Noble Vision (61 page)

“I adore gladiolas. They’re tall and bold. They assert themselves.”

Her hands lovingly brushed through the hardy arrangement. Then her fingers paused on an envelope. She gave it to David.

He pulled a flower from the vase and placed it in her hand, then set the others on her bed stand. She could hear the crisp sound of paper tearing as he opened the envelope. He could see the eager smile, the attentive tilt of her head toward him, the hands that caressed the flower. Sitting on the edge of her bed, he read to her:

Dearest Nicole,

Today I plant my own garden for the rest of my life. From now on I will gather only bouquets watered by my own hands. Before, when my garden was overrun with the forced blooms of others, I smelled no fragrance. I saw scrawny hothouse attempts at bloom too dull to catch my eye. Those flower impostors lacked the color and perfume of my own hearty patch. It was you, Nicole, who gave me the courage to plant new seeds in the fresh air. And the world has never looked more breathtaking than from the special plot you helped me nourish.

Now, everywhere I go I see summer. It follows me around like my new companion. I heard the curling wind of an autumn storm and mistook it for a robin. I saw the first white patch of frost by the river and thought it was a swan. I felt the little lights that decorate the trees for the winter and thought they were new buds.

When you open your eyes, Nicole, the man who hid from you and the world will be there. Whatever the outcome of your ordeal, we’ll face it in an embrace. You’ll be mine, all mine, for today I come to claim you.

Nicole listened intently as if hearing a stirring love song. She held the flower to her breast, stroking it tenderly.

“The Phantom’s changed, David. He doesn’t sound like the most desperate man in the city.”

“He doesn’t sound desperate at all.”

“Not anymore,” she said, her voice solemn, her head raised in a salute.

“Are you ready, Nicole?” She detected a slight tremble in his voice.

“David, the Phantom is the second person I want most to be with me when I open my eyes. The first is
you
. Would you tell the Phantom that this is our moment together, yours and mine?”

“We’ll have to see how this works out. He’s pretty insistent.”

David lowered the blinds to block the glare of the direct sun. He took the flower from Nicole’s hand and returned it to the vase.

The softness on her face disappeared. No trace of a smile remained. Her mouth tightened as if to brace for anything. She propped herself up with pillows. Her swanlike neck seemed to stretch even longer, like a pedestal to display her bandaged head. Her shoulders tensed to form a square base for the pedestal.

David lifted a hand that had begun to sweat and squeezed it. Nicole did not respond, as if the intensity of her thoughts was all consuming. She felt the quick sting of bandages pulled swiftly from her face. Then the patches were lifted off her eyes. The cool air of the room hit her lids.

“Your eyelids may feel as if they’re stuck. It may take a little work, but they’ll open.”

He walked to the door. She heard it close.

“David, are you still here? Did you leave? . . . David?”

He did not reply. He looked at her as a doctor and as a man, staring intensely in both capacities.

She tried to pry her eyelids open, but they stuck like stubborn clams. Her brow wrinkled as she gave the task a second try. The lids loosened. But lashes from the top and bottom still intertwined. Nicole kept trying. Then her eyes slowly opened. A liquid smear glistened before her. She blinked several times.

Suddenly she was thrust back in time. She was standing at the corner of a street, across from a flower shop. A man stood outside the store looking at her with an unusual intensity. The upward tilt of his head told her that she was a goddess he would worship. The downward sweep of his eyes over her body told her that she was a woman he would possess.

“I . . . I . . .” The small cry that was her voice struggled to gain volume. “I can see you! I can see you! I . . . can . . . see!” Just as she found her voice, it was muffled again, this time buried in the arms and chest that urgently fell against her. “I see this room! I see you! I see everything!” she screamed, her cries a sublime mix of laughter and tears.

His hands stroked her face, her neck, her bandaged head. He seemed to want to laugh wildly but was suppressing the urge to make a sound.

The radiant Nicole of the stage exclaimed, “You came for me after all! And I can
see
you!
Oh my, I can
see
! But I must see my doctor now. Where is he?”

The man before her grinned boyishly.

“Where’s Dr. Lang? I must see him!”

He laughed quietly.

“Why don’t you speak?”

His eyes, those green lasers that seemed to burn her skin, never left hers as his mouth widened in yet more laughter. The Phantom was enjoying the moment.

“Talk to me, won’t you?”

Her eyes held curiosity; his, amusement.

She reached out to touch his engaging face, to cup it in her hands. “Why won’t you talk—?”

She paused as a thought took shape. She studied him curiously. Her hands began trembling.

“Wait a minute,” she whispered.

Then she closed her eyes. She touched his brow, his eyes, his mouth, his cheek. Her fingers paused on the telltale dimple. She opened her eyes, incredulous.

She mouthed a word, shaped it on her lips, for she could find no voice to utter it. Then she gasped, “D-David?”

“Yes, Nicole.” She heard a familiar baritone voice heavy with affection for her.

Two arms wrapped tightly around his neck. A tear-stained cheek rubbed against his face. “David, I’m thrilled!”

“You said the Phantom was the most desperate man in the city. Who better fit that description than me? The
old
me?”

“David, I’m so glad it’s you! I’m so happy the Phantom is you! I wouldn’t have wanted him to be anyone else!”

His lips landed on hers, choking her voice. He slipped his arms around her body, his eager fingers racing over her back and shoulders. Then they heard the ringing of a phone, and he reluctantly released her.

“Hello,” David said into his cell phone.

“What’s happening in there?” asked Randy.

“Does anybody have an eye chart?”

The door of Nicole’s room burst open. Two optic nerves that had been dormant for months were now firing rapidly to capture the lively scene that followed. Dozens of people barged in. They wore scrubs of various colors, white coats, or business suits, many with stethoscopes swung around their necks, all with hospital name badges clipped to their clothing. They cheered. They opened champagne, poured the bubbly liquid into plastic cups, and clicked them together as if they were fine crystal. They shook David’s hand and embraced him. They squeezed Nicole’s hands and expressed their happiness for her. David’s triumph was in some way a victory for them all, a deliverance, a rekindling of the dream of practicing a noble profession that had inspired them in the early days of their medical schooling. Their wild cheering for David and Nicole was also a glorious tribute to medicine as it might be and ought to be and to themselves as healers.

An austere-looking woman with joyful tears streaming down her face embraced Nicole.

“Mrs. Trimbell!” the patient exclaimed.

A man who closely resembled David smothered him in a robust embrace, then grabbed her face, and kissed her cheek.

“You must be Randy,” said the radiant Nicole.

Though Nicole observed the dizzying spectacle, it kept moving to the periphery of her vision, the way scenery whizzes by a carousel rider. Her eyes, as though drawn by a magnet, kept fixing on the new joy of their existence, on the tall, handsome figure who looked at her with a boy’s amusement and a man’s passion.

Word of the surgery had spread through the university, and chemist John Kendall came to congratulate both patient and doctor. “Now I know what those analyses were about!” he said jubilantly.

Resident Tom Bentley gazed at David with a look normally reserved for icons such as Louis Pasteur. “Dr. Lang,” he said, “how did you keep from giving up on your research? After all the obstacles you encountered, what kept you going through it all?”

The commotion in the room ebbed as the others turned to David to hear his response.

“A wise woman once told me that we can’t confine our dreams to the world we see on the stage. We can’t just idly dream about the things most precious to us. We have to act to gain them in real life.”

David winked at Nicole. She smiled at him in return.

Epilogue

Should a Man Receive Flowers from a Woman?

Wearing the feather boa given to her by Hope, Pandora seized Zeus’s torch and burned the ropes binding Prometheus. The valiant couple, armed with fire and hope, fought the woes that Zeus had unleashed on mankind through Pandora’s box. To the orchestra’s climactic notes of victory, Pandora and Prometheus chased all of Zeus’s Plagues back into the evil box and saved the human race.

The sun shone on the Earth. The mortals rejoiced. A corps of ballerinas joined the first men of Earth in a jubilant dance of life. With a trembling hand, Pandora touched Prometheus’s arm, his hair, his face. She moved about him with the fragility of a ballerina and the sensuality of a woman. He lifted her high in the air to begin their final pas de deux.

The playbill for the hit Broadway show
Triumph
concluded: “Man discovers woman and enters an age of innocence, goodness, and joy.”

The audience clapped, whistled, and roared. A radiant Nicole Hudson bowed appreciatively, threw her fans kisses, and gathered the bundles of flowers lovingly tossed to her on the stage. As she smiled at the people she had stirred with her dancing, she, in turn, was moved by their cheering. She felt a burning rush of liquid fill her eyes and wondered why happiness could hurt. Basking in the warmth of the spotlight, she knew that finally she, like Pandora, had entered a period of innocence, goodness, and joy, and that nothing greater was possible to her.

Backstage she leaped into the waiting arms of David Lang. He raised her off her feet and whirled her around. In him she had found a new passion, one that was never sated but grew more intense the more she indulged it, like a sweet addiction nourished on itself.

A taxi took David and Nicole to the restaurant in the park where they had spent their first date. It was a place that held a special fascination for the couple. This time it was Nicole who described to David the enchanting scene outside the glass walls. She could now understand the exciting mystery of the woods that David had so vividly imagined on their first visit. However, the park no longer contained the bare shrubs and barren grounds that David had seen the previous autumn. The wooded patch now held lush trees with delicate spring leaves of yellow-green, along with fragrant bushes and tulips in full bloom. Many changes had occurred between autumn and spring.

The charges against David of cruelty to animals were quietly dropped. And no one ever arrived to punish him for performing Nicole’s illegal surgery.

The day that Nicole regained her sight was not a good one for Governor Burrow. His agencies had banned a revolutionary new treatment and arrested a surgeon who had to break the law to make medical history. “OOPS!” read a glaring headline over Burrow’s picture in New York City’s leading newspaper. In the aftermath of David’s wild success, the governor’s popularity, always precarious, plummeted. Six days later at the polls, a dispirited Mack Burrow lost his bid for reelection.

The voters also defeated a referendum calling for new taxes to bail out the financially troubled CareFree. A failure to meet its payroll, combined with further curtailments in service, threw the agency into chaos and enraged the citizens. Following David’s example, other doctors began ignoring the rules and providing their own independent services. A cottage industry of private medicine was developing, and the politicians, intimidated by the popularity of the new movement, were forced to ignore the lawbreakers. The steady deterioration of Burrow’s pet program and the rumors of its imminent collapse sent shockwaves through the CareFree-created physician groups, such as Reliant Care, which released half of its doctors. One of its employees, the recently divorced Dr. Marie Donnelly Lang, was a casualty of the layoffs.

With the financial backing of drug company president Phil Morgan, David and Randy leased a small, closed hospital and reopened it as the Lang-Morgan Institute for Neurological Research and Surgery. There was no public announcement of its opening because it technically did not exist. More accurately, it existed in violation of countless regulations. It had no permits or licenses. It passed no inspections, save the rigorous ones of its vigilant owners. “We’ll just work until somebody comes to arrest us,” David said to his partners. No one did.

Somehow the people of the city heard about the establishment despite the lack of signs, advertising, and announcements of any kind. Ambulances carried victims of spinal cord injury, stroke, and other nerve trauma to the institute. As if they were abandoning children at the doorstep of a church, the ambulances dropped the patients off secretly, then quickly sped away. Word spread beyond the city of the revolutionary work being performed. Desperate patients flew to New York, their plane seats replaced by stretchers, to reach the place that did not exist.