CH02 - A Match Made in Texas Read online

  The trip out of the suite, down the stairs and into the ambulance was every bit as painful as he’d expected. He gulped and gritted his teeth, training his gaze on the frescoed ceiling above, a painting of blue sky, fluffy cloud and feathers. Suddenly a large, ornate crystal chandelier blocked the peaceful scene.

  Stephen closed his eyes and attempted to blank his mind, only to find Hypatia’s prayer whispering inside his head. Give him comfort now, Father, please. Heal him inside and out. Let him feel Your great love and power. Before he knew what he was doing, Stephen was adding his own plea to Hypatia’s prayer. I know I don’t deserve it, but please, please help me.

  He felt an odd sensation sweep through him, a chill that was not cold, a wind that did not blow. Then suddenly the EMTs were loading the gurney into the ambulance. To his horror, Stephen heard a man’s voice say, “Good grief. That’s Hangman Gallow. What’s the star goalie of the Blades hockey team doing here in Buffalo Creek?”

  Stephen groaned. So much for prayer and keeping a low profile! The news of his whereabouts would likely be splashed all over the DFW Metroplex by evening, and speculation about his accident would soon run rampant. Team management would probably be screaming in Aaron’s ear before week’s end. As if reading his thoughts, Kaylie clambered up into the ambulance with him, clasped his good hand with hers and spoke into his ear.

  “Don’t worry. These are medical personnel bound by privacy laws, but I’ll speak to them myself just to be sure that nothing slips out.”

  He doubted that it would make any difference. He was going to lose it all anyway. Deep down, he’d always known it, but he’d keep fighting to the very end, because that’s what he did, he fought. Always.

  “Never give up,” he muttered.

  Drugs, weariness and pain all weighed on him, pushing him down toward oblivion, but he struggled to stay awake, to stay in control.

  “I can do this,” he told himself, trying to believe that he could survive yet another setback. He had already survived more pain, disappointment and loss than many people knew in a lifetime. But this…this could be the end.

  “It’s all right,” a voice whispered. “Just relax.”

  For a moment, he was confused. Was that his mother’s voice? Aunt Lianna’s? No, of course not. She hadn’t spoken to him since Nick’s death.

  A man’s deep voice said, “Doesn’t look like he’s been doing too well.”

  Stephen roused, wondering when his father had come. “I’ll do better,” he vowed. “I’m not a pansy,” he insisted, shaking his head. “Not a mama’s boy. I can do it.”

  “Yes,” said that sweet voice in his ear. “You can do it. You are doing it. Rest now. Just rest.” Gentle hands pushed him down. Relief swept through him.

  Rest. He could rest now. Tomorrow was soon enough to get back on his skates. Tomorrow he would prove himself. Again. But first, he would rest. Gratefully, he sank into unconsciousness.

  When he woke again—it might have been minutes or hours later—they were off-loading him from the ambulance, and Kaylie Chatam was there, her small, delicate, feminine hand clasping his.

  “I was dreaming,” he muttered.

  The smile that she rained down on him warmed every tiny corner of his heart.

  “I know,” she said sweetly. “I know. We’re going to do something about that.”

  A pair of shapeless green scrubs and a working knowledge of the local hospital granted a gratifying amount of access in a process that might otherwise have relegated Kaylie to the role of distant observer. Instead, she’d been allowed to accompany Stephen in the ambulance. His mutterings had broken her heart, but she didn’t have time to really think about what they had revealed.

  As promised, she spoke to the EMT crew before they departed for their station, making it clear how important confidentiality was in this instance. They joked that they would avoid risking their careers for the price of autographs.

  “Sure, sure,” Stephen responded groggily. “Game tickets even.”

  “But later,” she insisted to a quartet of smiling male faces. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Thankfully, no one questioned her right to stay at Stephen’s side. The emergency room physician was too concerned with Stephen’s physical condition to care about such things. He was not someone Kaylie knew well, but he seemed to accept her presence without question and allowed her to provide the necessary information pertaining to previous injuries and prescription drugs.

  No one said a contrary word when she accompanied Stephen to X-ray, not even when she squeezed into the lead-shielded operations niche with the technician or studied the developed pictures. Every time she returned to Stephen’s side, his hand groped for hers, and she always gave it to him, understanding well that she had become, by sheer default, his lifeline in this situation.

  While they waited for the doctor to report his findings, Stephen blearily asked her to tell him what to expect. She could have put him off with medical mumbo jumbo or disclaimers about her personal expertise, but she chose instead to give him the truth.

  “I think you’re looking at surgery, Stephen. There’s a new break above the cast, and the old break appears to have been dislocated. It looked to me like you have some fragmenting there. That sometimes means a shortening of the bone.”

  What color remained in his face drained away, and the grip on her fingers became almost punishing. “So it really could be the end of everything,” he rumbled.

  “Of course it’s not the end of everything,” she told him firmly. “Many people naturally have one leg that’s slightly longer than the other. Most don’t even know it. Few doctors even try to treat it if the discrepancy is less than three centimeters.”

  “Three centimeters,” he echoed hollowly. “As little as three centimeters and I might never skate again. Oh, God.”

  “At least you’re looking in the right direction for help,” Kaylie told him, bending close and smiling indulgently. She was discovering that the man beneath the tough exterior had fears and concerns like any other and that he responded to a compassionate touch with a silent, secret hunger that clutched at her heart. “Would you like to pray about it?”

  His gray eyes, foggy and bleak now, plumbed hers. “I—I don’t think I know how. I have tried. I even learned a prayer once, but…”

  “What is it? What prayer did you learn?”

  He stared at her for a moment then squeezed his eyes shut and whispered, “Our Father, Who art in heaven.”

  “Hallowed be thy name,” Kaylie joined in, repeating the familiar words of the Lord’s Prayer with him. At the end, she added her own. “Please, Lord, if it can be within Your will, spare Stephen the loss of his skating. Surely You have given him the talent and desire to play hockey for a reason. Show him what that reason is, to Your glory. Amen.”

  “Amen,” he whispered.

  A throat cleared, and Kaylie turned to find that the doctor had once more entered the cubicle. She gripped Stephen’s hand and waited for the verdict.

  Surgery. Kaylie was right about that.

  Please, God, Stephen thought, let her be right about everything else.

  He almost laughed at himself. Praying at the drop of a hat now, was he? As if God had ever listened to him! The Chatams, on the other hand, when Kaylie or her aunts prayed, it was as if they summoned the very presence of God into the room, as if that Power drew close and cloaked them in peace.

  Stephen knew that he had clung to Kaylie all that morning like a toddler clinging to a security blanket, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Thankfully, she didn’t appear to mind. More than likely, she considered it a part of her job, so he hesitated only a moment before asking if she would be there with him during the surgery.

  She tilted her head, her long, sleek, dusky red hair sliding freely about her face and shoulders. He caught his breath. With her hair down around her clean face and those big dark eyes glowing with concern, she looked too beautiful to be of this earth. Only the presence of the doctor an
d the entry of another nurse into the room kept Stephen from foolishly reaching up to clasp the nape of Kaylie’s neck and pull her down to him for a kiss.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him softly. “The operating room is one place I cannot go, but I’ll be right here, praying for you.”

  Stephen gulped and nodded. Then, as if aware of that longed-for kiss, she bent and pressed her lips to the center of his forehead. A sense of peace and well-being filled him. It flowed into the all the dark, lonely crevices of his soul, bringing light and something else along with it, something he had a difficult time identifying.

  Hope, he decided woozily.

  Not the hope for any one thing, but the mere chance, the opportunity, that something in his life might finally go right, that it might all somehow come together finally.

  The feeling was almost embarrassingly intimate and, at the same time, comfortingly ordinary. It somehow set him apart from, yet united him with, all humanity. It elated and terrified. In an instant, the whole world and his perspective of it shifted from one of disappointment and struggle to one of teeming possibilities. He couldn’t bear the thought that it might be imaginary, ethereal, fleeting, and in his clumsy way he attempted to grab on to it.

  “Hey,” he teased, swirling a finger around his forehead, “let’s skip the meds from now on and just go with that. What do you say?”

  Kaylie laughed and stepped back. Only then did he realize that he was about to be wheeled away. An orderly and an orthopedic surgeon had been summoned and an operating room cleared for immediate use, he was told.

  “A smaller hospital sometimes has its benefits,” Kaylie said.

  Stephen nodded and reached out to her as he rolled past. She brushed his fingertips with hers.

  “I know Dr. Philem personally, and he’s one of the best orthopedists around,” she assured him, keeping pace with the head of the gurney as it traveled down the gleaming corridor.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” she went on softly, “not even the nightmares. I think we can even take care of those.”

  Nightmares.

  With that one word, she destroyed the first truly bright moment he had known in years. The nightmares unlocked all his horrors, all his failures, all his fears. All his guilt. As her face receded from his view, the all too familiar black pit of despair, disappointment and shame opened inside him, swallowing whole his momentary joy.

  For what could possibly ever “take care of” the fact that he had killed his best friend?

  Chapter Six

  Rubbing her arms lightly, Kaylie studied the displays on a variety of machines surrounding Stephen’s bed.

  “So how is he?” Aaron asked, nervously jiggling the coins in the pocket of his light gray slacks.

  “He’s fine. They used a temporary nerve block so he’ll probably feel better than he has in some time once he comes out from under the anesthesia.”

  Aaron had arrived just after the surgeon had given Kaylie the post-op summary. Brooks Leland, at the behest of the aunties, had contacted the personable sports agent, something Kaylie should have thought to do herself. Instead, for nearly two hours she had sat in the waiting room with her head bowed and her hands clasped, beseeching God on Stephen’s behalf and thinking about what he had said in the ambulance and the way he had prayed with her before they’d taken him into surgery. That prayer had pricked her heart, a heart already softened by his physical suffering, mindless mutterings and the way in which his hand had repeatedly and continuously clasped hers. Perhaps Stephen was not a believer, but she had to believe that God was moving in Stephen’s life.

  Kaylie felt genuine delight at that, but she felt only sadness about what his words in the ambulance had revealed. Someone, she very much feared, had taunted Stephen as a child, called him a pansy and a mama’s boy. Was that, she wondered, why he had chosen such a violent, punishing sport?

  “What kind of cast is that?” Aaron asked, indicating the black casing that covered Stephen’s leg from the hip to the ankle, leaving the sole of his foot bare.

  Pulled from her reverie, Kaylie explained that in a few weeks the temporary cast, along with the screws that the surgeon had inserted to stabilize the bone, would be removed and replaced with a cast that would allow Stephen to walk, or at least get around on his own somewhat. The recovery-room nurse—a brisk, plump, forty-something woman whose name Kaylie could not recall—breezed into the curtained cubicle while Kaylie continued to answer Aaron’s questions about this latest mishap and the doctor’s prognosis.

  After a moment, Kaylie heard the woman say, “Mr. Gallow? Mr. Gallow, can you hear me?”

  Steven cleared his throat just as Kaylie turned back to the bed. “Yes,” he croaked. “Where’ m I?”

  “You’re in recovery, Stephen,” Kaylie answered.

  His eyes popped open, and he looked straight up into Kaylie’s face, smiling crookedly. “’Lo, beautiful.”

  Instantly, his lids dropped closed again, and he went off on a sigh. Her heart lurching, Kaylie stepped back as the nurse went about checking his vital signs. Kaylie prayed that her face did not show the thrill that she had felt at his slurred compliment. The man was drugged, for pity’s sake, and probably used to flirting with every other woman he saw. That’s what sports stars did, wasn’t it?

  “Can you cough for me?” the nurse asked Stephen. His head rolled on the pillow, but he obliged, opening his eyes again.

  “The two of you should go on up to his room now,” the nurse said to Kaylie and Aaron. “We’ll bring him to you as soon as he’s ready.”

  “Wait, wait,” Stephen mumbled, reaching out his good hand to Kaylie. “My leg. How many cen’meters?”

  “None,” she assured him, resisting the urge to clasp his fingers. Somehow, with her heart still tripping, it did not seem wise just then. “You lost no bone. The doctor was able to stabilize everything. It’s going to take several weeks longer to heal than it might have otherwise, but it will heal.”

  Stephen breathed out a huge sigh of relief, dropped his head back on the pillow and mumbled, “Keep th’ prayers comin’, liefje.”

  Aaron chuckled. “You just do what this nurse tells you. Liefje. See you up in your room.”

  Stephen looked around in surprise at the sound of Aaron’s voice. “Hey,” he said through a big, goofy grin. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Looking at a trussed turkey.” Aaron waved a hand in jocular farewell and turned away with Kaylie to start down the wide aisle between the rows of beds. “What am I doing here? As if I haven’t always been here for him. Is he really going to be all right? He hasn’t done himself in this time?”

  “He’s going to be just fine,” Kaylie said, smacking a big round button on the wall that opened the wide mechanical doors at the end of the aisle. Her relief, however, was tempered by an uncomfortable feeling of having wandered onto dangerous territory.

  As they ambled through those doors and into a bright corridor, Kaylie told herself that comforting the man and becoming emotionally involved with him were two different things. She would do well to remain as personally aloof as possible for a number of reasons. For one, the man was obviously self-destructive. For another, he did not share her faith. Thirdly, his lifestyle was utterly foreign to her. Spurred by that, another thought occurred.

  “What does liefje mean?” Kaylie asked after a moment. She’d first thought that Stephen had merely mangled her name due to his drug intoxication, but then Aaron had repeated the word back to him in that teasing manner of his.

  Aaron shot her a knowing, lopsided grin. “Sweetheart. It means sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart. Kaylie’s heart thunked. She felt a disturbing shiver of delight, which was pure foolishness, of course. It meant nothing to him, and should mean nothing to her.

  “Hey, I’ve picked up a lot of the Dutch, you know,” the bluff agent went on, swaggering a bit.

  “I’m sure,” Kaylie muttered with a limp smile.

  “I’m pretty good at stuff like t
hat,” he bragged. “Stevie, now…” Aaron wagged a finger at her. “Stevie’s good at two things—hockey and hockey. Everything else, like life, for instance, well, he just never has seemed to get the hang of it.”

  Kaylie felt her heart sink. It was no more than she had suspected, of course. Mentally shaking her head, she sternly told herself to get her mind back to business. What was wrong with her anyway? She had allowed the mutterings of a drugged patient to set her thoughts on a path that they would never have wandered down otherwise. She chalked it up to exhaustion. Losing several hours’ sleep plus several hours of stress must have scrambled her brain.

  She suddenly wanted to go home. And why shouldn’t she? Stephen was out of surgery and would be spending the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours in the hospital. Aaron was here to lend support; she was no longer needed. Pushing aside memories of how Stephen had clutched her hand earlier, she walked Aaron to the elevator, where she checked her watch. The time was just after 11:00 a.m.

  “Listen,” she said, punching the up button for him. “I’m going to swing by and give my aunts a brief report on Stephen, and then I have to get home to make lunch for my father.”

  Aaron blinked, obviously surprised. “But you’re Steve’s nurse.”

  “Aaron, he’s in the hospital. He doesn’t need a private nurse in the hospital.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I have this sneaking suspicion that he’s going to expect to see you, anyway.”

  “Tell him I’ll be by tomorrow to check on him,” she decided, backing away.

  Aaron raised both eyebrows. A ding signaled the arrival of the elevator. Aaron spread his hands as the doors slid open. “Okay, then. Say hello for me to the old…uh, your aunts.”

  Kaylie nodded and made a little wave before turning and swiftly walking away. Stephen, she told herself, would be just fine, and she would be…

  Safe? From what? Temptation?