Chat - Archer Mayor [74]
“Because of the bone knitting?”
“Right. Once the flail chest is behind him and he can breathe entirely on his own, my suspicion is that we’ll see improvement.”
“But you did say, ‘From what we can tell.’”
Weisenbeck stopped walking to look at Joe straight-on. “Mr. Gunther, as I told your mother earlier, there’s a lot we don’t know. Sometimes, it can be like driving in winter with the windows fogged up. You trust to instinct, luck, your knowledge of the road, all your other senses, and anything else you can find. In the end, you can usually figure out why you failed—ice on the pavement, a deer jumping out in front of you, a mechanical failure. But only rarely can you do the same with success. Things often work out simply because it wasn’t your time for them not to.”
Oddly, Joe thought, he found those words comforting despite their absence of medical vocabulary or cant, perhaps because they so eloquently applied to life in general.
Weisenbeck’s pager went off. He glanced at it briefly and began making apologies before Joe cut him off with “Believe me, Doc, I know what it’s like. Thanks for your time,” and headed down the hallway on his own as the doctor disappeared into a nearby stairwell.
In the ICU waiting room, as if in counterpoint to the conversation he’d just left, he walked in on Gail Zigman and his mother, sitting side by side near the window overlooking the euphemistically called “floor,” their heads together in a deep discussion.
They both looked up as he entered, Gail rising.
“Hey, guys,” he said, smiling. “Plotting an overthrow?”
Gail gave him a brief hug as he drew near to kiss his mother, who admitted, “Good Lord, no. We were comparing recipes.”
“God, don’t tell him,” Gail protested. “He always hated my cooking.”
“I did not,” he exclaimed. “I just could never tell what it was.” He glanced at his mom. “Tofu-no-fish? Instead of old-fashioned tuna? I mean, give me a break.”
“That’s an extreme example,” Gail said.
“Tofu instead of tuna?” their elderly spectator spoke up, her interest sharpened. “That sounds wonderful. You spread it on bread?”
Joe left them to exchange details and approached the window, where he watched nurses and technicians in gowns and masks working their way among their swathed, recumbent, immobile charges. It was both futuristic fantasy and lunatic ant farm, where those bedded in the white pods were tended and catered to for reasons far outreaching their apparent usefulness.
Of course, one of those pods had a very clear use to him personally, and he found himself staring at Leo’s supine shape with the intensity of an aspiring mentalist, wishing he could transfer some of his own life force across the sterile space between them.
“What’re you thinking?” Gail’s voice said quietly from beside him.
He turned to look at her, surprised by her presence. A glance over his shoulder revealed his mother’s absence from the room, as well as how deeply in thought he must have fallen.
“Bathroom trip,” Gail explained.
He returned to his viewing and answered her question. “I was trying to figure out how to revive him using ESP, or maybe a ray gun.”
“It’s weird seeing him like that,” she said. “A guy so famous for his energy. You learn anything new? I heard you talking with Weisenbeck outside.”
“No,” he answered simply. He considered sharing some of the thoughts he’d entertained as a result, but held back, realizing that he didn’t have that kind of bond with her anymore—a continuing revelation, which jarred him still, and which, he knew, was inhibiting his taking any great steps forward with Lyn. He and Gail were friends now—old and deeply intertangled friends, to be sure. But they weren’t what they’d once been, and he now found a governor restricting the things that he’d never held from her in the past.
As if to cover his own embarrassment, he added, “It boiled down to no news being good news.”
“No news is becoming agony, if you ask me,” she said softly. She then checked her watch and added, “I better get going.”
They both