“Do you agree?” she asked.
“Agree with what?”
“The treatment,” she replied.
“What treatment?”
She removed her hand from my shoulder. “So you didn’t hear everything, then.”
“Sasha,” I said, not angrily but forcefully, “what treatment?”
Sasha sighed. “It’s experimental. Dr. Crumb doesn’t think it’s ready.”
“It’s not,” said Dr. Crumb.
I ignored him. Sasha had my undivided attention.
She continued, “An oral corticosteroid, very powerful.”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Sasha looked over her shoulder at doctor Crumb. He stepped up to us. “It must be administered with precision timing and precision dosage.”
I nodded emphatically. “Fine. You tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”
Sasha addressed the doctor. “There are fifteen of us here. We can look after her day and night. She’ll never be out of sight.”
“Never,” I said.
“She couldn’t possibly get any better care than the care we’ll give her,” said Sasha.
Dr. Crumb sighed and rubbed his chin.
“I can send the helicopter for the medicine now,” said Sasha. “Please, we’ve already wasted enough time.”
21
Noah
There would be no second vote, no final vote. The helicopter was off to Scotland to retrieve the medicine. Sasha said it would return in five hours. Dr. Crumb had left with the helicopter and would not be returning. So Sasha called everyone to meet in the dining room. No drinks were poured. No food was served, only instructions: meticulous, life or death instructions.
Sasha and Dan took turns explaining the procedure we were to follow.
“The corticosteroid is potent,” said Dan. “The main difficulty is to assure it’s being absorbed by the body at a regular pace—”
“But not too fast,” Sasha interjected.
Dan nodded emphatically. “That’s right. The body can only take so much of the corticosteroid. An overdose—”
“Even a slight overdose,” Sasha interjected.
Dan nodded. “Yes, even a slight overdose could have...” He looked down at his feet and did not finish the sentence.
“We must absolutely avoid giving her too much of the medicine,” Sasha said.
Dan took in a deep breath and began again. “Intravenously, well, that would be too much of a shock to the body.” The more Dan spoke, the less I liked this idea. “The solution,” continued Dan, and he looked at us in the eyes with a severe expression as he spoke, passing from one person to the next. “The solution is to administer the medicine in tiny droplets onto the lips. When the corticosteroid is absorbed, the lips will become dry again. Then we add another tiny droplet. And we repeat and repeat until Bonita wakes from her coma.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
Dan shook his head. “Hours? Days? Weeks?”
“Never,” Ken mumbled.
I snapped at him. “Shut up! That’s not helpful.”
“Do we all understand what this means?” asked Sasha. “Bonita’s lips must be continuously wet with the medicine.”
“But never too wet,” Dan interjected.
“Not even for a second,” said Sasha.
“And her lips must never be dry,” Dan added.
“Not even for a second,” said Sasha.
To sit at Bonita’s bedside, never taking my eyes off of her, studying and touching her lips: If I’d been told a week ago that this would be my mission and that it would be a life-or-death mission, I would never have believed it. However, I would have thought the life or death would be my own. For being that close to such beauty for that long could surely be fatal.
We took turns, the seven of us, watching over Bonita. Sasha’s men wanted to help, but we insisted on taking care of it ourselves. They understood.
There was something in the way they looked and spoke, especially Harry and Dan, that had me suspect that they did understand, and quite probably from personal experience.
I found Harry alone, making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen late at night. “This isn’t your first time, is it?” I asked.
He looked at me with a furrowed brow. “My first time?”
I motioned vaguely to the upstairs where Bonita lay somewhere between life and death. “I mean, you’ve seen this before: people in love on the precipice of losing it all.”
He went back to pouring his tea, staring into it as if the memories were there inside the light-brown liquid. Eventually, he turned to me. He didn’t need to speak. I saw it in his eyes. He had known the fear and the desperation I was feeling at that moment.
I learned that a person’s lips have between three to five cellular layers. I stared at Bonita’s lips so intently, I could make out when the drop of medicine had penetrated each layer. I stared at Bonita’s lips so intently, I could see the medicine being absorbed, my hand always ready with the dispenser to administer another drop.
We rotated, each of us doing forty-minute shifts, with some overlap—sometimes, even as tired as our eyes were, as anxious as our hearts were, it was difficult to leave the room.
I spoke to Bonita while I was with her. I’m sure the others did, too. I told her about how we’d busted into the house she was being held in. I laughed and described the look on the guy’s face when a pickup, probably his, smashed into the door and how the door shot out, almost hitting him. I told her about how we raced through the forest, as a team, to get her back here safely.