Flashback

the tissues over his cheek and around his right eye were badly swollen by fresh bruises. 'No! ' he bellowed again. 'Don't move me. I'm going to die if I go back there tonight. Please. Just one night.'

'What gives? ' Zack asked. The emergency physician, a rotund, former GP in town, named Wilton Marshfield, released his hold, and the old man sank back on the litter. 'Oh, hi, Iverson, Dr. Cole, ' he said, nodding.

'I thought you two had gone home.'

'We were about to, ' said Zack. 'Everything okay?'

He had known Marshfield, a marginally competent graduate of a now-nonexistent medical school, for years, and had been surprised to find him working in the emergency room. During a conversation earlier in the evening, the man had explained that Frank had talked him out of retirement until a personnel problem in the E. R. could be stabilized.

'Plucked me off the scrap heap of medicine and offered me a salary as good as my best year in the office, ' was how he had put it. 'Sure, sure, everything's fine, ' Marshfield said. 'It's just that ol' Chris Gow here doesn't understand that Ultramed-Davis is a hospital, not a bloody hotel.'

'What happened to him? ' Suzanne asked. 'Nothing as serious as it looks,

' Marshfield answered, with unconcealed disdain. 'He just had a little too much of the hooch he brews up in that shack of his, and fell down his front steps. Fractured his upper arm near the shoulder, but there's not a damn thing we can do for that except ice and immobilization. Films of his facial bones are all negative, and so's the rest of his exam.

Now, we've got an ambulance all set to cart him home, but the old geezer won't let us take him off the litter without a fight. We'll take care of it, though. Don't worry.'

Suzanne hesitated for a moment, as if she wanted to comment on the situation, but then nodded and backed off a step. Zack, however, brushed past the portly physician to the bedside. 'Mr. Gow, I'm Dr. Iverson,' he said. The old man looked up at him, but didn't speak. His face, beneath the beard and the filth, had an ageless, almost serene quality to it, but there was a sadness in his eyes that Zack had seen many times during his years of caring for the largely indigent Boston patients-a sadness born of loneliness and hopelessness. There was also no small measure of fear. 'Are you in much pain?'

'Not according to him, I ain't, ' the man answered, still breathing heavily from his struggles. 'I wonder when the last time was he fell down the stairs like I did and broke his arm.'

'Who do you live with?'

The old man laughed mirthlessly, wincing from the pain. Then he turned his head away. Zack looked to Marshfield for the answer. 'He lives by himself in a shack at the endfof the old logging road off 219.'

'Do you have a phone, Chris?'

Again, the man laughed. 'How did you get here?'

'How do you think?'

'A trucker found him sitting by the highway and brought him in,'

Marshfield explained. 'Chris is no stranger here. He's a woodcutter.

Periodically, he goes on a toot and cuts up himself instead of the wood.' He laughed at his own humor and seemed not to notice that no one else joined in. 'We sew him up and ship him back home until the next time.'

Zack looked down at the old man. Could there be any sadder state than being sick or badly hurt, and being alone-of hoping, against hope, for someone to come and help, but knowing that no one would?

'Why can't he just be admitted for a day or two? ' he asked. 'Are there empty beds in the house?'

'Oh, we have beds, ' Marshfield said, 'but ol' Chris here doesn't have any kind of insurance, and unless his problem is life-threatening, which it isn't, he either goes to Clarion County, if we want to ship him out there, or he goes home.'

'What if a staff doctor insists on admitting someone who can't pay?'

Marshfield shrugged. 'It doesn't happen. If it did, I guess the physician would have to answer to the administration. Look, Iverson, you weren't around when this hospital admitted every Tom, Dick, and Harry who came down the pike, regardless of whether they could pay or not, but I'm here to tell you, it was one helluva mess. There were some weeks when the goddamn place couldn't even meet its payroll, let alone buy any new equipment.'

'This man's staying, ' Zack said. The emergency physician reddened. 'I told you we had things under control, ' he said. i, Zachan glanced down at the old man. Sending him home to an isolated shack with no phone and, as likely as not, no food, went against his evess instinct as a physician. 'Under control or not, ' he said evenly, 'he's staying. Admit him to me as… malnutrition and syncope. I'll write orders.'

Marshfield's jowly cheeks were now crimson. 'It's your goddamn funeral,

' he said. 'You're the one who's going to get called on the carpet by the administration.'

'I think Frank will understand, ' Zack said. This time, Marshfield laughed out loud. 'There are a few docs beating the bushes out there for a job because they thought the same thing, Iverson.'

'Like I said, he's being admitted.'

'And like I said, it's your funeral. It's okay, Tommy, ' he said to the guard. 'You can go on about your rounds. Dr. Social Sewice, here is hell-bent on learning things the hard way.'

He turned on his heels and stalked away. 'Chris, you're going to stay, at least for the night, ' Zack said, taking the old man's good hand in his. 'I'll be back to check you over in a few minutes.'

The man, bewildered by the sudden change in his fortune, could only stare up at him and nod. But the corners of his eyes were glistening.

Zack turned to Suzanne. 'Come on, ' he said, 'I'll walk you outside. I can use the fresh air.'

They walked through the electronically opened doorway and out onto the ambulance platform. A steady, windblown rain swept across the coal-black pavement. 'I guess I have a few adjustments to make if I'm to sunive here,' he said, shivering momentarily against the chill. Suzanne flipped the hood of her trench coat over her head. 'Do us all a favor, ' she said, 'and don't make any ones you don't absolutely have to. That was a very kind thing you did in there.'

'Insurance or not, that old guy's paid his dues.'

'Perhaps, ' Suzanne said. 'Yes, perhaps he has. Well, I'll see you in the morning.'

'Yeah.'

She turned and took several steps, then turned back. 'Zack, about that dinner. How about Wednesday night? My place.'

Zack felt his pulse skip. 'I thought you didn't date men you worked with?'

'No policy should be without exceptions, ' she said. 'You just made that point in there yourself, didn't you?'

'Yes. Yes, I suppose I did. But how about your… other involvement?'

She pushed her hood back from her forehead and smiled at him, first with her eyes, then with her lips. 'I lied, ' she said. IVERSON stood by the glass doors of her bedroom balcony, wincing as half a dozen spears of lightning crackled through the jet sky over the Androscoggin River Valley. Far below and to the south, Sterling incandesced eerily beneath the strobe. A cannonade of thunder rumbled, then exploded, shaking the tall, hillside A-frame like a toy. She tightened her robe and then tiptoed down the hall to check on the girls. Mercifully, after two fitful hours battling the ghosts of the storm, both were asleep. Lisette had never done well with thunderstorms herself, and felt no small guilt at having passed those fears on to her children. God, how she wished Frank would come to bed, or at least talk to her. It was nearly one in the morning, and he was still downstairs in 'his' den, staring, she knew, at the embers in 'his' fireplace, and listening over and over to the album of morose, progressive jazz he favored when he was angry at her. And as usual, she also knew, he would take his own sweet time in telling her why. It was the job, the hospital, that kept him so tense.

Lisette felt certain of it. For a year-no, much longer than that now, two at least-he had been a bear to live with. And with each passing week, each passing month, there seemed to be less and less she could do to please him. Silently, she cursed the day he had closed his business in Concord and moved back to Sterling, even if the little electronics firm was on the ropes. To be sure, his success with Ultramed had given them more than she could ever have imagined. But as she reflected on the dashing dreamer she had fallen in love with and married, Lisette told herself the price they were paying was far too high. For a time, she debated simply going to bed. If she did, of course, Frank would never come up. He would spend the night on the sofa in his den and would be in his office at the hospital by the time she and the twins awoke. With a sigh of resignation, she stepped into her slippers and