Chapter Twenty-Two
Nathan sprang out of bed the next morning as if he was nineteen years old and living on a farm. “I feel great,” he said. “No pain anywhere. I was so worried about that.”
Suella groaned when the bright sun’s rays bathed her face in their glow. “Can’t I sleep in just a little bit, today?”
Nathan patted her on the rear. “If you do, you’ll miss breakfast. These people don’t play around.”
Natalie also pushed herself out from between the covers, joyously receiving another day. She had jumped into her uniform before Suella swung her thighs over the edge of the bed and put both feet on the floor. “Gosh, what’s wrong with me today?” Suella asked out loud, not expecting an answer. Nathan had laser-razed himself and put on his uniform shirt and pants while Suella still shuffled around the hotel room in her nightgown. “Maybe I’ll feel better if I have a little breakfast.”
Later that morning, she ate just the Belgian waffle and a few slices of orange instead of the powdered eggs or the sausage. While the sausage was meatless, she felt that they used too many chemicals in making that type of product and she never touched it. Kaitlyn and Jeff met them at their table. To Suella’s dismay, Kaitlyn seemed as bright and chipper as Nathan and Natalie.
“I feel like crap,” she confided to Kaitlyn at one point.
“But you look good,” Kaitlyn said. “What more could one ask for, right? Is it your time?”
“No. That’s a whole other kind of feeling like crap. This is something different.”
Kaitlyn patted her on the wrist. “Maybe you’ll feel better when we get out there in the sun and the fresh air.”
Like the day before, the fantasy camp staff made a grand production of starting the game, complete with the gameshow style announcer, the men standing along the baselines, and the girl’s rendition of the Star Spangled banner. Kaitlyn bounced over to her post along the third base foul line. The umpire called “Play ball,” and another day of middle-aged crazies swinging for the fences and huff-puffing around the bases started.
“How are you holding out?” Kaitlyn asked, a few innings into the game.
Suella sighed. “Well, I’m no longer nauseous, like I was back at the room. I just have this, kind of tingling somehow.” She put both of her wrists before her and examined them. Neither one of them could see anything wrong.
“I’ll get you a glass of iced tea, with lots of lemon,” Kaitlyn said, getting up. She got a tall glass for the both of them, and as Suella sipped the cold, refreshing fluid, she did begin to feel better.
“Guess I was all worried about nothing,” she said, straightening up in her seat, paying new attention to the game. When his team would take the field, Nathan played shortstop, another position Suella was sure he’d never played before. He had to have more skill with it than some of the paunchy fantasy campers out there, she supposed. A small, thin guy Suella didn’t recognize pitched for the team that day. He looked as if he worked in a library in his everyday life.
One of the bigger black players from the other team had come up to bat. With his big shoulders and powerful demeanor he looked more suited to football than baseball. What happened next seemed to take place in a slow, alternate universe. The batter swung mightily at one of the little guy’s looping pitches. He connected and sent a vicious grounder wide of the third base bag, directly to Natalie. Suella jumped up and started to say “No!” all the while watching her daughter and the speeding baseball headed toward her. Natalie bent over, concentrating on it, getting ready to scoop it up. At the last instant, the baseball hit a fold on the outer track, and took a wild hop askew. Natalie had crouched down with her glove poised, but the diverted ball smacked her hard on her other, unprotected wrist, with a cracking sound like the breaking of a tree branch.
“Oh my god,” Kaitlyn said.
Everyone stood. The players on that side of the field, the umpire, and Suella all ran toward Natalie, who had crumpled to the ground on her knees, flung her baseball glove aside and held onto her wrist. One of the staff members, a stocky, balding guy reached her first. “Where does it hurt, honey?” he asked. Nathan had gone around to her back and held her, while Suella jumped over the rail and landed on the field’s outer track, scrambling to reach Natalie. She wasn’t crying, she realized. Maybe that was a good sign. When Suella reached her though, she discovered cold sweat on Natalie’s brow, dripping down over her white, pasty skin. Her eyes had opened wide and she breathed rapidly. She cried out “No! No! Don’t” every time the medical staff guy touched or examined her wrist.
The man gazed solemnly at Suella. “Ma’am, we’ve got to get her to a hospital. I’m pretty sure her wrist is broken in two places.”
Suella’s heart sank. She felt worse than ever, wondering if they were going to need an ambulance for her, too. The next moment, a hydrogen-powered cart arrived.
It looked the same as the carts saw at regular baseball games, to take injured players away. Suella sat on the cart beside Natalie and Nathan sat on the bench seat, beside the driver as he sped them away, toward the outfield bullpen. Someone opened a door. The cart rolled through the fence and into the bowels of the stadium before it emerged from the other side, where a car waited on the street. “This can’t be happening,” Suella kept on telling herself. “This can’t be happening.”
But it was.
The second car raced them to the largest hospital in the area, where they pushed through the emergency room doors. It was the middle of the week, during early March and Suella almost fainted with relief when she saw only a small handful of people in the waiting room. She eerily realized that for the second time in her life, her father arrived with her at the hospital while wearing his San Diego baseball uniform. He stood in front of the clerk, to give them Natalie’s number and the insurance information. Since the clerk worked out of a glass-encased enclosure in the middle of the waiting room, all of the people sitting could see Nathan. A man sitting against the far wall exclaimed “Did I travel back in time? It’s Methuselah!”
Nathan turned to the man and gave him a small salute. He, Natalie and Suella found seats around the edge across from the man who spoke earlier. “Hey, it looks like they’re going to take you right away,” he said. “Celebrities have clout, let me tell you.”
Two nurses in shimmering teal uniforms took Natalie through the doors into the examination suite, with Nathan and Suella following along.
Natalie whimpered as the nurses helped her onto an examination gurney. “It hurts so much.”
Suella saw a tall blond in scrubs and said “Get my daughter pain meds, now!”
The blonde nodded and left the room with one of her co-workers. Nathan turned to look at Suella with watery, fearful eyes. “We ought to call the center, or Dr. Allende’s office or something.”
“Go ahead.”
They both had the doctor’s office number programmed and Suella felt better about her husband calling, after all of the ways she’d worn out her welcome there over the years. At the same time, the two nurses reappeared. One of them spoke in the proper English that matched her smooth, tea colored skin and glossy black hair. “Mrs. Worthy, the physician requests that we do a blood draw so that we can get your daughter medication for her pain.”
The news hit Suella like a jolt to her abdomen. “Are you sure? She’s in so much pain. Isn’t there something safe you can give her right away?” She indicated Natalie, whose cheekbones glistened with dried tear tracks.
The nurse sighed. “We have to make sure there won’t be a reaction. It won’t take long.”
Nathan patted Suella on her shoulder and spoke to her tenderly. “There’s nothing to worry about, hon. Nowadays, they can tap someone with a wand and get blood. It’s not like it was when we were kids.”
Suella still felt an impending sense of dread as she leaned her head against Nathan’s shoulder.
How could she tell him that she wasn’t worried at all about the physical pain Natalie would endure? She was worried about what they would find.
As Nathan said, the blood draw itself was quick and painless.
It looked like they were just taking Natalie’s temperature. Yet, when the nurse pulled the wand back, Suella could see a vial of blood. When the nurses took the vial of blood away, Nathan resumed calling the doctor’s office. Suella could only sit beside the examination table and hold Natalie’s hand comforting her, when she was the one who needed comforting, during her sense of gray doom.
“How does your wrist feel, baby?” Suella asked.
“Better,” she said. “As long as I don’t move it.”
While they waited, Nathan reached Dr. Allende’s office and at first he seemed to be speaking with the receptionist, giving Natalie’s name. After answering a few more questions about what had happened and giving them more information, he moved his mouth away from the phone to speak with Suella. “They’re getting Dr. Allende.”
That surprised Suella. She’d never gotten service that quickly. Then again, she’d never called the office with a bonafide emergency before. A moment later, Nathan started speaking again, more rapidly now that Dr. Allende had come to the phone. He repeated the same information he’d just given the nurse and told her their location. Her husband then sat silently for several minutes, now and again murmuring “Okay,” or “I see.” Soon after that, their call ended.
“Dr. Allende said something about getting a linkup with this hospital,” Nathan announced, sitting tall and confident, apparently feeling better after having taken some control of the situation.
“She’s going to have to tell them, isn’t she,” Suella said, meaning Natalie’s status as a clone.
“Yeah.” He let out a long, bewildered sigh,
The nurse reappeared, alone this time. “Mr. Worthy, Mrs. Worthy, we have to go over something with you,” she said, a tone of foreboding in her voice.”
Suella’s stomach frosted over again, and her limbs felt leaden.
She continued. “You said that Natalie was not on medications, but we found significant traces of an anti-depressant in her system.”
Suella felt like crying. She turned to her daughter, who was gazing up at the nurse, dumbfounded. Nathan asked “Anti-depressants? How can that be?”
When she tried to speak, to explain herself, her voice croaked at first because her throat was so dry. “I gave them to her myself,” Suella said, her eyes welling up with tears. “I thought they might help her focus more, in school. It won’t be a problem, will it?”
The nurse’s eyes widened, as she took in a deep breath. “As far as Natalie receiving the pain medication, no.”
Suella reached out to touch the nurse’s hand. “Can I make one small request, please? Can we keep the information private?”
The nurse’s hand felt cool and detached, just like her demeanor. “Natalie’s doctor’s office has already called,” she said. “They’re on the phone to Dr. Rastovar now.”
Suella let go of the nurse, and thought she could not feel any worse, but she was wrong. Nathan turned to her and hissed “Anti-depressants? You gave her anti-depressants? What the hell for?”
She knew he wouldn’t accept any sheepish explanation. Over and over to him and Natalie, she said “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Shortly after that, Dr. Rastovar appeared. He was darker than the nurse, with a full head of jet black, glossy hair like hers, although cut in a conservative man’s hairstyle. “Thank you for waiting,” he said in short, clipped tones while he rushed up to tend to Natalie. His voice softened considerably when he addressed her. “How is our star baseball playing lady doing?”
“I think I broke my arm,” Natalie said, weakly.
The doctor frowned as he gently examined the contours of Natalie’s wrist, touching it lightly. Natalie gasped and winced while she tried to hold her wrist still. From his coat pocket, the doctor retrieved a small object that looked like a pocket calculator with a lens attached. Suella leaned over to watch as he placed the lens over Natalie’s injured arm. Through the device, which also shone a bright, focused light onto her skin, she could see the blue nerves and veins along with the red arteries and the white bone. The white, jumbled, jagged bone. Dr. Rastovar lifted the viewer off of Natalie’s arm, flipped it closed with a flick of his wrist and placed it back in his pocket. “We are going to have to operate,” he said, calmly. He reached down to pat a lock of Natalie’s blond hair. “You’ll be fine, miss. We’ll take good care of you. We’re going to put you to sleep, and when you wake up, your arm will be as good as new.”
Nathan took things over from that point. “Now doctor, you have spoken with Natalie’s other physicians, right?”
“Yes.”
“And they told you about her…” Nathan’s face contorted while he searched for the right words for what he was going to say next, “…her status, right?”
“Oh yes.”
“And it won’t pose any unusual problems?”
Dr. Rastovar looked down at Natalie and smiled. “She’s a healthy, beautiful girl. She’ll be fine.”
Young men orderlies soon arrived to transfer Natalie onto a gurney and take her to the surgery suite, a place where neither Suella nor Nathan could follow her. They had to return to the waiting room. Suella felt cold while she sat next to Nathan. All he said was “I can’t believe you gave her anti-depressants. I just can’t believe it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, again. They sat in painful silence for the next several hours.