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