Kitabı oku: «A Mother For His Adopted Son»

CHAPTER ONE

SAM MARCUS STOOD in the observation room above the OR suite in St. Francis of the Valley Hospital, waiting for his child to lose an eye. He’d seen his share of surgeries before, being a pediatrician, but never for someone he loved. This time he needed an anchor, so he leaned against the window to see his son better and to offer support against the threat of his buckling knees.

He watched as the anesthesiologist put his tiny boy under and while the surgeon measured the eye globe and cornea dimensions, the length of the optic nerve. His heart thumped in his chest, and a fine line of sweat gathered above his lip as the surgeon made the first incision. He swiped it away with a trembling hand, trying his best to get his mind wrapped around what was happening.

Enucleation.

His barely three-year-old newly adopted son had retinoblastoma and needed to have his left eye surgically removed. He swallowed hard and shook his head, still unable to believe it.

He’d fallen in love with Danilo, an orphan, on his last Doctors’ Medical Missions trip to the Philippines. The mission had been in response to their latest typhoon, to tend to the countless new orphans. He hadn’t been in the market for a son or daughter. No, it had been the last thing on his mind then. Yet there had been one particular one-year-old boy who’d lost his entire family in the typhoon and who’d miraculously managed to survive for forty-eight hours on his own. A little hero.

Over the days of the two-week mission, Sam and the other doctors had performed physicals and minor procedures, as well as arranged for other children who had required more extensive medical care to be transported to where they needed to be. Dani had used his new walking skills to follow Sam everywhere. It’d made Sam remember one of his favorite childhood books, Are You My Mommy? A story his own mother had read to him, where a little bird who’d fallen out of the nest went looking for his mother, asking everyone, even machines, if they were his mother, and it had broken his heart.

All the children on this mission were orphans dealing with their losses in their own ways, yet this child, Dani, seemed to have chosen Sam. He gave in and took the boy with him everywhere at the orphanage clinic, cautiously opened his heart, then fell in love in an amazingly short period of time. Then it was time to leave. Dani cried inconsolably, and one of the sisters at the orphanage told Sam that it was the first time the child had cried since arriving there six weeks before.

What was a man supposed to do? He knew how it felt to be homeless. He’d been taken away from his mother when he was ten. She hadn’t abused him, but she’d had to leave him alone most nights so she could work a second job. Her plan had backfired and the authorities had taken Sam and put him into foster care. Yeah, he knew how it felt to be left all alone.

Fortunately for him he’d been placed into a big happy family and currently suffered from missing them, with everyone fanned out all across the United States. There’d been five natural siblings in all, and he’d become kid number six, yet his already overworked foster mother had insisted on bringing in more foster children—a long, long list of foster kids had come and gone over the years. Why? he used to ask whenever he’d been instructed to share his bunk bed with yet another new kid. We don’t have room for more, Mom. She’d always insisted he call her Mom.

Even after all these years her response never left his subconscious. “We don’t always know how we’ll make ends meet or where they’ll sleep, Sammy, but we just know we’ve got to bring them in because the child needs a home.”

The child needs a home.

He’d been one of those children. And he’d been trying to prove himself worth keeping ever since.

When he’d returned home from the Philippines, he’d been unable to get Dani out of his mind. Missing his infectious smile and unconditional love, he’d decided to try for the adoption in honor of his deceased foster mother, because that child needed a home.

Though it had taken a year and a half to jump through all the hoops to arrange for Dani’s adoption, six months ago he and Dani had teamed up and never looked back. And what an adjustment being a single father had been. It’d always been hectic, growing up with so many foster siblings, yet under the chaos there had been stability. Something he’d never had when he’d been a young boy. That was his goal for Dani, to give the boy stability, but he’d never been a parent before and they were both on a stiff learning curve, working things out, juggling the logistics of his busy career, child care and father-son time.

Then this cancer nightmare had happened, and any stability they’d established had been replaced with utter mental and emotional turmoil.

They’d discovered the tumor on Dani’s very first eye examination in the United States. The simple yet disturbing fact that his pupil had turned white instead of red when the ophthalmologist had shone a light into it had heralded the beginning of more and more bad news. The child had intraocular retinoblastoma.

The team of doctors, headed by the pediatric oncologist, had recommended the surgery after all other avenues of treatment—each with drawbacks and no guarantees—had been considered and rejected. Dr. Van Diesel, the pediatric eye surgeon, had come highly recommended, and since there wasn’t a chance that Dani’s vision could be saved, they’d opted for enucleation.

Sam watched from behind the viewing window as the surgeon, through a dissecting microscope, removed the outer covering of the eye. Next the four rectus muscles were detached from the eyeball, then the surgeon placed a hemostat on the stump of the last severed eye muscle. With special long, minimally curved scissors, he cut the optic nerve. Sam’s battered heart sank, realizing the monumental change that single surgical incision had made to his son’s vision. He stood motionless, unable to take in a breath, emotion flooding through his veins as next the surgeon removed the eyeball.

Unable to swallow the thickening lump in his throat, Sam watched as a nurse stood nearby with a small specimen container to collect a tiny piece of the optic nerve for histopathologic study. For their next huge hold-your-breath diagnosis—had all of the cancer been removed or had it spread? His stomach pinched at the potential outcome. The doctor worked painstakingly to also open the eye globe to harvest tissue from the retinoblastoma. Before closing, he placed a plastic temporary conformer into Dani’s eye socket to avoid a shrunken look and maintain a natural shape. They’d discussed in advance how this would be done in preparation to ensure the proper size and motility for the future eye prosthesis.

When he finally could, Sam took a deep breath. The worst was over, no, check that, the worst had been getting the damn diagnosis of cancer in the first place. Since he wanted to keep a positive outlook, he’d deemed today the first step in Dani’s healing. He watched like a hawk as the anesthesiologist prepared his son for transfer to the recovery room and the surgical nurse bandaged Dani’s left eye with a special patch to help decrease swelling.

He rushed out of the observation deck and hustled down the stairs to be the first to talk with Dr. Van Diesel when he exited the OR.

“All went well,” the white-haired man said, as he tossed his gloves in the trash and removed the surgical cap then the mask from his face. “No surprises.” He forced a smile that looked more like a squint. “Should be a couple of days before we get the pathology reports.”

“Thank you.” And Sam probably wouldn’t sleep until he knew whether the tumor had spread or not. But he was determined to keep that positive attitude. As of right now the tumor was gone, his son was free of cancer. That was how it had to be.

The doctor continued on to the locker room. Sam stood outside the OR doors and waited for the team to transport Dani. Several minutes later the doors swung open and his son, looking so tiny on the huge gurney, got rolled toward the recovery room.

He followed the medical parade out of the surgical suite, down the hall and into Recovery. As he was a staff member as well as a parent, he was also allowed to accompany the boy rather than be instructed to wait outside until he was ready for discharge. The receiving RR nurses bustled around the gurney, transferring him to their bed, disconnecting Dani from the OR equipment and attaching him to theirs. Heart monitor, blood-pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, oxygen.

Sam remained by his son’s side, taking his tiny yet pudgy fingers into his own, feeling their chill and asking for a second blanket to cover him. Every once in a while his son moved or took a deeper breath. His heartbeat was steady and strong, blipping across the monitor screen; his blood pressure read low for a three-year-old, but he was still sedated. One particular Filipino nurse looked after Dani as if he were her own. That gave Sam reassurance.

“Is your wife coming, Doctor?” Her Filipino accent made the sentence staccato.

“No.” Sam shook his head. “No wife.”

He’d lost the woman with whom he’d thought he’d spend the rest of his life. She’d walked away. But he’d committed to adopting little Dani and he couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing the boy who would finally have a home and a family of his own. Even if it was just the two of them.

“I will watch him,” the nurse said. “Don’t worry. You should take a break.”

He stretched and glanced at her name tag. “Thank you, Imelda. I could use a cup of coffee about now.”

She nodded toward the nurses’ lunchroom. “We just made some.”

He thought about taking her up on the offer but realized how much he needed to stretch his legs, to get his blood moving again. To help him think. To plan. Maybe with more circulation to his brain he’d be able to process everything that’d happened today. “Thanks, but I’m going to take a walk.”

He stood and started to leave, then blurted the first thought in his mind. “By any chance, do you know where the prosthetic eye department is?”

Imelda pulled in her double chin. “Do we have one, Doctor?”

He tipped his head. Good question. Hadn’t Dr. Van Diesel mentioned it at one point? “I hope so.”

As he left the recovery room, he made eye contact with the charge nurse. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes but beep me the instant Dani wakes up, okay?”

She nodded, so he pushed the metal plate on the wall and the recovery room department doors automatically swung inward. With one more glance over his shoulder to his sleeping son, and another pang in his heart, he stepped outside.

The one-hour operation under general anesthesia was fairly routine, and because the eye was surrounded by bone, it made it much easier for Dani to tolerate. If all went well, his son could even be discharged later that afternoon.

He walked down the hall, entered the elevator. His mind drifted to Katie, wondering if this pain would have been easier to take sharing it with someone else, but that was never to be. Katie had stuck with him all through medical school and his pediatric residency at UCLA while she’d tried to launch her acting career. Sure, they’d talked about marriage and children, but mostly he’d avoided it. He’d been left by the most important woman in his life, his mother, at a tender age, and it had marked him for life. Toward the end of their relationship, she’d kept insisting on wedding plans and he’d kept sidestepping them. When he’d finally brought up marriage because of the adoption, after screaming at him for making such a huge decision by himself Katie had suddenly decided her acting career needed her full attention.

He’d screwed up by not consulting her, but he’d thought he’d known her, and she’d very nearly wrenched his heart right out of his chest when she’d walked away.

Not a great track record with the women he’d loved. At least his foster mother, Mom Murphy, had never sent him back.

The elevator stopped at the first-floor lobby and he headed to the information desk. “Don’t we have a department that makes facial prosthetics here? You know, things like eyes?”

The silver-haired gentleman’s gaze lit with knowledge. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I believe we do.” He scrolled through his computer directory, then used his index finger to point. “It’s called Ocularistry and Anaplastology.” The man had trouble pronouncing it and made a second attempt. “And it’s in the basement, with Pathology.” He placed his hand beside his mouth as if to whisper. “I think it’s next door to the morgue.”

“What’s the name of the head of the department?” Sam asked.

“Judith Rimmer. Or, as we volunteers like to call her, Helen Mirren without the star power. Hubba-hubba, if you know what I mean.”

Sam’s brows rose at the thought—so even old guys had crushes—but off to the dungeon he went. Once he exited the elevator, he wondered why the fluorescent lights even looked dimmer down in the hospital basement, but pressed on. He passed the Matériel Management department, then Central Service—the cleaning and sterilization area. He knew where Pathology was—he’d visited there regularly to get early reports on his patients and to discuss prognoses with the pathologists. He’d also unfortunately been to the morgue far more often than he cared to in the line of duty. Nothing cut deeper than losing a child patient, and for the sake of science he’d sat in on his share of autopsies to help make sense of the tragedies.

Sam sidestepped the morgue double doors, refusing to even glance through the ocean-liner-style windows for activity, then squinted and saw the small department sign for Ocularistry and Anaplastology in bold black letters. How many people would even know what it meant?

The office was shoved into the farthest corner in the hallway, as if it had been an afterthought. The panel of fluorescent lights just outside the door blinked and buzzed, in need of a new tube, making things seem eerier than they already were. He wasn’t sure whether to knock or just go inside. He glanced at his watch, he’d wasted enough time finding the department, so without a moment’s further hesitation he pushed through the door of the “prosthetic eye people’s” department.

A dainty, young platinum-blonde woman with short hair more in style with a 1920s flapper than current fashion arranged flesh-colored silicone ears under a glass display case, as if they were necklaces and earrings in an upscale jewelry store. She looked nothing like Helen Mirren but might pass as her granddaughter. What had that volunteer been talking about? On the next table sat a huge model of an eyeball. He narrowed his gaze at the odd juxtaposition.

The woman glanced up with warm brown eyes surrounded with dark liner and smoky underlid smudges. Not the usual look he noticed in the hospital, and the immediate draw caught him off guard. His son was in Recovery, having just lost an eye, for God’s sake. He had no right to notice an attractive woman! The fact he did ticked him off.

“I’m looking for Judith Rimmer.” Okay, so he sounded gruffer than necessary, maybe impatient, but it wasn’t even noon and he’d already been through one hell of a no-good, very bad day, to paraphrase one of his son’s favorite books.

“She’s currently in Europe,” Andrea Rimmer said. The intruder had barged in and brought a whole lot of stress with him, and her immediate response was to bristle.

The brown-haired man with intense blue eyes, of which neither was prosthetic, stared her down, not liking her answer one bit. He may be a head taller than she was, but she wasn’t about to let him intimidate her. She’d had plenty of practice of standing up to men like that with her father.

“When will she be back?” He seemed to look right through her, which further ticked her off. Wasn’t she a person, too? Was her grandmother the only one who mattered in this department?

“Next week.” She could play vague with the best of them.

“I’ll come back then.”

It hadn’t been her idea to take the apprenticeship for ocularist four years ago. Nope, that had been good old Dad’s plan. She’d barely graduated from the Los Angeles Art Academy when he’d pressured her into getting a “real job” while she found her bearings in the art world. Now that she was in her last year of the apprenticeship, and since Grandma was threatening to retire and was expecting Andrea to take her place, she’d felt her back against the wall and resented the narrow choice being shoved down her throat. Work full-time. Run the department. The place didn’t even have windows!

What about her painting? Her dreams?

Had the demanding doctor brushed her off by assuming she was an inexperienced technician because she was young? She didn’t think twenty-eight was that young, but being short probably made her seem younger. If he thought he could be rude because she was young or a nobody, this guy with the tense attitude had just pushed her intolerant button.

“She may not be coming back.” She sounded snotty, which wasn’t her usual style, as she rearranged the ears again. But she didn’t really care because this guy, who may be good-looking but seriously lacked the charm gene so who cared how good-looking he was, had just ruined her morning for no good reason.

She glanced up. He raised a brow and stared her down in response to her borderline impudent reply, and she saw the judgment there, the same look she’d seen in her father’s eyes time and time again. I’m a doctor. You dare to talk to me like that?

The imaginary conversation quickly played out in her head. What? Am I not good enough for you? A feeling, unfortunately, she’d had some experience with on the home front most of her life. After all, wasn’t she the daughter of a woman with only a high-school education? A stay-at-home mother keeping a spotless house for a husband who rarely visited? A woman so depressed she’d turned into a shadow of her former self? Half of her DNA might be genius, but the other half, often insinuated by her father, was suspect. Well, good ol’ Dad should have thought about that before knocking up her mother if it meant so damn much to him.

The invading doctor continued to stare down his nose at her. Andrea wasn’t about to back down now. The nerve. Did he think she was a shopgirl, a department receptionist minding the store while Granny frolicked in France? She’d just spent a week making this latest batch of silicone ears, measuring the patients to perfection, matching the skin color, creating the simplest and most secure way to adhere them to what was left of their own ears. And unless anyone looked really closely, no one would notice. Just ask the struggling musician Brendan, who’d had his earlobe chopped off by a mobster, what he thought about her skills!

“What do you mean, she may not be coming back?” His tone shifted to accusing as if he should have been privy to the memo and voted on the decision. Wasn’t that how demanding doctors, just like her father, behaved? I need this now. Don’t annoy me with facts. He stood, hands on hips, his suit jacket pushed aside, revealing his trim and flat stomach—wait, she didn’t care about his physique because he was rude—refusing to look away from the visual contact they’d made. Something really had this guy bothered, and she was the unfortunate party getting the brunt of it.

“It’s called retirement.”

His wild blue stare didn’t waver, and, as illogical as it seemed under the circumstances, something was going on with the electrical charge circulating around her skin because of him.

A beeper went off on his belt, breaking the standoff and the static tickling across her arms. He glanced at it. She was glad because she really didn’t know how much longer she could take him standing in the small outer office, and most especially gazing into those intense eyes.

It was her job to notice things like that. Eyes. Yeah, she’d become quite an expert during her apprenticeship. If she kept telling herself that, maybe she wouldn’t scold herself later for falling under the spell of a completely pompous stranger based solely on his baby blues.

“I’ve gotta go.” Obviously in no mood to deal with her touchy technician act, he turned and huffed off, right out the door.

Wilting over her bad behavior, she tossed her pen onto the countertop and plopped into the nearest chair. Why had she behaved that way with him? She’d knee-jerked over the intruding and demanding doctor, but wasn’t he acting exactly like her father? Arrogant and overbearing. Lording his station in life over her. Where’s the head of the department, because you’re not good enough. Step out of my way. He didn’t need to say the words; she’d felt them.

Andrea caught herself making a lemon-sucking expression and let it go. Maybe she was the one with the attitude, and she hadn’t even tried to control it. That man had just got the brunt of it, too. Truth was, she needed to be more accommodating to clients and doctors, especially if she actually ever agreed to take over as the department head. Which she sure as heck wasn’t certain she wanted to do. Especially if catering to demanding doctors like that guy would be part of the routine.

She hadn’t expected a young doctor with such interestingly pigmented irises—because that was what she’d learned to notice since beginning her apprenticeship—and penetrating eyes as that guy’s to set her off on a rant. And she’d acted nothing short of an ass with him.

Shame on her.

Guilt and longing intertwined inside her. She’d fallen short of the mark just now, and it was a symptom of the battle she fought every day when she came to work. This was her job, creating prosthetic eyes for people who needed them, silicone ears, noses and cheeks for cancer victims and veterans, too, and it was a noble profession. She actually loved it. Loved the patients and making their lives better. But she liked things the way they were—working four days a week at the hospital and painting the other three. Her heart yearned to paint, not run a windowless department in the bowels of a hospital.

Andrea put her elbows on the counter and rested her forehead in the palms of her hands. If Grandma ever retired, some lousy department head she would make.

A week later …

It had taken Sam a good day and a half to calm down after his ridiculous encounter with the young woman in the O&A department. Where did they find the employees these days anyway? But to be fair, she didn’t have a clue that he’d just come from watching his son have his eye removed in surgery. He may have been more demanding than usual, but he’d been in no shape to judge how he’d come off to her, or, at that moment, to care. All he’d wanted had been to ensure his boy could have the best person possible make a realistic-looking eye to replace the one Dani had lost.

That woman couldn’t have been more than in her early twenties. How could she possibly have the skill …? Yet, he reminded himself, he’d eventually realized that Judith Rimmer had a reputation known all over the country for excellence in her specialty. He’d read up on her online while little Dani had napped one afternoon. She wouldn’t leave her beloved department in the hands of a novice. Would she?

Now, having completely calmed down, and being back on the job with a miraculous break in his schedule that morning, thanks to a no-show patient, Sam prepared to return to the basement to discuss Dani’s need for an eye.

He reached the ocularistry and anaplastology department door, took a deep breath and entered with a plan to apologize for inadvertently insulting the still-wet-behind-the-ears ocularist—if that was even what she was. How could he know for sure? They hadn’t gotten that far. Because his foster mother hadn’t raised an ungracious son—she’d knock him upside the head from the grave if she found out, too. Nor had she raised a son to judge a book by the young cover—not with the revolving door of foster kids with whom he’d grown up. He smiled inwardly, then swung open the door, and much to his surprise found Helen Mirren’s double, not retired but standing right in front of him beside a row of unblinking eyeballs in all colors in a display case. She wore something that looked like a sun visor but with magnifying glasses attached and a headlight, examining one specific eye as if it were a huge diamond.

Sitting with an expectant gaze on her face was the girl, who, on second encounter, and with all that eye makeup, looked more like the iconic 1960s model from Great Britain. Twiggy, was it? But not nearly as skinny. This girl had curves. She obviously waited for Judith’s approval on something, a project she’d made? Maybe, but, no matter what the scene was about, Sam was ticked off. Again.