"Oh, that's tough. I'm so sorry," she said. "But don't give up hope yet. My husband works construction. A month ago he fell from four stories up, broke almost every bone in his body. I thought I'd lost him." Her voice trembled with remembered despair. "I'd been trying to talk him into retirement and he'd finally promised me next year, then this happened and I just knew he'd never get to enjoy all the hunting and fishing trips he'd planned with our son. No one thought he'd make it, but he's still holding on, and now they think that maybe next week he can be moved into a regular room."
"That's good," he murmured, looking down at his hands. "I'm glad. But my mother-" He broke off, shaking his head. "I found her too late." He threw in a bit of guilt, to make the pot bubble. "They're running tests now, but if she's brain dead..."
"Even the best doctor doesn't know everything there is to know about the human body," broke in a burly, red-faced guy seated on the other side of the gray-haired woman. "A couple of weeks ago they brought in a woman who'd been in a car wreck, ran off the road and hit a tree. Tree branch went right through her chest."
There it was, exactly what he needed to know, and he didn't even have to get into the ICU itself. Simon controlled his expression as his attention was caught with a painful jerk. That was Drea. Beyond a doubt, that was her. The relief came as a roller-coaster ride in his stomach, but then abruptly it knotted with dread. She might have survived the wreck, but in what kind of shape? Would she ever be able to function? Walk, talk, recognize anyone? He tried to speak and couldn't, his throat so tight he could barely breathe.
The gray-haired woman patted his arm in sympathy, evidently thinking he was on the verge of tears. The simple, compassionate gesture startled him. People didn't touch him so casually, so easily. There had always been something about him that made people keep their distance, something cold and lethal to which this woman was evidently impervious. Drea had touched him, though; she'd put her hand on his chest, she had clung to him and kissed him, her mouth as tender and hungry as if she couldn't resist the urge. The memory made him swallow convulsively, and that loosened his throat enough that he managed to talk. "I think I read something about that," he lied, choking the words out.
"The medics said she was dead at the scene. They were packing everything up when one of them heard her gasping. They swore she hadn't had a pulse, but all of a sudden she did. They had to cut the branch off so they could bring her in, because they figured if they pulled it out they'd do even more damage, plus the branch must somehow have been pressing against her aorta, kept her from bleeding to death." The burly guy crossed his arms over his massive chest. "They thought for sure she'd be brain dead, but she wasn't. Took over eighteen hours of surgery to patch her up, then...was it three days ago when they moved her?"
"Two. Day before yesterday," said the gray-haired woman, picking up the story.
"They moved her into a regular room. I heard she's doing fine, but I also heard she can't talk, so maybe there was some brain damage."
"She's started talking," someone else said. "She said something to one of the nurses. They were all talking about it."
"That's amazing," Simon said, his stomach doing the loop-the-loop again, this time joined by his heart. With distant amazement, he realized he might pass out-or vomit. Or both. She was doing fine. She was talking.
"It's a miracle, for sure," said the burly guy. "She was a Jane Doe. She didn't have any kind of ID, and nobody seemed to be looking for her. They couldn't get her to write her name or anything. Now that she's talking, though, I guess they know her real name."
No, they wouldn't, Simon realized. Drea was too sharp for that. She'd give them a fake name, which presented him with a problem: how was he to find her? Even if he gained access to a computer, which he had no doubt he could manage, he had no idea what name she'd told them. Swiftly he abandoned that idea; he'd have to tackle this from a different direction.
"Who was her doctor?" He had no reason to ask a question like that, but people talked about any number of subjects in a hospital waiting room. They talked to pass the time, they talked to distract themselves, they formed relationships that might not last beyond their loved one's stay in the ICU, but while they were enclosed in this glass cell they laughed and cried together, comforted one another, passed along family recipes and birthdays-anything to get by.
"Meecham" was the prompt answer. "Heart surgeon."
The surgeon would make his rounds every day, visit all his patients. When someone had a traumatic injury like Drea had suffered, the surgeon's ego got all tied up in how well that patient was doing, especially when the patient had defied all odds and survived. Finding Dr. Meecham wouldn't be difficult; following him around wouldn't be, either.
He thought about hospitals, about how they were organized. Patients weren't assigned willy-nilly to an empty bed; different floors were for different situations, which streamlined different types of care by concentrating it. There was the maternity floor, the orthopedic floor-and the post-op surgical floor, which was where Drea would most likely be.
Doors to the patients' rooms were left open a lot, whether it was from carelessness, haste, or for the nurses' convenience. The odds were at least fifty-fifty he could walk down the hall on the surgical floor, glance in all the rooms that had open doors, and find her. If not, then he'd trail Dr. Meecham. One way or another, though, he would find her. There had never been anything more important to him than that.