The Timer Game (27 page)

He’d told Grace that as they scrubbed down the simple room she used for OR. From outside came the faint sounds of the orphans’ childish laughter, and the wet slap of laundry as Sister Mary Clare was hanging wash. Grace looked at him searchingly.

And damned if his eyes didn’t fill. He turned away, embarrassed.

She came up suddenly on the balls of her feet and kissed him. His shirt was open and small beads of sweat glistened in the warm hollow of his throat. His hair was tousled gold and his eyes were wide, and in that instant, she’d seen a new life for herself, stretching out through the decades, babies growing up, having babies of their own, years spilling like puppies one on top of each other, a life full of buoyant opportunity, because Mac was in it.

The simple but life-changing surgeries are a far cry from the sophisticated procedures she’s spent her residency learning how to perform, heart transplants for kids.

In less than seven weeks, Grace Descanso goes back to her old life stateside, forever changed.

Her kiss was direct. His body radiated heat and more than that, substance. He was the most present man she’d ever met, and when he kissed her back, she felt a current sing up her spine. She exhaled and her lips parted and he pulled her to him, and they kissed with an intensity that thrilled and alarmed her. He sunk his hands into her hair and she closed her eyes and moved her hands over him as if she’d been doing it all her life.

A week later, he had found his way to her bed. It had been the most natural thing in the world, having him there standing in her room, next to the open window. Moonlight had slanted across the simple wooden table. A hot breeze from the Guatemalan highlands brought the rich scent of tropical rain, moon lilies, and pine. They’d taken turns washing in a tin basin and she still wore a gauze shift, naked underneath.

He reached for her hand. She took it and guided it under the nightgown. Her breast was warm and heavy in his hand. He grazed the nipple with his palm and she made a sound, eyes half open, glazed. He kissed her mouth, her naked shoulder, her breast, and she took a step back and lifted the nightie over her head, shaking her hair free. She dropped the nightie to the ground.

She exhaled. She wasn’t tethered anymore. There was nothing holding her except the substance of the man standing in front of her. He found her mouth and kissed her. Her arms went around him and tightened. He sank his tongue into her mouth. There was desperation and hunger and a yearning to come home. He pulled back the sheet and laid her down, looking at her. She reached for him.

He dropped his shirt and came to bed. She could feel his heart beat in the flat of her hand. His hands moving, too, electrifying, hot. Their mouths. She shifted and took a breath. She was drowning.

He groaned and opened his mouth and she dug her hands into his back, and when he entered her, she trembled and cried out and she tasted sweat and the salt of her own tears. She wanted him to know every corner, every dark place. The sadness, the constraints melted, and left behind the truest part, messy and enthusiastic, bubbling with laughter, staring in squint-eyed wonder at the world. He believed in her, and that belief fueled her own and made her careful with him, wanting to know everything he’d held back, his weakness, imperfection, the things that brought him joy. She wanted to be the carrier of that kind of joy, glad and alive.

“They call me
doctora de la corazón.”
Doctor of the heart. And she smiled.

“And she smiled,” she repeated softly. She scrubbed away tears.

Twenty minutes out of Los Angeles, she stopped at a Unocal station where she borrowed a key for the women’s bathroom. She carried her cell phone and charts with her and left them on the dirty sink while she started the second cuts on the Walkmans. She locked one of them inside the restroom. There was a pay phone next to the self-serve island and she closed the booth door and put the second Walkman down on the ledge as she called his cell. On the Walkman, there were the simple sounds of somebody using a toilet.

Mac picked up on the second ring and she said, “I’m going to tell you a story. It’s short, because we don’t have much time. It started the morning you were due back at the clinic.”

She’d awakened to the sound of men with machetes hacking a space big enough for a landing strip. Those same men barred Grace’s path when she tried to leave the building. That’s when she and Sister Mary Clare discovered that Miguel and Jose, the two youths they’d been training as assistants along with Cristina, had vanished during the night into the mountains. But first the boys had drawn blood from all nine of the younger orphans.

“Sister Mary Clare put in a call for help to the diocese in Guatemala City, but the signal kept breaking up.” Grace kept her voice steady. “Outside, there was a banging sound against the building. The men were stacking dried vines against the side of the clinic. A funeral pyre. The kids were terrified. And so were we.”

At the Unocal station, a carload of teens pulled up to the gas pump and a boy got out, his pants dragging. He slouched into the office to pay. Grace closed her eyes, remembering.

Besides the suffocating heat, the thing she remembered most was the smell. Nine orphans, the oldest ten, with sour diapers and sickly sweet ointments covering raw skin, harsh disinfectants steaming the washroom; the dusty odor of wood crumbled by termites, and outside, the smell of vines bleeding sap.

"We heard a noise from the sky. Thunder, we thought at first, though the sky was a blazing blue. It was a military helicopter.” She leaned her forehead into the glass of the booth.

On the CD, the sound effects had moved to the washing-up stage and Grace knew time was running out. Maybe four minutes, tops, while the person on the CD brushed her teeth and put on makeup.

“Guerrillas. Two men in fatigues and boots carrying Uzis stepped out, backs to the helicopter, protecting the man who emerged next. Deputy General Tito Velasquez. I’d never heard that name before that day. And after him, two men in white lifted out a stretcher and ran toward the clinic with their patient."

"A wounded guerrilla,” Mac offered, his voice steady.

"It was a girl on the stretcher, Mac. A little girl." She pressed her hands against the glass to steady herself. "Deputy General Velasquez's daughter. She was six. Close to death. Sister Mary Clare and I launched into triage, stabilizing her, getting in an IV, taking her temperature, the basics. The girl we’d been training to help, Cristina, was useless. Wandering in circles, whimpering. All the time, an Uzi was trained on us. And then we saw why. Velasquez had gathered up all the little kids, the orphans, and lined them up against the wall.”

It came shooting toward her past the barriers of time, every detail clear. The paint flaking off the walls. Heat beading the girl's stretcher, the back of her gray hand where they'd punched in the IV. Cristina twisting her hands into her dress, a sturdy girl of eighteen with bad teeth, shaking, on the edge of hysteria.

"¿
Esteban? ¿Quíen es Esteban?”

Velasquez’s voice pulsed with urgency, staring at the wide-eyed kids pressed against the wall as far away from him as they could get. Nobody breathed. Velasquez’s mouth twisted into a terrifying caricature of a smile and Grace was suddenly very afraid.

“Tengo dulces para Esteban. Y tambien para el niño que me diga dónde esta.”
Treats for Esteban and the kid who points him out.

Velasquez pulled out taffy pieces, and every hand along the wall shot up. Ten-year-old Esteban himself, dark-eyed and solemn, stepped forward confidently, his hand out.

“Yo soy.”

“¿Esteban?”

“Sí. Yo soy.”

Velasquez signaled, and the two men in white stepped forward and clamped their hands around Esteban.

"Oye,”
Esteban protested
. “Mi dulce.”

"
Me olvidé
.” Velasquez whacked his head and grinned, like that old V8 commercial.
I

forgot! I coulda had a V-8!
And he gave each of the kids along the wall a piece of candy.

He saved the biggest piece for Esteban. A golden caramel with a creamy white center, all wrapped in cellophane. Esteban grinned, unwrapped it, and popped it greedily into his mouth as he trotted off between the two big men in white. One of them carried a bag. They took him to the office at the end of the hall and closed the door.

It was a small sound, awful in import.

A crack. A sigh. The sudden smell assaulted their senses, the scent of urine and feces and raw meat. Grace made a move and the Uzi came closer. Sister Mary Clare dropped to her knees and prayed.

"What is this? What do you want?" Grace cried, voice rough with terror.

Velasquez reached in his jacket pocket and Grace stumbled back, certain it was a gun.

It was a clipping. The AP wire story by Mac McGuire. About the bright young heart surgeon, working miracles.

Capable of anything.

“Mi hija necesita un corazón.”
My kid needs a heart. His voice was matter-of-fact. A to-go order at Pizza Hut. Grace stared, uncomprehendingly.

From the other room came the sound of blade cracking bone.

Cristina burst into tears and a toddler clutched her knees, moaning. The kids looked apprehensively toward the sound and huddled close. A preschooler wailed and was shushed by her brother.

They carried it back into the room in a cooler, exactly like the ones they used stateside after a harvest.

Grace knew then what was in the other room. What was left.

“No. I won't do this. I can't.”

“You can and you will.” He had a faint American accent. “We did tests.”

The blood tests, she realized in horror. The blood Miguel and Jose had drawn.

“And Esteban is the best match.”

“You could have gone to a hospital. There were other ways.”

Velasquez exchanged looks with the others. He smiled. “Let us just say, I am a person of interest. Hospitals are out of the question.”

''I don't have the right equipment. The ventilator doesn’t work. You’d have to bag her the entire time."

An eye flick at the man with the Uzi. He lifted it and leveled it at Grace. “Sister will bag her.”

Sister Mary Clare, with arthritis in both hands. It was painful for her to do simple sutures anymore, and now she was expected to manually inflate a child’s lungs for several hours? Sister Mary Clare struggled up from her spot against the paint-peeled wall and stared wonderingly at her twisted fingers. Next to her, a child whimpered and buried her face in the nun’s waist.

“You don’t understand. There’s no way this would work. I’d need a team. There’s no cardiac monitor. All I have is a pulse oximetry, no automated blood pressure cuff—I couldn’t regulate her vitals and without that— it’s doomed, understand? It’s crazy even suggesting it.”

“You will not call me crazy,” Velasquez screamed, the cords in his neck extended.

Nobody breathed. A soldier banged through the door carrying a cardboard box and slammed it down. The children jumped. The solider peeled back the lid. Inside were syringes, latex gloves, drapes, IV’s. All opened. Unsterile. The soldier looked impassively at Grace.

General Velasquez shrugged toward the man holding the cooler. He was short, dumpy-looking, with hooded eyes and thinning black hair. ''I brought an anesthesiologist and a nurse to assist."

She felt tears rise. "Then let them do this, not me."

"No, you're the heart surgeon,
you
,” he said sharply. “You will do this.” He pressed his lips together angrily. “He's already dead, Grace. All you can do is save yourself.” He touched his daughter's hair. “And her. You must save her.”

“And if I don't?”

“I kill one child in this room for every minute you delay.” He glanced at his wrist. A Rolex knockoff. “Starting. .
. now.”

They'd been teaching the kids English. They'd been so proud of their English.

Along the wall, the kids froze, and she could see helpless, beseeching understanding in their eyes.

“I need to sterilize. And scrub. Everything has to be cleaned, we have to boil water.”

Cristina collapsed wailing down the wall and the children dived after her, burrowing for comfort.

"Get them out of here.” Grace’s voice came from some other place, autopilot, and her medical training kicked in, those labs, the thoracic surgical rotations at the Center.

It had all led to this, the dismemberment of a little boy she would feed to a little girl.

To save the others. To save herself.

There was no air-conditioning and sweat poured down her body, blinding her vision. Next to her, Sister Clare struggled to bag the lifeless girl, pressing her heel into the bag, finally, when her fingers gave out. Every muscle in Grace’s body ached. It felt like hours, but in reality, the fast part was putting the heart in. There was simply no way this would work and she knew it. She was closing the dome of the atrium when it occurred to her to ask what would happen if she failed. When, was more like it. If she did the best she could and the patient still died.

“But you won't let that happen.”

"Not on purpose but—”

"You will not let that happen,” Velasquez repeated more sharply.

She took a slow breath. Nodded. “No. I won't.” She kept her voice calm, steady. “But if she dies—she won't, but if she dies. For any reason—”

Velasquez jerked his head toward the window covered in a sheet to keep prying eyes from looking in. “You know what they think out there. What the rumor is.”

She kept working. Sweat coated her body under her gown and dripped down the inside of her gloves.

"The rumor's always been, the
americanos
steal the children, chop them up for body parts, for organ transplants. You've heard, yes?"

Her fingers slipped and she steadied herself and kept suturing. The man with the Uzi nudged her.

“Yes.” Her voice was faint. “Yes, I've heard.”