Chapter 13
A few days later, I find a clear plastic bag from her bakery on the coffee table. There’s an assortment of mixed nuts inside—pecans, walnuts, and peanuts, too. Dangling from a yellow ribbon is a notecard.
Thanks again for coming to the rescue this past weekend. What would I do without a nut lover like you?
I smile and save the card, then pop some nuts in my mouth on the way to work.
* * *
The next few weeks at the hospital pass in a blur of gunshot wounds, chest pain, shower falls, drug overdoses, boiling water spills, and an apple where the sun doesn’t shine.
The man who became intimately acquainted with the fruit told me he fell on a basket of Granny Smiths while sweeping the floors. “I like to keep them around, easily accessible. Apples are good for you,” he’d said, while explaining away his . . . predicament.
In his case, the apple a day didn’t keep the doctor away.
There was also an afternoon shift when the paramedics rushed in an incredibly polite British man who had collided with a wooden post at a construction site. “I seem to have acquired a splinter,” he’d said, of the half-foot-long piece of wood in his ribs.
Ouch.
Today, we encountered a surprise baby.
When I return home, I tell Josie the story as she slides a lasagna dish out of the oven to check on it.
I lean against the doorframe of the tiny kitchen, savoring the aroma of her cooking.
“The girl was eighteen. She came in complaining of food poisoning. When we informed her she was pregnant and dilated to ten centimeters, she told us she was going to sue us for defamation of character.”
“Well, naturally. Being told you’re pregnant by a doctor is complete and absolute grounds for a courtroom trial, I’m sure,” she says as she closes the oven door. “Five more minutes for this.”
“Then she started pushing, and when the baby came out, her first words were, ‘It’s not mine. It needs to go back to its mama. Send it back to its real mom.’”
Josie frowns. “Awww. Poor baby.”
I nod. “Yup.”
She tilts her head. “Do you think she just didn’t want to be pregnant and was trying to deny it, or was she mentally unstable?”
“Hard to say. The girl’s not the first one to come into the ER saying she didn’t know she was pregnant.”
“But if she doesn’t want the kid, what happens to the baby?”
I shrug as I grab a grape from a glass bowl on the counter and pop it into my mouth. “Don’t know. That’s for the hospital social worker to figure out.”
“I wish there was something we could do for the baby,” she says softly.
“It’s going to be fine. The baby is healthy,” I say, since that’s really all I know.
Worry is etched onto her features as her brow furrows. “But how do you know it’s going to be fine?”
Her question gives me pause. Makes me think. “I don’t entirely know, but I trust that the appropriate people will help both of them.”
She sighs heavily and shakes her head. “But for a second, just think about what happens next. What is life going to be like for either one of them?”
I shrug, half wishing I could give her the answer she wants, and half wishing she’d stop asking.
I don’t always like to contemplate what happens next to my patients.
Next isn’t always pretty. Next isn’t always good.
I do all I can do in the exam room. I can’t start marinating on the pieces of everyone’s life that I have zero control over.
She peers at the clock on the stove. “I can’t help it. I feel bad for both of them.”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “She’s going to be fine.”
She shoots me a skeptical stare. “Who? The baby? The mother?”
I stare at her back. “Both, I presume.”
Her voice escalates in a mix of sadness and irritation. “You can’t just presume that.”
I nod. “Yes. I can. It’s part of the job.”
She shakes her head and knits her brow. “I don’t get it. How can you separate everything so easily? How can you say she’ll be fine when you don’t actually know?”
I take a breath and call upon my best cool demeanor.
Josie’s getting emotional. She’s becoming attached to patients that aren’t even hers.
I need to talk down the Florence Nightingale in her.
“Hey,” I say calmly, setting a hand on her arm.
“We have people at the hospital who can help. We have a great social worker. We’ll do everything we can.
The only way I could assist her medically was to focus on the physical.
Now there are others who will help her, okay? ”
She draws a huge breath, like she’s gulping up oxygen after being deprived. When she nods as if she’s settled, I’m ready to write this off as done, but then she slides past me. “Excuse me,” she mumbles, her voice hitching, then she’s off and seconds later the bathroom door slams closed.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
And I wait. And I wait. And I wait.
When the timer beeps on the oven, I half figure that Josie’s internal baker clock will ding and summon her from the bathroom.
But after sixty seconds, she’s still MIA, so I grab a potholder, pull out the lasagna, and set it on a cooling rack.
Staring at it for a minute, I decide on a game plan.
I don’t know what Josie’s upset about, but I can only fix what I can fix.
The rest of dinner.
I hunt around for a bottle of wine, grab a merlot, and unscrew the cork.
When I find two glasses, I set them on the coffee table in the living room that doubles as our dining room table.
I add cloth napkins—the only kind we use, since Josie’s taught me that paper ones are wasteful to the environment.
When I return to the kitchen, I grab two sunshine-yellow plates, then a spatula.
I serve a chunk of lasagna for her, then one for me.
As I set the plates on the table along with forks, she rounds the corner, a wad of tissue in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice thin with tears. Her expression is soft now and apologetic. “I didn’t mean to push so hard about a patient of yours.”
“Don’t think twice about it. But . . . are you okay?” I step closer to her.
“It’s not you. I just . . .” She swipes at her cheeks with the tissues.
“I just had a long day, and we ran out of seven-layer bars earlier than we’d advertised for the Tuesday special, and this customer came in and threw a complete fit that we were out, and said she was going to”—she stops to adopt a bitchy voice—“‘rip us a new one’ on Yelp. And I know it’s a little thing in the scheme of all the big things, but I’ve worked so hard to build a good business after I took over for my mom, and sometimes all it takes is one bad review to shred you.
So I’ve been waiting all day for the other shoe to drop, and on top of that my friend Lily’s boyfriend is acting like a total dick, and I feel bad for her because she still likes him, but he’s so not worth her time and I want her to realize it.
And so I was making lasagna to try to get my mind off it all.
” Her words are tumbling out like she’s in a confessional.
“And then you come home, and you’re so good at separating everything, and I just can’t do that.
I’m terrible at that.” Another tear slips down her cheek.
I take a tissue and wipe it away. “You don’t have to deal with things the way I deal with things. You’re you, and you should deal with them as you need to.”
She takes a deep breath and nods. “I wish I could just shut things off. Like you can.”
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” I joke.
“It’s a gift,” she says emphatically.
“Well, look. I have to separate myself to some degree. I can’t react to things the way a patient would, because if I did then I wouldn’t be very good at taking care of them, right?”
She nods as I wrap an arm around her and guide her to the couch.
“I’m sorry I gave you a hard time,” she whispers.
I shake my head. “Ha. That was hardly a hard time. And if you do decide to give me a hard time, I can handle it.” I puff out my chest and hit it. “Steel, baby. I’m steel. I can take it.”
She smiles, a rueful little grin.
“But look. Don’t get frustrated that emotions spill over for you. It’s who you are, and it’s part of what makes you . . .”—I pause, looking for the right words—“one of the most amazing people I know.”
She swats my shoulder. “Oh stop.”
“Hey, you are,” I say. Then I take a beat and quirk up my lips. “Honestly, though, I thought you were just having your period.”
“You ass,” she says.
“I totally am an ass. But this ass served dinner.” I gesture to the meal. “Dine with me?”
“Why, I thought you’d never ask.”
As we dig into the lasagna, my belly thanks her. I point with my fork to the plate. “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”
“You say that about everything I make.”
“And I mean it about everything you make.”
“Thank you,” she says with a smile. “Oh, and in case you were wondering, my period was last week, and you didn’t even notice.”
“Damn, you’re stealthy in the hormonal reaction department.”
She nudges her shoulder into mine. “Sorry again. Do you forgive me?”
I meet her eyes, and for a second I’m tempted to run my hand through her hair, to brush my lips to hers, to kiss her softly to reassure her that we’re all good.
Then I snap out of it.
Even so, I wish I could tell her the truth. That it’s getting harder for me to pull off this trick. That she challenges my ability to compartmentalize like no one and nothing ever has. All my instincts tell me to kiss her, to touch her, to take her to bed.
But man can’t let instincts rule him.
Mind over man, I remind myself.
The good news is when she checks Yelp again that night, her bakery still has a sterling average.
I tell her the woman was all talk. When she kisses me good night—on the cheek—I clench my fists as a reminder to keep it all in check.
As she turns on her heel and walks into her bedroom, my eyes don’t stray from her, and that’s the problem.
It’s become all too clear that these separate drawers are getting messier every day.
I’m not sure how to keep them closed.
But I vow to try.