Emergency in Alaska Read online

  “And I was planning on hitching up your dogsled team and giving Maggie a run about the area tomorrow,” he said. “Which is better than going off for an appendectomy, although I’m sure you don’t believe that.”

  “One more crack about my dull life and I might forget how to make oladi.”

  He clutched playfully at his heart. “Not that!”

  Laughing, Alek blew him a goodbye kiss. “See you tomorrow, or the day after, depending on how things go.”

  “And you be careful. That man seems to be giving you the eye.”

  “You can’t see that in the dark,” she said, then took a quick look at Michael and laughed. “I think he’s debating the merits of Dramamine versus a brown paper bag.”

  “Call me from Walter’s,” Dimitri yelled as Alek sprinted back out to the sidewalk. “I’ll have the latest forecast ready for you.”

  She didn’t wait for Michael to catch up to her this time. Instead, she jogged across the street and over to her own cabin, then went straight inside.

  “You were in my bed?” she snapped, as Michael finally stepped inside.

  “Technically, no.” He laughed. “But I was curious about that lovely scent of lavender I kept smelling.”

  “So you were in my bedroom!”

  “Lavender suits you, Alek. I think jasmine might suit you better, though. It’s a little bolder. Has a little more kick to it. Lavender is subdued and polite. So you might think about jasmine.”

  She shook her head, wondering if dragging him along was the smart thing to do. “I don’t have time for this,” she said, pointing to his parka. “Grab that and your boots and let’s get out of here.”

  “You’re assuming I’m really going to fly with you?”

  “I’m assuming that you’re everything you taught me to be. If that’s the case, then you can’t stay behind because no good wilderness doctor would. But it’s your choice. I can do this with or without you.” Her lips turned up into a slight grin. “And if you stay behind, I’m locking my bedroom.”

  For whatever odd reason she couldn’t define, she wanted him to go with her, which scared her more than the crazy thoughts whirling around her head, because those were only thoughts and this was reality. A great big, fuzzy reality that didn’t make any sense.

  Yet it made so much sense.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “YOU can look now,” Alek said to Michael as she settled back in her seat now that they were up and on their way.

  “Look at what? It’s dark down there.” He was clutching the edges of the leather seat like a panicked goose, hoping she didn’t notice that his knuckles were white. Airplanes were meant to be huge—two pilots, several cabin attendants, little bottles of alcohol served to calm fidgety nerves, stale pretzels in foil bags, three hundred other people in roughly the same high-strung condition flying along for good measure. What in the world had possessed him to come with her, anyway?

  “I have an instruments rating,” she said, then laughed. “So you don’t have to worry because most likely we won’t get lost. And I think Walter probably gave us a full tank of gas so chances are we’re not going to get stranded out there tempting fate by hoping that some kind person passes by who can lead us to the next filling station.”

  He shot her a less-than-amused look, and as the plane hit a little dip, he sat up rigidly in his seat. “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you? Holding me captive in this tin can so you can taunt and torture me.”

  “Actually, yes, I am. It’s the most fun I’ve had in days.”

  “Should I have asked to see your license before coming up with you?” he asked, trying to sound light about it, even though he was anything but.

  “License?” she teased. “They require a license for this?”

  “Okay, so you’ve got the best of me. I don’t like small planes. Does it make you happy to hear me admit that? I’ll fly on a regular airplane, but I hate these little things.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It makes me happy to hear you admit it. Confession is good for the soul, you know. It reduces you to the level of the rest of us mere mortals.”

  “You’re evil, Alek Sokolov. Pure evil.”

  Smiling, she gave the plane another little dip—this one on purpose—then glanced over at him. “Don’t look now, but your hair is standing on end.”

  “Evil, and not funny,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “So how long are you going to get to torture me?”

  “A little over half an hour. Not nearly long enough, but we’ve got the wind with us, so this is just a short hop over the mountain.” She frowned. “You don’t have panic attacks, do you?”

  “No.” He glared at her. “I don’t have panic attacks.”

  “Good, because I’d hate to have to make you crawl over the seat and sit in the back. It can get a little turbulent back there on the floor.”

  He took a glance over his shoulder. The back was set up for medical transport, with a fold-up stretcher, oxygen cylinder, and a portable defibrillator. All things considered, it was a nice little rig. Which would have been nicer sitting stationary on the ground. “So, how often do you go out on a call like this?”

  “Oh, I do an outbound maybe three or four times a month. More in the winter than the summer, since travel is difficult.”

  “And Dimitri doesn’t go with you?”

  “We rarely ever went together when he could fly because someone had to stay behind at the clinic. When Olga was alive…Olga was his wife, she often went along. Then after she died, the state sent medical staffers in for short-term assignments until I came home to take over the practice, and through that time Dimitri was the only one to go out.

  “I think Walter used to fly along with him if it was going to be a rough trip and he needed a second. He’d had some medic training in the army. But Dimitri lost his license last year, so now it’s all up to me. I go, and sometimes take one of the nurses or volunteers. And having your mother here is going to be a huge help, Michael, because there will be another doctor to go along now while someone stays back.” And before the words were out, she instantly regretted them.

  “No way in hell are you bringing my mother up here!”

  “Do you stand over her during surgery and tell her how to make an incision or tie a suture?”

  “Not if she’s on flat ground I don’t.”

  “You honestly think I’m a bad pilot, don’t you?” Alek snapped. “I forgave you for calling me a bad doctor years ago, but now you’re calling me a horrible pilot.”

  “I honestly don’t know what kind of pilot you are. But I sure as hell don’t want you piloting my mother about. Which is one more reason for me to get her out of here.”

  “Here’s a hint, Michael. I’m still here, in one piece. That should tell you how good a pilot I am. And the fact that about a year ago we—as in Dimitri and me, the people of all the villages we attend, and the Alaskan government—invested a small fortune, more money than I’ll probably make in my entire life, to buy this particular airplane to get us from place to place, should tell you that this is a very needed service up here and I’m pretty good at providing it, including the part where I have to fly to it.”

  “I’m not faulting anything about you or your medical practice. Probably more than most, I do know how badly the services are needed. But not my mother’s services, Alek. Money aside, she needs to come home.”

  “Why, Michael? Why does she need to go home when she’s happy here? More than that, why does she need to go someplace where she can’t practice her medicine when she’s needed here? Why would you want to take all that away from her?”

  “It’s not a matter of taking anything away,” he said, then settled back in the seat and shut his eyes. “It’s a matter of restoring things to the way they should be.” Maybe he owed Alek an explanation for that, too. Certainly, she would think that if she knew the rest. But how could you tell someone that in the darkest hours of your life you’d failed the people who meant the most to you? “So
when we get to Ridgeover and take the dogsled, then what? Surgery in an igloo?”

  “First, we’re not dogsledding. That’s a fun way to get around, but we’re going in by iron dog, which to you, city boy, is a snowmobile or snow machine, whatever you want to call it. It’s fast, efficient, and takes far less upkeep than the dogs. As for the igloo situation, personally I prefer my surgeries in a little warmer structure than that. Igloos are more of a tourist illusion now. They are ice huts that are still used for protection basically—for hunters, fishermen—but not homes where people live. Up here in Alaska we’ve actually progressed to this odd anomaly called a house.” She smiled at him. “But if you’d like, while I’m doing the appendectomy, I can have somebody show you how to make an igloo so you’ll have a place to spend the night.”

  “I prefer to sleep in a room that’s above freezing,” he said. “Something with room service is nice, too.”

  “Because you’re spoiled.”

  “I’ll admit that,” he said, relieved to be off the subject of his mother. “Spoiled, and glad to be.”

  “Since you like the easy life, why wilderness medicine as a subspecialty? I can see you being in trauma, heading an emergency department. But that’s a different world than wilderness practice, yet that’s what you teach. I guess what I’m asking is why you practice one thing and teach another.”

  “Because someone needs to get it right out in the wilderness. If they don’t, people die for needless reasons. Running an emergency in the wilderness isn’t the same as running one in the emergency room, but so many people assume that it is. Even experienced trauma physicians. I started looking into procedures purely for my own benefit, saw the lack of training, and eventually started teaching. Then it became a passion of mine”

  “One you don’t practice?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I have my emergency department.”

  “And you like that more than wilderness?”

  “I like it differently, which probably sounds a little odd, but I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s what I do, what I was trained to do, and with teaching wilderness medicine I get the best of both my worlds.”

  “That explains it, but you don’t sound so convincing.”

  “Don’t have to sound convincing. It is what it is.”

  “Well, since I don’t have to be convinced, tell me how this passion for wilderness medicine came to be.”

  Another story he’d never told anyone. He was laying open a vein and letting it all bleed out for Alek tonight. Funny thing was, he didn’t mind doing it. “I was still a medical student the first time I saw a medical disaster resulting from poor treatment in wilderness practice. It was a simple case of frostbite and a pair of too-tight boots. Up until then, even though the educated part of me knew better, I thought you could simply shake frostbite off, keep the extremities moving, then submerge them in warm water. But after what I saw…The doctor in the field had done just about everything wrong. Not intentionally, of course. But all the adjuncts to field therapy were wrong. He used radiant warmth trying to rewarm the poor guy’s feet—heat from the campfire, if you can imagine that. He didn’t put gauze between the toes and the poor bastard macerated.” The skin literally grew so thin it stuck together and ripped at the slightest movement. “Then the doctor kept tight socks on his feet because he thought they would be warm. If there had been a how-not-to book written on frostbite, I’d have sworn the doc would have had it in his hip pocket. So when they finally got the patient to us…gangrenous necrosis.” The leg tissue had literally died. “He lost his legs and he was damned lucky he didn’t lose his life. “It was a rude awakening for me because field treatment should have been straightforward, but the doctor didn’t know how and even though he used his best judgment, it wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t experienced in wilderness medicine and he was doing the best he could. So I decided that even though I wasn’t going to practice it—I was too far into my trauma residency to turn back—I wanted to teach it to make sure the wilderness patients who got to me had been treated right. Most likely that patient would have lost his feet no matter what anybody did, since he was third-degree frostbite to begin with, but I decided that somebody had to go beyond what they teach in medical school, especially when I remembered what the poor patient suffered.”

  “I think that’s a very noble cause,” she said. “And a worthy one. Too bad you don’t practice what you preach because you’ve got such excitement in your voice when you talk about it. Dimitri and I get greenhorns coming through the clinic from time to time—doctors who think they know how to run a practice like ours and for whatever reason want to come up and spend a few weeks observing and working. Some of them are anxious to learn, others think they know it all. Some do know, most don’t, and those are the ones who become disappointed when we don’t let them haul out to an avalanche or an emergency appendectomy on a remote island in the middle of the night. It’s a different medical world, and some can do it, but most cannot. And it’s a true passion, otherwise nobody would do it because it’s so difficult.”

  “And my mother? She’s not experienced in it.”

  “I don’t know your mother, and I haven’t seen her work as a physician. But Dimitri’s impressed, and it has nothing to do with her money. She could have all the money in the world and if she wasn’t the kind of doctor who would fit in well here, and one who could work the way we need to, he wouldn’t allow it. It’s as simple as that.”

  “But you’re trusting me right now.”

  “I’m trusting that you’re as good as your reputation. If you’re not, I always have an opening for someone to clean up after me. Mop up, put away, that kind of thing. So are you, Doctor? Are you as good as your reputation?”

  He chuckled. “I have my moments.” Why was he doing this? Why was he telling her so many things? He twisted to look out the window. Maybe because it was a good way to keep his mind off the fact that he was up in an airplane in the middle of the night with a woman who probably wouldn’t think twice about dumping him out the door, without a parachute.

  Or maybe it was because he actually felt comfortable with her.

  In the moments when she wasn’t absolutely despising him, he caught himself thinking how much he liked her, in spite of the way they seemed to go at each other. But, then, maybe that was part of what he liked.

  “I suppose we all have our moments, don’t we?” she said, sighing. “And I’m sorry about being so grumpy with you all the time. But you’ve got to understand—”

  “Actually, I do. You’re protecting someone, like I am.”

  “Neither of whom need, or want, protecting,” she said, then laughed. “And right now they’re plotting some way to end our interference, which is exactly what we’d be doing if the situation was reversed.”

  “Ah, but isn’t it our sworn duty to interfere in the lives of those we love?” If he’d interfered more in his father’s life, Eric Morse might still be alive. But he hadn’t taken the time to notice, or to even support his mother when she did. A two-year battle with prostate cancer—one that might have had another outcome but for the lack of interference from someone who should have interfered, someone who had been caught up in his own disconsolate world.

  “I try every chance I get. It’s probably a good thing I don’t love too many people, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said quite soberly.

  Alek glanced sideways at him. “Since we were actually having few nice moments, I thought you might protest that a little.”

  “See how you are? I agreed totally with you, and you expect me to argue. I can’t win with you, can I?”

  “No,” she said quite soberly, then they both laughed.

  “So I’m curious. Why bother taking your wilderness certification when you live the life? It’s not required by law. And I’m betting you could probably teach the class as well as I do.”

  “Better,” she said lightly. “Instead of lecturing, I would have brought the class up here and put them
through some practical experience. Nothing beats book learning better than good, hands-on practice, and Dimitri and I usually have plenty of that to go around.”

  “So, like I said, why the class?”

  “Dimitri insisted. He said it was for the prestige of the clinic but I think it was because he likes for me to get out of here every now and then.”

  “Because it’s so isolated?”

  “No, I love the isolation, and we have everything here you could possibly want. Warm climates, cold climates, long days, long nights. And the countryside…beaches, ice fields, forests. We have hundreds of varieties of flowers and even though the season is short, when they come alive…there’s nothing like it anyplace in the world. And the animal populations…Where else can you have bears, caribou, moose, walruses, oxen, eagles, reindeer and whales? But most of all the people are the best. It’s such an exciting mix of indigenous Alaskans, Russians and people from everywhere else who can’t pass up the lure of the wilds. And we wouldn’t have any of this if we weren’t isolated and separated from the lower forty-eight, because people would overrun us, trying to get here.

  “So being isolated isn’t why Dimitri sent me off for certification. I think he wanted me to snare a husband. That’s been on his mind a lot lately. He’s afraid I’m about to pass my prime. I also think he wants grandsons. Maybe a granddaughter or two, since he’s awfully good with little girls.”

  “I didn’t think he was your—”

  “He’s not. Long story.”

  And she wasn’t going into it. The set look on her face told him the topic was off-limits and the last thing he was about to do was stress the pilot of his plane. “I’m wounded. You took my class because you were husband-hunting and not because you wanted to listen to my brilliant teaching style.”

  “Dimitri was husband-hunting. I was taking your class because you do have a good reputation and I wanted to hear what you had to say.”

  “And you challenged me from your dark little hidey-hole in the back row so eloquently. Every chance you got.”