Chapter 23
NIA
“K atie-cat!” I shout down the hall as I fill my travel mug to the brim with steaming coffee. “Shoes need to be on and we need to be out the door, missy!”
When she rounds the corner with her backpack in hand, Katie gives me a twirl, showing me her princess costume – complete with tiara – which was absolutely not the option we’d set out for her to wear before breakfast.
“I love your princess dress,” I tell her, “but school says you can’t wear it unless it’s Halloween. Please put on your other outfit.”
“Daddy lets me wear my dress-up,” she whines.
“That’s because you’re at Daddy’s house on the weekends, Katie-cat,” I counter. “You can’t wear your dress-up to school. I’m sorry.”
“Daddy says you play dress-up,” she pouts, kicking her foot at the ground. “He said you only pretend so you go away more.”
I know the human anatomy. I know how it functions, and I know that it isn’t possible; and yet, I still feel my heart plummet out of my chest as the words leave her mouth.
I feel it hit the ground with a sick, squelching impact that knocks the breath from my lungs as they crumble and fall out of place in its absence.
Abandoning my coffee and the bag that was slung over my shoulder, I take the few steps necessary to get to my daughter and I sink to my knees in front of her. Reaching for her hands that, right now, feel so small, I search her eyes.
“Katie, I would never choose to be away from you,” I tell her. “Your daddy was— just confused. Mommy misses you all day while I’m at work, and my favorite part of the day is coming home to see you.”
“I wanna wear my dress-up,” she tells me, her voice going soft as her knuckles reach to rub at the corners of her eyes, and the heart that plummeted to the floor somehow manages to split clean down the middle.
“You can wear your dress-ups all week long when you’re on break, okay?” I offer, stroking her hair behind her ear. Trying to keep my voice from shaking through my own tears that beg me to let them fall feels like a near-impossible task. “Even to the grocery store.”
I pull my daughter into my arms and hold her tightly while she cries.
This isn’t just about not being allowed to wear her costume to school, and I know that. It goes so much deeper than that, and it’s a pain that I wish I could have kept her from. I wish that I could take it away from her and make it my own, instead.
I wish I could let her wear the stupid costume.
When we finally make it out of the door with a new outfit and a washed face, we’re twenty minutes late to school, which makes me ten minutes late to work.
Even though my body is present, my mind isn’t.
I run on muscle memory for the first two hours of my shift, cycling through my patients as quickly and effectively as I can. Normally, I try to talk to each of them; let them know that we’re taking care of them, that they’re safe. I typically take the extra time to make sure that they know I care about them.
The emergency room is a scary place, and the trauma bays can be terrifying for patients who are aware that they’re in them. I consider it a part of my job to make my patients feel as secure as they can, even if they’re not conscious.
It isn’t until I’m drawing blood on an eight-year-old boy with a fever and a tender abdomen, crying for his mommy, that everything hits me. Not a light impact, but that of a freight train moving so fast that it could derail at any minute.
“You did such a great job,” I tell him as I press a cotton ball to the bend of his arm and wrap it with medical tape. My voice threatens to crack over the emotion in my throat, but I plaster on a smile instead. “You’ll feel better soon, I promise. You just have to be brave a little bit longer.”
So do I , I think.
Pulling off my gloves, I stick my hands underneath the dispenser for hand sanitizer, smiling at the little boy’s worried parents as I leave the room. As soon as I’m out of the door, I hurry toward one of the clean holding rooms, pressing my body against the door to block it as I step inside.
My hands meet my knees as I bend forward, letting a loud sob crack through my throat. I cry until I retch, and then I cry some more, until I’m sure that I’ve run out of tears for the next year at least.
A gentle knock sounds on the door, and I sniff, straightening my spine as I wipe a hand over my face. “One second,” I tell the person on the other side.
“It’s me.”
Bethany.
Turning to pull open the door, I face one of my favorite people in the hospital. Bethany is a resident upstairs in OB, and I hardly ever get to see her anymore, but she has remained one of my best friends here and someone that I look forward to seeing any chance that I get to.
“I was doing a consult and someone said you came in here like, five minutes ago,” she says, slipping inside and closing the door behind her. “Did you lose someone?”
“No,” I say, swiping my hand across my face again with a humorless laugh, “which makes this all the more stupid. I started my period this morning, and then I was late to drop Katie off and get to work because – get this – my husband told her that I’m faking my job to spend more time away from her.”
I nearly retch again, just thinking about it.
“So nobody died, but it’s still a shit day,” she says sympathetically, pulling me close to her as she rubs a hand along my back.
“Okay,” I breathe, pushing myself away from her embrace, “I can’t do that or I’ll start again. We’re both off tomorrow, so I’m just going to lay in bed with my girl, eat crappy food, and watch whatever movies she wants.”
“Want me to sneak you upstairs so you can see all the squishy babies?” She asks as she adjusts my badge clip.
“No,” I answer with a laugh. “I just— is it weird that I don’t know who I am right now? I mean, one minute, I’m me; I’m confident, I know what I want, I assert myself. Then the next, I’m crying in a supply closet or shrinking down and doubting myself.”
Look at me, I think. I’m thirty-five years old, stuck right back in the quarter life crisis I had ten years ago.
“You saw me after my divorce,” she says. “And mine was amicable. You cope how you cope.”
With a gentle squeeze to my shoulder, she leaves the small room, and I follow shortly behind. I’m able to pull myself together just enough to slip back into autopilot as I triage more patients.
It’s hard to keep the thought from my mind that I want to call Brody and talk to him about all of this. I tell myself that I want to pick his brain, to use his experience and what he’s seen to help make this feel more normal than it does, but I know that I’m lying to myself.
I just want to talk to him. I want to seek comfort in him that I don’t know if I’m entitled to. He’s my attorney and he’s my teacher, in a way, but outside of that, I’m not sure what he is to me. I’d like to think that we’re friends, but are we?
There are too many things that I don’t know right now; and not knowing the answer to that question is too high on the list of unknowns that bother me.
The house is filled with a musical number from Thumbelina - because as soon as I knew that I was pregnant, I knew that I’d be raising my daughter to enjoy the real classics, and Katie is sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, serving up pretend food from her imaginary restaurant.
My heating pad is sandwiched between my thighs and my stomach, occasionally being sent to a new post at my lower back, while I lay on the couch.
“Mommy,” Katie says, turning to me with a small plate topped with a whole plastic chicken, a slice of plastic pizza, and one real Cheerio, “try this one. It’s sploop.”
“Wow,” I chuckle, “how did you know sploop is my favorite?”
I pretend to eat the food, making chewing sounds and nodding my approval at her recipe before handing the plate to her again so that she can concoct something new with it. I make it through five more faux food taste tests before the jolts of pain coming and going in my lower stomach make me hiss.
“Uh oh,” Katie gasps. “You got poisoned food!”
Abandoning her kitchen toys, she flies up toward her bedroom, returning a few moments later with a plastic stethoscope around her neck and a medical supply bag in her hand.
“I’ll fix it, Mommy,” she assures me. Her stethoscope is placed on my forehead, my shoulder, my knees, and my feet. The toy thermometer goes into my ear, and the neuro hammer is tapped against my elbow. “You need some medicine.”
“You’re right, Doctor Katie,” I tell her, “I do. I’ll be right back, okay?”
I quickly move from the couch to head toward the medicine closet, clenching my fist and blowing out air on the way, which doesn’t do much for my pain, but it serves as a helpful distraction from it. As I unlatch the child lock keeping the closet secure and I reach for the small white bottle calling my name, I feel…absolutely nothing inside of it.
I put the stupid bottle back instead of recycling it.
After closing and latching the door with a groan, it feels like a long walk back to the couch, empty-handed, save for the play bottle of cough syrup that Katie has ready to dose me with.
At this point, I’ll take the chance at the placebo effect.