Once in a Lifetime Read Free

wasn't out of danger yet. At four thirty in the morning she was taken from surgery to intensive care, and it was there that the night nurse in charge went over her chart in detail and then stood staring down at her quietly, with a look of amazement on her face.
    "What's up, Watkins? You've seen cases like that before." The resident on the floor looked at her cynically, and she turned and whispered with annoyance in her eyes.
    "Do you know who she is?"
    "Yeah. A woman who was hit by a car on Madison Avenue just before midnight... broken pelvis, hairline crack in her femur ..."
    "You know something, Doctor? You aren't going to be worth a damn in this business unless you learn to see more than just that." For seven months she had watched him exercise his craft with precision, and very little humanity. He had the techniques, but no heart.
    "All right." He looked tired as he said it. Getting along with the nurses wasn't always his strong suit, but he had come to understand that it was essential. "So who is she?"
    "Daphne Fields." She said it almost with awe.
    'Terrific. But she still has all the same problems she had before I knew her name."
    "Don't you ever read?"
    "Yeah. Textbooks and medical journals." But with the rapid-fire smart-aleck answer, suddenly a light dawned. His mother read all of her books. For a moment the brash young doctor fell silent. "She's well known, isn't she?"
    "She's probably the most famous female author in this country."
    "It didn't change her luck tonight." He suddenly looked sorry as he glanced down at the small still form beneath white sheets and the oxygen mask. "Hell of a way to spend Christmas." They looked at her together for a long moment and then walked slowly back to the nurse's station, where monitors reported the vital signs of each patient in the brilliantly lit intensive care unit. There was no evidence of day or night there. Everything moved at the same steady pace twenty-four hours a day. At times there were patients who came near hysteria from the constant lights, and the hum of monitors and lifesaving equipment. It was not a peaceful place to be, but most of the patients in intensive care were too sick to notice, or care.
    "Has anyone looked at her papers, to see if there's someone we should call?" The nurse liked to think that for a woman of Daphne's stature there would be a host of people anxious to be at her side, a husband, children, agent, publisher, important friends. Yet she also knew, from articles she had read in the past, how zealously Daphne guarded her privacy. Hardly anyone knew anything about her. "She didn't have anything on her except a driver's license, some cash, some charge cards, and a lipstick."
    "I'll take another look." She took out the large brown manila envelope that was going to go into their safe, and she felt both important and somewhat outrageous as she went through Daphne Fields's things. She had read all of this woman's books, she had fallen in love with the men and women born in Daphne's mind, and for years she had felt as though Daphne herself were her friend. And now she was going through her handbag as though she did so every day. People waited in bookstores on autographing lines for two and three hours just to get a smile and a signature in a book, and here she was rifling through her purse like a common thief.
    "You're impressed by her, aren't you?" The young resident looked intrigued.
    "She's an amazing woman with an extraordinary mind." And then there was something more in her eyes. "She has given a lot of people a great deal of joy. There were times ..." She felt like a fool saying it, especially to him, but she had to. She owed it to this woman who was now so desperately in need of their care. "There were times when she changed my life ... when she gave me hope ... when she made me give a damn again."
    As when Elizabeth Watkins had lost her husband in a plane crash and she had wanted to die herself. She had taken a leave from the hospital for a