Chapter Three - USFMC

Mt. Zion Children's Hospital

How they made it to the hospital in anything other than an ambulance was purely a miracle in Adrian's mind. Sharona's haphazard driving already caused him anxiety of the highest order, so this version of her driving, somewhat like the erratic, frantic prowling of a distressed mother lioness trying to reach her cub, nearly drove him to close his eyes and pray – something he hadn't managed to do since he lost Trudy. Instead, he closed his eyes and hoped for the best on the short ride from the place they had stopped to the hospital. He'd offered to drive, the offer was met with a resounding "NO!" and he had felt a moment of relief until the car started moving again. When they arrived, Sharona threw the car into the nearest empty space in her line of vision, slapped the "SFPD On Duty" sign that Stottlemeyer had recently given her in the windshield, and broke into a dead run as soon as she locked the doors. Leaving the car crookedly in the loading zone ratcheted up Adrian's anxiety to the point where he nearly opened the top button of his starched, windowpane-check shirt, but he refrained. When he turned to point out the sloppy parking situation, Sharona was gone.

He quickly moved to follow her, still fretting about the car until he confronted the face of the hospital and its entrance. The sliding doors gave him a moment of terror until he saw an old fashioned door beside them that said "pull" on its handle. He grabbed the grip with his handkerchief-covered hand and hurried inside. He caught up with Sharona as she was being led through another doorway into the rear section of the emergency room. He followed silently, negotiating his way over mysterious stains on the tile floor and desperately trying not to make eye contact with the various bodily fluids spilling from people in the rooms and halls of the emergency room's wards; he closed his ears to the moans and other sounds as he tried not to add visuals to the audio in his mind.

When they finally found Benjy, Sharona, a nurse, a woman Monk thought of as unbreakable – did the unthinkable – she nearly fainted. Ever attuned to the world around him, when she swayed, it was Adrian who steadied her. He stood directly behind her like a shadow, holding her up - his chest against her back. It was the most intimate contact he'd had with a woman in more years than he could comfortably count, but he didn't stop to look at the feelings the contact aroused, because the sight in front of him made that train of thought ditch its track. Bruised and bloodied, Benjy looked very small in the large bed. He was attached to various machines and wires each measuring, helping, and calculating. The most ominous of the machines seemed to be doing his breathing for him. A memory of the apparatus flashed fleetingly in Adrian's mind and he shuddered involuntarily – recalling the anguish of watching someone dying while a machine did her… he shook his head to clear it of the past…their breathing. Stottlemeyer and Disher approached from the nurses' station with Benjy's sitter, Marjorie. The girl was visibly distraught and shaken with fear and remorse.
The doctor pulled Sharona closer to Benjy and filled her in and Marjorie followed like a teenage shadow. Adrian couldn't hear the words, but he watched as the remaining color in Sharona's cheeks drained away. Marjorie stood beside Sharona, hand on her arm, to steady her, with eyes red from crying, she was softly repeating her apology over and over without thinking – somewhat like a mantra.

"Monk," said Stottlemeyer, "I need you on this."

Adrian held up a hand sending a "just a moment" type signal and watched Sharona approach him.

"Adrian," Sharona began in a hesitant tone, "Benjy isn't breathing on his own. His lungs are incapable of helping him breathe without that machine," she gestured over at the contraption that starred in many of Adrian's worst nightmares. "They've put him in a drug-induced state of unconsciousness so he doesn't try to fight the machine. He is bleeding internally, and they have to stabilize him before they can do surgery. He has a few broken ribs; one arm and one leg are broken. His liver has damage, one lung is collapsed and one of his kidneys is...is…perforated." She bit her lip to try and stem the tide of tears she felt gathering behind her eyes. "God, he was awake…awake! He must have been in shock and terrible pain when they brought him in for them to do this to him." She looked up at him through the tears that had broken free against her will and Adrian cringed inwardly at the thought of the suffering that Benjy might have had to deal with while he was conscious, and his stomach lurched when he faced the distress Sharona was feeling too. "He also has a linear nondisplaced fracture of his skull. They're not sure about… b-brain… d-damage yet." More tears coursed silently down her cheek.

It was all Adrian could do to listen to the litany and not want to scream. Instead, he said calmly, "Wasn't he wearing his helmet?"

"They found it near him, so I guess it fell off of his head."

"Maybe he didn't close the clasp." Adrian frowned, remembering admonishing Benjy about that very habit the previous week. "I've seen him do that."

"I know, I always remind him…" she trailed off, and sobbed again.

"He's a strong boy, Sharona… he's in good shape, and he's healthy. He's in caring hands here… he'll be okay, he'll be okay." He touched her shoulder gently, trying to let her know that he was upset and wanted to help. What he really wanted was to hold her, and, he noted with surprise, to be the one completely in charge - completely strong, competent and appropriate. But there were spectators, and he could barely touch her when they were alone for fear of making a fool of himself, he certainly wasn't going to chance it with the doctor, Marjorie, Leland and Disher standing right there.

To break the awkward silence that had descended as the assemblage watched Monk and Sharona try to reach out to each other, Stottlemeyer said, "Listen to Monk, Sharona. He's right. I'm going to call Karen and have her come here to stay with you. Can we call Gail? Your mom?"

"No…no, I want …I want," she stuttered and looked beseechingly up through her wet lashes at Adrian, wanting him, knowing he wouldn't – no, couldn't - stay. Not knowing that he was torn in two. "… I want to stay here. Alone. Alone with Benjy. I'll be okay. Really." No one believed her, but no one was going to voice their disbelief or concern. To many of them, this was the first time Sharona seemed fragile and no one wanted to shatter her by arguing with her. They submitted to her wishes and one by one they drifted away from Sharona and Adrian as they stared deeply into each other's eyes. Both aching and reaching for something that they were afraid wasn't really there. Stottlemeyer wondered when the hell they'd wake up and do more than just struggle with their feelings and act on them. Maybe now just wasn't the time, although if ever there was a time they needed each other… he shook his head sadly and turned towards the door with a shrug.

Adrian was afraid to leave Sharona in case Benjy took a turn for the worse, but Disher and Stottlemeyer wanted him at the scene of the accident. He shifted his weight back and forth on the balls of his feet and felt his responsibilities heavily for the first time in a long time.

He looked into Sharona's eyes and felt her agony, her guilt and his own. He watched her take on the responsibility for this the way she always took responsibility for everything in all of their lives. It was as if she was donning a piece of heavy clothing. She could have been the poster-child for social responsibility; between him, the consulting work, and Benjy it was like two or three full-time jobs. He'd recently realized, though, that Sharona, her son and the work were responsibilities he also carried – and when he realized it, he'd felt good about it. Only, it wasn't anything he'd done alone. Day-to-day, month-by-month, she'd made it easy for him, she made it seem as though he wasn't responsible for anything, while all the time she'd been making it so painless for him to become accountable again. Working with him in small ways towards owning his responsibilities, she'd re-taught him that responsibility wasn't a burden to be feared, nor was it as overwhelming as he might have thought it was six years earlier. It was still a struggle; the burden of decision making wasn't a task he'd learned to accept quite yet. He looked from Stottlemeyer's retreating form to Sharona's tear-streaked face to Benjy- helpless and still and back to Sharona; looking for a decision that he couldn't make alone. Hell, he couldn't decide what to eat for lunch…how would he decide to leave or not?

Finally, Sharona, seeing through her own pain and into his, said in a whisper, "Go. Go find out… for Benjy… there's nothing you can do here." She turned from him as his heart cried out silently, But what about you? I don't want to leave you. Then, What about me? His brain thought petulantly, I can't work without you, I need you. And even as he thought it, he saw the irrational fears of his being alone being just that – irrational. More than irrational – selfish and wrong-headed. He gathered himself and readjusted his jacket. I may need you, Sharona, but right now you need me more. I'm going to do this for you. With a last look of reassurance to Sharona, he nodded at Stottlemeyer and Disher and followed them out the door.

Several frustrating and pointless hours later, Adrian returned to the hospital and found that Benjy had been moved from the ER to ICU. Adrian looked across Benjy's bed at his dozing mother. Sharona was curled up in what looked like a terribly uncomfortable position. Her head was propped at an awkward angle and her legs were tucked underneath her small frame. Through the window, one of few windows he'd ever seen in an ICU, the backdrop of the dark sky and the city lights formed a halo around her golden curls.

Adrian looked back to the boy in the bed. Except for the bruises that were various shades of the rainbow, Benjy's pale face blended into the sheets. The pallor of the perpetually tan and smiling face that Adrian had unknowingly loved almost as long as he'd known the boy was quite nearly as frightening as the assortment of machines and tubes that were attached to Benjy in different places. He looked up from Benjy's face to find Sharona blinking the sleep from her eyes. It took a moment, but the anguish and the pain came back to her in a sudden rush and Adrian could see the despair deepen her frown. But, in what he had come to think of as typical "Sharona-style," she visibly steeled herself and silently stood up. Quickly, she stretched with feline grace, kissed her son's scraped and purplish cheek, and absently patted Adrian on the shoulder as she headed straight for the chart on the foot of Benjy's hospital bed. She consulted her watch to see how often he was being monitored and, Adrian intuitively knew, for how long she'd slept.

As he watched her read, her delicately arched eyebrows drew together, and the fine lines that appeared every so often above the bridge of her nose deepened. He had the urge to reach out and smooth the shallow furrows with the tip of his finger or to press his lips to the spot. The thought came unexpectedly from somewhere deep inside of him – he was so shocked that, involuntarily, he stepped back from her. As footsteps approached, she hurriedly put the chart back in its place… family members were not supposed to look at the medical charts of patients, nurse or not. Sharona was an RN and had the experience it took to understand what she was seeing although she hadn't done hospital work in a while. Nursing, she'd once told him, registered or practical, was like that – you learned a lot of what you knew by living through things with the people and the families of people for whom you cared rather than in books. He watched every movement she made, studying her, hoping she could feel his unvoiced concern and caring. She looked back over her shoulder at Adrian and shrugged hopelessly.

"No change." He frowned and nodded in response to her words. The lines around his mouth deepened with the frown. Adrian didn't want to tell her that he hadn't needed a chart to tell him that.

When Benjy's nurse walked in, Sharona pulled Adrian outside the ICU and down on the padded bench on the other side of the glass-walled room and said, "Tell me what you found out."

"Not much, but I asked Stottlemeyer and Disher to have the eyewitness meet back tomorrow at the same time the … the accident happened. I want to place them, see the situation in...uh...well, in situ…" he trailed off lamely. He couldn't tell her about the stains on the sidewalk… made by Benjy's blood.

"Were there many witnesses?" she asked. She knew their neighbor, Mr. Jacobs had been a witness, but he'd been a couple of blocks away… it was he who'd identified Benjy for the authorities when the ambulance arrived.

"Yeah...yeah. But that means… you know… a lot of points of view."

She nodded; she hadn't worked with him for this long and not understood that too many witnesses could often be as bad for solving a crime as too few. "I know, but you'll try, right?" she asked in a timid and unsure tone he'd never heard from her before. Adrian knew this woman like he'd never known another, including Trudy, but he never acknowledged, even to himself, that she could possibly be fragile or less than perfectly strong. It terrified him deeply to realize that underneath it all, Sharona was as vulnerable as he, she just hid it better most of the time. This wasn't one of those times.

"Of course I will…of course." He raised his hand as if to touch her, but slid backward on the bench instead. She smiled over at him the way a disappointed teacher would look at an exceptionally gifted but underachieving student. She stood, turned on her heel, and went back to her post at Benjy's bedside. Adrian settled in, crossed his arms over his chest, and took up residence on the bench just outside the transparent walls of the ICU.