Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Adam
I was sitting at my desk, tapping Liv’s Turks and Caicos postcard against my fingers, thinking about how my time with Ani had begun.
How she’d pulled me in like a hurricane.
I’d lost my balance, my head. My heart. It had been easy to go along on a wild ride with her, stamping out fires, helping when I could.
But this wasn’t an adventure game. This was reality, our life—and Rosie’s life.
For any normal man, it would be justifiable to be cautious, wouldn’t it?
Ani was a whirlwind, and I wasn’t. Was that a crime?
But if it wasn’t, why did I feel so bad? Why did I miss Ani, miss Rosie, and regret how I’d ruined the life we’d been building? What had I been I so afraid of?
I looked up and smiled at Angie. “Okay, thanks. I’ll be right there.
” I thought of Mrs. McClellan, who’d been afraid of exactly that same thing, falling with a big dog, and how maybe I’d been a little judgy.
Ani and I had relieved her of the worry, as evidenced by our big hairy family member who’d happily entrenched himself into our lives to the point of cockiness, as evidenced by his propensity to think that our bed was his too.
I found myself smiling.
Our family. Until I realized there was no our because I’d screwed everything up.
And believe me, I was feeling the effects of my stupidity.
I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything but work, and that only because I kept my head down and forged through a sea of difficulties, counting the minutes until the end of each shift.
As for the postcard, I guess I’d been asking Liv what she thought of all this. But I wasn’t getting any answers. So I slipped it into my white coat pocket and went to do my job.
I rolled back the curtain of one of the acute patient bays to find an elderly couple.
The man sat in a chair. He had close-cut, white hair and was dressed sharply in a white button-down shirt, black pants, and a black suit coat with a bright red pressed handkerchief sticking out of the pocket.
He sat straight as an arrow, holding a polished wooden cane.
In his other hand, he held the thin, veined hand of a woman lying on a stretcher.
When she saw me, she hid a grimace with a weak attempt at a smile.
Despite her look of frailty, she wore a Nike quarter-zip and running pants with a stripe down the side.
The rubber-bottomed soles of her bright white sneakers poked out through the ER blanket.
“Mr. and Mrs. Russ? I’m Dr. Lowenstein.” I shook their hands and addressed Mrs. Russ. “Heard you had a fall.”
“I was walking our dog, and he spied a darn squirrel.” She grimaced again and held her hip. “And please call me Cynthia.”
“Okay, Cynthia. You fell on your right side?” I already knew in my heart with ninety-nine percent certainty what the diagnosis was: a hip fracture. I hoped for the best kind, a non-displaced, clean break that would give her the best prognosis.
“That dog is a menace,” Mr. Russ said. “He has no restraint. I told you he’s too big for you to walk him on a leash.”
“Hush, John.” She tipped her head toward him. “He was just being a dog.” Then she turned to me. “We love our Newfoundland. But I think I did it this time, Doc. Better sign me up for the nursing home.”
John looked crestfallen. A shadow fell over his face. He bit down on his lip.
“Hey, I don’t think you’re ready for Green Acres yet.” I used the nickname of the local assisted living community, Pleasant Acres. I spied a Kindle sticking out of her purse, which was on the floor near John’s chair. “Although I hear they have a fantastic book club there.”
I learned that Mrs. R walked five miles every day. That she gardened and read and got around for both of them, as John had bad arthritis.
“I’m worried about John if I’m going to need surgery,” she said with blunt honesty. “He hates driving anymore, and he’s a terrible cook. And poor Jaxson won’t get any exercise.” Jaxson, the Newfie, I reckoned. Why did everyone in this town give their dogs people names?
“Don’t worry about me,” John said. “I know how to do DoorDash.” He directed his next comment at me. “She loves that dog more than me.”
“Jaxson’s a lot easier to live with than you are sometimes,” Cynthia said. “He doesn’t talk back.”
John made a face.
“I know it’s broken,” Cynthia said, pointing to her hip. “I heard a crunch. John’s right. He can do DoorDash. But I’m going to have to go to rehab and our poor dog is going to suffer.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
Don’t do it, Adam. Don’t be a savior this time. Haven’t you got enough problems already?
“On Hawthorne,” John answered. “For the past fifty years.”
Old neighborhood, one street away from our—I mean Ani’s—house.
I absolutely was not thinking about helping with their dog.
One giant dog was more than enough—except I realized that I wasn’t a part of Ani’s household any longer, and so I didn’t technically have a dog.
After my shift, it was back to my sad, gray house.
“If you did break your hip, the rehab hospital is close by. Let’s do an X-ray and see what we’re dealing with. Don’t put yourself out to pasture yet.”
We gave Mrs. R some pain medicine. Things in the ER were slow, so while she was at X-ray, I checked in on Mr. R, bringing him a cappuccino from the back room, made by the expensive machine my staff had asked for and the hospital board had magically provided. Thanks, Julia.
“You married?” Mr. Russ asked after thanking me for the “fancy coffee.”
“No.” I decided to spare him the sob story.
But maybe my pathetic, depressed expression gave me away. “You love someone?”
I sighed heavily. “Yes.” Two someones, actually. And neither of them had been far from my mind for, oh, about fifty-seven minutes out of every hour. And yes, of course I loved them. But I hadn’t even said it to them yet.
“We’ve been married for fifty-seven years,” he said. “Even with all the ups and downs, I wouldn’t trade even one of them for the world. Best decision I ever made was to marry that woman.”
“H-how did you know?” I blurted.
Mr. Russ looked at me with a puzzled expression. No doubt wondering why the ER doctor was asking for a therapy session in the midst of a busy day. “Say that again, son?”
“How did you know that it was a great decision?” What I really meant was that there are no guarantees in life. How do you commit for the long run, knowing you could get your heart ripped out?
“She’s the best thing in the world for me. Sometimes she knows what I’m thinking before I think it. She makes me laugh. Of course, she calls me out when I do something stupid. She’s real good at that too.”
I wanted to know something else. But it would have been inappropriate to ask. What if something happened? Something you couldn’t control? What if you weren’t lucky enough to share a whole lifetime together?
That would have been callous and unprofessional. It reminded me that I needed to do my job, not ask patients for advice.
I looked up to find John laughing.
“I know about you and the doctor and the baby. You three are cute together. Why not marry her?”
“I-ah-my wife died,” I blurted, my words spilling out. “And I—I—to do it again…” I swallowed.
“Oh, I get it.” He waved his hand as if to say no big deal.
“You’re afraid it’s going to hurt. Well, sometimes it does.
But take some advice from an old man.” He waited until I made eye contact and he was certain that I was paying attention.
“Enjoy every minute together that you can. You think life will go on forever, but it doesn’t.
It’s short. And precious. Every single minute of it is precious. ”
A lump got trapped in my throat.
Ani had been the best thing in the world for me. She’d awakened me from the dead. Not just woke me up—startled, shook, and stunned me awake. Made me care about—well, everything. And she hadn’t been afraid to call me out on my fears. Somehow, she’d known them better than I did.
“I’m near the end of my time with my wife, but I’d still do everything exactly the same.” He looked up at me, his eyes watery. “Don’t miss out on a beautiful life.”
I got up. I squeezed his shoulder, but he was too choked up to talk. Actually, I was too.
If I’d suspected that I was short on brain cells before, this solidified it. I’d been so afraid to love, to be hurt, to have pain—but I’d realized that it was already too late. Because I was hurt. I was in pain—the pain of being petrified that I would never get to spend my life with Ani.
I found myself desperately wanting two things: one was for Mrs. Russ to have a clean, simple fracture with a great prognosis so that I could deliver this nice couple some good news, and the other was the end of my shift so that I could go and try to make up for all my dumbness.
I was granted my wish on the first count.
Mrs. Russ had a non-displaced intertrochanteric fracture, which was fancy talk for the best kind of hip fracture possible.
It didn’t get her out of having surgery, which Caleb, the orthopedic doctor who saw her, scheduled for the next day.
With the right rehab program, she would do great.
At last, my shift ended. Back in my office, I was taking off my white coat to hang it up when I felt the cardboard postcard in my pocket. I pulled it out, staring hard at the pure white sand of Grace Bay Beach, the turquoise water, the pier, the azure sky.
This was where I’d said goodbye to Liv and hello to Ani, when I was so full of sorrow that I could only hold myself together by regimenting every aspect of my life.
I was about to shove the postcard into my desk drawer when I dropped it, and it landed handwriting-side up. I read the back as I put it away. You’ve got to see this place! Having a fun time, so don’t worry about me. See you soon!