24. Marcus
24
MARCUS
W ith a grunt and a squeal of anger, Lily announced that she hated me just before slamming her bedroom door in my face, again. I was getting really sick and tired of this attitude from her.
Didn’t she know we were all struggling?
Maybe I should have let her cry out her frustration on her own. Her mother would have known how to handle this. I was at a complete loss with this child. I couldn’t just walk away and let her think she could get away with this behavior. It was fully unacceptable.
I took a deep breath before opening the door and stepping into her room.
“Get out,” she screamed as she rolled in on herself, clutching a pillow over her head.
I was feeling it myself, the struggle, the pain, the loss.
I pulled the pillow from her head. “You do not have to speak, but you will listen.”
She folded her arms, stuck out her lower lip in a pout, and leveled her most intense glare at me.
“I don’t know where this attitude is coming from, but it is getting worse, and I’m done with it. So you need to figure out how to curb this,” I said, circling my hands in her general direction. “And participate appropriately in our family setting.”
Her pout turned into a glower as she continued to not speak.
“So you think not talking to me is the best approach to take here?” I crossed my arms and stared right back at her. Damn, she looked like her mother more and more every day, but the attitude was straight up, one hundred percent me. Her mother had been a calm and soothing presence in our life. She knew how to unruffle the messiest of feathers. She was the peacemaker. I was the bull in a China shop, and unfortunately, that probably wasn’t the best approach when dealing with Lily and her grievances.
She needed calm. She needed the soothing attitude that Blair would have known how to approach this with.
“How can you stand there and tell me you want to be a family when you’re trying to erase my mother’s memory?”
Lily’s words caught me off guard. I knew she aimed them with intent to hurt, but honestly, they only confused me.
“What are you talking about?” I finally asked after a long, drawn-out moment of awkward silence as I tried to figure out what the hell my daughter was talking about.
“You keep bringing that woman over here and forcing her on us.”
“Nobody is forcing anybody on you, and nobody is trying to erase the memory of your mother,” I said as slowly and calmly as I could. I felt like screaming. How could she think that I wanted her to forget her mother? I didn’t want that. Ever.
I could continue to hold Blair in my heart and still develop feelings for Emma. It was complex and difficult at times, but it was possible. I didn’t need some teenager, my child or not, to tell me whom and how I could love.
“Having friends over is not trying to erase your mother’s memory.”
“That’s what you say,” she snapped.
“That’s what I mean,” I countered. “Look, Lily, this is hard on all of us, and I don’t know what to do with you. I think we need to go back to family therapy.”
Her eyes went wide. The tension in her shoulders temporarily dropped away before returning even more intensely. Her lip began to quiver. “I don’t want to talk about my feelings,” she whispered.
“I get that,” I said, “but I think you need to. I think we all do.”
“Fine. Can I at least go to therapy on my own? Or maybe just… I don’t know… you and me?”
“I think your brother needs it too.”
“I don’t want to talk about my feelings around Jason. He’s so weird about it.”
“Your brother lost his mother too,” I pointed out.
“Dad,” she whined. “If he goes, I’m not going.”
“Okay, fine. We’ll figure out how to do therapy for you, and I’ll probably still send him, but you can go on your own.”
Putting Lily back into therapy meant I needed to find her a therapist. And while I was at it, I was definitely going to have to find one for Jason. And I might as well round it all out and find one for myself as well. After all, family therapy meant the whole family.
While I knew she most likely would not participate, I still felt that this was something she was going to need. I could set broken bones. I could stitch closed open wounds. If somebody was bleeding, I could get it to stop, and I could patch them up. But I didn’t know how to make my daughter stop hurting. It was not a good feeling.
I was supposed to be some kind of medical professional, and yet I had no idea how to help my own kid. Work wasn’t much better—the stress and tension from home certainly didn’t help at work, not when the one person I felt could help me get through this was also someone I felt an immediate need to be avoiding.
How did I tell Emma that she was right? It certainly felt as if the administration might have it out for her. And because of bullshit internal office politics, I was now caught in their game. This wasn’t a game I was going to win. I either played by their rules and lost out on a potentially brilliant relationship, or I risked my career and hers.
“Dr. Chen,” I may have said a little too enthusiastically the next time I encountered her in the hall.
“Hi, Marcus.”
She seemed a little distant, which I didn’t blame her for.
“I was hoping to run into you.”
“Were you now?”
I could tell she didn’t believe me. “Actually, yes, I was,” I said.
“Oh, because it seems more like you’ve been avoiding me?” She lifted her hands and kind of pressed them at the air. It felt almost as if she were attempting to push me away.
“Look, I’m sorry—” The alert on my smartwatch sounded at the same time the alert on her phone went off.
“We have incoming.”
“Looks like that’s us,” she said.
Whatever I thought I was going to say to her got lost as we rushed back down to the emergency department. We were barely given any information, just that we had multiple incoming and that it was an all-hands-on-deck situation, and there were children involved.
By the time the EMT crews arrived, whatever had been on my mind was effectively erased while I focused on taking care of the patients in front of me.
It was intense, and at times gruesome. I didn’t feel like I let out a breath of air until my last patient was stabilized and being rolled away to recovery. Everyone on the team was exhausted. There was no possible way I was going to be able to have a productive conversation with Emma at this point. It would just have to wait until later.
I stepped into the prep room where she was washing up. I let out a frustrated grumble, and I said something unflattering because she was there scrubbing soap up past her elbows without a goddamn shirt on again.
“If this bothers you so much,” she snapped, “you can step out of the room until I leave. I thought you were an adult, but clearly, you?—”
“Emma,” I groaned. “I’m too tired to argue right now. But you should know that James Collins is already concerned about your professionalism.”
She turned and looked at me, her mouth open in what I could only assume was tired annoyance. “James isn’t here right now. So if he has a concern about my professionalism, he can shove it. You certainly didn’t seem to be worried about any of this before.”
I started to open my mouth, unsure of what I was going to say.
“You know what, Marcus? Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about any of it. I will be out of your hair soon enough, and you won’t have to worry about my professionalism or lack thereof.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
She grabbed a shirt from the stack of folded scrub tops on the shelf and pulled a clean scrubs top over her head. She wadded up the towel she had draped over the front of the sink and shoved it at me as she stormed out.
“You’re a smart man. I’m sure you’ll figure it out when you don’t see me around here anymore.”
I stared after her as she pushed her way out of the room. I had wanted to tell her that I thought James might be after her, and instead I was left standing holding a damp towel.
I stared at it for far too long before my overly taxed mind caught up. I had burned all of my mental energy on stitches and surgery and doing my job. Emma required a delicate balance between my personal and professional lives. I had always kept the two completely separate. And it was clear I was fucking up and blurring the lines between the two.
I didn’t know what to do with Emma, but at least I knew what to do with the towel. “I need a drink,” I said as I tossed it into the appropriate dirty linen hamper.