The Society

cover knowing that Will was likely to be the next person to take one? Again, far out but remotely possible.

With several scenarios playing in his brain, each one of them seriously flawed, Will headed back to the ICU. Anne Hajjar, the nurse he had felt closest to over the years, was standing just inside the glass doors.

“Welcome back,” she said. “We’ve been worried about you.”

Another kindness. Will’s battered faith began, ever so slowly, to return.

“It’s been hell,” he said, “but I’m still out there turning over stones to find out how this could have happened to me.”

“You just make sure you’re okay as far as drugs go,” she said, her almond eyes fixed on him, “because if you’re not, if you’re fooling yourself, nothing will be okay.”

“I appreciate that,” Will said, and he did. “Grace Davis’s husband around?”

“He’s in with her.”

“She okay?”

“She’s alive. Given what she went through, that’s okay. The kid who did the trach had never done one before.”

“What a brave thing to do.”

“You said it. He had a horrible decision to make and went with what he believed. We’ve done everything we can to make sure Grace and her husband understand that. Unfortunately, while he definitely saved her life, the guy made a bit of a mess of things. The ENT people are going to have to repair the damage to her trachea. But before they can do that, she’s aspirated some blood and now has a bit of a pneumonia.”

“Just make sure she gets you taking care of her until she’s out of here.”

“That’s very kind. No problem. I’ll stay close to her. Speaking of getting out of here, it looks as if your patient Kurt Goshtigian is going to make it.”

“You know what?” Will said. “I’ve been so wrapped up in my own deal that I completely forgot to check on him. Of course, that may also have something to do with the fact that he and his family are suing me for like a gazillion dollars.”

“Maybe they’ll back off once he’s home. He really has had a tough go of it. I lost the pool when he made it through last Sunday. His family’s in there with him now, so you may want to steer clear of room one.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“I think you’ll remember the room Grace is in,” Anne said with a wry grin. “It was yours.”

Will paused at the doorway to Grace’s cubicle and tried to imagine what he looked like when he was transferred there from the ER on a vent. Grace looked surprisingly good. She was pale and extremely weak, but awake and alert, communicating with her husband by hand signals, some carefully mouthed words, and the clipboard and blank progress notepaper Will knew only too well. She had oxygen running into her lungs through the tracheotomy that had saved her life. On the wall to the right side of the room, her latest chest X-rays were displayed on an illuminated view box-two views, one shot from her back through her front and one taken from side to side. At a brief glance, Will could easily make out the fluffy white density in her left lung that represented the pneumonia he had been told about.

“Greetings,” he said.

Grace managed a weak smile and a wave. In addition to her pallor, her respirations were slightly rapid and shallower than normal. So long as her condition remained like this, the ICU was exactly the place she should be.

You OK? she wrote.

“Define okay. I feel as though I’ve been hit by an invisible bus. I’m trying to fight back at whoever nearly killed me, but nobody seems to notice. How about you?”

Grace made a so-so sign.

“She seems a little more worn out than she was earlier this morning,” her husband observed. “Maybe they shouldn’t have taken her down to radiology for those X-rays.”

“We wheel patients down there if we can because they’re better quality than the films done by the portable machine,” Will replied. “Here’s one of the reasons she’s not feeling better, this white stuff right back here. A pneumonia.”

He pointed to the area on himself. At that moment, another finding in the films caught his eye. There was a small density inside the wall of Grace’s right chest, just below her third rib, perfectly round and much whiter even than the bone, which suggested that the object was metallic. The lateral view confirmed the object’s presence and located it toward the front and fairly deep. Almost certainly, it was a BB.

“Look at this,” he said.

Grace smiled.

BB, she wrote. Brother shot me.

“How old were you?”

12.

“On purpose?”

Who knows?

“I never even knew about this,” Mark said. “My wife, shot. What a mysterious, exotic woman you are, Grace. Having met the man, though, I don’t have to stretch my imagination too far to see him doing it and it not be an accident.”

Grace waved him off, but her expression suggested she agreed.

“Did your parents take you to a doctor?” Will asked.

Grace nodded.

“I imagine he said trying to get it out was more trouble than it was worth, and that it would either work itself out or stay there for the rest of your life.”

Another nod.

“Obviously, he was right, because there it is.”

There it is, she wrote.

“And there it will stay.”

Keep your spirits up.

“I appreciate that. Listen, don’t worry about me. Somehow I’ll come out of this okay. And don’t worry about what’s going to happen with your chemo.”

I know.

“There are alternatives. Right now you should just concern yourself with getting better. Well, I think I should leave you to rest.”

Thanx.

“I’m just grateful you made it. What a thing to go through.”

You, too.

Will smiled, kissed her on the cheek, shook Mark’s hand, and turned toward the door.

“Dr. Grant?” Mark said.

Will turned back. Mark had moved closer to the X-ray view boxes and was peering at Grace’s films.

“Yes?”

“If this BB is here on her chest films, then wouldn’t you expect it to be on her mammograms, as well?”

“Some of the views, yes, of course.”

“Well, it wasn’t there.”

“Pardon?”

“It wasn’t there.”

“Are you sure?”

“As you can probably tell, Dr. Grant, I am a very meticulous man-not obnoxious about it, I hope, but I am a stickler for details. There was no BB on Grace’s breast films-not any of them. Did you see it there, hon?”

She shook her head tentatively.

Never thought about it, she wrote.

Will tried to remember the distinctive density in Grace Davis’s mammograms, but he couldn’t. It would only have been on a couple of the views-perhaps two or three out of ten-but from what he could tell, it definitely should have been on some. He did sense that, just as with these films, had there been a BB on the mammograms he