White Lies (4 page)

           
 
"How about some coffee?" he asked
softly, not wanting to startle her, but her head jerked around anyway, her eyes
wide.

           
 
Then she smiled. "That sounds good."
She walked away from the bed, then stopped and looked back, a frown knitting
her brows together. "I hate to leave him alone. If he understands anything
at all, it must be awful to just lie there, trapped and hurting and not knowing
why, thinking he's all alone."

           
 
"He doesn't know anything," Payne
assured her, wishing it was different.

           
 
"He's in a coma, and right now it's
better that he stays in it."

           
 
"Yes," Jay agreed, knowing he was
right. If Steve were conscious now, he would be in terrible pain.

           
 
That
first faint glimmer of awareness had faded; the warm voice had gone
away and left him without direction. Without
that to guide him, he sank back into
the
blackness, into nothingness.

           
 
Frank lingered over the bad cafeteria food and
the surprisingly good coffee. It wasn't great coffee; it truly wasn't even good
coffee, but it was better than he'd expected. The next batch might not be as
good, so he wanted to enjoy this one as long as he could. Not only that, he
didn't know exactly how to bring up the subject he'd been skating around all
during lunch, but he had to do it. The Man had made it plain: Jay Granger had
to stay. He didn't want her to identify the patient and leave; he wanted her to
become emotionally involved, at least enough to stay. And what the Man wanted,
he got.

           
 
Frank had sighed. "What if she falls in
love with him? Hell, you know what he's like. He has women crawling all over
him. They can't resist him."

           
 
"She may be hurt," the Man had
conceded, though the steel never left his voice. "But his life is on the
line, and our options are limited. For whatever reason, Steve Crossfield was
there when it went down. We know it, and they know it. We don't have a list of
possibilities to choose from. Crossfield is the
only
choice."

           
 
He hadn't needed to say more. Since Crossfield
was the only choice, his exwife was also the only choice by reason of being the
only person who could identify him.

           
 
"Did McCoy buy it?" the Man had
asked abruptly.

           
 
"The whole nine yards." Then Frank's
voice had sharpened. "You don't think Gilbert McCoy is—"

           
 
The Man interrupted. "No. I know he
isn't. But McCoy's a damned sharp agent. If he bought it, that means we're
doing a good job of making things look the way we want."

           
 
"What happens if she's with him when he
wakes up?"

           
 
"It doesn't matter. The doctors say he'll
be too confused and disoriented to make sense. They're monitoring him, and
they'll let us know when they start bringing him out of it. We can't keep her
out of his room with-' out it looking suspicious, but watch it. If he starts
making sense, get her out of the room fast, until we can talk to him. But
there's not too much danger of that happening."

           
 
"You're stirring that coffee to
death." Jay's voice broke in on his thoughts, and he looked up at her,
then down at the coffee. He'd been stirring it so long that it had cooled. He
grimaced at the waste of not-bad coffee.

           
 
"I've been trying to think of how to ask
something of you," he admitted. Jay gave him a puzzled look. "There's
only one way. Just ask."

           
 
"All right." He took a deep breath.
"Don't go back to
New York
tomorrow. Will you stay here with Steve? He needs you. He's going to
need you even more." The words hit her hard. Steve had never needed her.
She had been too intense, wanting more from him, from their relationship, than
he had in him to give. He'd always wanted a slight distance between them,
mentally and emotionally, claiming that she "smothered" him. She
remembered the time he'd shouted those words at her; then she thought of the
man lying so still in the hospital bed, and again she felt that unnerving sense
of unreality. Slowly she shook her head. "Steve is a loner. You should
know that from the information you have on him. He doesn't need me now, won't
need me when he wakes up, and probably won't like the idea of anyone taking
care of him, least of all his ex-wife."

           
 
"He'll be very confused when he wakes up.
You'll be a lifeline to him, the only face he knows, someone he can trust,
someone who'll reassure him. He's in a drug-induced coma... the doctors can
tell you more about it than I can. But they've said he'll be very confused and
agitated, maybe even delirious. It'll help if someone he knows is there."

           
 
Practicality made her shake her head again.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Payne. I don't think he'd want me there, but I wouldn't
stay anyway, if I could. I was fired from my job yesterday. I have two weeks'
notice to work out. I can't afford not to work those two weeks, and I have to find
another job."

           
 
He whistled through his teeth. "You had a
bitch of a day, didn't you?" She had to laugh, in spite of the seriousness
of the situation, "That's a good description of it, yes." The longer
she knew Frank Payne, the more she liked him. There was nothing outstanding
about him: he was of medium height, medium weight, with graying brown hair and
clear gray eyes. His face was pleasant, but not memorable. Yet there was a
steadiness in him that she sensed and trusted. He looked thoughtful. "It's
possible we can do something about your situation. Let me check into it before
you book a flight back. Would you like a chance to tell your boss to go take a
flying leap?"

           
 
Jay gave him a very sweet smile, and this time
he was the one who laughed. It wasn't until later that she realized the request
meant they were certain Steve would live. She was back in Steve's room,
standing by his bed, and she gently squeezed his arm as relief filled her.
"You're going to make it," she whispered. It was almost sundown, and she
had spent most of the day standing beside his bed. Several times a nurse or an
orderly had requested that she step outside, but except for that and the time
she had spent with Frank at lunch, she had been with Steve. She had talked
until her throat was dry, talked until she couldn't think of anything else to
say and silence had fallen again, but even then she had kept her hand on his
arm. Maybe he knew she was there.

           
 
A nurse came in and gave Jay a curious look
but didn't ask her to leave the room. Instead she checked the monitors and made
notes on a pad. "It's odd," she murmured. "But maybe not.
Somehow I think our boy knows when you're here. His heartbeat is stronger and
his respiration rate settles down if you're here with him. When you left for
lunch his vital signs deteriorated, then picked back up when you returned. I've
noticed the same thing happen every time we've asked you to leave the room.
Major Lunning is going to be interested in these charts." Jay stared at
the nurse, then at Steve. "He
knows
I'm here?"

           
 
"Not consciously," the nurse said
hastily. "He isn't going to wake up and talk to you, not with the
barbiturate dose he's getting. But who knows what he senses? You've been
talking to him all day, haven't you? Part of it must be getting through, on
some level. You must be really important to him, for him to respond to you like
this."

           
 
The nurse left the room. Stunned, Jay looked
back at Steve. Even if he somehow sensed her presence, why would it affect him
like that? Yet she couldn't ignore the nurse's theory, because she had noticed
herself that the rhythm of his breathing had changed. It was almost impossible
for her to believe, because Steve had never needed her in any way. He had
enjoyed her for a time, but something in him had kept her at a small but
significant distance. Because he couldn't return love of any depth, he hadn't
allowed himself to accept a deep love. All Steve had ever wanted was a
superficial sort of relationship, a light, playful love that could end with no
regrets. Theirs had ended in just that way, and she had seldom thought of him
after they had parted. Why should she be important to him now?

           
 
Then she gave a low laugh as understanding
came to her. Steve wasn't responding to her, he was responding to a touch and a
voice meant for him personally, rather than the impartial, automatic touches
and words of the healers surrounding him. Anyone else would have done just as
well. Frank Payne could have stood there and talked to him with the same
result.

           
 
She said as much an hour later, when Major
Lunning studied the charts and stroked his jaw, occasionally glancing at her
with a thoughtful expression. Frank stood to one side, careful to keep his face
blank, but his sharp gaze didn't miss anything.

           
 
Major Limning was one of the top military
doctors, a man devoted to both healing and the military. He wasn't stationed at
Bethesda
, but he hadn't questioned the orders that
had gotten him up in the middle of the night and brought him there. He and
several other doctors had been given the task of saving this man's life. At the
time they hadn't even known his name. Now there was a name on his chart, but
they still had no inkling why he was so important to the powers that be. It
didn't make any difference; Major Lunning would use whatever weapon or
procedure he could find to help his patient. Right now, one of those weapons
was this too-thin young woman with dark blue eyes and a full,
passionate-looking mouth.

           
 
"I don't think we can ignore the pattern,
Ms. Granger," the Major said frankly. "It's your voice he responds
to, not mine, not Mr. Payne's, not any of the nurses'. Mr. Crossfield isn't in
a deep coma. He's breathing on his own and still has reflexes. It isn't
unreasonable to think that he can hear you. He may not understand and he
certainly can't respond, but it's entirely possible that he hears."

           
 
"But I understood that his coma is
drug-induced," Jay protested. "When people are drugged, aren't they
totally unconscious?"

           
 
"There are different levels of
consciousness. Let me explain his injuries more completely. He has simple
fractures of both legs, nothing that will prevent him from walking normally. He
has second-degree burns on his hands and arms, but the worst of the bums are on
his palms and fingers, as if he grabbed a hot pipe, or perhaps put his hands up
to shield his face. His spleen was ruptured, and we removed it. One lung was
punctured and collapsed. But the worst of his injuries were to his head and
face. His skull was fractured, and his facial bones were simply shattered.

           
 
"We performed surgery immediately to
repair the damage, but to control the swelling of the brain and prevent further
damage, we have to administer large doses of barbiturates. That keeps him in a
coma. Now, the deeper the coma, the less the brain functions. In a deep coma
the patient may not even be able to breathe for himself. The level of the coma
depends in part on the patient's tolerance for the drugs, which varies from
person to person. Mr. Crossfield's tolerance seems to be a bit higher than
usual, so his coma isn't as deep as it could be. We haven't increased the
dosage, because it hasn't been necessary. In time we'll gradually decrease the
dosage and bring him out of the coma. He's going to make it on his own, but
I'll tell you frankly, he definitely does better when you're with him. There's
still a lot we don't know about the mind and how it affects the body, but we
know it does."

           
 
"Are you saying he'll get well faster if
I'm here?"

           
 
The Major grinned. "That's it in a
nutshell."

           
 
Jay felt tired and confused, as if she'd spent
hours in a house of mirrors trying to find her way out but instead finding only
one deceitful reflection after another. It wasn't just these people, all
insisting that she stay; part of it was inside. Something happened when she
touched Steve, something she didn't understand. She certainly hadn't felt it
before, even when they'd been married. It was as if he were more than he had
been, somehow different in ways she sensed but couldn't define.