Fallen Masters Read online

  Tyler had attended Vanderbilt University for undergrad and medical school. “You are as good a student as I have ever encountered,” Dr. George Gibson, one of his professors told him, shortly before he graduated. “But you are too full of yourself.”

  “I don’t consider confidence as being tantamount to conceit,” Tyler said. “And don’t you think that a doctor, especially a surgeon, who is about to cut into a person, should have confidence in what he is doing?”

  “Find some way to tone it down, Mr. Michaels,” Dr. Gibson said. “Confidence in the operating room is one thing. Conceit in life is something altogether different.”

  Tyler was forty-four years old, but a healthful diet, a workout regimen, and—he would be the first to admit—being born with good genes caused many of the nurses, as well as some of his patients to have, as one young woman put it during a break, “thoughts that were not pure.”

  The other nurses had laughed because she said aloud what many of them kept to themselves.

  Dr. Tyler Michaels drove a mint-condition 1967 Corvette. It was black, and the scooped side panels were red. The vanity plate read CUT. He had thought of having it say HEALER, but that was already taken.

  One could perhaps forgive Tyler for having a God complex. He seemed to have it all: He was living his dream, acknowledged without question as the best surgeon in St. Agnes Hospital, many said the best in all of Atlanta. And the ones making such claims were other doctors and nurses, people who could validate their claims.

  Tyler did not use the word surgery when he spoke to his patients. Instead he preferred to term his procedures “positive invasive techniques.”

  Some might even consider it ironic that Tyler had a “God complex” because he was an atheist. Both his parents were atheists: his mother, who was a lawyer working for an appellate judge, and his father, who was a physicist. They taught Tyler to set unsubstantiated belief aside, to adopt what they called the “scientific approach” to existence.

  “No creaky, old bearded man sitting on a throne in the clouds gave me anything,” Tyler liked to say. “Everything I have ever earned is by the sweat of my brow and the power of my intellect.”

  “What makes you think that those of us who believe in God picture him as some bearded old man sitting on a throne in the clouds?” Karen asked.

  Karen, Tyler’s wife of seven years, who was eight months pregnant with their first child, had an unwavering faith, and she desperately wanted Tyler to find a faith—any faith. It didn’t have to be Mormon like hers; she just wanted to know that her child would be raised by two parents of faith.

  Karen Michaels felt that Tyler’s parents had done him an injustice by raising him as a nonbeliever. She made him promise that he wouldn’t stop her from giving their child both: a love of science and a love of God.

  “I won’t stop you from trying to indoctrinate him in your faith,” Tyler said. “But when I think he is old enough to understand, I intend to inculcate him in the beauty of science. And he will learn, quickly, that science and God are incompatible concepts.”

  “Not according to Emanuel Swedenborg,” Karen said, surprising Tyler. She was always tuned into forward thinking and the latest in New Age and metaphysical thinking. It drove him nuts, of course.

  “Who is he? Some TV evangelist?” Tyler bowed his head, closed his eyes, and extended his arm, palm out. Then, assuming the singsong voice of an evangelist preacher, he said, “Send me one hundred dollars-uh, and I will send you a genuine prayer cloth-uh, that has a picture of Jesus Christ with eyes that glow in the dark-uh!”

  “Stop it,” Karen said. “That’s sacrilegious. Even though I know you’re kidding—aren’t you?” She went on, seriously: “Emanuel Swedenborg was a cool seventeenth-century scientist and inventor, and one of the most important persons in Swedish history. Geez, I can’t believe you don’t know this. His early life was devoted to science—and he made a ton of discoveries—but as he got older, he focused on the spiritual aspects of life, where he experienced dreams and visions.”

  “Dreams and visions? Get real. He might have been a scientist early in his life, but if you ask me, he turned into a kook—or a drug addict,” Tyler scoffed.

  “Just promise me that you won’t try to poison our son’s mind against religion, that you will let him grow old enough to make up his own mind,” Karen said.

  Tyler wanted to tell her that she would be doing exactly what she was asking him not to do, but he knew how important her faith was to her, so he gave in to her entreaty.

  Tyler was a true workaholic who spent more time at the hospital than he did at home. Karen loved him very much, and learned to accept his commitment to work by focusing on the coming baby, and also by writing and illustrating what she hoped would be the first of many children’s books. She was an experienced editor herself, having edited both adult and children’s books, and now she was going to move over to the other side of the desk in hopes of being an author. She had also attended three or four writers’ conferences where she took classes on writing and, more importantly, was able to convene with many writers who were successfully published, as well as editorial colleagues in the business.

  She was writing her first book for their unborn son, Jeremy Tyler Michaels, and planned to have it finished and ready for submission on the very day she and Tyler brought their baby home together.

  Karen had a rare talent for planning—and for following through with her plans.

  “We will bring him home together, won’t we?” she asked Tyler. “Even if you are on call, you will take enough time off to bring our baby home.”

  It was Christmas Eve, and Tyler and Karen were curled up on the leather couch in front of the fireplace, listening to a CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Lux Aurumque.” Tyler might be an atheist, but he did have an appreciation of beautiful music.

  “We will bring him home together,” Tyler promised.

  Karen smiled at him. “You are making that promise on Christmas Eve,” she said. “And any promise made on Christmas Eve can’t be broken.”

  “You mean like a ‘spitting in the palm of your hand’ promise can’t be broken?” Tyler teased.

  “If that’s what it takes,” Karen said.

  Tyler made the motion of spitting his hand; then he rubbed it on her protruding belly. “Here,” he said. “I’m making the promise to both of you.”

  Karen laughed, then lifted his hand from her stomach and kissed it. “It isn’t just bringing him home, you know,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tyler, I so much want you to be a part of the baby’s life. Please, try to be more present after he is born—if not for me—then for him.”

  “I’m well ahead of you, my love,” Tyler said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The baby is due the first week of January. I have already told the hospital that I intend to take a four-day holiday over the New Year’s weekend. No pager, no patients, no calls, no surgeries.”

  Karen’s face lit up. “Oh, Tyler, do you promise?” she asked.

  “I promise.”

  With the baby scheduled to be born in the first week of January, Karen was well aware that the New Year would bring all sorts of life changes. It was, she knew, going to be a new transition for both her and Tyler. How would Tyler handle it? Would he realize that he had new responsibilities, and that the child’s very future would be shaped by Tyler’s actions? She could only hope and pray that Tyler would rise to the occasion and become as incredible a father as he was a surgeon.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Being on staff rather than a visiting physician had one perk that Tyler especially appreciated: He had a marked parking spot, and though he was senior enough to have taken one of the spots nearest the physician’s entrance to the hospital, he chose one over in the corner instead. On one side was the brick wall of the hospital building, and on the other side was the utility building that housed the air-conditioning unit. That w
ay there was very little opportunity for someone to misjudge their parking place and damage his car. Also, it kept his car out of sight. The Corvette was worth, conservatively, sixty thousand dollars. It would be quite a tempting target for an automobile thief.

  Tyler parked in his spot, then completing his parking ritual, fitted it with the canvas car cover that he kept in the trunk. With the car covered, and out of harm’s way, he entered the hospital by the physicians’ entrance. Tom Claiborne was working on a circuit-breaker panel.

  “Ready to sell that Vette, yet, Doc?” Claiborne asked.

  “Not yet,” Tyler said.

  “I’ll give you an arm and leg for it,” Claiborne said. “In fact, if you wait for a moment, I’ll give you the leg right now.”

  That was Claiborne’s sense of humor. He had lost his left leg below the knee in an industrial accident but had so mastered the use of his prosthetic limb that Tyler knew him for two months before he realized he had an artificial leg.

  “Now tell me, Tom, just what would I do with an extra leg?”

  “Well, seein’ as how your chief of surgery is always ridin’ you, you could stick a boot up his ass and still have two legs left,” Claiborne said.

  Tyler laughed. There were some who worried that Tom Claiborne’s dark sense of humor might harbor some deep-seated psychological problem, but Tyler had visited with Claiborne more than anyone else in the hospital, and he believed that it was just the guy’s way of coping with it.

  When he stopped by the nurses’s station on the recovery floor, he saw the chief of nurses making an entry in the computer, tapping the keys with two fingers as fast as the average person could type using the QWERTY method.

  Rae Loona was a fifty-eight-year-old African-American woman with a cartoon-print six-inch headband and an Afro that, according to her, had not gone out of style and never would.

  “When are you going to learn to type?” he asked.

  “When you learn to rap,” Rae shot back without looking away from the monitor.

  Tyler picked up the file folders that were lying in the “rounds” basket.

  “How was Mr. Underhill’s night?” he asked.

  “The night nurse said he was quiet,” Rae said. Finishing whatever she had been typing, she sent it to the printer then stood up and came over to the counter. “How is Karen?”

  “She’s tired of being pregnant,” Tyler said. “I told her to stop being such a baby.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She told me she would stop being such a baby when I carried one in my belly for nine months.”

  Rae laughed out loud and slapped her hand down on the countertop. She pointed at Tyler. “She got your little pink ass with that one.”

  “How do you know my ass is pink?”

  “You’re a white boy, aren’t you? You think in my thirty-five years of being a nurse, I haven’t seen ten thousand pink asses?”

  “I’ve often wondered why you’re still here.”

  “That’s ’cause my Johnny hasn’t returned my calls. If my Johnny Travolta would have me, I’d be out of here so fast—well, I can’t even tell you how fast, ’cause there’s no words to describe it. That’s why I’m still here.”

  * * *

  Before Tyler made his rounds, he stepped into the physicians’ lounge for a cup of coffee. There were three interns there, drinking coffee and laughing. They grew quiet and stood as Tyler came in.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “How is it going?”

  “Fine, Dr. Michaels,” one of the interns replied.

  “You’re Dr. Poole?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tyler poured himself a cup of coffee. “Tell me, in writing a medical report, what does the SOAP method mean?”

  “That’s an acronym, Doctor,” Poole replied. It mean ‘subjective, objective, assessment, and plan.’”

  “Very good. And to what does the subjective refer? Dr. Blake?”

  “The subjective part of the report tells what the patient says about his symptoms in his own words,” Dr. Blake said.

  “And the objective?”

  Dr. Urban, the remaining intern, replied. “The objective part of the report details what the doctor sees and hears when he observes the patient.”

  “He?” Tyler said.

  “Yes, sir,” Urban replied, not sure why Tyler questioned him.

  “How many interns are here at St. Agnes right now?”

  “There are nine of us,” Urban replied.

  “Uh-huh. All men?”

  “No, three are…” Urban paused in midsentence. “Oh. I meant what he or she observes.”

  “Good for you,” Tyler said. He finished his coffee, then picked up the stack of files again. “Well, gentlemen, are you ready to make the rounds?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Dr. Urban replied.

  At her nurse’s station, Rae Loona watched the three eager young interns trailing along in Tyler’s wake. She knew, as they knew, and every intern past or present who had interned with Dr. Michaels in the last ten years, that they could learn more in one hour with him than they could learn in an entire semester of medical school.

  CHAPTER

  13

  When the phone rang, Karen Michaels checked the caller ID before she answered. It read DR. J. D. KIRBY.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said brightly. “Or is this Mom?”

  “It’s me, sweetheart,” Edna Kirby said. “How are you doing?”

  “Still pregnant,” Karen said. “Just like I was when you called yesterday.”

  “And the day before and the day before that,” Edna said. “I’m just thinking that maybe your father and I should cancel the cruise.”

  “What? No! Why in the world would you want to cancel the cruise?”

  “So we can be here for you when the time comes,” Edna said.

  “Don’t be silly, Mom. Tyler will be here. There’s nothing you or Daddy can do when the baby is being born. I will need you after the baby is born. You said you would come for the first week and I’m holding you to it.”

  “Oh, there is no way you can keep us away,” Edna said. “You think we don’t want to be there to see, and to play with our grandson? And then give him back to you when he needs his diaper changed?” she added with a little laugh.

  The cruise was a vacation and fellowship retreat sponsored by the church her parents attended in Nashville. Her father was chief of residents at Nashville General Hospital. Dr. Henry Emory had been on staff there, and when Emory left Nashville to come to St. Agnes as chief of surgery, Dr. J. D. Kirby had recommended that he try to recruit Dr. Tyler Michaels. He had also played a hand in getting his daughter together with the young surgeon, whom he thought showed more promise than any other surgeon he had met in the previous ten years.

  “Did you have a good Christmas?” Karen asked.

  “Oh, we had a good enough Christmas, I guess—except you weren’t there,” Edna answered. “We had a beautiful church service, then a potluck dinner. Everyone dressed up for it. But I wish we were together. I miss you and want to see you with the baby on the way.”

  “It was a nice Christmas for us,” Karen said, but with hesitation.

  “Nice?” Karen’s mother’s voice had a questioning lilt to it. “What do you mean, nice? Did something happen?”

  “No, Mom, really. It was fine. Tyler gave me the most beautiful diamond pendant you ever saw. It’s just that—” She stopped in midsentence.

  “Don’t just leave me hanging, sweetheart. It’s just that, what?”

  “Well, Tyler is so sweet, like I said, he gave me the most beautiful diamond pendant.” She laughed. “And he bought Jeremy a football. Not a little one, mind you, a full-sized, real football. It’s as big as Jeremy will be when he is first born. But to Tyler, Christmas is just—things.”

  “It’s about tradition and family, built on a foundation of faith and values.”

  “I agree. You know that. Oh, Mom, I wish for anything, something—I would se
ttle for him being a little more spiritual. I don’t care about him being religious. I mean, I can’t really complain too much. After all, he has never tried to change me, he accepts—no, more than accepts, I think he even respects that I am a person of faith. But he—”

  “Sweetheart, you hold on to your faith,” Edna said. “There’s no need for you to preach. Tyler will come around. This, I know in my heart.”

  “I hope so, Mom.”

  “Are you going to celebrate New Year’s Eve?” Edna asked.

  “Yes. They are having a reception at the ballroom in the W Hotel. Tyler said we could stay home and pop a big bowl of popcorn, then watch New Year’s come in on TV, but I’m the one who pushed him to go.” She laughed. “Next New Year’s Eve we’ll have to hire a babysitter!”

  “Well, have a good time, dear. But don’t get too tired.”

  “I won’t. And you and Daddy have a good time with the cruise.”

  Karen had silently hoped they would change their minds and stay, so she wouldn’t feel alone, after all, on this special night. Despite Tyler’s attempts to be there for her, she felt abandoned—by everyone—and somewhat depressed, but she decided she would keep it to herself, to hang on and think about the positive outcome that lay ahead … after all, her baby had not abandoned her. He would be with her forever. She could count on that.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Grenada

  Patricia Rose Greenidge, Mama G, sat in her chair and rocked back and forth slowly as she watched a log burn in her patio fire pit. It wasn’t a high, lapping blaze, but a long, low blaze that was blue closest to the log, then orange and yellow before dissolving into little curls of smoke. The outside evening air was unseasonably cool.

  She drank a cup of tea and tried to deal with the visions that were dancing through her head.

  She saw a big building, surrounded by towering Corinthian columns, and inside that building, an assembly of some sort. It was not the national parliament of Grenada, nor the Congress of the United States, nor was it the General Assembly of the United Nations.