in the emergency department, and especially members of the trauma team, had a brief but vital relationship with the patient. It was like a missed encounter on a bus—they had minimal details about what preceded the trauma, an intense flurry of total focus and attention, during which the patient was the center of their universe. And then, once the patient was rushed off to surgery, everyone moved on. There was no closure. They glimpsed a single page from the narrative, never the whole story.
The room emptied quickly. The once pristine suite now resembled a bloody field in the aftermath of battle. Orderlies appeared to clear the area. Reese glanced around the room. She spotted something on the floor—an elongated penny that had been flattened on a train track, or maybe in one of those machines. The words Old Blakeslee Sawmill had been pressed into the copper.
She slipped it into the pocket of her lab coat. Then she went out to the garden adjacent to the emergency department, where there was an outdoor seating area favored by the staff. From here she could see the river, its banks flanked by long green swaths of parkland populated by kids playing Frisbee and shooting hoops, people lying on the grass in the sunshine, strolling tourists and cyclists rolling by.
She thought of the boy being rushed to surgery, and a shiver passed over her. At the far end of the garden, one of the trauma nurses stood alone, smoking a cigarette and staring into space as she blew a thin stream of smoke into the warm, unmoving air. Reese didn’t judge her for the habit, nor did she remind her of the property’s ban on smoking. After a major trauma, everyone involved seemed to deal with it in their own way. Some were chatty, expending the excess adrenaline in conversation, while others stayed quiet, floating in some placid reflection pond in their mind until balance returned.
Reese was still discovering what sort of trauma team member she was, but this rotation would probably end before she figured it out. She stood mulling over the incident, putting it into the context of her long-term plan.
For as long as she could remember, she had been focused on this career. She didn’t even recall choosing it. Perhaps it had chosen her, or more accurately, it had been chosen for her. Sometimes she felt like a stranger in her own life, like Rip Van Winkle waking up twenty years in the future. She blinked and looked around, wondering, How the hell did I get here?
On paper, the journey was as clear as a road map. Her parents were physicians, hugely successful in their fields of infertility and neonatology. Her father had an endowed chair at Penn. Hector and Joanna Powell were known for their groundbreaking work. Reese was their most successful experiment of all. She had been a test-tube baby, the result of her parents’ in vitro fertilization. She owed her very existence to their efforts and expertise.
It wasn’t anything she thought about too often, but every once in a while it made her feel … different. On the one hand, she knew she had been so desperately wanted that her parents had gone through an amazing medical ordeal to bring her into the world. On the other hand, the idea of having started life in a petri dish was downright strange.
Her parents had sent her to the best schools in the country, financed by their work for other infertile couples. That she would be a doctor was a foregone conclusion. There was never any other decision to be made. After completing her BS in premed, she went straight into the MD program and was now aimed like a straight arrow toward a career in pediatric surgery, the perfect complement to her parents’ practice. A five-year surgical residency followed by two years of peds surgery would bring her into the fold.
Sometimes thinking about the journey ahead gave her a migraine.
Mel came outside, his affable, slightly disheveled presence a welcome interruption. He was a good doctor and a good teacher, and he was happily married, for which she was grateful. No danger of come-ons or late-night gropings in the on-call room, something she’d dealt with far too often in medical school.
“So what did you think of that?” he asked. “Pretty intense, huh?”
“Yes. That team is incredible.” She shook her head. “Poor kid. His life will never be the same.”
“The flight nurse said he’s an Amish kid.”
She frowned, digesting the info as she pictured horse-drawn buggies, bonnets, barefoot children. “No shit. So how did he get mangled by a piece of machinery? I thought the Amish did everything by hand.”
He shrugged. “I guess not everything. But the nurse said some of the neighbors and family made a big stink about the chopper. They didn’t want him to fly. It broke one of their rules.”
“I’m glad the father went ahead and broke the rules, then. Is that why the media showed up?” She gestured at the parking lot. News vans from the local affiliates had already disgorged cables, gear, and primped on-air reporters. This was what was known in the hospital as a “drama trauma”—an unusual and often tragic event that drew the local press and created a storm on social media.
“Probably,” said Mel. “A hospital spokesman will handle it.”
“Good. The last thing the family needs is the local news hounding them.” She glanced through the broad windows into the building. In the ER consultation rooms and waiting area, people huddled in worried clumps or paced the floor. A tall blond man, as upright and still as a tree on a windless day, stood looking outside, his face seemingly carved in stone.
Reese frowned. “Isn’t that the father?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Why isn’t he up in surgery?”
Mel shrugged again. “Maybe nobody told him.”
Reese felt a hitch of irritation. A big hospital was a wonder in many ways. But sometimes things slipped through the cracks. “Damn. I’ll go tell him where the surgery waiting area is,” she said.
Mel nodded, and she went back into the building. The boy’s father looked wildly out of place in the high-tech trauma center, with his pinned-on dark clothes and a flat-brimmed hat clutched in his hands. There were smears of blood on his shirt and hands and boots. This man had set aside his principles to save the boy, but clearly at a cost, for he looked miserable.
She felt a well of sympathy for the guy. Thanks to her parents’ profession, the hospital had always been a familiar environment, the place where they worked. For most people, it was an alien world—and not a friendly one.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Jonah Stoltz’s father?”
The man turned. This one didn’t have the big U-shaped beard she associated with Amish men. Blond guys always seemed to look younger than they actually were, and special, somehow, a breed apart. He had the same clear blue eyes as the boy. His mouth was set in a grim line of suppressed fear.
“I’m Caleb Stoltz,” he said in a rich, slow voice. “Jonah’s uncle.”
“My name is Reese Powell.” The guy inspired a welling of sympathy within her, perhaps because he seemed so alone. “Will his parents be coming soon?”
“His parents are dead.” The blunt words fell into the silence between them.
“Oh … I didn’t realize,” she said, the warmth in her throat turning into an ache. She wondered if some awful farm accident had taken them. Were such things common in an Amish community?
“I’m raising Jonah now.” He focused briefly on her name and school embroidered on her lab coat.
