Four #2
Henry chuckles, taking a long drink of his beer. After a beat, he says, “But are you happy? I mean… are you glad you’re here? Glad you… did this?” he gestures to the apartment.
“I kind of didn’t have a choice,” I mutter, taking a sip from my bottle.
“Sure you did,” Henry says. “You could have stayed in California and tried to match for residency somewhere else next year. Worked as a paramedic or a medical assistant there. Done a fellowship. You had a lot of options,” he explains, making me feel small with every item he lists.
His face is compassionate, his brows slightly raised, making me feel like I don’t really have a choice but to be honest with him.
Part of me forgot how intuitive Henry is.
I haven’t seen him for more than a day or two over the past few years, but he has a way of getting right to the point.
When I called him six months ago and said I was moving back to New York, his immediate response was, “Do I need to bring a shovel?”
“What are you talking about?” I’d said, so confused by his initial reaction.
“A shovel. To bury the body. We’re using your car though because I’m not getting mine dirty.”
“Henry, what the fuck are you talking about?” I’d snapped.
“You literally said you’d never move back to New York unless you had to. So I have to assume that you’re on the run from the law, or the mob, or something. And I’m just saying I’m here for you, man. But I’m not getting dirt in my car.”
And that’s Henry.
“Alright, you don’t have to be so dead-on about it,” I say, placing my beer on a coaster on the coffee table.
“Dude, coasters, really?” Henry accuses, changing the subject for a moment. “You’re a thirty-year-old man, not a grandma with plastic on her couch.”
“Oh fuck off,” I grunt, pushing a coaster in his direction. “Don’t make a ring on the coffee table. This shit is from Pottery Barn.”
Henry rolls his eyes and puts his foot on the table. I’m about to yell at him, but then I see that he is laughing, trying to goad me. I give him the finger as he moves his foot. “Sorry,” he says, laughing. “Go on, you were saying something about me being right.”
I squint. “Not sure I said that…” I reply and he raises his brows. “But I guess I could have done other things. And maybe I would have, if—” My voice trails off, the unspoken words filling the silence.
If not for my father.
Henry knows all about my relationship with my father.
For four years in undergrad he listened to the monotonous lectures blaring through my phone about my future, the expectations I had to live up to, the role I was meant to play in our family’s legacy.
I was the next Dr. Cole, and my father made no mistake of explaining the consequences of my not following through on that plan.
It’s not as if I was a student who struggled with the academics required for what was asked of me.
I wasn’t the kid born with a desire to be an actor or some shit instead of a doctor.
I love medicine. Although sometimes—a lot of the time—I wished that I didn’t, just to spite my father.
But I was good at it, and for the amount that my sister calls me a curmudgeon, I do like helping people.
I sailed through a lot of undergrad, but the difficulty of medical school hit me hard.
And residency interviews even harder. Because the fact is, I am a curmudgeon.
I generally don’t work well with others, and I don’t make friends easily.
Which is exactly what I had to do to match for residency—make people like me.
“Yeah, I guess you couldn’t avoid him and the Cole name in New York forever,” Henry says with a sigh.
I nod, defeated. The Cole name. The name that will follow me every step of the way through residency.
The name with a weight that I’ve been trying to escape for eight years.
The expectation to be the exceptional son of Dr. Andrew Cole.
“It hurts me to not see you happy, though, man,” Henry adds.
“It’s not that I’m not happy. I’m just—”
“Surviving,” Henry finishes.
I drum my lips. “Yeah, I guess.” I take another drink.
“What would you do—if you didn’t match for residency at all?” Henry asks, a genuinely curious look on his face.
“Dude, I didn’t match. My father is the reason I’m in a residency program right now.”
“You really think so?” I nod. Henry lets out a breath, trying to wrap his head around the insane level of nepotism.
It’s hard to believe shit like that actually happens, but I’m the proof of how far my father is willing to go to protect his name.
I push away the intrusive thought about being unworthy of being in the program at all.
“But what if?” Henry adds.
I shake my head. I wish I could tell Henry the truth, that I would choose a career that didn’t come with such anxiety, so much risk of something going wrong, and so much of a chance to indulge my obsessive tendencies.
I wish I could tell him that my compulsions rule my days in the hospital.
I wish I could tell him that even though there are some parts of medicine that I love, I would take the chance to escape from the path my father has laid out for me in an instant.
But those thoughts are still there, the ones that tell me if I share too much, if I tell people what I’m really thinking, they’ll judge me, and that feeling of unworthiness will come back.
Not everything I think is true, I say to myself.
But still, I stay quiet.