Bateman stood, palms flat on the table. “You want me to do something decent? You tell her to do something decent. You tell her that when she comes home, I’ll think about paying the bills. Otherwise, they’re on their own, just as she wanted it.”
8
I scheduled Daniela’s surgery three weeks after my consult with Trina Crouch on a Thursday morning. When I entered the surgical room, I felt nervous. I usually had some nerves before surgery, but my nerves that morning were more pronounced. I knew in a way that I was Daniela’s Pastor Brogan. I was the person fate had destined to protect her from the bully. The irony was she and I had shared the same bully. In some ways, I saw myself in Daniela, and this was my way of standing up to David Bateman.
“How’s she doing?” I asked the anesthesiologist.
“She’s doing great. Everything looks good.”
“You ready?” I asked my erstwhile surgical assistant for that day.
“Let’s save an eyeball,” Mickie said.
We were lucky. We did not need to remove the lens, and there was minimal scar tissue. We finished the surgery in just over an hour. As we stripped from our surgical gear, Mickie gave me a wink. “Nice work, Dr. Hill.”
I removed my surgical hat as I entered the waiting room, where Trina Crouch sat, looking worn and tired. “She did great,” I said. “I’m very optimistic she’ll recover full vision.”
Crouch burst into tears. After a moment, she took my hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what to say. I wish you would let me pay you something.”
“That isn’t necessary,” I said. Mickie and I had donated our time, and the hospital administrator at Mercy cut the cost of the operating room and the instruments as much as she could.
Trina pulled an envelope from her purse. “It’s a thank-you card, for the person who paid the hospital bill.”
I’d told Trina that Daniela’s benefactor wished to remain anonymous. “I’ll be certain he gets it,” I said.
Ernie had insisted on paying. He’d helped his father grow Cantwell Computers exponentially, and he had become a wealthy man in the process. He said there were new opportunities on the horizon, something about a new platform that would allow people to view pages on a computer like pages in a book, one hidden behind the other, as well as other technology that would someday allow us to send information from computers on our desks to other computers around the world. To me it continued to sound like a Star Trek fantasy, but then I’d never thought I’d be able to put a phone in my car, either.
“Would you like to see her?” I asked. “She’s coming out of sedation, so she’ll be groggy, but I think she’ll feel better having her mommy in the room.”
When Trina stepped into the recovery room, Daniela’s head was swathed in bandages, and her eye was covered with a protective cup and gauze. It was heartless of me, I knew, but it was an image I wanted burned into Trina Crouch’s own retina so that it would hopefully never again come to fruition. She held Daniela’s hand and kissed the bandages around her forehead. There was not a dry eye in the room.
Later that afternoon, Trina sat in a chair in Daniela’s room, sipping a Diet Coke, and we talked while Daniela slept. Trina looked at me and said the words I needed to hear. “I’m ready to end this. I don’t ever want to see my daughter like this again.”
9
Concerned David Bateman was stalking his ex-wife, I arranged for a meeting at my office to make it appear to be a normal follow-up. Mickie and Dr. Pat LeBaron, the emergency room doctor who had initially treated Daniela, sat in the conference room, along with Merilee Montoya from the San Mateo County Department of Justice’s domestic violence unit. Ernie’s father had arranged for her to be present. Montoya was a petite Hispanic woman with gray hair, the gravelly voice of a smoker, and a no-nonsense demeanor.