8. Marcus
8
MARCUS
“D ad,” Jason whined with a huff. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this.”
He dropped his heavy backpack into the chair in my small office.
“What am I supposed to do with you? Jason, you’ve been tormenting your sister. You broke the PlayStation in a fit to get back at her, and now I get an email from your teacher telling me that you aren’t turning in your homework. It’s not like you. Not like you, Son.”
He shrugged and slapped his arms up at the elbows before sitting heavily in the empty chair across from my desk.
“Why are you making me come here after school?”
“Because here after school, I can check on you to make sure you are doing your homework. I don’t know how to make you and your sister get along.”
“Mom never punished me like this.”
I let out a weary sigh. “She knew what she was doing.” My wife had been special. Her children adored her. I adored her. “I’m Mom until I can figure something else out. I want you to come to the hospital after school and do your homework.”
“Do I have to stay all day? Do I have to do this tomorrow too?”
“Maybe once you prove to me and your teacher that you can get your homework done and get your grades back up, you can go home after school. But until then, you come here, you sit in this office, and you get your homework done.”
“You’re being unfair.”
“Life isn’t fair, Jason. And I’m trying to instill a sense of ownership on the tasks that are assigned to you.”
I reached into my desk drawer, pulled out my wallet, and removed a couple of bills, slamming them on the desk in front of him.
“There are vending machines down the hall. You can get snacks. I’ll be back to check on you.”
“Are you just going to leave me? Are you doing rounds? How long have I got?”
“It’s not going to be hours. I’m just going to go check in at the emergency department, see if they need me. If they need me for anything, I’ll be back in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I expect you to show me completed homework when I get back.”
I left him bemoaning his plight, how incredibly unfair I was expecting him to complete his assignments. I ran my hand through my hair as I headed down to the emergency and trauma department.
I didn’t get that kid. I didn’t get either of my kids, actually. But Jason was so sweet. He had been such a kind boy, eager to earn good grades and show off the notes of encouragement from his teachers. Even after Blair’s passing, when Lily grew more morose, Jason seemed to be… reassuring. He wanted praise and approval more so than before. This sullen, moody, full of attitude… it was new, and I didn’t like the direction he was headed. I didn’t want to call my son a jerk, but if he kept this up, he was going to turn into one.
I stopped at the nurse’s station to check in with the charge nurse.
“We just had a patient come in presenting with abdominal pain,” the nurse said as she handed me a chart when I asked her how things were.
I flipped it open and reviewed the notes.
The patient was an overweight, middle-aged woman presenting with sharp pain in the right midline, and her shoulder hurt.
“Have you sent her for an ultrasound on that gallbladder?” I asked.
“No one’s had a chance. No one other than triage has had a chance to look at her yet.”
I went and visited the patient, and after pressing lightly on her abdomen, I was convinced it was a gallbladder issue.
“I’ll have those tests ordered for you,” I mentioned before I left.
I put in the order for the tests I wanted her to have before checking in with the other department doctors. Technically, these were my office hours when I was supposed to be completing all the paperwork I hadn’t bothered to do during my previous shift. But if I could help out down here, I wanted to stay where I was needed.
I also needed to give Jason some time to get his act together. After he finished pouting, I was convinced the boy would buckle down and take care of his homework. And if I were being honest with myself, I was kind of hoping to run into Emma. We still hadn’t managed to schedule a time where we could really sit down and hash out the details of an intake procedure protocol.
I felt that we should be working on something just to streamline the process. But it wasn’t a desperate need. The hospital obviously functioned well without it. It was my excuse to get Emma to sit down, spend some time with me.
I stuck around long enough to confirm the gallbladder patient was, in fact, going to need surgery. I passed her case on to the hospitalist, who would get her admitted to the hospital and appropriately scheduled for surgery.
“You’ll be feeling better in no time,” I said to the patient as I gave her the status update.
I put her chart back into the appropriate slot at the nurse’s station so her records could be picked up when she was transferred, then headed back to see how much homework my son had managed to avoid doing.
“Dr. Walker,” I heard Emma call my name as I approached my office door. “I’m glad I caught you. I thought we should schedule that meeting.”
I smiled. She looked flushed around the edges, maybe a little nervous. Was she nervous talking to me? Maybe it hadn’t been my imagination that she had been avoiding me the past few days.
“That would be great. Let me grab my schedule, and I’ll be right back.”
I stepped into my office to see Jason at my desk, smiling at the computer screen. The noises coming from my computer were not indicative of studying. There were ‘boings’ and whizzes and loud crashes.
I stopped in my tracks. “Jason!” I barked.
“Dad?” He gasped in surprise. He frantically smashed at the keys on my keyboard.
“That had better be homework.”
“Yeah, I was looking something up.”
“Do not lie to me.”
“But, Dad?—”
“Jason, I left you here to do homework, not play video games. Unless you can produce a completed essay or any piece of homework from that backpack in the next thirty seconds, we are going to have a serious conversation. And if you think coming to my office after school to do homework for a week is punishment…”
I pointed at him and grabbed my date book before turning back to face Emma.
“My apologies. Shall we?” I extended my hand, indicating that we should go back out into the hallway.
I held up my leather-bound date book. “I know this is old-fashioned, but I still can’t seem to keep track of my schedule unless I write it down.”
She whipped out her phone from her pocket and held it up. “I have mine with me all the time.”
“I know, I know. I just can’t seem to keep up with it when it’s digital. It doesn’t seem to work for me.”
As I had all of my attention on Emma, I almost missed the growl of frustration coming from behind me.
Emma’s eyes went wide, and she reached out to snatch a coffee cup out of the air right before it crashed into the side of my head.
“Wow, that’s a good throwing arm he’s got there,” she said with a nervous laugh.
I looked from her to Jason. He was panting hard, and the expression fighting for control of his face was somewhere between shock, awe, and a smile. The pretty doctor had complimented him, and he had almost hit me in the head with a ceramic coffee mug. Both of these realizations were having a power struggle over his expression.
Emma stepped into the office and set the mug down on the edge of my desk.
“I think next time, don’t throw something at the back of your dad’s head. Okay? Especially not in a hospital. You’ve got a good aim. But what would have happened if you had been off? You could have hit me. You could have hit a patient. A nurse. Anybody you didn’t want to hit. So next time, let’s not throw things in the hospital. Okay?”
Jason nodded at her, wide-eyed. His mouth hung open. She hadn’t yelled or shouted, but as Jason nodded and started blinking, his face turned white. Then the tears started.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry.”
He collapsed back into my desk chair.
“I think I’ll let you handle this, and we’ll talk about scheduling our meeting another time. Okay?”
She patted me on the back.
“That was a good catch,” I managed to say.
“I think the two of you have a lot to discuss. I’ll see you later.”
My son needed me, but I couldn’t help but watch her leave. There was something about how she handled that entire situation—from her superhero-quality reflexes to how she managed to put Jason in his place. She got through to him, I think, in a way that all of my blustering and shouting hadn’t.