“Okay, you shouldn’t feel this,” she said.
“Right.”
“Don’t talk.”
Then, there it was. Like the slightest tug on the end of a fishing line, a scrap fish stealing your bait. He opened his eyes and saw the line of the scope, as thin as a fishing line, still deep in the heart.
“Okay, we got it,” she said. “Coming out now. You did good, Terry.”
He felt her pat his shoulder, though he couldn’t turn his head to look at her. The scope was removed and she taped a gauze compress against the incision in his neck. The brace that had held his head at such an uncomfortable angle was unstrapped and he slowly straightened his neck, bringing his hand up to work the stiff muscles. Dr. Bonnie Fox’s smiling face then hovered above his.
“How you feeling?”
“Can’t complain. Now that it’s over.”
“I’ll see you in a little while. I want to check the blood work and get the tissue over to the lab.”
“I want to talk to you about something.”
“You got it. See you in a bit.”
A few minutes later two nurses wheeled McCaleb’s bed out of the cath lab and into an elevator. He hated being treated as an invalid. He could have walked but it was against the rules. After a heart biopsy the patient must be kept horizontal. Hospitals always have rules. Cedars-Sinai seemed to have more than most.
He was taken down to the cardiology unit on the sixth floor. While being wheeled down the east hallway, he passed the rooms of the lucky and the waiting-patients who had received new hearts or were still waiting. They passed one room where McCaleb glanced through the open door and saw a young boy on the bed, his body tied by tubes to a heart-lung machine. A man in a suit sat in the chair on the other side of the bed, his eyes staring at the boy but seeing something else. McCaleb looked away. He knew the score. The kid was running out of time. The machine would only hold him up for so long. Then the man in the suit-the father, McCaleb assumed-would be staring at a casket with the same look.
They were at his room now. He was moved from the gurney onto the bed and left alone. He settled in for the wait. He knew from experience that it could be as long as six hours before Fox showed up, depending on how quickly the blood work was run through the lab and how soon she came by to pick up the report.
He had come prepared. The old leather bag in which he had once carried his computer and the countless case files he had worked on was now stuffed with back issues of magazines he saved for biopsy days.
Two and a half hours later, Bonnie Fox came through the door. McCaleb put down the copy of
“Wow, that was fast.”
“It’s slow in the lab. How are you feeling?”
“My neck feels like it had somebody’s foot on it for a couple hours. You’ve already been to the lab?”
“Yup.”
“How’d everything come out?”
“It all looks good. No rejection, all the levels look good. I’m very pleased. We might lower your prednisone in another week.”
She spoke as she spread the lab report out on the bed’s food table and double-checked the good results. She was referring to the carefully orchestrated mix of drugs that McCaleb took every morning and night. Last he’d counted, he was swallowing eighteen pills in the morning and another sixteen at night. The medicine cabinet on the boat wasn’t big enough for all the containers. He had to use one of the storage compartments in the forward berth.
“Good,” he said. “I’m tired of shaving three times a day.”
Fox folded the report closed and picked the clipboard up off the bed table. Her eyes quickly scanned the checklist of questions he had to answer every time he came in.
“No fever at all?”
“No, I’m clean.”
“And no diarrhea.”
“Nope.”
He knew from her constant drilling and double-checking that fever and diarrhea were the twin harbingers of organ rejection. He took his temperature a minimum of twice a day, along with readings of blood pressure and pulse.
“The vitals look good. Why don’t you lean forward?”
She put the clipboard down. With a stethoscope she first warmed with her breath, she listened to his heart at three different spots on his back. Then he lay back and she listened through his chest. She took her own measure of his pulse with two fingers on his neck while she looked at her watch. She was very close to him as she did this. She wore a perfume of orange blossoms, which McCaleb had always associated with older women. And Bonnie Fox was not one of them. He looked up at her, studying her face while she studied her watch.
“Do you ever wonder if we should be doing this?” he asked.
“Don’t talk.”
Eventually, she moved her fingers to his wrist and measured the pulse there. After that she pulled the pressure collar off the wall, put it on his arm and took a blood pressure reading, maintaining her silence all the time. “Good,” she said when she was done.
“Good,” he said.
“Whether we should be doing what?”
