Part 58 NC-17
"So far pregnancy does not slow you down much, does it?" Zander asked Brenda.
"I don't expect it to slow me down much, period." she said.
She was slick and smooth as silk. He entered her slowly.
"That feels good," she groaned. "Ahhh," she said, thrusting her hips forward.
He put his hands on her hips, not needing to draw them forward. He pushed into her, feeling thrilled at being so deep inside. Her hands went lazily down his chest. Then she lost it, didn't do anything deliberately, and was just yelling.
It charged him up to be able to make her so happy. She shuddered, came, and he held her close.
She kissed him on the chest, and then ran her fingers over it.
"I really feel like I should be more careful with you," he said.
"That's really sweet."
He could feel her relax, and she soon fell asleep. "That's right, get plenty of sleep," he said, stroking her hair.
"That was his wife's name," Anna said to Jackson. Their offices were on the same hallway in the municipal building. "Dr. Lewis' wife."
She went back down the hall to her office and found the file.
"That's the name he gave me," she told Montgomery. "Donna. Here's the son; the young man I talked to." She looked at the photograph again. He was a nice looking young man. He looked familiar in an odd way. She tried to remember him from her talk with him.
"Jack come here," she said, after she had been looking at the photo for a little while. "Look at this."
Jackson came and looked.
"Who does he remind you of?" Anna asked.
"Another son of Vanessa's?" Jackson guessed.
"This one is rather young for that. But it must be."
Anna went to the hospital to interview someone on a case. When it was over, she decided to go right back to her office.
But she was right there at the hospital. She stopped and considered for a moment.
No, there was probably no police case. Cameron Lewis had only succeeded in wasting her time.
But she had brought the file with her, with Alexander Lewis' picture, in case.
Well, there could be something there. Maybe there was a key to Vanessa's activities in this mystery.
Expert at tracking down David in the hospital, she found the right floor. When he came out of a patient's room, she was ready.
"All right, David, who is this?" she said, pulling out the photo and showing it to him.
"You talked to him. You know his name."
"But who is he?"
"Call my lawyer."
"David, tell me who he is and I can close this case. This is another son of Vanessa's, isn't it?"
"Try a DNA test."
"Just tell me. Now where are you going?"
"I'm going to the airport."
"So he's not a patient. Not your patient, anyway. But he has something to do with Vanessa. Don't kid yourself, David. I'm going to find out. And then you will need a lawyer."
Monica and David were in the elevator going to the Cardiac Care Unit at Port Charles General Hospital.
"Then with the double lumen tube and 2 ventilators to ventilate each lung separately - timing is a problem," Monica was saying.
"It takes a lot of effort, but it can be done. Before labeling it as unilateral ARDS you may want to do a TEE to see if there is pulmonary vein thrombosis."
"What will it show?"
"You'd expect to find copious fluid in the tracheobronchial tree."
"This is the second day after the surgery, and he still requires 100 FiO2," Monica said in frustration as they walked onto the floor. "And he can't tolerate being placed supine without saturations dropping to 75 or less."
They went to the patient in question. Monica looked at him in frustration, David examined him and the chart. "It looks like injury to the pneumocytes was the primary lesion," he said, after a minute. "Do you agree?"
"I hadn't thought of that," she said. "Let me see. Maybe. You have something there. So this means that surfactant production was altered."
"Try inhaled surfactant."
"Like what we use for children?"
"The case is desperate enough it's worth a try."
"OK," she said, doubtfully, but not coming up with anything better.
"Let's do aerosolized surfactant 8 cc into the endotracheal tube," she told the nurse, "starting at midnight and at 6 hour intervals."
David and Zander were sitting at a table at Kelly's. David was looking at Zander's chemistry book.
"The gas pressure in an aerosol can is 1.5 atm at 25 degrees C. If the can were heated to 450 degrees, what would be the pressure?" Zander read. He wrote on a piece of loose leaf. "So 1.5 over 25 is as the answer is to 450."
"Switch to K."
"Oh, I forgot that. Why is there more than one scale? We only need one."
"To mess with your mind."
"Professors must sit around trying to invent ways to do that. OK, so" he wrote figures down. "How do you do that? Oh, yeah. So 25 would be 298 degrees K and 450 is 723 degrees K. So according to the ideal gas law, or the combined gas law, or which is it?"
David gave the book back to Zander.
"OK," Zander put numbers in a calculator. "723 divided by 298 times 1.5. That works out to 3.6 atm."
"Now you see why it says on aerosol cans not to incinerate them."
"To tell you the truth, I don't. I'll think about it."
"OK. Think about it."
"I'm glad Dr. Quartermaine had that case, since it brought you here."
"Yes, I came over here just out of interest in that case. It had nothing to do with the fact you live here."
Zander smiled. "Mom doesn't think Vanessa's crazy."
"That's crazy."
"You and she don't agree."
"It's OK. Humor me in this - promise me, for the time being anyway, you'll never talk to Vanessa unless I'm there too. I know you can handle it without me. It's just a whim of mine that I want to be a witness to everything she does."
"That's part of why Mom thought there's really nothing that can happen. You're between me and Vanessa. Do you call her that to her face or just talking about her? Did you ever call her Mom or a variation of that?"
"I called her Mom until maybe the past few hears when Leo and I got in the habit of calling her Vanessa. For some reason, it helps us deal with her. Our issues. Our Vanessa-related issues."
"I guess I'd have called her Vanessa too."
"You'd have definitely picked up that habit."
"It's funny she is - whatever she is - yet she seemed to criticize you for being married many times and you and Anna for being career minded and not having children!"
"Where'd you get that?"
"She told Mom. Not in so many words, but that's the gist of it. Thank you for caring what Mom thought. It means something to me. Dad wouldn't have. I mean, I don't mean to keep comparing you to Dad, I just do, but what I mean is -"
"I've heard Donna say that, too," David said, to let him out of whatever he was apologizing for.
"It's one of Dad's things I don't want to repeat," Zander went on. "I try to listen to Carly. Which amazes me. A year ago I never would have believed I was going to really respect her opinion."
"Brenda, too."
"That's easy. She's so happy. It's the best feeling. I don't even care that I'll have two children before I graduate. I don't even care what Dad says."
"You know where he's coming from, but you are somewhere else. You put a value on some things that he does not."
"Yeah. He'll just say Pete is in college with no kids. Pete'll never have kids until he's already graduated, married. Like Dad did. Everything right."
"While you just like that Brenda's happy. It's OK. You know, I'm glad Donna spent so many hours of her valuable time doing something for you that did nothing at all for Pete. I'm so jazzed about this, that I may even listen to her opinion of Vanessa."
"Vanessa can know. I don't care who knows now. I really don't, so long as you don't. Anna, too."
"Anna has made a giant leap forward."
"How's that?"
"Cam gave her a picture of you. She showed it to me. She had taken a good look at it. Now she knows it's not a medical case. She now knows you're yet another son of Vanessa."
Zander laughed. "You like to play with Anna's mind, don't you, David?"
David walked down by the docks to get to the hotel. It seemed that in this town you could find your way anywhere from the docks.
Donna was standing there, looking out at the water. She smiled when she saw him.
"Did you see Alexander?" she asked.
"Yes."
"What did you do? I mean - well, you don't have to tell me."
"It amounted to helping him with his homework."
Her eyes lit up, radiant. "Thank you."
"Stop thanking me."
"It's so much to ask - for you to love him. I can't help it."
"It's not much to ask. It comes naturally."
"I'm sorry," she said, feeling responsible again that he and Zander hadn't known each other until Zander was a grown man.
"Stop apologizing!"
"OK. If I can tell you something."
"Anything for that!"
"There's this way your eyes light up when you talk about him. I love that. I saw it when he came in my room that night he came up after he talked to Cam down in the bar. I've never experienced anything like that."
"Me neither."
"I'm happy you can feel something for him even though I cut you off all those years."
"You're dangerously close to apologizing."
"OK, I won't do it again. It's just that Cam didn't get it. Not like that."
"He's not in town, is he?"
"I don't think so. I don't know. But I can tell."
He laughed. "Why, is the atmosphere clearer?"
She laughed too. "Yes, it's less heavy."
"Enjoy it while you can."