Chapter Ten
Ten
The thing about emergencies is that they care very little about convenience.
The fifty-nine-year-old gentleman about whom I have been called was jolted out of a deep sleep by crushing chest pain after a long shift at the auto shop and was rushed in by ambulance.
I am being dragged from my date possibly minutes before getting ravished in order to fix him.
Neither I nor my patient is particularly thrilled by the interruption, but we’re both here because this situation is quite literally as serious as a heart attack.
Julian drives me to the hospital. The electrocardiogram that Nasreen forwarded to me looks foul.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to Julian for the thousandth time.
“It’s fine. You’re saving someone’s life,” Julian says.
He doesn’t look fine. His grip on the steering wheel is perfectly set at ten and two, and he’s barely spoken to me since I got off the phone with Nasreen.
He’s disappointed, and I don’t blame him, because I am too.
I just don’t quite understand why it’s led him to this sullenness when we can just pick up where we left off the next time we see each other.
“This doesn’t usually happen,” I say. It never happens, I almost amend.
Brandon is the one on call, but he didn’t respond to the page and isn’t picking up his calls or answering his texts.
But to quote every interventional cardiologist ever, Time is myocardium, and I am not about to sit by and let someone die because I’m caught in my own romance.
Still, Brandon Pendersen better be lying in a ditch right now to justify ruining my night.
“It’s fine,” Julian repeats, but when we pull up in front of the hospital, he doesn’t lean forward to kiss me good night. He is so many miles away from the man who sat with me on the bench just minutes before, telling me he wants to gulp me down.
“It’s clearly not,” I say as I gather my things.
Julian sighs, but his gaze doesn’t lift from the wheel.
“Maybe,” he says slowly, “we should hold off on going to each other’s places for a little while.”
The whiplash almost strains my neck.
“Wait, what?” I blurt out, bewildered. “Sorry, but why?”
Julian gives me a plaintive, puppy-dog look, the same one I get from Onix when I catch him going through the trash.
“Because we get carried away,” he says. “We should be taking things slow. Getting to know each other properly. It’s hard to do that, with what we get up to whenever we’re alone.”
I almost retort that I think I know him plenty well enough already, and that being within the public eye has so far not stopped us from getting handsy with each other, but I can’t afford to entertain his contradictions. I have to go and now.
“Let’s finish this conversation later,” I tell him, throwing the car door open. “Call me? Tomorrow?”
Julian nods, but his mouth is still set tight.
“Hope it goes well,” he says.
I try not to let his chilliness bother me.
Men being intrigued by my career in theory but spooked by it in practice is par for the course.
Knowing that neither stops the twinge of disappointment from turning my stomach nor the panic from squeezing my chest—Did I tell him too much tonight?
Overwhelm him with details? Does Julian suddenly want to take things slow because now that he’s had a minute to process my baggage, he’s realized he doesn’t actually want to carry it?
The thoughts plague me as I rush into the hospital, change into my scrubs, and throw on my lead.
The case is straightforward but deadly—a blockage in the left anterior descending artery that pops open with the first inflation of our small balloon.
We get a stent in quick, and my annoyance at being interrupted fades as my patient goes from sweating through his gown and cursing us all out to comfortable and apologetic in just under half an hour.
There’s peace and purpose in the catheterization lab, a regimented process that involves minute, fine movements.
It feels like art, twirling micron-thick wires into millimeter-wide arteries, calmly directing my fellow to adjust the X-ray arms, pull the table, flush the sheath.
I take a Lyft home afterward. Onix is sleeping when I make it, and I hear him shaking awake as I turn the key in my apartment.
He plods wearily to the door, nudging it open with his snout, then gives me a scathing look like a parent who has just caught their delinquent daughter sneaking back into the house after curfew.
“I would have been back early enough tomorrow to take you out,” I assure him. He releases a long-suffering sigh, like he pays rent, then hobbles back into my room and flops onto his mattress at the foot of my bed.
It’s late, and the drastic swing of emotions from anticipation and excitement to dread and careful concentration has left me drained.
I send Julian a quick text letting him know I made it home as I brush my teeth, then collapse gracelessly into bed.
My descent into sleep is precipitous; one second I am staring up at my ceiling, and the next I have slipped into darkness.
When I wake up the next morning, I feel like death warmed over.
I spend all the next day in bed. Onix is thankfully gracious about his delayed, abbreviated walks, and in return I let him lie next to me under the covers, shivering against his body heat.
I take five flu and COVID tests and they all come back negative.
In my symptom journal, I write: Jittery. Nauseous. Extreme fatigue. Body aches.
When I tell Winona that my symptoms are back, she forces me to reach out to my primary care doctor, Dr. Steinbeck.
He orders a few tests: blood counts to see if I have an infection, inflammatory markers to assess whether my body is attacking itself, a chemistry panel to check my organs and electrolytes, a respiratory viral panel to make sure we aren’t missing a strain that wouldn’t show up on my home tests.
Everything comes back normal. I am, by Dr. Steinbeck’s estimations, the picture of health.
“Maybe it’s just a really bad cold,” he tells me over the phone.
But it doesn’t feel like a cold. It feels like being hit by a monster truck.
I suspect, glumly, that I may just be suffering from a contused heart, because days after we swapped traumas over the keys of his ostentatiously fancy piano, Julian still hasn’t called.
Worse, my check-in text, the totally neutral, definitely even-keeled request for him to let me know if he still wanted to talk, has been left unanswered, but because his read receipts are on, not unseen.
Surely, I think, the rapid oscillations in my heart rate and blood pressure whenever my phone dings with a text from someone who is inevitably not him can’t be good for me.
Regardless, no positive tests and no clear infection means that I have to go in to work.
“Don’t be a pussy, Sullivan,” Krause, who is officially the head of the cath lab and unofficially the king of unpunished Title IX violations, says, when I ask him if he or any of our other interventional cardiologists can cover my day in the lab.
“Just wear an N95 and do your job like the rest of us.”
I try each of my colleagues directly to see if any of them are willing to cover me, but they’re all either on vacation, out of town giving talks, or, in Haoran’s case, on after-school pickup duty this week.
Brandon is insufficiently apologetic.
“I promise I’ll pay you back,” he says. “It just might take a while. I’ve picked up some extra shifts, so the schedule is pretty outrageous right now. Sorry you aren’t feeling well.”
Sorry that you’re useless, I want to say, but I have neither the energy nor the desire for another fruitless confrontation with yet another man who destroyed my belief in love and loyalty. So I drag myself in and manage to get myself through my cases without passing out into my sterile field.
In some ways, I am happy for the work. It distracts me from perseverating 24/7 on the fact that Julian still hasn’t reached out.
It’s hard to sink into despair when someone else’s life is on the line, to dwell on the tragic coincidence that his disappearance coincides with my decision to confide in him about the fallout of my last relationship.
In the lab, I am the cool, precise Dr. Sullivan, jamming to my playlist of nineties R & B while I give my patients their second leases on life.
The moment I step outside it, I collapse into a pathetic pile of achy goo who can’t go longer than five minutes without checking her phone for a missive from a man who, at this point, has made it abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with me.
It doesn’t help that I still see him every night.
He’s different in my dreams too, distant—a passerby in a crowd, a stranger standing opposite me on a darkened train platform.
When I call his name, he averts his eyes, and in this space in which my hold on my emotions is tenuous at best, his dismissal feels like torture.
Through the force of sheer will alone, I make it to my girls’ date with Sophie. I’m about 99.99 percent sure that I’m not contagious, but my appetite is shot and I don’t want to get my goddaughter sick, so I wear a mask, push the menu at our favorite ramen spot to her, and tell her to go hog wild.