Of Flesh and Blood (33 page)

Nikki gently ran the back of her hand over Paige’s cheek. “The swelling has come down, too,” she reassured.

The rest of her engorgement dissipated like a tire slowly deflating. Ten minutes later, Paige’s neck and chin reappeared. Since the girl was breathing easily on her own, Gratton pulled the mask away from her face. He looked over to Tyler and offered him a hangdog smile. “Thanks for coming in, boss.”

Concerned that Paige’s allergy might rebound unexpectedly, Tyler stayed by her bedside while waiting for the arrival of her parents, who were racing back to the Alfredson from their workplaces in Seattle.

Paige seemed shell-shocked. Tears streamed steadily from her puffy eyes, and she whimpered like an abandoned puppy. She offered only short yes or no answers to all questions and avoided eye contact with everyone.

An hour later, when Nikki and Tyler were the only two left in the room with her, Paige finally spoke up. “I thought I was going to die, Nikki,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper.

“We weren’t going to let that happen,” Nikki said.

Paige’s brow crumpled and her bloodshot eyes focused on Tyler. “Dr. McGrath, I don’t want to die.” Her voice cracked. “
Please
don’t let me.”

The words stabbed at his heart. “I won’t, Paige.”

“Thank you.” Her eyes closed again and she drifted back to sleep.

Tyler turned to Nikki. “A little better, huh?”

Brown eyes sparkling, Nikki smiled at him with warmth he had not felt since their night at O’Doole’s.

Turning back to the sleeping teenager, Tyler felt a wave of satisfaction wash over him. For the first time since Nate’s death, he remembered why he loved his job.

Jill leaned against the bathroom countertop, the little white stick dangling between her fingers. She had seen the plus sign at first glance; it had not disappeared in the following three confirmatory checks. She stared at the mirror, overwhelmed with surprise and denial.

How did this happen?
she thought, feeling as helpless as a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has barely connected ‘cause and effect.’

She had only bothered to “waste” another pregnancy test because she was seven days late, but, as her periods were often irregular, she had been through the same situation several times before without being pregnant. After eighteen months of fertility treatment and countless pregnancy tests, she never expected this one to finally reveal the elusive plus sign.

Knowing she was supposed to feel elated didn’t help Jill conjure the emotion. She stared blankly at her reflection, aware of the irony. Up until last fall, Tyler and she had worked so hard to become pregnant: the fertility-enhancing drugs, the regimented sex, and even the adherence to the old wives’ tales on positions and times of day. Now, when they were no longer actively trying—arguably, with their near-dormant sex life and strained relationship, passively avoiding pregnancy—Jill found herself knocked up.

“Perfect!” she grumbled. She wondered if she experienced a moment of queasiness but decided the sensation had to be psychosomatic.

Jill was insightful enough to realize that no time would have ever been convenient for a pregnancy, but she had trouble imagining a worse one. So much had happened in the past week. She had already heard, unofficially, from inside sources that her major research grant was about to be renewed in the wake of the preliminary data on her stem cell study. The day before, news of her results had somehow found its way onto a popular academic
blog. Ever since, she’d been bombarded with e-mails and voice mails from colleagues. She had also received numerous interview requests from journals and newspapers as far away as Sydney and Tokyo, all of which she had either ignored or refused. She had expected the attention to come sooner than later, but she was annoyed with the breach in confidentiality and felt unprepared to go public yet with her results.

Life had become a blur around her. She had no idea how she was going to balance all the directions in which she was being pulled. And she had felt like that even before she saw the little red plus sign on the stick.

Why now, when I’m so close?

Jill knew she should tell Tyler, but aware that a third of all early pregnancies ended in miscarriage, she saw no point in getting his hopes up prematurely. At least, that was how she rationalized it to herself.

Her ambivalence stemmed from more than just her once-in-a-lifetime academic opportunity. The timing on the personal front wasn’t much better, either. Since moving to Oakdale, she and Tyler had hit a rut in their relationship. Based on the disastrous experiences of some friends and colleagues, Jill realized a new baby was not the savior for a troubled marriage.

Jill had a flashback of walking onto the oncology floor and seeing that dark-haired, exotic nurse with her hand clasped around Tyler’s elbow. Though jealousy was not one of her prevailing traits, Jill recognized something deeply intimate in that moment. She doubted her husband was capable of having an affair, but the memory continued to gnaw.

Collecting the box and the stick, she tucked the evidence of her positive pregnancy test into an unmarked white plastic bag, tied it up, and tossed it into the garbage can. She decided to take a wait-and-see approach over the next few days before informing Tyler.

Downstairs, she grabbed a bite of breakfast, remembering only as she was putting the dish away to swallow a folate vitamin supplement with it. Imagined or not, her belly did not feel right after eating.

Arriving at the hospital, Jill considered stopping by to visit Senator Wilder, whom she had not seen since his drastic deterioration and transfer to the ICU. She wondered if Wilder had even survived the previous night. If he was still alive, Jill had nothing to offer the poor man except her pity. Out of a sense of duty, she started in the direction of the Henley Building. Then she thought of her pregnancy and the risk of exposing the fetus to
C. diff
or any other microorganisms that might be floating around the ICU. Changing her mind, she turned around and headed straight to her office.

Jill arrived on the ninth floor of the neurosciences center, pleased to discover that she had the lab to herself. She experienced another wave of queasiness and began to doubt that the nausea really was all in her head.

She sat down at her computer but did not open any of the more than a hundred e-mails that had poured in overnight. The sudden attention her lab was drawing among the academic community again stirred the contradictory mix of apprehension and excitement.

Instead, Jill clicked open Andrew Pinter’s spreadsheet. She had studied it so long and hard that she could see the table almost as well with her eyes closed, but she still wasn’t satisfied. As the recognition of and interest in her study flooded in, her concern over the data’s accuracy only deepened.

“Boss, if I showed you a photo of your house, would you even recognize it?” Pinter said through a yawn.

She looked up with a start. Pinter stood in the doorway, his thick hair disheveled and matted on the right side. Jill wondered if he might have been sleeping in the lab. It was not such a far-fetched idea. Pinter seemed to bounce between girlfriends’ apartments, and the volatility of his relationships was legendary. The most recent flavor-of-the-month could have easily tossed him to the curb. But Jill did not want to tread those waters, so she did not ask.

Pinter sauntered up to her desk, wearing a black concert T-shirt with the name and logo of some band Jill had never heard of. “You’re all aglow this morning,” he said.

Nauseous, pregnant, and on edge, she was in no mood for his juvenile flirtatiousness. “Andrew, I want to see the raw data scores,” she said tersely.

Pinter lazily nodded at her computer. “It’s all on that spreadsheet you keep trying to stare down.”

“No, I mean I want to see the individual forms on each enrollee,” she said, referring to the original paper copies her research assistants would have filled out on each of the subjects.

“Why, Jill?” Pinter stifled another yawn. “You don’t think I can transcribe a form onto a spreadsheet?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Last time I checked, Andrew, I was still the principal investigator on this study.”

“Whoa.” Pinter gestured as though trying to calm a startled horse. “Easy
there. I’ll get you the pages.” Then he viewed her with one of his frozen-lipped smiles. “Everything okay, Jill? You seem kind of . . . frustrated this morning?”

Jill ignored the innuendo in his remark. “You saw that blog about our study?”

Pinter shrugged. “It was going to get out one way or another. This is big stuff.”

“How did it get out
this
way, though?”

“Don’t look at me,” he said, appearing amused rather than defensive. “I don’t go for that blogging crap. It’s kind of like deliberately leaving your diary on a bus for people to paw through.”

She viewed him, stone-faced. “
The Sydney Morning Herald
wants to interview me.”

“Way to go, boss!” Pinter nodded, impressed. “If they’re noticing you down under, you’ve truly gone global.”

“It’s too early, Andrew.”

He waved her concern away as he dropped sideways onto the seat across from her and threw a leg over the armrest. “The protocol is well on its way. The results are there.”

“We
think
they are there.”

He shook his head and snorted. “What’s gotten you so spooked?”

“What if we can’t validate the study?”

Pinter managed to smile again without moving his lips. “You can play that ‘what if’ game forever, boss. What if the Arctic melts away tomorrow?” He shrugged. “You learn to row in a hurry.”

“Grow up, Andrew.” She waved a hand up and down, indicating his slovenly appearance. “This carefree, grunge bohemian act of yours won’t cut it anymore. Our study is getting international attention now. And that always attracts world-class scrutiny.”

Pinter scratched his beard, unperturbed. “International attention. I thought that was the point of doing the fucking thing.”

“I didn’t know we would be judged this early.” She sighed. “What if the results are wrong? It’s one thing to have egg on your face for a grant re-application. Kind of another to wear it on the cover of an Australian daily.”

“The data will stand. You’re just getting a bit overwhelmed by the
attention. That’s all.” He interlocked his fingers and cracked his knuckles. “A little neck massage might do you wonders.”

Jill rolled her eyes. “The raw data would do me wonders.”

“Your loss.” Pinter stretched and rose from the chair. “These hands have been described as lethal.”

As Pinter was heading for the door, Jill called after him. “Oh, and Andrew, I want to see the sheets on all the exclusions, too.” She referred to the subjects who were initially enrolled in the study, but later excluded because they did not meet one or another of the criteria.

Pinter stopped and turned slowly. “Why do you want those?”

“Because they’re part of the data, too.”

“That’s a lot of useless paper, Jill.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

Pinter hesitated a moment before he walked back to the desk. He folded his arms across the chest. The laissez-faire indifference normally chiseled into his features gave way to a suspicious frown. “I thought I was your statistician on this project.”

“What’s your point, Andrew?”

“All this second-guessing my work.” His eyes narrowed. “You make me feel like a kid whose parents don’t trust him to finish his homework on his own.”

She shrugged unapologetically. “This is the biggest study of my life, Andrew.” She cracked a slight smile and tapped the center of her chest with a finger. “And like everyone around here says: This bitch is one major control freak.”

Pinter didn’t appear amused or mollified. He stared at her for a long moment before he turned abruptly for the door. “Okay, Dr. Laidlaw. I’ll go get you every last page of it. Knock yourself out.”

Watching Pinter stomp out of the room, Jill felt a pang of remorse. She wondered if she had been too hard on him. She had no reason to doubt his ability to run data; in fact, he had repeatedly proved that he was a whiz with statistics. She wondered if her shortness with him was related to the pregnancy. And if so, was it merely her reaction to the news or a genuine hormonal fluctuation?
I don’t have time for this
, she thought again.

Distracted for the rest of the morning, she practically sleepwalked
through her clinical rounds on the ward and her academic departmental meeting. With varying degrees of politeness, she brushed off all attempts by her excited colleagues to discuss the rumors of her stem cell breakthrough. Just before noon, Andrew Pinter walked into her office and dropped a box full of files on her desk. It landed with a solid thud. He didn’t even make eye contact with Jill, but she had neither the time nor energy to address their rift. She merely nodded her thanks.

After he’d left, Jill decided she needed a break from the Alfredson. She hoisted the weighty box and lugged it out to her car. In the fresh air, she wondered if paranoia was getting the better of her.

Once home, she resisted the urge to brew a pot of coffee, resenting the deprivation her pregnancy was already imposing on her. Instead, she steeped a pot of decaf Earl Grey tea and then headed into her home office with a full mug.

Jill emptied the box of files onto her desk and organized them into neat stacks. Each of the files represented one study patient. Reaching for the first folder, she knew she was in for a long afternoon. The initial survey on each patient was ten pages long with five-page follow-ups performed at three-month intervals following enrollment. The subjects were kept strictly anonymous (to “blind” the assessors and data collectors) and identified only by unique eight-digit numbers. With the spreadsheet open on her computer screen, Jill found the patient identifier and began to compare the answers on the pages to the columns on the screen.

Three hours later, Jill had sorted through close to a hundred files from both the treatment and control groups of the study without finding a single discrepancy between the paper copies and the electronic spreadsheet. Tired, but relieved, she felt even more remorseful for having grilled Pinter about the results.