Nick of Time (3 page)

Chapter Two

“H
i, this is Nicki. I'm either on the phone or I'm ignoring you. Leave a message, please.”

“Nicolette, it's Dad. I don't know what's going on, but please give me a call. Like, yesterday.”

She was gone. Poof. Without a trace. Carter could feel his face getting hot as his hands started to tremble. The hospital staff was falling all over themselves apologizing, but he was tired of hearing it. “Okay,” he said, silencing the three nurses. “There are only so many ways out of here. Let's get security looking for her.”

Okay. Absolutely. Brilliant idea. Clearly thrilled to have something productive to do, the nurses scurried off to put the plan into action. And the less face time they had with a lawyer, the better. There wasn't a hospital in the country that didn't look at lawyers as organisms only slightly less terrifying than Ebola.

Carter seethed. Nicki never would have dreamed of pulling a stunt like this if her mother were still alive. Jenny wouldn't have tolerated it. It had been her special gift to communicate with their daughter. In the quiet moments, he still wondered why God made the choices He had. Life would have been so much better for Nicki if He'd chosen Carter for His cancer games and left Jenny alone.

Carter kicked himself for not seeing the escape in the offing. It was exactly what she'd promised to do if he didn't agree to her terms. He just never thought she'd follow through. Her terms were the equivalent to suicide, for God's sake. He'd given her credit for being smarter than that.

He had to find her, and he had to get her therapy started as soon as possible. With the prostacyclin and a minor turn in their luck, she might be able to buy the time she needed to wait out the next donor.

So, where would she have gone? He spent a minute running through her options, but only came up with one: home. How sad was that? Ever since her grim prognosis was announced, Nicki's depression had manifested as an ugly rejection of all her friends and her hobbies, driving her instead to the impersonal interaction of the Internet and its endless chat rooms. God only knew what she talked about.

Carter called the house three times during his drive home, but to no avail. That meant one of two things: either she wasn't there, or she was dodging his calls.

Okay, there was one more possibility, but he refused to consider it. Suicide.

He pressed a little harder on the gas.

I don't care what happens to me anymore,
she had told him a dozen times.
It's my life and I'm tired of it. Just let nature take its course.
Those damnable adolescent platitudes on fatalism drove him up the friggin' wall.

What the hell did a seventeen-year-old know about life or living? For her, life was exclusively about the comforts—junk food, freedom, and the right friends. There
was
no world outside of suburbia for her. It would be years before she could realize how thoroughly her limited horizon blocked any view of the future. What seemed so bleak to her now might well be the gateway to great things. Momentary discomfort was the price of long-term good health, period. Why couldn't he make her understand that? Why was she so much more impenetrable than a dozen juries?

God, he missed Jenny.

Carter slid the turn onto the parkway, past the landmark diner that told him he was exactly six point seven miles from home.

For some awful reason, his mind had seized on the image of Nicki slitting her wrists. If that was how she chose to do herself in, there'd be no stopping the bleeding. Not with the Coumadin on board.

“Stop it,” he said aloud.

Nicki needed a mother, a confidante. He tried to fill those shoes, but every attempt at a father-daughter chat somehow turned into a cross-examination. His was a world of facts and logic, Nicki's was one of emotions and feelings. How was he supposed to deal with that? A couple of decades ago, when he'd signed on for this parenthood gig, he'd never in a million years thought that he might have to go it alone. With a daughter.

He sped past the Alabaster Dam on his right. Four point four miles to go.

It had been twenty months, almost to the day, since Jenny had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, thus beginning the longest, most relentlessly awful period of Carter's life. Two months later, just after Thanksgiving, she was dead. It felt like no time at all, the cancer equivalent of being hit by a truck, and whatever genius had devised the platitudes about grief diminishing with time had no clue what he was talking about.

Back in the happy days, Carter and Jenny used to chat glibly about what each of them would do in the event of the other's death. Jenny made him promise to let her go first, because she said she'd never be able to find another man, and he'd find a new wife in a heartbeat.

In a heartbeat. The irony brought a lump to his throat. There was only one heartbeat that he cared to hear again, and Carter prayed every night that she could somehow return to him. It was silly, he knew, but it was all he had.

He navigated the hairpin curve at Waples Mill. Three point eight miles to go.

In Nicolette's mind, she became an orphan when Jenny died. Those two were different sides of the same brain. They could think each other's thoughts, complete each other's sentences. Now, she found herself facing her own mortality without an ear she was willing to talk to. No wonder she was so depressed.

Nothing about Carter's relationship with Nicki had ever been easy, but it tore him apart to be shut out of her pain. The only person she was willing to open her heart to was the psychologist who charged a hundred twenty bucks an hour for the privilege.

He slowed for the stop sign at Clatterbuck Road, then gunned the engine. Three miles. He called her cell phone again, left another message.

In the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, Carter should have seen Nicki's impending illness long before he did. She'd had no stamina, no energy for anything but sleep. She'd allowed her grades to slip. Because it had started at the height of Jenny's illness, Carter had written it off to normal, ordinary depression. Besides, teenagers were
always
tired, right?

Working on the assumption that it was all about the depression, he didn't even take her to the doctor till February, almost three months after they'd buried Jenny. A diagnosis took four months: primary pulmonary hypertension, a gift from a pharmaceutical company that preyed on young women's desires to look like supermodels with physiques more suitable to the gulag than the runway. A death sentence.

Jenny had picked up on Nicki's binge-and-purge cycle four years ago and saved her life by whisking her off to a shrink. Carter had never had much tolerance for psychology or its practitioners—he'd always seen it as equal parts voodoo and bullshit—but God bless him, the doctor's counseling had turned her around. To Nicki's horror, she'd even put on a few pounds.

Then came Jenny's Cancer. The Big C. Within a month, between the chemo and the radiation, there was barely enough life left in Jenny to power a smile. A few weeks later, she was dead.

Suddenly, with the speed of half a finger-snap, Carter and Nicki were all alone together. Father-stranger, meet daughter-stranger. It was like trying to turn on a light when no one had connected the wires. All they shared between them was the desperate need for Jenny to somehow reenter their lives.

Carter took the bridge at Wilson's Creek way too fast. If there'd been a car coming the other way, there'd have been no survivors. As it was, he was only a mile from the house and accelerating even faster.

Nicki's relapse, it turned out, had been inevitable. In Nicki's mind, the doctor explained, recovery had been all about pleasing her mother. In the tangled non-logic that defined so much of psychology, Jenny's death had relieved Nicki's obligations to the get-well contract. “Surely you must have seen the warning signs,” the doctor had observed. “Some kind of abnormal behavior.”

Right. Nicki's behavior hadn't resembled normalcy since she was twelve. Besides, Carter would have been looking for all the wrong signs.

This time, instead of bingeing and purging, Nicki turned to diet drugs obtained from friends. Carter knew nothing about them, of course, but if he had, he might actually have approved. They'd have seemed like a good compromise: Nicki would eat
something
and keep it down for the whole day, even as the drugs reduced the size of her appetite. The diet drug was two drugs, actually, and taken together, according to the popular media—hell, according to the evening news—the results were truly amazing. People shed unwanted pounds, seemingly without side effects. Why wouldn't that have been a good thing to try? If it would have improved her consistently sour attitude, he'd have tried anything.

But there
were
side effects. Deadly ones. Primary pulmonary hypertension, PPH for short, thickened the tiny vessels in the lungs. This thickening, or “hardening,” in turn caused the pressure in those vessels to increase, causing blood to back up in the rest of the body as the cells awaited their turn to pass through the narrowed passages. The biological chain reaction that resulted took a half hour for the doctor to explain, but the time would come when Nicki's lungs would no longer be able to sustain life.

The average life expectancy from diagnosis to death was eighteen months. The average waiting time for transplants was twenty-four to thirty months. Do the math.

At first, Carter had refused to believe it. Doctors were a dime a dozen, for heaven's sake. He'd figured he could keep shopping till he found a physician who told him what he wanted to hear.

But the decision was unanimous: a bilateral heart-lung transplant was her only hope for long-term recovery. In the end, Carter decided on a multipronged approach. He'd wear the damn pager for the transplants, but he'd also keep pressure on the doctors to try something new.

No matter what the literature said, come hell or high water, he was not going to let Nicki die.

God forbid that Nicki might make it easier. She was so pissed off that her regularly scheduled teen years had been interrupted by illness that she'd turned downright recalcitrant. She just wanted it all to end, she'd said. Life wasn't worth living if it couldn't be lived on her terms, and long hospital stays for experimental procedures were not on her agenda. She wanted movies and pizza, not EKGs and intravenous drugs.

With five hundred yards to go before his street, Carter eased the Volvo down from eighty and hoped that he wouldn't spin out in the turn.

Carter's house on Berwick Place in the Westgate subdivision was identical to fifty percent of the homes in his neighborhood. The builder had designed exactly two interiors for his houses—both center-hall colonials, but one about $75,000 more expensive than the other—with half a dozen exterior elevations for each. The effect to the casual passerby was a wide variety of charming, 2,200-square-foot brick-and-siding homes. The homeowners' association saw to it that the lawns stayed trimmed and green, and that nobody dared to install chain-link fences.

Carter jerked the Volvo to a halt in the driveway, nearly forgetting to turn off the ignition as he dashed to the front door. His heart sank when he found it locked. Nicki
never
locked the door when she was home, despite his repeated demands that she do so. Nobody would try to do harm to a prosecutor's daughter, she'd say with a smirk.

His key found the slot and he threw open the heavy door. “Nicki?” he called. “Nicki, where are you!”

No answer.

“Nicki! Are you here?”

Still, no answer.

Wheeling from the kitchen, he charged back through the foyer and up the stairs to her bedroom. “Please God,” he prayed, “let her be okay.”

* * *

Nicki made the one phone call she needed to make, then turned her phone off. She'd silenced the ringer while in the hospital room, so as she looked at the Nokia's display, she was surprised to see that she'd already missed five calls from her dad. So he knew. The clock was ticking.

She swung around in the backseat of the cab for the thousandth time to check out the back window to make sure no one was following her. As stupid as it sounded, this was the first time she'd ever been in a taxicab. It all felt so daring and adventurous. Now all she had to do was keep her cool. It wasn't the time to get jittery.

And no one was following. Duh. She hadn't broken any laws; why should anyone be following? She settled back into her seat in time to catch the taxi driver watching her in the rearview mirror. She smiled.

Now you've made him remember you,
she thought—a violation of Brad's cardinal rule of evasion. How many times had he told her that? A hundred? No, five hundred. It was the keystone to her getaway plan: just blend in and always walk.

Wait till he found out that she'd actually put the plan into action. He'd be shocked.

Almost as shocked as her dad.

The first step in the plan was easiest to remember: cash. Not credit, not checks, but cold hard greenback money, the last nearly untraceable source of spending.

As they pulled into the center of Pitcairn Village—the chamber of commerce was lobbying to have the name changed to Olde Towne Pitcairn in hopes of spurring a tourist trade—Nicki leaned closer to the cabbie and pointed to a building up ahead on the right, past the Lewis and Clark memorial that marked the center of the square. “Could you pull in there for a minute, please?”

“Where? At the bank?”

“Yes, please.”

Nicki had the door open a second after the vehicle pulled to a halt. “I'll just be a second,” she said. “Do you mind waiting?”