That Space In Your Heart

Chapter 5. Drops of Water, Rivers of Blood





The rain had started too soon. Elizabeth had taken Ella to daycare with her, planning to bring her home on the El. But droplets were pelting down the size of dimes and nickels, and Ella’s head was bare.

“Damn,” she murmured, standing just inside the door. She hadn’t even brought an umbrella to work, expecting the rain to begin later that night.

“Such language in front of your daughter!” chided the sarcastic voice from behind her.

Elizabeth turned and realized Romano had been standing there, looking out at the rain with her. She flushed – he had a point. “I didn’t know it would rain this evening,” she explained. “I’m hoping it’ll die down in a minute so we can walk to the station.”

“If it were just you, Lizzie, I think I’d laugh at you and go about my business. But I don’t have the heart to let Ella get soaked.” He ruffled the blonde ringlets affectionately. “Want a lift?”

“Are you driving your Jag?” Elizabeth queried, eyebrow arched.

“So you’re a closet materialist – I’ll remember that,” he said with a smile. “You’re in luck, the answer is yes. Well, technically the one doing the driving is Bill, the guy I hired to cart me around from now on.”

Elizabeth looked down, embarrassed to have made the slip. “Then let’s go, shall we?”

He nodded towards the door, but Kerry passed by and called Elizabeth peremptorily.

She tried to protest, but there was no arguing with a chief of staff who shouted for you and then left without listening to your excuses. “Robert, I should go see her,” she said with a rather unreasonable surge of anger at Kerry for … what? “You can go ahead, Ella and I will take the El.”

“I’ll wait,” he shrugged. “So will Bill.”

*

Ten minutes later when Elizabeth hadn’t yet made her reappearance, Romano decided to get something to keep him awake for the drive home. He had hardly slept since he’d come back to work, because the pain in his arm chased him into hideous, screaming nightmares when he finally escaped its hold long enough to drift off.

“Can I borrow a dollar?” said a deep feminine voice from his side.

He turned to see a woman, a girl really – no more than eighteen or nineteen – smiling hopefully at him. She had beautiful hair, golden blonde, straight and sleek; and enormous azure eyes in a round, strong-featured face. Little puckered creases at the corner of her mouth. Pale, smooth skin; a strong, substantial nose.

The irrational, deep-seated recognition nearly knocked Romano over. “Who are you?” he gasped.

She held out a hand he was almost afraid to shake, half fearing his hand might pass through her flesh like so much mist; but her grip was warm, firm, alive. “Carrie Lambert,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve been waiting here a couple of hours now, and I’m incredibly thirsty.”

“Uh –” Romano gathered his wits. She was only a patient who happened to remind him of someone. He wouldn’t let himself get so flustered – wouldn’t allow the old ache of defeat mingled with unacknowledged loss to rise in his throat. “No problem. Coke?”

“God, no,” she laughed. “I’m trying to be nice to my stomach, it’s been through quite enough. How about a Dasani?”

He obliged, and Carrie Lambert scooped his purchase from the slot near the ground. “Thanks,” she said.

After buying his Coke, Robert sat down next to her, keeping an eye out for Lizzie. “So, you’ve been waiting two hours?” he said. “I feel terrible.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Well, I’m supposedly the chief of the ER,” he confessed.

“In that case it’s entirely your fault,” she joked. “Actually, I’m not sure I’m such an emergency. It’s just a little stomachache. I’m only here because I had cancer awhile back, and I got worried.”

“Cancer,” he repeated. “Well, why don’t I work you up now?”

“Robert, I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth exclaimed, rounding the corner without warning. “Weaver wanted to talk to me about Fish and—”

She skidded to an abrupt halt when she saw who he was with. Her eyes met Robert’s, and they shared a momentary, tacit, pained sympathy. “I’m sorry,” she said, “am I interrupting?”

“No, I was just going to work up this young lady—” He had started to explain when Carrie coughed spastically, spewing blood over herself and Romano, then slumped over.

After a startled cry, he began instinctively to yell orders, to try to help. Screamed for a gurney, for a crash cart.

Inside a desperate haze, forgetting himself and his accursed arm – feeling it, in fact, at his side, made of flesh and blood, a psychosomatic limb as strong and functional as the real one – he became vaguely aware of the restrictive touch on his shoulder, trying to guide him away, to give room to the real doctors.

Elizabeth’s eyes were a deep, kind blue, gazing into his with warm concern, but her words were hasty and sharp. “Move aside, Robert,” she was calling. “Let me do this.”

Blindly he reached out for Ella, and, reading his thoughts, Elizabeth deposited her daughter in his firm one-handed grasp. As the gurney rolled an unconscious Carrie to Trauma, with Elizabeth running alonside the prostrate body and echoing his orders of a moment ago, Robert gathered Ella closely against him. With a blissful smile she wrapped chubby arms around his neck and rubbed her cheek against the scratchy five o’clock shadow on his chin.

*

Carrie was stabilized when Elizabeth handed the case off to Pratt and headed to chairs looking for her daughter.

Four years ago, she had stood over a face eerily like that one in the most bitter defeat of her life. A pretty, endearing face, round, a bit babyish, with oddly long lashes. And behind it a quick brain, an abundance of dreams and potential.

Across from her, with her, always near her, there had been Romano. His blunt lack of sentiment had been oddly comforting after the first go-round. Then, as their beloved patient crashed, they had argued without enmity or rivalry, his hands brushing her wrists and hips, a reassuring and supportive touch. In the last furious moments they had worked fluidly, seamlessly, like one surgeon with four hands.

At first it was Robert who recognized their defeat: his eyes met hers across the table in exhausted hopelessness, as he grimly waited for her to come to the same realization. He told her to stop: impassive, cool, he forced her into acceptance. But then he had broken, rebelling against the inevitable, and Elizabeth had only been able to choke out his name, reminding him of reality.

Give and take – back and forth – Lizzie and Robert. They had merged and blended for those few wretched hours, tasted with one sensation the bitterness of her death. The old harmony of that pairing, parallel and opposite at once, had taken on a new meaning in those final moments, and Elizabeth would never be able to hate her antagonist unreservedly again.

But did he hate her? After Carrie collapsed, he’d seemed to forget that he couldn’t be a doctor anymore. When a whispered warning from her didn’t work, Elizabeth had no choice but to pull him away. Then, seeming still not to hear her, he had looked up with black, inhuman wrath etched on his face.

She approached the chairs nervously, wondering how the unpredictable Romano would amuse her child. But Ella was laughing happily, chocolate smeared all over her face. As Elizabeth came nearer, Robert put down the bag of M&M’s he’d been feeding Ella with a guilty face. She smiled tiredly at the two miscreants, and Ella jumped up and ran towards her.

Robert wouldn’t look at her. The side of his neck and face was splattered with blood. There were more droplets on his hand. Odd that Ella wasn’t frightened; she hadn’t had the chance to develop squeamishness, what with all the things she’d witnessed when Elizabeth forgot for a moment to protect her.

“Is she okay?” he asked.

Elizabeth broke away from her reverie. “Stable. There was a bowel obstruction.”

He tossed the candy into a nearby trash can. “I figured. Ready to go?”

“Robert, there’s blood all over you, and chocolate on Ella. You’re both frightening to look at.”

“She was hungry.”

“It’s okay, I just think you should get cleaned up.” She took Ella’s hand and, beckoning to Romano to follow her, led them both to an empty exam room to wash up. A few vigorous swipes with a wet towel cleaned up Ella’s mess.

“Come on,” Elizabeth said, turning to him.

His expression was as difficult as always to read, but she knew its nuances intimately enough to detect his resentment. Knowing Ella’s presence would restrain his temper, she simply reached out to take his wrist and guide his hand under a stream of warm water. He trained his eyes on the pale pink ribbons of water and blood running off his hand.

“She reminded you of Lucy, too?” she murmured, squeezing soap onto his hand.

“I forgot she was dead when I saw her,” he said. His mouth tightened as she lathered his hand, allowing the suds to wash off in the hot, cleansing stream.

Elizabeth wet another paper towel and pressed it to the side of his face, the hollow underneath his cheekbone. “It was less than four years ago,” she said. “It seems like longer. So much has changed.”

“You’re telling me,” he said. At last he allowed himself to look directly at her, and she was stunned by the emptiness in his eyes.

His shoulders tightened as she began to wash the last traces of blood off his neck. Little rosy rivulets ran glistening down his skin, dipping and rising in the uneven texture of muscle and skin and tension and weakness. Elizabeth watched their path, afraid to look up and catch him as she had frequently caught him before, watching her with warm hungry eyes when he thought she wouldn’t see.

“I’m sorry that took so long,” she said abruptly.

“It’s all right. I’m glad—” He paused as she turned and threw the towel away, bending at the same time to lift Ella to rest on her hip. “I’m glad it was you taking care of her and not a bunch of incompetent ER docs.”

“Careful.” She could smile teasingly at him, now that her hands were safely removed from his throat and her daughter’s distractingly heavy body filled her arms. “You are an ER doc now.”

He groaned, making a funny rueful face at Ella just to hear her shriek with laughter. “Don’t remind me.”





Chapter 6: Certain of You