Second Shot

I opened my eyes again after what seemed like no more than a slow blink, and found it was now dark outside, and my father’s shirt had changed color although his suit remained the same. The oxygen mask had gone, but the IV line had not. There was a bank of monitors to my left, turned away from me so I couldn’t see the readouts.

“Have they told you when I can think about moving around?” I said, continuing the train of thought where I’d left off.

I thought I caught the barest flicker of a smile cross his thin lips.

“Not long,” he said. “You’ll know when you’re ready, Charlotte. I wouldn’t be in any hurry, if I were you.”

He nodded towards my torso and I discovered, looking down, that I had a tube coming out of the side wall of my chest and disappearing over the edge of the bed. My God, how much morphine was I on not to have noticed that before?

“What the hell is that?” I said weakly.

“A thoracostomy tube,” he said. “It’s keeping your lung inflated and taking care of any residual bleeding. It will remain there until the lung’s healed,” he added, like a warning. Until then, you re tethered to your bed.

I took a shallow breath and channeled a lot of effort into keeping my voice casual enough to ask, “Is Mother here, also?”

I saw the uncharacteristic hesitation and didn’t need his answer. No, of course not. “She didn’t-”

“What’s happened to Ella?”

He frowned at my interruption. “The child? She’s with her grandparents.”

Her grandparents… Lucas and Rosalind.

A picture of Lucas’s face flashed into my head, holding Ella in front of his chest, using her for his own protection, and before I knew it my father had crossed to the bed in two short strides and was holding me down again.

“Calm yourself,” he snapped, “or I’ll have you sedated.”

I abandoned my feeble struggles. “You don’t have the authority,” I said, gasping for breath, aware of the childishness of the comment even as I said it.

The doorway was slightly behind me on my left, and my view of it was partially blocked by one of the monitors. I’d tuned out the background noise of telephones and footsteps and the squeak of gurney wheels on the polished floor to the point where I didn’t hear anyone come in until he spoke.

“Ah, the patient’s showing signs of fighting spirit, is she?”

“Yes,” my father said drily “A little too much of it for my taste.”

There came a rich chuckle and a man moved round the foot of the bed into my line of sight. He was tall and wide without being overweight, with a distinguished head of short gray hair that contrasted with the dark mahogany of his skin. I could just see a yellow bow tie above the collar of his coat. He had the unmistakable ultimate self-confidence of a surgeon.

“You must be Richard Foxcroft,” the man said, and I heard the respect in his voice as they shook hands, two equals weighing each other up. “Your work precedes you.”

My father inclined his head graciously “Tour work,” he said, with a nod in my direction, “speaks for itself.”

The man laughed out loud, a deep belly laugh. “Yes, I suppose she does. Well now, young lady,” he said to me, “and how are we feeling today?”

“Like we’ve been shot,” I said.

“Well, nothing wrong with your recall, at least,” he said, still smiling broadly “You’ll be pleased to hear that we successfully removed the bullet from your back.”

“Can I see it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well now, I do believe the police had first claim on it.”

I swallowed and said, “How far am I likely to be able to come back from this?” It wasn’t the clearest wording, but he seemed to get the gist.

“Your injuries were serious,” he said, letting the smile slide for the first time. “We nearly lost you on the flight over here. You were bleeding internally and we had to give you around four units of blood to get you stabilized. You suffered a hemopneumothorax-that is to say, you bled into your chest wall and your right lung collapsed. You’re probably aware that you still have the chest tube in there, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any infection. We should be able to remove the tube within the next few days.”

He moved around the bed and lifted the sheet to inspect my misshapen thigh, his fingers cool against my skin. After a moment he gave a grunt of satisfaction. “The injury to your leg was more straightforward. We simply cleaned out the clothing debris and irrigated the wound with antibiotic solution. You had a drain tube in there for the first few days — which you possibly wont remember-but it’s healing nicely now. All in all, you’ve been very lucky. That and the fact your treatment has been first-class, of course.” He smiled again, magnificently. The man ought to have been advertising dental work. “There’s no reason why, given time and hard work on your part, you shouldn’t make a full recovery.”

“I seem to be having some, ah, difficulty with my right arm,” I said.