The Queen of Hearts(26)
I told myself I was not intimidated. Reeling under the colossal weight of their fear, the Packards were ashen and gaspy. No amount of money can insulate you from the capricious whims of the trauma gods: they fling their lightning bolts at the rich and poor alike. You could bring trauma upon yourself, certainly, but you couldn’t always protect yourself from it, a fact that was currently hammering Boyd Packard like an anvil to the head. He staggered toward me.
“Where did you train?” he demanded as soon as I’d introduced myself and explained the injuries I thought their daughter had suffered.
“I—I did my residency here,” I said, wincing internally at the icy note that crept uninvited into my voice. “And I did a fellowship in trauma surgery at Vanderbilt.”
“Vanderbilt, okay,” said Boyd, as if he had the first clue which surgery programs were any good.
His wife, Betsy, placed a restraining hand on his arm. She turned to me, focusing her clear gray eyes on mine, her beauty stunning. She had jet-black hair and a sculpted, full-lipped face of such perfect symmetry it was hard to look away from her. She reminded me of Snow White.
“Will she be okay?” she asked, her voice distorted.
“I’ll do my best,” I said stiffly. “It depends on what we find. I need to go—they’ll have the OR ready any second. I’ll send one of the circulating nurses out with an update as soon as possible.”
“Wait.” Betsy Packard transferred her hand from her husband’s arm to mine, causing me to involuntarily recoil. Her hand, white and smooth, capped with flawless pale nails, felt like an icicle. “Ten seconds,” she said. “Please.”
She dug around in her handbag, an autumn-hued buttery Birkin, and extracted a cell phone. She punched a button and thrust the phone into my hand. I accepted it automatically, realizing as I did that she had turned on a video.
The bass of a rap song, rendered tinny by the iPhone’s speakers, filled the room. “Betsy, for Chrissake,” said Boyd, but she turned her great gray eyes on him, and the power of her pain shut him up. I returned my attention to the screen, where a little girl was dancing. She had her mother’s wispy black hair and perfect face, miniaturized and placed on an adorable toddler body. She wore a leotard and a look of fierce, utterly unself-conscious concentration as she wiggled her little booty in time to the music. “Eleanor,” said a woman’s musical voice, and the little girl startled and then burst into a peal of giggles as enchanting as a fairy chorus. The camera zoomed in on her face, capturing a look of such infectious joy it could have made the most hardened criminal melt. Despite the circumstances, I felt my face relax.
“See,” said Betsy. She closed her eyes, swaying a little. She opened her mouth to speak again, but all that came out was a low, anguished rasp.
I took her hands in mine, and her eyes opened. For once I felt no hesitation at all about touching someone else. “I’ll do everything,” I said. “I understand. I do. She’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. I promise you, I will do everything as if she were mine. I promise.”
“Thank you,” Betsy Packard whispered. “Thank you.”
Chapter Eleven
GAS, ASS, OR GRASS
Zadie, Present Day
Monday, ostensibly my day off work, always seemed to be occupied with catching up on work at my practice. I’d just spent the last four hours on electronic charting—none of which was reimbursable time—trying to avoid excommunication from the hospital. I sighed as I finished the last one.
Nina, my nanny, would be taking Rowan to acting class at our city’s vibrant downtown library this afternoon, so I had to collect Delaney from her before I hit the grocery store and fetched the boys. Panting as I raced to the parking lot, I calculated I’d make it in time if I hit every light perfectly and didn’t get stuck behind any plodding Southern drivers.
The traffic gods were smiling; I made it to the store and then to Nina’s and school with time to spare. There was a strict no-cell-phones policy for the carpool lanes of the Oak Academy, and this included texting, but I really could not see the harm in sneaking out a little message to Emma while idling in place. I threw this tiny guilt on top of the guilt that came from idling in a large SUV spewing Freon and hydrocarbons into the air next to a playground where my asthma-prone boys were currently rolling around in a heap of other boys. They looked like a wriggling mass of puppies. Six-year-old arms and legs were flying everywhere.
Yo! I typed. Are you at the hospital? How’s Buzzy?
No reply. Evidently Emma prioritized saving someone’s life over communication with her best friend. I harrumphed to myself.
Thinking of Emma led to thinking of Nick, despite my resolve to banish the memories of the calamitous black whirlwind that had accompanied Nick’s presence in my life. Until Emma’s announcement, he hadn’t crossed my mind in a while, although I’d be lying if I said I’d never Googled him. Of course I had. But it had been a long time, back in the days when Facebook was competing with Myspace for fledgling social media dominance. I knew next to nothing about Nick now. I glanced ahead of me; still no movement in the line of cars. I clicked the Facebook icon on my phone.
I was relatively certain that Nick wouldn’t be on it, and I was right; typing in his name produced no results. Well, he wasn’t the sort of guy who would tolerate a daily blast of other people’s dinner photos or endless memes featuring sarcastic kittens. But you have to start somewhere. Almost absentmindedly, I closed Facebook and opened Twitter.