Runaway Heart

SIX

Susan watched through the window in the cardio unit as her father was placed on the bed next to the defib machine. The nurses removed his shirt and had him lie back on the table, then smeared gel on his furry chest. Herman looked up and saw her worried expression through the glass. He stuck his tongue out at her. She couldn't help herself-she laughed. Then she put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers back at him. She was scared out of her mind, but as she'd predicted when she suggested the more intrusive operations to him twenty minutes ago, he had just listened with a sad expression and shook his head no.

Now Dr. Lance Shiller and two nurses manned an electro-shock machine. They hooked Herman to a negative ground and placed a rubber plug between his teeth to prevent him from biting his tongue. Dr. Shiller picked up the defib paddles, put them against Herman's chest, and let him have it.

Susan jumped; she actually cried out when her father arched his back under the current. Then she leaned forward, trying desperately to read the faces of the people in the room. Did it work? She couldn't tell.

They did it three more times and Susan thought she was going to faint. Tears of relief came to her eyes when Dr. Shiller turned and gave her the thumbs up. A few minutes later he left the room, joining her outside where she was still glued with her nose to the window.

"Okay. He's converted," Dr. Shiller said.

Susan nodded and smiled, but she couldn't speak. Her eyes were still on her father, who was being disconnected from the negative ground and getting the goop cleaned off his hairy chest.

"We'll keep him here overnight on an EKG monitor to make sure he's all settled down. Then you two can go roll the bones with his life, if that's still your plan. Go fight your damn lawsuit, Miss Strockmire, but this is, in my opinion, an extremely high-risk idea. So you keep your eye on him. Here's my pager number. If he goes into an arrhythmia I want to know immediately."

She took his card. "Thank you, Doctor." She said, finally looking away from her dad and fixing her reef-water blues on Dr. Shiller, seeing anger flash in his dark browns. "Don't be mad at him; he's only trying to do what he thinks is right."

"So am I," the young heart surgeon said.

Susan brought Herman a tuna sandwich on a tray from the cafeteria. The cardio unit food was bland, vitamin-enhanced pabulum. While she went over the pretrial briefs and motions Herman revised his opening statement, eating and scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. He had a nine o'clock appointment to prep the last of his three butterfly experts.

Dr. Deborah DeVere was a world-renowned entomologist Herman had flown in from the University of Texas. He was going to put her on the stand first, to explain the monarch butterfly's eating and migration pattern. He had another doctor and a university professor on retainer to describe the deadly effects of bio-corn on the monarch's genetic structure and reproduction. Dr. DeVere, whom he hadn't actually met but had briefed over the phone, was scheduled to arrive in about twenty minutes.

Herman continued scribbling on his yellow pad, scratching out phrases, reconstructing ideas and arguments, while Susan worked on her laptop retyping the new version and printing it out on her portable printer. She glanced at the heart monitor beeping ominously from his bedside table.

"Stop looking at that thing, it's not going to go off. It is in my control," Herman said, switching to his spooky Outer Limits voice: "We control the horizontal. We control the vertical."

She reached out and took the hand that was still finger-clipped with several electrical feeds. She squeezed it carefully. "I still don't see why you won't just ask for a continuance."

"Honey," he said, "you know we don't have a choice here. You know we have to go now. This is really important. If I ask for a continuance with the federal docket so congested we'll never get back in front of a judge before the monarch migration."

"I know, Daddy. It's just…" She wanted to say how frustrated he made her sometimes, how her own heart was aching right along with his, and how desperately she needed him to be alive and there for her. "It's just-I don't want to lose you." He turned, pulled his half glasses off his nose, and looked at her.

"Understandable. Why would anybody want to lose something as beautiful as this?" he spread his hands out to include his fat, hairy body. "I'm just too big and sexy to lose."

"You know what I mean, dummy." She smiled at him.

"Honey, I'll make you a promise, okay?"

"Yeah, sure," she said, knowing what was coming because he'd made this "I'll take care of myself promise a hundred times before, and it was always just to shut her up.

"I'll tell you what… if I start to feel even slightly wrong I'll get the continuance and I'll check back in here quick as a bunny."

"You mean, like you did this morning, when you had a pulse rate of a hundred and eighty while you were trying to hold onto our three wussy clients instead of getting your big, sexy ass over here?"

"Well, maybe this morning was bad judgment on my part… pretty foolish, okay? I'm admitting that. I'll cop to it, but from now on I'm gonna be a good patient, okay? Gonna win the Patient-of-the-Year Award."

"Okay." She squeezed his hand again and sighed. There was a light knock on the door, and a surprisingly attractive forty-eight-year-old woman with salt-and-pepper hair stuck her head in.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Doctor Deborah DeVere." Her anxious eyes immediately taking in all of the bedside equipment beeping and flashing like a NASA launch computer.

"Come in, Doctor. Pull up a chair. Can we get you a bypass, a heart transplant, or a manicure?" Herman said, smiling at her. She smiled back and Herman liked her on sight. Over the phone she had sounded knowledgeable and angry at the government's callous disregard for the monarch. Now, looking at her, he was sure she was his kind of witness: a doctor who worked hard to save threatened life-forms, did cutting-edge research science, and had a pretty fine ass on her to boot.

She strode into the room displaying runner's legs. Susan rose to shake her hand. "I'm Susan Strockmire, Herman's daughter. We spoke."

"I assumed," she smiled. "Nice to meet you." Dr. DeVere pulled up a chair and sat, but a frown crept across her handsome face, spreading like a dark shadow. "Are you really okay? This looks serious."

"I always do this before court," Herman grinned and put down his legal pad. "You'd be surprised how a little electro-cardioversion and an EKG can calm you before a trial."

"Seriously, Mr. Strockmire, are you okay to go into court?"

"I have my doctor's approval. Right, baby?" He looked over at Susan, who smiled and nodded, then turned her gaze back to the window so she wouldn't give away her true feelings.

They spent the next half hour prepping Dr. Deborah DeVere, although she was already up to speed on the issues.

She was going to be a dynamite witness. She even suggested some good secondary questions to ask that would allow her to interject some overpowering scientific facts, including how genetically engineered bio-foods that produce their own pesticides not only affect the butterfly, but also damage the caterpillar before its metamorphosis.

At 10:30 the nurses cleared the hospital room and Dr. DeVere, who had become Dedee, got up to leave. She shook Herman's hand and smiled at him.

"See you in court, Dedee," Herman said. "I'll be the one wearing the backless nightgown and the EKG clips."

"I can hardly wait for that one, Herm," she said with a wink, then left.

There could definitely be something going on here, Herman thought as he watched her go.

Susan gathered up her laptop and printer and started packing her stuff away. "Dad, what are you going to do about getting another client?" she asked. "You said, don't worry about it, but I can't help but worry. Judge King is going to demand we represent someone. In order to get a jury trial we had to add a suit for damages to the injunctive relief. We need a plaintiff who's been damaged."

"We're in luck. We've just been hired by the Danaus Plexippus Foundation," he said.

"And what on earth is the Danaus Plexippus Foundation?" She was smiling at him now. That was just like him to have something up his sleeve.

"It happens to be Latin for 'butterfly.' It's a DBA operating in Michigan, and they've gone all over the country spending money on saving the monarch. I had it on standby, just in case. By the way, you're the secretary-treasurer, and you are looking at the president and founding partner."

"A sham foundation?" she said, arching her brow at him.

"Honey, it's the best we've got. It's going to pass muster. We'll just amend the plaintiff list with this motion before court tomorrow." He ripped a page from his yellow pad and handed it to her. She scanned it. It was in his curlycue, hard-to-decipher script. Only Susan and Leona Mae Johnson, his secretary back in D.C., had ever successfully translated an entire page. She folded it and put it into her purse.

"Dad, if Judge King finds out…"

"How is Judge King gonna find out? Three people know about it. You, me, and Leona Mae, and unless you guys blow me in, we're cool."

She nodded, then turned off his bed lamp. "I love you, Daddy."

"I love you, too, sweetheart. I count on you more than you know."

Then she leaned down and kissed him, holding her father close to her, almost afraid to let go. His heart was beating with hers as she pressed against his chest, strangely in rhythm, his electronically beeping from the bedside monitor while hers was frightened about the future.

She closed her eyes as she hugged him.

Beep… beep… beep. Thump… thump… thump.

His was the heart of a lion.