Chapter 36

"Where is he?" Eddie demanded as she walked back to the central nurses' station in the surgical ward to find Marguerite after having arrived later than intended at nine-thirty due to another disagreement downstairs over the cause for her slightly elevated temperature. "Jamie… he's not in his room!"

"It's all right, dear," the older woman sought to ease her apparent fears as she looked up from her computer screen. "There was an early opening for the scan downstairs. They took him around seven. I expect he'll be brought back shortly."

"But he wasn't supposed to have that until after lunchtime… he would have called me first," Eddie insisted. "Jamie always makes sure I know if things change like that."

"I'm sure he usually does," Marguerite smiled as she sat back. "It's important though to remember that it's easy for a patient in his condition to forget or lose track of time when they are medicated and their world fails to revolve around a normal schedule. He had a quiet night according to the previous shift, but he was very tired and somewhat disoriented when I woke him. With all of those injuries it's difficult for him to sleep well, dear," she explained.

"Sleep… that's all he does," Eddie insisted sadly as her blue eyes welled up in frustration. "I thought the whole point of all these drugs is to force him to do that."

"The drugs force the body to rest so it can heal, but the mind gets caught up when it's not able to do the same. Unfortunately, sleep quality and quantity are two different things in critically ill patients," the nurse continued. "They tend to stay in the lighter stages of sleep with the sedation and fail to get the required REM… the required rapid eye movement periods our brain needs… when deprived of that they can develop an acute onset of impaired cognitive function, visual hallucinations, delusions, and illusions. Jamie is a bit altered today," she warned. "You should expect that he may display some of these symptoms this week. As I tried to explain to him though, it's something that will lessen and go away as he's able to adjust and get some true regular-patterned sleep. We try very hard here to keep the nighttime disturbances and noise to a minimum, but these episodes of delirium can and will happen."

"Then how can you tell the difference between that and the other complications he could have… that FES thing?" Eddie wondered. "It scares me and it all sounds the same."

"Experience and instincts, dear," Marguerite assured with a sympathetic look towards the obviously worried young wife and expectant mother. "Just like you will know the cause behind your baby's cries without a second look. He's following a normal pattern, although I will admit Jamie has displayed a high sensitivity to everything that has been done to him. Don't be surprised if he has periods of vivid wakeful dreams where he's seeing spiders on the wall for instance, or my personal favorite was a few years ago when a patient was convinced a giant bullfrog named Henrietta was living under his bed. He was a navy diver injured in an underwater blast, and no one in his unit or family thought he would ever recover from that," she patted a small ceramic remembrance of the amphibian that held a special place of honor on her desk. "But he did… and the next week we were laughing about it."

"Great, that's all we need… his grandfather's name is Henry," Eddie revealed as she thought back to the night before and the extended phone conversation she'd had with the Reagan family patriarch where he had managed to settle her to a degree after having ordered the hotel kitchen staff to send up a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich and soup in his absence while they talked. A similar discussion had followed that morning when she had called in only to hear about Kaylin's little meltdown and her cries for her mommy and daddy. "Only in our case it will be turkeys or nuns," she admitted with a wave of the hand while remembering his incident on the street just before Thanksgiving that had left Jamie recently traumatized. "Don't ask unless you remember seeing it on the news a couple of weeks ago."

"The Great NYPD Turkey Roundup… was that your husband?" Marguerite laughed. "Well, see… there you go, now we know what to look forward to. Remember the best thing you can do for him is to keep him quiet and calm so his body can naturally relax and recharge with less sedative interference. If he has periods of this, just go along with them… to him they are real."

"Shouldn't he be back by now though?" Eddie fretted anyway as a glance at the clock showed it to be quarter to ten already. "Dr. Kenzie said the scan would take two hours. That doesn't mean something's wrong, does it?"

"No, but it does seem to be taking longer than usual," the nurse agreed and could see that her advice would be difficult for the tense young woman to take, still she needed to keep trying. "Why don't you go relax in his room and I'll check on where things stand down there," she assured as she reached for the phone.

"Okay, thank you…," Eddie sighed as she wandered across the hall while noting that the other patient who had been brought from surgery the day before was alone but apparently resting comfortably. Frustrated by Jamie's absence, but determined to try to hold things together in front of him and everyone else a bit better today, she forced herself to sit down in the surprisingly comfortable bedside chair and after a few moments of reflection reached for the phone to call home. Given the earlier report from her mother, it wasn't going to be easy to explain to an apparent likewise overwhelmed child that her daddy wasn't available to talk to her once more.

###

"I not 'ungry!" Kaylin grumpily insisted once more as Henry and Eva had failed to coax the little girl into taking more than a bite or two of her breakfast before she went back on a hunger strike although her demands were simple. "I want my Mommy and Daddy!" she insisted in a repeat of the current mantra which had not let up despite a great-grandfather's patient attempts to turn the tide.

"Sweetheart, you need to eat more than that if we're going to make that cake with Nagyanya later," Henry tried bribery even as the three-year-old crossed her arms and stubbornly dug in for the long haul. "Aye yi yi," he sighed. "There's something to that pig-headed gene theory too," he muttered under his breath before the house phone rang and Eva gratefully walked over to pick it up, hoping that another talk with Eddie, or better yet Jamie, would help smooth things over with her granddaughter.

"Hello… hello? Edit, is that you?" she answered, expecting to hear either her daughter or son-in-law's voice over the line. Instead, Henry watched as the older woman's expression went stone-cold flat in an instant after a moment's delay revealed the true identity of the caller and she somehow resisted the urge to slam the phone back down on the receiver. Even at his age, the volume was such that Henry clearly heard the automated message and his eyes also widened as what could only be described as a vortex in the universe threatened to open.

"Ed-it... Jan-ko, you are receiving a collect call from inmate… Arm-in… Jan-ko… from the Federal Correctional Institution at Fairton, New Jersey. Press one to accept these charges and be connected. Press two to decline this call. Press three to permanently block this number from the approved call list. Be advised that all inmate communications may be monitored and recorded for your safety. Press nine to repeat this message."

"Eva…" Henry warned as he watched her shaking finger hover over the third option. "Before this happened the kids were planning on going out there tomorrow for a visit to tell him about the baby..."

"Ed-it... Janko, you are receiving a collect call from inmate…" the loop began again as Eva's face began to flush while her recently quelled temper mounted and threatened to explode in true mommazilla fashion. Despite the years that had passed, she had never forgiven her now ex-husband for his arrest over the ponzi scheme and the monetary indiscretions that had ruined their marriage and left her alone and destitute, nor had she spoken to him since he was led away from their home in handcuffs in front of their very impressionable late teenaged daughter.

"Eva, he's expecting them tomorrow, or he's checking to see if they've cancelled because of the weather," Henry continued to reason as he stepped slowly closer to try to take the phone out of her hand as if he was disarming a skittish perp. "He can't dial out to a cell phone or receive an incoming call in prison… that's why they've kept the landline here. Let me take that and tell him so he knows what's happened. Eddie wouldn't want him to worry..."

"WORRY?!" Eva snapped on that word and her eyes flashed as she snatched the handset away. "Let me assure you that ARMIN JANKO has never for a day worried about what he did to US!" she declared as he backed away at her obvious determination to handle this herself even as her mind waffled back and forth on what to do.

"Press nine to repeat this message..."

Another click to buy time.

"Eva… you've come so far with Eddie, don't ruin that now. It was a long journey, but with Jamie's help she's been able to forgive her father and move on," Henry pleaded one last time to mitigate the circumstances and calm her down before she did something regrettable. "She can't deal with all that's happened this week and something else on top of it too. You have to try to do the same… she needs her family, all of it. Every one of us matters… especially now..."

"And you'll have to excuse me, Henry Reagan," the older Janko woman replied coldly before taking a determined stride away from her innocent unoka and towards the steps to go upstairs to the relative privacy afforded there. "This is a family matter… a private Janko family matter," she reiterated before closing the bedroom door behind her.

A controlled press of option number one followed.

###

"Busy," Eddie muttered as she hung up the phone, unaware that her parents were having a reunion of sorts on the line at that very moment, especially when a call to Eva's cell number also went unanswered. "Terrific, and now my mother is apparently missing too," she griped and stood up to go to the window and watch as the heavy flakes were blanketing the campus just as fast as the crews could come through and plow the various drives and parking lots. It had been a very good call on Frank's part to have her stay here last night as given the conditions outside she would have never made it in from Bay Ridge otherwise, but there was a little girl stranded there now that obviously needed parental attention too.

"I screwed up again, munchie," she admitted after walking back over to the chair to sit down as she pulled on her tightening waistband and placed her hands over her tummy. "First off, I should have packed more comfortable fat clothes because now even my favorite pants don't fit," she lamented. "But I also should have let Pop Pop stay here and brought Kaylin so I could be with her at night… I don't feel like I'm thinking straight about what's best for her, or making things better for anyone… and now I'm not paying enough attention to you either," she added as she leaned back and rubbed her belly. "It hasn't even been a week since we found out about what might be going on… and it's only two weeks before we… I mean I... well, you and me… have to go back to Dr. Geisner to have her take another look at you. How am I going to do that by myself? Your Daddy is never going to be able to come with me, and he'll be so upset about missing it," she sighed sadly. "You have to be okay, you know… Please, baby, I just really need for you to do that for me… Daddy… he needs all of us right now," she trailed off. "Although it would be nice if I knew where he was," she frowned after getting up again to glance out in the hall and finding Marguerite's desk tellingly empty. It was now nearly ten o'clock and more than an hour over the expected time when he should have returned.

"What is going on here?!" Eddie demanded as she paced the corridor; her nervous acquired sixth sense air of something's-gotta-be-wrong catching the attention of the other patient who was on the ward, awake but observing quietly for now against his nurse's predictions.

"Where is my husband?!"

###

"Edit Katalin, moja ljubav... my sweetie, you took so long to answer, I didn't think you were at home… but where else in this weather would you be?" Armin Janko chided as he sat in one of the phone cubicles in his orange jumpsuit and shifted back in his chair. His relief was short-lived, however, and his blood ran cold before he nearly dropped the receiver as a voice he never prepared himself to hear again cut over the line.

"Zdravo… hello, Armin," his ex-wife's icy greeting knifed into his ear, spilling over with contempt.

"Eva..." was all the stunned man could manage at first as his mind whirled. "Prokletstvo," he cursed under his breath although he knew she had heard him. "What are you doing there? Gde je moja ćerka… where is my daughter?!" he demanded as the first thought that crossed his mind was filled with fear that something must have happened to her… that profession, a police officer… why else would her mother be in New York City instead of her usual lair of Rochester? "Šta radiš tamo… what are you doing there? Answer me!" he demanded again.

"Tvoja ćerka… your daughter?! Where is she?!" Eva snapped back as she matched him in his native Serbian. "Ja ću vam reći gde je… I will tell you where she is! Edit is with her husband at a hospital. Jamison was struck by a car three days ago in Washington and is hurt badly; his leg is broken in many places. She had to go there before his family brought him back to the city by helicopter for care, and now he cannot come home until he has more surgeries. I am here because she needs me to be. Gde si… where are you?! Oh, zaboravio sam… I forgot, you are still in a prison where you cannot help her! Ostavi je! Ona nema mesta za vaše probleme sada!... Leave her be! She doesn't have room for your problems right now! She has too many!"

"Šta? Šta drugo nije u redu… what? What else is wrong?" Armin demanded as he sparred with her over their daughter, just as they had done for many years.

"Ona je tek u drugom stanju, beba nije u redu, a sada njen muž. Ona ne treba da se meša… she is only just pregnant, the baby is not right, and now her husband. She does not need you to interfere!" Eva revealed to him and announced the presence of their first blooded grandchild.

"Moja beba, ona je trudna? Već, oni su samo u braku! Kada?... my baby, she is with child? Already, they are just married! When?"

"Sa medenog meseca ... ona je da ima bebu u junu, ali ne brinite vi nećete biti tu za nju tada ni!.… from their honeymoon... she is to have the baby in June, but do not worry you will not be there for her then either!"

"I am what I can be for her now!" Armin snapped. "You are the one living in the past! Now what is wrong with the beba?"

"One of the bubrezi… the kidneys is too big," she explained. "The doctor must watch for now. Perhaps it will be fine… they do not know yet. If it is not, Edit… she will not be well. She does not handle things like this since you betrayed us."

"Eva," Armin sighed. "Neka se završi… let it end… it is over. I am sorry for the things that you cannot forgive, but Edit is not only your daughter, she is mine too. Her heart is more open than yours," he declared.

"And now when it is broken, and she needs her mother and father…"

"I will always be her father, and when I am able I will be there. What's in the past is done and I regret it, but please, for her… Eva, we must be finished with this between us… Promise to tell her I am sorry for the beba and for what happened to Jamie; he is a good husband for my devojčica and father of my unuci. Now, when will she be home?" he asked. "I will call again to speak to her instead."

"I do not know," Eva answered truthfully, her initial anger subsiding slightly as she finally had the opportunity to express it, but now allowed her concern for Eddie and Jamie to calm her ire and override the bitterness she held so long for her ex-husband. "Jamison is at Columbia… not many can visit now, they are very strict. He will have more surgery Monday and Thursday… it is very bad though, he cannot walk for now and Edit has not left his side except for when they require it."

"Will he recover?" Armin asked, concerned that his daughter would now be the primary caregiver for three instead of one and now soon to be two children. "She cannot do this alone. I will not allow that, not even from here… no matter what you intend."

"To ne može da se još uvek ne zna... that cannot be known yet," Eva admitted. "But she will not be without her cela porodica… her whole family no matter. The Reagans will insist she is one of them and they can handle these things, but she is mine and I am staying here and moving back to the city for her. It is over now, Armin… what this was between us. I will put it away and promise her that."

###

"Where is my husband?!" Eddie repeated once again even as the sound of the elevator ding when it arrived on the floor saw her hurrying down the hall towards the opening doors. Relief washed over her as she turned the corner to find Jamie being wheeled out of the car although that soon faded as she noticed Dr. Kenzie and Marguerite exiting behind in attendance while pointing to something on his chart and discussing whatever it was in earnest, hushed tones.

"Is he okay?" she demanded and quickly noted that his eyes, while open, did not focus on her as he passed, but rather stared straight ahead. "Jamie! What happened? Why was he gone so long?"

"Mrs. Reagan," Kenzie acknowledged as she looked up. "We were just going over his medication history. The tech had difficulty with the scan which is why the procedure took so long."

"What kind of difficulty?" Eddie demanded. "What was wrong with his medicine? Why is he like this?"

"Nothing that we can see. Initially when he arrived in the lab, he had some jerky muscle movements for the first half hour or more which required her to wait and restart several times. These measurements on the uninjured left side are used to print the matrix which will be placed in his right femur, and must be precise so that his bone will heal at the same length. Something is off though. Marguerite called me down there after she checked on him because she feels those twitches and this dissociative state he appears to be in… what we describe as the patient looking as if "the lights are on, but no-one's home" is not his normal reaction to the level of patient-controlled analgesia he is prescribed so we are looking at every other possible cause including an overdose due to an equipment failure of the infusion unit or the incorrect agent being administered. So far though all of it has checked out normally though. We've changed everything as a precaution and I'll send it to the lab for testing."

"You think he was drugged with the wrong stuff or had too much of it? How could you let that happen?!"

"It did not… not on my watch," Marguerite insisted vehemently. "Every vial, every bag is barcoded and scanned before it is administered and his current drip was started by the night shift nurse before she left. He had no such reaction when I sent him downstairs and nothing else was supposed to have been added since then."

"But I thought you said that he could have states like that today, right?" Eddie asked as she looked towards the nurse before hurrying her step into Jamie's room. "This isn't that?"

"Experience and instincts, dear," Marguerite reminded as she followed close behind. "I know my patients, and this is definitely not that."

Did anyone expect Eva and Armin to go head-to-head like that, even over the relative safety of the phone? Poor Eddie, wait until she hears about that one, but first she will have to deal with a husband who is convinced that not only did his dead brother run him over in the Chevelle, but now he's been targeted by someone from the past. And Jamie, they're asking for the truth about what he saw, and he's giving to them, but no one will believe him and very soon he will use that to begin to doubt himself too.

Next up, Danny explains a few things to the boys before being unwittingly drawn further into Malevsky's intended trap while Eddie manages finally to pull herself together enough to bring some much-needed comfort to her husband.

For anyone who doesn't know the whole story behind the "Great NYPD Turkey Roundup," mentioned at the start of this chapter you can read the two-shot "No Good Deed…" in the Snapshots II collection in my profile.