Trapped. Beverly Long

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      Brody looked from the knife to Mrs. Hardy and then back again. “And I had to give up my four ounces of shaving cream,” he said.

      Mrs. Hardy smiled. “There are advantages to being an old woman.”

      Brody tested the point against the palm of his hand. It was very sharp and would make a difference. “Thank you,” he said, and started for the cockpit.

      When Brody got there, Angus had his head back and his eyes were closed. Captain Ramano also had his eyes shut. Pamela was wide-awake and looking pretty agitated.

      She was still dutifully pressing down on the pilot’s head wound. “How is he?” Brody asked.

      “I don’t know. I’m not the doctor,” she said crossly.

      “You’re doing fine,” Brody assured her. “The bleeding looks as if it has stopped. You can go back to your seat.”

      He’d assist Captain Ramano once he finished with Angus. He tapped the young man on the shoulder. Angus opened his eyes.

      “So it wasn’t a dream?” Angus said.

      Brody shook his head. “Wish it was, my friend. Once we get that leg set, you’ll feel better. I promise.”

      He helped Angus up out of his seat. There was so little room that as careful as they were, at one point Angus brushed his injured leg against something and let out a yelp as if he were an injured dog.

      The young man leaned heavily on Brody as they carefully maneuvered back to the main cabin area, where Brody helped him lie down. Angus wasn’t a big guy, but he filled the small center aisle, and right now he looked as if he was about ready to pass out. His pant leg was still rolled up and Brody got his first really good look at the leg. It was already starting to swell. Brody untied the man’s shoe and took it off.

      It was going to get worse before it got better. This was frontier medicine and he didn’t even have any rotgut whiskey to give to Angus.

      Elle took a spot on one side, Brody on the other, each of them shoehorned in the seating area. Both were on their knees.

      She could see the pain on Angus’s face and she looked up at Brody. “He’s lucky you were on this plane,” she said.

      He didn’t answer her.

      When Brody didn’t answer, Elle realized that the young man she’d loved was gone. Instead, there was a stranger, who didn’t feel the need to be particularly polite to her.

      The Brody Donovan she remembered was always polite. She’d met him during his first year of med school. Had known he was supersmart after an hour of conversation, not because he told her he was—he just was. She’d enjoyed it when he and his friends came into the little bar where she’d been cocktailing. And when he asked her out, it had been flattering.

      She’d declined. Men like Brody Donovan were out of her league. But he hadn’t given up. Finally, she’d agreed, thinking it might be a nice holiday romance, and to her great surprise, and great joy, it had worked. They had clicked.

      Loved the same movies, enjoyed the same food, laughed at the same things. She hadn’t been a bit surprised when she learned that he’d been an Eagle Scout in middle school and the senior class president in high school. When he casually mentioned that his father was a novelist, she’d rather belatedly put together that Larry Donovan, hottest thriller writer around, was Brody’s dad. Learning that his mother was a scientist who worked off and on for NASA didn’t even make her blink an eye.

      Brody was special.

      When he graduated from med school with honors and had been accepted into his first choice for a residency program, everybody had assumed that he was rightfully on his way.

      Everybody loved Brody. And she had, too. Which had made leaving him the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.

      Brody opened the sewing kit, threaded a needle with a piece of dark blue thread and set it down on the spread newspaper.

      He opened a couple packages of antiseptic wipes, then handed her a pair of gloves and slipped a pair onto his own hands. “Angus, I’m going to move your bone back into position. To do that, I’m going to make a very small incision, but given that I don’t have anything to numb the pain, it’s going to hurt. I need you to keep the leg as still as you possibly can. Can you do that for me?”

      Brody’s voice was calm, reassuring.

      Angus nodded.

      “Elle, wipe that blood away,” Brody said, his voice still calm.

      She took the antiseptic wipe and as gently as possible, tried to clean around the wound so that Brody could see what he was doing. Her stomach was jumping.

      “After that, I’ll be ready to stitch up the wound and bandage it. You’ll be on the road to recovery. How’s that sound, Angus?” Brody asked.

      He got a nod from the man.

      “Okay,” Brody said, his voice soft. He wiped the knife off, using two more antiseptic pads.

      With confidence that she could only imagine, he made a small incision on Angus’s leg. The young copilot jerked and moaned but kept his leg fairly still.

      Then, using his hands, Brody pressed on the protruding bone and eased it back inside the leg. He was concentrating fiercely and she knew that he was trying to align the two sections of snapped bone so that healing could begin.

      “It’s going fine,” he said, smiling at Angus.

      The young man nodded and closed his eyes.

      She’d always assumed that Dr. Donovan would have a good bedside manner. So confident, so smart. So calm.

      Once Brody seemed satisfied with the position of the bone, he looked up at her. “Wipe off the needle and the thread with the antiseptic wipes.”

      She did as instructed and then handed him the needle.

      “Thank you,” he said automatically. “I need you to gently press the edges of the wound together while I stitch it up.” That part seemed to go relatively well. The stitches closing up the incision were a nice straight line. When he got to the torn jagged edges of skin where the bone had poked through, they weren’t quite as pretty.

      Still, Brody looked satisfied when he put the needle back down on the newspaper. The wound was closed and the bleeding had stopped. He opened the tube of antibacterial cream and spread a liberal amount over the whole area. Then it was a bandage and some tightly wrapped gauze.

      Brody took off his gloves and dropped them on the newspaper, then patted Angus’s shoulder. “All done.”

      “Thank you,” the young man whispered.

      Elle didn’t need a medical degree to know that she’d just witnessed something amazing.

      “Now what?” she asked.

      “I need to find something to immobilize the leg, to give the bones a chance to knit together.”

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