John Lutz - Lightning

Another doctor in a green gown appeared, this one a slight young woman who appeared to be of Indian descent. Carver tensed his body and gripped the crook of his cane to stand up, but the woman crossed the room and said something to the gangly man. He looked stricken as he rose from his chair and followed her from the waiting room and down the corridor in the direction the woman and the other doctor had gone.

Carver didn’t at all like the way this was going.

A long time passed, even according to the clock on the wall. Two nurses entered the waiting room, sat side by side in plastic chairs, and exchanged copies of papers from folders they were carrying, then left. Later an elderly man wearing work clothes came into the room, glanced at the TV, then at Carver, and sat down on the sofa. He leaned sideways as if reaching for his wallet but instead pulled a paperback book from his hip pocket, crossed his legs, and began reading intently. Carver got only a glimpse of the title: something about angels.

“Mr. Carver?”

Carver looked up to see the surgeon, the one with the badly wrinkled green gown who’d left earlier with the woman, standing near him. He was a weary-looking, fiftyish man who would soon be as bald on top as Carver but for now combed his hair sideways in a pathetic attempt to camouflage his gleaming scalp.

As he parted his lips to ask Carver’s identity again, Carver nodded. There was a lump in his throat that made him afraid to try his voice.

The doctor, whose name was Galt, according to the plastic tag pinned to his gown, understood and smiled.

“Beth’s going to be okay,” he said.

Something heavy and dark seemed to shift from Carver. He leaned back in the chair with relief and wiped at his eyes with his knuckles.

Dr. Galt looked around, then at the cane leaning against Carver’s chair. “Want to come with me?”

Carver nodded and stood up.

He followed the doctor down the corridor to a small, neat office with a desk, an extra chair, and a small, round table with a vase with artificial flowers in it sitting precisely in its center. There was no sign of the woman or the young man from the waiting room. Carver sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Dr. Galt sat on the edge of the desk and crossed his arms. There was a window behind the desk. Carver could see numerous birds fluttering in a tree on a patch of grassy ground near the parking lot. It was a happy scene, another world.

“How seriously is she hurt?” Carver asked.

“Concussion, and we picked some broken glass out of her.” Dr. Galt paused. “And a badly bruised hip and abdomen.” He stared at Carver uneasily, with a tired compassion.

It took a second for what he’d heard to hit Carver full force. Hip and abdomen! “The baby?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carver. She lost the baby.”

“You’re sure?” He knew it was a stupid question even as he spoke; the words had simply slid out from between his lips.

Dr. Galt treated it like any other question. “Yes. We’ve already done a D and C. We had no choice.”

Carver listened to his own breathing for a while. “Does she know?”

“Not yet. She won’t be conscious for at least another few hours.”

“Because of the anesthetic?”

“No, we used locals on her. She hasn’t yet regained consciousness from the blow on the back of her head and the trauma from whatever struck her pelvic area. We surmise a heavy object or piece of debris propelled by the force of the explosion hit her there. That might have been the impact that sent her out through the glass doors, where the paramedics said they found her. All her cuts are superficial, needing only a few stitches to close some of them.” Dr. Galt studied Carver for a moment, then forced a smile. “The thing is, Mr. Carver, she’s alive. You might have lost them both.”

Carver swallowed. Beth was alive. But the baby . . . again, like her first pregnancy.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carver. I can tell you it’s still possible for her to bear children. That’s something.”

“Something,” Carver agreed. He was sweating. The room was cool but he could feel his clothes sticking to his flesh.

The doctor straightened up from where he was perched on the edge of the desk. “I’d better get back to my patients. You going to be okay?”

Carver nodded and stood up, leaning on his cane.

“I’ll have the duty nurse tell you what room Beth’s going to be in. Check back in a few hours and you can go up and see her.”

“Have they found out anything about the explosion at the clinic?” Carver asked.

Dr. Galt shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it other than that it was lethal. Two dead, two injured. We’re going to have to amputate the other injured woman’s lower right leg. She’ll lose her foot and most of her ankle.”

“We should count our blessings, is that the message?”

“We really should do that, Mr. Carver. Every day.”

“Beth didn’t even have to be in that clinic.”

Dr. Galt held the door open for him. “Usually none of us really has to be anywhere.” He shook his head sadly. “Still, things happen to us.”

The only thing in the hospital cafeteria that looked remotely edible was the salad. Carver used tongs to place some in his plastic bowl, got a cup of coffee from a nearby self-service urn, then paid the cashier. He found a table off by itself near the single row of windows that ran the length of the cafeteria.

He wasn’t really hungry, but he knew he had to eat, both to keep up his strength in case there wouldn’t be a chance later today, and to pass the time. So he dutifully chewed forkfuls of lettuce and sipped coffee between bites. A group of women were clustered around the table closest to him, apparently employees chatting about hospital gossip on their lunch hour. Beyond them sat two men in white uniforms-nurses, Carver assumed. They were eating quietly. One of them was studiously reading a folded newspaper. Most of the other tables were occupied by one or two people, friends or relatives of patients, reading paperback books or staring pensively at nothing while they ate, wondering and worrying. At the far end of the cafeteria, on the other side of a low railing, sat several doctors in suits and ties. Carver recognized one of them from earlier that day when the man was wearing a surgeon’s green gown.

As Carver returned his attention to his food, he noticed the gangly young man from the Emergency Department waiting room. He was seated at a table near the wall opposite from where Carver sat. There was no food on the table, only two cans of soda and two white foam cups. Sitting across from the gangly youth was a slim woman with short, curly black hair, a ballerina’s long neck, and dark eyes. She was wearing white shorts and a white blouse, what in other surroundings might have passed for a tennis outfit. She probably hadn’t seen thirty and had a very sweet, oval face of the sort seen in cheap religious paintings. Her expression was one of compassion, and she seemed to be trying to console the young man, leaning toward him and talking earnestly, once even patting his hand.

The man suddenly seemed to sense Carver staring at him and glared over at him. Carver quickly looked away and concentrated on his salad. It embarrassed him to intrude on someone else’s grief, to the point where it was sometimes even awkward for him to express sympathy. He was a private person and didn’t like his own emotions trespassed upon. “Out of touch with his feelings,” a female friend had once said of him. But he knew it wasn’t that at all; he simply assimilated grief and other powerful emotions gradually as he adjusted to them-perhaps because he was more sensitive than his friend the amateur analyst.