Chapter 9
The taxi pulled up in front of the Group Health Hospital entrance on Sixteenth East, and Anne, distracted, fished money out of her wallet to cover the fare and a tip.
“Thanks, ma’am,” the driver said in an accent so thick she could barely understand him. “I hope whatever’s wrong will be better real soon.”
Nodding her own thanks, Anne lifted her suitcase, hurried through the main entrance, then asked for the Coronary Unit.
“You want Critical Care,” a man in a red jacket replied. “Down the hall, first elevators on the right, then left on the third floor. You can’t miss it.”
As she stepped off the elevator into the third floor lobby, Anne found herself surrounded by a color she instantly recognized as “flesh,” the long discontinued and totally unmissed hue the crayon people had apparently thought resembled the skin tone of some race of men that neither she nor anyone else had ever seen. The peculiar shade of the walls was set off by a faintly deco white trim, a depressingly institutional decor which Anne knew her husband would detest—if he were well enough even to notice it. Then she was in an anteroom outside the closed double doors to the Critical Care Unit, facing a sign instructing her to use the red phone in the waiting area. Before she could even look around for assistance, she heard Heather’s voice: “Mom? In here!”
A second later Anne was hugged in a three-way embrace with both her children. “How is he?” she asked. “What have they told you?”
“He’s going to be okay,” Heather said. “They’ve got him hooked up to about a billion machines, but the doctor says it’s mostly just to watch him.”
As the pent-up tension in her body was suddenly released, Anne sank exhausted onto one of the chairs that sat next to the door. There, on a table a few feet from her, was the red phone the sign had mentioned. Now that she knew Glen was out of danger, she grinned at Kevin. “You asked for the President when you picked up that phone, didn’t you?”
Kevin blushed as he nodded. “Couldn’t help it,” he admitted.
“I wanted to kill him,” Heather said, glaring at her brother. “Daddy could have been dying in there, and he was making jokes!”
“He wasn’t dying,” Kevin protested. “Come on, Heather, gimme a break! It’s not like …”
Leaving her children to settle the argument themselves, Anne picked up the red phone, identified herself, and was told to let herself through the double doors to the unit and come to the nurses’s station.
“Your husband’s in 308,” the nurse said. “He’s awake, but don’t expect him to say much, and try not to stay too long, all right? He really needs to sleep.”
The door to the room was open, but Anne hesitated for a moment before she went in, trying to prepare for what she might find inside. Then she took a deep breath, put on the best smile she could muster, and tried to think of something light to greet Glen with. Her words died on her lips as she crossed the threshold. The man who lay in the bed was barely recognizable as her husband.
His face was gray and his whole body appeared to have sunk in upon itself. And Heather was right—tubes and wires were everywhere. An IV needle was taped to one arm, his chest was nearly covered with electrodes, and on the wall around the bed, CRT displays seemed to be monitoring every function of his body. With just a cursory glance Anne could read her husband’s pulse rate, his respiratory rate, and his temperature. There were myriad other data as well, indecipherable and worrisome to Anne: if he was truly out of danger, why were they watching him so carefully?
She moved closer to the bed, and his eyes flickered open, looked right through her as if she weren’t there at all, then focused. His lips worked, then barely audible words emerged from them. “Maybe I better go back to houses,” he whispered. “I guess high rises don’t agree with me.”
Anne’s eyes flooded with tears of relief, and she moved close to the bed, leaned down and kissed Glen’s forehead. “What are you doing? Do you have any idea of how badly you scared me?”
“You?” Glen complained. “What about me? There I was, having the worst attack of acrophobia in history, and then wham! Dropped like a rock!”
Anne stared at him. “Acrophobia?” she echoed. “Since when do you have acrophobia?”
“Since this morning, I guess,” Glen told her. “It started on about the fifth floor, and just kept getting worse the higher I went.”
Anne shook her head reprovingly. “Then why did you keep going up? Oh, never mind, I know—it’s your building, and that’s that. How do you feel?”
Glen made a move to shrug, gave it up, and managed a wan smile. “Like I got run over by a bus. One of those big ones, too. Not your ordinary bus, but one of those new double ones …” He groped for the word, couldn’t find it in his drug-fogged mind, and gave up. “What do they call them?”
“Articulated.”
Glen nodded weakly, and his eyes closed. Anne opened her mouth as if to speak, then changed her mind as the nurse appeared in the open door and gave her a look that clearly said she’d been there long enough.
Sighing, Anne bent over and gently kissed Glen’s lips. “Go to sleep, darling,” she whispered. “Just go to sleep, and get well. I’ll be back in a little while.” Straightening up, she followed the nurse out of the room. “Where can I find his doctor?”
The nurse glanced at her watch. “He should be coming in for rounds in half an hour, but I’ll call him.” Picking up the phone on her desk, she punched in four digits, spoke for a moment, then smiled at Anne. “If you’d like to take a seat in the family room, Dr. Farber will be up in five minutes.”
Anne found her way out of the CCU, and as she came back into the waiting room, Heather and Kevin finally stopped their bickering. “What did Dad say?” Kevin demanded. “Did you see him?”
“He said if you don’t do exactly as I tell you every second he’s in the hospital, he’ll have your hide when he gets out.”
Kevin’s eyes rolled scornfully as he turned to his sister. “He must’ve been asleep.”
Anne sighed. “Well, you can’t blame your old mother for trying.” Then, as she remembered how Glen had looked when she went into his room, she felt her tears welling up. This time she didn’t even try to hold them back. “He said he felt like he’d been hit by a bus,” she told her children, her voice quavering. “He said—” Then she choked on her own words and dropped onto the sofa. “He’s going to be all right,” she said, making herself sound as positive as she possibly could. “He’s going to be fine, and in a few days—”
“Mrs. Jeffers?” a voice interrupted her. Anne looked up to see a white-coated man with a stethoscope hanging around his neck standing in the doorway. He had dark hair, deep blue eyes, and wore a look of perfect confidence.
But he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old.
“I’m thirty-seven,” he told her as he crossed the room to offer her his hand. “And I’m really a doctor, too. I mean, a real doctor, not an intern. And the stethoscope is to keep at least a few people from mistaking me for an orderly. I’m Gordy Farber.”
“Anne Jeffers,” Anne replied automatically. “And these are—”
“I already met the kids,” Farber told her. “Why don’t we sit down so I can tell you what we’re dealing with here. Unless you’d rather do it in my office?”
Anne shook her head, dropped back onto the sofa, and tried to follow the complicated medical terms that flowed from his tongue as easily as water from a tap. Finally, when he saw how confused Anne was, Farber turned and winked at Kevin. “Want to tell your mom what’s wrong with your dad?”
“A myocardial infarction,” Kevin promptly replied. “That’s what the doctors call a heart attack.”
“That’s exactly right,” Farber said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a five dollar bill. “And since you got it right the first time, you get to take your sister to the cafeteria and buy a couple of milk shakes.” Only when Heather had taken her brother out of the room did Farber turn back to Anne. “It was the kind of heart attack we used to call ‘a real doozy’ back in medical school,” he said. “However, your husband has a lot going for him. Not only is he relatively young, but he’s in excellent shape, he’s very strong, and he had a very good team of paramedics working for him.”
Anne suddenly had a feeling that Glen had had a much closer call than she’d been told about. “How bad was it?” she asked.
“About as bad as they come,” Gordy Farber replied. Long ago he’d learned that most people could deal with pretty much anything, as long as they didn’t think things were being hidden from them. “They almost lost him in the ambulance. It was touch and go for a few minutes, but they got him back.”
Anne sucked in her breath in a sharp gasp. “Lost him?” she echoed. “You mean …?” She left the question hanging, then steeled herself to learn as much as she could. She was a reporter, wasn’t she? She’d never left a question hanging in her life. “How close was it?” she asked, and her tone told Gordy Farber that she wanted to hear all of it.
“He stopped breathing, and his heart stopped beating,” he told her. “We got him back but it was a very close call.”
Anne remembered Glen’s inability to remember the word “articulated,” and all the fear she’d felt that day came rushing back to her. “My God,” she breathed. “Is he—is his brain …?”
This time she couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.
“Things look very good right now,” Gordy Farber told her. “He’s stable, and the next day or so will tell the tale. If there are no further incidents, I think his prognosis for a full recovery is excellent.”
“And if there is another … incident?” Anne asked.
Gordy Farber spread his fingers noncommittally. “We’ll cross that bridge if and when we come to it. For now, the important thing is that he’s doing very well, given what happened to him, and in spite of how he looks, he’s already a whole lot better than he was when they brought him in this morning.” He stood up, handing her a pamphlet he’d produced from the pocket of his white coat. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you read this while I go check on my patients. As soon as I finish my rounds, I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have.”
Anne took the pamphlet, her eyes focusing only on the two major words in its title: Heart Attack. Nodding mutely, she sank back against the harsh material of the small sofa. She sat silently holding the pamphlet for a few minutes, trying to adjust herself to the fact of Glen’s heart attack. Only two days ago—only this morning, really—he’d been so strong, so healthy, so … alive.
And today he’d nearly died.
Once again she thought of him lying in the hospital bed, his face ashen, his body connected to the monitors, looking weak and helpless. What if he didn’t get better? What if he had another—what was it Dr. Farber had called it?
Incident.
But it wasn’t any mere “incident”; it was a myocardial infarction—a heart attack—and another one would undoubtedly kill him.
What would she do if that happened? How would she cope with it? A terrible wave of loneliness and despair washed over her. She was afraid she might cry again, but steeled herself against it. Falling apart was the last thing she needed right now.
She opened the pamphlet, but the words made no sense to her. For right now, she couldn’t deal with it. Right now she had to do something else, something that would take her mind off Glen, if only for a few minutes.
It was only then that she remembered the man who had not survived this terrible day. Richard Kraven.
The man she had watched die in the electric chair only hours earlier. And about whom she should already have written and filed a story. Grasping at work as a way to keep the terrible fear of losing Glen at bay, Anne Jeffers concentrated on constructing a story in her head.
A story of death, but at least not of Glen’s death.
By the time Gordy Farber returned to the waiting room, Anne had not only composed the story in her mind, but called the paper and dictated it into her voice mailbox.
Now, the story filed, she turned her attention back to her husband and listened calmly as the doctor told her what she could expect.
As she listened, her resolve took hold: she would deal with it.
No matter what it took, Glen would not die.
She wouldn’t let him.