The Awakening of Dr. Brown

body toward the entrance of the burning building. Ethan felt himself moving with them, with no idea how he’d come to be.

A small cluster of people had appeared at the top of the steps, seemingly disgorged from the doorway along with billows of smoke and the snapping, creaking, cracking sound of collapsing timbers. A strange-looking assembly it was-two firefighters in breathing masks and full protective gear supporting one elderly man, who held cradled in his arms a woman-who carried in her arms a child-and all of them barely recognizable, covered from head to toe with soot.

As paramedics rushed forward to relieve the exhausted firefighters of their burden, Ethan struggled to join them.

“Please,” he croaked, looking into Tom Applegate’s eyes.

The Secret Service man hesitated only a moment, then nodded and let him go.

He got to Joanna just as a paramedic was fitting an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. She struggled against it, eyes blazing like pieces of a sunny day in her blackened face, until Ethan, down on one knee beside her, laid a restraining hand on the paramedic’s arm. She spoke to him, then, in a voice like blowing sand, and he had to lean down close to hear.

“Help…them. Doveman…”

Something fierce and bright exploded inside him. It rushed through his chest and exploded from his lips in a sound-not words, just a gust of breath, as if someone had punched him hard in the stomach. He felt himself shattering, saw his heart and soul and every preconceived notion he’d ever had of goodness and character and courage and strength lying in glittering shards all around him. For the first time in his life he felt that he was seeing things clearly, all those things and one more: Love. There they were, all laid out before him in one ravaged, smoke-blackened face. Joanna’s face.

“Doveman…” she whispered again, pleading.

“I will, I promise,” he said, forcing the words through the terrible ache inside him.

He nodded to the paramedic, who replaced the mask. Joanna’s eyes drifted closed.

Dragging in great gulps of air, Ethan surged to his feet. He stood for a moment, swaying slightly, trying to slow the frantic pace of his heart, trying to orient himself in a world that seemed suddenly to have spun out of his control. The only concrete thing in his life just then was the woman lying at his feet. The only thing he knew for certain was that leaving her just then was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

He touched the paramedic’s shoulder and croaked, “Take good care of her.” Then he went to find Michael and Rupert Dove.

Michael he found with no trouble. All he had to do was follow the racket, because his aunt Tamara was hovering over the paramedics who were trying to tend to him, sobbing and scolding at the same time with the shrill ferocity of overwhelming maternal relief. “Boy, what were you thinkin’? I’m gonna skin you alive-what am I gonna do if you get killed? What’s your momma gonna think? Don’t you ever do that again, you hear me?”

Ethan stopped long enough to assure both himself and Tamara that the boy’s condition was far from life- threatening, which in the latter case took some doing. It was only when she realized who she was talking to that she finally stopped her agitated pacing to whisper, “Dr. Brown…he’s really gonna be okay? You sure? Praise God, he’s gonna be okay…” Then she sank to the curb and began to rock herself and her baby back and forth, back and forth, crying in soft, exhausted whimpers.

“Where’s the other one?” Ethan quietly asked the young female paramedic who was checking Michael’s vitals. “The old man-the one who brought them out.”

The paramedic jerked her head. “Over there, last I saw.”

“Thanks…”

In a quiet eddy behind an EMS wagon he found a little knot of people working in grim and frenzied silence. Wading through them, he crouched over the still body of Rupert Dove. “What’ve we got?” he asked hoarsely.

Kenny Baumgartner glanced up at him and pulled the stethoscope out of his ears. “Lost him once,” he said tersely. “He’s back now, though. We’re ’bout ready to roll.”

Ethan nodded. “Let’s go.”

Kenny gave him a surprised look as he got to his feet. “You coming along, Doc? I didn’t think this was your night-”

“I’m coming,” said Ethan softly. He looked down at the haggard and blackened face of the old piano man, mostly hidden now behind the oxygen mask. “You know who that is?”

“Well,” said Kenny, “I hear he’s one helluva hero.”

“Yeah. He’s also Rupert Dove.”

“The Doveman? You kiddin’ me?”

Ethan shook his head. “We’re not losing him.” He felt calm in his mind for the first time since he’d climbed out of the dark sedan back there in the street, and filled with a tense resolve. This was a battle he was used to, a battle he was trained to win. A battle he was determined to win. Because there was just no way in hell he was going to let the Doveman die. Not here, and not now.

Not until Joanna’d had a chance to say goodbye.

“No, sir,” Kenny said, “not if I have anything to say about it. Okay, guys, let’s move!” Moving in perfect sync, the team of paramedics popped the gurney and rolled it to the wagon.

Just as they got there the sky opened up the way it can do sometimes in the east, in June. The rain fell straight down, heavy and hard, with a rushing sound like the beating of wings.

Ethan sat in a hard plastic chair and watched her sleep. He’d lost track of what time of day or night it was, or how long he’d been there. Outside, beyond the hospital walls, the world waited; word had gotten out that the rock-and-roll icon known as Phoenix and her legendary piano man Rupert Dove had been injured in a row house fire, and that the president’s son was somehow involved.

In here, though, all was quiet. The hospital went about its business as usual; routine noises faded in and out of his awareness, like the ticking of a clock.

He hadn’t been able to take his eyes from her face, still a dusky-gray from the residue of smoke they hadn’t quite gotten washed off, but with a lovely pink glow showing through, her hair splashed like spilled ink across the pillows and down over her neck and breasts, a spiderwebbing of it clinging to the dampness of one cheek like a fine filigree of black lace. He’d been able to find again the endearing little flaws he’d noticed that first day, the first time he’d seen her in person-the tiny lines near her eyes, the smudges, deep purple, now, the sprinkle of freckles across the tops of her cheeks-and had memorized them all. He wondered if he would ever again be able to close his eyes and not see her face in every detail…so vulnerable and unguarded…just like this.

He’d been expecting her to look different, as if his thinking of her as Joanna Dunn instead of Phoenix would have changed her in some fundamental way. It had taken him a while, sitting here alone with her, but it had finally come to him that she was who she had always been. That it was he who had changed. Though she was the one lying helpless in a hospital bed, it was he who felt stripped naked…he who was vulnerable and unprotected.

He’d accused her of hiding her true self with her disguises, but now he wondered if he’d been doing the same thing himself, all his life. His childhood shyness had grown into reserve, then hardened into detachment masquerading as quiet self-confidence. But what if all it had really been was another kind of mask-what was it she liked to call it? Protective coloring? Yes…protective coloring, a way of camouflaging his feelings to keep them safe from the terrifying dangers of involvement.

And now he’d lost that protection. Here he stood, all out in the open, soft and squishy as one of those sea creatures that sheds its shell and then has to wait for the new one underneath to harden. Except that he was very much afraid his shell was never going to grow back, that from now on he was going to feel like this-desperately fragile, vulnerable and afraid. Was this what it was like to love someone? He wondered if he would ever feel safe again.

Tearing his eyes away from her face, finally, he reached for her hand and raised it to his lips, then simply sat and gazed at it. They’d made an effort to clean it up some, he noticed, but grime still lingered around the short, unmanicured nails, making it seem more than ever like the hand of a child-a grubby one, now. Slowly, he raised it again and pressed his lips to the palm. Then he folded it into a fist and enclosed it in both of his. Bowing his head