had made that set off all the alarms. She was stumped.
Her father had once told her that all of his best ideas had sprung from a strange and unpredictable interplay between disciplined persistence and spontaneous inspiration. One had never come without the other, in his experience. There had been moments, he said, when ideas would appear in his head while he was driving to work and listening to music on the radio, his mind drifting to wherever the song took him; in those moments it seemed to him that the idea had ricocheted indirectly into his brain. In those times he would run into his lab and work for endless hours, inspired by the insight that had just come to him. Other times he would work for days, feeling he was doing nothing more than beating his head against a problem like a fly bouncing against a pane of glass; when finally he gave up and went home to let himself rest—when he truly let himself find release from the effort—a new potential solution just seemed to ooze into him like the warmth of a hot shower. He used that analogy because, literally, he had come up with the idea of one of his most profitable inventions while he was standing with his head under the beating jets of a shower after he had run for an hour on a treadmill.
Her father never spoke of what he might consider the source of ideas. He was not religious, and Lara supposed—naturally, it seemed to her—that he believed such a question to be unanswerable, so he decided at some point in his life to waste no time on it. And yet he attacked other questions, mysteries that most others in his field believed could not be solved. He never expected Lara to be a surgeon, much less a researcher and inventor; when it became clear to him that she had both the talent and the determination to push forward in the same battle he was fighting, he taught her everything he knew, and part of that knowledge was the strategy for increasing knowledge. A cornerstone of that strategy was: Never be afraid to ask questions. What if? What if? Always ask, What if?
He was a wonderful man, her father. He was kind and he was generous and it broke his heart when her mother died and that, more than anything else, was what brought the tears to Lara’s eyes on the lonely nights during holiday times, whenever she thought of the family she no longer had, and in fact had never really experienced. She controlled great sums of money, she owned vast quantities of brain power, a great deal of it between her own ears, and she had friends she trusted—only Malcolm and Brenda, only two; but she could rely on them absolutely, and that was no small thing.
But her father had seldom held her in his lap, or read to her at night, or taken her out under the stars to look up at the sky and wonder how all that brilliance got there, arrayed in the heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart. Her mother had done that with her, so long ago now. Her mother had used that phrase: the heavens of the heart. But now her mother was gone.
And Lara was still stumped.
No one in the company outside of Malcolm and Brenda knew how profoundly personal her father’s quest for discovery was, or that it was even more personal, if that was possible, for her. They were searching for ways to save lives; how could any work be more important than that?
And yet, Lara thought, if we spend our lives trying so hard to hold on to life that we never live, never really allow ourselves the chance to dance and sing, what is the value—the wisdom, the use, the purpose, the importance—of that?
Still she was stumped. She turned to the microscope, and looked through it; she saw the tiny, hand-carved statue. She shook her head, marveling at it. She heard someone moving up behind her and knew it was Malcolm.
“Lara—” She didn’t turn around. “Maybe if you tried to rest,” he said, “and come at it fresh tomorrow…?”
“There is no tomorrow, Malcolm.” Now she looked at him, and saw the sadness in his face. “Sorry. You’re right. I’ll walk you out.”
Except for the security guards, Malcolm and Lara were the last to leave. As they stepped out of the elevator into the garage, a limo rolled up for Lara. But she waved it off, and the driver pulled back to his slot beside the guard shack. “Aren’t you going home?” Malcolm asked gently, pleading.
“I’ll sleep here. I want to go over the replays again.”
“Get some sleep! I had to tell your dad that all the time.”
“Did he listen? Listen, the doctor who did that carving? I want a folder on him by 6 a.m.”
“Whatever you say, boss. Are you sure you won’t go home?”
“I am home.” She watched Malcolm walk to his car, then stepped back into the elevator and rode back up to the top floor, where no one was left but her.
The chair in the pediatric ward was metal and would not have been comfortable to most people, but the cast-off baby had fallen asleep, her monitors were all steady, and Jones was nodding off. As the first clouds of sleep seeped in upon him, he began to twitch and make the sharp low sounds of fear. Whatever he was dreaming, it was a nightmare. He began to moan…