Julian
NOVEMBER, YEAR 2
St. Vincent is the busiest L&D in the region, and for reasons no one can adequately explain, only one resident covers each shift with a single OB hospitalist attending. Half the year, an intern is also assigned, but there’s enough work for at least three upper-levels. Covering it by myself as a second-year is like drowning beneath a tsunami while a horde of people on silver surfboards complain about my inability to swim.
Errors often occur—not only mine—and prior to this month, I had vastly underestimated the hospitalists’ ability to make me feel guilty for their mistakes.
Grace has been an ideal night resident the entirety of the month. When I arrive each morning, she’s bright-eyed and smiling with the patient list in hand, color-coded from her rainbow pens. Sometimes, she even has black coffee waiting for me, so I’ve taken to bringing her a chocolate donut every morning just to make her smile.
Her sign-out is pristine—far better than mine in the evening. I’m pretty sure she spends the first hour of every shift combing the charts to revise all my mistakes. I read my notes twice before I sign, yet errors persist.
The glory of electronic medical records is that they all have shortcuts for charting—dot phrases and saved templates. Dr. Narayan, the most unfriendly hospitalist to ever grace these sacred halls—and perhaps the worst human on the planet—has removed my “template privileges” in an effort to improve my charting. It forces me to write all my notes from scratch, taking triple the time it normally would.
Grace’s notes are flawless, and she rounds on at least half the list each morning, including all the discharges. It significantly lightens my workload, and if I wasn’t halfway gone for her already, this would have tipped the scales.
She’s my savior.
Four weeks since Halloween. She still has no clue Drunk Grace admitted she wants me. Sober Grace is as reticent as always, but her smiles have grown dreamy and she blushes when I touch her. This has become the longest game of foreplay in history.
I’m desperate for her to let her guard down. I want her to confess her desire, unclouded and sober. And she will.
Once she fully trusts me.
I’m patient. The waiting will pay off. Soon.
Right?
I really hope I’m not kidding myself.
Heading to the hospital before dawn on the last day of November, I smile to myself. Traffic lights reflect through beads of rainwater, red and green fractured around my truck, painting the black leather in Christmas colors. The chilly walk to the back elevator that lands me in the postpartum unit barely pulls my attention from the anticipation of seeing her.
Next month, we’ll be on different services—her on L&D days at TUMC, me on GYN surgery. These patient checkouts will be a thing of the past.
I slip into our closet-sized call room, expecting she’ll be ready with coffee and a freshly printed patient list. Instead, the room is dark. The overhead multicolor Christmas lights we leave up year-round glow in the dim space, rainbows bouncing off the white walls. The list is indeed printed, sitting beneath the ASCOM on the little fridge we use as a nightstand. Grace is curled up on our twin bed, fast asleep atop the covers.
I nearly trip over one of her shoes as the magnet inside her draws me closer. The rainbow lights dye her in patches, blue across her cheek, pink over her lips, green and yellow in her hair.
Her slow, even breaths disturb the rebel strands that lay across her cheek. My hand moves without direction from me, and my pinky pushes those hairs away from her face, sliding down her temple and jaw. She stirs, and an arousing moan resonates in her throat.
“?” Eyes closed, she slurs my name in a sleepy voice, like she knows me by touch alone.
“Mmm-hmm.” I drop to my knees, closer to her level.
Her eyes flutter open. Reflected rainbow lights wink at me in the darkness.
“There’s my girl. Rough night?”
That languid smile jumpstarts my pulse. My heart thuds once, then speeds my blood through my veins as I picture crawling into the bed with her.
She blinks, still smiling, then lucidity hits and her body tenses. “Oh my god. I didn’t round. Shit. I can’t believe I fell asleep.”
I withdraw my hand as she sits up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“It’s okay. It’s technically my job to round on everyone.”
She grabs her phone and scowls. “I set my alarm for 4:30 p.m. instead of a.m.” She takes the list and yawns.
“You—you wake up at 4:30 to help me round?”
She glances at me and does a double take. Colored lights smear across her skin and hair as she leans toward me, quickly sweeping back the hair that always lays over my forehead. “I just… They’re hard on you for stupid reasons, and I’m usually awake anyway, and—” she sighs and looks at her lap, her voice shrinking “—I want your days to be good, .”
My breath stalls. It’s such a simple statement.
I want your days to be good.
But that isn’t what it means. At least not to me.
I want you to be happy.
I’ll sacrifice my own comfort for you.
Her light-filled eyes lift to meet mine.
I’m not coming back from this. It’s happening in real time, a pistol held to my heart, poised to change everything. Her finger’s on the trigger, and staring into her eyes, I’m unsure whether she’ll pull it or lay the weapon down and show me mercy.
I’ll let her do either one, won’t I? Tendrils of frost curl around my veins as the truth unfurls inside me. I’ll let her destroy me, and I’ll do it with a smile.
I’m hers now.
What if she never agrees to be mine?
“Grace—”
The ASCOM blares and we both jump. I answer, barely listening as a nurse gives a quick report on a patient in triage. I can’t look away from Grace even though she’s diligently studying the paper before her, avoiding my gaze.
“I’ll be right there.”
“Thanks, Dr. Santini. Today’s your last day, right? We should celebrate.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” I hang up.
Grace hands me the list, but I’m still fixated on her face, the constellation of freckles over her nose, the one on her lip. Checkout is useless. I miss her entire report until she says, “This last girl is the one you need to worry about.”
My attention finally lands on the patient information. The woman is in the ICU. Unusual for OB-GYN.
“She came in through the ER a few hours ago in septic shock from a miscarriage. Positive pregnancy test and bleeding, but the abdominal ultrasound still shows a bunch of crap in her uterus. She wasn’t stable enough to take to the OR right away, and I couldn’t even do an exam because she wasn’t lucid from the fever. One hundred and six! Can you believe that? As soon as she’s stable, you’ll be taking her for a D&C to get it out.”
“Damn.”
“I know. The hard part is she speaks some dialect of Burmese or Tibetan or something. We don’t have a translator for it. I think she said her last period was six weeks ago.”
“Jesus. What a shit show.”
She rubs her eyes, forehead crinkled. “I really wanted to have her tucked in before you got here, but she was crashing in the ED. Barely conscious. They’ve got her on drips and antibiotics. It shouldn’t be long now.”
“It’s really okay, Grace.” I give her a grin as she cuts her focus to me. “You don’t always have to do all the work.”
A brittle smile lights her face. “Maybe I like to. It’s the last day of the month. I’ll…miss you.”
There it is. She’s so close.
“I’m still here,” I say. “Anytime you want me.”
“I—really?”
I can’t resist brushing my thumb along the corner of her smile. “Really. Say it, and I’ll be there. Whatever you need. Surely you know that by now.”
Her gaze warms as it roams over my eyes, nose, then lingers at my mouth.
Say it. Please just say it.
“Thank you, ,” she says instead.
“You’re welcome, Sapphire .”
She hides her smile and swings her backpack onto her shoulder. Pausing, she opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.
My hopes climb a steep mountain. “Yes?”
“Nothing. Thanks for a good month.” She slips from the room and the hope takes a dive off a cliff.
The girl is cagey AF. What happened to make her this skittish? Maybe what I’m interpreting as interest on her part is really just excessive kindness. Maybe this is her letting me down easy.
Guess I’m going to have to man up and actually ask.
I have to reread the list to orient myself, then head to triage. The blonde nurse at the desk sits straight when I approach. Pulling her name from the dregs of my memory, I smile. “Hey, Taylor.”
“Yours is in room two.”
“What’s her story again?”
“Thirty-two weeks. Claims she’s a virgin, but thinks she has chlamydia.”
I blink. So many contradictions there…
She only laughs.
The patient is a short redhead with bright blue eyes. They gaze at me with unblinking intensity while I introduce myself.
“What can I help you with today?” I ask.
“I was hurting and had this yellow stuff comin’ out my twat, so I took a home test for STDs. Said I have chlamydia.”
I draw a breath, but she holds up a finger.
“Doesn’t make sense. I never had sex.”
My eyes narrow and my pen drifts to point at her very pregnant stomach.
She follows the pen’s direction and stares at her belly for two seconds before jumping in surprise, like she’s forgotten a human grows there.
Blue owl eyes return to me. “I didn’t have sex, but I think I know how I got pregnant.”
“Did you have a sperm donor?”
“No.”
I scratch my head. “Then where’d the sperm come from?”
“From a cup.” She has no inflection to her voice. No tonal changes. She’s an owl-eyed robot, and a little voice in my mind whispers, You’re being punked .
“How did it get in the cup?”
Her owl eyes drop to my pants. “Don’t you have one? You don’t know how they work?”
I tilt my head and beg the universe to keep me from laughing. “Fair enough. How did it get in your vagina?”
“I poured it in.”
The image of a red Solo cup filled with cold semen fills my mind, nauseating this early in the morning. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
Her blue eyes go impossibly wide. “Wait. Is that how I got chlamydia?”
And that’s about how my morning progresses until Dr. Scarlett calls to tell me the patient in the ICU has stabilized and they’re moving her to pre-op.
A quarter hour later, I slide a latte toward Scarlett where she’s waiting in the OR attending lounge. “Any luck on a translator?”
She pops the lid and glances inside. I know all the hospitalists’ coffee orders by heart, so hers is perfectly made, but she still doesn’t thank me as she takes a sip.
She shakes her head. “Now they’re thinking it might be Khmer. The reverend from her church showed up, but his translation of her story doesn’t make much sense.”
I suppress the pang of annoyance that she didn’t call me for the interview with the reverend. “What did he say?”
“That her last period was four days ago and she only started feeling sick this morning. Did you look at the ultrasound images?”
I nod.
“What’d you think?”
“Honestly? It looked like a huge gray mess in there.”
She chuckles. “I thought so, too.”
It’s another forty-five minutes before we’re gowned and gloved alongside our trusty scrub tech, Livia, in the OR. I sit on the stool, adjust the lights and place a speculum. What I see makes no sense. A shiny white cord protrudes from the woman’s dilated cervix. It looks like a—
Livia gasps. “Is that—?”
I grasp it with a clamp and pull, dragging out a term-sized placenta which lands with a splat into a blue basin, its rancid odor drifting up under our masks. I hold up the umbilical cord—cleanly cut in half.
All three of us stare at it in silence.
“Did—” Dr. Scarlett pokes at the placenta in the bucket. “Did she say there was a baby? She said she was miscarrying!”
But did she? The language barrier…
Livia turns away. “Oh my god.”
Images fillet my mind. A baby cut away from its mother, kidnapped, sold into slavery, trafficked away for nefarious purposes. Or worse, killed for being unwanted. Abandoned. Cold and alone.
The images won’t stop, each worse than the last. Because I’m staring at only half the pregnancy.
A ragged breath drags through my lungs. “Where’s the baby?”