Once in a Lifetime Read online

  "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 year, and she had sat home and mourned, drinking Bob's pension. But something in Daphne's books had turned things around for her again, as though she understood, as though Daphne herself had known that kind of pain. And she made Elizabeth want to hang in, to keep going, to fight back. She had come back to the hospital again, and in her heart she knew it was because of Daphne. But how could she explain that to him? "She's a wise and wonderful lady. And if I can do anything for her now, I will."

  "She can use it." And then he sighed and picked up another chart, but as he did so he made a mental note to himself to tell his mother the next time he saw her that he had treated Daphne Fields. He knew that, just like Elizabeth Watkins, his mother would be impressed.

  "Dr. Jacobson?" The nurse's voice was soft as he prepared to leave.

  "Yeah?"

  "Will she make it?"

  He hesitated for a moment and then shrugged. "I don't know. It's too soon to tell. The internal injuries and the concussion are still giving us a run for our money. She got quite a blow on the head." And then he moved on. There were other patients who needed his attention. Not just Daphne Fields. He wondered, as he stood waiting for the elevator, just what made up the mystique of someone like her. Was it that she wove a good tale or was it something more? What made people like Nurse Watkins feel as though they really knew her? Was it all illusion, hype? Whatever it was, he hoped they didn't lose her. He didn't like losing any patient, but if an important, newsworthy one died, it was worse. He had enough headaches without that.

  As the elevator door closed behind him Elizabeth Watkins looked down at Daphne's papers again. It was strange, there was no indication of anyone to call in case of emergency. There was nothing in her handbag of any significance at all.... Just then, tucked into a pocket, she found a photograph of a little boy. It was dog-eared and frayed but it looked fairly recent. He was a beautiful little blond child with big blue eyes and a healthy golden tan. He was sitting under a tree, grinning broadly and making a funny sign with his hands. But that was it, other than the driver's license and charge cards, there was nothing else except for a twenty-dollar bill. Her address was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Park and Lexington, a building that the nurse knew would be handsome and well guarded by a doorman, but who was waiting for her at home? It was strange to realize that despite her fascination with this woman's books, she knew nothing about her at all. There wasn't even a phone number for them to call. As Elizabeth mulled it over an irregularity turned up on one of the monitors, and she and one of the other nurses had to check on the man in 514. He had had cardiac arrest the previous morning, and when they reached him, they didn't like the way he looked. They ended up having to spend over an hour with him. And it wasn't until her shift ended at seven in the morning that she stopped to look in on Daphne again. The other nurses had been checking her every fifteen minutes, but there had been no change in the past two hours since she'd come up to the fifth floor.

  "How is she?"

  "No change."

  "Are her vitals steady?"

  "No change since last night." Nurse Watkins glanced at the chart again and then found herself staring at Daphne's face. In spite of the bandages and the pallor there was something haunting about that face. Something that made you want her to open her eyes and look at you so that you could understand more. Elizabeth Watkins stood over her quietly, barely touching her hand, and then slowly Daphne's eyelids began to flutter, and the nurse could feel her heart begin to pound.

  Daphne's eyes opened slowly as in a distant haze she seemed to look around. But she still looked very sleepy and it was obvious that she didn't understand where she was.

  "Jeff?" It was the merest whisper.

  "Everything's all right, Mrs. Fields." Nurse Watkins assumed Daphne Fields was a Mrs. Her voice was gentle and soothing, barely audible, as she spoke near Daphne's ear. It was a practiced voice of comfort. She could have said almost anything in that tone of voice, and it would have brought a sigh of relief, and the knowledge that one was safe with her.

  But Daphne looked frightened and troubled as her eyes struggled to focus on the nurse's face. "My husband ..." She remembered the familiar wail of the sirens from the night before.

  "He's fine, Mrs. Fields. Everything's fine."

  "He went to find ... the baby ... I couldn't ... I don't..." She didn't have the strength to go on then, as Elizabeth slowly stroked her hand.

  "You're all right... you're all right, Mrs. Fields ..." But as she said it she was thinking of Daphne's husband. He must have been frantic by then, wondering what had happened to Daphne. But why had she been alone at midnight on Madison Avenue, on Christmas Eve? She was desperately curious about this woman, about the people who populated her life. Were they like the people she wrote about in her books?

  Daphne fell back into her troubled, drugged sleep then, and Nurse Watkins went to sign out. But she couldn't resist telling the nurse who took over the station. "Do you know who's here?"

  "Let me guess. Santa Claus. Merry Christmas, by the way, Liz."

  "Same to you." Elizabeth Watkins smiled tiredly. It had been a long night. "Daphne Fields." She knew that the other nurse had also read several of her books.

  "For real?" Her colleague looked surprised. "How come?"

  "She was hit by a car last night."

  "Oh, Christ." The morning nurse winced. "How bad?"

  "Take a look at the chart." There was a large red sticker on it, to indicate that she was still critical. "She came up from surgery around four-thirty. She didn't come to until a few minutes ago. I told Jane to put it on the chart." The other nurse nodded and then looked at Liz.

  "What's she like?" And then she felt foolish as she asked it. In the condition Daphne was in, who could possibly tell? "Never mind." She smiled in embarrassment. "I've just always been intrigued by her."

  Liz Watkins admitted her fascination openly. "So have I."

  "Does she have a husband?"

  "Apparently. She asked for him as soon as she woke up."

  "Is he here?" Margaret McGowan, the nurse who had just taken over the station, looked intrigued.

  "Not yet. I don't think anyone knew who to call. There was nothing in her papers. I'll let them know downstairs. He must be worried sick."

  "That'll be a rotten shock for him on Christmas morning." Both women nodded soberly, and Liz Watkins signed out and left. But before leaving the hospital, she stopped at central registration and told them that Daphne Fields had a husband named Jeff.

  "That's not going to help us much."

  "Why not?"

  "Their number's not listed. At least there's nothing under Daphne Fields. We checked last night."

  'Try Jeff Fields." And out of simple curiosity, Liz Watkins decided to hang around for a few minutes to see what they came up with. The girl at the desk dialed information, but there was no listing for a Jeff Fields either. "Maybe Fields is a pen name."

  "That doesn't do much for us."

  "Now what?"

  "We wait. By now her family will be panicked most likely. Eventually they'll call the police and the hospitals. They'll find her. It's not as though she's just any Jane Doe. And we can call her publisher on Monday." The girl at central registration had recognized the name too. She looked at Liz curiously then. "What's she look like?"

  "A patient who's been hit by a car." For an instant Liz looked sad. />
  "Is she going to make it?"

  Liz sighed. "I hope so."

  "Me too. Christ, she's the only writer I can ever read. I'll stop reading If she doesn't make it." The remark was meant to be amusing, but Liz was annoyed as she left central registration. It was as though the woman upstairs wasn't really human, just a name on the front of a book.

  As she walked out into the snow in the winter sunshine, she found herself thinking about the woman behind the name. It was rare that she took patients home with her. But this was Daphne Fields. The woman whom, for more than four years, she liked to think that she knew. And as she reached the Lexington Avenue subway at Seventy-seventh Street, she suddenly stopped and found herself looking downtown. The address on the charge cards was only eight blocks from where she stood. What was to stop her from going to Jeff Fields? He must have been half crazy by now, frantic about the whereabouts of his wife. It certainly wasn't normal procedure, but after all, they were all human. And he had a right to know. If she could tell him now, and save him some of the frantic searching, what was so wrong with that?

  Almost as though her feet were moving without her telling them to, she walked along the salt spread out on the fresh snow, and turned right toward Park when she reached Sixty-ninth Street. A minute later she stood outside the building. It looked exactly as she had suspected it would. It was a large, handsome stone building, with a dark green canopy, and a uniformed doorman standing just inside the door. He opened the door for her with a look of determined inquisition and his only word was "Yes?"

  "Mrs. Fields's apartment?" It was extraordinary, she said to herself as she faced him. For four years she had read her books, and now she was standing in the lobby of her house, as though she knew her.

  "Miss Fields is not in." She noticed then that he had an English accent. It was like something out of a movie, or a dream.

  "I know. I'd like to speak to her husband." The doorman knit his brows.

  "Miss Fields doesn't have a husband." He spoke with the voice of authority and she wanted to ask him if he was sure. Maybe he was new, maybe he didn't know Jeff. Or maybe Jeff was just her lover, but she had said "my husband." For an instant Liz felt confused.

  "Is there someone else at home then?"

  "No." He looked at her cautiously, and she decided to explain.

  "Miss Fields had an accident last night." With a burst of inspiration she flashed open her coat then, revealing the white uniform and stockings, and she indicated the starched cap she always carried in a plastic bag. "I'm a nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital and we couldn't find a notation of next of kin. I thought that maybe ..."

  "Is she all right?" The doorman looked genuinely concerned.

  "We don't know. She's still on the critical list, and I thought that ... Does she live with anyone at all?" But he only shook his head.

  "No one. There's a maid who comes in every day, but not on weekends. And her secretary, Barbara Jarvis, but she won't be back till next week." Barbara had told him that with a smile when she gave him Daphne's Christmas tip.

  "Do you know how I might reach her?" He shook his head again with confusion, and then Liz remembered the photograph of the little boy. "What about her son?"

  The doorman looked at her strangely then, almost as though he thought she was slightly mad. "She has no children, miss." Something defiant and protective came into his eyes, and for a split second Liz wondered if he was lying. And then he looked into Liz's eyes with an air of dignity and distance and said, "She'd a widow, you know." The words hit Liz Watkins almost like a physical blow, and a moment later, with nothing left to be said, she walked back out into the frigid Christmas morning and felt tears sting her eyes, not from the cold, but from her own sense of loss. It was as though she could feel her own husband's death in her bones again, as she had with such intense pain for that whole first year after he had died in the crash. So she had known ... they weren't just stories she dreamed up in her head. She knew. She had been through it too. It made Liz Watkins feel closer to her again as she walked slowly back to the subway, at Sixty-eighth and Lexington Avenue. Daphne was a widow, and she lived alone. And she had no one, except a secretary and a maid. And Liz Watkins found herself thinking that it was a lonely existence for a woman who wrote books so filled with wisdom and compassion and love. Maybe Daphne Fields was as lonely as Liz was herself. It seemed yet another bond between them, as she walked down the stairs into the bowels of the subway beneath the streets of New York.

  Daphne lay drifting in her own private haze as a bright light seemed to pierce through the fog from very far away. If she tried very hard to concentrate on it, it would come closer for a time, and then the fog would envelop her again, almost as though she were sailing away from shore toward a distant place, losing sight of the last, barely visible landmarks, the lighthouse blinking faintly at her in the distance. And yet there was something familiar about the light, the sounds, there was a smell she could almost remember as she lay there. She didn't know where she was, and yet she sensed that she had been there before. There was something strangely familiar about it, and even in its distant, intangible familiarity, she knew that there was something terrifying about the sounds and smells. Something terribly, terribly wrong. And once, as she lay there, dreaming, she let out a small agonized sound as, in her mind, she saw a wall of impenetrable flames. But the nurse on duty came to her side quickly, and administered another shot. A moment later there were no memories, no flames, and there was no pain. She floated out again on a blanket of soft, fluffy clouds, the kind one sees looking out of the windows of airplanes, unreal, immaculate, enormous ... the kind of clouds one wants to dance on and bounce on ... she could hear herself laughing in the distance, and she turned in her dream to see Jeff standing beside her, as he had been so long ago....

  "I'll race you to that dune in the distance, Daffodil." ... Daffodil ... Daffy Duck ... Daffy Queen ... Funny Face ... he had had a thousand nicknames for her, and there was always laughter in his eyes, laughter and something gentler still. Something that was there just for her. The race was as much a lark as all their other youthful endeavors. His endless, well-muscled legs racing her thin, graceful ones, and beside him she looked like a child, dancing in the wind, a summer flower on a hillside somewhere in France ... her big blue eyes in her tanned face, and golden hair flying in the wind.

  "Come on, Jeffrey...." She was laughing at him as she raced beside him in the sand. She was quick, but she was no match for him. And at twenty-two, she looked more like twelve.

  "Yes, you can ... yes, you can!" But before they reached the dune in the distance, he swept her off her feet and spun her into his arms, his mouth crushing hers with the familiar passion that left her breathless each time he touched her, just as though it were the first time, which had happened when she was nineteen. They had met at a Bar Association meeting, which she was covering for the Daily Spectator at Columbia. She was a journalism major, and with overwhelming seriousness and intense devotion, she was doing a series of articles on successful young attorneys. Jeff had spotted her instantly, and somehow managed to get away from his cronies and invite her out to lunch.

  "I don't know ... I ought to ..." Her hair had been wound into a tight figure-eight knot at the base of her neck, a pencil stuck into it, a notebook tightly clasped in her hand, and those huge blue eyes looking up into his with just a hint of laughter. She seemed to be teasing him without saying a word. "Shouldn't you be working too?"

  "We'll both work. You can interview me over lunch." Afterward, months later, she had accused him of being conceited, but he wasn't. He just desperately wanted to spend some time with her. And they had. They had bought a bottle of white wine and a handful of apples and oranges, a loaf of French bread and some cheese. They had gone deep into Central Park and rented a boat, and they had drifted on the lake, talking about his work and her studies, about trips to Europe, and childhood summers spent in southern California and Tennessee and Maine. Her mother had been from Tennessee, and ther
e was something about her that suggested the delicate southern belle, until one listened to her, and realized how powerful and direct she was. It wasn't the kind of style Jeff associated with a southern belle.

  Her father had been from Boston and had died when she was twelve. They had moved back to the South then, and Daphne had hated it, enduring it until she left and came to college in New York. "What does your mother think of that?" He had been interested in everything about her. Whatever she told him, he wanted to know more.

  "She's given up on me, I think." Daphne said it with a small smile of amusement, her eyes lighting up again in just the way that tore at something deep in Jeffrey's soul. There was something so damn alluring about her, at the same time so sexy and so sweet, and then at the very same time so outrageous and gutsy. "She's decided that in spite of her best efforts, I'm a damn Yankee after all. And not only that, I've done something unforgivable, I've got a brain."

  "Your mother doesn't approve of brains?" Jeffrey was amused. He liked her. He liked her one hell of a lot in fact, he decided as he attempted not to stare at the slit in her pale blue linen skirt, and the shapely legs beneath.

  "My mother doesn't approve of the overt use of brains. Southern women are very canny. Maybe wily is a better word. A lot of them are smart as hell, but they don't like to show it. They play.' " She said it with a southern drawl worthy of Scarlett O'Hara, and they both laughed in the summer sun. It had been a beautiful July morning, and the sun was hot on their bare heads at noon. "My mother has a master's in medieval history, but she'd never admit it. 'She's just a lazy southern belle, y'know ...' " The drawl was back again as she smiled at him with those cornflower-blue eyes. "I used to think I wanted to be a lawyer. What's it like?" She looked suddenly very young again as she asked, and with a sigh he leaned back comfortably in the little boat.