Change of Heart (17 page)

Brian went downstairs for a cup of coffee. When he returned to the room, Sharlie was lying very still, staring up at the ceiling. Her body was stiff, and all the color had drained out of her face.

“Hey,” Brian said. “You okay?”

She blinked her eyes, but didn't look at him. Suddenly he noticed the newspaper on her bedside table. It was folded open to the headline C
RIME
F
IGURE
D
EAD
IN
G
UNFIGHT
D
ONATES
H
EART
TO
G
IRL
. He grabbed the paper and whispered hoarsely, “Where did you get this?”

Still, she didn't answer him. “Sharlie, tell me. Where did this come from?”

She turned her head slowly on the pillow. “You shouldn't have let them do it, Brian. How could you let them do that to me?”

“The guy saved your life.”

She grabbed the newspaper from his hand and, with a howl of pain and rage, threw it at his chest. It fluttered to the floor at his feet.

“Go away!” she screamed. “Just leave me alone!”

Brian hurried out to find someone who could give her a sedative and make sure she was all right. Once Nurse Wynick was on her way to Sharlie's room, he telephoned Dr. Rosen's office, but the psychiatrist was out of town until the next morning. Then he took the stairs eight flights down and stepped out into the warm breeze. He felt calmer after he'd walked the length of the grounds a few times, so he went back inside again. At the nurse's station he was told that Sharlie was asleep and wouldn't wake up until morning. He might as well go back to his motel.

He was dreaming about Walter and Mrs. Salvello when his telephone rang at two
A.M
. He groped for it and Margaret's anxious voice said, “Brian? Is that you?”

“What's happened?” he murmured, alarmed through his grogginess.

“Sharlie's rejecting. They think you should come.”

“I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

By the time he got to the eighth floor, a confrontation was in progress outside Sharlie's door.

Tiny, wiry Nurse Wynick was putting up a mighty struggle to bar Mary MacDonald from Sharlie's room, and Mary was responding to Nurse Wynick's defensive posture in her characteristic straightforward manner.

“Out of the way, you monkey-faced bitch, or I'll shove your ass all the way to Hawaii.” She gave a push that sent Nurse Wynick sprawling against the wall.

“I'll have your license. You're a madwoman!” Nurse Wynick cried, her forehead above the gauze mask mottled with fury. A young nurse's aide stood by, staring at her superior in horror and delight. Nurse Wynick brushed herself off and shrieked at the girl. “Don't just stand there like an imbecile! Call Security. And page Dr. Lewis.”

Meanwhile Mary had slipped into Sharlie's room. When Nurse Wynick tried to open the door, she found it locked. “Don't you touch that patient!” she shouted through the crack.

The response from inside was unintelligible, but its intent was clear. Nurse Wynick tore off her mask and stomped down the hall with a flaming face.

Brian tapped on the door. “Hey, Mary. It's me.”

In a moment the door opened a crack, and he slid inside. Mary quickly fastened a mask over his face.

“Know what that crazy Nazi was going to do? Spike her IV with Vibramycin. These hotshots may be able to do fancy footwork in OR, but when it comes to common sense, they're a bunch of yo-yos.”

“What's the matter with Vibramycin?” Brian asked.

“She's allergic to it.”

“Oh,” he said, impressed. “Is she okay?”

Mary settled down next to Sharlie's bed as if she intended to remain there throughout eternity. “Trying to murder my girl, they are, and her on foreign soil,” she muttered.

“Mary, this isn't Borneo, it's California. Is she going to be all right?” he repeated.

“She's holding her own.”

“What about the rejection?”

“They upped her prednisone to a hundred milligrams. She's responding, but we're just going to have to wait.”

“But shouldn't somebody be here? I mean from the staff?”

“Not when they don't know their nostrils from their assholes.”

“Isn't Margaret around somewhere? How did you beat me here anyway?”

“I didn't like the way she looked at nine, so I stuck around. Her mother's on the phone with Converse in New York trying to decide whether he could come out again.”

“Should he?”

Mary shook her head slightly, but Brian hadn't taken his eyes off Sharlie for a moment. Mary went on indignantly. “I'm just glad I didn't get on that plane home this morning. They'd have killed her for sure. I want you and Mrs. Converse to talk them into sending her back to New York, where she can get the proper care.”

This last was said very loudly for the benefit of Nurse Wynick, who had just arrived with a security man in tow. The women eyed one another malevolently, then Mary rose with great dignity, brushed imaginary lint off her skirt, and said to the security man, “I assume you have come to escort me, sir.” She crooked her elbow, which the baffled guard took, and sailed out the door.

Nurse Wynick stared after her with narrowed eyes. Finally she muttered, “Who does she think she is, Queen Elizabeth?”

“Wouldn't be surprised,” Brian replied proudly. Nurse Wynick glowered and turned her attention to Sharlie, or rather to Sharlie's bedclothes. She fussed over them busily, tucking in loose corners until Brian finally objected, “She can't even wiggle her toes in there.”

This was too much for the vanquished nurse. She started to cry, her words punctuated by deep sniffs of mortification and indignation. “You people … you all think you know what's right.… New York people … always the same, throwing your weight around … There are other places in this universe besides New York City, you know.”

Brian made some expression of sympathy, which only unleashed another flood of anguish. Her fresh mask was soaked with tears, and all the time, she fidgeted with the sheets, checked IV tubes, rearranged items on the bedside table.

“I've been in the hospital fifteen years, and I know as much about transplants as anybody, and I won't have a bunch of ignorant … busybodies … coming in here and messing up my work and telling me how to do my job. I mean, if you people thought you knew so much, why didn't you just stay where you belong instead of coming all the way out here? I won't have this … importation of personnel on my floor.…”

Brian tried to interrupt with an explanation of Mary's deep involvement with Sharlie, how she'd been caring for her since birth. But Nurse Wynick immediately seized on it as proof of Mary's lack of professionalism.

“Just keep that woman out of my sight until Miss Converse is discharged. If I see her on my floor again, I'll …”

Brian waited curiously for the dreadful plans Nurse Wynick had in mind for Mary.

“… I'll anesthetize her and slap her into surgery and transplant her insides with that ugly old orangutan we've got downstairs in the lab.”

With this she left the room, but not until she'd looked at Brian's face to make sure he was impressed with her threat. He was, and she marched out with her spirits somewhat restored.

Brian sighed. If only one could harness the energy of those two veterans—it would cure the common cold, wipe out cancer, maybe even establish order in the chaotic tangle of the hospital accounting department. But now, left alone with Sharlie, no battling ladies of mercy to distract him, Brian panicked. He looked in every direction except at the neat bed with the crease up the middle that was supposed to represent the woman he loved. Finally he forced himself to focus on her. She was staring at him, wide awake, her eyes liquid and haunting in the middle of her distorted face.

“Brian,” she whispered, “tell me what's happening.”

He did, not coming too close, despite his mask and gown, for fear of infecting her.

She considered what he'd told her, and after a minute said, “If I make it through this one, Bri, and if you still want me with my big fat face, I'll marry you.”

She talked with effort, so he just smiled, squeezed her hand quickly and stayed near the bed until she fell asleep. A cardiologist and two residents arrived, and he left the room, guilty at the enormity of his relief to walk out of the hospital and into the California moonlight.

The next night he lay in bed listening to the murmur of voices through the thin wall between his room and Sharlie's parents'. In the beginning, except for an occasional expletive from Walter, there had been silence, as if the room were unoccupied. Tonight, however, the dark was punctuated by Walter's low rumble and the lighter response from Margaret. Brian strained his ears trying to catch pieces of these prolonged conversations. They hadn't had much to say to each other in public, and Brian found the hint of private, intimate communication tantalizing. He remembered lying awake in the creaky old farmhouse when he was a child on those nights that seemed undefinably scary. How curious he was to know exactly what was being said by his taciturn father. There was even an occasional burst of laughter, low-pitched and full of love for the woman who had inspired it with some unseen bit of mischief.

As if on cue, Walter chuckled from next door. He had arrived midaftemoon on the first plane he could find, which meant a circuitous route through Atlanta and New Orleans. Now, after all this aggravation, it looked as though Sharlie were going to make it. Thank God, of course.

Brian stared up at his fake Spanish stucco ceiling and wondered if Walter and Margaret ever thought the horrible things he did, and if so, did they ever say them to each other?

Sharlie had caught him off guard in the early hours of the morning—was it only this morning? He had imagined that her reasons for refusing to get married would intensify with the augmented severity of her illness. Here she was, trembling on the brink of death, saying yes. Maybe she thought the end was imminent and wanted to make him feel that she was truly committed? No. He'd read in her face, swollen and unfamiliar as it was, the clear communication that she
wanted
to marry him. But Christ, how could they do it? That girl was no longer his Sharlie but some bizarre caricature, who now and then gave him a cruel, teasing glimpse of the person he had lost.

He'd marry her. He'd gotten himself so enmired that there was no way out now, not, at least, any way that would allow him to look in the mirror ever again. Her life would be short. His stomach heaved in self-disgust at the thought.

Anyway, by the time that happened, his career would be finished, at least with Barbara's firm. The generous leave of absence had long since run out, and her voice over the phone had become more and more remote, her conversation liberally laced with “Joe did this” and “Joe says that,” Joe being the young man she'd hired to take Brian's place when Brian eventually took hers.

He turned over on his side, willing himself not to think about the cases he'd prepared so carefully, that still mattered despite the girl lying near death a couple of miles away. Joe could never invest the same emotional commitment into Brian's causes—he'd have causes of his own.

With the sense of resignation toward the future marriage to Sharlie came a new awareness of the element in his attachment to her that transcended even her deterioration—mysterious dovetailing of fates that felt so inevitable that Brian suddenly recognized that if he'd been born an aborigine in the outback of Australia, he'd nonetheless be lying here in this very bed tonight contemplating his marriage to Sharlie Converse.

Finally, lulled by the monotonous murmuring from next door, he fell asleep and dreamed of Susan on the tennis court, serving him a ball that, as it whirled toward him, changed into a grinning jack-o'-lantern.

Margaret sat in the waiting room while Walter went into Sharlie's room alone. He came out a few moments later, and Margaret noticed with a shock how deeply the lines beside his mouth had eroded the square cheeks.

“She's …” he began, then lifted his hands helplessly. Margaret took his arm and drew him down the hall toward the elevators. “She's not our girl anymore, is she?” Walter said.

Margaret put her face against the rough wool of his sports jacket.

“We were wrong to do it,” he went on.

“It didn't have to work out this way.”

Walter shook his head numbly, and they walked into the evening heat of the parking lot. Margaret stopped him at the car and said, “Let me take you to a place I found.” He gave her a puzzled look. “I'll tell you how to get there,” she said, sliding into the passenger seat.

Soon they were driving along the rocky-coast road, which ran parallel to the Pacific about a mile inland. Here and there gnarled pine trees stood silhouetted against the darkening sky, their shadows like aged hands twisted by the wind off the sea. The twilight faded quickly, and by the time they turned left toward the sound of the ocean, it was dark and suddenly very windy. The road narrowed, barely wide enough now for one car. Long grass grew to the edge of the crumbling pavement, and it billowed wildly in the headlights' glare, scratching against the windows. In the tall weeds ahead, two small lights gleamed, and a cat flashed across the road, then disappeared into the grass so quickly that Walter wondered if it had been a shadow or some ghostly mirage. He glanced briefly at Margaret. She was staring straight ahead, and he found himself unwilling to break the silence.

The wind gusted so powerfully now that he struggled to keep on the narrow track. The sky had become a deep, murky black, but intermittently a beam flickered up ahead like heat lightning. The flashing intensified, and soon they emerged from the grass tunnel onto a flat, sandy expanse, dominated by the pale-gray shadow of a lighthouse. It loomed above them, casting its blazing circle into the night.

Walter stopped the car and looked at Margaret with awe in his face. Her eyes were shining. They got out and walked silently, arm in arm, toward the rush of the sea.

They watched the black waves curl into foam, smashing against the rocks. They were silent, hypnotized by the rhythmic recurrence of light against the darkness. After a long time Margaret began to shiver against Walter's shoulder, and they started back to the car.

Inside, Margaret smiled at him, a girlish, secret-sharing smile he'd long forgotten. Suddenly, before he had time to think, he blurted out, “I'm sorry, Margaret.” Then he sat feeling foolish and confused. What was he apologizing for anyway?

Margaret picked up his hand where it lay tense and flat on the seat, and she pressed it hard against her wet cheek.