Brain Child (8 page)

They had thinned out after the first couple of hours, when Barbara had finally told them that there would be no more news that night—Alex was undergoing a series of tests, but the results would be unavailable for an indefinite period.

Now, at five o’clock, she could at last go home. Everything that needed to be done, or could be done, was finished, and she realized she was bone weary. All she had to do was check the waiting room, and she could go. She pushed the door open, expecting the room to be empty.

It wasn’t.

Sitting on the couch in the far corner was Lisa Cochran, her parents flanking her. She was dry-eyed now, and sitting straight up, her hands folded quietly in her lap. Barbara hesitated, then went into the waiting room, letting the door swing shut behind her.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “Some coffee, maybe?”

Lisa shook her head, but said nothing.

“If you can think of a way to convince her to come home with us, that might help,” Carol said, rising to
her feet, stretching, and offering the tired nurse a resigned smile.

“I can’t, Mama,” Lisa whispered. “What if he wakes up and asks for me?”

Barbara crossed the room and sat next to the girl. “He’s not going to wake up tonight, Lisa.”

Lisa regarded her with bloodshot eyes. “Is … is he going to wake up at all?”

Barbara knew it wasn’t her place to talk to anyone about Alex Lonsdale’s condition, but she also knew exactly who Lisa was, and how Alex felt about her. God knew he’d spent enough time perched on the edge of Barbara’s desk telling her how wonderful Lisa was. And after watching her through the last several hours, Barbara was convinced that Alex was right. She sighed heavily. “I don’t know,” she said carefully; then, when Lisa’s eyes turned suddenly frightened, she went on: “I said I don’t know. That doesn’t mean he’s not going to wake up. All it means is that I don’t know, and no one else does either.”

“If he wakes up, will that mean he’s going to be all right?”

Barbara shrugged. “We don’t know that, either. All we can do is wait and see.”

“Then I’ll wait,” Lisa said.

“You could go home and try to get some sleep,” Barbara suggested. “I promise I’ll arrange for someone to call you if anything happens. Anything at all.”

Lisa rubbed at her eyes, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “I want to be here. Just in case.” She looked at the nurse beseechingly. “He
might
wake up.”

Barbara started to speak, then changed her mind. She’s right, she decided. He damned well might wake up. And as she absorbed the thought, she realized that she, like most of the staff at the clinic, had only been going through the motions of administering to Alex.

For all of them, all the trained medical people who had seen injuries like Alex’s before, it was a hopeless case. You did what you could, tried not to overlook any
measure, no matter how drastic, that might save the life, but deep inside you prepared yourself for the fact that the patient wasn’t going to make it.

And at the end of your shift, you went home.

But Lisa Cochran wasn’t going home, and Barbara Fannon decided she wasn’t going home either, even though her shift had ended long ago. Coming to that decision, she stood up. “Come on,” she said.

The Cochrans looked at her uncertainly, but followed her down the hall. Without knocking, she opened the door to Marshall Lonsdale’s office and led them inside. “If we’re all going to stay, we might as well be as comfortable as possible.”

“This is Marsh’s office,” Jim Cochran said.

“Nobody else’s.”

“Should we be here?”

“You’re his friends, aren’t you? It’s been a long night, and it’s going to be an even longer one. I was going home, but if you can stick this out, so can I. But not out there.” She lowered the lights a little, and closed the blinds to the windows. “Make yourselves comfortable while I go find some coffee. If you want something stronger, you might poke around the office while I’m gone. I’ve heard rumors that sometimes there’s a bottle in here.”

Jim eyed the nurse. “Any rumors about just where it might be?”

“No,” Barbara replied. Then, as she left the office, she spoke once more. “But if I were you, I’d start looking in the credenza. Bottom right.”

Ellen Lonsdale sat in a straight-backed chair that had been pulled close to Alex’s bed, her right hand resting gently on his. He lay as he had been placed, on his back, the cast on his left arm suspended slightly above the mattress, his limp right arm extended parallel to his body. His face, covered with the respirator mask and a mass of bandages, was barely visible, and totally unrecognizable. Around him was an array of equipment
that Ellen couldn’t begin to comprehend. All she knew was that the monitors and machinery were somehow keeping her son alive.

She had been there for nearly five hours now. The sky outside the window was beginning to brighten, and she shifted slightly in her chair, not as a reaction to the stiffness that had long ago taken over her body, but so that she could get a clearer look at Alex’s eyes.

For some reason, she kept thinking they should be open.

The night had been filled with odd thoughts like that.

Several times she had found herself feeling surprise that the respirator was still operating.

Once, when they brought Alex back from one of the tests—she couldn’t remember which one—she had been shocked at the warmth of his hand when she touched it.

She knew what the odd feelings were about.

Despite what she had been told—despite her own inner resolve—she still had the horrible feeling that Alex was dead.

Several times she had found herself studying the monitors, wondering why they were still registering life signs in Alex.

Since he was dead, the graphic displays of his heartbeat and breathing should be flat.

She kept reminding herself that he wasn’t dead, that he was only asleep.

Except he wasn’t asleep.

He was in a coma, and despite what everyone kept saying, he wasn’t going to come out of it.

Abstractly she already understood that it wasn’t a matter of waiting to see what would happen. It was a matter of deciding when to remove the respirator and let Alex go.

She didn’t know how long that thought had been in her mind, but she knew she was beginning to get used to the reality of it. Sometime today, or perhaps tomorrow, after all the test results had been studied and analyzed, she and Marsh were going to have to make
the most difficult decision of their lives, and she wasn’t at all sure either of them would be up to it.

If Alex’s brain was, indeed, dead, they were going to have to accept that keeping Alex alive the way he was was cruel.

Cruel to Alex.

She stared again at all the machinery, and momentarily wondered why it had ever been invented.

Why couldn’t they just let people die?

And yet, she realized with sudden clarity, even though she understood the reality of Alex’s situation, she would never simply let him die.

If she were going to, she would have done it already. During the last two hours there had been plenty of opportunities. All she would have had to do was turn off the respirator. Alarms would have gone off, but she could have dealt with that. And it wouldn’t have taken long—only a minute or two.

But she hadn’t done it. Instead, she’d simply sat there battling her feelings of despair, strengthening her resolve not to let him die, and whispering encouraging words to Alex as she held his hand.

And even though part of her still insisted that Alex was already dead, the other part of her, the part that was determined that he should live, was growing stronger by the hour.

Suddenly the door opened, and Barbara Fannon stepped into the room, closing the door behind her.

“Ellen? It’s eight o’clock—you’ve been here all night.”

Ellen turned her head. “I know.”

“Marsh is in Frank’s office. They have the test results. They’re waiting for you.”

Ellen thought about it for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “No,” she said at last. “I’ll stay here with Alex. Marsh will tell me what I need to know.”

Barbara hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll tell them,” she said, then let herself out of the room, leaving Ellen alone with her son.

*   *   *

“It’s bad,” Frank Mallory said. “About as bad as it can get, I’m afraid.”

“Let’s see.” Marsh’s whole body felt drained from the shock and exhaustion of the last hours, but for some reason his mind was perfectly clear. Slowly and deliberately he began going over the results of all the tests and examinations that had been administered to Alex during the long night.

Mallory was right—it was very bad.

The damage to Alex’s brain was extensive. Bone fragments seemed to be everywhere, driven deep into the cortex. The cerebrum showed the heaviest damage, much of it apparently centered in the temporal lobe. But nothing seemed to have escaped injury—the parietal and frontal lobes showed extensive injury as well.

“I’m not an expert at this,” Marsh said, though both he and Mallory were well aware that many of the ramifications of Alex’s injuries were obvious.

Mallory decided to take the direct approach. “If he lives at all, he won’t be able to walk or talk, and it’s doubtful that he’ll be able to hear. He may be able to see—the occipital lobe seems to have suffered the least amount of damage. But all that’s almost beside the point. It’s highly doubtful if he’ll be aware of anything going on around him, or even be aware of himself. And that’s if he wakes up.”

“I don’t believe that,” Marsh replied, fixing Mallory with cold eyes.

“Don’t, or won’t?” Mallory countered gently.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Marsh replied. “Everything’s going to be done for Alex that is humanly possible.”

“That goes without saying, Marsh,” Frank Mallory said, his voice, reflecting the pain Marsh’s words had caused. “You know there isn’t anyone here who wouldn’t do his best for Alex.”

If Marshall heard him, he ignored him. “I want you to start by getting hold of Torres, down in Palo Alto.”

“Torres?” Mallory repeated. “Raymond Torres?”

“Is there anyone else who can help Alex?”

Mallory fell silent as he thought about the man to whom Marsh was considering turning over his son.

Raymond Torres had grown up in La Paloma, and though there was little question in anyone’s mind of the man’s brilliance, there were, and always had been, many questions about the man himself. He had left La Paloma long ago, remaining in Palo Alto after medical school, returning to La Paloma only to see his mother—old María Torres. And even his
visits
to her were rare. There was a feeling in La Paloma that Torres resented his mother, that she was little more to him than a constant reminder of his past, and that, if there was one thing Torres would like to ignore, it was his past. In La Paloma he was primarily regarded as a curiosity: the boy from behind the mission who had somehow made good.

Beyond La Paloma, he had become, over the years, something of an enigma within the medical community. To his supporters, his aloofness was a result only of the fact that he devoted nearly every waking hour to his research into the functioning of the human brain, while his detractors attributed that same aloofness to intellectual arrogance.

But for all the questions about him, Raymond Torres had succeeded in becoming one of the country’s foremost authorities on the structure and functioning of the human brain. In recent years, the thrust of his research had changed slightly, and his primary interest had become reconstuctive brain surgery.

“But isn’t most of his work experimental?” Mallory asked now. “I don’t think a lot of it has even been tried on human beings yet.”

Marshall Lonsdale’s desperation was reflected in his eyes. “Raymond Torres knows more about the human brain than anybody else alive. And some of the reconstruction work he’s done is just this side of incredible. I’d say it
was
incredible if I hadn’t seen the results myself. I want him to work on Alex.”

“Marsh—”

But Marsh was on his feet, his eyes fixed on the pile of X rays, CAT scans, lab results, graphs, and other documentation pertaining to the damage his son’s brain had sustained. “He’s still alive, Frank,” he said. “And as long as he’s alive, I have to try to help him. I can’t just leave him alone—you can see what he’ll be like as well as I can. He’ll be a vegetable, Frank. My God, you told me so yourself just now. Nothing can hurt him anymore, Frank. All Torres can do is help. Call him for me. Tell him what’s happened, and that I want to talk to him. Just talk to him, that’s all. Just get me in to see him.”

When Frank Mallory still hesitated, Marshall Lonsdale spoke once more. “Alex is all I have, Frank. I can’t just let him die.”

When he was alone, Frank Mallory picked up the phone and dialed the number of Raymond Torres’s office in Palo Alto, twenty miles away. After talking to him for thirty minutes, he finally convinced Torres to see Marsh Lonsdale and look at Alex’s case.

The doctor made no promises, but he agreed to talk, and to look.

Privately, Frank half-hoped Torres would turn Marsh down.

Exhaustion was overtaking Marsh, and he was beginning to feel that the situation was hopeless. He’d been in Raymond Torres’s offices for most of the day, and for most of the day he’d been by himself. Not that it hadn’t been interesting; it had, despite the overriding fear for his son’s life that had never left his consciousness since the moment he had arrived that morning.

He’d stared at the Institute through bleary eyes. The building itself was a bastard—it had obviously started out as a home, and an imposing one. But from the central core of the mansion—for a mansion it had been—two wings had spread, and no attempt had been made to make them architecturally compatible with the original structure. Instead, they were sleekly functional, in stark contrast with the Georgian massiveness of the core. The buildings were surrounded by a sprawling lawn dotted with trees, and only a neat brass plaque mounted on the face of a large rock near the street identified the structure:
INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMAN BRAIN
.