“Close for me,” I said, knowing I was too curt but unable to be any other way. “Close for Maori.”
“We don’t need to make this a cultural issue.” That was a bloke I didn’t know. Thin, pale, and supercilious. I thought he was a surgeon, and I’d bet I was right.
“We absolutely need to make it a cultural issue,” I said, “as that’s what it is.” I reminded myself that I was in Dunedin. Maori weren’t exactly thick on the ground down here, but New Zealand was a multicultural society, and Dr. Whosit could bloody well remember it. “She’s part of my whanau, and she’s been having a hard time. I’d treated her exactly once, weeks ago, when there was nobody else to do it. When it was, yes, an emergency. She’s not my patient anymore and hasn’t been since that emergency, and there’s nothing inappropriate about me seeing her in any context. Ring her up, though. Ask her what did happen.”
“You visited her in hospital later that day,” Ian said, lifting a paper in his folder, “the day of the birth, after you went off duty. Unusual.”
“Again,” I said, working hard for cool, “my whanau.”
“Ejected the husband from the room after the birth, too,” Ian added. “Which doesn’t look good, and could lend weight to the allegation of a prior inappropriate relationship.”
“It’s my right and my obligation to look after my patient.” I knew I sounded stiff. Offended. That was because I was. “He was agitating her, and she was distressed and vulnerable. I protected my patient. After that, when I wasn’t acting as her doctor anymore, I visited a member of my whanau.”
“And took off your clothes,” Ian said.
I didn’t answer that. I was still hot. In fact, I was burning. I wasn’t going to explain about her vulnerability and what it had done to me, or the breast milk, and I definitely wasn’t going to tell him that I’d cried. It was an invasion, asking me to open my heart like that. “Not my patient,” I repeated, as it was the salient point. “And nobody’s business.”
Ian sighed again. “Poppy Cantwell was Poppy MacGregor before her marriage. As in Alistair and Megan MacGregor.” Everybody at the table looked more alert. What the hell?
“But, of course, our committee wouldn’t be swayed by the social position of the complainant,” Jennifer, the gynecologist, said. I’d been right about the humorous mouth. “Or by the fact that the MacGregor Trust happened to fund the new MRI machine in the neurosurgical unit last year. What was that, five million dollars?”
“Five-point-six,” the pale bloke said. I’d been right. Surgeon.
“Of course not,” Ian said. “The only issue is the impropriety. Or not.”
I could have said that Poppy and I had nothing going on, then or now. I didn’t. I was furious. I said, knowing I was betraying emotion and unable to help it, “Tell me where it says in any written or unwritten rules in any hospital ever that I can’t see a woman on a consensual basis, a woman I knew previously and who was my patient for a period of an hour or so. Whoever her family is. Whatever her ex says.”
“Perception is reality,” Ian said, as if he’d invented the phrase.
I didn’t say, Why the hell did I come here from Tauranga? I didn’t think about nearly twenty years invested in this profession, not to mention my mind, my heart, and let’s face it, my very soul, too. I didn’t wonder about what would happen. I stayed in the now. That was the only place to be. I said, “Perception is not reality. The perception was incorrect. This is about money, yes, but it’s about the money Max Cantwell forfeited when he ...” I stopped just before I said, When he had an affair with one of his employees while his wife was pregnant, and his wife found out about it on the day she gave birth to their daughter on the grass. When he betrayed her and humiliated her when she was most vulnerable.
It wasn’t my story to spread. Instead, I said, “When their marriage broke up.”
Ian knocked the sheets of paper together on the table and said, “Notwithstanding anybody’s motives, this is a serious breach. Could you wait outside the room, please, while we discuss next steps?”
I could barely feel my feet as I walked from the room. It wasn’t fear. It was rage. I was used to bad news, but not this. I made it to the corridor, then pulled my phone from my pocket, because another thought had just arrived with the force of a boulder dropped into a party.
Was this why Poppy hadn’t texted me back? Had she decided it was inappropriate? Thought I’d taken advantage of her?
I put the phone away again. Nothing would happen, surely. There was nothing here. But I’d wait until I knew for sure.
It took thirty minutes. Too long. It should have taken five.
“You’re suspended,” Ian informed me when I was back in the room again, before I’d even had a chance to sit down. “Two weeks. Without pay.”
“That’s rubbish,” I said, when I could move my mouth again. “If I did something wrong, sack me. If I didn’t, apologize for the misunderstanding. What’s two weeks? It’s a rubbish compromise for appearances, and nothing more. And you don’t have the personnel to cover the unit. Not with the weather warming up, you don’t.” Emergency was always busiest in summer, mostly because teenagers were more stupid in summer, and so were University students. And then there were the bike accidents. And the drownings.
“Nevertheless,” Ian said, “you’re suspended. Two weeks. You’ll be receiving a letter.”
I walked out.
Jennifer, the gynecologist, caught up with me down the corridor, even though I was flying. She said, “Matiu,” and I turned around and said, “What.” Flatly. I’d gone into tunnel vision, the way you did in a crisis. Right now, my vision was focused on getting out of this hospital. I’d think about it then. I’d think ... something.
My life wasn’t actually falling apart. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t happen this fast, or this undeservedly. No matter how it felt. I just needed to ... think.
All those years I had done things wrong, and this was the anvil dropped on my career? On my life?
Jennifer said, “I’m sorry. We took a vote. Four to three in your favor, and Ian cast the deciding vote.”
“Which would be four to four,” I said.
“Which is the reason for the suspension,” she said, then shook her head and said, “Not quite true. Alistair MacGregor weighed in on it. That was the real deciding vote. That’s the reason for the suspension. Which, you’re right, is rubbish.”
“It’s personal,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s personal. And I’m not your doctor or your priest, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Get well away from here. Ian’s doing this because he thinks he has to, but you don’t have to accept the censure. Still—get away. Take some time. And stay away.”
“From Poppy,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “If you don’t want more trouble, if you want to hang onto your job and your career, stay away. If it’s you or the MacGregors, the MacGregors will win. This is Dunedin, Alistair MacGregor is the big guns, and he means business. And ...” She hesitated. “If the woman’s five weeks postpartum, and newly separated into the bargain? She’s not herself. If you care about her, urge her to see her own doctor and go for counseling. Her hormones will be all over the shop just now. Whatever she thinks she feels, she’ll be feeling something entirely different in three months. Been married a while, hasn’t she. Three kids, her marriage failing. A traumatic experience, and a white-knight savior who just happens to look like a Maori god. She’s trying to find a way to believe that her present isn’t as bad as she thinks, and that she has a future, maybe. But mostly, she’s reaching out blindly for something to make her feel better now.” She had her hand on my arm, and her voice was gentle. “It’s tempting. It’s flattering. I get it. But it’s not about you. She’s looking for something, I’m sure. It’s just not you.”
17
A Perfect Plan
Poppy
Have you ever flown with kids?
I have. Often. My fellow passengers on all thos
e flights would probably have called it “too often,” and that was before I’d had three. As a Labour-weekend treat, this journey wasn’t much of one so far.
Theoretically, Dunedin to Tauranga was a short flight. In actuality, it involved changing planes in Auckland.
In thirty-five minutes, because the first leg had been delayed.
If you’ve ever tried to collect your nappy bag, get your kids’ backpacks onto them while holding nappy bag plus baby, get down the plane’s steps and across the tarmac with the three of them, discover that your departure gate is at the opposite end of the terminal from your arrival gate, tell yourself you can make it, find out that your daughter has to use the potty now, then try to run to said gate with nappy bag, backpacks, infant, and three-year-old while your five-year-old shouts encouragement and the loudspeaker announces that all passengers for your flight have now boarded and everybody is waiting for you, you may know what I mean. By the time we bumped our way down the aisle and found our seats on the absolutely chokka holiday-weekend flight, registered the horrified expressions on the faces of the three hapless travelers in the row ahead of us, who were clearly convinced that somebody was going to be kicking the backs of their seats or crying or both for the full forty minutes of the flight, I needed a holiday from my holiday, and it had only just begun. It was also six o’clock on Friday afternoon, which is, as you probably know, dinnertime for kids the world over.
Well, this had been a brilliant plan.
I had boxes of juice in my backpack. I also had cheese cubes and dry cereal and grapes. Unfortunately, my backpack was under Olivia’s seat. I pulled a plastic packet containing the smashed pieces of the chocolate-chip cookie from the last flight out of the lumpy pocket of my sludge-colored cardigan, scattering used white tissues around me like bargain-basement flower-girl petals, ripped the packet open with my teeth, handed the nutritionally negligible cookie fragments to the kids, offered Isobel her own more easily accessible snack, and realized, when the flight attendant stopped at my row, that I’d forgotten to put on my seatbelt and laid Isobel on my knees in order to do it. Which was when the whole thing started to go pear-shaped. Or more pear-shaped.
First, Isobel started to wail, with that newborn volume that always surprises you. Babies’ acoustics are astonishing. The crying wasn’t exactly a shock, though, since her comfort measures had been seriously interrupted.
Second, fastening a seatbelt while keeping a wriggling five-week-old infant safe on your lap was proving pretty bloody difficult. And third, the bloke in the suit in the aisle seat across from me glanced over and said, “Cover that up, will you?” Because, yes, I had a breast out. I don’t mean, “Showing through the gap, if you look.” I mean, “Out.”
I was cheerful. That was who I’d always been. Now, I did my best. “Consider it your unexpected gift from the universe,” I told him. “I have great boobs.”
Well, probably not, but it made me laugh.
He looked shocked. In his world, mothers probably didn’t talk like that. At least I thought I was funny. “Never mind,” I said. “I won’t tell your wife you peeked.”
The grandmotherly lady next to the fella leaned forward to have a look, and I thought, Wonderful, as I cradled Isobel between my knees and managed to get my seatbelt fastened at last. The plane had started to taxi, and beside me, Olivia said, “I want to see the ground go away,” and began to squirm.
Hamish said, “You can look across me, Livvy.”
Olivia said, “I can’t see. I want to see the airplane flying in the sky!” And, yes, somehow wriggled lower so she could kick the seat in front of her.
I grabbed for her, and the thirtyish fella in front of me turned around and asked, “Do you mind? My partner is trying to rest.” He had one of those thin, ascetic faces. A marathon runner, something like that. One of those blokes who prided himself on his self-discipline, anyway. Possibly planning on getting in his daily meditation en route to the big event. He was also English, and had one of those very posh accents, for extra annoyance points.
I said, “Sorry,” but I was still having trouble not laughing, even as I was pulling Olivia upright again as best I could with one hand. Maybe I was able to see the funny side because Isobel was back at my breast, the aircraft was lifting off the ground, and we were almost there. “It’s been a journey,” I tried to explain to the fella, who was going to get a muscle spasm in his neck if he kept that up. “As soon as I can pull my bag out, I’ll find a juice box and quiet her down.”
“People who can’t control their children,” he intoned, “shouldn’t have them.” Olivia kicked the seat in front of her again, and I thought, Fine. Do you want to take mine? And what do you suggest, shock collars? And couldn’t help laughing again, causing both of my male neighbors to look affronted.
The older lady in the middle seat across from me, the one who’d had a look before, spoke up now. That was fortunate, as Marathon Man clearly wanted to smack me. “Give me the baby when you can,” she said. “I’ll hold her while you see to the others.”
Another woman would have left it. I said, “Cheers,” then told Marathon Man, “See? It takes a village.”
He said, “Don’t ask me to be responsible for your choices. The planet is overpopulated as it is. I have no interest in being part of your village.”
I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. Hysteria, possibly. “Fine,” I told him. “You can build your own childfree village, far away from ours. You’re right, it’s noisy in our village. Untidy, too. You could even call it ‘chaotic.’ You can live in yours instead, maybe get some wind chimes and a Japanese rock garden to meditate on, the kind where you rake patterns into the sand. I have to admit, it sounds appealing.”
“Well, I can’t do it just now, can I?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “So I reckon we’ll have to muddle along for the next half hour or so as best we can.” And smiled at him. Cheerfully. Or evilly. You decide.
The decision to come up here had been an impulsive one, as so many of my decisions tended to be. I’d taken Isobel to visit Nan and Grandad on Sunday afternoon, possibly because I didn’t want to hang around the house without Olivia and Hamish, and possibly because I didn’t want to think about my behavior with Matiu and whether he’d actually thought I was as desperately thirsty for him as I’d probably seemed, and had ended up sitting in the sun with Grandad while Nan weeded around the flower border, where her collection of heritage roses was protected from the wind by the neatest of hedges.
No sea view in this perfect, self-contained space, just green grass, a cool breeze, the buzz of honeybees drunk on spring nectar, and the heavenly scent of lavender and roses, white and yellow and violet and red and orange, each of them offering up its gift of fragrance. Nan would be cutting them in a few minutes and taking them into the coziest white cottage in the world, where she’d place an exuberant arrangement in the middle of the round wood table in the kitchen where she and Grandad had been eating their meals for sixty years.
The storm of the day before had scrubbed the air clean, and the air smelled like the fresh washing on the line, white towels and sheets flying like flags. It was impossible to be gloomy out here, or maybe my spirit had just hit the floor and needed to bounce. Which was why I told Grandad, gradually, about last night and this morning, omitting the shirt-removing and Maori tattoo and line of dark hair down the belly and so forth, and he listened thoughtfully, asking the odd question or two, until I’d run down.
A long silence, then, until I asked, “What would you do?”
“That’s interestingly put.” He’d been a literature professor at Otago University in times past, and he still sounded like one. Thoughtful. Measured. Kind. “You aren’t asking me whether you were foolish, or even whether you were right. To ask Max to leave, and everything that’s come since.”
“Should I be asking? I’m pretty sure I was foolish, but I also think I was right, or as right as it’s possible to be. That is—full of mistakes. But necessary ones
.” I laughed, and he smiled, his blue eyes gentle. I went on, “But I think I just have to muddle through them. Find a path, and if it’s the wrong path—find another one. Cry, possibly. Rend my garments.” I might be close to crying right now, but I was still laughing, too. I was mixed up, and that was the truth.
“You tried staying in your own patch,” he said, “hoping you could ride it out. You can’t stand out in the storm forever, though. Too dangerous.”
“Exactly.” I sat up straighter and took a quick look at Isobel. She was sleeping in her little seat, though, wrapped up snugly, looking as secure as I always felt here. “But I thought—a fire. That my house was on fire, and I had to get out.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Excellent analogy. Or are you being literal? Are you worried about the house? About having to sell? Do you want to sell?”
“Not sure,” I said. “I’m not sure about the money, how it will all work, but I don’t think it matters so much. What matters is ...” I hesitated. I hadn’t said this to anybody but Matiu. Talk about mistakes. I wasn’t telling Grandad how much of a mistake, or about my extremely confused sexual feelings.
Could you want protective shelter and headlong excitement both? You could, but you probably couldn’t get both. At least not five weeks postpartum, you couldn’t. “It matters that I can work,” I said instead. “That I can draw. I’ve ...” I took a breath and said the words. “I’ve lost it, Grandad. My fingers don’t want to move anymore. They don’t have anything to draw. And I know,” I hurried on, “that I’m lucky. I can afford to buy Max out of the house if I want to, at least I think I can. I know the kids will be fed and housed and clothed. I know it’s not an emergency, so why does it feel like one?”
“Is that the only measure?” Grandad asked. “Physical survival? Does your spirit not matter, then? Have you ever asked yourself ...” He sighed and looked at Nan, still working on her flowers. Patience, that’s what they both had. A quality they hadn’t passed on to me. “Have you asked yourself,” he continued, “why a woman who’s accomplished so much has settled for so little?”
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 13