A Heartbeat Away (18 page)

25

Christian Mitchell was a favorite of his little patients and their parents. His ability to explain problems in plain language as well as to empathize with their misery, even through shedding his own tears, endeared him to them as a caring and competent physician.

Unfortunately, his superiors didn't appreciate his emotional connections. As a consequence, Christian was scrutinized. He was often given assignments others didn't want. When a program to give interns a taste of the life to come was instituted, his chief resident assigned other interns to assist in the private practices around the Baltimore suburbs and routed Christian to the downtown free clinic where the poor and uninsured clogged the system with trouble.

After a morning of seeing a dozen kids with flu symptoms, Christian spent thirty minutes following up with a child who suffered from terminal recurrent retinoblastoma, a cancer that had begun in the patient's eye. His patient, Dale Walker, had undergone surgery to remove his right eye, as well as chemotherapy and radiation. Unfortunately, the cancer had recurred, and after three more rounds of an experimental regimen of chemo, his oncologists had told the Walkers that Dale's condition was ultimately terminal. It was time for comfort measures only.

Christian had reviewed the latest MRI scans and made a referral to palliative care. He was sitting down to eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich when Clara Rivers, the clinic's director, opened the door to the small break room. She held a prescription in her hand. “What's the meaning of this?” she asked.

Christian looked at the prescription. “It's a prescription for oxycodone for my terminal patient. Is there a problem?”

“Only with the amount.”

Christian sighed. “Look, addiction isn't a concern here. The boy is going to die. My main concern is to get him pain relief.”

“You don't seem to understand. I'm not critical that you provided too much medicine. I want you to give him more.”

“I prescribed thirty tablets and referred him to palliative care. They should be able to take care of him.”

The director pushed a strand of graying blonde hair behind her ear and took a deep breath, her expression conveying clear annoyance. “This family can't afford the palliative team. You need to provide him more medicine.”

“Okay,” Christian said. “Sure.”

She shoved a new prescription in front of him. “I take care of the palliative treatment for the clinic patients. Just sign the script, and I'll fill out the details.”

“But it's a controlled substance, a powerful narcotic. I'd like to know what's being done in my name.”

“Just sign this. Dr. James oversees everything anyway.”

Christian shrugged. Dr. James was his department chair. It wouldn't do for him to think that Christian was rocking the boat. He signed the prescription.

“Would you mind signing a few more?” she asked. “I'll only use them for the palliative cases.”

Christian studied her for a moment. She appeared tired, and even a heavy coat of foundation couldn't hide the crow's-feet extending from the corners of her eyes. “Actually,” he said, “I do mind. Let's keep this to a case-by-case basis, shall we?”

She straightened and sighed. “Well,” she said, smoothing the front of her white lab coat.

He thought some other comment was forthcoming, but she turned and stomped out, clicking her heels on the spotted linoleum floor.

He watched her disappear as the door closed and shook his head.
Weird.

He turned his attention back to his brown bag, but his mind was far from lunch. His eyes had fallen to a small framed photograph on the wall. It was of Clara Rivers receiving some sort of civic award. He squinted at the photograph. Shaking her hand was his chairman, Dr. James.
Great, that's all I need. She's in with my boss.

He looked at his sandwich, suddenly not hungry. He stuffed it into the bag again and tossed the bag into the corner trash can.

Sighing, he left the break room in search of his next patient.

Tori talked for two hours about growing up in Richmond, Virginia. First memories. Biggest fears. A childhood without tears.

She wearied of the questions. She'd told all she could remember and felt spent. Dried up. She sat. She paced. She consumed a liter of bottled water, and still Dr. Jaworski questioned, probed, and pried.

When time came for a trance induction, she welcomed it. Anything to stop the conscious searching of every little recollection. For her, the time during the trance passed without consciousness.

When she awoke, she heard her name being called, as if at the end of a tunnel. And for the first time since her heart transplant, she had the sensation of heart pounding. A horse race in her chest.

Sweat stung her eyes.

“Tori, Tori!” A voice sharpened with urgency. “You're okay. No one is hurting you.”

Images of fire, falling, and pain fled from the edges of consciousness.

A man? Screams? I'm burning!

Tori reached up to touch the face in front of her.
The psychiatrist.
She wiped sweat from her eyes.
Was I crying?

She looked into the searching face of Mary Jaworski. “You're okay, Tori. You're in your home. You're safe.”

Tori shook her head and tried to dispel the sense of fear. She couldn't speak. She took inventory of her emotions. There was something besides fear.

Anger! White-hot. A tiger ready to defend or attack.

When she finally found her voice, it came as one finding air upon breaking the surface of the ocean. She gasped. “What did I say?”

Dr. Jaworski returned to her laptop and typed for a moment.

Tori pressed. “Did I reveal something important? Did I tell you who killed my donor?”

“Oh, Tori,” she said, “I really need to go over the tape.” She closed her laptop and folded her hands and let them rest on the surface of her denim skirt. “Are you hungry? You've been working so hard.”

She shook her head. “I'm not hungry. I want to know what I said.”

“You don't remember?”

Tori concentrated. “No. Everything's gone.”

The psychiatrist smiled in a smug sort of way that irritated Tori.

“Tell me what I said,” Tori said, standing, still feeling the fear and anger that had greeted her when she surfaced from the trance. “I have a right to know.”

Mary Jaworski stood and backed away from Tori, her face showing a hint of fear. “Not now,” she said, lifting her hand. “I want to reveal the information to you in a controlled setting. I'm concerned for your well-being.”

Tori huffed and shook her head. “You think I can't handle this? The memories can't hurt me. They belong—” she touched the front of her blouse—“to Dakota Jones.”

“Your case is complicated, Tori. Give me a few days to make some sense of this and make a report for the captain.”

“Give me a clue.”

“We made real progress.”

Mary Jaworski slipped her laptop into a leather satchel and lifted the video camera from a tripod. She folded the tripod, lifted the satchel, and collected her notes.

As Dr. Jaworski prepared her belongings, Tori protested. “I'm your patient. You're obligated to me.”

“Well, not exactly. I was hired to interview you as a potential witness to a crime, not as a patient,” she said. “Baltimore PD is paying my salary. I'll make my report, and we can talk next week.” The psychiatrist headed to the front door.

Tori wanted to scream. This didn't seem fair. She was so close, yet so far from the information she wanted.

At the open door, the psychiatrist stopped. “Call my office and make an appointment. We can talk once I've had a chance to process the information on the tape and go over my notes.”

“Was I able to give you any more information?”

Jaworski put her hand to her lip and sighed before speaking. “Yes.”

“So what did I say?”

The doctor held up her hand and stepped onto the front porch. “Later, Tori. We'll have a chance to figure this all out.”

“Later,” Tori muttered.

Tori watched as Mary Jaworski plodded across the lawn to the driveway and her BMW sedan. She thought for a moment about wrestling the video-camera case from the psychiatrist, but she let the feeling pass. Instead, she just nodded and looked at the sky, feeling a sudden strange urge to pray.

“Help me, God.” She touched the front of her blouse. “Why was Dakota so angry?”

Confused and still a bit angry, she closed the door. As she did, her cell phone sounded. She found it on the recliner in the den. “Hello.”

Heavy breathing and a man's voice.

It was as if the call uncapped her anger again. “Who is this?”

“I thought I'd made myself clear.”

“Clear? You're a coward. Tell me who you are!”

She ran to the front room and stood behind her front door before stealing a glance through a window bordering the door.

“I told you to stop. Now someone is going to get hurt.”

There was no one on the street. Mary Jaworski's car was gone.
Was someone watching me?

Who knew about this?

She repeated her question, but her voice had weakened, betraying her fear. “Who—who is this?”

But the line was dead. She looked at her phone. The call had ended.

26

A duo of Richmond police officers responded to Tori's urgent call for help.

After an interview and a careful search of Tori's property, the officers seemed unimpressed. To make things more difficult, Tori was reluctant to explain all the details of her transplanted memories, unwilling to risk more ridicule. So she told them only about her threatening phone call.

Hands on hips, she glanced toward the front windows, now dark since the sun had long set. “So what am I to do? Someone is threatening me.”

The older and heavier of the two officers sighed. “You said the caller said someone would be hurt. How do you know that someone is you?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Don't know, ma'am,” he said. “We just don't have enough information, do we?”

“Could you at least watch my house?”

She watched as the pair exchanged a look.
They think I'm crazy.

“We can drive through the neighborhood a few times during the night. Do you have a security system?”

She nodded. “Doesn't everybody?”

“Is there any place you can go? A friend's place you can crash for a night?”

She thought about Phin. She hadn't left things on a very open note there. She didn't want to bother Charlotte. Besides, Charlotte would worry, and she had warned Tori to stop looking into her donor's death.

Tori looked up. “I'll go to a hotel. Could you stay to give me time to collect a few things?”

The older officer nodded. “Sure.”

A few minutes later, she left her neighborhood in her Mazda. She circled her neighborhood, frequently checking the rearview mirror. Twice, when headlights appeared in the mirror, she pulled to the side, pretending to park, forcing the other vehicle to pass.

She drove downtown, occasionally doubling back, turning left three times in order to go right, and timing the traffic lights so that she could just scoot through on yellow. Finally, after thirty minutes, she pulled into the Jefferson and used the valet to park.

She paid with a credit card and settled into a room on the fourth floor. There, she took a long shower, hoping the water would not only cleanse her body but also soothe her troubled soul. She adjusted the showerhead to pulsate its delivery.

As the water pounded her back, she took inventory.

No job.

No boyfriend.

Do I have any real friends beyond Charlotte? Has my professional distance completely sabotaged my relationships?

No peace of mind.

A mystery I can't seem to solve.

Threats to my life.

The water did little to wash her fears away. If anything, she saw with more clarity the foundation of sand upon which she had built her self-confidence. She stayed under the stream until her skin started to wrinkle. She toweled off and slipped into a thick terry-cloth robe.

Back in the other room, she frowned at the clock. 12:40 a.m. With no sleep in her foreseeable future, she channel surfed the selection of digital drivel. She paced the room and stared out at the Richmond skyline, listening to the warble of an ambulance siren. Up the hill from her hotel, the medical school hospital campus would be in full swing, accepting the night's offering of trauma. She felt a profound sense of loss. She used to thrill at the challenge of an emergency case, but now, the work went on without her, the towering hospital apparently oblivious to her absence.

Without my career, who am I?

In the absence of friends, who would care if I lived or died?

What is the center of my identity?

How much have I changed because I have a new heart?

Tori opened the drawer to a small nightstand. It was empty except for the presence of one book. A Bible.

She shut the drawer. Stopped. Opened it again, looking at the book. She thought about Phin's love for the Bible.
But that's so not me.

Maybe I should see for myself.

She thought for a moment of the way she was changing, and even as she lifted the Bible from the drawer, she felt incredulous.
If Charlotte could see me now.

She opened the cover and examined the first few pages. In the front was a section for those unfamiliar with the Bible: “Where to Find Help.” She scanned the categories and found a section referring to lack of peace of mind.
Bingo. That pretty much describes me.

She sat on the bed with the book in her lap and was soon absorbed in a search. For years Charlotte had tried to interest Tori in the Bible. For years Tori had resisted, preferring her own science-rules philosophy.

She talked to herself: “So how's that life philosophy working out for ya? Not so good, huh?”

The directory sent her to a particular page where she read from the words of Jesus.
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Somehow, strangely, her heart warmed at the thought.

A yoke doesn't sound easy to me.

She followed a trail from one verse to another, directed by the page numbers provided in the guide. There she read silently.
“Casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.”

She thought about Dakota Jones, and again, almost instinctively, her hand clutched the robe in front of her chest. “God,” she whispered, “did Dakota Jones love you?”

Dakota must have been a follower of Jesus. Why else would Tori be feeling so drawn by the words of the Bible?

Could it be that Charlotte and Phin are right after all?

Does God really care for me?

Tori thought back to a conversation she'd had with Charlotte about the mysterious number that seemed tattooed into her memory after her transplant: 316. Charlotte had suggested that it might have been a message intended for Tori, a message of the famous verse Tori had been able to recall:
For God so loved the world.

Was I able to quote the verse because Dakota loved it too?

Or just because I'd heard it from Charlotte so many times?

Tori looked at the Bible in her hand. She hardly knew what to think.
Here I am in distress, and in my old life the last place I would have turned was to this book. But now, I have a compulsion to read these words. Is this crazy?

She weighed the book, moving it up and down in her hand.

What has happened to me? Am I Dakota? Or Tori?

“I'm Tori Taylor,” she whispered. “But I am not the same Tori Taylor, am I?”

She turned to the back of the Bible and read about the steps to becoming a Christian.

Am I really separated from God because of sin?

She'd always considered herself a “good person.” She worked hard in her job to do her best.

But in my quest for perfection, I managed to alienate my coworkers and ended up jeopardizing the one job I love.

I am a sinner.

Really?

Tori sensed a nervous energy and stood. She paced the room, considering the gravity of the decision in front of her. She'd been a scientist all her adult life. She lived for the power of her position as a surgeon. She loved the control and had rested comfortably in her own competence.

She touched the front of her robe over her new heart. She'd lost control, and it was obvious that her professional abilities were not the key to unlock faith.

This new heart has changed me. I want to believe.

Did my donor love Christ?

So what do I do? How do I learn to follow the leading of my new heart?

She slipped her hand under her robe and felt the pulsing of her heart beneath her fingers, amazed that her heart transplant had meant so much more than the physical healing it had brought her. She had opened up emotionally and spiritually as well. She wondered about Dakota Jones, her life experiences, relationships, and loves. She imagined the timelines of her life and the life of Dakota Jones from birth streaking toward an intersection on the day of her transplant. What had her donor experienced, felt, or feared that could be affecting Tori now? Were there significant events of happiness or sorrow? Worship or wonder? Faith or doubt?

“God,” she whispered, “I'm not doing so well on my own.”

She wondered about the proper posture for prayer. She knew that Charlotte prayed anytime, often even while driving, so she understood that there wasn't an exact formula. But for now, it seemed right to bow. Slowly she knelt by her bed and laid the Bible open in front of her.

Alone, she began to cry. She allowed the burden her life had become, her fears for her life, her failures at her career and relationships to be expressed in a flood of tears. Sobbing, she lowered her head to the bed.

I'm so lost.

She rubbed her eyes and read through the steps again. A prayer was written out for her to follow. She shook her head, amazed. Here she was, an educated, intelligent, beautiful woman, and she was contemplating her utter depravity before God.

“Dear Father,” she whispered. “I know I am a sinner. I believe you died for me.…”

I love you.

She looked up. Where had that come from? Another unwanted memory from Dakota Jones?

Tori read the prayer haltingly, unsure what to expect. She wanted to believe that God loved her and gave his Son to pay a penalty on her behalf.

Does simply praying a prayer mean that I'm in?

But what if I doubt? What if I think it sounds too good to be true?

She closed the book and wiped a tear from her cheek. Something was different. Not only did she want to believe, she
did
believe.

A sense of gratitude settled on her soul.

What had changed?

Her circumstances were still dreary. No job. No boyfriend. Someone was still threatening her life.

But I have peace.

Everything is crazy in my life … but things are okay with God.

Knowledge of love enveloped her. Little mattered in that moment except the fact that she knew she was loved. Warmth. Peace. Joy.
How can I describe what I feel?

A presence.

Glory!

She wanted to speak, to shout, to express her thanks, but her throat tightened. Trembling, she lifted her right hand into the air. There, kneeling on the floor of the Jefferson Hotel, Tori Taylor wept.

She wept for her own selfishness. She wept for the pride that had kept her running her own life for so long in spite of Charlotte's urging. And now, she wept for the joy of knowing her sins were forgiven.

Time disappeared. She felt only the embrace of her Savior, caressing her heart. She sniffed and looked at the clock. 1:45 a.m.

She took off the robe and dressed for bed. Slipping beneath the sheets, she whispered another prayer to God, something that, regardless of how alien it would have felt to her just a few days ago, now seemed to come as naturally as hunger or thirst. “Thanks, Father. Thanks.”