Chapter 19 Annie
ANNIE
The morning sun is already rude, slanting under the tent flap like it’s hunting me down.
The fans keep their lazy vigil, squeaking as they rotate, pushing heat from one corner to the other.
It’s early enough that the grandstands are just ribs against the sky and the loudspeakers haven’t found their voice.
I restock the cart and pretend the rhythm is enough to keep my brain quiet.
It isn’t.
Mac swings into the medic tent like a comet, camera bag bouncing her hip, iced coffee sweating down her wrist. She’s grinning so hard I’m worried she’s going to pull a muscle.
“Dr. Pearl,” she says, sing-song. “Are you accepting walk-ins for medical emergencies of the delight variety?”
I don’t look up from the gauze I’m stacking. “Only if you sign the consent form.”
“Oh, I consented,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Frequently.”
I drop the gauze on purpose so I have to crouch and buy myself two seconds. “How’s your wrist?”
“Fine. For now.” She flops into the chair I keep for exactly this purpose—Mac monologues—and slurps her coffee. “That could change at any moment now, if you know what I mean.” She winks.
“Romance is not dead,” I say, dry. I pick up the gauze and drop it into a bin, then line syringes in neat rows, cap-side out. Order helps when nothing else does.
“It’s not,” she says. “Last night was spontaneous. Magic. Stars aligned. I forgot the world can still surprise me.” She crosses her legs and bounces her foot. “Tell me you have some spontaneous magic to report.”
“From the medic tent?” I raise an eyebrow. “Yes, my sterile technique was dazzling.”
“You’re glowing again. You can’t fake it. Your skin looks like it made a pact with the morning.”
“Stop saying glowing like it’s a diagnosis.”
“It is.” She points with her straw. “It’s called ‘had a good time and might have it again.’”
The straw squeaks against the lid. I give the sharps container a gentle tap, like it needs to wake up. “You’re going to keep talking until I give in, aren’t you?”
“Here’s why…” She launches into her favorite subject of the week—spontaneity.
How some people study a map and some people take the wrong exit on purpose.
How last night involved laughter in a hallway and a stolen kiss on a stairwell and a rider who knew when to shut up and listen.
I let her talk because that’s our bargain.
She fills every space I don’t want to fill.
I triage her details and stitch the edges so nothing unravels.
“I’m happy for you,” I say, and it’s not a lie. I am. I also feel like a balloon tied to a chair, bright and taut and one tug away from getting loose.
Mac tips her head, watching me like she does through her lens, calibrating. “And you,” she says, softer. “You’re somewhere else right now. Which means you’ve been spontaneous lately too, because when you plan a date, you tell me the analysis instead of denying it ever happened. So, spill.”
I run out of stalling moves. The tent has four corners and I’ve paced all of them. My hands are too steady for how much my chest won’t be. “Who is it?” I ask, sharper than I mean to. “Your mystery rider. You’ve been singing about them for days. I’ve been very patient.”
Her grin goes wicked. “Who’s your hookup?”
“Absolutely not,” I say instantly, reflexive as a blink.
She leans back and spreads her hands. “Then absolutely not from me.”
“Mac.”
“Annie.” She sips. “We are at a stalemate.”
I stare at my own knuckles until the whiteness fades. The truth presses on my ribs like a second heartbeat. I don’t want to ruin a family because a man and I can’t keep our hands to ourselves.
I also want him. I want him when I’m stocking saline. I want him when the fans squeak. I want him at the stupid lemonade stand and in the line for the taco truck and in every doorway between here and sleep.
And in that horse stall again. And again.
I’ve never done anything like that before. Not even groping in public, much less the…other stuff. But I was so happy he wasn’t too hurt that I couldn’t control myself.
No. Scratch that—I refused to control myself.
I want to ask Mac what to do, how to fix this mess. But asking means saying his name. Saying his name means it belongs to more people than me and him. I’m not ready to be out about Brick—not to Mac, not to anyone. It’s still too fragile. If someone else touches it, it might fall wrong and break.
“Fine,” she says, reading my silence like a page she’s already photographed. “Keep your secrets.”
“I don’t have secrets,” I say, which is so ridiculous we both laugh.
She rests her elbow on the table. “I will say one thing—I’m really glad my hookup is with a woman, so I don’t have to think about protection. Had a pregnancy scare in college, and that was one too many. Zero out of ten, do not recommend.”
“Huh. I thought your hookup was a guy.”
“I might have implied it was a guy to keep you off the track of things a time or two…” She grins.
“And you had a pregnancy scare in college?”
She nods. “I didn’t talk about it much because I was too freaked out.”
My mouth says, “That must have been terrifying,” while my brain catches on the words like a sweater on a nail.
“Anyway, my hookup is spontaneous,” Mac says, blush high on her cheeks now that she’s given me something honest and heavy. “Like, truly impulsive. Like, ‘let’s take a left and see what happens.’ Which is not my type, historically.”
“You dated a librarian. Your type was Dewey Decimal.”
“Exactly.” She points the straw at me. “Now it’s…not.”
“So does this spontaneous woman have a name?” I ask, trying to make it easier. “Even a fake one?”
“Yes,” she says, smiling like she’s keeping a secret from herself as much as me. “And I’m not telling you.”
“Cruel.”
“Fair.”
“She likes spontaneity…” I say, and I hear my own voice go far away as the film in my head starts.
Brick, laughing in the stall behind the chutes.
Brick holding my shoulders in the trailer like the world was the size of his hands.
Brick at my door when the sky turned the color of copper and he decided the evening had something to say to us.
“So does the guy I—” I stop myself so fast my tongue stings. “So does a guy I know.”
Mac pounces. “The guy you what?”
“Nothing,” I say, too quickly. I steady my voice. “He’s spontaneous. That’s all.”
“Then you are in danger,” she says, delighted. “Spontaneous men and women are chaos. Delicious chaos. You, of all people, deserve delicious chaos.”
“Spoken like a woman who hasn’t seen my schedule.” I reach for my water bottle. My hands are steady, but my throat is sand. “Delicious chaos sounds expensive.”
“It is.” She slurps. “But worth it.”
We sit in the easy crackle that follows, both of us replaying our own movies in our heads.
The tent is still empty. The fairground is waking, stretching.
Somewhere, a bull throws his weight against the pen, and the fence answers back with a shiver.
It’s too early for the rodeo medics to be more than a rumor.
It’s just us and the coffee and the stupid fans and my stomach doing a slow, unruly roll.
“Good thing you’re on the pill,” Mac says breezily, like she’s commenting on the weather, “or you’d be in trouble. Condoms can only do so much.”
The world goes very quiet, the way it does before a real storm. I open my mouth to agree, to say the easy thing, to let the conversation skip like a stone.
We haven’t been using condoms.
I almost say it out loud and stop myself.
I’m a doctor. I’m the person who lectures teenagers about choices and condoms and why spontaneous is a word you respect, not a path you sprint down barefoot.
My face flames so hot it feels like a symptom.
I close the drawer of my thoughts and fold my stupid, impulsive, hypocrite self back into my scrubs.
“Yeah,” I say. My voice sounds normal, which is a betrayal. “That’d be crazy. Can’t handle a baby with my clinic struggling.”
Mac nods, buying the deflection like it’s on sale. “Yeah, you’d have to be nuts to have a kid right now. We’re basically kids ourselves.”
We are not. We’re in our late twenties with careers and lives. But I let her have the line because I can’t deal with anything but the calendar in my head. She tips the cup and drains the last of the ice.
My mind keeps running. Pill, pill, pill.
When did I take it last? Wednesday in my bathroom.
No, that was last week. I switched purses.
The pill case is in the black leather one with the broken zipper.
I think. Or did I stick it in the glove box after the drug rep lunch because I didn’t want to leave it in the sun?
I see my hand, dropping something in the glove box and shutting it with my wrist because my fingers were full.
Was that it? Or was that the sample inhalers for Bo Davis’s kid?
Was that two weeks ago? Three?
I do the math automatically, the way a body keeps doing what it’s trained to do even when the person steering it is lost. When was the date of my last period?
I don’t…
I count again. Clinic day. Then the first night Mac filmed the tie-down ropers at sunset.
I wore the gray scrubs, not the blue. The black hoodie.
Brick texted me a joke about cowboy knots.
I laughed in my kitchen, alone. That was nine days after.
Eleven? Fourteen? My stomach drops like an elevator that forgot the floor.
I can’t…I’m late.
My hand tightens around the water bottle until the plastic caves. The fan squeaks. The world keeps acting like it didn’t hear what I just heard inside my own head.
“Hey,” Mac says, oblivious to the giant bell I just rang for myself. She taps the cup with her nail. “If you see the lemonade stand guy, tell him to stop flirting with my camera. He’s going to sprain a hip.”
“Sure,” I say, perfectly calm, the way people are perfectly calm when they’re drowning in shallow water and no one knows because they don’t want to splash.
My brain scolds me—doctor, doctor, doctor—and then offers a hundred things I don’t need right now—incidence statistics, failure rates, pharmacokinetics, half-lives. I don’t want science. I want a clock I can turn backward, a pill bottle that rattles in my hand with proof I didn’t forget who I am.
I realize, dimly, that my mouth is moving. “Yeah,” I hear myself say. “That’d be crazy.”
“What would be?” Mac asks, taking my non sequitur and accepting it as currency.
“To have a baby now,” I say lightly, like we’re strangers in a grocery line making jokes about the price of milk. “Clinic’s still on life support as it is.”
“True,” she says, nodding. “And you mentioned that already.”
“Did I?”
Her nodding slows. “What’s up?”
I force a laugh I don’t recognize as mine. “I think the sun is getting to me.”
“More water, then.” She stands, slinging the camera bag across her body. “I should go claim a spot near the chutes before the other vultures do.” She squeezes my shoulder. “Thanks for letting me overshare for sport.”
“Any time,” I say. “That’s what the tent is for.”
“And you’re okay? Is your head fuzzy or anything on that chart?”
“I’m all set, no worries. I’ll crack an electrolyte packet and be all good.”
“Okay.” She leans down and kisses the top of my head the way she did in college when I saved her from a bad haircut. Then she heads out into the light, her ponytail swinging, and the flap floats back into place behind her.
A baby. The word takes up the whole tent. It’s ridiculous. It’s also possible. My mind tries to find a way to climb out of it and can’t, so it starts tidying—the sign is crooked, the tape needs replacing, the bin of gloves should be one box fuller.
I suppose it’s fitting that the first thing I do is reach for a Sharpie.
I make a new label for the drawer that holds the pregnancy tests we keep for teenagers who need a bathroom and a witness and a nonjudgmental place to cry.
The letters wobble a little. I peel the old label off and stick the new one on, smoothing it with my thumb until it lies flat.
I am not crying.
I am breathing like a person who has practiced it for years in rooms with bad air.
The rational part of me lines up its bullet points with shaky hands. Pills aren’t perfect. People aren’t machines. Stress messes with cycles. Travel does too. So does heat. So does forgetting. So does time.
I stand because sitting makes me feel like prey.
I wash my hands and stare at my face in the little mirror above the sink.
It’s the same face it was an hour ago. The same woman.
The same problem solver. The same person who, ten minutes ago, thought the worst thing she’d have to do today was tell a teenage boy he wasn’t heat-proof.
I turn the water off, and the tent gets loud again.
I need to take a test. The thought is clinical, a single plank in a river. I can stand on that. I need to take a test and I need to do it quickly, and I need to do it alone, and I need to figure out how to look at the result without the world tilting so hard I slide.
I grab my phone and pretend I’m checking the roster. My fingers open the pharmacy app instead. I could walk to the trailer. I could drive to the drugstore on the edge of town. I could steal one from my own drawer and pretend it’s for a patient who came in and asked for help.
No. Not from here. This tent is too bright. This tent belongs to other people’s emergencies. Mine can’t borrow its light.
I tuck the phone into my pocket. I put my stethoscope around my neck like armor. I straighten the heat-illness flyer one more time.
Jaden will be here in twenty minutes. The line at the lemonade stand will be long by then.
The girls from the mutton busting will show up with glitter on their cheeks.
The day will be loud and ridiculous and full of small disasters I can fix with tape and competence.
I will do that, because that is what I do.
And then I will take a test. Quickly. Before my bravado runs out, before my brain starts writing a future and calling it the truth.
I’m a doctor. I know exactly what to do next.
I just have to do it.