Chapter 3 Hayley #2
It seemed most of Dermatology was still down in the cafeteria for spaghetti day. The lounge was deserted. Hayley fled for the reflection pod at the very back of the lounge and reached for the handle.
Then she realized she was about to open up an occupied pod. Through the glass door, her eyes locked with those of Deborah Morales, holding a forkful of spaghetti over her plate on the tiny pod table, the both of them absolutely frozen in place.
Hayley moved first, backing up and running for another pod. She flung the door open and hurled herself inside, sitting down and immediately crumpling over the table. Arms pillowing her head, she burst into sobs that racked her entire body.
It wasn’t often that a patient's death got to her like this. But she’d spent so much time with Ernest over the last month, since he’d alienated all the other female nurses and wasn’t very cooperative with the male ones.
Despite his partial pervy insistence, he’d been a sweet man.
He’d enjoyed fishing on the weekends, was a big Chargers fan, had proven to be surprisingly well-read.
He’d been a widower for five years and missed his wife terribly.
He liked applesauce and disliked scrambled eggs.
An hour ago, he had been a whole, happy person, and now he was simply gone. Hayley thought she’d never stop crying.
There was a tentative tap on the glass door. Startled, Hayley lifted her head and stared through the door with her swollen eyes. Deborah.
“Can I… Are you okay?” Deborah asked, looking as though she wanted to be anywhere but there. Hayley knew the feeling.
Reaching over, she pushed open the door. “Of course I’m not okay. What kind of a question is that?”
Deborah rolled her eyes. “A civilized one. Never mind. Sorry I bothered.” She began to close the door.
“Wait!” Hayley held her hand out to keep the door open. She sniffled. “Do you have any tissues?”
“No.” Deborah glanced around. “Hang on.” She walked out of Hayley’s line of sight briefly, coming back with a green box of tissue. “Of course Derm would be using the tissue with aloe.”
“Oh, no, that’s good, it’ll be nice around my eyes and nose.
” Hayley took the box and pulled out a tissue, dabbing delicately around her sore eyes.
She almost certainly looked terrible—tearstained, bright pink.
She never had been a pretty crier. Pulling another tissue, she cleaned up around her nose, wincing at the amount of snot she was clearing up.
The whole time, Deborah stood there, a look of uncertainty on her face. Hayley wasn’t feeling all that steady herself. This sort of interaction wasn’t exactly usual for them. By now at least one of them would have said something insulting.
Deborah didn’t seem inclined to break the silence, or maybe she just didn’t know what to say. Hayley decided to go first. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” Deborah said, a trifle gruffly. As she often did, she stuck her hands into her lab coat pockets and started messing around with whatever was in there.
Her dark eyes darted around the room as she fidgeted.
She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t look like she was leaving, either. Interesting.
Hayley finished dabbing at her face and stood up in the little reflection pod, clutching her used tissues in her hand. Deborah was blocking her way out. “Hi. I need to…”
“Oh, yeah.” Deborah stepped back, pulling the door open more widely. “Sorry.”
“No problem.” Hayley looked around and spotted a trash can. She walked over to throw away her tissues. When she turned back around, Deborah was still there by the reflection pod and still looked ill at ease. Hayley frowned in confusion. “Did you… did you need something from me?”
“No, no.” Deborah pulled one hand out of her pocket and gestured back towards the pod she had been occupying. “I was in the middle of my lunch.”
“I know.” Hayley simply waited.
After a long moment or two, Deborah rolled her eyes and heaved a sigh. “I didn’t want to get back to it without making sure you were okay.”
“What do you care?” Hayley blurted without thinking, so surprised was she at the concern.
“Wow, damn, nevermind then.” With a snort, Deb turned and began to stomp back over to the pod she’d left her spaghetti in. “Pardon me for not being an asshole.”
“For once,” Hayley mumbled under her breath. Then with a sigh of her own, she trotted after Deborah and caught up just as the other woman reached the pod and had her hand on the handle. “Doctor Morales. I’m sorry. I was just surprised. We don’t usually…”
“Exchange niceties? No.” Deborah turned back and shrugged. “But you seemed really, really upset. I can have some compassion even for snotty little nurses.”
“Oh, and there it is.” Hayley threw her hands in the air. “Wow.”
But Deborah didn’t fire back another snarky remark. “I’m not interested in arguing, I have a lunch to get back to before it gets cold. Are you all right, Nurse Milton?”
“Yeah, I just…” Tucking her hands into her scrub pockets, Hayley began to pace around. “We lost a patient in ICU. He’d been there for a while, and I’d finished his paperwork to send him up to cardiac. He was supposed to be going upstairs to finish getting better and…” Her throat closed up.
Still standing by the pod, Deborah nodded. “Ah. Yeah. That’s rough. Did you like him?”
“I mean…kind of?” Hayley walked back to the pod she’d been in to retrieve the box of tissues. She could feel her eyes welling up again. “Honestly, he was kind of a perv. He was always flirting with the female nurses.”
“Even you?” Deborah raised an eyebrow and chuckled. “And he lived?”
“Well, you know, we have to be nice to patients, especially in our unit.” Hayley dabbed at her eyes as the tears began to trickle out.
“But he was this sweet old widower, mostly. He liked to read, and we had a little book club going. We were about to finish reading Pride and Prejudice together.” She sniffled.
“He didn’t really like it. Said he liked Northanger Abbey better.
He was such a…” She looked up, groping for words. “He contained multitudes, I guess.”
Deborah nodded. “Humans are complicated. And we have complicated feelings.”
“Yeah.” Hayley patted a tissue under her nose and then took in a deep breath.
“Anyway. It just hit me hard. Warts and all, I’ve spent a lot of time with him this month.
He was turning the corner, after weeks of complex care.
He should have been able to get better and get back to his fishing boat. ” More tears began to flow.
Deborah took a step or two forward. “You said he was a widower?”
“Yeah.” Hayley was beginning to feel stinging around her eyes as she wept, despite the aloe in the tissues.
“Maybe…” Deborah’s hands were back in her pockets. “Maybe he’s with his wife again. If there’s an afterlife.”
Well. That was an unexpected turn for the conversation to take. Hayley’s eyes widened in surprise. “Do you believe in the afterlife?”
“Eh, well. I don’t know, exactly.” Deborah pointed to herself.
“You see me. Mexican-American. I was raised Catholic. In Texas.” Walking over to one of the tables, she leaned back on it.
“So my whole childhood, I spent being terrified of hell. And deeply, deeply afraid the Virgin Mary was watching me commit a multitude of sins I didn’t know about and telling her son about them. ”
“Oh.” Hayley had been raised in a fairly casually Methodist household by a pair of methodical-minded high school teachers in Sacramento.
Her mother taught English, her father Biology.
Church was mostly a social occasion for them.
She racked her mind for what she knew of Catholicism, which wasn’t much. “Did you go to confession?”
“Yeah, after my First Communion … you know a lot about Catholicism?” When Hayley shook her head, Deborah nodded.
“Communion means I did the whole bread and grape juice thing, body and blood of Christ and all. Then I started Confession, and man.” She chuckled.
“I Confessed everything. My priest was sick of me. Thinking about smacking my little sister with a Barbie when she took my favorite doll dress? Confession. Stepping on a crack on purpose because I was mad at my mama? Confession. Hugged the family dog too hard and made him yelp? Confession.”
“Oh, wow.” Hayley couldn’t imagine being that devout about anything.
Deborah seemed to see what she was thinking. “I wasn’t particularly religious, like I said, I was just terrified of hell. I figured if I was sorry about every little tiny bad thing I ever did, I’d be okay.”
This was fascinating. “Do you still go to church, then? Still believe in hell?”
“No, and… I don’t know.” Deborah tilted her head back, her messy bun flopping backwards as she thought. “Things got complicated when I realized I was a lesbian. Even if you don’t know a lot about the Catholic Church, you probably know they have opinions on that.”
“True, I do know that.” Hayley nodded.
“My mama was mostly all right with the lesbian thing… she’s gotten better in recent years.
But she still struggles to reconcile it with her faith in the Church.
I think that’ll always be a thing for her.
For me…” She rolled her head and stretched her neck.
“Science is a big deal for me. Obviously.” She gestured to her white lab coat and offered Hayley a lopsided grin.
“There’s a lot I still love about the Church, though.
Like the smell of incense is still an important sensory memory, right?
But the Church…” Deborah sighed. “It doesn’t really love me, I guess.
And they really hammered the gay sin thing home when I was young and impressionable.
So, logically I think, of course there’s no hell.
But emotionally, the threat of it is still there, and by all the Church tenets, I’m going to it.
So…” She wobbled a hand. “I do, and also I don’t, believe in the afterlife. ”
“Wow.” This was a lot to digest. They’d never had a real conversation before, really, let alone one as deep as this was turning out to be.
“That’s fascinating. I don’t… I don’t really believe in hell.
Or heaven. We weren’t religious in my house.
But maybe Ernest did. That wasn’t something we talked about.
” Hayley thought back over the conversations they’d had.
“I just know he missed his wife. He talked about her a lot. So maybe if there is an afterlife, yeah. Maybe they’re together again. ” It was somehow a comforting thought.
Silence fell between them again, but it wasn’t a weird and awkward silence. Hayley felt comfortable continuing to clean herself up while Deborah leaned against the table, seemingly deep in thought.
The loss of Ernest still stung, and she knew it would for a while. But this conversation with her absolute professional nemesis had been oddly helpful.
There was a mirror and sink over in the corner of the derm lounge, with a few skincare products and a stack of clean white washcloths in a little basket. Hayley walked over and soaked a cloth in cold water and placed it over her swollen eyes.
Footsteps behind her made her jump and spin around, yanking the cloth off of her face just a moment later. “Sorry,” Deborah said. “I’m gonna go hole myself back up in my pod and finish my lunch. But I wanted to make sure you were actually okay before I did.”
Hayley clutched the washcloth to her chest and told her racing heart to slow down. Then she remembered the cloth was wet, and it was soaking her scrub top through.
Deborah was standing close. She reached forward and gently took the cloth out of Hayley’s hand. “You’ve got a little…” With a finger, she tilted Hayley’s chin up and brushed carefully under her eyes with the wet cloth. She was concentrating hard.
Hayley held her breath. The feel of Deborah’s hand on her chin, the focus in her eyes as she wiped away at whatever was on Hayley’s face, the growing tension she felt unfurling in her stomach, she didn’t know what to do with any of this.
The only sound in the room was the two of them breathing, and it slowly synced into one sound. Deborah set the cloth aside but didn’t release her hold on Hayley’s chin. Their eyes locked.
Kiss me, Hayley was surprised to find herself thinking. Do it. Do it!
Deborah’s head moved down, ever so slightly.
Do it…
The door to the lounge opened, hinges creaking as a pair of nurses entered the room, chattering brightly as they carried their boxes of spaghetti over to one of the tables.
Deborah leaped back so fast, she was almost a human blur.
In the next instant, she’d walked briskly back to the reflection pod her lunch was in and pulled the glass door shut behind her.
Hayley stood frozen, blinking, trying to process what the last twenty minutes had been. It didn’t take long for her to realize it was hopeless. She managed to take one step forward, thinking she’d go yank open the door of the pod Deborah was in. But then she stopped. No. Bad idea.
She didn’t know what was going on with Deborah, or between them, or if she wanted something to be going on between them, and it was all too much to unpack while she was grappling with the fresh sorrow of a patient loss.
But she did know that after Deborah had been so vulnerable with her about her religious beliefs, she should honor the clear signal that the closed door was.
And, she realized, she should go find a clean, dry scrub top. The cold wet spot on her chest was spreading and increasingly uncomfortable.
With one last glance at the firmly closed pod, Hayley shook her head and left the Derm lounge.