Not Quite Forever (Not Quite series) (14 page)

Walt stood in the trauma room with gloves already on, a full gown covering his scrubs. He heard one of the techs announce that the ambulance was pulling in with the patient. He knew she was in her early thirties, thrown from the car she rode in on the freeway. She was unconscious and in severe respiratory distress. The paramedics had already intubated her en route to the ER.

“How soon before Dr. Meeks is down here?” Chuck Meeks was the trauma surgeon. The two of them would work together to stabilize the patient as quickly as possible before Chuck took the patient to surgery to fix what he could.

“Five minutes, maybe less.”

Fair enough.

He heard the familiar shuffle of firefighter boots as the medics wheeled the gurney into the room. There was one medic on the Ambu bag, breathing for the patient. Two more helped push the gurney. They lined up to the ER gurney and started to coordinate the transfer, all the while one of them spouting off the patient report. Only Walt had a hard time hearing the man once he caught a look at the woman on the bed. Dark hair was matted with blood, her face stone white with high, cut-up cheeks and full lips that circled around the tube.

She looked like Dakota. It wasn’t the woman he was spending his off hours with, but this woman could be her sister.

“She was unconscious on scene with bystander CPR. She had a pulse when we arrived. Blood pressure is dropping 80 over 42 with a pulse of 135, occasional PVCs.”

Walt moved in once the patient was on the gurney. He listened to her lungs, didn’t like the gurgling he heard on the right. Was equally unhappy with the sound on the left. “We need X-ray to jump in. I need to see what’s going on inside her chest. John,” he called to the nurse. “Pull two chest tube trays.” Walt methodically moved down her body, her pulses were thready, her body looked like she was run over by a car and not just thrown. The laceration on her scalp went from ear to ear, exposing more of her skull than he cared to see. “Do we know how this happened?” he asked the medic.

“We found her on the other side of a barbwire fence.”

“Second line is in, Dr. Eddy,” Valerie said while she attached an IV bag of Lactated Ringers. “Labs are on their way. We have four bags of O negative on standby.”

The radiology techs pushed in and shoved a plate under the patient as gently as they could.

“Her temp is 96.5, Walt.”

“We need to warm her up, but not too fast.” Her head wound had lost a lot of blood, but was only a trickle at this point.

Before radiology could snap a picture, the monitors started alarming.

Everyone turned, saw the rhythm of the patient’s heart. V-tach.

The woman who was not Dakota, but looked so much like her Walt had to stop glancing at her face, had just lost a functioning heartbeat.

Four units of blood, one chest tube, three rounds of CPR, and one hour later, his patient lost her battle. They never managed to get her to the OR.

He pulled off his gloves, his soaked gown, and slippers, dropping them in the contaminated waste container by the door. After washing his hands, he went through the department to take a moment in the doctors’ room.

“Walt,” one of the nurses who wasn’t in the trauma room called out.

He turned, knew what to expect. “Smith’s CT is back, labs are on his chart. The child on eighteen has finished his Albuterol treatments and his fever is down—”

He lifted a hand, stopped her. “Five minutes, Deb.”

The ER was packed, patients in the halls, ten deep in the lobby. Some moaned, some coughed, some bled. But all of them were breathing, except one.

He never made it to the doctors’ room.

“Dr. Eddy?”

He didn’t want to respond, but the hospital chaplain wasn’t someone he could ignore.

“Mrs. Comer’s family is in the chapel. John is ready to go with you.”

Mrs. Comer’s husband couldn’t be any older than Walt. He jumped when the three of them walked into the room. Fear, anguish, and dare Walt say, hope, filled the man’s eyes.

The chaplain introduced them and Walt delivered the news no one ever wants to hear.

Chapter Twelve

He lurched from his bed, his heart pounding too fast. “Fuck!” he swore to the empty room. The images of Dakota mixed with the fading memory of Vivian . . . and Mrs. Comer. Damn it, he hadn’t brought his work home with him in years. Now, two days after the trauma, his head kept going there.

He kept seeing Dakota dead, felt the heartache of another doctor telling him she was gone.

The clock by his bed said two thirty. The hotel shades he’d placed over his bedroom window blocked out the daylight after a graveyard shift, but his body knew it was sleeping at the wrong time.

Giving up on sleep, he pushed out of bed and slid into a pair of pajama pants. His refrigerator was pathetically bare. Dakota scolded him the first time she saw it. “One week supply minimum, Doc. The only thing you’re prepared for is a ball game.”

“Don’t underestimate the game,” he’d told her.

He finished the milk with the tail end of a box of butter crunch cereal.

He couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Yet he hadn’t called her in three days. He was being a coward, he knew . . . but life was so fragile and he didn’t think he could handle losing Dakota. Not to death.

He’d cared for Viv . . . but the growing pressure in his chest every time he thought of Dakota was so much larger, and that scared him.

The threat of loss kept his dates with other women to only a few and then it was time to move on. So why had he broken his own rules with Dakota?

“Back off, Walt,” he told himself. “Slow down.”

What he needed was a distraction. Space and time away from the woman who had forced her way into his thoughts every damn day.

He moved to his small office and removed his new cell phone from the charger. Sure enough, Dakota had sent a text.
I’m told that sexting always ends up on the Internet, so just imagine the picture I want to send. Call me when you wake up.

His palms itched with the desire to hear her voice, take her up on her obvious invitation. Instead, he listened to the voice message blinking on phone.

“Eddy! It’s Klein.” Dr. Klein was one of his colleagues with Borderless Doctors. “BD is looking for a full-time doctor to coordinate staff, train, and be first on scene. I thought of you. Call me.”

Instead of calling Dakota, Walt made a detour.

The same blinking cursor had mocked her on chapter fifteen for a full day.
What comes next? What comes next?

Dakota checked her phone for the fifth time that hour.

She gave in and let a call go through.

Walt’s voice told her to leave a message. “Hey, Doc,” she attempted to sound unaffected by his sudden absence in her life. “I’m calling to see if you’re still breathing.” Which wasn’t a lie. A part of her worried something awful had happened. A bigger part of her worried that he wasn’t calling her, texting her, for an actual reason. She didn’t add anything else to her message before hanging up.

Her eyes started to blur and her head started to pound so she gave up on
what comes next
and turned off her computer.

It was after six when her phone buzzed. She jumped, like a teenage girl with a one-way crush. And that pissed her off. When had she become so needy for a man’s attention?

Still, she smiled when she saw Walt’s face appear on her screen. “You’re alive,” she said when she answered.

“Yeah. Sorry. I’ve either been working or sleeping.” His voice was flat and the background was filled with noise.

Was it too demanding of her to suggest a text, a quick call? Was admitting she worried about him too big a step? Channeling her latest heroine, Dakota found her backbone. “You know, Ace, a text between shifts so I know you’re alive isn’t a time-intensive activity.”

He paused. “I know. My bad.”

My bad?
What are we, sixteen?

“I’m at work. Picked up a shift,” he told her. “I’m going out of town for a few days. Didn’t want you to worry.”

There was a definite chill in his voice as he rattled off his incomplete sentences. “Is everything OK? Any natural disasters I haven’t noticed happening in the world?”

“Nothing like that—”

Dr. Eddy?
Dakota heard his name called over the phone.

“I’ve got to go. I’ll let you know when I get back.” Not
I’ll call you
, not
we’ll get together
. . . just a
let you know
.

The back of her throat tightened. “Fine. Be safe, Doc.”

“Yeah . . . you, too.” Then he hung up.

What the hell just happened?

“Did he tell you where he’s going?” Mary asked from across the table.

The pizza between them was getting cold. The go-to food for a breaking heart would normally work wonders. Tonight, the thought of eating mushrooms and pepperoni wasn’t sitting well with her. “No. Just that he was going.”

“Maybe he’ll call you later with details.”

“He won’t. I’ve heard this before, Mary. He was cold.”

“Hmm . . .” Mary hummed over the bite of pizza. “How does that make you feel?”

“Like shit. Like I’m being dumped.” Dakota picked up her whiskey and downed the glass. Even that tasted like crap. “Don’t turn that psych shit on me. I need my friend, not the therapist.”

Mary dropped the pizza on her plate. “I know. I’m sorry. With me, you get both. I don’t know how to turn it off.”

“You’re supposed to tell me I’m overthinking this, or call him a dumbass. His loss. Anything.” Damn the moisture gathering in her eyes.

“You’re not overthinking this and you have the right to feel hurt.” Mary placed a hand over hers and squeezed. “If Walt is dumping you, then he is a dumbass. A dickless asshat who can’t even tell you. And if I see him again I’ll tell him that.”

“Yeah.” She hated tears. Hated them. But her friend was finally getting it. “Dickless asshat.” Dakota tried to laugh but failed.

“He might have a reason—”

Dakota snapped her hand away. “No psych shit. Stick with dumbass, counselor.”

“Fine . . . but—”

“Mary! I’m warning you. I’m wallowing and need you to wallow with me.” Dakota moved to Mary’s fridge, opened the freezer. She grabbed the ice cream that Mary never did without before pulling a spoon from the utensil drawer.

“Wow, you really are wallowing. There’s lots of refined sugar in that, Dakota.”

“Yeah, well . . . tonight I don’t care. A proper sulk needs ice cream.” She ripped off the top of the carton and dug straight into the mix. It hit her tongue and the smooth texture melted in her mouth. “God, this is good.”

Mary was staring at her.

Dakota shoveled in another spoonful. “I need to stock up on this.”

Mary’s hand stopped Dakota’s from devouring another bite. “Dakota, you’re scaring me.”

“It’s this or whiskey.”

Mary let her hand go.

“I thought so.”

San Antonio was hot, humid, and just this side of a smoldering death. But Donald Klein had arranged this meeting at the central headquarters. A place where the weather, albeit sucky in the summer, seldom had issues the rest of the year.

Walt was 1,200-plus miles away from California . . . from Dakota.

He thought of texting her, calling her, daily. He didn’t.

He listened to Donald’s proposal, met with different members of Borderless Doctors, and went through a lengthy interview process.

Juggling an ER job full-time while taking on this charge wouldn’t be possible. Yeah, he could moonlight, but anything other than a temporary fill-in for his current job wouldn’t work.

When Walt had first started with Borderless Doctors, he knew he wanted more. He loved the ER, loved the autonomy of walking away from his patients at the end of a shift, learning from them, and moving on.

What Donald was suggesting sounded perfect.

He could live anywhere so long as an airport was nearby. And with the Fairchilds on board with emergency flight plans, Walt could take his pick of locations.

So why am I hedging?

Because being a nomad, someone without any roots, shook him. Running off to the next disaster always had an end. Taking this job without a home base would feel a lot like being on a constant rotating coaster . . . chaos.

“Can I be honest with you?” Donald asked over the dinner they were both enjoying on Walt’s last night in Texas.

“I would hope you know to be honest by now.”

“I thought you’d already be signing the contract.”

Walt placed his fork down. “I’m seriously considering it.”

“What’s keeping you back?”

“Nothing,” he lied. “I want to consider everything. Now, tomorrow . . . ten years from now.”

Donald ran a hand over his bald head. “Really, Walt? Do you have a crystal ball? Who the hell knows where any of us will be in ten years?”

Walt released a short sigh. “You’re married, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How does what we do interfere with your family life?”

Instead of answering, Donald sat back and regarded Walt. “There’s a woman?”

“Maybe.”

Donald laughed, picked up his knife and fork before continuing to eat the prime rib on his plate. “We both know what it means to be away during a disaster. We focus on what has to happen, what we need to do during the time we’re knee-deep in crap so deep we can’t see. Finding a woman to share your life who understands that, and doesn’t hold it against you, is key.” Donald plunked a chunk of beef between his lips and started to chew. After a few seconds he continued. “You and I were born of the same cloth, Walt. We don’t do normal. As much as you tell yourself you hate graveyard shift, you show up night after night and suck it up. If you didn’t have to go in, there would be nights you’d be staring at the walls.”

Walt shook his head. “Three a.m. sucks if you don’t have a drink or a woman under you.”

“You’re not that shallow.”

His memory moved to Dakota . . . three a.m. with her was worth everything.

Damn it! Why couldn’t he shake her?

Walt dug into his food. “How long before Borderless Doctors wants an answer?”