Lucidity

Chapter 12 - Light of Day

Vincent always started his morning by checking on his sickest patients. And right now there was no one on Peds more critical than Alex Weiss.

But Vincent was smiling as he pushed open the door to Alex’s room. He’d finally been able to convince the ethics committee to place Alex on the list for a heart-lung transplant and waiting in his in-box this morning had been a message that UNOS had approved Alex and made him Level 1, the highest priority. Vincent couldn’t wait to tell Alex, to be able to offer the boy something besides comfort measures. He grabbed the clipboard from its hook beside the door and went inside.

Then stopped. A woman lay beside Alex in his bed, her arm snuggled around the boy’s shoulder, his hand entwined in hers as if he was grabbing onto a lifeline.

What the hell? Who had allowed a stranger into his patient’s room? Vincent dropped the clipboard to the bedside table and stalked over to the side of the bed where the woman slept, the side of her face cradled against the top of Alex’s head. Night and day is what they looked like—her long dark hair tousled against Alex’s blond curls.

“Hey, sleeping beauty,” Vincent tried to pitch his voice low enough that Alex wouldn’t be disturbed. No answer except for the soft snuffle of stereophonic snores.

“You’ve got to get out of here or I’m gonna call security,” he continued. Still no response. But then, anyone who could sleep through the noise of a hospital ward must be a sound sleeper. He wished he could sleep that deeply. Before the Nguygen case, he could.

He touched the woman’s bare arm. Who had given her a set of scrubs? Did she work here? He didn’t recognize her.

A stray beam of sunlight slid through the window, casting her profile into relief. Vincent stopped, caught by the secrets the light revealed.

She might have been beautiful once—but something had happened. The light exposed thin whispers of scars lining her face. One angled through one eyebrow and across her forehead, another through her cheek and upper lip. They’d been expertly repaired but now that he was looking Vincent saw that bones had been broken as well; one cheekbone was slightly higher than the other. She shifted and the blanket slid from her right arm. Both arms were crisscrossed with scars. A gold wedding band and emerald engagement ring circled the fourth finger of her left hand.

The only time he’d ever seen injuries like these was after some sonofabitch had thrown his wife through a plate glass window. The sunlight grew stronger now, glinting off a row of surgical staples closing a fresh laceration in her scalp.

Vincent backed away. She’d gone back, let the sick bastard do it again! Why did women do that?

He remembered his college girlfriend, Mona. Well, at least he’d thought she was his girlfriend—she kept going back to her ex, a lacrosse player who would torment her, drag her down, and then beat her senseless and kick her out. She’d end up on Vincent’s couch for a few days, igniting his hope that this time she’d see what was going on, stay for good, then one day he’d wake up and she’d be gone again. Finally he went to confront the bastard—only to have Mona call the cops on him and try to hit him with a lamp before they came. He’d fled, vowed never to get involved with anyone that needy again. He’d never heard from her again until he read in the paper that she’d married the lacrosse player.

Probably was still letting the guy use her as a punching bag. He knew you weren’t supposed to blame the victim, but the way Mona kept leaving him, going back for more—that spoke of some fatal flaw in the psyche.

So, how had this refuge from the woman’s shelter ended up in his patient’s bed?

He was about to shake her awake, demand answers, when the door was flung open and Kat Jellicle flew in.