8. Alex
CHAPTER 8
Alex
“ G ood morning, Mr. Edwards.” I smiled, glancing up from the patient chart as I entered one of the private rooms in the surgical ward at Rosa Memorial Hospital. “How are you doing? Making any headway with your puzzle today?”
“These crosswords are damned near harder than recovering from surgery,” he grumbled, dropping the magazine on his lap. “Give me a seven-letter word for ‘equal in status’.”
Mr. Edwards had been in the ward for two days after a total knee replacement, and every time I walked through his door, he’d toss a cryptic clue my way and then tap his finger impatiently against the magazine when it took me longer than a split second to answer.
So far, I’d had five out of six. The only one I hadn’t managed to get, at least not without having to step out and use the Safari app on my phone, was a five-letter word for “chief gods of Norse mythology”. The answer was, of course, Aesir , which I wouldn’t have gotten in a million years, yet Mr. Edwards had called me an embarrassment to the medical profession.
He was a ray of sunshine like that.
I even had to brush up on my general knowledge the last two evenings—not that I minded, it wasn’t like I had anything better to do. In fact, it actually stopped me from staring at the two unanswered text messages I’d sent Sophie for minutes on end.
“Um . . . ” I gave it a thought, glad when the word popped into my head. “Compeer.”
Mr. Edwards studied me through his bushy eyebrows, which were dipped so low his light eyes were hidden and nodded. “Right, you are. I had that word at the tip of my tongue.”
“Of course, you did, Mr. Edwards. How’s the knee doing?”
“Fine,” he mumbled. “Pain’s at a manageable four out of ten.”
“Good,” I said, moving the linen sheet aside, pleased to see he was dressed in his own pajamas instead of the hospital gown. I checked his range of motion—it could be improved, although pain after a TKR was often severe—as well as the dressing.
“If the physical therapist says you’re moving independently with the crutches and can get up and down the stairs, we can look at discharging you soon.”
Mr. Edwards grunted. “Good. You know how much I hate hospitals.”
“Most people do,” I said, heading back to the door. Before stepping out, I glanced over my shoulder and added, “I’ll be back to check on you later. Leave me a few of the hard ones.”
A rumble of laughter from Mr. Edwards followed me into the hallway, where the usual hum and intermittent beeping of monitors filled every silent crack and corner. My morning rounds were just starting. I had another three to see in the ward and thereafter—
My phone suddenly rang.
I fished it out of my pocket, read the caller ID, and groaned so loudly a surgical nurse walking past stopped abruptly and frowned. “All good, Doc?”
“All good, Jackie,” I said, though things were far from good. What was that saying again? When it rained, it poured. The last person I needed to force a civil conversation with now was my ex-fiancée. “Vicki,” I said, pressing the phone to my ear. “I’m at work.”
“I need you to come and fetch the couch tomorrow.”
Not even a hello. You’d think everything between us would be more amicable considering there were no affairs, no financial disputes. Just two people with clashing views of their futures.
Not that it was that simple. It never was.
“I’m sorry, Vicki. I can’t make the trip to St. Helena this week. I’m busy. I’m overloaded with patients as it is, and you know I do most of the elective surgeries for the week on Wednesday.”
“Tomorrow’s Tuesday, Alex,” she snapped.
I was well aware. Just like she was well aware I did a fair amount of prep for the surgeries the day before.
“Well, make a plan, Alex. I need the couch gone before the new one arrives. The order’s set to come on Wednesday.”
“I don’t get why you don’t just keep that one,” I said. “It’s perfectly fine.”
“It’s too big,” she puffed.
“It’s a modular couch. You can just move one of the sections elsewhere. Or sell it. Do whatever you want with it.”
I had bought that couch specifically for us right after we’d moved in together, with only one thing in mind. A couch for a family. A mom, a dad, and two kids. But that was the problem. The biggest of all the small problems, the one that had sliced open our pretty relationship like it was a fragile vein. Nothing we did could ever stitch it back together.
Vicki didn’t want kids.
I did.
And you’d think not wanting kids would be an important thing to mention when dating had become serious enough for Pinterest walls dedicated solely to engagement rings. But Vicki hadn’t seemed to think so. Except the longer she went without telling me about her secret, the more snappy she’d become, pointing fingers when something broke in the house, complaining of my hours, working herself up over every little thing, until one day she’d finally confessed.
Things had ended right after.
“I want you to come and fetch it,” she said in that same, sharp, no-nonsense tone I’d grown to both love and hate. “That’s what I want, Alex. Is that so hard?”
Incredibly. Extremely. I rubbed two fingers against the space between my brows, hoping to still the headache that was slowly creeping in, and sighed. “Fine. I’ll send someone to pick it up, alright?”
“ You need to come out Alex. There’s a few other boxes you need to sort through,” said Vicki, her voice less sharp. “It’s been two months. You need to come and fetch your stuff.”
There was no need. Everything I had left behind was just pieces of a past I had no business holding onto. But Vicki didn't seem to understand that. She seemed to think I was being silly for not caring about parting with my old tennis rackets, with the signed baseball glove she'd bought me for our first anniversary, or the antique coffee grinder she'd gotten me for my birthday last year.
Whatever I was going to pick up tomorrow, I’d just end up dropping off at Goodwill.
Still, I relented, in the same passive way I had accepted the end of our relationship, because deep down, hidden beneath everything I had imagined my life would look like at thirty-eight—a job, a wife, a house, and kids—, I'd probably always known it wasn't ever meant to be.
I sighed, “Fine. I’ll come over late this afternoon and I’ll ask Sam if I can use his truck.”
“Perfect.”
The front door was open when I arrived at Vicki’s house sometime before six. The same house we’d bought together even before our engagement. Funny, how certain we were about each other back then, how sure we were that things would work out . . . no matter what.
Funny, how we could be so wrong.
I parked Sam’s pickup truck—Sam was a fellow orthopod, one of my best friends, and an admirer of huge cars, the bigger the better—in the driveway behind Vicki’s Jeep. I walked along the stone path, up the two steps to the front door, and was just about to walk inside when I leaned back to take in the house instead.
It was a two-story, three-bedroom house with a gabled roof, wood siding painted olive green, and stone accents around the base and columns. At the back of the house, French stack doors led out onto a big deck with a huge garden sprawling under the shade of a coastal live oak.
A dream house.
The perfect place for a family.
Vicki rushed into the foyer as I entered, her bare feet thumping on the honey oak floors, wearing jeans ripped at the knees and the same light blue blouse she’d worn a million times hanging loosely around her short frame.
She halted, as if she’d seen a ghost in her periphery, and then snapped her head in my direction. “Alex,” she said, her brows furrowed, her lips curled down instead of up.
Vicki was known for her smile. Big and toothy with dimples digging into each cheek and her roundish face brightening up like the sun. But that smile was nowhere in sight. “You came.”
“You summoned me, didn’t you?”
She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and carried on to the living room, pointing to the couch even though I knew exactly where it stood and what it looked like. “It’s too big. I don’t even know why you got such a massive couch in the first place.” “You know why.”
Her gaze latched onto mine, holding it so fiercely I couldn’t blink.
The staring match continued for a few seconds and ended when Vicki looked away, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know how you’re going to fit it in Sam’s truck.”
“It’ll fit,” I said sharply.
She pressed her lips thin, placed her hands on her hips, and walked to the center of the living room, where large casement windows brought in tons of sunlight. “Do you think you could take the coffee table as well, Alex? It’s not quite the right style.”
“That thing?” I pointed to our engagement gift from Vicki’s father—a solid walnut coffee table with floral motifs around the edges. The thing weighed like 120 pounds.
“Yes,” replied Vicki without hesitation.
“Fine,” I succumbed. Putting up a fight would get us nowhere but onto a path of anger. “I’ll put it in the truck first. Might have to make another trip. How’s the house?” I asked, walking over to the coffee table, trying to remember that day when Chris dropped it off. He had two men carry it in the living room.
“Great,” said Vicki. She then bit at her lip and shifted her weight onto her left foot while she scratched her shin with the other. Her balance was impeccable. She could stand like that for hours. “You know you could’ve kept it, Alex. You paid up most of the house. You could’ve lived here and done the trip to Los Osos every day. Or we could’ve sold it—”
“I wanted you to have it,” I said, glancing back at her. It was like the tennis rackets.
Whatever I once had of this life, I no longer wanted.
“Bend your knees, Alex,” said Vicki, shifting the conversation. “When you pick it up, alright? Otherwise, you’re going to hurt your back.” “Oh, how very caring of you.”
She shot me a look.
I chuckled and then bent down, not nearly squatting enough in the legs—probably just to irritate her—before I gripped the edges of the table, felt the solid weight of the walnut, and heaved with every ounce of my strength.
The question wasn’t whether I could lift it off the ground, but rather how the hell I was going to get it into the back of Sam’s pickup truck when I could barely manage to lift it an inch off the floor.
“Alex, you need to bend your knees more,” Vicki said again, watching me with her hands on her soft hips and a frown lining her forehead, clustering all the freckles together.
“Why don’t you help me?” I shot back, beginning the shuffle toward the foyer. Just when I started to believe that I might actually be able to pull it off, a sharp, stabbing pain shot through my lower back.
“Ah fuck!” I yelped, dropping the table with a loud thud, missing my feet by mere inches.
Clutching my back, I tried to straighten, but the pain radiated up my spine like an electric shock. Vicki was at my side in a flash. She slipped in beside me, wrapped her arm around my waist, and helped me to the couch.
“You probably herniated your disc.”
“You think?”
“Well, that’s what you get for thinking you’re Hercules. You should’ve asked Sam to help you out or hire someone.”
I shot her a look, made sure there was just the right amount of venom in it, and sank my head into the cushion. The pain wasn’t disappearing, but it was at least dimming for now.
“You’re going to have to stay the night, Alex,” said Vicky, sighing deeply, as if she was heavily inconvenienced, as if she was the one who had put her back out. “There’s no way you’re going to make the drive home in that state. I’ll make up the spare bedroom for you.”
Adrenaline was a mighty drug. One that could get a person to lift a car off the ground if absolutely necessary—though in my many years of medical experience, I had never witnessed such an event.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, pushing myself up slowly and cautiously until I was standing. But before I could get fully up, the pain came back with a vengeful fury, and I staggered backward, falling into the soft cushions of the couch. “Remind me to axe that table tomorrow.”
“I can have one of my therapists look at you first thing in the morning,” said Vicki, sitting down at my feet. “Unless you want me to take you to the emergency room?”
The thought of moving, especially into a car, only to be wheeled into an emergency room, didn’t sound appealing at all. Besides, the best thing right now was to let the inflammation heal, and the best way to do that was to rest. Tomorrow, if all went well, the pain would be a lot better, and I’d be able to move.
“I don’t need help. Just some strong painkillers. You’ve got those in a cupboard somewhere, don’t you? Besides arsenic?”
A small smile tugged at the sides of her lips. “Of course, I do. But I’m also booking you in with one of my therapists. I owe you that at least.”
I was just about to say something snotty like You owe me a lot more than that , but kept it to myself, and instead tried to shift to a better, more comfortable position. But the pain came in like a hot poker. “Fine . . . But only because I can’t exactly run away from you.”
“Good,” said Vicki. “At least the pain’s making you less stubborn. I’ll make you a cup of tea.” She rose, squeezed my foot unceremoniously, and headed in the direction of the kitchen, exposing that soft, gooey side of her that hadn’t completely stopped caring about me.