Critical Condition (2 page)

She dared a step inside. Jerry sat in his bed, on top of the beige blanket, wearing his Steelers sweatshirt. There was no food on the wall or window, no soft restraints on his wrists to keep him from throwing things, and the nurses hadn’t confiscated his “real” clothes or slippers, so it must be a good day. As good as days around here got since the shooting, anyway.

Normally it would be Jerry, a detective with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police and consummate people-reader, who would have picked up on these little details, not Gina. But then nothing had been normal, not since a hired killer had almost killed both of them and ended up shooting Jerry in the head.

Everyone except for Gina seemed to have forgotten that first part, that she’d been targeted too, but she hadn’t—how could she?

Snuggled alongside Jerry was Deon, the ten-year-old great-grandson of the hospital librarian, Emma Grey. Deon had adopted Jerry for his own a few months ago after they’d first met. Emma sat beside the bed, in the visitor’s chair in front of the window, knitting something bright and colorful and most definitely not beige.

The windows, opaque with frosted snow and fog from their breaths, reflecting the overhead lights, added to the home-for-the-holidays glow. Deon held a picture book open and was reading aloud from
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
.

More like the hit man who stole Christmas,
Gina thought. But if Jerry was having a good day, she’d fake some New Year’s cheer. Odds were he wouldn’t remember or realize her efforts, but it was important to keep the peace.

After working a twelve-hour shift in the ER, she was long past due for some peace. Although the ER had been reasonably quiet for New Year’s Eve—except for a deluge of car accidents caused by the arrival of the snow this afternoon. But then things had slowed down for most of her shift as the city waited for the plows to work their magic, slow enough that her boss, Mark Cohen, had let her leave a half hour early. He knew she was dividing her time between the ER and Jerry, but as an emergency medicine resident, Gina didn’t have the luxury of being able to take the holiday off.

The overhead fluorescent lights reflected off the fresh scar tissue crossing from ear to ear over the top of Jerry’s shaved scalp as he nodded in time with Deon’s words, following the little boy’s finger as it traced the words, scrutinizing each letter, searching for a key to hidden treasure.

If the shooter’s bullet had been a centimeter in any direction . . . Gina shivered away her fear along with the memory of bullets, blood, and her own screams.

She busied herself hanging up the garment bag, removing her shearling coat and shaking the snow from its shoulders before draping it over the door handle while they finished the story. Jerry didn’t seem to notice the tears streaming down his own cheeks as Deon closed the book. He didn’t notice Gina either.

“Happy New Year’s!” Gina called out gaily, placing a bottle of sparkling cider on the bedside table.

“Gina’s here!” Jerry shouted.

As if he’d never expected to see her again. He always greeted her with the same startled expression whether she’d been gone fifteen seconds or fifteen hours. She couldn’t help but wonder if he totally forgot she existed in between.

His smile was brilliant, piercing her heart. With joy that he was alive. With fear of what could have been. Heart-break that in many ways, she had indeed lost him anyway.

Then he followed with the same greeting he gave every woman who walked into his room: “Where’ve ya been, sunshine?”

Emma, one of their many friends who’d been helping out since the shooting, bundled up her knitting. “Happy New Year’s, Gina. He’s having a good day today, aren’t you, Jerry?”

“So I see,” Gina said. “Did he have dinner yet?”

“He wasn’t hungry and then he took a nap, so no.” Emma straightened the stack of books that lay at the foot of the bed. Mostly children’s picture books. Before the shooting, Jerry had been the one reading to Deon—he’d been reading the boy
The Lord of the Rings
, censoring out the “gory” bits, although they both knew that Deon was sneaking peeks so as to not miss anything juicy.

“What happened to the hobbits and orcs and that big, slimy spider?” Gina asked Deon.

Deon squirmed, then, to Gina’s surprise, hopped down from the bed. He avoided her gaze as if caught in some kind of betrayal.

“No mood,” Jerry answered her question, using the clipped shorthand that colored his speech now. He reached for the tumbler of water at his side. He made two attempts, missing both times. Deon expertly snagged the glass, adjusted the straw, and held it up to Jerry’s lips in one well-practiced motion.

Jerry frowned and shook his head, refusing to drink. “Headache. Go ’way.” His speech was as blunt as a two-by-four. He lay back on his pillows and closed his eyes, dismissing them all.

Deon joined his Gram, taking her hand in his. “He can’t read anymore,” he whispered to Gina, shuffling his feet as he tattled the awful secret. “I miss the old Jerry. He promised to take me hiking, teach me how to use the compass he gave me, show me how to take pictures of the animals and stuff. When is he coming back?”

Same question Gina had been too terrified to ask herself. She dredged up a new smile, lowered herself to crouch at Deon’s eye level, and offered him the same clichés the neurologists had given her. “It takes time, Deon. Healing takes time. And sometimes”—her words snagged and she had to swallow before finishing—“sometimes people change. But he’ll get better.”

She stopped short of making a promise she couldn’t keep. Deon pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, too smart to blindly believe. Gina would have applauded his skepticism if she didn’t need so badly to believe herself. She pulled him into a hug, denying the tears she was desperate to shed. He too-quickly squirmed free.

“Hey, before you go, I found a Christmas present for you.” She’d finally had the energy to face Jerry’s ransacked apartment and, while sorting through the debris, had stumbled across a bag filled with gifts. She hadn’t had the strength to unwrap hers, but no sense not giving Deon his. She handed him the box. Jerry had wrapped it in crime-scene tape—which somehow didn’t seem so funny anymore.

Deon eyed it with suspicion, hefting it. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Jerry got it for you.” Gina shoved her hands into the pockets of her cardigan and looked over at the bed. Jerry was now asleep. One of his frequent catnaps that had replaced normal sleep. Sometimes he’d fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, only to wake a few minutes later confused and combative, trapped in the memory of fighting for his and Gina’s lives. “It’s okay, he won’t mind if you open it.”

“Can I, Gram?”

“Of course. As long as you don’t forget to thank Jerry later.”

“I won’t.” Deon eagerly shredded the tape, exposing a pocket-sized digital camera. “Wow!” He turned the box around, already immersed in the directions and list of features. “Zoom! Look, Gram!”

“What do you say?”

Deon threw his arms around Gina. “Thank you, thank you! It’s the best ever.” His voice dropped into a whisper. “If Jerry doesn’t get better, maybe I can teach
him
how to take pictures again.”

“I think he’d like that.” If any part of Old Jerry had survived, it was his artistic vision. The one activity that seemed to calm him was scribbling with crayons and markers, delighting in combining them to create kaleidoscopes of vibrant color.

“We’d better go before the roads close with the snow,” Emma said with a glance out the window.

“I heard they were pretty bad. Be careful.” Gina stood, then noticed the Dr. Seuss still clutched in Jerry’s hand as he slept. “Don’t you want your book?”

Deon didn’t even look back. “Jerry can keep it. He
is
still my friend.”

Out of the mouths of ten-year-olds. Gina watched the door close behind them, tried not to envision a prison door clanging shut, trapping her with her beige future.

She sighed and turned back to the bed, then started. Jerry lay perfectly still with his eyes now open, watching her warily. How much had he heard?

New Jerry was paranoid when people whispered around him. New Jerry hated being talked about. Hated it more that even when he was a participant in a conversation, half the time he couldn’t remember it five minutes later. And New Jerry really, really hated being reminded of his shortcomings.

She freshened her smile for him as she rearranged the get-well-soon trinkets and flowers arrayed along the windowsill, simultaneously sliding them all out of reach of his throwing arm. “I’ll get your cane and we can go for a walk.”

He grunted at that—he felt self-conscious, stumbling through the hallways leaning on a three-footed cane for balance. “No. Too many people.” Jerry flung his hand toward the snow-frosted window. “I want to go out.”

“There aren’t really that many people. And you don’t want to go out in this weather. They say this storm might grow into a real blizzard. The entire city is pretty much shutting down.” Gina was prattling, but New Jerry wasn’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist.

He said nothing, just kept watching her, a stranger who wore Jerry’s face like a Halloween mask that slipped and wrinkled in all the wrong places.

“Want my gun.”

New Jerry was only nineteen days old—and had spent the first three of those in a coma. His gag reflex still wasn’t working properly, so he couldn’t handle anything more solid than oatmeal without triggering a coughing fit. He was easily frustrated, especially when he couldn’t ignore his new clumsiness and inability to perform simple tasks that used to be automatic, like adjusting a toothbrush to the right angle while looking in the mirror. He couldn’t sleep and alternated between outbursts of tears, laughter, fury—sometimes all three at once.

Words and faces and entire chunks of his life had been lost to him, maybe forever. He remembered Gina but had forgotten their engagement, and seemed to have blacked out most of the shooting, except for when he dreamed. Yet he constantly asked to see Lydia Fiore, the ER doctor who’d been the real target of the hit man.

And his gun, he wanted his gun back; he would retreat into a glowering silence for hours if she didn’t let him have it.

Gina blew out a sigh that left a steam cloud floating on the window, obscuring her reflection. Her dark skin was dull and had lost its shine, her braids were haphazard, her eyes appeared bruised. The woman in the window was a stranger. She drew Jerry’s Beretta from her sweater pocket—it was unloaded, of course—and handed it to him. He grabbed it greedily, clutching it like a security blanket. For the first time since she’d entered the room, his face relaxed, a glimpse of Old Jerry—
her
Jerry—winking into sight.

Then it was gone once more. “Lydia?”

Never once did he ask how Gina was—ask about her own nightmares and lack of sleep and outbursts of tears, laughter, fury. So totally unlike Old Jerry who had cherished and protected her, solved her problems, vanquished her fears, and wrapped her in Kevlar.

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” she said, forcing a laugh, hoping it disguised her anger. If it weren’t for Lydia, he wouldn’t be lying here, both their futures in shreds. “I’m sure she and Trey are home celebrating.”

“She’s okay?” He frowned as if Gina’s words made no sense. As if Lydia hadn’t come by to visit him every morning since the shooting. “Sure?” He scratched at his scar and the stubble of dark brown hair growing back on his shaved scalp. “I need to—can’t remember—”

“She’s fine.” Her words cracked through the air between them. “Forget about Lydia. Let’s work on getting you up and moving.”
Getting you back to normal,
she wanted to say but didn’t.

She ducked her head to reach for his slippers under the bed, hoping the movement hid her fear: Life would never be normal again.

He ignored her as she knelt before him, guiding his feet into the slippers. Cradling his gun, he rubbed it as if it were Aladdin’s lamp, waiting for a genie to emerge. “Don’t know,” he whispered, clutching her shoulder, his gaze skittering around the empty room, searching for enemies. “Not safe. Out there.”

“It’s okay,” Gina lied. She stood and wrapped her arms around him, gun and all. “I’ll keep you safe.”

 

 

AMANDA MASON LEFT THE HOSPITAL CAFETERIA through the front door, clutching her prize: a large aluminum can clad in a black-and-white generic label. She paused for a moment, looking at the way the snow swirled over the glass walls and ceiling of the spacious atrium to her right. The snow was pretty, but she hoped it didn’t get any worse—she had big plans for tonight.

Turning her back on the atrium, she passed the auditorium and went to the rear elevator bank reserved for staff and patients, which usually moved a bit faster than the visitor ones. Although the elevators’ idea of “faster” left a lot to be desired. She was debating taking the stairs instead when she saw ER charge nurse Nora Halloran approaching from the hallway behind the auditorium, pulling on a jacket over the top of her scrubs.

“Can you believe how quiet it is?” Amanda asked by way of a greeting.

“The ER got a bit busy when the snow started, but we haven’t had a new patient in the past two hours,” Nora agreed.

Amanda noticed how her friend avoided the use of the Q-word—ER people were so superstitious. She herself missed the hustle and bustle that usually energized the hospital. This quiet was nothing less than eerie; it made her nervous, like the way the wind held its breath before a squall hit back in her hometown on the South Carolina coast. But Pittsburgh was home now, ever since she’d left the Lowcountry to attend medical school here four years ago.

“With the holiday and no elective surgeries, we only have four patients in the PICU. Rounds went by like lightning,” Amanda said. It was the last day of her pediatric ICU rotation but, despite the holiday, the PICU fellow had initially scheduled her to be on call. Which, with so few patients in the unit—and since as a medical student she was low person on the totem pole when it came to any interesting procedures—also meant sitting around doing nothing.