Damage Undone

Chapter 5. Wake-Up Calls





Romano slammed into the ER, noticing vaguely the falling faces of the desk clerks when they saw him. “Maria Tucci, LOL, just brought in,” he demanded without ceremony.

“Trauma One,” Frank said sullenly.

He made himself walk, not run, with desperately long strides over to the room where his mother was.

The message on his machine had been brief and less than friendly, since he wasn’t beloved by the staff of his mother’s hospital any more than by the staff of his own. “This is Josephine Taylor,” the head of the hospital had said. “Your mother fell while she was trying to get out of her wheelchair, and she hit her head. She’s being brought to Cook County General in an ambulance. You should get down there right away.”

The door of Trauma One opened to reveal Carter working on his mother. Of all the doctors available, she had to end up with some kid who’d been a resident for about twelve years? “Out,” Romano barked. “I’m doing this one.”

“I’ve got it, Dr. Romano,” Carter protested.

Romano rounded the edge of the gurney to look down at the pale face, made whiter and pastier by the harsh light. “Give it to me and go,” he snarled.

Cowed, Carter rattled off her stats. “Maria Tucci, brought in from her nursing home after a fall. Eighty-three-year-old woman, blunt head trauma. Apparent dislocation of the hip and multiple leg fractures. BP 100 over 60, pulse-ox 90.”

“Page Corday,” Romano said, beginning a quick examination. “Leg is shattered. We should operate right away.”

“Corday’s not on call,” Carter ventured.

“Get her anyway,” he growled.

Carter started to argue further, but seeing Romano’s gritted teeth, he lifted his hands. “Okay. Okay.”

Ignoring the petulant looks from Carter, Romano switched into doctor mode, forgetting that the shattered leg, the closed eyes belonged to a person he knew and recalling instead the vast stores of knowledge he needed.

After only seconds of impassioned labor, he heard Carter come back in again. “What?” he growled.

“She’s not answering her pager.”

Romano looked up at the pale challenge on Carter’s face. “Once she’s stabilized, I’ll take her up to the OR and handle it from there. You can go, Dr. Carter.”

“Well, thank you,” Carter muttered under his breath as he left.

*

Susan was sound asleep on the couch again when the phone rang.

Late night phone calls frightened her with their vast possibilities. Without even thinking, she picked up and said, “Hello?”

In the short, shocked pause that followed her answer, she realized where she was. Mark’s house. At –she checked her watch—midnight.

And who else would it be but Elizabeth? She waited, savoring the feeling of idiocy, for the caller to identify herself.

The voice on the other end came as an utter surprise. “Dr. Lewis?” it asked.

She winced. “Dr. Romano. Hi…”

“I guess I don’t want to know what you’re doing at Greene’s house. Don’t even bother with the locked-out-of-your-apartment story. I need to get in touch with Elizabeth right away.”

“This better be good,” she sighed.

“It’s a helluva lot better than anything you’re going to be able to come up with,” he retorted. “She’s not answering her page.”

Susan sat up with a groan of protesting muscles. “Is this about a patient?”

“Yeah. Can I assume she’s not in on your little… colleague bonding session and ask for her hotel number?”

“Dr. Romano, it’s really not—”

“I said, don’t bother. Just get the goddamn number,” he said. “Please.”

“Okay, I have it,” Susan said. “Got a pen?”

“I’ve got a brain. Just say it.”

She recited the number quickly and added, “And whatever you tell Elizabeth, let her know I answered from the phone on the couch.”

“Do I get to hear who’s on the couch with you? Because I’m fascinated.” He was hardly invested in the slam this time; his sarcasm was weary, reflexive.

“Just tell her the truth.”

“I’ll let you do the telling, if your conscience is that guilty,” he said. “The messenger always gets shot.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll see you in the morning, Dr. Romano.”

“Sweet dreams,” he answered pleasantly.

*

Elizabeth had been dreaming about food.

Eating, rather. The food was an appendix. Stale, standardized, a backdrop to the drama of life at boarding school. Her dreams had begun to revolve around her adolescence every night since moving to the hotel. She’d decided it was due to the alienation of being away from home; the dislocation was very similar to her early, wretched days at boarding school.

But the phone rang, drawing her back into adulthood. She groped for the receiver on the wrong side of the bed at first, then remembered where she was.

“Hello?” Her voice was scratchy.

“Why the hell aren’t you answering your pager?” said Romano’s voice.

“I didn’t even hear it,” she said, checking to see – yes, she’d missed three pages. “I’m so sorry. I had it right here.”

“I need you in the OR. Now. Eighty-three-year-old woman with a shattered leg.”

“What happened to Edson? I’m not on call.”

“This isn’t a case I want him working on.”

“Look, I just went to see Peter, which I shouldn’t have been asked to do in the first place, and now you’re calling me out of bed for something you could quite easily handle yourself—”

He cut her off. His voice was strained. “If I could handle it myself, do you really think I’d be on the phone practically begging for your help?”

She paused. “No.”

“I need you in the OR,” he said, returning to brusqueness. “That’s the end of it. If you’re not able, I suppose I’ll call Edson.”

“No. No, I’ll come.”

“If the kid’s a problem, Yosh will take care of it.”

“Ella’s a she, and Yosh is a nurse, not a babysitter.”

“Isn’t it the same? Look, I’ll have something arranged. Just bring her over.”

“I’ll call the nanny and get her to stay with Ella tonight. I’ll be there in thirty minutes; can you start without me?”

“I think I’ll manage okay,” he said dryly.

She didn’t bother answering.

“Thank you, Elizabeth,” he added, his tone lower, just before she hung up.

*

Susan’s watch beeped to wake her two hours before her shift. She wanted to strangle it, or use it to strangle herself, but she desperately needed to get home and put on something clean. A shower would be good, too.

She crept upstairs to see how Mark was doing. To her surprise, her soft knock brought a clear answer. “Susan?”

She opened the door. He was still in bed, staring up at the ceiling, already awake. “Morning,” she sing-songed.

“Morning.”

“How long have you been up?”

“A few minutes.”

Susan sidled inside, taking only a few pace sand then stopping. “I have to tell you something,” she said.

Hearing her tone, he sat up with some effort, leaning against the headboard. Susan could see his ribs sharply outlined through his skin, another inescapable reminder. “What is it?”

She came closer, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I did something incredibly stupid last night. Romano called for Elizabeth’s number, and—”

“You answered the phone,” he filled in.

“I’m so sorry. I was sleeping, not even thinking.”

He sat up. “Don’t be sorry. I know Elizabeth’s been sensitive about you coming back, but we didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No,” Susan agreed hesitantly.

He noticed the look in her eyes. “Of course, I don’t remember how I got up here,” he joked. “Or how my shirt came off. So maybe I’m a naughty adulterer and don’t even know it.”

She laughed. “Oh, Mark, you couldn’t be naughty if you tried.”

“I know,” he said amiably.

“–Do you really not remember talking to me last night?”

“No.” His eyes searched hers, wide and warmly brown. “Why, what did I say?”

“Nothing important,” Susan murmured. Then, louder, “Except that you were going to work today. Which I’m sure was just radiation-induced hallucination on your part, right?”

“I want to keep going like always,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t want to slow down.”

Ruefully she touched the back of the thin hand lying on the bedcovers. “I know. You want to pretend nothing’s wrong.”

“That’s not it.”

“Yes it is. You do it all the time; you always have. It’s one of your more endearing flaws.” She sparkled a little at him, wanting to kiss away the childish, joking pout that her teasing brought to his face. “Now. Let me call the hospital and say you’re sick.”

She’d already picked up the telephone when Mark snatched it out of her hand. Giggling, she tried to grab it back, but the game ended too quickly – he couldn’t move fast enough to elude her grasp, and her laughter faded when he blanched with the effort of roughhousing.

Soberly Mark put the phone back on the hook. The prickling behind Susan’s eyes told her to make an exit quickly and gracefully. It wasn’t her place to grieve so intimately, to watch him die. She’d expected sadness, but not like this, twisting and wild and uncontainable, too much to feel for a mere friend.

“I need to go home and freshen up before work,” she said hastily. “I’ll see you later.”

He lifted his hand wanly. “Later.”

Emerging from the spacious, melancholy house into a cleaner, brighter morning, Susan decided to forget about last night. Maybe the old affection had returned for a moment on his part and a new, tentative attraction had arisen on hers. Well, the combination of empty houses and lonely nights and impending death could wreak havoc with anyone’s psyche.

But once she’d silenced her inner voices, new trouble arrived in the form of Carter. According to her own verdict that last night had been innocent, Susan openly told him where she’d been last night.

He was different than the boyish John Carter she’d known before Suzie and Chloe and Arizona and Paul Sobricki intervened in their stolid little lives. Now capable of anger, of irrationality, of coldness, he was an adult, and underneath her sarcastic quips, she started to chafe at his particular brand of querulous, demanding maturity.

She told him Mark was like a brother, uncomfortably conscious of the first open lie she’d told in ages; even played the Abby card, which made scarcely a dent in his jealousy.

They went to work and, because it wasn’t enough that she was dealing with Carter and the background threat of Romano, a tall blonde dominatrix happened along and earned Susan a sexual harrassment class the next day, along with three other miscreants, and Carter.

*

Romano slumped out of the OR ahead of Elizabeth when they’d finished patching up their elderly patient.

She followed him, pulling off her scrub cap as she did. “Robert?”

“Nice work, Lizzie,” he said.

She waited for an added comment, something slightly more cutting – more like Robert – but he just gave her a tight half-smile, and a nod. It had been like this all morning: he was terse sometimes, polite others, but he didn’t speak other than to talk about the medicine. She was so unused to his silence that it put her on edge.

The surgery had started out difficult, so precarious that Elizabeth fully expected the patient not to survive. Romano had worked with intense concentration, even when it was clear the procedure was going well. When Babcock remarked on a scrap of gossip about a couple of X-ray technicians, Robert snapped at him to shut up.

They stood awkwardly in the hallway. “Way to start out the morning,” Elizabeth finally said with a small sigh. Her eyes felt watery and glassy from lack of sleep.

“Well, you never quite got a good night in,” he said. “I wish they timed these things better, but you can’t stop the masses from hurting themselves at night.”

He reached around to the back of his own neck, kneading the muscles with a wince on his face, the tendons in his arm straining as if to burst from his skin. Eyes fluttering closed, he rotated his head gingerly, taking in a deep breath.

“Are you ill?” she asked reflexively.

Taken by surprise, he opened his eyes. Even recently, when the dynamic between them had been so much more charged and – yes, almost intimate – than usual, this kind of friendliness was an event between them. “I’m kind of wiped out,” he said. “Was it just me, or did that take forever?”

“Six hours. …I’ve seen you go eight or ten without flagging.”

“Felt longer than six,” he grunted, digging his fingers into sore muscles again.

“What’s going on?” she asked out loud. “You seem strange today.”

Romano’s eyes flicked open, meeting hers. Shaking his head, he opened his mouth to answer, but Elizabeth’s pager went off, and then his, in chorus.

They rushed together to the ER to deal with a schoolbus-load of kids that had crashed into a ditch. Elizabeth never got a chance to speak to Romano alone as she worked with increasing detachment on child after child. Her sleepiness enveloped her in a haze of apathy that insulated her from another mercilessly demanding day at work, even from the rare awkward moments when she came face to face with an equally sleepy-looking Mark.

That evening, when the last child was safely dealt with, Elizabeth signed her cases out to Jensen and called Chris to apologize for the overtime, but no one answered. They must be asleep already, she realized. She felt terrible. It had been twenty-four hours since she’d last seen Ella, and it might be morning before she saw her again.

On her way out, she passed post-op, where the patient from this morning, a Ms. Tucci, was resting. To her surprise, Romano was standing by the gurney, talking with apparent calmness to Shirley.

Elizabeth waited outside, watching him. The posture still aggressive, but also weary; the face grave and reserved. He must be ill, or why was he acting so human?

When he turned away from Shirley to leave, his eyes met hers through the window. She stayed still, solemnly returning the recognition in his face. His features were drawn, sharp, pale.

He didn’t break that gaze until he came out into the hall, finally allowing himself to drag his feet as he walked.

They faced each other. The silence weighed on Elizabeth. “She’s fine?” she said.

“Vitals are good. But there was a concussion, and she’s still unconscious,” he said. Then, with a sharp, rueful exhalation, “What a hell of a day.”

“What’s going on?” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you so involved?”

“I don’t know why you keep harping on this,” he snapped. “I want good surgeons working on good cases. That’s all.”

“Don’t lie. It’s me.”

His eyes flared into hers.

She stood staunchly, driving home her admission that she was, or should be, more than a colleague to him.

He opened his mouth finally, but only to speak through barely open lips, his voice flat as if to conceal how much he cared about her answer. “Are you busy tonight?”





Chapter 6: Unwind