Cate Campbell (26 page)

He gave up trying to breathe. The pain vanished seconds later, and he felt suddenly light. Free. His chest didn’t hurt. His back didn’t hurt. The blackness receded, and around him the twilight glowed faintly golden.

Then, in the middle distance, as if someone had opened a window, he heard her. He heard a voice he hadn’t heard in nearly fifty years, and she was calling his name.

“Abraham! Oh, Abraham!”

The sweet, husky, familiar sound filled him with joy.

The telephone on Thea’s desk rang just as Margot was gathering her things, ready to go out to wait for Blake. Thea spoke into it, then looked up at Margot with wide eyes. “Margot. There’s been an accident.”

Margot had just pulled on her gloves. She strode to the desk, dropping her hat on the pile of invoices. She took the receiver from Thea’s hand and spoke into it. “What’s happened?”

“Margot.” Her father’s voice rumbled in her ear. “Blake crashed the car. Hit a tree, apparently, down near Jefferson Park. I don’t know if—I can’t imagine what they were doing there—but they’re both hurt. They’re at Seattle General.”

“Who’s the emergency physician?”

“What?”

By the strain in her father’s voice, Margot knew it must be bad. She was afraid to ask which of them was in real danger. “Who’s the attending physician, Father?”

“I—I don’t know. Can you just—”

“Where are you?”

“The hospital.”

“All right, I’m on my way. I want you to sit down, Father. Loosen your collar, and take deep breaths. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She gave Thea a swift explanation, and a moment later was striding down Post Street, pulling on her hat as she went. The evening traffic was heavy, and she doubted she could find a taxicab without calling for it first. It would be faster just to walk up the hill on her own.

She hurried, and in fewer than fifteen minutes she was walking into the hospital, stripping off her gloves and hat. The receptionist led her to where her father sat on a straight wooden chair outside the accident room, head in hands, elbows on knees. When he saw her, he grasped her hand in both of his and squeezed it. “Thank God, Margot. They made me wait out here. I was going to call Peretti, but then I thought—I thought you could find out what’s happening. Can you get them to tell you something?”

“I will,” she said. She circled his wrist with her fingers, and eyed his pale face. “Do you feel all right, Father? Dizzy? Short of breath?”

He gave her a wan smile. “Stop it, Doctor. I’m fine. Please go see how Blake is.”

A rush of cold ran through Margot, though she was so warm from her hurried walk. “Blake? I thought it was Preston.”

“Both of them.” Dickson ran his hands over his face. “Blake wasn’t moving. Or talking. He looked—” His voice broke, and he drew a rasping breath.

“And Preston?”

“He’s pretty banged up, but he was conscious. He drove Blake back to the city.”

“Preston can drive?”

“I don’t know if he can, but he did. They made it here. The car’s a mess.” He shuddered suddenly, a spasm that shook him from head to foot. “Oh, God. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t give a damn about the car.”

Margot pressed his hand. “You’re in shock, Father. It’s hard to say the right thing.”

Her father pressed his shaking hands over hers. “Go and see them, will you?”

“I’m going in now.”

“I should telephone Edith.”

“Yes. That would be good.” Margot helped him up, and he turned down the corridor toward the reception desk. She turned the other way, and pushed through the door into the accident room. It was a forbidding place, with its big sinks and glass and enamel cabinets. Steel surgical instruments ranged on countertops, with basins and jars and, in one corner, a bulky autoclave. Margot hurried past all of this to the four beds in the back. Preston, with a nurse bandaging his head, lay on one.

The nurse, a young, rather stern-looking woman with her hair pinned into a tight chignon beneath her white cap, glanced up at her as she approached. “Are you family?” she demanded. Margot saw the corner of Preston’s mouth twitch.

She said evenly, “This is my brother.”

“Well,” the nurse said crisply. “Dr. Miles has seen him. You don’t need to worry. He’s going to be fine, in time.”

One of Preston’s eyes was covered with cotton, and strips of linen bound his head. He had a sling over one arm. Gingerly, he turned his head to look at Margot. “It’s Blake,” he said in a sorrowful voice. “I’m so afraid—”

“Where is he?” Margot demanded.

The nurse said, “You mean the chauffeur? He’s in the colored ward.”

“Is there a doctor there?”

She raised her eyebrows, and Margot was sure that if she hadn’t been a head shorter, she would also have looked down her nose. “I wouldn’t know, of course. I don’t work on that side of the hospital.”

Margot bit back an irritated remark. She eyed Preston, and saw that his color was good, and the pupil she could see looked normal. She didn’t touch him, but nodded to the nurse. “I’m going to find Mr. Blake,” she said, emphasizing the
Mr.
She strode out the back of the ward, and started down the long corridor to the far side of the hospital.

She had been in the Negro wards of the hospital several times, when none of the Negro physicians were available. Most of her colleagues wouldn’t treat Negro patients, but the hospital staff had learned that Dr. Benedict had no objection.

This section of the hospital was understaffed. The corridors were deserted, and Margot only found the right ward by trying doors. When she opened the right one, she found the room eerily quiet.

Blake was the only patient, and he lay terribly still. Too still. Margot struggled to sustain a flicker of hope as she hurried across the ward.

Blake lay beneath a brown wool blanket. His face looked faintly gray, as if someone had dusted him with ashes. His eyes were closed, and his hands lay outside the blanket, one palm up, the other down. She touched the hand nearest her. The fingers curled blankly upward, and it was ice-cold. Freshly alarmed, she reached for her stethoscope, then realized it wasn’t in its usual place around her neck. She had left it behind at the clinic. She put her fingers on his wrist, and found his pulse thready and fast.

Her heart sank like a stone in a pond. She held Blake’s wrist in her fingers, no longer as a physician, but merely as a friend. A daughter. Someone who couldn’t bear to lose him.

A nurse appeared in the doorway and crossed to the foot of the bed. She was a dusky-skinned girl with enormous brown eyes and kinky hair pinned back beneath her nurse’s cap. She was small, nearly dwarfed by her voluminous white apron, and her voice was high and girlish. “Excuse me, ma’am—you do know this is the colored ward?”

Margot answered sharply, her voice edgy with fear. “I do. Is there no doctor?”

“Not right now,” the nurse said. “There’s only me. They carried this man here from the street, and I—I didn’t know what to do for him. I don’t even know his name.”

“No one told you his name?”

“No. They just brought him in and laid him here, and I was so afraid he would—”

“I need a stethoscope,” Margot said abruptly, to stop her speaking the thing they both feared. “And he’s cold. We need more blankets. Two, at least.”

“I’ll get them,” the nurse said. And then, with a hopeful expression, she asked, “Are you a doctor?”

“I’m Dr. Benedict.”

“Oh! I know your name.”

“Our patient is Abraham Blake. He works for my family.”

“Oh! Very good, Doctor. Good! I’ll be right back.” The nurse hurried to a cabinet, and came back with two more of the brown blankets and a stethoscope. As she spread the blankets over Blake, Margot put the earpieces of the stethoscope into her ears and pressed the bell to Blake’s chest.

Now she could hear the struggle of his lungs, rales and rhonchi all over the chest, and the irregular heartbeat she had already detected with her fingers. She took the earpieces out, and hung the stethoscope around her neck. “Does he have visible injuries?”

The nurse said, “I checked under his shirt, and I took his shoes off. All I can find is that bruise.” The mark on Blake’s forehead was nearly black against his dark skin, contrasting with the silvery gray of his hair. “They said he was in a crash.”

“Yes.” Margot gazed down at Blake’s gentle face, the full lips and prominent jaw, the high forehead. His cheeks sagged now, and she saw the wrinkles in them, pale threads like delicate cobwebs stretched across his dark skin. She had not noticed he was getting old, except for the grizzle in his hair. Feeling helpless, she pressed her palm to his cool forehead.

“Why is he unconscious, Dr. Benedict?”

“It’s his heart.” The worst possible news. Despite everything they knew about cardiac events and their symptoms, there was a paucity of steps they could take to address them.

“Is there anything else we can do?”

Margot glanced up at the nurse. She looked terribly young, hardly older than Loena and Leona. She didn’t look afraid, though her patient was very likely dying. She looked—curious, Margot thought. It was the way she had been herself, when she first began treating patients. Curious about what was wrong, what she could do to help, how she could ease their discomfort or repair their wounds. Margot said, “What’s your name, Nurse?”

“Church. Sarah Church.”

“Well, Nurse Church, we’ll want to hydrate him. We’ll see if we can get him warm, and we need to get the rest of his clothes off, make sure there are no injuries we’ve missed. Then . . .” Her voice broke suddenly, in a most unprofessional way, and she clutched at the stethoscope around her neck as if it were a lifeline. Then . . . what? She had to do something. She couldn’t give up. Blake needed her. He had no one else.

Nurse Church used scissors to cut away his trousers. Margot scanned his legs and ankles, probing them gently with her fingers. She found no trauma. The little nurse watched with interest as Margot palpated his abdomen, not finding anything unusual nor getting any response.

“He hasn’t moaned, Nurse, tried to move his legs, to speak?”

“No, Doctor. It didn’t seem right—that is, I didn’t think—” The girl’s voice broke off.

“What? What did you think?” Margot fixed her gaze on the nurse. She knew she was being abrupt, but Sarah Church seemed to understand. She was a courageous little thing, Margot thought. Any number of more experienced nurses could learn from her example.

Nurse Church drew a determined breath through her wide, delicate nostrils. She met Margot’s look with a level one of her own. “It didn’t seem right to me that he should be unconscious. The bruise on his head isn’t that big.”

“I see that.” Margot bent to gently lift Blake’s eyelids with her fingers. The pupillary response was normal, neither fixed nor dilated. She let his eyes close again, and smoothed the blankets over him. “His symptoms are contradictory, it’s true. Prolonged unconsciousness is not good, but no doubt you know that.”

“Yes,” Nurse Church said sadly. “It seems you were fond of him, Dr. Benedict. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” Margot understood the implication of the past tense, but she thrust the thought away. “Dr. Henderson is the cardiologist. Place a telephone call to him, will you? Ask him to come and see Mr. Blake as soon as possible.”

For the first time, the nurse hesitated to follow her orders. When she didn’t move immediately, Margot scowled at her. “What’s the matter?”

“Dr. Benedict—I don’t know if he’ll come.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

With an air of patience, as if speaking to a child, little Sarah Church said, “Dr. Henderson is white. He might refuse to see a Negro patient.”

Margot stared at her, thunderstruck. She was right, of course. Margot might think of Blake as a third parent, her protector, her precious friend, but to another doctor—a white doctor—he was just a Negro man. He was only a patient in the colored ward of the hospital. Dr. Henderson might consider that such a patient was neither his responsibility nor his duty.

A wave of anger replaced her fear. She looked down at Blake again, lying so deathly still beneath his pile of brown blankets, and she said firmly, “Nurse Church, stay with Blake, will you, please? I’ll place the call to Dr. Henderson myself.”

“Don’t worry, Dr. Benedict. I’ll be right here.”

Margot glanced back once as she hurried away, and saw Sarah Church chafing Blake’s wrists with her small hands. It was a simple gesture, even an old-fashioned one, but Margot approved. It might be all they could do just now.

At least, if Blake were to die in this moment, he wouldn’t be alone.

Margot found Preston sitting up in his bed in the accident room. His head was braced against the iron bed frame, his unbandaged eye closed. His bloodstained shirt was open to the waist, and there were bruises purpling on his chest. The stern-looking nurse hovered near him with a glass and a carafe of water. She gave Margot an indignant glance when she appeared, as if her territory had been invaded.

Margot approached the bed, ignoring the nurse’s challenging gaze. She eyed the pattern of marks on Preston’s chest and the angle of the wounds on his head. “What happened, Preston?”

He didn’t open the eye she could see. The nurse murmured, “Mr. Benedict was so heroic. Bleeding, injured—somehow he managed to get to the front door of the hospital, to get someone to come to the car.”