The Baby Who Stole the Doctor's Heart

“You could make that a dinner for two, and join him. I mean, it’s almost closing time, there aren’t many people left in the dining room, and there’s really no reason for you being in the kitchen the rest of the evening, since we’ll be starting our closing prep in the next half hour. So, cook your meal for him, then join him.”

“I can’t,” she whispered, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks. And it wasn’t a heat coming from the kitchen.

“Why not?”

“We don’t get along. Not even a little bit. I think that if I were even in the same room with him while he was eating I’d ruin his digestion.”

“Yet he specifically wants your sea bass?” Catie shook her head. “If he thought you’d ruin his digestion, he’d have gone somewhere else for dinner. But he didn’t. And I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

“I don’t have time for… for anything. Especially not for… well, you know. I’ve got Sarah, and my life is pretty hectic. Even if I didn’t ruin his digestion, I still couldn’t… have dinner with him. Bad timing. Other priorities.”

“Suit yourself. But in my experience, there’s always time, if you want it badly enough. And if you do want it badly enough, surprising things can happen, but only if you give them a chance. Personally, I think Chilean sea bass puttanesca for two is a good chance to take.”

Angela glanced over to the back door, to the great hulk of a man loitering there. Walt Graham, her new medical advisor in her camp program. He was a newly diagnosed diabetic himself, and under the close eye of Catie and her healthy cooking. Also the surprise of Catie’s life. Two widowed people, old friends from way back now with one reason to keep them together. No one had seen it coming, but everybody was happy for them. “Maybe for someone else, but I can’t take that chance,” Angela said, turning to the stove. Seven minutes to fix the meal, then she was going home. Out the back door, not through the dining room.

“I’ll admit, it was the best Chilean sea bass puttanesca I’ve ever had,” Mark said. The snow was coming down hard for early March. For White Elk that was good as it extended the ski season. And maybe, just maybe, he’d finally find some time to hit the slopes. He’d been intending to for the three months he’d been here, but so far it hadn’t happened.

Angela rose from under the hood of her car, and glared at him. “Glad you liked it,” she snapped.

“I suppose my logical question here is, are you having car trouble? Or do you simply enjoy tinkering with your carburetor in a heavy snow in a dark parking lot?”

“I’m not tinkering with my carburetor.”

He pulled his penlight from his pocket and shined it down, underneath the car hood. “That’s the carburetor, and it looks to me like you’re tinkering with it.”

“My car won’t start,” she admitted.

“And you’re a mechanic? That’s why you’re attempting to fix it?” From the look on her face, he figured he was about to get hit with a snowball, but to put himself in the position of the knight in shining armor coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress simply didn’t suit him. Oh, he’d help her. It was the only proper thing to do. But he wanted to make sure it was on the terms of the relationship they’d already established for themselves. Contentious. That was the only safe thing to do when he couldn’t keep a safe distance from her.

“No, I’m not a mechanic. And I don’t know a carburetor from… from anything else under the hood.”

“Then I’d suggest you get out from under the hood, get into the car and give it a crank so I can hear what’s going on.”

“You’re going to help me?”

She actually sounded surprised, which made him feel bad. And guilty. She was a nice woman with a tough life. Maybe he didn’t want to get involved in all that, but he certainly didn’t want his problems heaped on top of hers. “Look, Angela, I know we’re got some differences?”

“Big differences,” she interrupted.

In spite of himself, he couldn’t help smiling. This was the Angela that intrigued him. “Big differences. But I never meant you to get the impression that I was downright mean.”

“And rude,” she supplied.

He chuckled. “OK, mean and rude. But I’m at a bad place in my life right now, which has nothing to do with you. And I really just want to be left alone. Which is hard to do when—”

“When I keep coming at you?”

“Actually, you do keep coming at me, but that’s not it. It’s… everything.” He gestured to the restaurant, to the Three Sisters mountain peaks shadowed in the distance, to the main street of the village. To the parking light, where in the pinkish haze the snowflakes danced like fairy ballerinas. “It’s everything. I don’t want to be here. Don’t want this kind of life. Not medicine, not anything that I’ve had. But I’ve got it for the next year and a half, like it or not, and so far you seem to be the one who’s always closest when I feel it all closing in around me.”

“So, because of proximity, I get the brunt of your bad mood?”

Mark cringed. She was right about that and it made him feel ashamed. Yet something in the very essence of Angela Blanchard made him want to correct his life, and correct it immediately. Whatever it was about her that stirred that frantic beast in him burrowed to the very heart of what he needed. When she wasn’t around, he was able to concentrate on the tasks at hand; when she was, that compulsion to change, to try on a different existence nearly consumed him. “Something like that, and I’m sorry. I read your proposal earlier, and I respect what you’re trying to do. It looks like an amazing program and I have every intention of speaking up on your behalf tomorrow, and supporting it in the months I’ll be here.”

“I hope you’ll speak on my behalf with a smile on your face, because with the scowl you’re usually wearing, Eric and Neil won’t be convinced that you really think it’s a good idea.”

Yes, she did come straight at him and he was beginning to like that directness. “I don’t always scowl, do I?”

“About ninety-nine percent of the time.”

“Then tomorrow I promise ninety-eight.”

“You resist moving by leaps and bounds, don’t you? You prefer baby steps.”

“And you always move by leaps and bounds.”

“Life is short,” she said, pulling her scarf tighter around her neck as a gust of wind hit her. “I know there’s that poem that talks about not going gently into the good night, and that’s how I want to live my life, because there’s so much I want to do, and I won’t get it done going gently. I lost eight years I can’t get back, and I’m not wasting another minute.”

“Which is why you want to be a mountain rescue paramedic,” he said, feeling a fragile thread of guilt for not including her in the program. But he wasn’t going to. If he had to do this, he was going to give it his best, and that included putting the right people in place. As tough as Angela was, she still didn’t fit the criteria and, on that, he couldn’t budge. “So I assume this is where you’re going to make your pitch again? Right?”

“Wrong. You’re not getting rid of me, and I intend on being in your class, not in the back row, though. But I accept your decision. Don’t like it, but I’ll make it work for me.”

Which was one of the reasons he couldn’t afford any kind of relationship with her. She was so dynamic, so positive. He truly feared it could rub off on him. Truly feared it could make him change his mind about so many things he’d been etching in stone these past couple of years. “Well, right now we need to figure out if we can make your car work for you.”

Angela climbed in, turned the key, elicited only a clicking noise. No grinding, no sputtering, no nothing.

“How long’s it been since you’ve had a new battery?” he called out.

“A month. That was my last repair.” She tried it again. Still, nothing happened.

So he checked the battery cables and terminals, jiggled, adjusted and had her try one more time, to no avail. “Well, the good news is it’s not the carburetor,” he said, pulling out from under the hood. “The bad news is it’s either the starter or the starter solenoid. Meaning you need a mechanic.”

“I’ve needed a mechanic almost every other week lately. Or it’s the time to buy a new car. I’ve got to find something more dependable because of Sarah.” She pulled her cell phone from her pocket. Started to dial.

“Calling a cab?”

She shook her head. “Calling Eric.”

“Let him spend the evening with his family. I’ll take you home,” Mark offered impulsively.

“Are you sure?”

Again, she acted surprised that he had a little niceness in him. He really did have to work on that… some. “You fixed me a good dinner. It’s the least I can do.”

“Then I accept.” She tucked her phone in her pocket, grabbed her purse, her briefcase, and her laptop computer from the back of her car. Mark took the laptop and briefcase, and led her to a large black pickup truck that was so high off the ground she wondered if she could get herself inside it without making a complete fool of herself. “Men and their big trucks,” she said, hoisting herself up.

“Practical when you’re living in the mountains,” he said while he waited for her to settle herself.

He was barely inside when she asked,“But you’re not going to live in the mountains, are you? Once you’ve fulfilled your eighteen months, don’t you plan on getting out of here?”

“And if I don’t need a truck where I’m going, I’ll get something else.”

“You don’t know where you’re going?” That didn’t surprise her, as Mark seemed more like a man who was running away from something rather than running to it.

“Not a clue. Don’t really care. One road’s as good as another, and if it leads me someplace else, I’m perfectly fine with that.”

Fastening her seat belt, Angela relaxed back into the leather seat, loving the new aroma of it. It reminded her of Mark. Big, manly, bold. “No one’s ever sat in this seat before, have they?” It was a strange question to ask, but she couldn’t see Mark involved enough with anyone to allow them in this seat, and she wanted to know. Such a solitary man.

“You’re the first, except for the salesman who sat there when I took it out for a test drive.”

No women. He didn’t date. Again, it didn’t surprise her, yet, in a way, it did. Men like Mark Anderson didn’t live without women. In other circumstances, she could picture him with a woman hanging on each arm. Under these circumstances, though, all she could picture was him alone. And scowling. “I want seventy-five percent tomorrow rather than ninety-eight.”

“What?’

“Your scowl. I want you scowling only seventy-five percent of the time. Being all sullen the way you are is bad for your digestion, and while I certainly wouldn’t lecture you on all the things that can go wrong with you physiologically when your gut stays in a constant knot, let me just say that nothing good comes of it. So, if you force yourself to quit frowning for a quarter of your day, and even try and smile a little during that time, you’re going to relax your gut and feel much better overall.”

“And that’s your professional opinion?”

“Yes. But that’s also the opinion of someone who spent too much time frowning, whose gut was knotted up just like yours.”

“What happened to change that?”

“I became happy. Had Sarah, realized the value of my friends. Discovered what I really wanted in my life wasn’t as complicated as I was making it out to be. And, most important, I figured out what I didn’t want and put an end to it.” All of it the truth. When she’d quit letting Brad be the shadow over her that had always held her back, everything had changed. Mark had the same kind of shadow over him, she could see it looming very close, barely allowing him any room to breathe. It was a pity because underneath the scowl she was catching glimpses of something good, and something so conflicted he didn’t even know the good was there anymore.

Heading out of the parking lot and turning left onto the main street through town, Angela glanced up to the silhouette of the Three Sisters?three mountain peaks that towered over the entire valley. According to Indian lore, their magic safeguarded White Elk and all the people within their shadow. But theirs was a good shadow. Mark’s was not, and it was so heavy she could almost feel it trying to cloud her outlook. It was not a good place to be. In fact, it gave her cold chills. Come on, Three Sisters, she said silently to herself. Maybe, just maybe, they had a little of their magic in reserve for Mark, because he really did need it.

CHAPTER THREE

THE short drive was quiet, and once Angela had given Mark directions to her house, she settled back to stare out the window in lieu of tumbling into any sort of dialogue with him. Especially since he was making no effort to talk about anything. The silence between them was a little unnerving, so was sitting so close to him. She didn’t know why, didn’t know why the hair on her arms seemed especially tingly, or the little chill bumps parading their way up her spine seemed especially charged. But they did, which was why she chose to fix her attention on the road, and on the brisk snow trying its best to lay down a new blanket.

“What the…!” About three minutes into the drive, Mark jammed on the truck’s brakes then threw the truck into reverse before it had even come to a complete stop.

The seat belt snapped tight on Angela. “What’s wrong?” she gasped, hurled rudely from a nice, relaxed mellow into an immediate panic. She tried tugging the seat belt loose and found it locked down tight across her chest.

“Not sure,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he guided the truck backwards. “Thought I saw…”

No more words were spoken. Mark slammed on the truck brakes, and before she could say another thing he’d unfastened his seat belt, hopped out and was already sprinting toward the sidewalk.

“Mark,” she called, trying to maneuver herself out of her own seat belt. She wasn’t as swift as he’d been about it, and by the time her feet hit the slippery street, he was already half a block a head of her, on his way down the footpath into the city park. “What are you doing?” she cried when she’d almost caught up to him and saw him drop to his knees.

“Saw somebody,” he yelled back.

He’d struggled out of his coat by the time she’d reached his side. That’s when she saw…“It’s Mr. Whetherby. He’s the town librarian, and he has dinner at the lodge every Friday night. Lobster Newburg and…” She checked her words when she realized that Richard Whetherby was lying on the ground, not moving, and she was babbling. Immediately, Angela dropped to her knees alongside Mark. “What’s wrong with him?” Imitating Mark’s actions, she pulled off her own coat and laid it over the still form in the snow.

“Darned if I know. I just saw him lying here…”

“You saw him from the street?” Mark’s fingers were busy assessing the pulse in Richard’s neck. She recognized that action.

“It’s what I do.” No other explanation.

“Tell me what I can do.” Already, she was pulling her cell phone from her pocket. “Call for an ambulance?”

“Good first step. Tell them he’s hypothermic, pulse thready and slow. Tell them we’re going to need something to warm him in the ER, and to get one of the orthopedists in?I think we have a serious fracture.”

She made the call, told them exactly what Mark had said and, after she had clicked off, while Mark was making an evaluation of Richard’s arms and legs, Angela let her fingers stray to the same pulse point Mark had taken a reading from only moments earlier, hoping to learn, at firsthand, what it felt like. And, there it was, slow and thready, like Mark had said. To compare, she felt the pulse in her own neck and was able to determine what a healthy one was compared to the one barely beating at her fingertips. The difference was astonishing. Frightening. For the first time in her life she truly comprehended that she was feeling the very essence of life, and while her essence was strong, Richard’s was slipping away.

It didn’t take trained medical experience to know that.

“I think it’s his hip,” Mark said, standing. “Can’t tell for sure, but that would be my guess for a primary injury. Everything else going on is probably a result of that. Look, I’m going to run to the truck for my bag. I’ll be back right back.” He didn’t wait for her reply. He simply turned and ran down the footpath with a stride and strength she couldn’t have possibly matched. Which left her there alone. Richard Whetherby’s only lifeline for the next minute.

“Richard,” she said. “It’s Angela. Angela Blanchard. I’m here with Mark Anderson, one of the doctors from the hospital. We’re going to take good care of you, get you all bundled up and take you to the hospital in just a couple of minutes.”

No response, of course. No movement either. Because of that, Angela wanted to feel Richard’s life force again, just to reassure herself. So she laid her fingers back on his pulse point, but couldn’t find the faint rhythm she’d felt before. Anxiously, she tried again. Moved her fingers from side to side, up and down a little, yet still couldn’t find his pulse. Suddenly, it hit her like that proverbial lightning bolt! “Mark,” she screamed, rising up on her knees to position Richard’s head back a little. She’d taken a CPR class years ago but hadn’t ever practiced it except on a dummy. But now…“Mark!” she screamed again as she forced Richard’s stiff jaw open and bent to give him a breath. Actually, she gave him several… couldn’t remember how many, but she knew it had to be several. Then she reared up, threw off the coat covering the man’s chest, pulled his own coat open, placed one of her hands on top of the other, went to the critical spot in his chest she remembered from her instruction, and started to pump. “One, two, three…” she said aloud, fearing she wasn’t pressing hard enough, or that she was pressing too hard. She remembered something about bad positioning and broken ribs and punctured lungs.

“Angela!” Mark said, dropping down beside her.

“I couldn’t find a pulse,” she gasped, scooting aside while he took over the chest compressions. “So I…” Rather than finishing the sentence, she positioned herself at Richard’s head, counting each and every one of Mark’s chest compressions. “Is it thirty to two?” she asked.

He nodded. Didn’t look at her. And as she counted down the thirty, she got ready for the next two breaths, repositioned Richard’s head, drew in her own deep breath, then laid her mouth to his. She and Mark alternately repeated their resuscitation efforts for the next few minutes… minutes that felt like an eternity, neither one of them uttering a word as they concentrated on what had to be done. Then, finally, in the distance, came the wail of a siren. A flash of relief passed between them in the fleeting glance they allowed themselves.

“Where are you?” a voice from the road yelled.

“Twenty yards down the footpath,” Angela yelled.

“Angela,” Mark said. “Can you hold the flashlight, and keep his head tipped back once I get it into position. We need to get him breathing, and I’m going to insert an endotracheal tube into his throat.”

The first paramedic resumed the chest compressions, the second broke out the equipment?the tubes, the oxygen, the heart monitor. At Mark’s prompt, he handed the ET tube to Angela, who turned it over in her hands, not sure what it was.

“When I ask for it, hand it to me. Until then, just keep the light steady, and make sure that his head doesn’t slip. Normally I don’t have to get belly down in the snow to do this, and it’s going to be a little tricky.”

“I can do this,” she whispered, more for her own ears to hear than for Mark’s. But he heard anyway.

“I know you can.” He gave two good squeezes to the resuscitation bag, which had replaced the mouth-to-mouth efforts. “Oh, and when I get the tube in, hand me a stethoscope.”

It was all procedural, very matter-of-fact, which amazed her. Step one, step two, step three… a methodical plan they all knew, but she didn’t.

“And once I get the tube in, be ready to hold it while I check to make sure it’s in the right place.”

Now, that scared her a little, but she nodded, hoping her nervousness didn’t make her look like one of those dolls with the bobbling heads.

“Ready?” he asked, squeezing the resuscitation bag one last time. Then signaled for the paramedic to stop the chest compressions momentarily.

It happened in the blink of an eye, but she took in everything. Mark positioned Richard’s head, she positioned the flashlight. Mark lowered himself flat in the snow, she took hold of Richard’s head and held on for dear life. Then Mark took some kind of instrument from his pocket… she couldn’t remember its name, but she’d ask him later… opened Richard’s mouth even more, then asked for the tube. Instinctively, she moved closer as she handed it to him and, without fanfare or effort, Mark simply slid that tube into Richard’s mouth. Not the esophagus, she told herself. This tube was for breathing, so it went into the trachea.

For the first time she wondered about the anatomy of it, wondered what separated the two as they were in the same area. Wondered how Mark differentiated.

“Stethoscope,” Mark said. “And hold the tube for me now. Don’t let it move.”

Angela was immediately in the snow, not on her belly, but close to it, as Mark rose to his knees to listen. The IV paramedic who manned the equipment, and who was also preparing to start an IV, attached the resuscitation bag to the tube, gave it a couple of good squeezes, and Mark nodded.

“Tape it in place,” he told Angela, as the paramedic dropped a roll of white tape down to her.

“Tape it?” she asked.

Chest compressions were starting again. Mark was busy doing something with a syringe. The IV paramedic was attaching a bag of fluids to the tubes coming from Richard’s arm. So many things were going on and Angela felt more lost than ever in all the procedures. Even the simple ones, like taping the tube.

“Lasso the tape around the tube then anchor it on both sides of Richard’s face,” Mark explained with all the patience of a good teacher.

So easily said, yet such a daunting thing to do. For her. Still, she taped the tube in place as Mark attached the syringe to a tiny tube sticking out of it.

“Blowing up the cuff,” he explained. “The small tube leads to an inflatable cuff on the actual breathing tube—endotracheal tube is what it’s called?and when air is inserted into the small tube, it gives the endotracheal tube a tight fit to the tracheal walls so it doesn’t slip or let air get in around it.” He completed the task, then reattached the resuscitation bag to the tube and fell back into the rhythm of thirty compressions, two breaths.

All of this in mere seconds. Angela was amazed. And exhausted by the time they’d stabilized Richard enough to lift him onto the stretcher.

“Don’t you have to shock him or something?” she asked. She’d seen it on TV. Rush in, get the paddles, shock the heart. But they weren’t doing that here.

“We’ve got good oxygenation established to his brain, and it was done quickly. The purpose of CPR is not so much to revive the patient but to keep them oxygenated long enough to get them proper help. The hospital is two blocks from here… better to try the cardioversion there, in a more controlled environment.”

Cardioversion… something else to look up.

As Mark explained all this to Angela, the paramedics whisked Richard to the ambulance. And by the time Mark paused for a breath, and Angela had picked up their discarded coats, the ambulance was pulling away. “That was so fast,” she whispered. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, tops, from the time Mark had first spotted him. It was amazing!

“Thanks to you,” he said, taking her coat from her, brushing the snow off it then helping her into it.

“I didn’t do anything. I just… Look, do you need to follow them to the hospital?”

“I should. As I started this, I’d like to see it through.”

“Then you go on. I want to stay here, see if I can find Fred. And clean up the trash we’ve created.” Bags, boxes, tubes… an amazing amount of supplies and trash left behind for such a fast procedure.