High Country Nocturne - [50]
Sharon led me into a consultation room where an older woman in blue scrubs was waiting. She had a face that was both kind and had seen it all. Her identification tag read “RN.” I heard the door close.
Then I was sitting there with no memory of my body having moved from the elevator to this chair.
The woman said, “Your wife has a serious fever.”
I let out a heavy breath of relief. Lindsey was alive. How bad could a fever be?
I said, “I want to see her.”
“Talk to me for a minute, Mister Mapstone.”
I regained my fear and stammered, “She’s felt cold to me.”
“I know,” the nurse said. “That’s normal because of the shock and the blood loss.”
When she paused, I forced myself to take out a notebook and a pen. I wrote what she had told me, my shaky hand leaving the first few sentences looking as if they had been written in some strange, ancient alphabet.
“In general, fever is not altogether a bad thing,” she said.
“Is Lindsey okay?” What a foolish, immature question. I asked it anyway.
“No.”
“Sorry,” I said. “So, ‘not altogether a bad thing’…”
“Right. So far as fighting infection goes, it’s better for the body to run a little hot because the ‘bugs’ can’t survive above a certain internal temperature. So maintaining ninety-nine to a hundred-and-one degrees Fahrenheit is considered not out of the question.”
Her voice was calm and businesslike and I was screaming inside with impatience. If it wasn’t out of the question, what was the problem? But there was a problem, of course.
“She had a dirty wound,” the nurse said. “For the past hour, her temperature has been one-hundred-four. That’s dangerously high for an adult.”
I made my hand write. My letters became more intelligible.
“We’re using antibiotics and taking other steps to knock it down.”
I stopped writing and rested my hands on the table. “What if you can’t?”
“I’d rather think that we can. She’s a fighter and we’re helping her. She was healthy and is fairly young. It’s a much better scenario than if she had been elderly or in poor health.”
I wrote again like a dutiful student, which was ironic because as a professor I was suspicious of the ones that wrote down every word I spoke. I was pretty sure they weren’t getting the broader themes and most important points of the lecture, wrestling with them, thinking critically.
I put the pen down. Sharon took my other hand.
The nurse looked at me straight on. “You deserve to know that a very high temperature could be extremely serious, even critical, depending on whether the organism she has is, or is not, susceptible to the antibiotics.”
The hits kept on coming.
“Organism?” I asked.
“Some are resistant big-time.” She shot out some acronyms, some of which I had heard of, some not, none sounding good: MRSA, MERS, VRSA. “We have to rule those out.”
“I want to see her.”
“Not yet. Give us some time. We need to get the cultures back from the lab so we know what’s causing the infection. I’ll come and get you.”
Back in the ICU waiting room, Sharon asked me what she could do. I shook my head.
“Go home and get some rest,” I said.
“Let me stay.”
I didn’t answer.
After a few minutes, she stood, told me she would return in a few hours, and made me promise to call her if Lindsey’s condition changed. She didn’t ask about Mike and I was in no condition to debrief about what I had learned.
After Sharon left, I sat among four other bereft souls in the room, all as incapacitated with worry as me. The room was turbulent with a blaring television and the nearness of death. I thought of Kafka’s words, “The meaning of life is that it stops,” and I hated him for writing them.
After two aimless walks down the hall, I settled back in and slid low in the chair.
It was so wrong not to be totally concentrated on Lindsey. But I couldn’t even get in her room.
I felt like I was drowning.
To save myself, I called a criminal defense lawyer at Gallagher & Kennedy where we’d done work as private investigators. Before I got too far into my problem, Lindsey and national security, she stopped me.
“This is not something to discuss on the phone,” she said, and then sent me to her assistant to make an appointment.
I should have told Melton to go to hell and made this call instead of taking the badge. But maybe Strawberry Death would have broken into the house after we were asleep and killed us both. I was drowning in contingency.
It would be next Monday before I could see the lawyer.
Then I tried to sort other things out, the ones that didn’t involve secrets to the Chinese, dirty wounds, and deadly acronyms. Were she awake, Lindsey would save me from such situations.
What would she say now?
She might say, “What’s it all about, Dave?”
It was about…
Peralta and Cartwright, pulling off the diamond robbery and making it look oh-so-convincing by Ed being winged. They were both in on…what?
