had a mind of its own. Her door was hanging open. Fuzzily, she pushed herself out of the car. She knew she’d done something really bad. The woman kept screaming, “
Suddenly people were everywhere. “Someone cut me off,” Amanda muttered to someone rushing by. No one seemed to be helping her, only the woman who was screaming.
“Hey, I’m hurt too,” Amanda said. Blood rolled down her cheek.
This was like some really bad dream.
“
“I couldn’t help it,” Amanda said, coming around the car to see.
A woman was pinned under her car. She was kind of pretty. Her eyes were glazed and very wide and her lips moved ever so slightly, though her voice was faint.
That’s when Amanda saw that she was clutching something under there. Something bundled in blue. A blanket.
A baby’s blanket. And people were standing around with their eyes filling up with tears. And there was blood everywhere.
Part I
Chapter One
You get
All the rest is just clutter.
And driving my rented Cadillac STS somewhere outside Jacksonville, just off the plane from Ft. Lauderdale, looking around for Bay Shore Springs Drive and the Marriott Sun Coast Resort, I thought that today had a pretty fair shot of ending high on that list.
First, there would be eighteen holes with my old college buddy from Amherst, Mike Dinofrio, at Atlantic Pines, the new Jack Nicklaus-designed course you pretty much had to sell your soul-or in my case, remove fifteen years of wrinkles from the face of a board member’s wife-to even get a tee time on.
Then it was the Doctors Without Borders regional conference I was actually in town for, where I was delivering the opening address. On my experiences in the village of Boaco, in Nicaragua, where, for the past five years, instead of heading off each August on some cruise ship or to Napa like most of my colleagues, I went back to the same, dirt-poor, flood-ravaged town, doing surgeries on cleft palates and reconstructive work on local women who’d had mastectomies as a result of breast cancer. I’d even put together a fund-raising effort at my hospital to build a sorely needed school. What had begun, I’d be the first to admit, as simply a way to clear my head after a painful divorce had now become the most meaningful commitment in my life. A year ago, I’d even brought along my then- seventeen-year-old, Hallie, who freely admitted that at first it was merely a cool way to show community service for her college applications. But this year she was back again, before starting at UVA, snapping photos for a blog she was doing and teaching English. I’d even included some of her photos as a part of my presentation tonight: “Making Medicine Matter: How a Third-World Village Taught Me the Meaning of Medicine Again.” I wished she could be there tonight, but she was going through exams. Trust me, as a dad, I couldn’t have been prouder.
Then later, after everything wound down, I had drinks lined up at the Marriott’s rooftop bar with one Jennifer H. Keegan-former Miss Jacksonville, now regional field manager for Danner Klein-whose visits to my office were always charged with as many goose bumps and as much electricity as there was product presentation. The past few months, we’d bumped into each other at cocktail parties and industry events, but
Bay Shore Springs had to be the next street down.
I pulled up at the light, and started thinking about how life had bounced back pretty well for me after some definite rocky patches. I had a thriving cosmetic practice in Boca, annually making
It wasn’t exactly what I thought I’d be known for when I got out of med school at Vanderbilt twenty years ago, but hey, I guess we all could look back and say those things, right?
I’d played the field a bit the past few years. Just never found the one to wow me. And I’d managed to stay on decent terms with Liz, a high-powered immigration lawyer, who five years back announced, as I came home from a medical conference in Houston, that
But I hadn’t had a steady woman in my life for a couple of years. My idea of a date was to cruise down to the Keys on weekends in my Cessna for lunch at Pierre’s in Islamorada. Or whack the golf ball around from time to time to a ten handicap. All pretty much “a joke,” my daughter would say, rolling her eyes, for one of “South Florida’s Most Eligible Bachelors”-if he was trying to keep up the reputation.
Traffic was building on Lakeview, nearing I-10, as I continued on past Metcalfe. I saw a Sports Authority and a Dillard’s on my left, a development of Mediterranean-style condos called Tuscan Grove on the right. I flipped on a news channel…
Where the hell was Bay Shore Springs Drive?
Suddenly I realized the cross street wasn’t Bay Shore Springs at all, but something called Bay Ridge West.