Loree Lough - His Healing Touch

In the bright overhead light of the bathroom, he slid his wallet out of his back pocket. It required no hunting to find the article; he’d read it numerous times since…since the night that stupid, stupid prank went so wrong.

He looked at it now, reminding himself that the girl in the black-and-white photo had been twelve when the picture was taken. She wore braces, a ponytail, one of those dark-plaid, private-school–type uniforms. One look at those big, smiling eyes cinched it. The Kasey pictured here and the one in his kitchen, who’d made him laugh and smile—and mean it for the first time in years—were one and the same.

Why did life have to be so full of bitter irony? he wondered.

How much should he tell her, if indeed he told her anything at all? Was her visit here truly an accident? Or had she shown up for a reason?

He doubted that. He’d always been very careful to keep his identity a secret from the Delaneys, hand-delivering cash payments in the middle of the night, never at the same time of the month, so he wouldn’t risk having Kasey or her mother catch him making “deposits” in their mailbox.

It had started small, just ten dollars that first month, earned from his part-time job changing oil filters at the local lube center. Remorse-ridden that his cowardly silence had been partly responsible for a man’s death, for a woman’s widowhood, for a child losing her father, Adam had taken a second part-time job, upping the amount to twenty dollars the next month. And although the amount in the last envelope had increased to nearly a thousand dollars, the guilt hadn’t decreased.

“Hey,” she called, “you okay in there? Should I send up a 9-1-1 smoke signal?”

Adam slid the article back into his wallet and tucked the wallet into his jeans pocket. Heart beating against his rib cage, Adam did the breathing exercise that always calmed him before surgery. Smiling, he headed back to the counter.

“So,” he said, forcing a brightness into his voice that he didn’t feel, “did you save me any soup?”

She insisted he let her do the dishes, and he insisted right back. “Okay. All right,” she conceded. “But I’ll wash, you dry, since you know where everything goes…more or less….” And that’s how they ended up side by side in his tiny L-shaped kitchen.

Sharing this everyday chore with a virtual stranger felt good, felt natural, making Kasey wonder if she’d lost her mind somewhere between that field of flowers and this isolated cabin. In an attempt at rational balance, she tried to rouse some of the fear she’d felt earlier, when thoughts of murderers and robbers had her heart beating double time.

But it was no use. Rational or not, she felt safe with Dr. Adam Thorne. It didn’t seem to bother him, either, that as the minutes passed, neither of them had said a word. Kasey added “comfortable” to the things he made her feel.

“So tell me, what kind of medicine do you practice?”

“Cardiology.”

“In Baltimore?”

“I’m affiliated with several area hospitals—GBMC, St. Joseph’s, Sinai, Ellicott General—but my office is in Ellicott City.”

She looked up at him. “You sound like a TV commercial.”

He laughed at that.

“I live in Ellicott City, too. Small world, huh?”

Adam looked away suddenly. “Yeah. Real small.”

Kasey didn’t know what to make of the dark expression that accompanied what should have been an innocuous agreement. “So why cardiology instead of—”

The plate he’d been drying shattered on the floor.

“Careful,” she said, squatting beside him, “you don’t want to cut yourself.”

But he didn’t seem to have heard her. And his hands shook slightly as he reached for the fragmented ceramic.

She grabbed his wrists. “I’ll do that. You probably have surgery scheduled bright and early Monday morning. I’d feel terrible if you had to cancel, get your partner to do the operation, because you cut your finger on my sandwich plate.”

One side of his mouth lifted in a wry grin. “How do you know it was your plate? Could have been mine.”

“True, but it’d still be in the cupboard now if I hadn’t shown up. Now really, let me clean this up,” she repeated. “It’ll make me feel better about all the trouble I’ve put you to.”

When he hesitated, she put on her best “do as I say” look, hoping it would have more effect on Adam than it did on Aleesha.

Amazingly, it did.

“Do you have a dustpan?” she asked as he stood.

He pointed to a narrow door.

She pulled out a hand broom, too, then proceeded to sweep up the remnants of the plate. “What would you be doing if I wasn’t here?” she asked, eye-level with his worn hiking shoes.

“Watching something on TV, I guess.”

It was just a broken plate; the miserable way he sounded, a person would think he’d killed someone! “Then go watch something on TV. Pretend I’m not even here.”

The shoes—and their owner—hiked into the living room, and seconds later, the theme from the Channel 13 news filled the air.

When she joined him after cleaning up, he was in his recliner, TV listings in one hand, clicker in the other. Kasey sat on the end of the couch nearest his chair and hugged a quilted toss pillow to her chest. “Anything positive happening tonight?”

“Nah. Typical news day.” He brightened slightly to add, “The Dow Jones is up a couple of points, though.”

Yippee, she thought. Kasey knew as much about the stock market as she knew about cardiology. “Have they said anything about the weather yet?”

“Only that we’re in for a doozie of a storm.”

Yippee, she echoed silently. It’d be just her luck for the tail end of that hurricane that had been wreaking havoc in the Atlantic to choose tonight to head up Chesapeake Bay. If that happened, they could be stranded here for…for who knew how long! Several years earlier, when the weather had taken a turn like that, downed trees and power lines had Baltimoreans fighting in store aisles over the dwindling supply of ice and batteries. Kasey sighed inwardly.

A huge clap of thunder, followed immediately by crackling lightning, shook the cabin.

Wonderful, Kasey thought. What else could go wrong?

As if in answer to her question, the lights went out. She watched as the TV’s picture shrunk to a bright white pinpoint, then disappeared altogether. She’d never seen such total darkness, not even in the basement furnace room at home.

“Stay right where you are,” Adam said. “I’ll get a flashlight.”

“Don’t you worry, I’m not gonna move a muscle. I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.”

She could hear him, rummaging somewhere off to her left. Hopefully, he hadn’t stored the flashlight in that kitchen drawer, because he was likely to pull out the proverbial bloody stump instead of a flashlight.

Much to her surprise, he was back in no time, illuminated by the pyramid-shaped beam of a foot-long flashlight.

“Here,” he instructed, handing her a battery-powered lantern, “turn that on.”

And before she could agree or object, he was gone again, leaving nothing but a bobbing, weaving trail of light in his wake. Kasey fumbled with the lantern until she found a switch on its side. Minutes later, Adam placed a glass-globed lantern beside it, and once lit, the oil-soaked wick brightened the entire room. He placed a matching lamp on the kitchen counter.

“Well,” she said, laughing, “what in the world will we do without the TV to entertain us?”

Adam leaned back in his recliner. “Oh, I have a feeling you’ll think of something.”

For a reason she couldn’t explain, the way he sounded just now matched the expression he’d worn earlier. Suspicious was the only word she could think of to describe it. And she couldn’t for the life of her come up with a reason he’d have to feel that way. “We could play a game, I suppose. Do you have a game cupboard up here?”