As soon as they got there, Sarah was rushed through the emergency entrance, and David made a quick call to her husband’s cell phone. When Gary picked up, he said he’d already heard from Amanda’s mom and was on his way from a real-estate conference in Skokie. When he arrived, the paper name tag was still stuck to the lapel of his sport coat.
Fortunately, her oncologist, Dr. Ross, was on call, and he joined them near the nursing station, with a grave expression on his face.
“This certainly hasn’t helped,” he said, “but we do have her stabilized again. She’s conscious, and she doesn’t appear to have suffered a concussion. But we’ll keep her in the ICU overnight, just for observation.”
“And then?” Gary asked.
“Then,” he said, with a slightly more hopeful expression, “I’d like to enter her on a new experimental regimen. We’ve just gotten the go-ahead on it, and I think Sarah might be a very good candidate. The clinical trials in Maryland were impressive.”
For a minute or two, he explained how the therapy might work, and what its side effects might be, then concluded by saying, “But as it is experimental, there may be some trouble getting it by your insurance company.”
Gary didn’t hesitate. “I’ll handle it.”
“And I can help,” David blurted out, thinking of the business card in his wallet.
“That’s fine,” Dr. Ross said with a nod. “And I’ll do what I can from my end. But I just wanted to warn you.” And then he left them there, to continue his rounds.
“Why don’t we adjourn to the cafeteria?” David said. “I could use a cup of coffee.”
Lost in thought, they sat staring into their respective cups. A crooked Christmas tree, decorated with ornaments made by the pediatric patients, stood forlornly beneath the ticking wall clock.
David didn’t have to guess what was going through Gary’s mind. Apart from the life-and-death question that was forever hanging in the air, there were the money worries. Whether the insurance plan picked up most of this experimental protocol or not, Gary was looking at financial disaster. His business, David knew, had been way down—Sarah had once confessed that he was thinking of quitting and trying something else entirely—and there was no way he could cover any further demands without, at the very least, selling his own house.
But what couldn’t a million dollars do?
David would have to go to Florence. And he’d have to go now, while Sarah had been granted this temporary reprieve. There was always a chance that the new protocol would work … and there was always a chance that it wouldn’t. If he was ever going to take this chance, now was the time.
“You know that promotion I mentioned that I might be getting?” he ventured, and Gary nodded, without lifting his eyes.
“Well, to nail it down, I might have to go to Italy.”
“When?”
“As soon as possible.”
Now Gary raised his weary eyes. “For how long?”
“It’s hard to say,” David replied, “though I could come back, on a moment’s notice, anytime I had to.”
He could see Gary processing the information, just another complication in his already tumultuous life. “I just hate leaving you in the lurch like this, but—”
“Go,” Gary said kindly, “go. There’s no reason all of us have to live in this damn hospital. And if Sarah were sitting here, she’d be saying the same thing. You know that.”
There, David knew, he was right. It only made sense for him to leave immediately especially as he had begun to entertain—against his own better judgment—the nagging, and utterly irrational, notion that Mrs. Van Owen’s claims weren’t as impossible as they seemed. For one thing, he was beginning to believe that someone else took them seriously. Why else had he nearly been run down in the street? He glanced down at his knuckles, scraped raw from plunging into the snow and ice. Determined as Mrs. Van Owen was, was there some rival out there, equally determined to thwart her?
And for another—and this was the part that troubled him even more deeply—right after she had driven away from the Newberry, he had returned to the book silo and, slumping in his seat, turned the next leaf of The Key to Life Eternal. A sketch, one that he had barely paid attention to on his first reading, jumped out at him like an acrobat.
It was clearly an early rendering of the figure of Athena, destined for one of the panels making up the base of the great statue of Perseus. And the likeness to Kathryn Van Owen was startling—the imperious gaze, the haughty posture, the rich mane of dark hair. The words, Quo Vincas Clypeum Do Tibi Casta Sosor, were faintly legible below it; “I, thy chaste sister, give thee the shield with which thou wilt conquer.” Athena was the goddess who had provided the advice, and shield, that allowed the hero Perseus to slay the Medusa. And though David recognized that the woman who had just left the library could not possibly have been the artist’s model—that this had to be a mere coincidence, maybe even a trick of his own imagining—there was another part of him that said, Believe it. Because at this point, a belief in miracles, in the long-lost secret of immortality, might be his sister’s best—and only—hope. How could he dismiss it?
Chapter 10