The crunch of tires on gravel echoed across the unpaved
parking lot as Dr. Mercy Richmond drove into the apartment
complex where Odira Bagby lived with her
great-granddaughter, Crystal Hollis. A bare lightbulb glowed
over the small concrete front stoop at the door nearest the
alley so she'd know which apartment was Odira's.
Mercy pulled as close to the steps as she could and reached
over to turn up the heat in her car. The curtain at the
window beside Odira's front door was open, revealing a front
room with an old threadbare sofa and a straight-backed chair
crammed into a ten-by-ten-foot space, along with an old TV
resting on a nightstand. An off-white lace doily topped the
TV. Mercy had never been here before, but she knew the
sixty-six-year-old woman supported herself and
seven-year-old Crystal on social security. She couldn't get
a place at Sunrise Villa, the retirement apartments, because
the new management didn't want children.
Before Mercy could shift the gear into Park, the front door
opened and out lumbered Odira, all two hundred seventy
pounds of her, with wraithlike Crystal beside her, bundled
all the way to her nose in a thick quilt.
As Mercy stepped out of the car into the icy wind and
hurried around to open the door for them, Crystal started
coughing again—the same hoarse, dry sound Mercy had heard in
the background when Odira called a few minutes ago. It was
typical of a child sick with bronchitis, maybe even
pneumonia, brought on by the specter of cystic fibrosis.
"Hope you didn't have to leave your own little girl at home
alone for this," Odira said in her booming baritone voice
that always seemed to shake the walls when she came to the
clinic.
"No, I dropped Tedi off at my mom's on the way here." Mercy
got Crystal and Odira settled in the car, slid into the
driver's seat and pulled onto the quiet street for the
five-minute drive to her clinic.
At the first stop sign, she noticed Odira sniffing…great,
heaving sniffles. Tears, which she obviously could not
contain, paraded down her cheeks. Odira was known to talk
more than she breathed, a counterpoint to Crystal's silent
watchfulness. But not tonight.
Mercy cast a second concerned glance at the woman, where the
dash lights illumined her broad, heavy face and rusty-iron
hair that looked as if it had been cut with a pair of dull
scissors. Beside her, Crystal's face was thin and pale,
filled with a sad knowledge. She raised her hand to cover
her mouth when she coughed, just as Odira had taught her to.
Her stout, clubbed fingers demonstrated the effects of
oxygen deprivation to her extremities throughout her battle
with CF.
"Are you two warm enough?" Mercy asked.
"I'm plenty warm." Odira looked down at Crystal and wrapped
a thick arm around her. Worn patches at the sleeves of her
thirty-year-old coat had been carefully mended. "You okay?"
Crystal nodded and ducked her head into her
great-grandmother's side.
"What's Crystal's temperature?" Mercy hadn't bothered to
inquire about that over the phone because she knew that if
Odira was desperate enough to call for help, Crystal was sick.
"Hundred and two." Odira's voice sounded like a solid mass
in the confined space. "Couldn't get her temp down, and the
coughing just kept getting worse. Think she might have
pneumonia again." She sniffed and wiped at her wet face with
the back of her hand. "Sorry… just couldn't figure out
nothing else to do but call you."
"You don't have to apologize, Odira." Mercy laid her
heater-warmed hand on Crystal's face. Yes, it was hot.
Crystal's underdeveloped body was always fighting some kind
of an infection. She'd had bouts of both bronchitis and
pneumonia since Odira took over her care last year. Who knew
what nightmares the child had suffered before that? She
talked more now than she had when she first came to Knolls
after her mother disappeared. She was healthier, too. That
didn't surprise Mercy. Love and kindness had great power
over illness, and nobody could envelop a little girl in love
the way big, awkward Odira Bagby could.
Mercy shared the hope with Odira that they would see Crystal
live to adulthood, maybe even into her forties, with the new
treatments and increased knowledge about this debilitating
genetic disease. And by the time Crystal reached her
forties, maybe they would have a cure.
As Crystal's coughing and wheezing increased, Mercy turned
onto Maple, the street that fronted Knolls Community
Hospital and her clinic. The hospital came into view,
glowing a dark rose color in the security lights set
strategically around the grounds. Mercy slowed to the
required fifteen miles per hour as she passed the property,
set in a scenic residential section of town, with plenty of
open lawn and evergreens. Bare branches of oaks and maples
jutted out from between humps of burlap-protected rose plants.
She looked up to see, without surprise, that the
administrator's office was illuminated on the second floor.
Mrs. Pinkley had opted to move her operations into an unused
storage area rather than take the time to repair her own
suite, which had been damaged in the explosions when the
E.R. was destroyed. The E.R. was Estelle Pinkley's first
priority. Knolls Community usually employed about two
hundred fifty people, many of whom would be out of work
until they had the west wing with an emergency department.
Estelle's sense of civic responsibility had impacted her
career as prosecuting attorney for a great deal of her life.
Why stop just because she'd changed careers? At seventy, she
was a more powerful force than a whole roomful of attorneys.
Odira sniffed and wiped her face again. "Sure do miss Dr.
Bower." Her heavy voice had an unaccustomed catch of
sadness. "Bet you do, too. Bet you get all kinds of calls
like this since there ain't an E.R."
Mercy reached over and patted Odira's fleshy shoulder. "You
know I wanted to come." But what the woman said was true.
Mercy's practice had been overwhelmed the past three months.
She missed Lukas a lot, and not just for his professional
ability.
Lukas Bower, the acting E.R. director, was working
temporarily at a hospital on the shore of the Lake of the
Ozarks, a three-hour drive from Knolls. Patients and
hospital staff members continually asked Mercy when he'd be
back. She wondered, too. Nobody missed him more than she did.
"Don't seem right he should be out of work just because some
monster wanted to set fire to the E.R." Odira pulled Crystal
closer. "Don't seem right we should all be suffering like this."
"I feel the same way." Mercy looked down at Crystal. "How
are you doing, sweetheart?"
"My chest hurts."
Mercy bit her lip and prayed silently, the way Lukas had
taught her to do. God, please help me with this one.
She's so young. Why is she suffering like this? The
question came up often lately in Mercy's mind, and after all
the talking she and Lukas had done about the subject, she
still hadn't found a satisfactory answer. Every time she
found herself questioning God about it, she felt afraid.
Sometimes it seemed as if all those great, profound truths
she and Lukas had discussed last summer and autumn had
deserted her, and that her new belief in Christ was just a
fairy tale.
She turned into the dark parking area of her clinic, less
than a block from the hospital. "Let's get inside and get a
breathing treatment started."
Clarence Knight just happened to be in Ivy Richmond's
kitchen, raiding her refrigerator and practically swallowing
three frozen chocolate chip cookies whole, when the phone
rang for the second time Saturday night.
He jerked backward and knocked his head on the overhead
compartment where Ivy had been hiding the treats from him.
He thumped his elbow on the door and spilled crumbs down the
front of his size 6XL T-shirt in his rush to get to the
phone before the ringing could wake Ivy. If she came in and
found him eating, she would roast him whole over an open
fire, all four hundred twenty pounds of him.
He jerked up the receiver, then realized his mouth was still
full. He chewed and swallowed. "Mmm-hmm?"
"Hello? Who is this?" It was a man's voice. Sounded
familiar. Sounded upset. "Clarence?"
"Mmm-hmm."
"Is Dr. Mercy there?"
Clarence swallowed again. "Hmm-mmm."
"Do you know where she is? This is Buck. I just tried her at
home, and I couldn't get her. I need her bad. Kendra tried
to—" His voice broke. "She needs help. I've got to get her
somewhere…got to get her on some oxygen." There was another
crack in his voice. "Clarence? You there?"
Clarence swallowed again. "Hol' up, Buck. Ith's okay." One
more swallow. There. "Mercy dropped Tedi off here a little
bit ago, 'cause she was on her way to the clinic for some
emergency. What's the matter with Kendra?"
Buck took a breath. "She tried to kill herself. Carbon
monoxide poisoning. She was running her car motor out in the
garage when I found her. The doors and windows were all shut."
Clarence grunted as if he'd been hit in the gut with a
football. "Oh, man." Poor Kendra. And poor Buck. "She okay?
Where are you?" He knew they were still having trouble in
their marriage, but was her life bad enough for her to want
to die?
"We're still at home. I've got to get her to Dr. Mercy's,"
Buck said. "There'll be oxygen there."
"Yeah, Dr. Mercy'll check her out. Want me to call the
clinic and see if I can let her know you're coming?"
"Yeah. Thanks, Clarence."
There was so much relief in Buck's voice, Clarence went even
further. "You'll be coming right by here on your way…." He
hesitated. He'd just started getting back out into public
after losing all that weight, and he still had a long way to
go. Could he do this?
Yeah, he'd do anything for Buck. Buck had been there for him
when he was in trouble. "I could meet you out at the street.
All you'd have to do would be stop and let me get in and
ride with you. Then you wouldn't have to do this all by
yourself." And maybe he could talk to Kendra some. He knew
firsthand what depression could do to a person.
There was a pause, and he braced himself for Buck to turn
him down. He'd lost over a hundred pounds since last spring,
but he'd still draw a big crowd at a circus sideshow. He was
big and clumsy and took up two seats wherever he went, and
strangers stared and laughed, and he knew the few friends he
had were probably ashamed to be seen—
"You'd do that for me, Clarence?" came Buck's relieved
voice. "It would help."
Clarence blew out a bunch of air he hadn't realized he was
holding in his lungs. "Sure would, pal. Look at what you did
for me last fall. I'll be waiting out front when you get here."
He hung up and glanced toward the hallway that led to Ivy's
bedroom suite. Good. No lights, and he thought he could hear
her snoring over the hum of the refrigerator. Mercy's
daughter, Tedi, had gone straight to sleep in the spare
bedroom without waking her grandma. He guessed neither of
them had heard him on the phone.
Ivy had once compared his voice to a derailed locomotive
running loose through the house, and she really griped when
he woke her up in the middle of the night. Especially when
she caught him eating.
Clarence and his sister, Darlene, had come to live with Ivy
Richmond—Dr. Mercy's mom—three months ago when their health
got too bad to live on their own. And Ivy had bullied him
every day since then to eat right, exercise, take his
vitamins, exercise, take his medicine, drink a bucket of
water a day and exercise. She'd even tried to make him go to
church with her. He'd done everything but that.
Since he couldn't bend over and pick up all the crumbs he'd
scattered on his way to the phone, he shoved them aside with
his foot. Though sloppy and crude, it might save his life.
He had to hurry and brush his teeth and get out to the curb.
He wanted to be there when that pickup truck came rolling by.
Shouldn't've taken that Lasix a couple of hours ago.
He knew from Mercy that the medicine kept him from
retaining fluid, but it also kept him running to the
bathroom all night long.
Crystal Hollis lay on Mercy's softest, most comfortable exam
bed in an overheated room, with a pink teddy-bear sheet
draped over the lower half of her body. Some of the color
had returned to her face, and the sound of her breathing was
not as labored, nor her lips as blue, as a few moments before.
Mercy pressed the warmed bell of her stethoscope against the
little girl's chest. "Take a breath for me, honey."
Seven-year-old Crystal had the body weight of a
five-year-old, with stick-thin arms and legs and a slightly
protruding abdomen—clearly the cystic fibrosis affected her
pancreas as well as her pulmonary system. Which meant
Crystal could eat as much as an adult and still not put on
weight. It was a constant battle. She had an aura of
maturity in her long-suffering expression and sad gray-blue
eyes that befitted someone seventy years older.
Her chest sounded a little better, but not enough. She
coughed and Mercy grimaced. The breathing treatments weren't
going to cut it this time.
"How's she doin', Dr. Mercy?" Odira's deep voice rumbled
from her chair four feet away. She leaned forward, her puffy
face filled with tense worry.
Mercy sighed and placed the stethoscope back around her
neck. She tucked the sheet back up over Crystal's bony
shoulders and took the little girl's hand in her own. "I'd
like to see her breathing better, Odira." She perched on the
exam stool beside the bed and faced the child's
great-grandmother. "The X-rays don't show what I suspected,
but this could be early pneumonia. I'd like to have her
checked out by a pulmonologist in Springfield. I could
transfer her to St. John's and…" The expression of sudden
fear in Odira's face halted her words.
"But you're her doctor," the older woman argued. "You're the
one we trust. Couldn't you just do one of those consults
they talk about on TV? That big place up in Springfield
would be so scary for Crystal, and they might not even let
me stay with her. You know how those big places are."
Mercy patted Crystal's hand and released it, then stood up
and walked over to the chest X-rays placed in the lighted
viewer box. The films most definitely indicated bronchitis.
Time to blast those lungs with high-powered antibiotics.
Odira always made sure Crystal received the nutritional
support Mercy suggested, including the pancreatic enzyme
supplements and vitamins, but Mercy would increase the
caloric intake even more for a while. Crystal's fever had
dropped a little, but Mercy didn't want to take any chances.