A shrill, agonizing whine escaped from Kim’s lips when he realized he was holding necrotic shreds of Becky’s heart and pericardium. The toxin had been merciless. It was as if his daughter had been eaten from within.
The door to the ICU burst open. Two uniformed hospital security personnel spilled into the room. They had been called by the head nurse after the scuffle over the epinephrine.
As soon as the two men took in the scene, they stopped in their tracks. Becky was still being respired by the ventilator; her pink lungs intermittently filled the gaping incision. Kim stood by her, his hands bloodied, his eyes wild with grief. He tried to gently return the necrotic tissue to Becky’s chest cavity. When he was finished with this futile gesture, he put his head back and let out a wail of anguish unlike anything ever heard in the ICU before.
Tracy had recovered enough to step forward. Kim’s anguished cry cut her to the quick. She wanted to comfort him and be comforted herself.
But Kim was blind to everyone and anything. He shoved his way out of the cubicle and dashed across the ICU. Before anyone could respond, he was through the door.
In the corridor. Kim went into headlong flight. People who saw him coming got out of the way. One orderly didn’t move quickly enough; Kim slammed into him, sending the man and his water cart flying.
Outside of the hospital, Kim ran to his car. Gunning the engine, he shot out of the doctors’ lot, leaving a line of rubber in his wake.
Kim drove like a madman out to Prairie Highway. Lucky for him, he encountered no police cruisers. When he turned into the Onion Ring parking lot he was going fast enough to bottom out just as he had on his previous visit. The car bounced violently until he brought it to a screeching stop directly in front of the busy restaurant. Yanking on the emergency brake, he made the motions to get out. Then he hesitated. A glimmer of rationality seeped into the corners of his emotionally overloaded brain. The Saturday afternoon crowd enjoying their burgers, milkshakes, and fries and oblivious to his psychic pain yanked him back to reality.
Kim had raced to the Onion Ring in search of a scapegoat. But now that he was there, he didn’t get out of the car.
Instead he raised his right hand and stared at it. Seeing his daughter’s dark, dried blood confirmed the awful reality: Becky was dead. And he hadn’t been able to do a thing to save her. He began to sob. All he could do was drape himself helplessly over the steering wheel.
Tracy shook her head in disbelief of everything that had happened. She ran her hand through her tangled hair as Marsha Baldwin patted her shoulder. On top of everything else, it was hard to believe she was being consoled by a stranger.
Tracy had responded the opposite of Kim. Instead of flying off in a blind rage, she’d found herself paralyzed, unable to even cry.
Right after Kim’s precipitous departure, Claire and Kathleen had accompanied Tracy to the ICU waiting room. Marsha had followed although at the time Tracy was unaware of her presence. Claire and Kathleen had stayed with Tracy for some time to offer their sympathies and to explain what had happened. They had spared no details in response to Tracy’s questions, including how the E. coli toxin had obviously attacked both Becky’s heart muscle as well as her pericardium, the covering around the heart.
Claire and Kathleen had offered to help get Tracy home, but Tracy had told them that she had her car and that she’d be all right to drive. It wasn’t until the two doctors had left that Tracy realized that Marsha was still there, and the two women had begun a long conversation.
“I want to thank you for staying here all this time.” Tracy said. “You’ve been a wonderful support. I hope I haven’t bored you with all these Becky stories.”
“She sounds like she was a wonderful child.”
“The best.” Tracy said wistfully. Then she took a fortifying breath and sat up straight in her chair. The two women were sitting in the far corner of the room by the window where they’d pulled two chairs close together. Outside the long shadows of a late, wintery afternoon crept ever eastward.