Caroline and I had explained the whole situation to Vanessa during one of our weekly lunches in her hospital room. We’d taken to visiting her together during our lunch hours. Vanessa had at least gotten a good laugh out of the situation. I was closer to her now than I’d ever been before, and it was nice to have a new friend even if it was a little bit borne out of tragedy.
Vanessa arched an eyebrow. “It seems pretty real to me.”
I didn’t know what to say. It did seem pretty real. It felt like it was becoming more real every day. Every morning I woke up, and the first thing I thought about was Eric. When would I see him? Would we have time together? I hadn’t intended on falling in love with him, but that seemed to be exactly what I was doing.
“After Easter, this will all be over,” I told Vanessa and Caroline. That was the deadline I’d set for myself. I promised myself that I would end the relationship, or whatever it was that we were doing, at Easter.
“Why is that again?” Caroline asked. “If you like him, and he likes you, why not just stay together?”
“You mean married?” I asked.
“Or just dating.”
I bit my lip. “I don’t want to fall in love with somebody that doesn’t have the same values that I do,” I said hesitantly. “Eric doesn’t want to ever get married. He doesn’t want kids.”
“He clearly wants to be with you, though,” Vanessa said. “That’s something.”
“Sure,” I replied. “A temporary something.”
Vanessa and Caroline exchanged a look. I didn’t know what it communicated, but it was Vanessa who replied.
“I didn’t think Sam ever wanted to get married, either.” She was staring out the window again with that wistful look on her face. “But one day he just showed up with a ring. I thought he’d gone a little bit crazy because we weren’t even talking about marriage yet, we weren’t even living together!” She shook her head. “But now I wish we’d gotten married faster.”
I couldn’t think of anything that I could say that wouldn’t sound terrible. Poor Vanessa had just lost her fiancé, the man she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with. How could I say anything without sounding horribly ungrateful for the time I had with Eric.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I confessed eventually. “I have no idea whatsoever.”
Caroline smiled. “That’s normal.”
“It could be a lot worse,” Vanessa added. “You could have a dead log attached to one of your arms. Do you know how hard it is to pull your pants up with only one arm?”
Vanessa’s approach to her injury was sort-of bizarre, but I knew it was an attempt to make me and Caroline more comfortable, in addition to hiding how upsetting all this was to her. She was very strong. I wouldn’t have the ability to put on such a brave face for my friends.
I smiled at her. “It’s not dead, Vanessa.”
“It feels dead.”
“Just for now. The feeling will come back.”
“It had better, otherwise I’m gonna’ chop it back off.”
“Don’t worry,” Caroline chimed in, “once you start physical therapy, it’ll hurt so much that you’ll know for sure that it’s still alive.”
“Gee thanks. With friends like you, who needs enemies?”
Caroline laughed and rolled her eyes, but I knew that Vanessa felt a tiny bit better. I could see it in her eyes. The funeral had helped her say goodbye to Sam. That was healthy. Normal.
Eric wasn’t going to die, but I was going to have to say goodbye to him, too. Otherwise I was pretending that I could change him, and I wasn’t the type of woman who went around trying to change men. I’ve heard from plenty of sources over the years that the worst thing a woman can do is ignore it when a man tells you who he is. Eric was a man that could never give me the sort of future I wanted. I was going to trust him on that.
27
Faith
“Faith, it’s your turn,” Mrs. Ortega, no, Joanne, said to me. “Tell us about your plans for spring break. Are you and Eric going on a honeymoon soon?”
This garden party was right out of my nightmares about social anxiety. I was trapped with a bunch of hyper-competitive rich women with not enough to do but tear one another down.
Joanne had just finished fending off backhanded compliments about her planned skiing trip to Colorado. Apparently, Colorado wasn’t the place to ski right now. Switzerland or Canada were much trendier. I’d never been skiing in my life.
“You should go to Asia,” interjected Dr. Finkey’s wife, Delia before I could reply. “Arthur and I went on the most incredible tour last year of mainland China, South Korea, and Japan. You’d love it.”
“Or Hawaii!” Stephanie, Dr. Gupta’s wife, was constantly one-upping Delia, except when Delia was one-upping her. “Ravi and I spent a whole month there last summer and it was absolute paradise. I know where I’m retiring.”
Retiring? Stephanie didn’t work. She’d bragged that she stopped working as soon as she got married. As far as I could tell, she was retired.
“Oh no, they should definitely go abroad,” Delia insisted. “They can go to Hawaii any old time. You don’t even need a passport to go there.”
The women at this garden party were driving me nuts.
“I don’t think we’re going to be traveling soon,” I finally managed to answer. “It’s not the priority right now.”
Stephanie and Delia were staring daggers at each other, so I didn’t think they heard me, but Joanne nodded sagely.
“I see,” she responded after a moment. She smiled knowingly. “That makes sense. You’re trying to conceive.”
I’d just taken a sip of my lemonade and had to avoid spitting it out by half-way aspirating it. The result was a very unladylike snort. “I’m sorry-- what?!” I gasped.
“Oh, I know the most wonderful doula,” Stephanie insisted.
“No, I—”
“You should start your pelvic floor exercises now,” Delia added.
“But, I—”
“You know, Faith, maybe that’s why your feet are swollen up like that,” Joanne finished. “Maybe you’re already pregnant.” Delia and Stephanie both glanced at my feet, then at each other knowingly. I winced. I’d had to wedge my feet into my high heels and they looked doughy and gross.
My feet were unequivocally very swollen. I’d hoped that nobody would notice, but apparently nothing slipped past these three.
“I just got off a double shift at the hospital,” I explained as patiently as I could. “After being on my feet for twelve hours straight, they’re bound to be swollen.”
Joanne made a non-committal noise.
It was true that my feet had never been prone to swelling until lately, but swollen ankles were a well-known side effect of the nursing profession. Spending hours at a time running around frantically was bound to result in some fatigue. What I was really worried about at the moment, however, was my patience.
“I’m not trying to get pregnant.”
“Oh yes, of course not.” Joanne winked at me. “We wouldn’t want to jinx it.”
Joanne, Delia, and Stephanie moved on to another topic, an upcoming charity gala, and it gave me a moment of breathing room. What on earth was I doing here? This wasn’t a world that I belonged in.
Eric was somewhere off with the men. The last time I’d seen him, he’d looked miserable, too. I hadn’t anticipated this party to be so separated by gender, but the moment we got here, Joanne grabbed me and pulled me in with her female friends.
The truth was that I didn’t have any business hanging out with Joanne, Delia, and Stephanie. They were fake-nice to me, but I got the feeling that they were evaluating my worthiness as a member of their “doctor wives” club. I also got the feeling that I was coming up lacking.
I begged off to the bathroom and slipped inside the house, if ‘house’ is even the right word for where Dr. Ortega lived. It was really more of a mansion. My entire apartment could fit inside his kitche
n. All the furniture looked expensive, stuffy, and uncomfortable. Like this experience.
Everything about this party made me grateful I wasn’t really a doctor’s wife. If it always came with this kind of social pressure, I wasn’t sure I was cut out for it.
28
Faith
Faith McNamara [12:05 p.m.]: What the hell is this thing?
Caroline Riley [12:06 p.m.]: For real? That’s just a bidet.
Faith McNamara [12:05 p.m.]: I just looked it up on Google. I’m gonna’ try it.
Faith McNamara [12:06 p.m.]: It’s super weird and heated. I kind of liked it though. Does that make me weird?
Caroline Riley [12:06 p.m.]: Maybe? Either way, this is the best conversation ever. Where are you?
Faith McNamara [12:07 p.m.]: Dr. Ortega’s house. I’m at that weird garden party I told you about.
Caroline Riley [12:07 p.m.]: Lol. Dr. Ortega has a bidet?
Faith McNamara [12:09 p.m.]: Yeah. In one of his five downstairs bathrooms.
Caroline Riley [12:10 p.m.]: Did you count his downstairs bathrooms? That actually is a bit weird, Faith. You better get back to the garden before someone sends a search party.
I sighed. She was right. I could only hide in the bathroom for so long. Reluctantly, I made my way back outside to where Joanne, Delia, and Stephanie had been joined by two of the other staff physicians’ wives, Amelia and Carla.
“I just don’t think it’s right,” Carla was saying to the group. “It’s better for the child to have that attention when they’re little. And they grow so fast.”
Amelia frowned. “It’s just not in the cards for every woman with kids to stay home for five or six years, though. And some women don’t want to.”
“But studies have shown that children with stay-at-home moms do better in school.”
Yikes. This was not a conversation I would be able to keep my opinions to myself on. My mouth was moving before my brain caught up.
“Actually,” I heard myself saying, “when adjusted for socioeconomic level, the school performance of children with working moms and the children of stay-at-home moms are virtually identical. It’s just that households where one parent can afford to stay at home have so much built-in privilege they appear to do better when other factors aren’t controlled.” Amelia nodded her head, but the rest of the women looked skeptical.
Carla, the wife of an orthopedic surgeon I wasn’t too fond of, looked at me like I’d just suggested she eat dog shit. “Does that mean you think women who stay home with their children are just wasting their time?”
I shook my head. “Not at all. I just think it’s not necessarily a bad thing for moms to work when their kids are little if they want or need to.”
“Did your mom work when you were little?” Carla asked snidely.
“No, not when I was very little,” I explained as patiently as I could.
“And you don’t think you benefitted from that?”
“I’m sure I did,” I replied, wondering if she was trying to trap me. “But if she had worked during those years either by her choice or necessity, I like to think I would have still turned out fine.”
“Hmm,” Carla said after a moment. “You don’t have babies of your own yet, do you?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t.”
She nodded at me condescendingly. “I think you’ll feel differently when you do. Children need their mothers. I feel bad for women who have to work when their children are little to put food on the table. It almost makes me think that they shouldn’t have had them at all if they can’t afford to give them the attention they need.”
I ground my teeth in frustration. That was some judgmental bullshit right there. “It is a hard question,” I said as diplomatically as I could, “I don’t think anyone knows the right answer for sure. At least the research says the outcomes are the same statistically.”
Carla made a noncommittal noise and then more-or-less physically pulled the other women away with her, leaving me alone. It was like something out of a real housewives show. I watched her go in confusion. Were grown women allowed to act that petty in real life? It seemed to be happening right in front of my eyes, but I still had trouble believing it. Amelia, who was the wife of the next-youngest doctor at the party after Eric had been watching our exchange with interest and lingered back.
“It’s a bold move to poke the bear like that,” she whispered. “I think she’s wrong too, but Carla’s pretty vindictive.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not trying to impress anybody or curry favor with Carla.”
Amelia smirked. “I used to be like you,” she said after a moment. “Then I noticed what I said at parties like this had a direct effect on the assignments my husband was getting.”
My lips parted in surprise. “Are you serious?”
She nodded. “I wished somebody had told me this at the beginning, and they will cut you a little bit of slack at first, but yeah. You know Dr. Koels, right?”
“Yes. I work for him.”
“Oh right, you work at St. Vincent’s as a nurse. You told me that and I already forgot,” she said apologetically. “My brain is being addled by all the gossip.” She shook her head.
“It’s ok,” I told her. “I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s going on here.”
She smiled at me. “I swear I’m not trying to scare you off, I’ve just observed that Dr. Koels seems to let the staff physicians do mostly whatever they want. The older ones boss the younger ones around and it’s just a popularity contest half the time about promotions and department positions. If you’re popular and well-liked by the wives, and your husband is popular and well-liked by the doctors, everything will be good. It’s a total good-old-boy’s club.”
“And if we’re not well-liked?”
She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, ‘well then you’re screwed’. What she actually said was, “I wish it wasn’t like this, too.”
I frowned. I’d known that the nursing staff at the hospital was dysfunctional. It was disheartening to hear that the physicians were even worse. I wondered if Dr. Ford knew about any of this, or if I should tell her.
“At least Eric is reporting to Dr. Koels directly in his program,” I said after a moment. “He’s still a resident.”
Amelia nodded. “Yeah, that should help keep him insulated.”
“Thank you for telling me all this,” I told her. “I really appreciate it.”
She shrugged again. “It’s like I said. I wish somebody had told me.”
“Still, it’s really kind of you.”
Amelia smiled at me and then wandered back off to join the group, leaving me alone with my worries. I hadn’t realized that my arguing with the other doctor’s wives could have a direct impact on Eric’s prospects in the hospital. If I wasn’t careful, I could end up doing his career, and mine, actual harm. The minefield around me just became more dangerous.
29
Eric
“Want to play bocce ball?” I asked Dr. Ortega.
“Yes, please.” He looked relieved to have an excuse to get away from Dr. Gupta’s long recounting of his kitchen remodel. I knew I was.
Garden parties were every bit boring as an adult as they’d been when I was child. An alfresco afternoon with friends, lawn games, drinks, and fresh appetizers sounded nice enough, but the reality was just Texas heat (eighty-six in January), high humidity, and boring conversation with people twenty years my senior. I wondered how Faith was faring but didn’t want to interrupt the conversation she was having with Dr. Gupta’s wife and some of the other women at the party.
So, I was stuck playing bocce ball, instead. Ortega had an actual bocce ball court in his backyard, which reminded me a bit too much of the society parties I’d been subjected to as a kid. There were many a Junior League luncheon that I’d spent being told ‘not to run around on the bocce court’. As if the grass there was somehow special.
“Do you want to flip?” I asked Ortega.
&nb
sp; He shrugged. “You can have it.”
I threw the jack and we got started.
“Did you hear the news about Dr. Koels’ son?” Ortega asked after I’d thrown the first bocce ball.
“I heard he was spending some time in the ER but haven’t met him yet. What’s up?”
Ortega grinned. He threw his first ball, beating mine by several inches. “The word is that he got into a fistfight with a patient on his second day.”
I blinked. “How does that even happen?”
Ortega shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’ve also had plenty of patients I wouldn’t mind punching.”
I thought back to my most recent problem patient, Calvin Ross. The guy had been an absolute nightmare, and not one I’d forget anytime soon. When he wasn’t sexually harassing the female members of the staff, he was being a general pain in the ass. He was rude, eccentric, conceited, dismissive, high-handed, needy, and just plain awful. If not for Faith who was called up from the maternity ward as a ringer, we probably never would have been able to survive him. Or him us. The worst part about problem patients is that they’re still patients who are in desperate need of care. We don’t get to go around just punching them when they annoy us.
“Sure, but we don’t punch for a reason. And it’s not just because our mommies taught us it’s the wrong thing to do.” My ball knocked his bocce a couple of inches father from the Jack.
“True enough.” Ortega grinned. It was now his turn. “Apparently, and take this with a grain of salt, the reason he didn’t get fired on the spot by Koels was that he was defending Dr. Ford when he did it.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Hmm.”
“Dr. Koels’ didn’t fire him.” Ortega added. He threw his next ball and it pushed the Jack closer to his other balls. He was now winning. I had no chance of salvaging the game. “So, there must be some truth to it.”
“Either that, or he’s just not keen on ruining his own son’s career.”
A Bad Case of You Page 14