After Dr. Jonas was finished, he said, “Charmaine, I’m going to step outside with Dr. Haraldson for a few moments, and then she’ll come back in and stay with you, okay?”
Charm’s fingers tightened almost painfully. “You’re coming back, Auntie?”
“Of course I am.” Mina leaned down and kissed Charm’s feverish brow. “I won’t be gone long.”
Seeing Charm like that rattled Mina. She’d become so used to the sassy, irrepressible young woman who seemed older than her years in many respects. Now the child she really was had come to the surface, awakening a deep vein of protective instincts in Mina.
“It could just be a bad case of the flu,” Dr. Jonas was saying, and Mina forced herself to concentrate. “But are there additional risk factors I should know about?”
“She went camping over the half-term holidays, up at Justice Peak,” Mina said. “It made me worry about insect-borne viruses, perhaps even causing encephalitis, or meningitis.”
Neil Jonas nodded, his gaze darting back to the cubicle, before coming to rest on Mina. “I don’t want to play around with this. We’ve had one case of viral encephalitis in the northern side of the island, near to where she was camping, in the last week, so there’s a precedent we have to take into consideration.”
He took a breath, and Mina’s heart dropped, knowing what he was going to say, even before he said, “I’d like to do a lumbar puncture, to be certain, before I start treating her with drugs she might not actually need.”
That was when Mina realized it didn’t matter whether you were a doctor, or not. When it was a child you loved, there was no easy way to make a decision that would seem like a no-brainer to the attending physician.
She turned away, tears filling her eyes, and she pinched the bridge of her nose to hold them back. There was the urge to call Kiah, let him decide, but she knew he’d have the very same reaction she was having right now. He also might not be able to bear the thought of Charm going through such a painful, and potentially dangerous, procedure.
Yet, Mina also knew Dr. Jonas suspected, as she herself did, that Charm’s illness was serious enough to need medical intervention beyond anti-inflammatory drugs.
Both encephalitis and meningitis could be fatal, or have long-term effects, if not diagnosed and promptly treated. Mina knew she couldn’t take the chance with Charm’s life and future.
“Okay,” she said, turning back to face Dr. Jonas. “Do the spinal tap. Will I be allowed to stay with her while you do it?”
Normally parents were advised not to remain in the room, but she’d promised to stay with Charm, and she wanted to keep that promise. Besides, she wasn’t a parent, and she was a doctor to boot. Surely those things would count for something?
“You can, if you want to.” Dr. Jonas gave her a knowing look. “You know better than most what’s involved, so if you think you can handle it, then yes.”
“Of course I can,” she said, with far more confidence than she was actually feeling, and a sinking sensation in her belly, which told her she was a stone-cold liar.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ST. EUSTACE WAS a small island. The kind that it doesn’t take more than four or five hours to circumnavigate, depending on the time of day, and how fast you drive. But to Kiah it suddenly appeared to have grown to the width of Canada, since it seemed to take forever to get back to Port Michael.
Mina had called a couple of times, updating them, and Kiah had almost lost his mind when she told him that Neil Jonas had performed a lumbar puncture on Charm.
He hadn’t said anything untoward, he didn’t think, but even with the knowledge that it had been successfully done, and Charm had been admitted pending the results, he was enraged.
“Hezekiah, you know Mina would never agree to anything she didn’t think was necessary,” Granny said, but her voice wobbled, showing how badly all of this was affecting her, too.
“They shouldn’t have done it without my permission. They could have called—”
“You told them Mina would make the decisions until you got there, and she did as you asked. Do you think it would have been an easy one to make? Would it have been easy for you?”
But Kiah was in a head space where logic couldn’t touch him, where rage sustained his sanity, keeping all other emotions and impulses at bay.
When they finally arrived at the hospital in Port Michael, he was a ball of fury, ready to let fly at anyone who got in his way.
Neil Jonas was at the nurses’ station when he got up to the wards, and Kiah found himself wanting to punch him in the face. When the other man saw him approaching and gave him a solemn nod, the urge only increased.
“It’s definitely viral encephalitis,” Neil said after a brief greeting. “The lab results just came back, and I’ve ordered treatment. I want to keep her in for a couple of days under observation, but although it’s a bad case, it was caught early enough, and she’ll make a full recovery.”
“Thank the Father,” was Miss Pearl’s response, but although the news was good, it did nothing to lessen the churning ball of anger in Kiah’s belly.
When he entered the hospital room and found Mina sitting beside Charm’s bed, not even the sight of her worn, tired face could touch him.
Only Charm’s wan smile somehow cut through his rage, and he moved to her side, leaning down to kiss her forehead.
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
“A bit better,” she said. “They said the headache should go away soon, but Auntie’s made them turn the lights down for me. And I have to lie still, because of the thing they did to my back.” She looked past him to say, “Hello, Granny.”
“Why you want to scare an old lady
