“I already have,” I said. “I’m sorry for my shortcomings as a father. Please forgive me for those.” I felt a sudden pang of very specific guilt. “Oh, and for not getting my tax records to you.”
“I already have,” he said with a laugh. “And I went ahead and filed for an extension. You’ve got until September fifteenth to bring me the rubble heap that passes for your financial records.” He looked me square in the eye. “Dad, you did a good job of raising me, and if you end up raising another kid, you’ll do a good job again. Tell me if there’s anything we can do to help you. And please come out to the house for dinner next Sunday.”
“Deal,” I said. “On both counts.”
CHAPTER 45
THE WIND GUSTED AND SHIFTED, FLINGING RAINDROPSagainst the curved windshield of the helicopter. As the drops hit, they shattered into smaller droplets that rolled separately down the sleek glass like iridescent ball bearings. With each buffet I felt the helicopter shudder on the helipad. Through the headphones cupping my ears, I heard a faint click, then the voice of the pilot, a former army helicopter instructor named Mike Hawkins. “Y’all hold on back there,” he said. “It’s getting mighty lively outside.” Beyond the headset’s noise seals and above the rising whine of the turbine, the wind whistled and moaned.
Eddie had gotten The Phone Call from Dr. Alvarez an hour earlier. The good news was, Glen Faust’s hands—and his tissue type—made him an excellent match for Eddie. The bad news was, Faust’s heart was failing fast, and unless Eddie and Faust could be airlifted to Emory immediately, it was likely that Faust would finish dying and the hands would go to waste.
Faust’s motionless form—the brain definitively dead but the heart tentatively, barely alive—lay on the narrow gurney beside me in the helicopter’s patient bay. Taut nylon straps crossed his chest, hips, and legs, and another strap immobilized his head. An endotracheal tube snaked out of his mouth, and the bellows of a portable ventilator made his chest rise and fall in a steady rhythm. An IV tube led from one arm, and a bundle of wires ran from the gurney to a small monitor mounted behind the pilot’s headrest. The monitor’s pulse readout fluctuated between 77 and 83 as the beats traced a series of sharp little peaks across the screen. Perhaps it was only because I’d been told he was dying, but the peaks seemed provisional, as if even the monitor were already giving him up for dead. I heard Hawkins press his transmit button. “LifeStar One to LifeStar Two.” I looked out the window; a hundred feet to our right was a second air ambulance, where Eddie Garcia lay strapped to a second gurney. The neighboring helicopter twitched on its skids in time with our own. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” said Hawkins glumly.
“Not for a while anyhow,” answered the second helicopter’s pilot.
“I don’t think we have a while,” said a female voice. It was the flight nurse, strapped into the rear-facing jump seat on the opposite side of the gurney from me. “His pulse is getting real thready. He’s barely hanging on.”
“Do we need to get him back to the ER?” It was the second pilot—Wimberly was his name, but his colleagues called him Wimby.
“I give this guy a couple hours, tops,” the nurse said. “If we take him back inside, he’ll be in the morgue by suppertime, and his hands will go to waste.”
“I’ve got faith in you, Nancy,” said Wimberly. “I’ve flown…what, fifty, sixty missions with you, and you’ve never lost a patient.”
“I’m telling you, Wimby, this guy’s close to coding.”
“If he codes,” asked Hawkins, “how much time do we have to get him to Emory?”
“None,” she answered. “Their protocol requires a beating-heart donor. They won’t take the hands if his heart’s stopped.”
From the helicopter base, the flight controller radioed with an update. “Radar’s showing a solid line of storm cells to the west, Hawk, stretching all the way to Nashville. Won’t blow through till tonight.”
“Well, crap,” said Hawkins. “This isn’t looking like our day. Or Dr. Garcia’s.”
For what seemed a long time, there was no sound but the steady whine of the turbine and the fluctuating lash of the weather. Then, over the radio, came a soft voice. “Please,” said Carmen Garcia, who was in the other helicopter alongside Eddie. “Please.” There was no hysteria or panic in her voice, only sorrow.
“If we go now, my husband still has a chance to use these hands. If we don’t go, he loses them—he loses these hands.”
Neither pilot answered, and the silence was excruciating. The flight nurse gave me an agonized look.
“Please,” repeated Carmen. “I beseech you.”