One Shenandoah Winter (14 page)

“That's terrible.”

“Yes, it is. Hard to believe Nathan Reynolds would give up a place like this and start over in our little town.”

Lines tightened and lengthened from Margaret's eyes and mouth. “He did not have much choice.”

“I'm not following you.”

The woman sighed herself to a stop. “There's a similar danger for a hospital administrator. We can come to feel that every day is a battle over money. We can forget we're dealing with lives here. And pain. And fear. And families with hopes and dreams and anxieties that spread out far beyond the confines of our little hospital.”

“Not so little,” Connie said, wondering at what she was observing emerge in the other woman. “But I hear what you're saying.”

“Yes, I believe you do.” She gave a quick smile and started off again.

The path led around a protective wall of shrubbery and brought them to a one-story brick building. Its glass entranceway was decorated with smiling suns and huge flowers and children's drawings. In front stood a gleaming jungle gym and seesaw and sandbox. Despite the day's cool sunshine, however, the playground was empty and still. The wind pushed a seesaw back and forth with a dreary squeak. The sight of that silent building and the empty playground drew a shiver from Connie.

“Miss Wilkes, Connie, you have asked me for details about Nathan Reynolds. There is only one way you would understand, and that is for you to walk through those doors. But I warn you, it is a positively terrifying place. I want you to be absolutely sure you are strong enough to learn the answers to your questions.”

Margaret Simmons waited, an implacable, determined, very focused woman. Connie looked from her face to the doorway and back again. The desire to turn and run was so great she could actually taste it. She started to speak but halted herself, for the woman's gaze said it all.

She took a deep breath, clenched her hands into tight little balls, and nodded.

“Very well.” Margaret Simmons walked over and pulled open the door.

Connie forced herself to enter. The determination that had carried her this far kept her going through the lobby, even though every further step was a struggle. Even though there was no air to breathe inside that large chamber.

The bright pictures and the music and the sunlight streaming through the glass doors did not belong here any more than she did. Nor did the smile which the receptionist gave them. “Mrs. Simmons, what a pleasant surprise.”

“Hello, Jill. This is Connie Wilkes. She's city manager of Hillsboro, the town where Nathan is now practicing.”

The woman's face brightened even further. “You don't say! How is Doctor Reynolds?”

“Fine.” Connie's voice sounded foreign to her ears, shaky and empty. “He's fine.”

“Oh, I'm so glad to hear it. He was one of my favorite people.”

“Jill,” Margaret warned, “come on, now.”

“Well, it's true,” the woman said stubbornly. “That man was the most caring individual I have ever met, when it came to our children.”

A new voice coming down the hallway chimed in, “You can say that again, sister.”

Connie turned to meet a large black woman with the same determined strength and intelligence she had found in Margaret Simmons's eyes. “Nathan's working in your town, that what I heard?”

“Yes. Yes, he is.”

“Well, you tell him Dolores said we miss him. All of us. The children most of all.”

“All right. I will.” How could these people be so cheerful? How did they have the strength to come in here at all? It was one thing to walk through those doors the first time. But to do this day after day, how was it possible?

Dolores offered her a warm hand. “Nathan is a gold-plated saint in my book. You can tell him that as well.” She gave Connie's hand a brisk squeeze, then turned away, calling, “I see you over there, Johnny. You hiding from me?”

A young voice said glumly, “It wouldn't do any good if I did, would it?”

“Not a bit. Come on now, the sooner we start, the sooner we finish.” She stood and waited for a too-thin waif of a boy to walk over. He had no hair. His scalp was bare save for thin wisps of blond-gray fuzz. He wheeled a metal stand holding a drip attached to his wrist as he walked. The wrist was so thin it made Connie's heart hurt just to look at it. Over in the corner a woman watched the boy walk down the hall with Dolores. A magazine rested opened and unread in her lap.

The receptionist said cheerfully to Margaret, “Anything we can do for you?”

“No, nothing. I just wanted to show Miss Wilkes where Nathan used to work.”

Connie wanted to say something. It was only polite. But she could not pull her gaze away from the woman seated in the corner. Her eyes stayed fixed upon the empty hallway, the place where her son had once been. Connie felt if she looked much longer into those red-rimmed eyes, she would never find her way out again.

She started down the hallway because Margaret Simmons took hold of her arm and walked her. “Our hospital is one of four or five in the country to have established such a clinic as this. We specialize in what is coming to be known as pediatric oncology. That is the new medical term for what goes on here. Nathan Reynolds specialized in cancers that attack children. Nathan came here straight from his residency at Sloan-Kettering. He was a prize. Even the senior doctors were amazed at some of the work he did, and those doctors are a hard-bitten lot.”

They passed door after door. Connie looked because she could not help herself. Every one of the rooms held a bed and a body too small for the bed. Most of them also held families. All the families held gazes that mirrored the woman in the reception area.

“But Nathan never could learn the vital lesson of separating his private life from his work. He never learned how to walk away and leave this behind, to keep that kernel of spirit and life set apart from what you see here. For Nathan, there simply wasn't anything but work. He gave himself to his patients. Heart and mind and soul.”

Margaret Simmons stopped in front of another door. The room held a single bed. An empty one. It should have been comforting to look in that room. But Margaret stared in there with an unreadable expression, and she said, “Oncology is an area of tremendous growth and opportunity. We are making enormous strides. Almost on a monthly basis we are seeing one breakthrough or another.” She paused a long moment then, her eyes gazing at the empty bed. “But the fact of the matter is, most of the children who come in here suffer through radical and experimental treatments, and then they die.”

The words held such a bitter edge that Connie found herself shivering again. Shivering and sweating at the same time.
Radical
. She could not look at the empty bed any longer.

“Nathan was responsible for two new treatments which have now become standards in the field. He worked not only on healing the children, but protecting them from pain. I can remember some nights, working late, coming down into the cafeteria and finding him poring over reams of scientific journals. And his face . . .”

The hard-edged professional exterior slipped for a moment as Margaret Simmons bit down hard on her lips. There was an instant of waiting, the only sound the murmur of voices from two adjoining rooms. Connie looked away, trying to focus on something, anything else. She found herself reading the signs that marched down the ceiling of the long hallway. Each one of them held such unknown terrors she had to look away.

“His face,” Margaret sighed. “His face carried all the pains and the miseries of what he was confronting in here.”

Connie wanted to stop the flow. Turn and walk away, or simply say the words,
That's enough.
But she was held by the moment and the place, in a grip as cold and firm as death.

Margaret drew herself upright. “Nathan Reynolds had a nervous breakdown. I could see it coming. All of us could. We tried to talk to him. We urged him to take time off, to go for counseling. We did everything but the one thing we should have done, which was to order him to leave. But the work he was doing, the work . . .”

Then it came. A sound from one of the rooms farther down the hall. A single whimper. A sound as clear as a shattering crystal bell. A voice murmured in response, a man's this time, full of love and pain all its own. And Connie knew if she stayed one instant more in this ward she would go insane.

She turned and started for the doors. She did not care what she looked like, fleeing from the cold shadows that gripped this place and squeezed it dry of air and light and life. She did not care. She had to get out.

She did not stop until the sunlight was bathing her in an elixir she wished she could take and pour straight into her bones. She heard footsteps come up and stop alongside her. She heard the now familiar voice say, “Nathan was in our mental-care facility on and off for eighteen months. When he came out, he was spent. Utterly spent. I brought him home with me for a while. He had become very close to both my husband and me. But Nathan is a doctor. He lives to heal. We had to find some way for him to practice, some place utterly removed from here and everything . . .”

“I understand,” Connie said. Finally. And what was more, “I feel like such a fool.”

“No, I'm the fool. I made such a botch of this. I tried to correct one mistake by making an even greater one.” Margaret Simmons's hand came to rest on Connie's arm a second time. But now her tone was pleading. “I wanted to give Nathan the chance of a fresh start, do you see? But that was hopeless. I should never have thrust him and his impossible manner into a town of utter strangers, and hope that everything would work out fine. I was blind. Totally blind.”

Connie opened her eyes. The light shone down upon them both. The unshed tears in her eyes softened this professional woman, making her edges shimmer and glisten. “You did what you thought was right. What else could you do?”

Margaret started to respond, then stopped herself. “What will you do now?”

“Go home.” Connie felt bereft, as though she had lost someone dear to her. She took a breath. “I'm going back to Hillsboro and I'm going straight to Doctor Nathan Reynolds and I am going to apologize from the bottom of my heart.”

Fifteen

N
athan found it strange to return to roads that went in a straight line.

He followed the directions to Charlottesville's university hospital. Thankfully the chief resident oncologist had heard of him and his work. Of course they would make time for the patient. Melanoma with possible lymphoma? Critical stages? Could they have a couple of students observe the procedure? Much obliged.

The hospital sat at one corner of the University of Virginia campus, more a part of the city than the university. Nathan had never been there before, but even so there was a sense of returning to his former stomping grounds. As he pulled into the parking lot, he sensed the old surging energy. Simply by being here he was fitting on the familiar armor, hefting the old weapons, returning once more to the battle.

Poppa Joe's reaction could not have been any more different. In the fading light of day his eyes looked washed of both color and certainty. He stood by the car and stared up at the building, and asked, “This thing here, it's important?”

“Absolutely vital.”

The old man gazed at Nathan across the top of the car. “Son, you ain't expecting to get me cured in there, now.”

“We're here for an examination.” He had rehearsed the argument while calling the university doctor. But to his surprise, the old man had fitted himself to Nathan's speedy departure, saying not a word as he had been shepherded out of the clinic and into the car. “We need to have some blood work done and a full set of X rays. We should be finished and on our way back to Hillsboro in a few hours.”

He might as well not have spoken. Poppa Joe told him, “Because I ain't worried about going Home. And that's the truth.”

“Fine.” Nathan came around the car, patted the old man on a shoulder solid as Hillsboro rock. “Let's go get this over with.”

As they crossed the lot, Nathan reflected that the air seemed thicker here. Dense and clogged with people and city smells. When they entered the hospital, instantly he was struck by the sharp odors. Poppa Joe stiffened beside him, his eyes open and alert and worried. Nathan gave his name to the receptionist, asked for her to ring the oncology department and let them know they were on their way.

Poppa Joe endured the examination with a detached calm which unnerved even the university specialist. He sat with his shirt off, erect and still while the nurse took blood and the specialist led his students through the cursory inspection.

The three medical students watched with the same kind of avid interest Nathan recalled from his own studies. It was almost a hunger, this desire to study and know and conquer. Only here they were inspecting a new friend. Nathan stood to one side and sensed his own internal fears and shadows congealing into another confrontation with the enemy.

Nathan forced himself to hold steady as the hospital's chief oncologist explained to the students, “Melanoma can be readily identifiable by the black irregular growth you see here below the rib cage. This scab you observe here is also typical, the bleeding lesion which refuses to heal cleanly. Unfortunately it is also extremely aggressive—observe the smaller secondary lesions here on the arm, another there by the collarbone, and here again on the right shoulder.”

Nathan remained by the far wall, watching Poppa Joe and finding himself struck by a flood of conflicting emotions. Every professional instinct told him he was acting correctly. Yet there was another voice speaking to him now. One that he had never heard before, not in these surroundings. And that voice left him feeling more ashamed the longer he stood and watched the old man.

“Would you raise your arms, please? Thank you. All right, observe here the protruding lymph nodes. And here, the blue striations, yes, this is definitely more than a simple response to internal infection.