Texas Redeemed (15 page)

In the parking lot, Lucy hung back as Sarah’s mother wrangled her daughters into their car. Then Sarah lowered the
window and poked her head out. “You’re coming with us to the hospital, right?”

Oh, hell, no.
Lucy
detested spending time in the hospital. But Sarah was crying, her wig was all
messed up, her arm was probably broken and her little sister had consumed too
much sugar and was throwing a hissy fit in the car.

“Of course I’m coming with.” Lucy climbed into the backseat
beside Megan, who promptly socked her on the arm for crushing a Ziploc bag full
of animal crackers.

At Memorial, once a nurse had whisked Sarah and her
mother off to an emergency-room cubicle, Lucy looked at Megan, who stuck out
her tongue to reveal a chewed-up red Lifesaver. “That’s gross.”

“You look weird. I don’t like you green.”

And I don’t like
ladybugs.
“C’mon, let’s sit down,” she said instead, pointing to a row of
chairs in the nearby waiting room. The second she dropped into a chair she
realized Megan wasn’t with her.

“Oh. Freaking. Crap.” She shot
out of the waiting room. Everywhere there were people, all of them faceless,
indistinct. She kept the image of an annoying red-haired ladybug in her head as
she took off down the hall calling, “Megan!”

Just when she considered reporting the mishap to
security, she spotted a pair of antennae floating in the air at the end of the
noisy hallway just in front of a wide pair of sliding doors. The
ambulance entrance. Paramedics and nurses scattered about, hovering over
bleeding patients. There was a trail of broken glass on the floor.

Car crash, probably, Lucy guessed, suppressing a little
shudder. Maybe somebody who’d been at the orchard? It was creepy to be this
close to the action.

The antennae moved, bobbed as Megan rushed off. Lucy
followed, but lost her once she dared to blink. Then she found her again,
standing on tiptoe with her nose against one of the trauma room windows.

“Gotcha,” Lucy said, catching the little girl’s
shoulders. “Why’d you run away?”

Megan was distracted by whatever was going on in the
trauma room. “Is he gonna die?”

Lucy followed her gaze to the man stretched across the
gurney. Doctors and nurses surrounded the bed, one with a pair of paddles in
her hands.

“Don’t look, Megan,” she whispered, covering the girl’s
eyes but unable to stop herself from staring. It seemed to go on forever.
Doctors shouting, the paddles making the man’s body jerk on the gurney. More shouting, more shocking … then nothing.

Had it been like this with her sister? Anna had been just
a little kid, like Megan.

Lucy dropped to her knees and hugged the girl for all of
two seconds before Megan shoved her and growled, “I
said
I don’t like you green. Can you take me to Sarah now?”

The door swung open and a
doctor swore as he slammed out of the trauma room, causing Megan to flinch.
Frozen like a gargoyle, Lucy stared at him. The smock he shoved into a
biohazard waste container was blood-smeared; his face was sweaty and his
shoulders tense with almost palpable anger. As if he felt her watching him, the
doctor whipped around.

Dad.
No—Peyton. Doctor Turner. “Uh, hi.”

“Lucy.” His eyes flashed and his frown deepened, and for
a second he looked as scary as any Halloween mask. “Are you all right?”

“It’s my friend. She hurt her arm, that’s all.”

“Then go be with her. You, and especially you—” he
pointed at Megan “—shouldn’t be here.” Then he turned and kept walking,
shrugging off the consoling pat on the shoulder one of the other doctors tried
to offer.

“That man said a bad word,” Megan whispered
conspiratorially, resting her head against Lucy, either plummeting from a sugar
high or suddenly deciding not to care that she was green.

“I know.” Lucy took her hand and began to lead her away.

“Is he a bad man?”

“I don’t know.”

A
T
THE
SINK
in the on-call room Peyton twisted
the faucet marked with the blue sticker, cupped his hands under the pounding
stream of cold water and splashed it over his face. He repeated the motion
twice, then shut off the water and braced his hands on the edge of the sink as
rivulets of water traveled down his face.

He’d lost a patient tonight. It was a
team
effort,
one of the other doctors had tried to tell him. If the man had survived, the
glory would have been for the team of EMTs, nurses and doctors who’d pitched in
to help save his life. But he’d died before they’d even had the chance to get
him to the operating room, and Peyton had taken it as a personal blow. He had
looked straight into the patient’s eyes before he’d slipped out of
consciousness … had sworn that the man would recover.

Internal injuries. A steering wheel to the chest.

Recover? It seemed foolish as hell in retrospect to think
that, let alone assure that patient of it. He’d been blinded by the memories of
all the lives he’d saved in the past, too cocky for his own good, flying too
high to be realistic.

Reality hurt like a bitch.

“Turner, you gonna rip that
sink away from the wall, or what?”

Peyton uncurled his fingers from the porcelain, blinking
away the water that lingered on his eyelashes. He dragged a hand across his
face, avoiding the mirror. “Are you gonna get off
your ass and work tonight, or what, Reed?”

Sawyer Reed, a new resident, sat up on the top bunk,
plucked the sucker from his mouth and pointed it at Peyton. “Been
here since eleven this morning. Off the clock, technically.”

“But technically you don’t have anywhere better to be?”

“Guess I don’t.”

Peyton grunted, not wanting to analyze someone else’s
problems, not wanting to think at all. The construction paper Halloween
decorations of ghosts and witches and goblins mocked him as he made his way to
the row of lockers to change out of his scrubs and into street clothes.

The door swung open and Marlon Greer strode in. He had
been a part of the “team”—the team that had just lost a patient. “Peyton, I
need to ask you something. Get pissed if you want, but answer me.”

Peyton waited, swinging open the locker and pulling out a
black button-down shirt.

“Do you want to be assigned to another department? Is the
ER—”

“I can handle a damn ER, Greer.”

“Can you? Without going ballistic?
I don’t think emergency surgery …”

Peyton yanked his shirt off over his head and stuffed it
into a plastic bag. “Emergency surgery is why I was brought on board, Greer.
Take it up with Chief if you don’t like it.” Working his fingers over the
buttons of the fresh shirt fast, he added, “Let
me
ask
you
something. Do
you think that patient died because I screwed up?”

“Of course not!” Marlon snapped.
“Do you?”

Sawyer sprung off the bunk and moved to the candy bowl
sitting in the middle of a crumb-littered table. He didn’t utter a word.

“I don’t,” Peyton admitted, reaching into the locker for
his jeans. He could still smell the odor of antiseptic on his skin. Ordinarily
it didn’t bother him, but tonight he wanted to scrub away the smell until his
skin was raw. Tonight was about more than ego, more than disappointment, more
than even a patient’s death.

Lucy had seen it unravel. His daughter had watched him
let a life slip through his hands. She’d seen him fail.

Marlon sighed, scratched his salt-and-pepper mustache.
“Get home, Turner. Come back in the morning and talk to Cartwright or Fish or
somebody.”

“From the mental health department?
To hell with that.”

“Learn to listen to somebody else, because obviously some
part of you is trying to talk but the rest of you won’t hear it.” The doctor
twisted his mouth in a sympathizing way. “If talking it out confidentially—”

“Confidentiality’s barely more than a pipe dream in this
town, Greer.”

Sawyer snorted in agreement and reached for a fun-size
box of Nerds.

“Get a hobby, then. Hell, take up smoking, like Reed.”

“Pack a day makes the demons go away,” the
fresh-out-of-med-school doctor chimed in, his voice flat and void of emotion.

“Point is,” Marlon went on, “there’s no room in the ER
for rage. Get it together—fast.”

Peyton’s brain filled with the memory of his daughter
kneeling under the trauma room window covered in green goop and wearing that
ridiculous dress. In her eyes were surprise … and the same shade of pity that
he’d seen on Valerie’s face when they’d visited the cemetery.

As he quickly finished dressing, his colleagues left the
on-call room.

How long had Lucy been at Memorial tonight? Who was the
little girl he’d seen with her? And were they still inside the building
somewhere?

He found her in an emergency-room cubicle, sitting on a
gurney with another girl who looked about the same age and was outfitted in a
rock star costume and an arm sling. The ladybug he’d seen earlier now wore a
huge pink wig and was perched on a chair beside the bed fiddling with a remote
control.

From what he could tell, they were talking about llamas
and goats.

A redheaded woman wearing a tired expression appeared
around the corner. “What’s going on?” She peered into the cubicle then stared
warily at Peyton.

He pointed at Lucy, who looked unblinkingly at him. “I’m
her father. I want to see her.”

The bewigged kid in the chair frowned. “He’s the man who
said a bad word!”

“That’s your dad?” the girl next to Lucy hissed loudly,
her voice high and laced with accusation. “You found your dad? You didn’t say—
Ooowww
!
”

In her haste to scramble off the gurney, Lucy had nudged
the other girl’s injured arm accidentally. Or had it been intentional?

The redhead moved in front of Lucy, shielding her.
“Valerie didn’t say—”

Lucy produced a cell phone from a well-hidden pocket on
her dress. “Call her. Tell her my father’s driving me home.”

T
HE DRIVE TO
Battle Creek was so eerily quiet that more than once Peyton had looked to his
right expecting to find Lucy asleep against the seat. But each time she flicked
a furrowed-browed glance at him and continued staring out the window as
headlights and taillights flashed through the night.

At the house she led the way to the porch and directed
him to the bench that was now cluttered with several hardcover books. Pushing
them to one side, he sat down and then waited for her to park herself on the
porch railing a couple of feet away.

He glanced around at his surroundings, noticing that a
harvest wreath complete with pinecones hung on the front door.

“Are you trying to prove something?”

Peyton leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.
“Prove what?”

Lucy shrugged. “That you’re doing right by being a father
to a kid you didn’t ask for. Am I something to add to your good deed list?”

“The things I did before I left weren’t good deeds.”

Avid with curiosity, she urged, “Like what? Would
somebody
tell me already? Coop said
people won’t forget what you did. Pastor Bruin’s wife was talking about you. I
know you used to get into fights and stuff, and then you got my mom pregnant.
But there’s more, right?”

At his unbending look, she relented, and he continued,
“I’m not trying to cancel out all the bad things by being in your life now,
Lucy.”
Maybe I want to be your dad,
except I don’t think I know how,
he almost said, but left the unspoken
thought tucked in the reserves of his mind. “Valerie and I talked about
visitation.”

“How come?” The girl seemed
genuinely confused. “I snooped around in your stuff at Gramps’s place. I
ditched school. I lied—a lot.”

“Not news to me.”

“But I’m …
bad.
Why would you want to hang out with me?”