Emergency: Parents Needed (15 page)

One minute, she was upright. In the next, she was lying on the floor, cushioned by the carpeting. All her hopes, dreams and fears about the future faded into the background,
pushed there by the certainty that his desire matched her own, that whatever happened tomorrow wouldn’t take away from today.

And somewhere during the night, long after she’d slid into his bed and snuggled against his hot-as-a-furnace body, and long after they’d made love again in the pre-dawn darkness, she accepted the truth.

They were a team. Partners. Like peaches and cream, milk and cookies, pen and paper, they were Joe and Maggie—two people who balanced each other, two people who complemented each other in ways that no one else could.

They belonged together. Because she loved him.

F
OR
the past several days, ever since little Bee’s birthday, Joe felt as if he was in the middle of a dream that was simply too good to be true. From the moment Breanna had called him “Dada” it was as if she’d opened the floodgates that had kept her silent. Each conversation was peppered with “Dada this” and “Dada that” until he could hardly believe this chatty little girl was the same shy, quiet young thing he’d brought home.

One thing was certain, though. In spite of being awed by how easily she called him “Daddy”, hearing it constantly was also very intimidating.

What if he failed her? It wouldn’t be some guy named Joe Donatelli who was responsible. It would be
Dada
. He didn’t want to see the hurt in her eyes when he disappointed her.

The more he considered that, the more he wondered about his own father. Before Joe had entered the world of Social Services, his father had often left him for days on end with friends. How had the man been able to walk away from his son time after time, without any worries or backward glances? Joe would never be able to understand as long as he lived.

But as Maggie so often reminded him, his father’s decisions weren’t Joe’s. It was time to stop allowing the elder Donatelli’s mistakes to rule Joe’s life, especially his future.

Over the past few days he was finally starting to think beyond today, and even tomorrow. “For ever” wasn’t nearly as daunting as it once had been because it suddenly seemed possible. As for love, his attitude had shifted on that subject, too. Under Maggie’s influence and Breanna’s adoration, he didn’t view the prospect with a cynical, jaundiced eye. Instead, he actually began to feel cautiously optimistic about his own capacity to love.

He smiled as he gazed at the child who was currently patting his knee to gain his attention.

“OK, little Bee,” he told her as he hoisted her into a one-armed carry. “Let’s see if the mailman’s been.”

Standing half-inside the house, he held Breanna so she could reach into the box. Five letters had come and she painstakingly lifted them out, one by one, before handing them to him.

The last envelope, a large white mailer, was a struggle for her to remove. “Do you need help?” he asked.

Breanna vehemently shook her head. “No!”

Finally, she pulled it free and handed it to him, beaming at her success. Unfortunately, the moment he saw the return address logo, his gut clenched.

GPTS.

The initials were innocuous enough, giving no clue as to the identity of the sender to the casual onlooker. But he knew what those four letters represented.

Genetic Paternity Testing Service.

Automatically he closed the door and lowered Breanna as he clutched the letters in his hand. Although he’d first kept track of the date, he didn’t recall when he’d stopped counting the days and just lived them. Now, nearly three weeks later, the letter holding his fate had arrived.

“Dada.” Breanna tugged on his pants leg.

Knowing what she wanted, he handed her a mass-mailing
credit card application letter and an appeal letter from a charity he hadn’t heard of. While she raced to her toy corner to “read her mail”, which in essence meant shredding it, Joe sank into his easy chair, the GPTS letter on his lap.

The contents held his future. Did he dare open it and risk ruining everything that had been falling into place? He had a little girl who thought the sun rose and set in him, a woman who loved the child he’d been given as easily as if she’d been hers, a lover who made his heart sing and didn’t hold his past against him. One typewritten page, one sentence could wipe out every relationship he’d built up over the past few weeks.

Now that the knowledge he’d asked for lay at his fingertips, he didn’t want it.

And yet, knowing how much he’d come to love Breanna, if the test proved that he wasn’t her biological father, if her real father ever showed up on his doorstep, could Joe deny him the experience to know and love his child as much as he did?

However, if he lost Breanna, he’d lose Maggie too because he couldn’t have one without the other. And losing the woman who made him feel whole—the woman he loved—was too horrible to contemplate.

“I’m home!” Maggie’s voice interrupted his thoughts as she entered through the garage.

He quickly buried the envelope in a pile of newspapers. The truth had waited this long—it could wait a few days longer.

Twenty-four hours later, Maggie knew a heavy burden lay on Joe’s mind. While he played with Breanna and acted as if he didn’t have a care in the world, Maggie occasionally saw a pensive expression cross his face and he had a preoccupied air about him. When they made love, she also sensed a desperate quality that hadn’t been there before.

It was because of those dratted test results, she decided.
They should have arrived by now and eliminated the uncertainty hanging over their heads one way or another. She would have pressed the issue and suggested he contact the lab in case the mail had gotten lost, but she was selfish enough to want this obvious grace period to continue. Why look for trouble? The results would arrive when they arrived.

However, telling herself not to worry was easier said than done.

“Is everything OK, Joe?” she asked the next day on their way to the fire station.

“Why do you ask?” He didn’t deny it, which indicated to her that she hadn’t imagined his mood.

“You seem like you’re a million miles away.”

He smiled. “That far?”

“At least. So what’s brought back a return of the Joe Donatelli who doesn’t speak unless spoken to?”

“I’ve been thinking,” he began.

“About what?”

“Have you noticed how small my house is?”

His unexpected reply caught her by surprise. “It’s cozy,” she corrected.

“Cozy or not, where would I fit a wife if I ever brought one home?” A lazy grin wandered across his face. “I’m thinking about picking one up at the hardware store.”

Relieved by his joke, she laughed, and hoped…
hoped…
that this meant he was potentially willing to add “for ever” to his vocabulary. “If you decide to go for it,” she said lightly, “be sure to find one who does windows, likes to grocery shop, and has a green thumb.”

“I’ll make a list,” he promised.

Yet, in spite of his humor that calmed most of her fears, she sensed he was still holding back. Digging deeper would have to wait until the end of their shift.

Unfortunately, an early morning accident interfered with her plans. Two tires on a school bus had blown and the
driver had overcompensated. The bus had hit the curb, then tipped over and slid across an empty church parking lot to land against a row of bushes.

It was a frightening sight. “Dear God,” she breathed as soon as she saw the yellow bus lying like a beached whale on the pavement.

“How many kids did Dispatch report being on board?” he asked grimly.

“Thirty-four plus the driver. The ambulances from the other two stations should be here shortly.” With an accident involving this many people, the disaster plan had been activated. From the sounds of the children’s cries as she jumped out of the vehicle, they would need every available person to help.

“We’ll triage on the edge of the grass, near the ambulance,” he decided.

“Good idea.”

Joe grabbed a kit, noting Maggie did the same before they approached the overturned bus. The rest of the firefighter crew spilled out of the station’s fire engine to deal with stuck emergency-exit doors and windows.

While the men were working on the twisted metal, Joe directed his attention to the victims. The driver was slumped sideways over the steering-wheel and blood streamed down his forehead.

“See to him,” he told Maggie. “I’ll check on the kids.”

Leaving her to wait for Jimbo and another fireman to jimmy open the door, Joe walked to the rear and raised his voice over the children yelling and crying inside.

“We’re with the fire department,” he told them. “We’ll have you all out of there in a few minutes, but you have to stay calm. We’ll get you out,” he reiterated.

The weeping died down to sniffles and coughs. “Just stay calm,” he said, trying to sound unruffled. “We’ll prize open the exit in a few minutes. How’s everybody doing?”

Amid a chorus of “OKs”, one authoritative young voice stood out. “Kevin’s leg is broke, I think. Meghan’s not doing so good. She’s breathing but she won’t answer when I talk to her. She’s got blood all over her face. I can’t move around too much to see how the little kids up front are doing.”

“What’s your name, son?” Joe asked.

“Greg.”

“OK, Greg. If you and your friends can be patient for a few more minutes, we’ll get to you.”

Unfortunately, the door didn’t budge until they applied a crowbar. As the metal screeched open, freckled faces that reflected the horror of their experience soon appeared.

“Those of you who can, come this way,” Joe ordered. “If you’re hurt or don’t feel good, stay where you are and I’ll come after you. OK?”

“Take turns,” Greg ordered, clearly the unspoken leader of the group. “No pushing or shoving.”

One by one and in less than a minute the children appeared at the open door in an orderly fashion and Joe lifted them onto the ground and into the care of paramedics from the other stations who’d arrived in response to the disaster.

As soon as the last child had hopped out, Joe swung into the bus to assess the condition of those remaining. He found a pre-teen boy crouched in the center aisle, holding the hand of a young girl about five years old who was wedged between two crumpled seats and was having obvious shortness of breath. For an instant the girl reminded him of Breanna, with her pert nose, brown hair and small frame, and he had to reassure himself that this child wasn’t his daughter.

Across the aisle, an older boy, about ten, was leaning against a seat, clutching his knee and grimacing.

“This is Kevin and that’s his sister, Meghan,” the youth in the aisle reported.

“Then you must be Greg,” Joe said. “I’m Joe.” His first
glance made his patient choice obvious—Meghan came first.

“See, guys?” Greg said importantly. “I told you it wouldn’t take long.”

“Kevin,” Joe asked, “I know you’re hurting but can you hold on a few more minutes while I take care of your sister?”

Kevin nodded. “Yeah. I can.”

Greg bent close to Joe and lowered his voice. “She’s hurt bad, isn’t she?”

Joe rapidly assessed the damage. From her shortness of breath, restlessness, increased pulse rate and decreased blood pressure, he feared a pneumothorax, which was a condition in which air had entered the pleural space and formed enough pressure that the lung couldn’t expand. Everything else—the scalp wound and possible concussion, the obviously broken radius—would wait until he got her breathing and her shocky condition under control.

Before Joe could yell for Shep, Maggie appeared. “What can I do?” she asked.

“She has a tension pneumothorax,” Joe explained. “I’ll relieve the pressure while you start an IV.”

He quickly followed the treatment procedure and was gratified to see her breathing improve immediately. With her airway now stable enough for a trip to the hospital where doctors would insert a chest tube, he dealt with the rest of her injuries. Before long, her arm was splinted, her cervical spine protected, and she was hauled out of the bus.

Another team squeezed past to take care of Kevin, but Joe focused completely on his patient. “Let’s go,” he told Maggie as soon as they’d slid Meghan inside the back of the ambulance.

“I want…my…mama and…Daddy.”

“I’m sure they’re on their way,” he told her as they drove off, trying not to place himself in her parents’ shoes or imagine how frantic they would be after they received the
fateful phone call…“But I’ll stay with you until they get here. I won’t leave you,” he promised.

Tears trickled out from under her squeezed eyelids.

“You’re being very brave,” he told her. “They’ll be so proud of you.”

“Don’t feel…good.”

“I know, but after the doctors fix what’s wrong, you’ll be playing with your friends before you know it.” The vehicle slowed and he knew they’d reached their destination. “Hey, what do you know, we’re at the hospital already.”

Her brown-eyed gaze met his, the misery in them obvious, the same misery he’d seen at one time in Breanna’s eyes and hoped to never see again. “Your mom and dad will be here soon.” And if they weren’t, he silently vowed, he’d track them down himself.

The hospital was like a madhouse but, true to his word, he stayed with Meghan until her anxious parents arrived. Then, after patting the child’s shoulder and shaking hands with her grateful father, he met Maggie in the hallway.

“How is she?” she asked.

“Stable,” he told her. “Her parents are here now, so that helps.” He flexed his shoulders to relieve the tension he hadn’t felt until now.

“You did a nice thing for her, Joe. She won’t forget it and neither will her parents.”

He shrugged. “I had to,” he said simply. “Remember how you asked me once if I’d ever treated a patient who reminded me of someone special?”

“If I recall, you said it had never happened to you.”

“Today I’m eating my words. It’s crazy, but Meghan reminded me of Breanna. All I could think was that if this was our little Bee, I’d want someone to stay with her so she wouldn’t be so scared.”

She threaded an arm through his. “One of my instructors once said something I’ll never forget. Every patient is
someone’s parent, daughter, son, brother or sister, and we should treat them the way we’d want someone to treat
our
family. I’d say you did.”

Family. He’d been part of foster-families, but he hadn’t been part of his own for a lot of years. Now he was. Breanna wasn’t just Dee’s daughter…by virtue of the love he felt for her, she was his, too.

And yet, what if it
had
been his daughter on that wrecked bus instead of a little girl who only reminded him of her? Could he handle the worry, the pain, the anguish? He’d seen the tears on the mother’s face, the way she and her husband clutched each other for moral support, their struggle to be upbeat when they saw their daughter connected to tubes and hoses and monitors.