Chapter 4 #2
I used the photo as a reminder of my ultimate mission: to be a wall.
It was an expression ER doctors used that meant to do everything possible to not overwhelm the floors with admissions, to treat people and try to send them home instead of admitting them.
But in my case, it meant being sturdy. A leader. Impenetrable to nonsense.
I glanced up to see a shadow cast over my doorway, just outside my door. A second later, Ani Green stepped into my office.
Her hair was up in a ponytail, no nonsense. “May I have a word?” And was that her shoe tap-tap-tapping impatiently on my office floor?
I’d been expecting this day, wanting it and fearing it, the moment she would walk back into my life.
“Of course.” I gestured her in, warning myself to keep it to business. “Have a seat.”
I spied her earrings—dangling hummingbirds. My mom aways said that hummingbirds were spiritual messengers, evidence of reassurance from loved ones who have passed. Ugh. Also, a tiny fuzzy koala bear was attached to her stethoscope. These pediatricians.
She sat down in one of the chairs opposite my desk, where staff members came to complain, cry, or, rarely, to celebrate. She rubbed her forehead. Opened her mouth then shut it. Then simply stared at me for a beat or two before she finally spoke. “Did you lose something, Dr. Lowenstein?”
Her question threw me. I glanced around—my desk was nearly cleaned off and impeccably neat. Everything else was spotless and in perfect order. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Oh, I definitely think so. I’m thinking that it was your sense of humor.” She folded her arms. “You must’ve left it in Turks and Caicos. Along with your sweater.”
“I gave you that sweater,” I said somewhat indignantly.
“Aha!” She stabbed the air poignantly. “So you do remember.”
As if I could ever forget. “Of course I remember.” She kept drilling down on me with those eyes, a perfect clear blue, like the sky in Grand Turk. And right then, they held anger. Lots of it.
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“For right now, with my entire staff probably crowding to listen at the door, yes.” I got up and checked the hall in both directions, just in case. No one there—yet. Then I walked back and leaned against my desk in front of her.
“Why…” She pressed on her temple. “Why would you…”
“Why would I what?”
She threw up her arms. “I have so many questions, I don’t know where to begin.
How did you come to take this job? There is no way we’d ‘coincidentally’ end up in the same ER, in a small town that’s barely on the map.
No. Way.” She did air quotes on the coincidentally.
“Did you—did you follow me here?” Her eyes grew wide.
“Oh, my God, you did, didn’t you?” She smacked her forehead.
“This is why you should never have one-night stands. Because you don’t know who the person you sleep with really is! ”
“Shhhh,” I said, which made her even more angry.
“Relax, Ani. My mother lives here. She’s about to retire.
Would you like to meet her? She can assure you that I’m not a criminal.
” But I also knew from the moment I googled Ani last summer that she was living in Oak Bluff, of all places.
And soon as I was hired, I knew that one night, she’d show up in my ER and walk back into my life.
I’d worried about it, anticipated it, replayed it in my head, and dreaded it, all in equal measure.
“I don’t believe you,” she said weakly. Like she was trying to process how my mother could actually live here.
He snorted. “Believe what you want. But this is a place of business. And I’m in charge. I can’t—”
“Express emotion? Say hi to an old friend?” She got up and paced my office, which held a desk, two chairs, and all my diplomas and board certification certificates on the wall.
Seemed like all the degrees in the world couldn’t tell me what to do now.
She spun around. “At least, I thought we were friends. But even a one-night stand deserves some recognition, don’t you think? ”
I tried not to flinch. “Regardless of how you define our relationship, now we’re colleagues. Professional colleagues.”
Under her scrutiny, I felt like a jerk. But I could not make her a distraction.
I had to draw a clear line. “I liked you,” she continued, making me further feel like a pile of steaming bird guano.
“You were really nice. You stood out. And you were a lot different than—this.” She waved her hand over me, as if wishing I would disappear into thin air. Poof.
She wore her heart on her sleeve. She seemed incapable of deception. I didn’t know how to handle such honesty. And I definitely couldn’t give it back, or tell her that she’d stood out to me, too.
I reminded myself of my number one goal – keep everyone safe. Make my ER the safest, best ER in the state. Hell, on the planet, if I could have my way. I couldn’t save Liv, but by God, I’d use every brain cell in my head and every muscle in my body to save as many people as I could.
A dead, loaded silence filled the room. She curled her hands into fists.
I waited for her to pummel me—physically or mentally, I wasn’t sure.
How could I possibly befriend her when I was essentially her boss, at least in the ER?
And I was not going to say that I still thought of her, still wondered what might have happened if we had met at a different time of life.
That standing before me, angry as she was, she was even more beautiful than I remembered.
I absolutely could not allow anything personal to spill over into my professional life.
She narrowed her eyes, and I saw something else in them. Her anger I could take, but this…this was disappointment. Hurt.
The man I was before Liv died wouldn’t have let her feel that way. He would have been honest too. But I wasn’t that man anymore.
“Wow,” she finally said, her tone even and with deadly aim. “What…happened to you?” It was a punch in my gut.
What had happened, indeed. I could ramble on about the randomness of life, the unfairness of tragedy. How happiness could turn to grief in the space of a heartbeat. But no one wanted to hear about that.
Strange, that she was more concerned about our friendship—or whatever it was—than the fact that I’d hovered over her during her procedure. Which I shouldn’t have done.
I knew her qualifications, her recommendations. By all accounts, she was an excellent clinician. I hadn’t needed to check in on her.
So why had I done it? To scare her away? To make her angry? Or was it that if I made her angry, I didn’t have to deal with other, more complicated emotions?
I flicked up my gaze and tried not to notice her disappointment.
“What happened is that I am in charge of a place that deals with life and death Every. Single. Minute. It’s my job to ensure that everyone is doing all they can to never, ever forget that.
Our, um, relationship would put my ER at risk. ”
She snorted. Snorted! And crossed her arms. The defiance. “I’d hardly call extracting a couple of M&M’s from a child’s nose a life-and-death procedure.”
“One minute it might be M&M’s, but the next it might be someone being rolled through that door dying. Which reminds me, I wanted to reassure you that you’ll always have the backup of the ER doctor you’re working with. So never hesitate to call on me if you need help with anything.”
I reached onto the floor near my desk, pulled out a huge binder, and set it on the desk.
She stared at it with loathing. Opened it. “What is this?”
“Our protocols. You can read them at your leisure. It’s how we handle all the main emergencies, including a contact list of specialists who are on call twenty-four-seven.”
“Oh.” She shut the binder. As she leaned over my desk, my heart accelerated. I smelled her clean powdery scent, and it took me straight back to that hotel lobby on that bright, sunny, warm day, with the humid heat and the sound of the ocean waves lapping in the background.
Staring into her eyes close up, I remembered the very first time I’d seen her, when she was a terrible mess, those eyes red and puffy and mascara-streaked, but I had seen everything about her—her openness, her kindness, her heart. Her strength.
Her curls fell forward. I could reach up and touch one. Cradle her cheek like I had done once upon a time and admit to the strong connection between us that maybe hadn’t quite gone away. Ask her how she was doing—did she get over what’s-his-name? Did she ever think about me too?
“I’m not an ER doctor,” she said, “but I am a board-certified pediatrician. And I will not work shifts in this ER if I can’t have autonomy. That means no barging in on me when I’m treating patients. Okay?”
“It’s my responsibility to make certain that you’re a good doctor.”
She threw up her arms. “I am a good doctor.” And then she glared at me. “You have a real problem with control, don’t you?”
She had no idea. “I work with all kinds of community doctors with different levels of rigor in their training. I have to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
“I’ll tell you when I can use the help. When I’m out of my league. When an emergency comes in that I can’t handle by myself. You’re going to have to trust me on that.”
I nodded. “You’ll always have backup. You have my word.”
“Okay. You don’t dog me, and I’ll do my best to ask for help when I need it.”
“Deal.”
She extended her hand, and I took it.
Big mistake. Touching her—the warmth of her hand, the smoothness, the softness—made me realize that we were finally together again, through luck, serendipity, or fate.
All the dust kicked up in my old soul and blew away, replaced with a brand-new feeling of hopefulness, of excitement.
I tried like hell to tamp it all down. But if I had any doubt that the attraction, the chemistry, the heat from last summer had faded the least little bit… I was dead wrong.
I found myself lost in her eyes. Feeling the familiar undeniable pull between us. Remembering that brief but intense time when we’d both needed someone desperately and had found comfort in each other.
I never thought I’d see her again. But I had looked her up. I knew who she was, where she’d gone to school, and that her mother was the head of the women’s board for the hospital.
We were still awkwardly staring at each other, and I was still struggling to find words, any words, which were all muddled up with my swirling thoughts, when footsteps sounded down the hall, getting louder by the second.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled.
Footsteps with that amount of urgency meant that a staff member was coming to tell me something important: Someone’s had an accident.
Someone’s bleeding. Someone’s in cardiac arrest. It all boiled down to a patient needing help ASAP.
Sure enough, Angie, out of breath, burst into the room.
“Dr. L.” Angie was the real force in this ER, my right-hand enforcer and the best nurse I’d ever seen.
She was never out of breath, and she was never panicked, but now she was both.
I immediately started for the door. “We’ve got two coming at once.
” She glanced first at me and then at Ani.
Ani was already right behind me. We followed Angie straight into the ER, in time to see Cathy toss her yarn into a drawer and slam it shut. Tom stood at the front desk, ready for action. Ivy and BethAnn gathered around the desk for assignments.
“We have a fifty-eight-year-old male in cardiac arrest and a teenager in labor,” one of the triage nurses said.
“I’ll take the cardiac arrest,” I said to Ani. “You take the teen.”
Her face blanched.
I turned to Angie. “Is Dr. Cardiff on the way?”
“Already paged her,” Angie confirmed. “She’s the OB doc,” she said to Ani. “She’s twenty minutes away.”
“Oh good.” Ani blew out a breath.
Angie looked hesitant. “Not sure this baby’s going to wait. The teen is two minutes out and the EMT said she’s crowning.”
“I’m a pediatrician, not an obstetrician,” Ani said, her voice slow and steady. “I haven’t delivered a baby since med school.”
“Once the baby is born, you can practice your pediatric skills,” I said. “But for right now, Dr. Green, you’re in charge.”
She flicked me a pissed-off look, which I took as a positive sign. Defiance was always better than fright. I felt a little bad not to be more encouraging, but this was an ER, not a kindergarten. She turned to Angie. “Which room?” she asked.
“Room 2.” Ani immediately headed that way.
“Dr. Green.” My words stopped her in her tracks.
She turned, her brow creased. She was already deep in thought.
I put my hands together, palms touching, fingers out.
“What is that?” she asked, irritation in her voice.
“Just catch the football.”
“And don’t drop it,” Angie added, chuckling.
Ani looked at Angie. “Wait, Angie, aren’t you going to…”
“Sorry, Dr. G. Life and death first.” She patted Ani’s back. “You’ll be fine.”
The old me might have offered Ani more than a stupid football joke. Maybe even reassured her that I’d be right next door if anything went wrong. Or that I knew my staff of very experienced people would help see anything through.
But that wasn’t me anymore. I wasn’t here to coddle anyone, and I wasn’t here to resume an impulsive relationship that had happened by accident. Ani would have to sink or swim, just like all of us.