Garden of Lies (41 page)

She squinted and threw a hand up. More flashlights now, cutting in wild arcs, casting a shadowy

feverish light over the ward. As her eyes adjusted, she saw Lily struggling to drag a comatose

patient, a man twice her size, under the bed nearest the door. His IV line had torn loose, and a

bright crimson stain was slowly spreading across the bandages that covered his chest.

Rachel dove forward to help Lily, but Lily shook her head and pushed her aside. “No time. Get

the others down. Safer under the beds if we are hit.”

Rachel, pushing aside her worry about Brian for a moment, felt a burst of panic, as she

wondered what would happen to these poor guys, all of them hers in a way, if the building

sustained a direct hit. [241] Or even if they were forced to evacuate, the agony they might suffer,

and possible damage to healing wounds.
God, please help them ... make this stop.

Thunder shook the building, and slashes of vermilion sky flared between the slats of the

louvered windows. She heard distant screams, the squealing of pigs, and realized a shell must

have hit the village on the hillside below. Would any of them be safe if this old building was hit?

And Brian. He had been so sick last night, running that high temp. Mac had been right about

the peritonitis. Regardless of how careful she’d been to clean and debride the wounds, to pick out

every tiny bit of shrapnel and dirt, contamination had been inevitable. Mac, she knew, didn’t hold

out much hope. In Brian’s weakened condition it was touch and go under the best of

circumstances, but this ...

Please, God, just let him be all right. Let him get through this night. I’ll take care of the rest.

She darted down the aisle separating the row of beds on either wall, skirting nurses and

orderlies who were soothing some patients and wrestling with others. Brian’s bed was the last

one. She caught a glimpse of it in the thin, flickering light. Empty.

Burning pain exploded in her chest, as if she had been struck by a mortar.

“No!” she cried. “NO!”

Rachel, half out of her mind, grabbed the arm of a nurse rushing past. It was Dana, her

dishwater-blond hair straggling free of its bobby pins, her thin face pale and frightened. Dana

held an IV bottle of Ringer’s solution, and at Rachel’s touch she jumped, and the bottle slithered

from her grasp. A loud crash. Lukewarm liquid splashed Rachel’s feet. A splinter of glass stung

her ankle.

“When?” Rachel asked, gripping Dana’s arm much harder than she’d intended. She heard the

shrill note of hysteria in her voice. “When did he die?”

Dana wrenched her arm free, and took a step backwards, eyeing Rachel as if she’d gone mad.

Then Rachel realized how she must look, covered in mud, her hair streaming loose and wild. Like

one of the whacked-out patients on the druggie ward, the ones who had smoked too many of

Mama-san’s opium-laced marijuana cigarettes.

[242] Dana didn’t have to ask who she meant. “He’s not dead ... yet,” she said. “Doctor Mac

took him into OR. He went into cardiac arrest a minute or two before the shelling started.”

Relief pumped through Rachel, followed by an icy wave of panic. She must get to him, help

him.
She
was the connection, the last leaf that was somehow keeping him alive. Didn’t they

understand that?

Rachel wheeled, and darted back the way she’d come. The operating theater was at the end of

the corridor, not more than a few dozen yards, but it seemed as if she’d run miles by the time she

got there. Her clothes were drenched in sweat, her legs trembling, rubbery. Her heart hammering

crazily.

She burst in.

The operating room was long and narrow, with half a dozen operating tables. A flashlight

shining at the far end cast huge horror-show shadows that curved up the wall and across the

ceiling. Two shadowy figures crouched over an operating table. As she drew closer, she saw that

it was Doctor Mac and Meredith Barnes. Meredith was holding the flashlight in her left hand and

a hemostat in her right. Mac was bent over a long figure stretched on the table.

Brian.
Her
Brian. Rachel’s heart lurched in terror.

He was intubated. They were bagging him, squeezing air into his lungs. Blood was smeared

over Brian’s thin, naked chest. She saw the long incision in the left fourth intercostal space just

below his nipple. Mac was struggling with a pair of rib retractors.

He was going for open cardiac massage. Thank God there was still a chance. Thank God she

wasn’t too late.

Mac glanced up, shooting her a startled glance from under the shelf of his shaggy gray

eyebrows. Rachel was already snapping on a pair of gloves. No time to scrub, this would have to

do.

“Let me,” she begged. “My hand is smaller.”

“Have you ever done this before?” Mac asked, sounding impossibly weary, too weary to argue.

“No. But I’ve seen it done. I can handle it.” She felt oddly calm, as if somehow, deep down,

she had been preparing for this moment all along.

“Good. There’s no time for mistakes. It’s been too long already. He stopped breathing five

minutes ago. I gave him CPR [243] and six shots of intracardiac epinephrine. If this doesn’t work,

we’ve lost him.”

Rachel concentrated on remembering everything she had learned about emergency

thoracotomy. Peering into the open wound in the feeble glow of the flashlight, she found the

pericardium, and made a longitudinal incision with her scalpel, careful to avoid the phrenic nerve.

She inserted her gloved right hand through the incision, feeling her way around the pulmonary

artery and vena cava. Nothing. Not even a faint flutter. Oh God. She felt utterly still, cold as

death, as if her own heart had stopped beating as well. Yet somehow, incredibly, her mind and

body continued to function.

In the instant her hand closed about the still, flaccid muscle of his heart, she felt as if

everything had somehow come to a standstill, this room, this hospital, the entire world. The

shelling had stopped, or had she just stopped hearing it? There was only the steady throbbing of

her pulse in her ears.

Gently, rhythmically, she began to squeeze.
Live, oh please live, Brian, you’ve got to help me, I

can’t do it all, oh please. ...

Nothing.

Beads of sweat oozed from her forehead and trickled down her temples. She struggled to keep

from panicking. Keep up the rhythm, that was the way to go. Steady.
God, please won’t you help

me.

Every sense became heightened. She could smell the stale odor of Mac’s sweat, and a flowery

scent, the perfume Meredith was wearing. Blood seemed to float in the air like a fine mist, the

taste of it on her tongue, bitter, coppery. The pressure of her hand about his flaccid heart matched

by a rhythmic chanting in her head.

Come ON. Get going. COME ON. Now. Please. NOW.

Mac was shaking his head sorrowfully. “Enough, child. It’s no good. You did your best.”

Rachel could feel the sobs rising in her breath, choking her. “No,” she pleaded. “Just a little

while longer. Please. I want to be sure.”

“Another minute, that’s all. Others need us now.”

An eternity seemed to pass inside that minute. Rachel could feel it eating away at her control,

threatening to swallow her. It wasn’t just Brian she was fighting for, but herself, her own sanity.

At last, just as she had about lost all hope, a tiny spasm.

[244] Another.

A single faltering beat.

Several interminable seconds passed without another, then Brian’s heart began to beat with a

shallow rhythm of its own.

Rachel nearly staggered with the rush of stunned joy that hit her. Her throat unlocked, and tears

streamed from her eyes, dropping from her chin onto the still, blue-tinged face lying unconscious

on the operating table.

“It’s going!” she shouted. “It’s beating! He’s alive!”

She drew her hand out of Brian’s chest cavity, and looked up at Mac, meeting his incredulous

gaze. The beam from the flashlight leaped, and swung across the ceiling, as Meredith let go a

whoop of triumph.

“I’ll be,” Mac whispered. “A bloody miracle, that was, if I ever saw one. You sure you’re not

Catholic?”

Rachel laughed, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Not that I know of. Why?”

“For a second there, I could’ve sworn I saw an angel ridin’ on your shoulder.”

Chapter 14

Brian opened his eyes to a sea of white. White walls. White sheets. White louver shutters

thrown open to let in the smell of rain, and the hot blue of a tropical sky.

I’m dreaming this, aren’t I? I’m at home, in my own bed next to Kevin’s, and Mom is in the

kitchen stirring oatmeal in the big enamel pot, and I
—

He shifted to make himself more comfortable, and the movement brought a blast of pain

shearing up his middle, an instant of intense white-hot agony, followed by wave after thundering

wave of aftershock.
No dream, oh Christ, what then?

He was wide awake now. He moaned, tears of pain trickling from the corners of his eyes and

running slowly down his temples into his hair.

Through the fog of tears, he saw the blurred outline of someone standing over him. He blinked,

and the image sharpened.

A woman.

She was tiny, delicate, like Vietnamese women, but her coloring was fair, almost too pale, her

hair a lovely coppery brown. She wore it pulled back at the nape of her slender neck and fastened

with a barrette. Her eyes were so vividly blue, it almost hurt to look into them, like staring

straight up into a blazing summer sky. Gradually, he took in the rest of her. Small, heart-shaped

face. Stubborn jaw, and straight flared nose. A mouth that rescued her from conventional

prettiness by being a shade too wide. She seemed tired and anxious. There were violet shadows

under her eyes, and the skin around her temples and the base of her throat looked faintly bruised.

He had never seen her before, but strangely he felt as if he knew her.

“Good morning,” she said, those deep-blue eyes of hers fixed on him with complete

concentration, never flickering off to one side. “How do you feel?” He saw that she wore khaki

pants, sandals, and [246] a faded green overshirt with a stethoscope sticking out of its deep front

pocket.

Was she a nurse? This was some kind of hospital, wasn’t it? He was lying on a bed in a long

room. Other beds—iron cots really—stretched along the whitewashed cement walls. And in each

bed, a bandaged figure, some barely recognizable as human beings.

Brian’s head felt light and shimmery, his mouth dry as flannel. A dream? Lately, it seemed,

he’d been drifting in and out of one long dream, so he couldn’t keep straight anymore what was

real and what wasn’t. The only thing he knew for sure was real was the pain. His entire body,

from his neck down, felt as if it had been run over by a bulldozer. It hurt just to breathe.

“Like Sonny Liston after fifteen rounds with Cassius Clay,” he said, managing the tiniest of

smiles.

As if she had been waiting for something from him, some sign, the tautness in her face relaxed.

She smiled. A brilliant smile that seemed almost a physical touch, catching hold of him, lifting

him.

“You gave the crowd its money’s worth,” she said. “We weren’t sure you were going to make

it, but you put up a good fight. Do you remember any of it?”

Brian shifted a fraction of an inch on the hard mattress of his iron cot. Pain flared again. He fell

back, gasping. What in God’s name had happened to him?

“Not much,” he answered, the pain a dull hammering now. “How long have I been here?”

“Nearly three weeks now,” she said. “You slept through most of it. The morphine helped.”

He closed his eyes. The light hurt him. The sight of the men in the other beds—looking as he

imagined he must look to them, mummified under yards of gauze, tubes sticking out everywhere

—seemed to make the pain worse.

Inside his head, where it was dark and cool, her voice followed him, strangely restful. “Maybe

it would be better if you didn’t try to remember everything all at once,” she said.

He knew that voice, didn’t he? It was almost ... familiar. Like something he might have

dreamed. Now a small cool hand touched his brow, making the fiery pain recede a little.

Strange, disjointed fragments of memory floated up from some [247] deep dark place inside his

head. He struggled to fit them together. “We were on bush patrol,” he said. “Walked into an

ambush. I was hit. Yes, I remember now. It was Trang ... he stepped on a mine. The river ...”

Brian’s eyes flew open. He struggled to pull himself up, but was knocked flat by a pain so

crushing it set off an explosion of red stars behind his forehead. He waited for the agony to

subside a little, then asked, “Trang? Is he ...”

The woman shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said kindly. “Please, don’t try to sit up just yet.

It’s better if you lie flat. Can I get you anything?”

Brian felt sadness well up inside him. Anger too. He hadn’t been able to save Trang after all.

What was the use of even trying anymore? What was the use of any of it, all those guys dying,