The Baby Who Stole the Doctor's Heart (8 page)

“So, is this where I asked you if this was planned? You know, you paid him to come and shut us in?”

“Right,” Angela said, fumbling along the exterior wall for the light switch. “My true motive was getting you alone in the dark.”

“It's happened before,” he said, chuckling. “And I wouldn't waste my time on the light switch. It's outside the door.”

Angela sighed audibly as she sidestepped over to the door, taking care not to bump into the stacks of boxes along the wall. Thankfully, the little ribbon of light streaming in from under the door was just enough to give her a dim view as her eyes adjusted. “Well, my fondest wish right now is a nice Alfredo sauce. Linguini and crab. A hearts of romaine salad. Not a fumble and tickle among the saltine crackers.” She found the door, grasped the handle. Turned it and…

“Let me guess. It's not opening.” Mark stepped up closer to her, like that would change the situation.

“It's locked. Probably on the outside, like the light switch is. Who in the world would build a pantry this way? I mean, it's a brand-new construction. They should have known better. Somebody should have…” She jiggled the handle, started to get frantic about it.

Mark laid a hand on her shoulder. “Are you afraid of the dark?”

“No,” she snapped.

“Claustrophobic?”

“No!”

“Then calm down, and I'll call someone to come get us.” He pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open, and… “No signal.”

That triggered her. Not a panic reaction as much as an agitated one. She didn't have time for this. And the heck of it was, if they stayed in there all night, no one would even notice. Dinah wouldn't. In fact, her sister would be thinking all kinds of things…the kinds of things that set Angela pounding on the pantry door. “Help!” she shouted. “Somebody, let us out! We're in the pantry. Let us out!”

Thirty minutes later, her fists were sore, her voice hoarse, and they were still locked in a dark pantry.
Together
. “Any ideas?” she asked, slumping down onto the floor next to him.

“Wait.”

“Well, isn't that just helpful!”

“Give me some tools and maybe I can take the door off the hinges. Unless the hinges are on the outside, too.”

“Good idea. But I don't have tools.” Angela huffed a loud, frustrated sigh. “It's after six. Nobody's here.”

“Someone will miss you shortly when you don't show up for Sarah. And they'll come looking. So until then we make the best of it. Relax. Rest. Take a nap…I'll bet you never take a nap, do you?”

“I don't want to take a nap!” Not now, not while she was thinking about the fact that nobody would come looking until morning.

“Suit yourself. But it's awfully tight in here for you to pace, and unless you plan to whip up a miracle dinner in here, that's about all there is to do.”

Angela reached over to the shelf, grabbed a bag of pretzels, and thrust it at him. “Here's dinner,” she said in a disheartened voice.
“Bon appetit.”

 

If it weren't for the fact that the floor was hard and the company was ice cold, it wouldn't have been a truly bad situation. But his back ached from all the physical labor of getting this pantry stocked, and the cement floor underneath him wasn't making him feel any better. Neither was the fact that Angela had been sitting off in the corner for the past hour, totally silent, except for the occasional exasperated sigh. He knew she had things to do. And he'd actually intended to go down to the hospital this evening, after dinner, and put in a shift in Emergency. It wasn't scheduled, but Neil was on and he was sure Neil would have appreciated an evening off to be with his family. Then there was the other thing…he hadn't seen a patient in a week now, and he missed it. Sure, his intention was to leave medicine behind him. So he was surprised that he was actually itching to get back to the ER for a shift.

“What time?” he asked Angela.

“What time, what?”

“Will Dinah or Eric start worrying about you?”

“About seven.”

“Then we shouldn't have to wait much longer. It's just after seven, now, so they should come looking pretty soon.”

“In the morning. Seven,
in the morning
.”

“You're joking, right?”

“Wish I were, but I'm not.” He didn't need to know what Dinah hoped they were doing. That would only complicate things. “My sister was going to keep Sarah all night. So…”

“So unless the lodge is haunted and a kindly ghost lets us out, we're here all night.”

“All night…”

“Could be worse.”

“How?”

“We could be stranded in a cave, or somewhere out in the snow. I've spent some miserable nights out in the mountains, on various rescues. Bad weather. Conditions you can't even
imagine. At least here, we have pretzels.” He crinkled the bag. “So, let me see if I can feel around for some of that bottled water I brought in, and we'll be set for the night.”

“I think I like you better when you're grumpy,” she snapped. “At least then I know what to expect from you. But now you're sounding so…so chipper. Like maybe this is what
you
planned.”

Mark chuckled. “One of the things I stress in my classes is that you have to make the best of a bad situation. Being grumpy, complaining, pacing, worrying…it all just wears you down, and when you're in a situation you don't want to be in, you really need to keep your focus. So if you let the surrounding elements get to you, you're letting yourself get distracted. And on a rescue you can't let that happen. No exceptions.”

“You can actually think that clearly when you find yourself in a bad situation? Say, you're rappelling down the side of a mountain and you get stuck. You're hanging in midair, can't go up, can't go down. Ground's about a mile below you and the top is so far away you can't see it. Can you honestly say that you're not going to get distracted by your situation?”

“You want my lecture on that? Because it's brief and to the point. And what I say will save your life in just that situation.”

“Have you been in that situation?”

“Once.”

“And you didn't panic.”

“I knew what I was doing.”

“So give me the lecture. Tell me how you hung up there and didn't get distracted.”

“Well, first, it's about the equipment. If you climb a mountain on my time, you use an ATC—that stands for air traffic controller. You use it for both belaying and rappelling because it doesn't kink, it has no moving parts, and it's easier
on the hip skin than a hip belay. It's also light, inexpensive and safe if you know how to use it the right way.”

“And a belay is?”

“Belaying refers to different techniques used in climbing to apply friction on a climbing rope so that a falling climber doesn't fall too far.”

“That's a good thing, I suppose.”

“It is, if you're falling.”

“And you've fallen?”

“Trust me, I've fallen. And it was long, and painful.”

“I get the feeling we're not talking about you falling off a mountain,” she said.

“Isn't mountain-climbing an analogy for life? You're either fighting to get to the top, or hoping that once you get there you don't fall off. And one misstep along the way…”

“Spoken like a true cynic…about life, not mountain climbing.”

His audible sigh filled the dark room. “Not cynical so much as experienced. Mountain climbing's more predictable than life. If you do everything right, the odds are in your favor. In life, if you do everything right…who the hell knows what happens?”

“That's why you're quitting medicine? Because life isn't predictable?”

“It's as good a reason as any.”

“But you're good, Mark. Eric and Neil practically skip up and down the hospital halls singing your praises. And the way you took care of Sarah after the avalanche—”

“Sarah was fine,” he interrupted. “Every time you brought her into Emergency, she was perfect.”

“OK, then the way you took care of Sarah's mother by indulging her bouts of anxiety when she brought Sarah in to be examined.”

He chuckled. “You're a good mother. I worked in a
hospital…one of the largest hospitals in California…and I was confronted by bad mothers all the time. You know, mothers who didn't care, mothers who neglected their children's medical concerns or totally neglected their children. I saw some pretty ugly things when I was there, so there's no way I'm going to fault someone who might have brought her child in a time or two more than was necessary.”

“And that's why you're leaving medicine? You burned out because of the bad things you had to deal with?”

“No, those were easy because, no matter how bad the situation, I was taking care of someone who needed help, trying to help them get better. As discouraging as the bad cases can be, I never minded giving the care. But the reason I'm leaving medicine is that in one instance I displayed a gross lack of good judgment and killed my father-in-law.”

His words hung heavy in the darkness. So heavy, Angela could barely get her breath. “That's not the end of the story, is it?” she finally managed to ask.

“The story? There is no story. We were on our way home from a banquet honoring my father-in-law. He was retiring as a cardiac surgeon. Well respected, beloved. A little intoxicated. So I drove us home—him, my wife, me. But I wasn't in much better shape to drive than he was. Not intoxicated…I don't indulge. But exhausted. I'd come off of thirty-six straight hours on duty…hard duty, lots of traffic accidents due to heavy fog. And I could barely keep my eyes open. Didn't want to go with my wife and her father in the first place, but… Let's just say that better sense didn't prevail. I went, dozed my way though the banquet and afterwards asked Norah, my wife, to drive when I realized that Tom…my father-in-law wasn't able. But my wife…well, she liked the privileged life and it was always easier for me to let her have her own way. Never seemed worth the effort to argue with her. And that night she was tired, didn't want to drive,
so I got behind the wheel. Didn't doze off, mind you. But I was fighting it.

“My reflexes were slow, though. And we were struck broadside by another car. He'd run a stop sign, and if I'd been more alert, I might have seen it coming. But that's something we'll never know. Anyway, I was fine. Suffered a broken shoulder from the seat harness, some air-bag burns, but good. To cut a long story short, my father-in-law died.”

“But it was an accident. Not your fault.”

“See, that's the thing. It
was
my fault. Maybe not the accident itself. But I'm a trauma surgeon and I failed to see his fatal injuries. Thought he looked fine. Did what he said when he told me to look after Norah first.”

“Like any father would do. Mark, I'm so sorry,” she whispered, not sure what else there was to say.

“He was a good man. He deserved better than what he got at the end, which was a son-in-law who missed a crucial diagnosis. So anyway, there you have it. I was on my way out the door. Resigned my post at the hospital, and ready to try something different. Then Neil and Eric asked me to come here.” He chuckled bitterly. “They knew exactly what they were doing, telling me they needed help. Friends help. That was the example I'd learned from my father-in-law, and I felt like I owed it to him, as well as to Neil and Eric. They asked for eighteen months, I agreed to it. And I know they're counting on me to stay on when those eighteen months are done. You know, settle in to White Elk, have a change of heart, let those damn Three Sisters work their magic on me, or whatever the hell the legend is. But the thing they don't have to live with, that I do, is the look on my father-in-law's face when he died. He was so shocked. Not frightened, not angry. Just…”

His words trailed off, and Angela wasn't sure what to do. Leave him alone for a while? Comfort him? In the dark,
sitting on the cement floor, there weren't many options. “I'm not sure what to say,” she finally admitted, “because I don't think words will make you feel better. Time will do that, and in some ways accepting that you're only human will alleviate some of the pain. But right now…”

Mark laughed aloud, breaking the tension. “Isn't this the place where you're supposed to put your arms around me to comfort me, then we…?”

“Have pity sex?” The suggestion as well as the tension breaker caused her to laugh. “Something I learned a long time ago, from my husband, was that sex doesn't make it better if it's not good to begin with.”

“And we're not good?”

Actually, they were. Better than she'd thought they ever would be. Although she wasn't going to admit it aloud. Because the truth was she might have been persuaded in amorous ways in that closet, not out of pity but inasmuch as even in the dark, when she closed her eyes, she could picture herself in his arms. And that image caused a raise in her pulse that excited her, yet worried her more than it excited. Her relationship with Brad had started off physically and she'd always thought everything else would catch up to that. But it hadn't. So now she was cautious. Not prudish. Just cautious. It was as simple as that. “So tell me more about belaying,” she said, glad to be off the subject.

He chuckled. “You and me both, Angela.”

“What's the supposed to mean?”

“I think you know.”

She didn't even have to think about it because she did. They were good. And they were both wounded in deep ways. Ways that couldn't be explored or cured in a pantry. In other words, proceed with caution. “Yes, I think I do.”

“So…the friction is usually applied by the climber's companion. You never climb alone, by the way. Anyway, it's
applied by the companion at the other end of the rope, and it's his job to watch the climber and be ready to jam the rope as soon as he sees the climber fall. What's going to break that fall is that in a typical layout one end of the rope is tied to the climber. It passes through a metal loop fixed into the rock and runs down to a second person, called the belayer. He's the one who stays at the bottom, watching the climber. And he's the one who's wearing a harness to which a ring, called a belay device, is attached. If the climber falls, the belayer locks the rope in the belay device, and the climber's fall is stopped. He's left dangling, probably pretty sore, but he's safe.”