Which he would. After he gave WISH one last chance. In a couple of hours he was scheduled to make a presentation to the executive committee. The prospect of going to them, hat in hand, galled him but if he could prevent one child from going through what Kenesha Washington had, the effect would be worthwhile.
A knock on the side of the van broke into his thoughts, and he turned to see Dora Matsushita, one of the social workers in the unit, peering through the open door.
“I thought that was you I saw loping across the parking lot.” She held up a bag of oranges. “From my tree. It’s a bribe.” She winked. “I need a few minutes of your time.”
“Ah, sure, I can always be bought with oranges.” With a grin, he bent to take the bag and help her into the van. Dora had a bit of the rebel about her, a quality he admired. When they first told him to phase out WISH, he’d ignored the injunction, rounded up a small volunteer staff and taken the van out himself. Dora had been behind the wheel. A small, spare, fiftyish woman, she was a shrewd assessor of character, as quick to set straight a muddleheaded administrator as a young father.
“I want to talk to you about this little fifteen-year-old girl,” she said.
He listened, frustration building. Twice that week he’d been warned about admitting new patients, told that one more infraction would result in his dismissal. That threat didn’t trouble him as much as the knowledge that WISH would almost certainly die without his involvement.
“I’d like to, Dora. I’m not sure I can. We’ll know later this afternoon.” He told her about the upcoming presentation. “It’s the last hope we have. I’ve got all the supporting data, all the clinical documentation—”
“Oh, Martin.” She shook her head. “Facts and figures aren’t going to do it. Show some emotion. There’s a rumor up in the unit that you’ve got two temperatures, ice cold or—”
“Boiling over.” He shrugged. “I know, I’ve heard it all. So what should I do then, break into a chorus of ‘Danny Boy’?”
“WISH is your baby.” She ignored his attempt at humor. “Your passion. No one who didn’t care would put all the effort you’ve put into it. Let it out. Let yourself feel. Show the committee how important the program is to you.”
He turned away and stared through the dusty window and out to the windswept parking lot. An image of Kenesha’s face, contorted in a silent scream, filtered through his brain. Dora might be right, but emotional expression wasn’t his specialty. He turned to look at her again, shifted uneasily under her steady gaze.
“I was just thinking,” she said after a moment. “About these girls that come through WISH. By the time we see them, they’re usually right on the edge. They can go one of two ways—completely destruct, or get their lives together and find some peace.”
She paused and in the beat of silence, he heard the distant wail of an ambulance. He rolled the manila folder into a cylinder, unrolled it, tapped it against his chin. Without moving his head, he raised his eyes up at Dora. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, her expression impassive.
“Before they can find that peace and move on, they have to drop all the baggage they came in with,” she said. “Let go of who they thought they were and what they thought they knew.” She waited a moment. “I suppose, in a sense, you might say that something old has to die for something new to be born.”
DORA’S WORDS still rang in his ears as he walked into Western’s main lobby, but the sight of all the fake snow momentarily distracted him. Piles of it, flocking the branches of a massive Christmas tree, piled in drifts upon window ledges, heaped upon the roof of the Santa’s cottage. Streamers of sunlight shone like a benediction, filling the lobby with tropical warmth. Underneath his lab coat, the scrub top stuck to his back.
Unbidden, a memory of that last Christmas in Belfast surfaced. Sharon had wanted snow, and late on Christmas Eve, the rain had turned to a sleety mix that frosted the rooftops.
A voice beside him broke into his reverie, and he turned to see a tall, green-eyed woman with a glossy plait of brown hair. She had a wide, sensuous mouth and the fresh pink complexion of a child. Something about her seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place where he might have seen her. He saw her eyes widen as she read the name embroidered above the pocket of his lab coat, but as she started to speak, the employee choir, cued by a visibly perspiring Santa, broke into a loud rendition of “Frosty the Snowman.”
His mind back on WISH, Martin started to move away, but she caught his arm. Tiny charms hung from the thin silver bracelet she wore: a baby’s rattle, a gingerbread house, children’s toys. Her nails were short and unpolished.
“Dr. Connaughton.” She brought her mouth closer to his ear to be heard above the music. “Catherine Prentice. From Public Relations. Lucky coincidence, huh? I’ve paged you a whole bunch of times, left messages up in the unit and suddenly here you are.”
“And here I am.” He looked directly into the light green eyes of Catherine Prentice from Public Relations. “Will wonders never cease?”
Her face flushed pink. Arms folded across her chest, she returned his level stare.
“Actually, you mispronounced my name.” Even as he corrected her, he wondered why it mattered. “It’s Connotun not Connaughton. There’s no accent in the middle.”
“I’ll remember that.” A flicker of a smile. “Dr. Connaughton.” This time she pronounced it correctly. “That’s an Irish province, isn’t it? Connaught?”
“It is,” he said, surprised she knew of it, “Connacht in Gaelic. It’s in the west. A bit of a barren place. Have you been there then?”
“No, but my grandfather’s from County Sligo. He used to tell me all these stories. He said Connacht was so rocky and desolate that Oliver Cromwell’s men gave prisoners the choice of death or exile there.”
“To hell or Connacht,” he said, inordinately pleased by the exchange. “That was the term.” Her eyes weren’t exactly green, more of an aqua. Unusual color. And there was something different about one— He realized he was staring.
“Anyway…” With one hand, she flipped the long braid of hair back over her shoulder. “You didn’t get any of my pages?”
“I did, but I ignored them.”
“Shame on you.” She fixed him with a reproving look. “People like you make my job very difficult. Consider yourself lucky I’ve got the holiday spirit.” As she brushed a strand of hair from her face, the silver bracelet slid down her arm, lodged at her wrist. “The thing is, I’ve also got a producer breathing down my neck. Do you have a couple of minutes?”
“No, I don’t.” If this had something to do with the press, he wanted no part of it. His one-and-only encounter with reporters still gave him nightmares, and he had no desire to repeat the experience. “I need to check on a new admission and after that I have to be somewhere else. Sorry.”
Before she could respond, he plunged into the crowd and bolted for the elevator.
CHAPTER TWO
MARTIN LET the white noise of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit wash over him, waiting for it to restore some degree of equanimity. All around him, the sounds and sights of technology. The gadgetry brought in to rescue when the natural process went awry. The hiss and screech of ventilators. Machines that pumped and pulsed and calibrated. Electronic monitors with their waves and spikes and flashing signals. Delicate, intricate and complex all of it, but a damn sight easier to deal with then human emotions.
Martin