500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(9)
And here were all the medical folk of the town—Joan and Cormac and Jake—as well, my goodness, a full house. But they were smiling and chatting and everyone was excited, and the next minute out came Islay herself, being wheeled on a stretcher, sitting up, a tube in her nose to keep her blood supplied with oxygen.
“I can’t believe it,” Islay’s mother was saying, clutching her hands to her chest. Gregor, her dad, was blinking hard, trying to shush her, that it was very early days, that these things weren’t always a definite, that there were false alarms.
“Wheels up!” shouted Jake into his walkie-talkie, face beaming.
“Och, listen to you,” said Cormac, helping him wheel the bed. “With your fancy language! What are you, on Air Force One?”
“They’re sending a plane with the heart in it.”
“Who is?”
“British Airways! They volunteered!”
“They volunteered to fly here?”
“I think they had to move a plane,” said Jake. “Anyway, they’re rushing it.”
Cormac shook his head. “That’s amazing. That’s just amazing.”
He patted Islay on the shoulder.
“Can you believe this? They’re rolling the red carpet right out for you.”
They hopped in the ambulance, Jake in the front, Cormac and Islay’s parents in the back. Even though Islay was thirteen, she was still clinging to an old, raggedy toy seal she must have had since she was a baby.
Jake had every new gadget on his phone and pulled up an app that identified planes that flew overhead. They ignored him at first, then gathered around, in amazement, watching as the only flight in the air at that hour—BA 978, noted as “special cargo”—blipped its way up the country from London. They fell into silence. Jake gave the phone to Islay to hold and started up the ambulance.
THE TRIP THROUGH the pitch-black countryside seemed to take forever. Jake had the headlights on high beam, given the unlikeliness of bumping into anyone—at least until 4:30, when the farmers started getting up—and every hedgerow, it seemed, contained a pair of suddenly glowing eyes. Creatures stirred by the road: hooting owls, a shiver of starlings taking off from a tree, a quick rustling in the gorse or the high grass as small creatures rumbled through, past almost before you knew it. Cormac imagined the ambulance, the only little pool of light in the whole world, as it shot past distant darkened farmhouses and vast fields of sleeping cows, one occasionally stirring itself sleepily to watch as the precious cargo sped by; the animals of the Highlands, it felt to Cormac—ridiculously, of course—standing aside respectfully to let them through, nothing standing in their way, as a girl sat on a bed, tracing a plane through the night skies.
Chapter 11
The sun rose at six A.M., approaching the March equinox, and Cormac was there to see it, partly because he’d gotten caught up in making sure the operation went all right and partly because he had to wait for Jake, who had to sleep an acceptable amount of time before he was allowed to drive the ambulance back again.
He didn’t mind. He’d sat with the parents for a while, then, as Joan was still back in Kirrinfief, he took the calls from the hospital office in London, after explaining who he was. He was a little intimidated, talking to the world-class teaching hospital—it felt a little like taking an exam—but he explained as much of Islay’s backstory and state of mind as he could and felt he was more or less doing all right.
The plane had landed at a little after one o’clock, and another ambulance was dispatched and sent screaming through the streets, with absolutely no cares whom it woke in the process.
Cormac had watched as they’d jumped out the back, running. The icebox was so small, so inconsequential looking. It looked like nothing, even as it contained the whole world.
How amazing. And also the sheer luck: the tissue matching, the exactness of the match. He watched as they dashed in, said a wee prayer. Wondered, briefly, about the person who had sacrificed his life to give it, and to think how very, very lucky they were. Or should be.
LISSA GAVE UP at six. It was light. She closed her heavy, crusty eyes, opened them again, and thought at least she could get in first in the shower, wash it all away. That was one good thing about the nurses’ accommodations: it was triumphantly overheated, which meant almost limitless amounts of hot water, as long as you didn’t mind the low water pressure that made it dribble.
She stood under the shower, hair tied up, for as long as she could. She probably should have turned it to cold to wake herself up, but she couldn’t bear it. Her whole body hung down. She was weary and bedraggled and grimy to her bones, even as she stood in the shower, and was absolutely dreading the case meeting, whatever Kim-Ange said.
Chapter 12
The next week was awful for Lissa. She received a written warning, but more than that, she could see people pointing and talking about her. The young doctor had apparently been furious.
She tried to bury herself in her work and going out with friends. But she couldn’t sleep. Not at all. Every time she lay down, she saw that young boy’s beautiful face bleeding out. She heard herself screaming at him, saw the ambulance lights flash against the wet pavement. She called Ezra, but he wasn’t answering anyone. She couldn’t blame him.
During her years in A&E, she’d become hardened to practically anything. But when it was someone you knew: that was different. She got crankier and more careless, was so exhausted she was in tears half the time; not even Kim-Ange could cheer her up, even when she dated a man who liked to go to conventions dressed as a rhinoceros and wanted to know whether Kim-Ange had ever considered doing the same and whether she would like to.