‘I’m Sarah,’ Dr Rosen added, replacing the empty plate with a full one.
‘Thank you, Sarah.’ This smile was somewhat wan, but Doris Brown was reacting to the world around her now, an event far more important than the casual observer might have guessed. Small steps, Sarah told herself. They don’t have to be big steps. They just have to head in the right direction. Doctor and nurse shared a look.
There was nothing like it. It was too hard to explain to someone who hadn’t been there and done it. She and Sandy had reached into the grave and pulled this girl back from grasping earth. Three more months, Sarah had estimated, maybe not that long, and her body would have been so weakened that the most trivial outside influence would have ended her life in a matter of hours. But not now. Now this girl would live, and the two medics shared without words the feeling that God must have known when He had breathed life into Adam. They had defeated Death, redeeming the gift that only God could give. For this reason both had entered their shared profession, and moments like this one pushed back the rage and sorrow and grief for those patients whom they couldn’t save.
‘Don’t eat too fast, Doris. When you don’t eat for a while, your stomach actually shrinks down some,’ Sarah told her, returning to form as a medical doctor. There was no sense in warning her about problems and pain sure to develop in her gastrointestinal tract. Nothing would stop it, and getting nourishment into her superseded other considerations at the moment.
‘Okay. I’m getting a little full.’
‘Then relax a little. Tell us about your father.’
‘I ran away,’ Doris replied at once. ‘Right after David … after the telegram, and Daddy … he had some trouble, and he blamed me.’
Raymond Brown was a foreman in the Number Three Basic Oxygen Furnace Shed of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, and that was all he was, now. His house was on Dunleavy Street, halfway up one of the steep hills of his city, one of many detached frame dwellings built around the turn of the century, with wood clapboard siding that he had to paint every two or three years, depending on the severity of the winter winds that swept down the Monongahela Valley. He worked the night shift because his house was especially empty at night. Nevermore to hear the sounds of his wife, nevermore to take his son to Little League to play catch in the sloped sanctity of his tiny backyard, nevermore to worry about his daughter’s dates on weekends.
He’d tried, done everything a man could do, after it was too late, which was so often the way of things. It had just been too much. His wife, discovering a lump, still a pretty young woman in her thirty-seventh year, his best and closest friend. He’d supported her as best he could after the surgery, but then came another lump, another surgery, medical treatment, and the downhill slide, always having to be strong for her until the end. It would have been a crushing burden for any man, and then followed by another. His only son, David, drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed two weeks later in some nameless valley. The support of his fellow workers, the way they had come to Davey’s funeral, hadn’t stopped him from crawling inside a bottle, desperately trying to cling to what he had left, but too tightly. Doris had borne her own grief, something Raymond hadn’t fully understood or appreciated, and when she’d come home late, her clothing not quite right, the cruel and hateful things he’d said. He could remember every word, the hollow sound as the front door had slammed.
Only a day later he’d come to his senses, driving with tears in his eyes to the police station, abasing himself before men whose understanding and sympathy he never quite recognized, desperate again to get his little girl back, to beg from her the forgiveness that he could never give himself. But Doris had vanished. The police had done what they could, and that wasn’t much. And so for two years he’d lived inside a bottle, until two fellow workers had taken him aside and talked as friends do once they have gathered the courage to invade the privacy of another man’s life. His minister was a regular guest in the lonely house now. He was drying out – Raymond Brown still drank, but no longer to excess, and he was working to cut it down to zero. Man that he was, he had to face his loneliness that way, had to deal with it as best he could. He knew that solitary dignity was of little value. It was an empty thing to cling to, but it was all he had. Prayer also helped, some, and in the repeated words he often found sleep, though not the dreams of the family which had once shared the house with him. He was tossing and turning in his bed, sweating from the heat, when the phone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is this Raymond Brown?’
‘Yeah, who’s this?’ he asked with closed eyes.
‘My name is Sarah Rosen. I’m a doctor in Baltimore, I work at Johns Hopkins Hospital.’
‘Yes?’ The tone of her voice opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling, the blank white place that so closely matched the emptiness of his life. And there was sudden fear. Why would a doctor from Baltimore call him? His mind was spinning off towards a named dread when the voice went on quickly.
‘I have somebody here who wants to talk to you, Mr Brown.’
‘Huh?’ He next heard muffled noises that might have been static from a bad line, but was not.
‘I can’t.’
‘You have nothing to lose, dear,’ Sarah said, handing over the phone. ‘He’s your father. Trust him.’
Doris took it, holding it in both hands close to her face, and her voice was a whisper.
‘Daddy?’
From hundreds of miles away, the whispered word came through as clearly as a church bell. He had to breathe three times before answering, and that came out as a sob.
‘Dor?’
‘Yes – Daddy, I’m sorry.’
‘Are you okay, baby?’
‘Yes, Daddy, I’m fine.’ And incongruous as the statement was, it was not a lie.
‘Where are you?’
‘Wait a minute.’ Then the voice changed. ‘Mr Brown, this is Doctor Rosen again’
‘She’s there?’
‘Yes, Mr Brown, she is. We’ve been treating her for a week. She’s a sick girl, but she’s going to be okay. Do you understand? She’s going to be okay.’
He was grasping his chest. Brown’s heart was a steel fist, and his breathing came in painful gasps that a doctor might have taken for something they were not.
‘She’s okay?’ he asked anxiously.
‘She’s going to be fine,’ Sarah assured him. ‘There’s no doubt of that, Mr Brown. Please believe me, okay?’
‘Oh, sweet Jesus! Where, where are you?’
‘Mr Brown, you can’t see her just yet. We will bring her to you just as soon as she’s fully recovered. I worried about calling you before we could get you together, but – but we just couldn’t not call you. I hope you understand.’
Sarah had to wait two minutes before she heard anything she could understand, but the sounds that came over the line touched her heart. In reaching into one grave, she had extracted two lives.
‘She’s really okay?’
‘She’s had a bad time, Mr Brown, but I promise you she will recover fully. I’m a good doc, okay? I wouldn’t say that unless it were true.’
‘Please, please let me talk to her again. Please!’
Sarah handed the phone over, and soon four people were weeping. Nurse and physician were the luckiest, sharing a hug and savoring their victory over the cruelties of the world.
Bob Ritter pulled his car into a slot in West Executive Drive, the closed-off former street that lay between the White House and the Executive Office Building. He walked towards the latter, perhaps the ugliest building in Washington – no mean accomplishment – which had once held much of the executive branch of government, the State, War, and Navy departments. It also held the Indian Treaty Room, designed for the purpose of overawing primitive visitors with the splendor of Victorian gingerbread architecture and the majesty of the government which had constructed this giant tipi. The wide corridors rang with the sound of his footsteps on marble as he searched for the right room. He found it on the second floor, the room of Roger MacKenzie, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. ‘Special,’ perversely, made him a second-line official. The National Security Advisor had a corner office in the West Wing of the White House. Those who reported to him had offices elsewhere, and though distance from the Seat of Power defined influence, it didn’t define arrogance of position. MacKenzie had to have a staff of his own in order to remind himself of his importance, real or illusory. Not really a bad man, and actually a fairly bright one, Ritter thought, MacKenzie was nonetheless jealous of his position, and in another age he would have been the clerk who advised the chancellor who advised the King. Except today the clerk had to have an executive secretary.